This Is Why You're NOT HAPPY In Life! (Stop Wasting Your Life)

Courage comes from the fact of actually stepping up to the plate and saying, I don't care what everybody else says. It's my life. It's up to me. I'm gonna do something with it. I'm gonna do something amazing with it.

One of the things that we've been hearing from the audience recently is this theme of happiness. Everyone wants happiness, which is. I mean, that's obvious, right?

Yeah. I mean, I think everybody wants happiness, but most people don't understand that happiness is a created value, not something that's just organically established. The other thing, too is I think happiness in the end of the day is kind of like a falsity. Really. What they're looking for is meaning and fulfillment, and that's what they're looking for more than anything else. And at the end of the day, there's really four main things that people kind of learn and grow from that I see, that prevents them from actually achieving ultimate meaning and fulfillment. Actually getting a clear path, clear direction, knowing where to go, knowing how to get there. I think the first one comes down to focus. What are you focused on? Are you actually focused on all the things that are going wrong or all the things that you don't have? And, for example, when I went to go start my first business, it would have been very easy for me to focus so much on the end that I forgot about where I was in the journey and how much it was important for me to actually get started. And as a result, I might actually would have let the opportunity pass me by. And what I mean by that was when I had my second chance, if you will, with Steve. Steve Meyer. We've talked about him before on the show before, but when I first met him the second time around and he gave me a second chance, I didn't have tools, I didn't have equipment, I didn't have anything right. Well, I could have focused on all the. I could have focused on all the things that I didn't have. I didn't have money. I didn't have tools and equipment. I didn't have a team. I didn't have insurance. I didn't have a lot of different things to get started. Now, I could have focused on that which I think the vast majority of the public focuses on what they don't have, rather than leveraging what they do have. But what I did is I decided to take that moment and actually look at it from a different direction, which is the direction of opportunity. Like I was given an opportunity. So my word to Steve was very Very simple. I'll figure it out. Right? He rolls up his window, he boogies off with his Jeep. I'm there kind of standing and. Okay. Literally going through that moment. Okay, now what do I do? Now what do I do? Right, right. I knew because I knew I didn't have these things, but rather than focusing on what I didn't have, I decided to focus on what I did have. And what I did have is I did have drive, but I had ambition. And in this moment in time, I had a moment of courage. And I say a moment of courage because courage is not something that's necessarily present all the time, but it can be cultivated to be there more often than not. And unfortunately, going from homelessness to that moment, which was like the prior 12 months leading up to that moment, I had nothing else to lose. There was nothing that I was going to lose by actually going after this thing and making it happen. And as a result, we ended up building many of the things that I needed to actually start my first company, literally out of the trash piles, a job site that was nearby, all just.

Based on your perspective and your focus on what you did have.

Exactly. Exactly. And I think that people. That holds people back so much, they're so focused on, I don't have the right relationships, I don't have the right resources, I don't have the right commitment, I don't have the right upbringing, I don't have the right gender. I mean, we can come up with a thousand different things of reasons why we can't do something. People that are ultimately successful, that ultimately have a life of happiness and fulfillment and joy and consistency, all of them more or less focus on. Not that, but focused on, okay, what is it going to take for me? I have ownership. I'm going to make my life matter. What does it take for me to make this a reality? And if people focus there, they're going to find happiness and fulfillment a lot quicker.

So why do you think so many people are unhappy then? What mistake are they making? I mean, it sounds like they're focusing on the opposite thing.

There's a ton of different things. I think if I had to sum it all up into one word, and I actually was on a. I was on a clubhouse room recently with Mark Drager and Evan Carmichael and Bo and a few other people. And as things were talking, I actually had this, like. Almost like this mini epiphany. And we were talking about. Much like our friend Rory Vaden talks about, and AJ Vaden talks about, you know, getting your problem down to one word. The importance of that. I had this epiphany and this just happened yesterday. I finally discovered that my one word problem that I solve is inadequacy.

Wow.

Yeah, right? So people don't take a step forward because they feel inadequate to do so. And everything that we teach, everything that we go through, every live event we do, every online school that we have, every single ebook, every single mini course, anything that we have ultimately solves one major problem. And that's this feeling of inadequacy. Because the vast majority of the people who have been incredibly successful have overcome major adversity to get there. Which means there's truth in that. Right? So what happens is people feel inadequate, which means they're attaching a meaning to a specific event, an experience, a race, a gender, and they're saying, this is why I can't do this.

That's where the feeling of inadequacy comes from.

