Paul Martinelli is an internationally acclaimed speaker, mentor, and coach who has transformed from a high school dropout with a stuttering problem to sharing stages with some of the biggest names in leadership and personal development. His journey, marked by challenges, resilience, and the transformative power of mentorship, makes him a beacon of hope and a testament to the fact that with the right mindset and guidance, anyone can achieve greatness.
Discover Paul’s early life challenges and how they shaped his beliefs and self-concept, leading him to drop out of high school.
Uncover the pivotal role of the book “Think and Grow Rich” in Paul’s life, and how mentorship from Patrick Hayes changed his thinking patterns and set him on a path to success.
Learn about Paul’s commitment to empowering others, drawing from his own experiences to awaken and uplift individuals with low self-esteem or self-belief.
Don’t miss out on this inspiring episode filled with valuable life lessons and transformative insights. Dive in and listen now!
00:17:25: Reading “Think and Grow Rich” – Paul’s expanded thinking.
00:27:49: Success of Paul’s Cleaning Company – Loyalty of employees with an average tenure of 11 years. 2
00:29:22: Importance of Awareness – Recognizing opportunities and being in the right place at the right time.
00:30:06: Growth of Cleaning Company – Amazement at the scale of Paul’s business.
00:59:29: Understanding Customer Inquiries – Parallels between Paul’s approach and the dental industry.
01:21:41: Influencing People – Importance of guiding people to the next step in one’s work.
01:32:28: Recognizing Value – Transformation people undergo once they understand their worth.
01:33:15: Levels of Service – Different services based on customer needs.
01:34:05: Value of Coaching – Impact on teams and their performance.
01:40:22: Not Giving Up Territory – Long-term effects of preserving one’s beliefs and values.
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Unlocking Success with Paul Martinelli on Beyond Your WHY Podcast
In the latest episode of the Beyond Your WHY Podcast, we had the privilege of hosting Paul Martinelli, an internationally acclaimed speaker, mentor, and coach. From facing challenges as a stuttering high school dropout to sharing stages with global leaders in personal development, Paul’s journey is nothing short of inspirational. This episode dives deep into the transformative power of mindset, mentorship, and the principles that have guided Paul’s remarkable success.
The Power of Self-Concept and Self-Esteem One of the most profound takeaways from the episode is the emphasis Paul places on self-concept and self-esteem. He believes that our self-concept, which is influenced by the image we hold of ourselves and how we believe others perceive us, plays a pivotal role in our life outcomes. Our self-esteem, or how we value ourselves, can either propel us forward or hold us back. In Paul’s early life, challenges like stuttering and a stressful home environment shaped his self-concept, but with time, mentorship, and personal development, he learned to redefine his self-worth and potential.
The Transformative Impact of “Think and Grow Rich” Another major highlight of the episode is Paul’s introduction to the book “Think and Grow Rich” by Napoleon Hill. This book, based on interviews with successful individuals like Edison, Ford, and Rockefeller, presents 13 principles that guide thinking and behavior. Paul credits much of his success to the insights and principles he gleaned from this book. It not only rekindled his ability to dream but also equipped him with the tools to turn those dreams into reality. For anyone seeking personal or professional growth, understanding and applying the teachings of this book can be a game-changer.
The Role of Mentorship in Personal Growth Paul’s life took a significant turn when he met Patrick Hayes, a retired bond trader who became his mentor. Patrick introduced Paul to “Think and Grow Rich” and more importantly, challenged Paul’s limiting beliefs about himself. This mentorship was instrumental in Paul’s personal and professional growth. The episode underscores the importance of having mentors who can provide guidance, challenge our beliefs, and help us see beyond our current circumstances. As Paul’s story demonstrates, the right mentor can unlock doors we never even knew existed.
Paul Martinelli’s journey from facing adversities to achieving global acclaim is a testament to the power of mindset, the right guidance, and unwavering determination. His insights on self-concept, the transformative principles from “Think and Grow Rich”, and the pivotal role of mentorship offer invaluable lessons for anyone on a journey of personal or professional growth. Dive into the Beyond Your WHY Podcast episode to discover these insights and more, and let Paul Martinelli’s story inspire you to unlock your own potential.
If you love the show, please don’t forget to subscribe and leave us a review and rating on whatever platform you are using. Thank you so much for being here. I will see you in the next episode.
About Paul Martinelli
Paul Martinelli is an internationally acclaimed speaker, trainer, mentor, and coach who truly believes that if you can dream it, you can do it.
While many people know Paul as the Founding President of The John Maxwell Team and Co-Founder of the Cialdini Institute, what they may not know is that he is a high school dropout who overcame a stuttering disability to share the stage with some of the biggest names in leadership and personal development – names such as John C. Maxwell, Seth Godin, Dr. Robert Cialdini, Jack Canfield, Wayne Dyer, Brian Tracy, Denis Waitley, Zig Ziglar, Les Brown, Nick Vujicic and Mark Victor Hansen.
