Secrets to Gaining Awareness from Failure | Tim Storey on Impact Theory

There's a proverb that says, "He who works his land will have abundance. But if you chase fantasies, you lack wisdom." And people say, "Well, what's your land?" Your land is what's in front of you. If you're in the seventh grade, work your seventh grade land. If you're If you're the cameraman, work your land. If you're a janitor, work your land. If you're a single mother, work your land. Your land is what's in front of you. So, I started studying the law of the harvest, of working your land to get a harvest. You got to plow the ground. You got to plant the seed. You got to water the seed. And then you reap a harvest. And I think that mostly in the age of social media, people see guys like you and Gary V and others, and they think that they can go from bam to bam. It's not going to happen. You got to work your land. You got to plow, plow, plow, plow, plow, plow, plow. And when I [music] say plow, I'm constantly building another person's dream. This is This crap's not all about me. Everybody, welcome to Impact Theory. Today's guest is an acclaimed author and life coach who has worked with some of the biggest names in the world. Known as the comeback coach, he has helped to rehab some of the most famously troubled careers. From Robert Downey Jr., Charlie Sheen, Kanye West, and Stevie Wonder to Quincy Jones, Deion Sanders, and business icon Lee Iacocca, he's the one they all turn to. He's written nine books and spoken in 75 different countries to upwards of 85,000 at one time. He was a featured guest on Oprah's SuperSoul Sunday, and he is featured weekly on Steve Harvey TV's Facebook Live. Inspired by Mother Teresa, he's also an ordained minister who has partnered with organizations across the globe to spread hope and empowerment, working side-by-side with humanitarian organizations such as the Kids Haven Orphanage in Johannesburg, South Africa, and the Fred Jordan Mission here in Los Angeles' Skid Row, as well as the tireless work he does around addiction recovery. It's difficult to quantify the number of lives that he's touched, but it is definitely measured in the millions. So, please help me in welcoming the man who Quincy Jones called a voice of inspiration and hope. The Amazon top-selling author of Comeback and Beyond, Tim Story. [applause] Thanks, everybody. How you doing, man? Good good to see you. Good to see you as well. Super excited to have the comeback coach on the show. The people that you've worked with are really really extraordinary. And what I want to know is how do you help them get unstuck and literally like reimagine their entire lives so that they can move forward again? You know, I think um every one of us, we go through challenges. Uh the more I study people, when we're young, a lot of us had momentum. I remember as a kid chasing down the ice cream truck and flying kites. And then life interruptions hit. A life interruption could be uh somebody's parents divorcing. Could be somebody getting molested. It could be addiction at early age. And I just always had a heart for the underdog. So, it started with just helping people in my city that were hurting. And then it went to the NFL, the NBA, and then into entertainers. So, with the entertainers, what I see is that they have the same problem, but it's amplified cuz we all know about it. Right. And what are some of those core problems that hang people up? Is it their internal narrative? Is it the way that they look at the problem that they're facing? Your own story is pretty interesting. So, your father dies in a car accident when you're 10 and you and your siblings reacted to that event pretty differently. Yes. Um is there anything illustrative in the different reactions there that will help us see what to do or avoid? No doubt about it. I I was reading one time about Mike Tyson, the the boxer, that he never lost a fight by being uh you know, at a decision at the end of the fight. He only lost if he was knocked down but didn't know how to get up. And part of that is is because he was trained to to win and didn't know how to get back up. And so, I find that a lot of people that I work with, they don't know how to get back up from a setback. And um in my family, when my father died at 10, he was just going to a restaurant to pick up food for my mother and for himself and he was going through a green light and a man ran a red light and boom and took his life. So, that quick, man, our whole lives changed. My mother, whose first language is Spanish, she still speaks very broken English, she now had to raise five children working at Winchell's Donut Shop uh for a shift and a half. So, we went from like this happy family with a lot of energy to hearing my mother cry for the first time. So, I handled it different than the rest of my siblings. And what do you think was the key difference? I paid attention to the people that were around me. I think when somebody has a setback that number one, you you have to become awake again because a setback can just really put you in a daze. Uh uh a breakup can do that. Someone who loses their job, someone who gets fired, that's what I work with on a daily basis. But, you You what takes place so so many times is that people are they stay in their daze and they they're not awake. See, you have to become awake and