That's where the feeling inadequate comes from. You could take fear, you can take gender, you can take race, you can take socioeconomics, you can take demographics, you can take geographics, you can take all of those different things. And if they provide an excuse for you not to move forward, it's because you have the fear of inadequacy. At the end of the day, that's what it all sums up to. So how do you overcome that? One of the quickest ways to do that is to go back and look at the very same things that you're telling yourself of. Why you can't do something and why you can't take a step and why you can't feel ultimately meaning and fulfilled and happy. You look at those specific things. Instead of looking at it like, why don't I have this? Look at it like, what can I learn from this that I can leverage for myself? And as you do that, I think you're going to find a lot more success.

One of the other things that I noticed that you said was that you kind of started small because you had to, right? You were focused on eating, not building a million dollar company company. And that's what it eventually became. But in the beginning you weren't focused on that. So how big of a role do expectations play in happiness?

Well, I look at expectations.

In an easy form, but they come in a couple different ways. There's the expectations you set for yourself. We just kind of broke that down a little bit. It's like, look, I expect myself to fail because of X, Y and Z. There's the expectations of others. So Your mother, your father, your brother, your cousin, your close friends, whatever, are saying, you know, essentially what they're doing is they're verbalizing their own insecurities and their own fears and their own limiting beliefs. And because they feel that way, they're saying that you can't do it. So here's how that looks up. My father, for example, who is now totally on my side. Like, he seen me obviously move heaven and earth, and obviously my faith had a lot to do with that. But when he began looking at the early onset, he had a failed business. He had had limiting beliefs. He had made a bunch of huge mistakes, both with alcohol and stuff, that he finally overcame, thank God, with choices in our family, overcame some of his financial behaviors that he later overcame. But at the early onset, all of those fears, of all the mistakes and all the fears that he had done, he used in an effort to try to talk me out of starting my first business. Because for him, he was saving me pain.

He was protecting you from the.

In his perspective, he thought he was protecting me. Exactly. So that's how an expectation of someone else can influence your overall direction. Because those relationships, if you choose to believe the limiting things that they're telling you that are not possible, and that's what you choose to believe, that will become your reality. Courage comes from the fact of actually stepping up to the plate and saying, I don't care what everybody else says. It's my life. It's up to me. I'm going to do something with it. I'm going to do something amazing with it. And then it comes down to the next part that you mentioned, which is this element of diligence and focus and kind of using that to your thing. You see, here's the deal. The more you're able to focus, the more diligence is created. The more diligence is created, the more confidence is brewed, the more confidence creates future diligence.

Well, right, because you're going to make progress. And progress is where really that confidence comes from.

So when it comes back to the expectation side of things, if you start out every day or start out your week or start out your year without a vision, without something clear that you're going after or based on the expectations that somebody else has put on you, and you're just settling, which is definitely a no, no, if you're going to be successful, you don't settle. You just keep punching until the joker falls down. There's this old adage that you don't cut down a tree right by Hitting a thousand times in a thousand different locations. You cut down a tree by hitting it one time in the same location a thousand times. Yeah. You see what I'm saying? It comes down to focus. It comes down to, am I going to focus on my insecurities? Am I going to focus on the expectations of others? What am I going to focus on? Because once you decide what you're going to focus on, that's going to determine your significance, your meaning, your purpose. All of that stuff is going to just flood in all at one time.

So if someone's feeling these feelings of inadequacy, I feel like if you've been feeling that for a long time, it's hard to just make an instant flip. Right. It's hard to just come out of that and say, all right, well, today I'm very unhappy, but tomorrow I'm going to start making progress, and then I'm going to automatically be happy again. Is there, like, a progression where you take one step and you get a little bit of confidence, and then you take another step and there's a little bit of confidence? And over time, it's kind of like your slow fade concept you talked about, but in reverse. Can coming out of that fade work in the same way?

The easiest way to kind of articulate what you just asked is. And actually, I forgot where I just did this, but I just did this with a virtual event. It came into me in the moment. Imagine the old locomotives. You ever seen Back to the future, maybe? Back to the future, yeah. All right. So, you know, one of the back to the futures, there's this locomotive, right? And the locomotive is going to push that car.

Right.

And you're facing an oncoming bridge that's not there. Okay. In other words, if you don't figure this out, you're going to fall off into an abyss.

Right. You have to go super fast. I forget what speed was.

