If You Want to Get Wealthy, Watch This

this episode is sponsored by north one to learn more about business banking with north one visit north one dot com slash impact now enjoy the episode there's this thing people think that like i'll be happy when once i get like this big amazing home or once i get this car then i'll allow myself some happiness the problem is the finish line always moves you never arrive there right so there are everyone who has any experience whether you're an employee or an entrepreneur has had something bad happen to them you need to have some persistence you need to have a focus on what you want to do you need to know how to cooperate with other people share the credit you need to how to communicate well with people either orally or writing or some other method stop trying to convince everybody of what you're saying that's not the threshold of being a good communicator people do not need to believe what you're saying they need to believe you believe what you're saying that's influence influences you believe i believe it one common mistake that people make is they just try to cut a little bit of everything five percent here five percent their life sucks when you do that you would be better off picking your two to three biggest expenses and going after it so the important thing in terms of investing what that means is you need to know how to diversify well my standard is one more minute on the treadmill my standard is one more person i can reach that day one more phone call one more something nobody ever won a nobel prize working five days a week nine to five if you're going to do something great it takes a lot of time and hard work is important you've got the the whole concept of blissfully dissatisfied which i think is brilliant thank you walk people through what that is but but what i really want to know is how do you keep that from breaking you wow that's no one's asked me that before it's it's along the same vein really as um getting what you'll tolerate so there's this misnomer and you've watched this even in your own life or the successful people you've interviewed so there's this thing people think that like i'll be happy when once i get like this big amazing home or once i get this car or once i get this relationship or an amount of money then i'll allow myself some happiness the problem is the finish line always moves you never arrive there right the other part is people think well if i enjoy myself now i'm going to lose my drive in other words if i can just wire myself with enough pain all the time i won't lose my driver ambition the truth is there's no correlation between the two at all there's no relationship between you feeling complete pain all the time and losing drive and so i talk about living in a state of blissful dissatisfaction and really the best example of that would be like if you've ever i love a good meal right you know if i bite into a great piece of steak if you're a steak eater like i am you take that first bite it's like complete bliss right there's no correlation between how great that tasted and your lack of desire for the next bite in fact that bliss causes you to want more of it and so the more we can be into a reward ourselves with bliss we're not gonna lose our dissatisfaction we're not gonna we're not gonna lose that and so for me our brains this dopamine hit you get when you do something successful if you constantly cheat yourself out of that hit right biomechanically in your body less and less in the future where you want to achieve the next level the next dream the next step and that's why so many people stall out in life they didn't they got to a certain point and they cheated themselves out of the bliss out of the celebration it's important that we celebrate our wins we celebrate our lives because it causes us to want the next bite it keeps us hungrier not the reverse and so for me i want to live in a state of being grateful and blissful now not waiting for some future place or date that may never arise um but back on your audience i i think your audience ranges from um you know there's a wide range that you have in your audience and i would say that there are many people in your audience who can plan for a simple lifestyle that can be wonderful sometimes we acquire these needs that aren't at anywhere near as big as as we make them out to be um you know um do you have a bed to sleep in do you have food to eat do you have basic health care okay if you start to think okay what are my needs that i really need and i'm okay and how can i make provisions for those needs then once you've got that in your mind you're you're free okay you you can go beyond that uh that you may say listen oh i can do that for a year or two years or a month or whatever but you i think we visualize too much the things that we're used to one of the good things about this exercise is that you can bring it brings you back to basics you can be brought to basics and like i'm saying if you have a bed to sleep in and you've got food and so on and you have those basics and and good relationships with people who care about you and basic health care so if you budget for that and you figure how do you have it maybe it isn't in the luxurious place you're in maybe it's in the country and so on once you visualize that and you get that down in your head and you say oh i can get that then your stress will disappear because you as you visualize that in many ways that's a happy life it doesn't take a lot to there's stimulation there's nature there's relationships these fundamental wonderful things the most important things can be obtained and so for many of you i think if you look at that and you budget for that i'm seeing a number of people um who are um going broke uh and and i've watched this over many years and really it's just the adjustment process when that once they get to that point where ah you know they have they get settled