Paul was raised by a single mother in a Pittsburgh lower class family.
In the late 1980’s, with just $200.00, a used vacuum, and a dream, he founded a small commercial cleaning company in South Florida.
He combined smart sales tactics with personal development teachings and propelled his business to unbelievable heights. Just 15 years later, he sold his commercial cleaning company to pursue his passion and purpose of teaching people how to achieve success in their own lives.
His awareness and ability to apply the success strategies and principles that he has learned and taught to others, led to Paul’s success in life and business, including building 6 multi-million-dollar companies.
He now leads the Empowered Living community, a global platform of more than 2.3 million followers, providing personal and professional development training and education to help individuals and businesses build and grow beyond their current results.
Alongside of this, his most recent endeavor has him positioned as Founding Partner and Vice-President of the Cialdini Institute, a training and education enterprise that is dedicated to bringing the influential work of Dr. Robert Cialdini to individuals and organizations alike.
Paul Martinelli may not have a wall of diplomas, but you can’t argue with his PhD in results.
Having worked his way up from mop bucket to multi-millionaire, Paul has practiced and proven what he preaches.
Whether we’re at our highest highs or lowest lows, we can always find lessons that will help not only our journeys but also others. This episode’s guest is especially passionate about extending his success to others, using his experiences to guide entrepreneurs to reach their full potential. Rightly so, because he moves through life with the WHY of Contribute. Joining Dr. Gary Sanchez is David Mansilla, the founder and CEO of ISU Corp, a custom software solutions company with clients ranging from start-ups to multi-million-dollar conglomerates. In this conversation, he shares with us his story from software consultant to starting his own company, bootstrapping, and growing it. David’s success was never without its own challenges, though. He almost went bankrupt multiple times. But this experience taught him the importance of his why. Tune in as David tells us more about the lessons he learned in his journey, not only to find success but also fulfillment.
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The WHY Of Contribute: Why Life Is Not About You With David Mansilla
I have a fascinating interview for you. His name is David Mansilla. He owns ISU Corp, which is a high-tech IT company. We don’t talk much about IT. We dive more into his life, which is fascinating, the very high highs and the very low lows, the cycle that he goes through throughout the years, what he learned on that journey of being at the top of the mountain and being at the bottom of the valley, and where he is now. You are going to find it fascinating. There will be a lot of great takeaways for you and things that you can use in your own life. I’m excited for you to hear about David Mansilla.
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In this episode, we are going to be talking about the why of contribute, to contribute to a greater cause, add value, and have an impact on the lives of others. If this is your why, then you want to be part of a greater cause, something that is bigger than yourself. You don’t necessarily have to be the face of the cause, but you want to contribute in a meaningful way.
You love to support others and you relish the success that contributes to the greater good of the team. You see group victories as personal victories. You are often behind the scenes looking for ways to make the world better. You make a reliable and committed teammate and you often act as the glue that holds everyone else together. You use your time, money, energy, resources, and connections to add value to other people and organizations.
I have got a great guest for you. His name is David Mansilla. He is the Founder and CEO of ISU Corp, a custom software solutions company with clients ranging from startups to multimillion-dollar conglomerates like General Electric and Hines. It is located in Canada’s Silicon Valley. ISU Corp increases entrepreneurs’ net profits with exceptional custom software solutions.
They have been granted many awards such as the Best Innovative High-Tech Enterprise Software Company of the Year from Global 100 and ACQ-5’s Game-changer of the Year. David is passionate about inspiring others. A priority in his life is sharing his experiences in hopes of encouraging a new generation of entrepreneurs to reach their full potential.
David is the host of the Break Free Podcast where he invites a diverse set of guests to bring audiences valuable knowledge on living on their own terms, whether it’s professionally or personally. David is also a number one international bestselling author for his book, Breaking Out of Corporate Jail. David, welcome to the show.
Thank you for having me. It’s a pleasure to be here.
This is going to be great. David, where are you and where are you from?
I live in Toronto, Canada. I have been there for many years. I was born in Guatemala, which is a country in Central America, but South to Mexico. If you position yourself in Central America North border to Mexico on the North.
What was it like for you growing up in Guatemala? How long were you there, and then when did you move out of Guatemala?
I was there for nineteen years. It was a very tough childhood. The country was in the middle of a 36-year-old war. In small countries is where the Cold War was fact. It was capitalism against communism, and thank God capitalism won in Guatemala, but it was a horrible war. The city wasn’t as bad as the countryside, but it wasn’t uncommon to see houses getting bombed with a tank and people getting shot on the streets by different groups, either by the guerrillas or by the army. That’s how I grew up.