Yeah. So there's an element of facing your fears there. But the way I like to look at it is we all have a locomotive in our life. We essentially are our locomotive. Okay, here's what I mean by that. The rails that make the track are what I refer to as the principles. Right. If I'm going to be wealthy, I need to live by wealthy mindset of principles. If I'm going to be healthy, I need to live by wealthy or healthy, I need to live by healthy mindset principles. Those principles then control my decisions before I actually need to make them. So when I feel like being lazy, my principal says, no, you get your butt up and you go to the gym.

Right? And then those decisions are what create your actions, and the actions create the results.

Exactly. Now, to compound that, okay, Because I'm a big. I'm a big believer that if you're not where you're at, if you're not where you want to be at today, it's simply because you're not allowing yourself to be there. It's literally that simple. I know it seems like. And this is where all those. All those expectations, limiting beliefs are pop up. Well, you know, I grew up poor. So what I did too. I grew up underestimated. So what I did too. I grew up largely abandoned. So what I did too. I grew up in an impoverished household. So what I did too. Like you see what I'm saying? It's not that I don't want to be empathetic, but at some point in time, you got to get the hell out of your own way.

What about somebody, what if it's not about an external circumstance? What if it's about someone that's made mistakes over and over again and they regret those mistakes?

Well, let's go back to the train analogy because we're quite finished here. But I can hit both of those. The train itself has an engine. Okay. In the olden days, that engine was a coal engine. It wasn't an electric engine, and it wasn't a diesel engine. It was straight up coal. Right? And what they would do is they would load up, literally a tractor trailer load or train load of coal directly behind the engine, and then they would shovel that coal in, and as they shoveled more coal in, the engine would go poof, Poof. And you build momentum. Beliefs, expectations, all that stuff, positive or negative. Right. Are solely based on the coal that you're putting in the engine. The more coal that you put in the engine, the more confidence then occurs. The more confidence, the more diligence. The more diligence, the more focus, and that cycle repeats. Right? Building what we call momentum.

There is no such thing as a one and done. That's why I have such a hard time with folks that are. Their main course of action is to somehow show off that they have this immediate level of wealth. Right? One of the things that bugs me most about the thought leadership world in some instances, and not everybody does this. Some people serve with a huge heart like Evan and Brendan and gosh, Jamie Colonel, all these guys serve with heart.

What they do different than some other folks that I won't mention from my perspective, is they're not Showcasing necessarily their success and their wealth. They're showcasing their service and their impact. Why is that important? Because if you showcase the wealth and things like that, what you're telling someone is until you get here, you're not going to be happy.

That's a really good point.

Okay. Yeah. As a result, that person is always chasing it. And from the outside looking in, it looks like they got there almost overnight. Not realizing that, you shouldn't be celebrating the success, you should be celebrating the grind. What I mean by that is if you're celebrating the grind, you celebrate the fact that you got your ass, pardon my French. You got your ass up and you went to work, you got your butt up, you went to the gym, you got your butt up. You read a personal development, you got your butt up. You signed up for one of our TransferMe seminars, you got your butt up and you did something. As you do things, motivation happens. It goes from being external motivation to internal motivation because you know that it's a journey, it's not a destination. And too many people are bragging about their cars or bragging about their airplanes or bragging about all this stuff, right? And they're saying to that young person who's striving, who is me, back in the day, this is one of the biggest things. I got involved in multi level marketing when I was real young, like 19, 19 years old for a little while. And while it gave me a hunger for personal development, which is where I learned that from.

Me too.

One of the things that the negative side of that was it also kind of said, hey, until you have this 6,000 square foot home in one location, a 5,000 square foot home in another location, six Lamborghinis in your garage and your personal airplane that you're flying around the country on.

You'Re not worth anything. You don't have significance. You don't have meaning. Steve Meyer didn't have any of that stuff.

All his money was tied up in what we call passive income streams. Right. That doesn't mean he didn't walk in and buy things at will. He did.

But he chose to actually give back to humanity in such a way. Right. I'm a big believer in living off, you know, not necessarily living off of 10%, but if I'm, if I'm flying around the country in a private plane or something like that, you'll never see it.

Well, one of the things that I noticed regarding the difference between the people who talk about service and impact versus the people who are just kind of showboating their wealth is the people who are kind of constantly showing the cars and the houses. The problem with that is they're showing the end result and they're not showing the process.

Exactly.

Ironically, the people. Well, not ironically, but the people who are showing the service are actually kind of showing part of the process. Because one of the things that I've noticed from you is one of the ways that you create wealth and success is by service. Ultimately.