number two, you have to become aware. So, you're awake, but now be aware, like what's going on around me? So, wake, aware, then you got to take inventory. Because our lives were now different than before the accident. The inventory is my father's gone. The inventory, he he's not leading us anymore. The inventory, he's he's not being funny in the house anymore. So, that's that's intense stuff. So, the the awake, aware, and the inventory, a lot of people don't do it and then they stay stuck. The inventory idea is really interesting. I actually haven't heard you talk about that before, but you did um a sort of quick interview with a lawyer friend of yours who'd been a lawyer for 50 years, help people through crisis. And you said like, "How do you get through a crisis?" And his answer was really interesting and it's kind of along those lines and it's understand your reality. Yes. Why is that so important? Because what takes place in in the world of fantasy, like if you ask any little kid, "What do you want to be when you get older?" They they say things like a a basketball player or, you know, "I want to travel the world and I want to do something big. I want to be LeBron James." A little girl, really young, could say, "I I I'm going to be a princess." So, all of a sudden, when you have a life interruption that's major, let's let's say again, your parents getting divorced. Divorce means divided force. So, you you had force and now you have divided force. So, I work with a lot of families in this city where their parents got divorced and it took some of these people 10, 20 years to get through it. Okay? So, now the taking inventory is being real or, as you said, looking at the reality of the situation you're now dealing with. So, you could settle in your setback. And I knew that there was something that now had to be done in my family. My brother uh decided to smoke a lot of weed. That's what he got done. [laughter] My sister, who was a model, decided not to be around too much. Uh my other sisters decided to just be busy. And I was the youngest by many, many years. And it was me and my mother in that house. So, I was feeling her pain. But in the midst of her pain created some decisions in me that hell no, I wasn't going to live this way. And I think that's why I became who I am today. Yeah, that's really interesting. That's um a pretty astonishing reaction for somebody so young. Yeah. I want to talk about that awareness piece, which I I think this is really interesting. So, somebody um as somebody who's had to terminate employees before, you always feel like the person's reacting like you've just given them a cancer diagnosis. And you get that sense of there's the fog of they're not going to really remember this conversation. Um how do you help people regain that awareness, which man, having watched people go through divorce, having watched people spend decades, like you're saying, lost in that fog, how do you help people climb out of that? I think that what's important is for people to understand that that setback is only temporary. And uh sometimes you have to go left before you get right. [snorts] And you know, it sucks to think I got to go left before I get right. To be left forsaken, rejected, okay? It didn't work before you get right, apropos, germane, in the groove, in sync. We all want to be right, but sometimes you got to go left before you get right. So, like when I first met Robert Downey Jr. it in 1999 and he was very left and soon after that he was on the cover of Newsweek magazine and they were basically saying he's done. So, that was in the year 2001. Well, he he he's done okay since then. [laughter] He became Iron Man. Yeah, that that's one of the most extraordinary rebounds Yeah. ever and I know he's publicly shouted you out as being the comeback coach. Yeah, and and he's my he's my brother. That's my real brother there. That's really incredible. So, somebody that's going through that I've got to imagine self-narrative is a big part of this. For him to be having gone through what he went through to have the industry say, "You're done. Like there's no coming back from this." And I remember I'm as guilty as anybody from the sidelines I was like like there's no way. And when he started getting roles again, I remember Kiss Kiss Bang Bang. I thought, "Ooh, they really took a a shot on him." And he was amazing in it. Yeah, you remember. And then when he got Iron Man, I was like, "What? Like this is such a crazy turnaround." Yeah. And he he seemed so at ease. And so I actually had the good fortune I was on the set super briefly of Kiss Kiss Bang Bang. Yes. And so I saw him super close and I was like, "Wow, like he's really got an effortlessness about him." And I thought there's no way that happened by accident. This is the result of a lot of work. of a lot of work and a lot of what we all have had to do that have had setbacks and that is to reprogram ourselves. Because what happens is that when when you have that kind of setback what most people think is that they have to become a discount version of themself. Okay. And so now you're going to end up at one of those stores that's marked irregular, right? Uh I won't mention different stars, but stars that you know, stars that I know, the people that I work with. So many people have written discount version of yourself. Okay. But