I’m living in the US. I can’t even imagine that. How old were you when all of that was going on?
I was born in 1972. The war started in the mid-‘60s. You know the Missile Crisis. When was the Cuban Missile Crisis? That’s when everything got hot in Latin America after that crisis, but I was a baby. My dad used to take me to the school that I was in. It was a Catholic school that was attached to the cathedral, the main church in the whole country, and it’s beside this national palace because it’s a Spanish country.
There is a national square, and then you have the palace on the side, you have the cathedral on the side. You have one of the best Catholic schools in the country, and so I was there. My dad had to come and pick me up at least three times when war broke out in the palace. Under bullets, we have to escape. By then, I was 10 or 11 years old.
How did having a war going on affect your schooling, your childhood, and your ability to have sports? What was it like growing up at that time?
Tough, but you are a kid and your parents tend to shield you from what’s going on. Honestly, if you ask me, I didn’t think I had it that bad until I went back and realized that it was pretty bad. To give you an idea, my older brother died in the war. He was a volunteer firefighter. He saw something he shouldn’t see. He told us about it, and a week later, he disappeared. Since then, he never showed up again. My dad looked for him for years. My dad had good friends in the Army, so they were flying with helicopters all over the country, and we could never find him. It was real.
Did you have sporting events?
It was normal. Like I said, most of the heavy fighting was in the mountains. Sometimes the guerrillas will have little cells that will bring chaos to the city, but that was the exception. Usually, it was in the mountains. That’s what the heavy fighting was.
What were you like in high school? Were you into sports, acting, or computer? What were you like?
Since my brother disappeared, my dad encouraged me to join a military school to become an official in the Army. I went to military school for two years. I wanted to become a firefighter for the army. I didn’t care about the Army. I wanted to become an airplane pilot. That was my desire. My dad took advantage and said, “It’s better to be a trained official than getting killed as your brother got killed with no training.”
I joined the Army for two years, and that gave me amazing skills and incredible insight into discipline. My teenage years were marked by my military training. I thank God for that because I attribute most of my success in life thanks to that discipline. It’s funny. When you come to a country like this like Guatemala, even in this modern age where there is a rule of law and democracy, it has been here for many years.
Schools are more disciplined than North American schools. Kids cannot wear long hair and they have to wear a uniform, and it’s good. I see the difference. If you don’t teach kids discipline, you are getting them a tougher life. When they become adults, their life is ten times tough because they don’t know how to go through something that they don’t want to do, but they have to do. Isn’t life like that?
WHY Of Contribute: If you don’t teach kids discipline, they will have a tougher life. When they become adults, their life is ten times tough because they don’t know how to go through something that they don’t want to do, but they have to do.
I agree with you. That’s a good point. You have gotten to see both sides. You graduate from high school in Guatemala. Did you stay in Guatemala or did you leave after that?
While I was in military school, back then, to graduate, you had to pass this crazy typewriting exam, and I could never pass it. I wasn’t fast enough. Every time I did a mistake, I had to start the page all over again. I was so frustrated. By then, my dad had already bought a computer, an Apple IIe, believe it or not. It was an Apple that was text-based without a mouse. People don’t even know that they existed, but my dad had one of those. My uncle was a Senior VP of the computer department for a large bank in the country. At a family gathering, I was explaining how frustrated I was with this typewriter.
My uncle told me to come to his office during the week. I went to his office and he showed me how he was using a text editor in a mainframe computer and how he could make mistakes and push a button and print the letter. I’m like, “This is incredible. I want this.” That was the beginning of me falling in love with Computer Science.
Right after military school, my dad put me in the best computer science school in town, which turned out to be the best Math and Physics school in town, and that’s how I got my first Computer Science degree. As soon as I graduated from that, in that school I met my wife who became my sweetheart. We got married, got a kid, and moved to Canada when I was in my early twenties.
Why Canada?
I wanted to continue my schooling. My brother had come to Canada already for his degree in Commerce and Business. It’s funny because I’m in Canadian Technology Triangle, and this is where the best Computer Science universities in the country are. It happens also that our version of Harvard Business School is also in this town. My brother went to that university. I landed there and had three of the best universities in the whole country for Computer Science, so I did my second degree there.
Now, you are done with your Computer Science degree. Now, what happens to you?
I thought I was going to start my own business right after college. I’m like, “I’m going to become a software consultant.” I always fell in love with software automation since I started learning how to write software. In Guatemala, before I came, I was hired to build a payroll system. We are talking about 1988 to 1989. My best friend from university and I wrote a payroll system. They put it in production and they automated it. Running payroll by hand for 300 employees took a week. We made it in four hours. That was the first thing that I did professionally as a computer scientist.