they're fine it's the ambiguity it's the worry it's the stress so if you do that from the beginning and you have that that played out in your head then you know everything from there you can play with and it's your it's uh icing on the cake so i want to emphasize you can budget for that you can look at that find that scenario find what that looks like so that you know you got it down then you know you're safe once you've got safe everything beyond that is luxury so the first thing is the people i know that are really happy are very self-aware in fact the best entrepreneurs i know are very self-aware they're aware of their shortcomings right they want to improve them they want to get to the next version of themselves all the time and so for me self-confidence comes because i didn't have it and i think anytime you meet somebody like yourself or myself who might now appear self-confident it's because i really had to find tools and resources because i was so insecure and shy and introverted so i had to find techniques and resources to build that up in me and for me it's very simple it's the promises that i keep to myself if i have a habit over and over beginning to stack one on top of the other of keeping promises i make to me not other people in other words the minute you begin to get external in your life worrying about what other people think about you right you've you've lost all control you and it never fills you up and people's admiration people's gratitude towards you will never fill you up it's your own it's your own inside and so for me self-confidence comes from keeping the promises i make to myself and the other part of it is being aware i'm doing it in other words most people don't give themselves enough credit all the time they're very aware of these 20 things and not aware of the 80 right and that's why the dosage is so important too you've nailed it it should be 80 20 right because people get addicted to this i'm not good at this people don't like this about me i don't feel good instead of focusing on the 80 and stacking up wow i did eat what i said i was going to today i did get up when i said i was going to i made the amount of phone calls i treated people in such a way i promised myself it's not just doing those things it's rewarding it's being aware of it and stacking that up when i work with athletes the successful athletes i work with when they're in a slump it's never that they can't hit a ball anymore or make a shot or swing a golf club they've lost their self-confidence somewhere along the way they've lost the ability to focus on the things they are great at and stacking those promises they make to themselves and the way i get them to break their slump is not correcting their swing or getting them positive it's getting them to acknowledge the small promises showing up to batting practice early hitting that extra bucket of balls beginning to reward themselves for the extra promises they keep to themselves puts them back in a state of self-confidence all of a sudden they're hitting the ball great again well in my view success is happiness the most elusive thing in life is personal happiness thomas jefferson wrote about the pursuit of happiness he never told us how to actually get it but finding somebody that's happy with their life is really really good so if you ever meet a poor person and they are very happy with what they're doing why should you say your life isn't successful they're very happy with what they're doing if you meet a very wealthy person and he or she is tortured with their money and they don't know what to do with it their children hate them everybody hates them is that person successful i don't really think so i think success comes about when you're happy because that's the point of life to some extent is being happy that's why we're all here i guess to some extent we want to make the life better for other people but to some extent if you are making life better for other people you're going to be happy in my view the reason my standards are set so high is because i don't want to leave it up to my own devices right my standard is one more minute on the treadmill my standard is one more person i can reach that day one more phone call one more something and so for me i raise them every single year but the way i get to do it is i link it to my reasons and so goals are really empty to me i have a thing on goal setting but like my big thing is that you show me something with compelling emotional gigantic reasons i'll show you someone who's changing their standards all day long so like give you one quick version that you not heard before one of the reasons i'm relatively fit is not just peak state my uncle in my family that died at 50 years old of a heart attack my godfather my dad's only brother i kind of resembled him and i look like him a lot so on the way back from his funeral my reticular activators on heart attacks on the tv screen on the airplane i'm listening to music is the oprah winfrey show she's going through a new heart scan i've unplugged my headphones plugged into the airplane one they're telling this new scan at cedar cyanide that at that time was new it could read the plaques in your arteries the calcifications without going you know really invasively i scheduled it i went in i had a world-class doctor who understood reasons and leverage instead of just prescribing when we coach people you need to do this you need to do this doctors do it take this pill take this he understood leverage and reasons what you do is you take the scan then you go to lunch you come back i took the scan i went to i had a burrito i came back and i'm in the la when i walk in i sit down the doctor comes up and he says oh my i can't believe these arteries are in that young body uh got my attention we walk back in we sit down he could still go you need crestor eat clean get out of here is that what an average doctor does right no