I mean, at the end of the day, it's the ultimate mentality. The reality is you're not going to be successful unless you can solve somebody else's problem, period. Right? So when I first started my first company, the construction company, Custom Home Exteriors, right, The siding business, that's, you know, that has the vast majority of our team members. When I first started that company, Steve had a problem. His problem was his existing contractor was not planning on showing up Monday. That was going to put him in a predicament. Okay. I decided in the moment to be the solution to that problem, not necessarily knowing how I was going to do it. All right, take that a step further. The company began to scale. All right? One of our larger home builders was Lennar Pulte. These national home builders are some of our customer base.

Each of them had a problem. They didn't have a contractor that could serve them at scale, that could be in literally 100 places at once. I saw that as an opportunity. Most people's greatest wealth is hidden directly in solving somebody else's greatest problem.

But you were just one guy, right at the time.

So what?

So how did you expect to, like. Most people would look at that and be like, I can't possibly be in 100 places at once. They would be like. They'd see the opportunity, but they'd be like, I can't possibly fill that opportunity. How did you not look at it that way?

It was very simple. I just put my head down and went to work. I mean, my first four and a half, five years in business. So check this out. You'll find this interesting in my flagship company, Custom Home Exteriors. Okay? Now, inside of Custom Home Exteriors, there's multiple divisions and multiple departments, okay.

In that one business specifically, most people don't understand this because my oldest standing team member has been with the company eight years. Okay? That business is 22 years old. Okay. Why is that important? Because the first four and a half to five years, nobody saw what I was doing. I was under the radar of all my competitors. I was the chuck in a truck with guy with cut off Jeans with a tool belt.

You were a really blue collar guy.

I was 99% blue collar. And that's one of the reasons why I love the blue collar world so much. Because I know that blue collar, so to speak, that terminology, right? I always have my blue collar under my vest and my coat and whatever. I gravitate to that community because that community was me and is me in many respects when my team is stuck, right? Because I've done every role at least once around the business, I can, I can jump in and help in at different pivot parts. Now many of those team members do things a lot better than I did then because I was still grinding out the early days. But what I'm saying is four and a half to five years, remember, I'm sure there's like a six month window right between the two.

Here was my average day. Wake up at 5:30.

This is before I had a massive routine of prayer and meditation, stuff like that. I didn't know any better at the time, right? Wake up at 5:30, get myself ready, hook my beat up car to our beat up trailer equipment, tug that joker down the road where it's fishtailing like this, right? To get to the job site. Get to the job site, you know, call it 6:30, right? Start setting tools and equipment up. About that time, the people that were that I'd hired to work with me, right, show up. We start when we go, we just start working, okay?

About 11:30.

I would have a sales call, meaning I had somebody that I could go call on that I might have met at a gas station.

Or in Steve's case, for example, I was working so hard to serve him so well that he told other people about me, which didn't cost me a dime. In marketing, when you serve people at scale in a very real way, they tell other people about you very, very quickly. So that day turned into stopping 1130, changing clothes, putting on. I would, I'm just being honest, I smelt bad, right? Because I would, I was, had salt, I was covered in sawdust.

If you guys want to see his whole routine, there's a video we did with him. It was ridiculous.

So go through that whole scenario. I'd go do the sales call, I'd come back, I change back into my work clothes, I get back on the wall, I'd start doing more construction related activities. We would stop at dark, okay? I would then load the stuff up. I'd hit a Wendy's or a Taco Bell or something on the way home. Something quick and Easy. And then I would stay up until probably another three to four hours, almost to 1 to 2am Doing bids.

Yeah. And you got like no sleep.

I got no sleep. And that was my life for four and a half to five years. Here's what I mean by focus.

Focus is so important that that four and a half to five years I put in now is what I'm living off of now.

Yeah.

Okay. That four and a half to five years I didn't take a single day off. Not a holiday, not a weekend, not a rain day, not a snow day, not one flipping day. Lots of powerful.

I want to ask you something. I want to kind of try to tie all this back to the concept of happiness as well. So you've talked about your story before and around the time that you were starting this business, you were at your emotional low point in your life.

Sure.

So I know from experience when you're at such a low point emotionally, it's very hard to make that progress. But in addition, even when you start getting yourself to make that progress and you're doing a little bit better today than you were yesterday, the emotions, the negative emotions, going back to what I said earlier, they don't subside immediately. They take time at least.

Yeah. I mean again, momentum, confidence, focus, all of that stuff is a.

Again I go back to the train. That is the coal that you're throwing into the engine. You're allowing your little wins and your little successes to become bigger and bigger and bigger. And when you feel down and on yourself and like you're beat up or whatever, you go back to the time those little wins take over. You see what I'm saying? Yeah. So you mentioned that there's early days. There's early days for me.