Right after graduating in Canada, I thought I could do my own business. This is 1995 or 1994, the Canadian government saw the internet coming as something new. They had a problem for technologists that were graduating to give them a Canadian-backed loan from one of the banks to promote people to start their own businesses.
I took advantage, I applied, and they gave me a one-year fast-forward MBA paid by the government. After graduating from that program, I got a loan and almost went bankrupt two years after that. I spent the whole loan plus thousands of dollars on my credit card. My wife was sustaining the home. I had two kids back then. I was like, “I have to do something.”
Nobody will trust me with computer software. I turned to creating computers. I started assembling computers. We were doing pretty well until it started to go bad when I had to respect all the warranties. I was making a 5% profit, but then after a year, people will come back, and with one little change, the whole profit will go away, even though I was selling thousands of computers. Little did I know though that my company had a reputation because I had a lot of clients.
One time, a student that was working for me in the summer fell in love with the business and his dad was a very wealthy man. Out of the blue, I wasn’t even thinking of selling. I was thinking of closing. His dad came and said, “I want to buy your business. How much do you want for it?” I gave him the exact amount that I owed. I said, “I just want the government money and I want my credit cards paid off.” I gave him the whole number. He brought his checkbook and says, “Are you sure?” I’m like, “Yes, I’m sure,” and he wrote me the check.
Years later, after I became a businessman, I realized that I sold that business for a fifth of what it was worth just because of the reputation of the client base, but it saved me. It saved me because I was clean and I was able to get a job. It’s funny because I started looking for a job in 1996. It wasn’t easy for a computer scientist yet because the internet was starting up. I remember having to send about 200 to 300 resumes by snail mail. I got five job interviews in three months, and out of those five, I got one job as a computer analyst.
What did a computer analyst do in 1995 or 1996?
I was writing software as a coder. I was writing applications for the Board of Education. I had in charge of 2,000 teachers for the entire school board, and I was writing software automation for them to have classes better instructed. I was also supporting the staff of the school administrations. We had a bunch of schools. I think over 200 schools or something like that. I was writing software for them.
You did that for how long?
I was there for two years. Funny enough, my desire to become a software consultant came through three months after I got my first full-time job. Throughout this whole thing, my older brother became my client. He was the only one that trusted me. He had a chain of stores, and I wrote a point-of-sale system for him. He’s the only one that trusted me, but I left little signs on all his stores that I wrote this software that was running the invoicing.
Three months in, I get a call from a guy in the town nearby. He was building this massive warehouse with a storefront and needed a custom-made point-of-sale system. I had to go back to my director and talk to HR to see if they could change the contract, and they allowed me to work on my business part-time after work. From 5:00 PM forward, I could do whatever I wanted with my own business because it wasn’t competing with what I was doing during the day. I landed that contract, and it lasted for eight years. I was consulting part-time after work for eight years with this large store.
When did you start your own?
From that job, I started moving into larger corporations. The boss of my boss moved to the largest telecommunications company in the country, and I got a job as a leader already. I grew in the corporate lot quickly while maintaining my little tiny consulting gig part-time until finally, I was talking with my wife.
The idea was we were both very cautious about trying out our business again because it was super hard. Those two years were horrible. Horrible in the sense of not having enough money. Talk about being scared of not having enough money to pay the rent for the house the next month. We never wanted to go through that again.
Our plan was that my wife will come back to university. She will get a stable job with benefits, and that will allow me to risk it again. The plan happened, and she graduated in Computer Science. She was a developer too. She got a job as a database analyst for a large company. My kids were a little bit older too, so with that, I decided full-time business in 2005.
What was that business?
ISU Corp. The same one that I have now.
ISU Corp started in 2005, and who was your first client?
That was tough. I was blessed. I didn’t have any clients lined up, but I decided to quit like didn’t care because I knew I could do this. Now I had the business acumen. I knew how to work the corporate ladder and how to play corporate politics. In the beginning, I started looking for a gig, and somebody trusted me with my experience.
They hired me as a single consultant who embedded software for MFP. MFPs are called this large photocopiers that have a computer embedded and you can put on those computers to do multiple things. I wrote software for the Sharp machine. They had thousands of those machines in the corporate connected through the internet already. I was automating their enterprise software. The contract was for two months, and it lasted six months. I started by myself, and in three months, I had two people working for me already in my own business because we grew the contract because I proved to them that I could do it.
Then you kept adding businesses to ISU Corp.
It kept growing and growing. I’m scared to death about the money part. I never spent a penny from the income that I was making. I was building the bank account. I didn’t borrow a penny to open the second business because it went so badly with the loan. I said this is going to be bootstrapped. The $500 that I got to do my own registration in the government back then, that’s how much you pay. I didn’t even hire a lawyer at the beginning.