wired me with huge reasons he goes let me ask you a question i heard your wife's pregnant you have i said i have a son and he says do you want to be there when he graduates from high school to be there for that day i said yes sir yeah he goes your wife's pregnant what do you have and i said a daughter this is where you get a dad he goes she was six months pregnant he goes do you um would you like to walk her down the aisle on her wedding day are you okay that it's some other man i went what the is on the scan right like and he goes i want to be very clear with you if you keep going down the road you're going there'll be some other man with your son at graduation high school and a stranger's walking your daughter down the other not even born yet on her wedding day and i went boom and he goes but if you do exactly what i tell you to do you'll be there and so to this day brother there are mornings when i wake up not every morning i don't want to go to the gym i go bella's wedding bella's wedding bella's wedding so my standards are high because of my big old reasons other dudes may miss the gym that day because they're not going to miss their daughter's wedding if they don't go but i've convinced myself i get emotional i've convinced myself i'll miss my daughter's wedding so i will get my ass out of bed at four o'clock in the morning and i will get to that gym because my reasons are bigger so my standards are higher well sure happiness can be a momentary thing in some cases you're happy that something happened uh big success happened here you did something you got an award or something uh your children call you up and say they're proud of you if that ever happens but fulfillment means that you're content and contentment really is a more long-lasting kind of thing you know to be fulfilled i think is being uh is something that can goes on for quite some time happiness can be more transitory you're happy one day you're unhappy the next day but when you're fulfilled i think it's more long-lasting and probably a better thing so how did you craft that message for your kids one thing that it seems like you've really established yourself as in your career somebody who's deeply persuasive able to like you said a good leader get people to go somewhere that's going to be good for them how did you set your kids up for that for pursuing happiness or fulfillment there was a famous book that was written called presidential power and in it it was written by a man named richard neustadt and he said look president doesn't have that much power he only has the power to persuade and as i thought about it that's what life is all about persuading somebody to do something go on your show read your book uh greet with your theories life is all about persuading people even albert einstein couldn't come up with e equals m c squared and everybody said you're right he had to go persuade people that he was correct about that so persuasion is very important so there are three ways to persuade and communicate one orally you're a good talker you're martin luther king you're abraham lincoln a good writer you're mark twain you write very well but the most powerful way is by leading by example persuading by example so with my kids i was a hard worker and i tried to educate them about the value of hard work i read a lot i try to educate them about the value of reading treating other people well i tried to educate them but children learn by seeing what their parents do if your parents are are doing certain things and they're telling kids to do the opposite that's probably not gonna work so you have to kind of do what you're trying to get your kids to do and lead by example now nobody's a perfect parent i'm certainly not but um you know trying to lead by example is probably what i tried to do and and to some extent uh it worked and you know my kids are not perfect i'm not perfect and everybody has their flaws but i think generally they're reasonably happy and generally they're reasonably successful by normal human standards i got to tell you that um your mind gravitates towards which it is most familiar with and so if you're really familiar with what you're worried about and what your problems are and your fears are and that becomes your dominating thinking i know you've all heard this but here's the reason why your mind loves what's familiar okay and so if you don't go touch dreams for example just experience it for a second for example we would go down once every eight weeks if i did well in business we really knocked it out we could find a deal i had 200 bucks we'd go to the ritz carlton or some hotel ocean and for one day oceanfront feel like what it felt like to valet your car right walk in the lobby mr milette welcome back right she'd go get a massage i'd play a little bit of golf and just for that day i'd touch the dream and then maybe we'd do it again in a month or two and again in a month just little taste of it my mind began to begin to become familiar with it and more crazy i started to kind of trick myself into thinking i belonged there because we never end up anywhere we don't believe we don't belong and then we're not familiar with so there's these things you'd like to do in your life either visually seeing them over and over again or repeating those images to yourself that's powerful but a double whammy is to not only repeat them and see them but to go to see there's one thing that's a visual stimulus in your brain that makes you want to do something the triple whammies if you could see it touch it feel it and smell it if you allow all your senses to experience something it becomes far more familiar to your brain and so i'm a massive massive advocate of touching a dream in any form you can get it the best of which is actually going and experiencing it short term people begin to believe you belong there you're a little bit better and so i you will not probably produce many things