I overcame many of my negative emotions just by forcing myself to do it anyway.

I didn't believe in myself.

I still went to work and then was. I'm just guessing this because I've noticed the same thing recently because you taught me this. I noticed that at the end of the day when I do force myself to do it anyway, even though I don't feel it at all.

How do you feel?

I feel amazing. And it literally cures the depressing feelings, at least for that night. Was that like.

Yes. And then consistency becomes identity.

So now you are someone who's making progress. Right.

So you've seen this. This is something I feel is a pretty solid blessing. It can be a double edged sword though. And that is when I walk into a room in today's environment, I'm able to walk in and stand up in confidence and authority.

I was doing a production meeting last week with my team, and one of the pieces that I understood, and this is with the main business that I understood. And I didn't understand it until the moment because I kept asking myself, why are people not listening to my other leaders? Why? Why do they keep coming back, say, hey, I want you, I want you. I want your spin on this, or whatever? And then I realized when I started to speak, for some reason, the confidence, everything that I've earned, all the hard driving, the grind, everything that's not celebrated, that is actually the process in which you become this person. Right? Everything that I realized that that authority came from that place of stability. And I just know it's going to work out. I don't know how it's going to work out every time. I just know it's going to work out.

It came from the reputation you built with yourself of the consistency that you know that when you're facing an adversity, you're gonna find a solution. Cause you always have.

Exactly. Let's do it this way. I first set out to start the Journey Principles Institute, the thought development company that I've been building for like, what, the last five years?

Most people have just discovered us in the last six months. Yeah, okay, four and a half years of work, of diligence, of content.

It's like a bamboo tree.

Exactly. And that's the reality. It doesn't matter what industry, it doesn't matter what your goal is, it doesn't matter what your vision is, it doesn't matter what your outcome is, it doesn't matter what your relationship. It takes time. There is no such thing as get there overnight. You might have a rare unicorn, but I got news for you. Unicorns are hard to chase through the field. Right? There's a reason why people don't walk around seeing unicorns. Right? There's also a reason why people can build castles without unicorns. It's because they laid it brick by brick, stone by stone, door by door. Right? And at the end of the day, if you're going to find ultimate happiness and fulfillment, you have to be happy in the moment with where you're at. Accept that. And then also tell yourself where you're headed next.

I always use analogies and I can't help myself. Parables, whatever you want to call them. There is a reason that your car has a windshield. That windshield tells you where you're going forward. And there's a reason why that windshield is Massive. Okay. There's also a reason why you have a rear view mirror. And there's a reason why that your rear view mirror is tiny. It's because your focus should be on the big, not the small. And people are far too focused many times on past mistakes, past hurts, past this limiting beliefs. I don't have this opportunity because of this. Shut up. Shut up.

I'm so sick of hearing excuses. And that's all they are. If you want it, go get it.

We're happy to help you get there. I'm happy to give you the information. I'm happy to give you the process that I did for my own life. I'm happy to do that. But for God's sakes, work with yourself. Give yourself some grace. Allow yourself a chance to move forward and stop wasting time.

You know, there's a lot of people who, when their ego is that low or when their, their emotional state is that low, they hear something like that and they're like, I'm afraid to try and find out that I'm not good enough. It's almost like their, their self image is already so low that they're afraid to take that action. And because if they take the action and then that doesn't work, then they have nothing.

Yeah, but see, that's that, that's focus again. They're focused on whether or not they're going to feel worth it or feel good enough or whatever. Right? That's what they're focused on. They're not focused on discovering what I have inside that I have yet to unleash. You see what I'm saying?

Yeah.

Like, it's focus. Like, what do I have inside of me that I have yet to unleash? Am I the most amazing baker on the planet? Am I the most amazing painter? The most father, the mother?

You don't even have to be the best on the planet.

I'm just saying.

Do you love cooking?

What I'm saying is if you have a diligent passion, you got something that's amazing inside of you. If you don't pursue it, you are not only letting yourself down, you're letting your impact down of your entire life. We were not created to sleepwalk through life, period. And yes, I believe we were created too. Many of my examples throughout life say that there's a created factor right? At the same time, we are all giving this, we're all given, I, from my opinion, a destiny.