I went and fill up the funds myself as simple as I could. That $500 was for my consulting gig already. I never raised money anymore. The first year, I never spent a penny. The money was accumulated. It was beautiful because, in six months, I did a whole year’s salary as a Senior Vice President of a large company as consulting firm. I was so scared that we were living with my wife’s salary, but that helped me because I learned how to build a cashflow in the business so that during the downturns, you could leave off the cashflow without having to go and get funding or get a loan or anything like that.
What do you think was the secret to being able to make it this time bootstrapping it versus what you did the first time?
Experience and the support of my lovely wife because she did that first time. The second time, she told me, “You have five years. If in five years you don’t retire me, you have to go get a job.” Exactly in five years, I hired her back, so she came back as a Director of HR with a much less stressful job.
What’s ISU like now? Give us a picture of what it’s like now. How many people do you have working with you? You are outsourcing to different parts of the world and are all over the place now. What’s it like now?
We have 60 full-time senior engineers and expand our network up to 200 to 300 people depending on the client. We do tend to work for larger clients. We call it the SWAT team. We start with a small high-end team that is full-time employees, and then if the company requires us to expand and grow, we have partners where we can grow. That’s how we are in the business, but it hasn’t been easy. I have almost been bankrupt 3 or 4 times. It’s been most of the time when I get to the point of bankruptcy because I get greedy and I lose my why. I love your heart. Once your why is lost, once you just focus on the money or personal gain, that’s the beginning of the end. It took me a while for me to learn that lesson.
Give us an example of what you mean when you lose your why and focus. When was the time that you lost your focus and how that played out for you? That could happen to all of us and any of us could go through that exact same thing. What happened and how did you get out of it?
It’s greed. I had never been a greedy person until that time, but when you see your bank account getting larger and power through money, you want more, and then you start comparing yourself with other entrepreneurs that have more than you and you want to become like them. It becomes all about a money game, and you forget your employees and clients. All you want to do is increase your bank account and get as much money as you can so you could feel better than other people.
For me, it happened from 2009 to 2011. 2009, I was about 8 or 7 people, and from 2009 to 2011, we grew to 110 or 120. It was fast growth. We became an eight-figure company really fast, and my mind became my partner, but I was working sixteen hours a day and I forgot my family. I was traveling overseas every 2 to 3 weeks. It was all money-oriented. I remember going to the bank. Back then, you still had checks. We were depositing $500,000 checks every two weeks or every week and a half. The more money I gathered, the better I felt better than anybody else. Greed gives you ego and gives you false confidence.
I was overworking myself. I was using alcohol to cope with the stress. One day, my heart told my brain, “I don’t want to play this game anymore. You are crazy,” and I had a heart attack. That’s how I woke up out of that. I thank God for that because if that wouldn’t happen, God knows what person I would have been now. Probably my net worth would have been five times as it is now, but I will be a lonely, miserable, and rich person.
Do you know who was my best psychologist? My doctor. I was 39 or 40 years old back then. When she saw me, she was like, “Your hair is falling off.” I had patches of hair, falling hair all over my head. I had bruises on my tongue from distress. She said, “You are killing yourself. What is it worth the money if you are not going to have the health to enjoy it or your family to enjoy it? I can give you these pills, these opioids. They will allow you to cope with the stress so you can keep the same lifestyle, but my advice is to change your lifestyle. You could get addicted within three months if you have these pills.”
That was like a cold shower. I felt like God gave me a cold shower saying, “What are you doing with your life? You are killing yourself.” The next week, I apologized to my wife and kids. I haven’t seen them for two years. I took a plane to Atlanta where my partner was and told him I went out and left 95% of the business to him. I left everything. I told him, “I need to go out. You take everything.”
I was left with five employees again, and 95% of my income was gone like this. Felix is my VP of Operations and one of my best friends. He’s my best friend. I told him, “I need to take a break. I need to reconcile with my wife. I will leave you the business. I know that we don’t have enough income to sustain even the five people that we are. We cannot even pay the rent, but we are smart people. We can all get jobs if we go under.”
I told my wife, “Get me out of Canada to a place as far as you can find and make sure the kids come with us.” She took these kids out of school and we went to Thailand for a month. It was the first time I didn’t have any plans to come back until I got healed. The doctor also told me to follow a sport that allowed me to breathe because I was having panic attacks all the time. The one panic attack is the one that gave me a heart attack. I was talking on the highway for three hours. I saw helicopters bringing people from three accidents on the ice storm. That’s when I realized I was killing myself for nothing. The panic attack became a heart attack. I decided to learn how to scuba dive.