in your life that you've not visited either mentally or literally thousands of times and so if you want to end up somewhere you better be visiting them those could be dreams visions but the most important thing is if you could actually more powerful so you go touch them short term massive difference drive by the neighborhood see the cars if you want to spend your life in service for your church or your community take a day out every month and actually do it know what it feels like for an afternoon to feed the homeless or to do and you begin to love it and feel it and believe you belong there more and more chance that you'll be able to do that full time someday i have definitely made some changes in my financial advice one of the first things is that i am now advising people to target a one-year emergency fund which sounds like a lot we can talk about how do you calculate that and how do you actually do that if you lost your job for example but that's one change um you know another thing that i've really been talking to people about is the psychological mindset of how to take action right now and you know there's a little framework that i've been sharing with people which is step one is you have to accept reality and that means that for example if you're a waiter your job's not coming back for a long time and we have to just accept that that is the case that's really painful because culturally most of us are optimistic we want to go west we think that everything's going to work out all of our movies end with two people walking off in the sunset but sometimes reality is a little tougher than that uh the second thing that we have to do is make a plan it's one thing to be worried and anxious about money fine all of us are feeling that way but after we accept reality uh we have to decide hey what if things go great how am i going to come out of this but also what if things go poorly and then finally we have to move uh in normal times we are so uh we get paralyzed and if you think about if you're driving down the freeway and you see something in the middle of the road what's the first thing you do you slam on the brakes it makes sense but in a time like this in a crisis that's actually the last thing that you want so what is looking at the historical perspective what are things that are safe bets in terms of this job is going to be here in five years that this is a good place to begin building that skill set you're talking about the skill set not the investment i guess yeah skill set i think that that's maybe more useful for people if they've just lost their job and you know they're sort of just trying to make ends meet at this point well in terms of um i think in terms of any environment the lessons that we get over and over again is that you can't be sure what the next environment and twists and turns are what you don't know is greater than anything you do know so if if you were in the airline business or you were in the hospitality business and that was wonderful and you liked it and everything else all of a sudden that changed in important ways so the important thing it more are the more general abilities in terms of investing what that means is you need to know how to diversify well that's the most important thing in terms of any aspect in life to know how to deal with what you don't know is more important than anything you know because the world is so much more surprising than you can really be sure of so in a general sense for skills i mean i think and skills are part of you what what are your environment you know find out those things that um are that are self-sufficient and maintain uh flexibility you have to know how to maintain flexibility and change well if your career is in one area um you have to know how this you have to develop the skill for changing a career and that all comes down to knowing how to find the path to know how to triangulate well with others let's talk about business banking with north one with north one you can manage your money from anywhere whether you're working from home or on the go everything you need to manage your business finances is at your fingertips with north one north one make sure that you never step foot inside a bank branch again north one can also help you easily save for big expenses with their subaccounts feature that automatically helps you save for things like tax time rent and payroll and all of your favorite business tools are connected to your bank account for easy access shopify stripe square paypal and more with north one you can build and send invoices in seconds from your bank account track your invoices to know when you've been paid and send reminders when you haven't you can use the north one mobile app to send and deposit checks digitally in seconds that means no more checkbooks and no more bank lines and if you need a digital banking option that still lets you do cash north one is the way to go north one lets you deposit and withdraw cash for free through one of america's largest atm networks if you want to learn more about business banking with north one visit dot com north1.com impact that's north o n e dot com slash impact to learn more about business banking with north one take care guys and be legendary okay great let's start with people who lost their job i want to talk to them first because it is urgent for them and other people who still have their job or have savings you have a little bit more leeway so for both groups the typical advice that you hear is to shrink and cut back on everything but as i've always said there's a limit to how much you can cut there's no limit to how much you can earn so there are really three ways that i talk about in terms of getting stable and it's the ceo strategy cut costs we all know the the flavor but i'll give you a specific example i had somebody uh reach out to me and say ramit my wedding isn't for like seven or eight months what do you think i