you have to again think to yourself, "Okay, I am left, but I can now turn this left into something positive." So, what I teach is you could turn your left into a library of learning and a sanctuary of going deeper. And so, even as a 10-year-old, like no joke, I got the memo, man, and I felt that someday I'd have to rise up and and help my family. So, I told my mother when I was 12, I said, "I got this." And and I did. And so, I became very successful in my early 20s, and my mother's never had to worry about money since. Because it's just the way I looked at life. So, I I pushed a reset button and got very serious about it. So, you know, in my left, I got right through the library and the sanctuary. So, when you're in the left and it's sort of the you know, that moment where everything seems so hopeless, how do you get people to begin um seeing the path out? Is it just knowing that, you know, sort of the Buddhist mantra, this too shall pass? Is it really helping them work on um skill acquisition? Like what is it that you help people do to get them out? Cuz I know there are people watching this right now. They're so far left, Yeah. they can't even see right anymore. Yeah. And so, helping them get back on that path really has to be like some serious breadcrumbs. Yes. What are those breadcrumbs? Okay. So, when you're in that setback, in that pain, um there are times you feel like you will never get out. And that you will be a discount version of yourself and that what used to be your life is not going to be your life. And and that is not the truth. But you may have a reassignment. Okay? So, the key is not to try to become the person you used to be. And you may have heard this saying that I say, cuz Oprah Winfrey loves this saying, that a comeback is not a go-back. So, the guys I work with, male and female, don't try to go back. That'll frustrate you even more. So, now we got to pay attention to what we have now, and what is what is my new assignment? And you don't have to limp your whole life in that new assignment, cuz it's a new assignment. So, one of the cool things about what Robert Downey Jr.'s up to, and you may know this, is that uh himself, I'm in it, we brought in Jake Gyllenhaal, uh Brent Bolthouse, who you may know, um uh uh Scott Budnick from The Hangover, Shaka. We got into ARC, helping prisoners. Wow. So, so So, Robert went from prison, and now he's helping in prison reform. So, your mess can become your message. That's really interesting. So, I have a personal fascination with the prison system, and so at our last company, my wife and I, um we have a strong belief that it doesn't matter where you start, it just matters who you want to become, and the price you're willing to pay to get there. I found that most people are not willing to pay um much of a price, or they don't understand that something new, that they can have this reassignment. Yeah. Um but we would hire people, if they were a good fit, even if they had felony convictions. And so, some of the most extraordinary people that I know in my life happen to be ex-convicts. Um what drew you to that, and what do you see is like the like if you were going to package something up to give to them, what is in that package? Okay, the the thing that draws me is pain. I'm drawn I'm drawn to the underdog. I'll never forget, in in sixth grade, there was a guy named Don. And we were the two fastest guys in sixth grade. So, in the 50 he would beat me, but always barely. In long-distance races, we were always neck and neck, and in this particular race I was winning. And so, it was a long-distance race, and we we lapped this kid named Freddy. But I I I noticed that it wasn't just cuz Freddy was a a bigger kid, but it looked like there was something wrong with him. And and something in me made me stop. I was beating Don, and and I only had, you know, you know, been ahead of him a couple times in that particular race. I stopped, and I ran to Freddy, and I go, "Are you okay?" And he goes, "No." He goes, "I'm having an asthma attack." So, I grabbed this kid. This is in sixth grade. And took him to the teacher, and we and I made sure he got his inhaler, so he could be okay. Well, one reason is that my sister used to have asthma, and she had asthma attacks. So, I cared. So, I love the underdog. So, I I will even stop being in first place to to to help somebody in need. I love that. You were telling a story one time of somebody that you were working with. I if I remember right, they were a famous NFL star. Yeah. And you took them back to their school and put them on a swing set that they used to swing on. Great memory. What What happened there, and what makes that kind of moment so powerful? It's one It's one of those famous football players of all time, and we're driving in his big old Rolls-Royce through his town, and he's he he told me everything is wrong. From the Rolls-Royce? With all that money he was making. And he was coming to the end of his career. He goes, "Everything is wrong." And I go, "Oh, man." I said, "Weren't you Weren't you raised around here?" He goes, "Yeah, man, 15 minutes away. But I don't like to go in that neighborhood." I go, "Well, let's go just for fun." Cuz I'm I'm always kind of up to something. So I took him to his inner city and I said take take me to the elementary school. He goes, "No, man, it's right