After you are working sixteen hours a day, it’s all intensive. You cannot stay watching the palm trees. I went there. I got the blessing from my wife and got into a scuba diving course. Thank God it was May, so it was a very low season in Thailand. My diving instructor only had me as a student. He gave me 3 courses in 1. I was diving five times a day. I was living at 7:00 AM coming back at 6:00 PM every day for two weeks. It was beautiful because I learned how to breathe. I learned how to control my panic attacks through breathwork. I took the pills for a week and I never took them again. It was beautiful.
I never checked my email during that month. When I felt a little bit better, when I felt like, “I was monitored by my kids and my wife,” then I said, “It’s time to go back home.” I turned on my computer. I had thousands of emails. All I did was sort emails by name and noticed that one of my old friends was emailing me 150 times.
I finally phoned him. I was in Bali, Indonesia, because we were moving. He said, “What’s up? I got this VP of IT from this company and they are going nowhere. We have lost millions of dollars on this software project. I know you can help me.” To make the lost story short, I talked to the CEO the next day and signed a $1 million contract with this lady two days later. When I landed in Canada, we had a business again. It is just like that.
How were you able then to not overwork or not get back into the sustained rat race, or did you get back into the same place?
I didn’t. My learning didn’t finish then. Me selling that $1 million contract, even though it was nothing to do with me, it was God giving me another opportunity. I evaluated my business partner, client, and employees. Everybody was at fault. I was the good guy. The contract lasted about a year and a half. I was able to gather other contracts, but I kept working the same hours. After six months, I started abusing alcohol again.
I never became an alcoholic. Thank God because I don’t have an addicted personality, but I was drinking a bottle of wine a day. One glass of wine after dinner became a bottle. I didn’t have problems with my heart anymore because it wasn’t as bad as before. By December 2012, I looked at myself in the mirror and I was 40 pounds overweight. I was losing my hair again.
Not normal hair loss from age. I had holes in my scalp. It was a self-wake-up. It’s like, “Again? What are you doing?” I remember December 27th, 2012, I decided to quit drinking and to quit what I was doing. I quit my own job. I called Felix again, “You are not going to see me for one year. I need to fix myself again. This time I know what to do, but I know I can discipline myself.”
I joined a gym membership on January 6th, 2013, the first day of the gym. I joined a three-month transformation program with Kris Gethin, a famous online trainer. I went from 200 pounds to 159. Again, the discipline. I discipline myself to do the exercise. It was supposed to be one hour a day. I was doing four hours a day at the gym all-in.
I’m eating super clean seven meals a day. I couldn’t transform my body, but most importantly, I was transforming my soul. My mind and my emotions were getting transformed. I started to listen to spiritual leaders online and also to business leaders. Instead of working sixteen hours a day, I was working ten hours a week. I was still working.
Also, I joined the leadership course. I realized that I wasn’t a good leader. The business was 110. It went back to 5 or 6 people, then I grew to 20 people with that big contract, and then back to 5 people again. I realized that I was attracting the people that I was, a greedy self-pity person. I changed myself. I got the leadership course and changed my life. It was incredible.
2013 was a year of change. It was the only year that I lost money in the business after eighteen years, and it was okay. I needed to lose that money to recover. 2014 came, and I changed the business to a lifestyle business. I divorced myself from greed. I wanted to focus on culture. That’s what changed everything. I focused on my people. “How do I add value to my employees so that they add value to my clients?” I read every book I could on culture and I dedicated myself to my family. I also read The 4-Hour Workweek book. I never went back to working sixteen hours a day. I was working maybe 20 to 25 hours a week. That happened from 2014 to 2017. I repeated that trip five years in a row.
The 4-Hour Workweek
I will take my kids out of school in January and will come back in April and May after the winter was over. It was beautiful. I didn’t make a lot of money. All I wanted is to grow the business 5% per year because I knew that if you don’t grow, you shrink. I was growing 15% to 20% per year. I stopped selling and marketing. It was word of mouth.
The company kept growing, and I was having this beautiful lifestyle business, but there was a problem. After five years in 2017, I got bored. My kids grew out of the house. They went to university. We talked with my wife again. “Either we retire fully or we grow the business.” She told me that, and I said, “I don’t know how to grow the business. The last time I tried, I almost died literally.”
That’s when I joined Vistage. That was the first business group that I joined. I had a business coach, and now it was more systematic. I started growing and growing again just to fall into the same trap in 2021. Isn’t it crazy? In this case, 2021, it was the pandemic too. The business has been very stable growing systematically.
I never lost the part of the culture and adding value to my clients. That’s been great, but what I lost is focusing on everybody else. I started to focus on myself again. I started feeling myself better than everybody else, especially when my net worth grew after eight figures. I’m like, “I’m this millionaire. Very few people get to this number,” and I started getting egocentric again.