should do and i said without missing a beat i said you got to cancel it and as someone who has planned a large wedding i know how painful that is to just think of all the money lost all the planning all the time but at a time like this money in your pocket is worth more than money in your pocket later so money in your pocket now is worth more than money in your pocket later that means if you have to cancel certain things that are going to incur fees later fine deal with the fees later but get the money in your pocket that's c e earn more we can talk about earning more in a second but there's a whole opportunity there to start businesses and start earning more oh is really something that a lot of people haven't thought about right now so whether you have a job or not you can call up the companies that you owe money to or you transact with and you can get some surprisingly great results for example your student loan company if you guys owe student debt if you owe credit card debt uh if you have a cable bill a cell phone bill or even a landlord you pick up the phone and this is what you say you say i've been a good customer for three years covid 19 is making it difficult for me to be able to pay my bills like i usually do i'd like to know what options you have available for me and my readers have used this script a lot of them have gotten their payments paused with no finance or interest charges and some of them have even gotten rent waived so there's a lot of opportunity you're talking about possible hundreds or even a thousand plus dollars with one phone call that is how you start what i'm desperately trying to figure out for myself is what level of proactiveness of learning about their health they can do to try to weather this storm because short of just saving and cutting expenses and maybe that's it maybe there isn't any more that they can do but i guess that's my direct question is there something more uh i mean you know the parts right it's it's income expenses and savings okay now you can go get the money maybe the money comes in and you say okay my unemployment benefits are going to be this or my this is but um those are the parts then the issue is uh how clever are you at uh dealing with you know it's so rare to hear someone going on offense with their money most often like 99 of the time people are playing life on defense especially with their money i guess i spent that much i don't nobody taught me about money oh there's no way to make money on and on and on and even in the relatively simple area of cost cutting you were like no that i'm going after it i'm going to become an animal as you put it and so you don't have to have that aggression in every part of your life i think at a certain point it would become counterproductive maybe but just to pick that one zone and say i'm going to dominate this and whatever winning means to you so let me give a couple of suggestions for people for how you can start and then how you can take it to the to the next level if you want to first off with cutting one common mistake that people make is they just try to cut a little bit of everything five percent here five percent there life sucks when you do that and the classic thing we've all heard is three dollar lattes blah blah blah saving three dollar lattes is not gonna change your life at all okay i've run the math you save it for 60 000 years maybe you end up with some real material savings none of us are doing it you would be better off picking your two to three biggest expenses and going after them going really hard okay you got a car payment let's look at that um you know student loans have i called up my student loan company have i gone and typed in student loan debt payoff and calculated how i could shave four years off the payments no nobody has they spend their life complaining but they never read a single good book about personal finance for their entire life so pick two areas two to three target ten fifteen percent savings if you can achieve those you don't have to worry about cutting back on three dollar lattes those two to three big expenses can be amazing now if you wanna go all the way like to what you did you can get aggressive and you can start cutting everything but i would recommend because money is also a psychology game is you want to get a couple of wins under your belt first so even something as simple as getting your credit card uh fee waived that's 35 bucks it's not that much in the grand scheme but you're going to be like wait a second tie myself on the back i actually did this and now you can start to get more aggressive so what can the average person take away from that they don't have bonds they don't think like that they may not even understand what their 401k is or they may not even have a 401k so how do they navigate this is it just head down do your best to weather the storm or is there actually something that they can learn from the historical perspective and move on now to make this easier for them yeah it's the it's the same for every individual same for every company same and you if you understand this then you understand there well there are three things um the first is look at your income your expenses and your savings and then do a stress test so that you get yourself secure if you were to lose your income or if the income were to fall beyond a certain level and you play that out maybe that means you go get unemployment insurance but or whatever how long can you live in an acceptable lifestyle and do you have a savings that is adequate for that okay so what you do is you calculate if i lived in a simpler lifestyle and i had this amount of earnings how many months how many months or years could i live acceptably then you look at your what what do you put the money in what are you saving okay so i'm really glad that you you have shared that you were on unemployment i think anyone who has had a long career has had something