down the street." So he we pull up in his Rolls-Royce to his elementary school. I go, "Let's walk in the school." But this was really cool. So we couldn't get in. It was all locked. But they're they're the old-fashioned chain-link fences. And I go, "Let's go over the fence." And he's like, "Come on, man. Come on. Come on, brother. For real?" I said, "Come on. Let's go. I got I got we got to get to the other side." And so we start walk around the school. All of a sudden he goes, "Man, [snorts] you're bringing up some memories." I said, "Let's go over here." So we get on the swing. This big boy gets on the swing. Starts swinging. He's swinging and crying. Aw. And he goes, "You bastard. I see what you just did." I said, "What?" He says, "You brought me back so I could remember what I came from." Mhm. I said, "Absolutely." Absolutely. I have chills on my face right now. Yeah. See, because hey, my dad died, my sister died 2 years later. Being Tim's story has given me a lot, but it's also kicked the out of me. There's a price. There's a price to do what we do. So for me, I got to go back to that place of innocence. And I got to hear that voice again. And I I that that voice aligns me with I'm not about fame and I'm not about getting more rising to the top. What what's the top and what's not the top? I'm about being a servant. That's how I started and that's how I need to end. And and that's where the place of innocence takes me back to. Talk to me about Mother Teresa and this whole idea of being a servant. It's pretty interesting. When I saw that I was like, "Wow, that's for knowing where you go and knowing what you do, it it there's actually a through line there that I see that's really intriguing. Um but it's still a little bit surprising when you imagine that picture of Mother Teresa. What was it about her that drew you and how do you try to channel that energy? Okay, so just so I can just say this to you, I feel that a little bit from you, too, in a good way. Is that I think there's times that we're headed somewhere. And then people are in our posse going, "Oh yeah, that's where you belong." Well, you you you are headed that way, that's where you belong. So, Mother Teresa was a school teacher. And so she was she was headed towards being a school teacher and and moving up as a teacher. But then she saw something. See, our lives are changed two primary ways. Education and observation. That's interesting. One of the things you'll find about me, I watch every damn movie everybody's making. I'm always watching. So, Mother Teresa walked into the school one day and she noticed the orphans. Had she not noticed the orphans, we would never known of Mother Teresa. But she saw the orphans. And she said, "When I get out, I'm going to see if they're still there." They were still there. "I'm going to find a way to feed them." So, there's a few orphans. She fed them. The next day there was more orphans. She fed them. The next day was more orphans. So, she got off what she thought was her pathway because she heard somebody else was in in pain. And that's what hit me, man. Because like I was headed to USC communications major. I had connections there with people that like where I was coming from. And you know, that's that's how I saw myself in the entertainment business. But the more I saw people hurting, I wanted to be a humanitarian. And the the Mother Teresa story of she was headed somewhere, but she heard the the voice of the hurting stopped me in my tracks. Yeah, it's so interesting and I think that it would be really easy given how much you've accomplished to chalk you up to he's just gifted, anointed. Um but you have a concept that you talk about that I find immeasurably powerful called work your land. Wow. What do you mean by that? Working your land will change anybody's life. There's a proverb that says he who works his land will have abundance. But if you chase fantasies, you lack wisdom. And people say, "Well, what's your land?" Your land is what's in front of you. If you're in the seventh grade, work your seventh grade land. If you're if you're the camera man, work your land. If you're a janitor, work your land. If you're a single mother, work your land. Your land is what's in front of you. So I started studying the law of the harvest of working your land to get a harvest. You got to plow the ground. You got to plant the seed. You got to water the seed. And then you reap a harvest. And I think that mostly in the age of social media, people see guys like you and Gary V and others and they think that they can go from bam to bam. It's not going to happen. You got to work your land. You got to plow, plow, plow, plow, plow, plow, plow. And you got to plant the right seeds. See, if if we go back to your life, somewhere, somehow, somewhere, somehow, you were planting some good seeds. And one time and if I bring up Oprah once in a while cuz I love her. She's she's my real sister. We were we were just me and her in her backyard. And she goes, "I love the work your land, because she goes, "It's right. I planted the right dog on seeds." See, every day you got you got negative seeds and positive seeds. And and people that are selfish, man, you're just planting negative seeds, and they're not going to come back positive. So, when you plow and you plant the right seeds and you water them, which is