Those that try to pursue the destiny ultimately find not only wealth, not only health, but also ultimate fulfillment. Ultimate fulfillment. When you're fulfilled and you're content and you're happy and joyful, that's where the underlying word happiness comes from. When you're searching for I need to feel better today, I need to feel better next week. What does next year look like? You are focused on the wrong stuff. And because you're focused on all the unhappiness that you don't have or the happiness that you don't have, for lack of a better word, because you're focused there, that's what you're feeling. You're feeling it because you're focused on it. Stop focusing on it. Focus on where you're headed, not where you're going, not where you're at. Focus on where you're headed. Excuse me? Focus on the mission. What is your mission? I don't know what my mission is. Then focus there first. What is my mission on discovering it. Right, exactly. Discover, explore, consider, like explore what it explore many different things. James Altucher, we just did a show with him not long ago. He has a new book called Skip the Line that I love.

That guy's in everything.

Oh, I love it. But he has this little, this little thing that he uses to overcome fear. And he doesn't look at things as fear or success. Instead he looks at it as little experiments. I love that I'm going to do a little experiment. Because if you look at it from a little experiment place, then essentially what you're doing is now you're saying, okay, it's like it's being a science class. What did I learn from the experiment?

Well, and the thing is you're separating yourself from the outcome rather than tying your emotions to the outcome. Because one of the mistakes I've made in the past, also that's hurt my happiness is tying my emotional state or my self worth to an immediate result I'm getting. And so like when things don't work out and you're gonna have setbacks, you're gonna fail sometimes.

Well, I mean, let's go back to that production meeting I mentioned before. I've stepped in front of my team and I just shared my heart. The number one fear on the planet. Number one. If you were to research all the various fears, the number one is public speaking. Okay. When I very first started like very first started like stepping in front of my team to try to communicate my heart, my heart would beat out of my chest. I would be nervous as hell. I wouldn't want to do it. But I knew it needed to be done because how else am I Going to get my heart, my DNA into my team. How are they going to understand me unless I communicate to them? Whereas now I step up to the plate and I speak with authority because I have authority. The results of my little successes that have built a framework and a foundation and a footing and it's, you know, I went to New York, gosh, before the pandemic, and my wife and I toured the World Trade Center. Okay. Obviously the new building, along with the footings and stuff of the previous buildings. Do you know that those footings look like they're about 10 stories underground?

In other words, on a house footing, when you go to build a house, your footing might be two foot tall.

Oh, is that like the part underneath the house?

It's the concrete. Concrete that everything sits on the foundation, if you will. Okay. You could stand at the bottom of the footing and look up and it was like looking at a 10 story building like it was so tall.

So the bigger the vision, the deeper the footing.

Oh, I love that.

The bigger the vision, the deeper the footing. Journey Principles. Right. The Journey Principles Institute. This business that I started roughly five and a half years. Well, going on five and a half years ago now. Okay.

Has got a five year footing. Lots of mistakes, lots of learning, lots of ego checks and pride checks and heart checks. Lots of changing lives, lots of unfortunately hurting team members feeling because I'm a crusader by nature, there's a crusade and we will not stop until we get there. Right. That's how I'm wired. Not everybody understands that. Not everybody can understand and be pushed that way. Not everybody wants to be pushed to excellence. Some people would much rather be comfortable. And those that are comfortable rarely understand and rarely get to a place of contentment and true happiness because they're so focused again on what they won't have or what they don't have or what could go wrong or what if it doesn't work out or whatever. That they never take the chance because they never take the chance. They never get rewarded with the prize. You've got to make sure that the footing's deep. You've got to make sure you're focused on the right stuff. You got to make sure that you're surrounded by the right people and you've got to not give up, period. If you keep punching, eventually you will punch a hole through that punching bag. That's why you see in boxing rings they got these punching bags, they're all taped up with duct tape. It's because they poked a hole in the joker before, right?

I didn't know that actually.

And it's because they've been hitting that same area over and over and over and over and over and over. You know, with the journey principles, I will do this for free. If I need to, I will. Right. I may not be able to impact as many lives because, you know, I'll be directly connected to what I can invest on a consistent basis. Right. So we start putting on these live events that are getting larger and larger and larger. Right. We start looking at that stuff. That takes resource, okay? But that doesn't mean I'm gonna stop trying to help people become the best versions of themselves. I'm gonna keep doing that regardless. Why is that important? It's because there's a five year footing that's now starting to build a skyscraper. And five years from now, you're going to see a much larger building with a lot of great people along the way, with a lot of life transformation along the way and with a lot of happiness in those lives along the way. Because we took the time to pay the price, to make sure we did the right work and we kept the focus on it. We didn't stop moving forward.

Right.

I went through a massive transition. You know about this, the team knows about this almost three years ago, that by all intensive purposes I should have stopped altogether. And that two and a half year, three year hiatus, it crushed me.