bad happen to them i was laid off from my own company right so there are everyone who has any experience whether you're an employee or an entrepreneur has had something bad happen to them and i say that because i've had my own i will teach you to be rich readers who have come to me and some of them as recently as four weeks ago they were big ballers they had great jobs they were doing very well and suddenly they were laid off through no fault of their own and now it is humiliating for them to have to go to the unemployment website and my first response to them when they were dming me was to say these services are here for you you should not feel embarrassed about taking advantage of them they are here for you so if it's a matter of pride or it's a matter of feeling bad put it aside right rewrite that narrative in your head that i'm a failure because you're not and go take advantage of every resource you have available unemployment is one you should do that first thing if you've been laid off you should also take a look at what you can control with your expenses so let's talk about that one year emergency fund what is that a lot of people mistakenly think hey i make 60k a year my emergency fund needs to be 60k there's no way i can save 60k that's crazy well you don't need 60k in full for your emergency fund so let's break it down the way you do it is you imagine what is the minimum amount of money you need to live to cover your rent uh you know if you or your partner got laid off you would probably be cutting back quite a bit okay how much does that cost then you say all right i am going to take everything that i can and put it in an emergency fund in cash just a simple high yield savings account you don't need anything fancy now a lot of people already have some money in savings they've just never thought of it as part of an emergency fund other people have been following my book they've been automatically investing so for them i tell them put your investments on pause and redirect that money to your emergency fund now it's probably going to take people a while to save 12 months but guess what that's okay even if you get seven months of the way there that's better than nothing and once you have that money you have security you have safety you have the ability to breathe and think about a perspective for your job or your business that you want to start so that is what i would recommend take advantage of all the resources you've got redirect any money you can towards that emergency fund and remember it doesn't necessarily have to be your full salary it's probably a fraction of that you talked about a high yield savings account is that really a thing right now like are people giving interest rates well they're actually it's a good question because they're not really yielding high but they're called high yield savings accounts truthfully uh people waste so much time chasing interest rates i'm gonna give you an example people write me i get these emails every single day uh ramit um my ally account dropped from 1.5 to 1.35 oh should i switch i'm like why are you emailing me this have you actually run the numbers on a 10 000 balance we're talking about dollars per year it's nothing so the key thing everybody needs to learn right now is you don't make money on your savings account that's not where money is made it's just meant to be safe and stable the real place you make money from chapter seven in my book is investing so that's a whole different thing we can talk about that for people who have money um but right now they're paying zero percent they're paying 0.5 it doesn't really matter it's just there so your money is liquid and available to you if you had to put into a single sentence what leadership is what what its nature is if you will what would you say leadership is generally it's the effort of one or more people to convince a larger group of people to follow them in doing something that the leaders think is a good thing for everybody to do it could be social policy it could be a political effort it could be a business venture but basically leaders are people who try to convince other people that it would be in everybody's best interest to follow the leaders views on what should be done tell me about the time where you were trying to give a speech and you were so freaked out that your vision was blurring and you couldn't even read what was on your card because honestly like if i hadn't heard you tell that story i would just assume you're really good at this by nature because you're so good at this like you're so good and communicating is crazy and i've seen you in front of like 50 000 people's bananas right so how did you start from like just absolutely being paralyzed by fear like what was that process oh my gosh so but you really do your research yeah my first time i talked i literally went up and blanked out like i literally could not think i could not see the card how i fixed it speaking was over time but i'll give you a couple of key things on speaking for everybody one i had to i had to figure out you know what someone said because you love baseball you don't stutter when you talk about baseball you don't get insecure i go well i love that and i believe in it they're like oh you don't you know you talk about your kids you're great i thought oh there's a correlation here between me actually saying what i believe and what i'm passionate about and my ability to communicate it and so that now my first layer is always i must be passionate about it and i must believe it and i'm never doing an impression of another person so i always come from a place of saying what i really believe because you can't transfer to somebody that which you don't experience yourself i can give you passion i can give you energy i can give you my belief if i'm experiencing it big key is a speaker i'll give everybody stop trying to convince everybody of what you're saying