repetition, it doesn't look like it's going to grow. Come on, man. You're working at Taco Bell making gorditas, taking care of the Chihuahua. Doesn't look like it's working. All of a sudden, man, payday is on its way. And that harvest just starts to kick. Yeah, that concept of the seeds, like you've got a bag of seeds every day, and are you going to plant, you know, good seeds? Are you going to plant negative seeds? That's interesting. And I love what you're saying about water is repetition. Once people understand that, to me, I think the whole game unlocks for them. That and when I read about bamboo, I found that really interesting. So, bamboo, plant a seed, for 5 years it doesn't look like anything is happening, but it's it's developing this huge ball of roots under the ground. Takes 5 years. And then in something like 3 weeks, it'll grow 30 ft Amazing. above the ground. It's crazy. But you have to have planted the seed, watered it, watered watered it for 5 years. Yeah. Knowing that this repetition will pay off. Yeah, great great illustration. And in at that case, no matter what spirituality you have, you have to then walk by faith and not by sight. So, like when I was in seminary, it didn't look like I was going to be Tim Story. It looked [laughter] like I was a a dude just in seminary. Does that make sense? Yeah, of course. So, it it it just it it never never looked that way. But then I'd get these really weird breaks. Like I'd be speaking somewhere, and I saw this really famous celebrity guy, probably one of our best three actors. And he he was there to watch me. I was 24 years of age. Then right after that shows up Reggie White. Remember Reggie White, the football player? He comes and sees me in another city. He's like, "Oh man, man, I totally like your vibe. You're down-to-earth. Uh I want you to start speaking at the NFL chapels." So I go to speak at one chapel and the the guy comes up and goes, "Man, usually they got their arms folded. They're all bored." He goes, "You had them laughing." And then everybody was in line and I thought this is what they did. They kept saying, "Can I get your number? Can I get your number? Can I get your number?" But it was like stars of the NFL. So Reggie White put me from one team to the next team to the next team. Next Next thing I knew I was doing seven of the top teams in the NFL and I was life coaching people at 24 before I even knew what life coaching was. So that was like a break. That's really interesting. What are some of the key insights into just human nature that you had at that early age that really allowed you to help unlock people? So what I would say to you is what I had is life experience that I had not yet written down but I had remembered. That's really cool. So it's not like I had a manual but I had remembered the pain of what I had gone through. The the the the the the pain of the the loneliness and the the the wondering. And so what I would do is I would teach on subjects that I went through. Rejection. Okay? Fear. Shame. Guilt. And you would have thought I was like a executive producer for a for the Ellen Show coming up with great topics. But I was I would just think about what I went through and then I'm going to create a message on that and it was like it was pushing buttons. Cuz they they were standing up and wanting my number, you know. Yeah, talk to me about some of those things. So, you've said never waste your failures, which I think is incredibly powerful. Yeah. How do you help people make use of their failures? What does that look like? So, most people make big mistakes on a regular day. It's just a regular day. And now we got choices. A choice is a selection. I got a choice. And usually when they mess it up, they made a couple bad choices. And the choice created a challenge, okay? So, rather than just talking about their failure, the failure they already feel, the failure they already heard about, mostly if they're big and they're they're watching TV, it's all over the place. When I meet with guys sometimes for the first time, I never say a word about the failure. And it'll trip them out. They'll go, "Tim, when when are we going to talk about the thing?" And I go, "You know about the thing. We're talking about other things right now, but it works." So, the the key then is to find out what state of mind and what state was our soul in when we made that choice. Cuz I'm trying to tell you, when a person's at peace, they're not usually making really silly choices. It it's usually coming from a place that's not so peaceful. So, I I got to try to help get them back to that peaceful place. Let's talk about that. So, is it a journey of meditation? Is it a journey of clarity? Like how does one get back to peace? So, the beautiful thing about peace, it's not it's not a spot. Like people say, "Well, I'm going to go to Marbella, Spain. That's where I find peace." Or I'm going back to Egypt. That's where I find peace. That's cool. That probably helped. You can like stop, bam, right now and and and have peace. You You can go into that place of meditation. How though? Okay. Part of that is I call it stop, look, and listen. You got to You got to stop the noise. Okay? You got to look inside yourself. And then you have to listen. So, let's just stop now. Just go into a place of meditation. And don't think about where you've been, where