I longed to help people so much, like with so much energy so bad that I was utterly miserable without being able to quote, unquote, scratch that itch. You see what I'm saying? I should have, quote, unquote, given up. But there's something in my DNA that I think is cultivated, that can be cultivated in everybody's DNA. I do not think this is a special trait.

You mean the refusal to quit?

The refusal to quit, to never give up, the perseverance, the tenacity I had.

That I don't know where it came from in me. I don't know where it came from in me.

It came from the earlier adversity. I mean, you know, just to be transparent and vulnerable a little bit. You know, you've shared with me before and I think the audience will appreciate this, you know, being picked on in school, not, you know, because your intelligence was so far ahead of everybody, they didn't know what to do with. They were so damn insecure, they didn't.

Know what to do with it. To be fair, I was very annoying socially, but like.

Yeah, but what I'm saying is. But you would be surprised that the vast majority of the people that we serve all feel like outcasts. They all feel like they don't fit a block.

That's my people. And you'd also be surprised to know that the vast majority of our population is a misfit, Right? I was the kid in high school that was friends with everybody. I didn't care if you were the heavy metal guys. I didn't care if you were the rap guys and gals, so to speak. I didn't care if you were the computer guys. I didn't care if you were the piano people. I didn't care if you were cool. I hung out with you. And if you were a douchebag, I didn't.

And anytime I watched a douchebag try to mess with somebody else, it made me angry, right? And I used to have the same problem that everybody else wanted to have. I don't fit in. No one sees me. No one notices me. Maybe they're not supposed to. Maybe you're not designed to fit in. Maybe you're meant to stand out. Who the heck knows, right? But you won't discover that until you take a step forward to actually find out, to make it a reality. So why not do that? Why not go for it?

I mean, I definitely use that as fuel, like I would, see, but that's.

Where it comes from. There's two choices when you hit adversity. Rise and grind or rise and fall. In other words.

Life sucks. I can't do it. They're right. No, no, no, no, no, no, no.

All because they don't see the greatness inside of you doesn't mean it's not there.

Understand me? Yes. All because they don't see it doesn't mean it's not there. There's a biblical principle that. Of course, I'm a person of faith. And I'll quote Jesus here for just a second. You don't have to follow my faith. We've been clear on that before. Jesus said to his disciples that a prophet is never known in their hometown. Okay, here's what I mean by that. Jesus worked miracles in the scriptures throughout all kinds of cities across Judea, in Jerusalem and surrounding areas. The one place that he had the hardest time working miracles, helping people was the place he grew up.

Nazareth. Was it Nazareth?

Nazareth, Bethlehem. That geographic. But Nazareth is where he spent most of his young adult, his youth. But what I'm getting at is they didn't see in him the greatness within him that ultimately changed the world. Whether you want to believe in Jesus or not, the Fact that there were 2200 years later plus and people are still worshiping and still praising and still teaching and still. You know what I'm saying?

I mean, that's not a question. He's impactful.

Yeah, there's no doubt he was impactful. You can't deny that. Okay.

All came out of facing as haters. All came out of doing the hard work first. All came out of focusing on a.

Mission that mattered through the ultimate example.

Exactly. And he did so with dignity, love and respect, with the exception of what the Bible calls Sadducees and Pharisees. Sadducees and Pharisees were so full of self righteousness that they injured more people than they helped. They were so focused on their ability to look good and feel the part.

You know, that reminds me of some gurus today.

Yeah. And I'm always hesitant to kind of. Because, you know.

Everybody'S on their own journey. Okay.

Had I not had some divine moments kind of stepping my way, I can see how easy it is to transition that direction, which is why I don't hate on people. I'm just saying there's two choices, there's two methodologies, there's two ways forward. You know what I'm saying?

Yeah.

So again, if Jesus himself. Okay, again, whether you believe in Jesus or not is irrelevant. He definitely impacted the world. Okay. If he himself was surrounded by people that did not believe in him, sounded like people that did not believe, not only that he was the son of God, which is. But didn't believe he was doing miracles, didn't believe he was out serving people and healing the sick and all this kind of stuff if they didn't believe that? Right. That's the only place that that didn't happen. Why on earth would you think that necessarily that everybody in your immediate circle or surrounding circle is automatically going to believe in your greatness that you have yet to discover yourself. You're not illustrating it, you're not showing it, you're not. You're not moving towards it. People that hated on me in the earlier days of building my first business and building the subsequent businesses along the way did so because that was the Steven from high school. I was the kid that wore jeans two or three days in a row because we didn't have enough money to freaking buy a lot of detergent. You know what I'm saying? Like, they didn't. I had one guy recently that I went to high school with literally challenged me on social media, telling me that I wasn't homeless. Like the hell he would know.