that's not the threshold of being a good communicator people do not need to believe what you're saying they need to believe you believe what you're saying and as long as they believe you believe what you're saying you're an effective speaker i stopped trying to get people to believe me there's a neediness there's a salesmanship to that i stopped that it's a subtle difference i just want you to believe i believe it that's influence influences you believe i believe it well there's seven and a half billion people on the face of the earth and in some respects almost everybody's a leader in some way if you're a parent you're a leader you might be a leader of a girl scout troop or you might be president of the united states so everybody has probably some roles where they play as a leader um is it good for everybody to want to be a leader well i think leadership is good if we had everybody being a follower they have a lot of chaos now in the military uh leadership is more complicated because those people who are leading in the military they have people's lives at stake if you're in combat and you're not doing a good job in the military as a combat leader people can die not the same in other parts of life to some extent but i do think that uh people who want to be leaders uh can develop and mature and improve their leadership skills and that's part of what i wrote about how people became great leaders after some starts that were not so wonderful some mistakes and some failures and things like that one moment that i'd really love to get some color on and maybe this just comes down to what your reasons were after that first attempt which had to have like just been searing into your mind anxiety about speaking horrific how did you get up the second time yeah same room same people that helped for me um but i figured out i didn't have any preparation so my confidence when i speak now just like this interview the amount of preparation you've done for this is it is more than anyone who's interviewed me right and so me the separation is in the preparation like i have to be prepared i have to know what i'm going to talk about and so that second time i i knew every single thing i was going to say i didn't do great but i did what i said i was going to do i got up and i did it i got up and i delivered and i just be candid with you i liked the feeling eventually that i affected somebody i like the feeling that you know maybe the first time i spoke i i didn't affect anybody that second time maybe there were 40 people and maybe one person i helped and i had this very weird capacity now to focus on the ones i help i actually focus if i speak to 50 000 people there's got to be 3 000 people there who think i suck there has to be there's at least 30 right there's someone here and if i obsessed over those 30 people that's what made me nervous i was obsessed with just basically reaching somebody so the irony was the beginning of my speaking career it was my anxiety and fear of it that was what was inspiring about me not the words i said over time i think the words became more inspiring but i found what was inspiring about me what put them in spirit and it was overcoming my anxiety and fear of actually doing what they saw i was at the gym yesterday and a woman drove by me in a wheelchair at the gym i was working out pretty hard and she wheeled by me heavyset lady in a wheelchair i'd be honest with you i watched her wheel past me she inspired me do you know what courage it takes to get in your wheelchair and decide i'm going to go to the gym right i'm going to go to the gym she's heavy set awkward that inspired me far more than the jacked up dude doing 60 pound curls i mean that's inspiring but you see that a woman in a wheelchair at a gym with her two pound dumbbells because her legs don't work but she went in there anyway and you know how insecure she was about going in there she's the only person in a wheelchair she doesn't know what she's going to see how people are going to react to her she's not in shape she's never full makeup on and her little you know halter top like the other girls in there she's right in there she was right in there working out right next to them right i couldn't take my eyes off her i couldn't take my eyes off her and i ended up telling her that she was leaving i left what i was doing i walked over i said i just want you to know something you're inspiring me this is wonderful her face just lit up because you know how sad she how insecure she was about being in there most inspiring person is the one overcoming the fear of doing something not the person who's excellent at it so so in the book you break down what are the sort of core tenets of or aspects of leadership um in the book were they in order of importance no they were not necessarily in the order of importance but they were you know i they were 13 that i kind of thought were important and just to review the examples of them luck is very important because you need some luck to get anywhere i think you need to have some persistence you need to have a focus on what you want to do you need to know how to cooperate with other people share the credit you need to how to communicate well with people either orally or writing or some other method you also need to i think be ethical i think some humility helps a lot obviously we know arrogant leaders and have succeeded but generally i think humility helps rising to the occasion when a crisis occurs is very important so there are many different skill sets that i think are common with the people i interviewed well look nobody ever won a nobel prize working five days a week nine to five if you're gonna do something great it takes a lot of time and hard work is important so there aren't people there are not people sitting around just get lucky and all of a sudden the world goes to them and says i want you to be our leader it doesn't usually happen second i think