I kept my culture beautiful and my clients delighted, but I became my own God. The ones who suffered were my wife and my kids the most. 2022 wasn’t a financially ruined year. I made a lot of money, but I was spiritually ruined to the point that I almost lose what I love the most, which is my family, but I woke up again.
What a rollercoaster ride. We all go on it. All of us, the ups and downs, but you have had some real big highs and some real big lows. Your wife probably almost doesn’t want you to have success.
She realizes that the money was what made me proud again, but we are believers. We were believing in Jesus Christ as our Lord and Savior. I move away from my faith for all those years from 2020 to 2022. To give an idea, I joined a new age cult, and we start with loving everybody with multiple gods down to doing witchcraft and using pendulums to detect your future and stupid superstitions like the horoscope, for example.
After being a computer scientist with two degrees and having done all this, I fell into that stupidity. My wife should have let me go like ten times over, but she’s so lovely. What she did is she started praying for me. Her mom and my kids started praying for me and her whole network. I had at least 100 people praying for me. I woke up one day and realized that what I was doing was wrong. I asked for forgiveness.
We split for two months last 2022 and thought it was over, but I came back to my faith. I came back to God. I repented again. 2023 has been beautiful. It’s been a year of healing and recovery. It’s funny because we decided to read the Bible again, which is one of the things that I stopped doing for many years, and God gave us Psalm 23. January 1st, we opened the Bible and we got Psalm 23. We read it and it’s like, “This is our song. I have it in my heart.”
It’s a very famous song because it talks about, “The Lord is my shepherd. He makes me lie down in green pastures. He takes me to calm waters. He straightens my ways. Even though I walk in through the shadows of the valley of death, I will fear no evil because you are with me.” It’s beautiful, and it’s been our theme the whole year. Now we are on this beautiful path where all we want to do is give back and give an example of what happened to us.
I’m so blessed that the business keeps running. Thanks to the networks that I belong to like strategic coach Dan Sullivan. In the last few years, I already made the business to the point that it’s a self-managing company now, which allows me to run other businesses. I have been blessed to have multiple businesses that I can run, but I don’t do it for the money anymore. My wife makes sure I keep humble. No more pride.
One thing happened. The miracle in all this is realizing that I had ADHD. I had ADHD since I was a kid, and in November, I got diagnosed by three different doctors. When that happened, then everything made sense. My extreme behavior, my compulsive behavior of excessive business traveling, and my success too. It’s a superpower if you use it the right way, but if you don’t know that you have it, you can also use that to become proud and arrogant and to destroy your family, which is what I was doing in the end.
WHY Of Contribute: Your ADHD diagnosis is a superpower if you use it the right way.
How did knowing you had ADHD help you?
That’s what got used to wake me up. I was so blessed. I had one of the best psychoanalysts in the country. Listen to this. This guy has been practicing psychoanalysis for 40 years. He is a doctor in psychology with clinical psychology with a specialization in analytical psychology, brain functions, and neurotransmitters. He took me in. I was his last patient. He’s the one that told me, “You are heavy on ADHD,” and he had ADHD. That’s why he became a psychologist. He gave me all the strategies to live life in a beautiful way. He’s the one that told me how to bring my wife back.
When I was away for two months, he was the one that told me, “Do you know about the three horsemen of the apocalypse of the marriage?” I’m like, “No. What’s that?” “You blame, you defend, and you hide. If you keep doing those three things, you will never get your wife back. Stop that.” The minute that I stopped that, my wife was able to talk to me and I was able to understand. He gave me strategies to deal with the condition that I have, and then he passed away. I started seeing him in September. My breakthrough was in November. He passed away in January. Isn’t that crazy?
What’s next for you? You got back with your wife and then you guys continued with ISU. Were you continuing to build it, or are you trying to keep it? What’s next on your agenda?
We have a five-year plan to sell it or give it to our employees. We created this plan where we gave shares to everybody. For everybody who has been in the company for over two years and deserves it, they got shares. The idea is either we tire our people or we give them the company and they keep growing it. It was a five-year plan. We want to grow in a way that we can hit $100 million. It is not about the money anymore at all. Most of those profits will go back to helping others in need, and I’m not that involved anymore. I spend my time doing the Break Free Podcast and writing. I’m on my third book now. I open a brand-new podcast called Leaders in Tech.
What I’m doing is I’m acknowledging the leaders that are helping companies grow by multiples. I’m making this world a better place, but nobody’s talking about them. Nobody’s talking about the CTO, CIO, and VP of technology and how they are impacting businesses. I’m going to be talking with senior VPs of Nokia and Disney. I have a senior VP of big hospitals like Bishop Hospital in Orlando. It’s fun. My whole life now is giving back and sharing my story. If I can save somebody a couple of years of deep pain, it makes my life worth it. That’s my why now. It’s giving back and raising the flag of ADHD and how to manage it for your own good.