Because when they were celebrating their senior year, I was fighting for my life. And it wasn't until he went back and look at his yearbook to realize I wasn't in the yearbook picture in the senior year that he realized, oh, crap, Stephen wasn't there. Which meant what also means that I was largely ignored by some of these people groups. That's normal. It's normal to be ignored by people groups. It's normal. It's okay. That just shows you that's not your tribe, Right. As you start to walk into the greatness that's hidden inside of you on a consistent basis, not only does your happiness rise, but the other thing that comes along with that is your tribe begins to rise. You begin to find the people that are also quirky. You begin to find, like, I'm surrounded by entrepreneurs all over the place now, right? I'm an entrepreneur. Entrepreneurs know entrepreneurs. I can tell if somebody's an entrepreneur within five minutes of meeting them, regardless of the size of their business.

What's funny is, is like, that's actually what drove drew me into this world so much, is because like you said, I was never accepted by my peers. But the second I came into entrepreneur land, I had all these mentors and people who loved me and appreciated me. And so I was like, this is my place.

Yeah. And as a result, while you still have a, you know, stuff we have to deal with insecurities and self esteem, that's just part of the process. So rather than being scared of all the stuff that you, all the questions you don't have answers to, why not just take a daily step? Why not read a book, watch a podcast, watch YouTube videos like this one? Like, why not actually just take a step? If you take a step on a daily basis, then on a yearly basis, you'll ultimately discover exactly what it is you're looking for.

So you need to give yourself grace and be patient. Except you're not supposed to be happy overnight.

I got news for you. I love social media to death. It's how we communicate with our tribe and our folks, which is where we get a lot of these questions from and stuff like that, which I'm always honored in, and I'll even answer some of those in the moment with a voice recorder from time to time if I get to it quick enough.

But one of the reasons I kind of admire that is because you're starting to build real connections. The tricky part is like, especially with like Instagram and Facebook, right? The only thing that's posted is the end result or the success or the desired end result. Nobody's actually focused on or rare people. It's rare that people are out there. Just like somebody who's maybe really overweight is out there filming themselves on a treadmill, trying to burn the calories, trying to get the work done because again, they feel inadequate, insecure, Right. Rather than saying, I'm putting in the work today. It's funny when you can actually have a starting point where you can see the vulnerable, transparent of the beginning of the transition and then see the contrast of what and you see the entire journey that gives the underlying semblance of hope. One of the reasons I'm so vulnerable, with how I share things and how I look at happiness and how I look at all these different subject matters is because I know that the more vulnerable I share on the front end, the more real I am on the front end, the more courage it's going to give somebody to pursue their thing on the back end. Right? So where some people think it's important to show off stuff, I think it's more important to show the process. I'm a big fan in celebrating the grind, the journey, the effort, and honestly.

Ignoring the successes, that's what creates the happiness. Then. Happiness isn't something that you either have or you don't. And I think that that's something that a lot of people don't realize. So to wrap all this up, if you had to give people who feel at their lowest point ever, because there's going to be some people watching this who clicked on this video for that reason, and they've been listening to you and you've been dropping gold bombs this entire time. If you had to give them one thing to just do or one message in, you know, parting, what would that be?

It's not over.

That's the one message. It's not over.

You can't judge where you're at right now, but where are you going to be? And if you grind it out and you go after it and you make something out of yourself, you will not only see the successes, you will not only get the fulfillment, you'll not only get the happiness. You'll probably discover that you're a hell of a lot stronger than you thought you were, capable of more than you thought you were, and able to make a larger impact than you think you can. So I think that at the end of the day, that's going to be the primary message. It's not over. I don't care what you're facing. Look, I have faced business closures or the potential of having a business closures more times than I can count on on this journey. And it's because I chose not to focus on that, but I chose to focus on the creative ways to get myself out of those situations that I was able to again build, build off of failures, then the successes, failures and successes, that kind of stuff like that. I'm where I am today because I chose not to focus on the mistake as being a limiting factor rather than a learning factor. So use your use your struggles, use your insecurities to create fire rather than create a pitfall, and I think you'll be successful. As you can see, your questions are important. Do me a favor and drop your questions in the comments section below to make sure we can answer your specific questions. In the meantime, you're probably going to check out this video right here. So check it out. That's where that focus comes down into play. Most people focus in on what's going wrong, what's not working, why they feel confused, why they feel stuck, why they feel like they're searching for more.