it is focus you can't do a hundred things and do them all well you can do one thing extremely well maybe two or three reasonably well but focus on what you want to do and then i think you've got to just be willing to overcome failure because everybody's going to fail and if you give up if you fail and you don't persist in your idea you're not going to be a leader and those are things that are very very important which is to say uh be persistent uh focus on something and again you have to want to be a leader you can't sit in your home and say you know i don't really want to be a leader and all of a sudden people are going to say you know you're our leader that doesn't usually happen if we really go back and we look at it i had a couple good things happen for me um or to me one was at that time my wife did get frank with me this is not who you are this is not what you're about i don't recognize this person this is who you are and i had a other person to my benefit pointing out to me the things that were great about me now this is going to sound hokey but i'm going to give you the big one and this is why life gives you these great tests i had a really good friend of mine i went to lunch and he said i don't know who this guy is here in front of me and he goes let me ask you a question honestly right now what are you grateful for and at the lunch i said jack nothing brother there's nothing good in my life right now and i'm not exaggerating this to you when i tell you this and this is a factual story as i'm mouthing these words two people walked in with an older man both of them clearly were fighting cancer somehow both had lost their hair one of the ladies had a bonnet on and they were barely moving in both walked by our table and gave me the most warm greeting the warmest smile as a stranger and he goes that's pretty freaking pathetic you can't find anything in your life to be grateful for right now and on the drive home i'm not kidding you i started to stack gratitude i started to take inventory because if you can find things to be grateful for in that space man is your life going to be rich when there really are external things to be grateful for so my first mechanism out of that space was honestly to stack the things i was grateful for and i started reinforcing it over and over and over again and what happens is there's this reticular activating system in our brains right and all of a sudden because that's the messaging i was giving myself all of a sudden all these things start to come into my awareness that i'm grateful for i start to magnetize to myself some people that i needed to find into my life and that was the next layer i started to see things to be grateful for my health my fitness people who loved me what it is it changed my state when i stacked gratitude i changed what i did in the morning and i changed what i did in the evening and so somehow by grabbing control of my morning and by grabbing control of my evening i got some measure of control over the middle of my day i was an out of control person back in those days meaning this i woke up worried stressed fearful and i immediately start thinking about a bill i had to pay something that was wrong and i'm in a state of reaction to begin every i'm talking within six minutes of waking up six seconds most people listening to this that's what they do i said i gotta grab control of my morning and i set up routines in my morning maybe they served me maybe they didn't but they were things i could deliver on doing for myself and so not only did that give me control over the day but i started to stack my self-confidence too some of what comes into that is framing it how you think about failure i mean you talk about that as one of the important things that a leader has to be able to do how in your life have you um talked to yourself about what failure means well i failed at lots of things and so you just have to say to yourself okay does the whole world know i failed or just i know i failed and then the whole world knows it's a little more embarrassing uh if you know then maybe you don't run around telling everybody how much you fail and then you realize sometimes you fail because you made a mistake or sometimes you don't have the ability that you wanted to have or sometimes here has some bad luck but everybody has failed at something in life and if you say you haven't failed at something you're not being honest everybody's failing at something all right my last question what is the impact that you want to have on the world the impact i want to have in the world is it sounds real general but it's something that i'm obsessed with is i want to inspire as many people as i physically can in their lives to chase down the ultimate version of them in their way in their place and in their space and so i happen to have a little number written down i think i can reach 100 million people before i leave here with just that message of chase down the version of you that you were born to be that version of you or myself it has nothing to do it could have to do with money but it could have to do with the people that you reach the people you touch the one person's life you change see the one thing in business that people miss is that someone hired me into the business i'm in so although i'm a pretty good business story what about the person who gave me the shot what about that door that opened and how many people did he reach and no one even knows his name and so i want to be that person who gives people their platform their shot their shot at life their ability to join the ranks of people who meet the highest version of themselves and so that's the impact i want to make in the world hey everybody thank you so much for watching and being a part of this community if you haven't already be sure to subscribe you're going to get weekly videos on building a growth mindset cultivating grit and unlocking your full potential