you were, what everybody's saying about you. But let's just go into a place of being grateful. And you love that word, too. You got to You got to go back to that place of of being of being grateful. It's this idea of you may not be what you want to be, but thank God you're not what you used to be. And what I find is from that that place of peace, okay? You You can find a better place to help solve that dilemma that you're in. Cuz chaos will create more chaos if you're not careful. Yeah, that is for sure. So, let's go back to meditation. Let's define that. So, I think it's really powerful and I get why you have people start with gratitude. Um that's such a a I'll say weapon um to help people really get calm, to change their neurochemistry, to focus on something that's going to be helpful. Do you define meditation as simply thinking about things you're grateful for or or is there something else there? I think there's different things that people meditate on. To meditate is to mutter or to have your mindset. To set your mind to mindset. So, um some people do spiritual meditation, some people think about nature. But, whatever you meditate on, mindset, okay? Is the whole being grateful. That does take you into a beautiful state because then you start to remember that you're you're still living, you're still breathing, you're you're still alive. And then the the second place I think that we should go is you need to begin to go beyond your situation. You need to think big in small places. That's interesting. So, so let's say that let's say you're you just found out your son has a really bad illness. And somebody's working through that. It'd be It'd be so easy to go singular. See, when somebody's sick, they usually go singular. I'm hurt. I'm in pain. You don't know what I've been through. You go singular. When you begin to think beyond, you go plural. So, you you go from being grateful to now thinking big in small places and and starting to be thankful and grateful that your son has doctors and there is a chance that he could be better and start to see him better. And that's a technique I use on a daily basis on on my clients. Mhm. I read on one of your Instagram post something that I thought was really great. And you said, "I keep my mindset on possibilities." And I thought that was really interesting. Is that um a tool that you've always used? Was that something that you learned through a hard time in your life? And um how do you do that? Okay. It's an amazing thing about the mindset is as you know, cuz I I'm studying you, too. Is that it's so easy to be driving in LA and just think about traffic. When I'm in traffic, I think that I'm going to turn that situation into something really good, and I do, I promise. I listen to to books on tape. Okay? I have funny conversations with guys. Like, I'll call a guy and they'll go like, "Are you okay?" And I'm They're like, "You never just check in." Cuz I usually don't have that kind of time. But now I'm in traffic like for an hour and a half. So, I'm just like joking with my buddies, seeing what they're up to. So, that is a That's a choice. That is a That is a mind set, right? So, I believe in having what I call a miracle mindset. A miracle is a supernatural event. It's extraordinary. It's beyond. Okay? And I honestly believe this that the more my mindset goes into a miracle mindset, you see this in the life of Ellen, you see it Let's talk talk shows for a minute. Ellen, Steve Harvey, Oprah, every one of them saw themselves there before they got there. So, that mindset of the miracle mindset took them into where First of all, they believed. Then they then they expected. So, when you begin to get a miracle mindset, and you start meditating on what can happen, man, it's wild. What I saw, all is happening. Let's talk about that. So, putting that together with what you said earlier about watering it and repetition, you you made a very similar body movement, which makes me think that they're related for you, which they certainly are for me. Um Um Do you think of the meditating on what could be as a form of like visualization where you're meditating on what you want to come true? Is it something like that or is it different? I think that it it goes into phases. The the first place of meditation could be just a place of of calming of coming into a place of quiet, okay? Because our our lives are so busy and and there's so much disruption. So, I think the first phase of meditation is I come into a place of quiet. And the second phase is I want to then start hearing myself. Your dream has a has a voice. And and I start I start hearing my dream. Like Tim, you're going to make movies. I I knew that before then it was Quincy Jones later that said, "Tim, you were made for this. This is what you're going to do and I'm going to help you." Which he did. But I I I go from a place of quiet then a a place of of hearing then then a place of seeing. The the vis- the visualization takes me out. So, the it's so important again not just to be inward. No matter what you're going through. Get quiet. Let the dream speak. But then you got to think outward. Yeah. Even Oprah, she said that when she was struggling as a teenager, she used to constantly just see herself at that place. Did you see yourself doing better things when you were little? I did and I used to fantasize about it and um that was when I was little it was always thinking about my future and what I could become that would make me almost giddy with possibilities, which is actually what first attracted me to doing impact theory was so I big brothered for a kid in the inner cities South Central LA and so I'm coming off of when I was his age I would get giddy thinking about my future and he did not he didn't even think about his future so for him it was like just surviving and I'd never encountered that it was one of those where I kind of always thought everybody thought about the future the way that I did and so seeing that whoa like he does have the ability to do everything that I've done but he doesn't believe he has the ability to do it and so he's got and I unfortunately didn't understand it this well back then but he didn't have the mindset that was going to allow him to pursue that because he couldn't sit there and imagine and meditate on where he was going he was meditating on just how do I get through today Okay so so good and even though you were helping him unless he was willing to change his mindset he could just stay stuck because he's now not cooperating with the process see and that that's that's the key is that me and you can leave here today and and go down to places where people need help but if they're not willing to cooperate with the comeback then they're going to stay in the same situation You've talked about being a voracious learner which I think is really powerful how do you go into something so like when you decided I'm going to get into film and TV production but I don't know anything about it I don't know the right people necessarily how did you begin to put those together and do you have a formal process around learning or is it sort of ad hoc Um that's one of my favorite questions anyone's ever asked me I am so curious man if I don't know a word I look it up I want the synonym I want the antonym I want I want to know where it came from where the word derived from if I go to a country I'm all up in that country I'm like why where who hot hot how cold who's here what's there what's happened So, now that I'm doing the movie business and doing TV shows and doing plays, I'm working on a big $25 million Broadway play right now. I didn't know anything about it. So, now I'm all up in it. So, I'm into watching plays, hanging out with Broadway guys, you know, ask guys that are like doing the best music how they do it. And so, I'm really in a season of plowing in this business. So, I'm always listening. I'm paying attention. Reading, watching documentaries. Man, not a lot of people can do the plowing phase. They certainly they maybe willing to do it when they're really young, but certainly not once they're established. That's something I find really interesting about you. I mean, you could easily coast the rest of your life making a fortune doing what you're doing. And the fact that you're reinventing now, I'm really blown away by that. Yeah. in you. I think that's really really powerful. Thank you. If I could just take you through something real quick. See, I think people want to soar like an eagle, but you got to sit before you soar. You got to sit, then you got to stand in what you learned, then you got to walk it out. Then hopefully you run, that's passion, and then you soar. Yeah. So, so I'm soaring in other places, but in other places I got to come back and sit. Yeah. And most people can't do that. I think that's really awesome. And that whole work your land, work your land, that's what I keep coming back to that. Every day I'm working my land. Every damn day. I mean, I don't I don't want to be in the gym 6 days a week, but I'm over 50, so I have to be. And I don't want to always uh call the people I got to call, uh do funerals for people that, you know, I wish I didn't have to do that funeral cuz, you know, whatever. It's it's it's depressing some of these places I got to go. Mhm. But I I I do them because that's working my land. That's working my land. That's so powerful. Tim, where can people find you? Um so I'm Tim Story s t o r e y dot com. So Tim Story dot com. So um we do a lot of cool things and you can find us all through that and then you know we're on Instagram, Facebook. Instagram is Tim Story official. Um but they can find all things Tim Story at Tim Story dot com. All right. And now I have to know what is the impact that you want to have on the world? Another great question. Um I think if I change one then I change another person. So I I think about changing one person. Because then it can have the domino effect. You know? So Mother Teresa when they gave me that book to read could you imagine it helped change little Timmy Story from Compton and it had a domino effect on millions of people. So um I want to known for I want to be known for changing one person and it went from there. It's really incredible, man. Plant those seeds. Guys, this is somebody who will blow your socks off if you give them half a second. Work your land, plant your seeds, it will change your life and as he said it will change the lives of others. Tim, thank you so much for coming on. That was absolutely extraordinary. Guys, if you haven't already be sure to subscribe and until next time my friends, be legendary. Take care. 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.