For those that are reading that know more about the WHY.os. Your why is contribute to a greater cause. How you do that is by finding the right way to get results, and what you ultimately bring is a trusting relationship. I’m curious about how did that work for you when you weren’t being “trustworthy” to your people, family, and kids. How did that work and play out for you in your own head?
When you are on your game and you are helping people by finding the right way to get results and being that trusted source, being that one that they can count on, you are on your game. Things are great for you. When you went down the ADHD route, and you started doing things that didn’t allow them to trust you and didn’t allow them to look up to you, how did that play out for you?
Horrible because I changed my why in the wrong way. This is the common denominator. If you look at the pattern in my life, everything became about me. Everything started to fall off. It’s funny because it doesn’t matter how much success you gain in life. If you are doing it for yourself, you will never be completely fulfilled. You always stay empty.
I remember reaching the next million dollars and thinking, “Now I’m going to be happy,” and then it just became another number on a computer. You don’t even see the money. You have it invested. Maybe we have a real estate portfolio, and it’s beautiful. It gives you a beautiful passive income, but at the end of the day, if you are doing it for yourself and your own comfort and you don’t think of others, you never get fulfilled.
When I was doing it for my people, I wanted to get my people in a better position in the world. When I focused on them having the right feelings and producing the right emotions and the right attitudes, when I saw the benefits that I was giving my clients with the software I was building for them, and when I only thought about them and how I can benefit them and how I can grow their own profits, it’s beautiful, and then you get fulfilled.
The funny part is that when you do that, you get more. It’s inevitable. You know the Law of Gravity. There is another law that says what you give is what you receive, and it doesn’t matter what you give. You will always get it back like a boomerang, and you get it back increased. When you give greed, you receive greed and increase in greed. You receive horrible people and stress.
When you mean that you want your client to prosper in what you are doing for them, then you prosper with them. When you mean that your own employees are growing their careers and they have more time for their families and have a better lifestyle because of you, you get a better lifestyle. It’s incredible, but that’s how it works and then you get fulfillment.
There is no worst failure than being filthy rich and being empty in your heart because there is no money, success, or fame in the world that can fill that. That can only be filled by God, and he does it by you serving others unconditionally, by you thinking of others, and by you making this world a better place. If you read the Bible, what Jesus said is to take care of the poor. Take care of the homeless, widows, orphans, and drug addicts. Take care of them unconditionally. Start doing that and see how your life changes around. It’s beautiful.
WHY Of Contribute: There is no worse failure than being filthy rich and being empty in your heart because there is no money in the world nor success nor fame that can fill that.
You have hit both sides of it. You have been on the top and you have been on the bottom so you get to see both, and that’s a big part of your story. I had no idea when we were going to have you on the show that this is the direction we were going to go. I thought we were going to be talking about software. I’m glad we got to learn more and go deeper with you because it’s super valuable. It’s way more valuable than anything you could have taught us about software. Thank you so much for sharing your story.
My pleasure. I live for this now. Whenever I can add value, if there is one person that reads this show and avoids making their own choice in their life and they get joy and peace, that’s what we are looking for. We are looking for sustainable joy and peace, not necessarily avoiding suffering. Suffering and pain are unavoidable because you live in a world where anybody can crash in front of your car for a mistake that you didn’t expect and then you are going to be in the hospital probably.
What I have learned is that you can keep your joy and your peace regardless of what’s going on in your life, and that’s what I’m experiencing now finally. 2022 was horrible. I woke up from this terrible cult that I was in. I woke up in July. That’s when my eyes got up, and when I did research, I didn’t even know what New Age was. Unfortunately, I did a lot of psychedelics and stuff like that. That’s what they do and those rituals. I developed acute pancreatitis. I developed anemia because I never ingested drugs before in my life. It was all psychedelic, and they are so popular now, all that stuff. If you start doing that without a prescription or without a clinical doctor prescribing you that stuff, you start doing it for spiritual reasons. I got lost, but now I’m here, like the story of the prodigal son.
If there are people that are reading and they want to follow you, they want to hear more from you, they want to see what you are up to, and they want to learn more about ISU Corp, what’s the best way for somebody to get in touch with you?
You can go to DavidMansilla.com. All my podcasts are there. They can read my story and buy my book. My life story that is there until 2014. This new stuff is another book, but they can also go to ISUCorp.ca if they want our services. We are growing exponentially. We are hiring people now, especially now that I have everything in place.
If you want to run a software project where you are going to be considered top your need first, not our need, come to us. Believe that our last project is our best project, and it’s the only project that matters. My last client finds new clients because they get delighted with us and they are going to get my employees, which are delighted with us because they have a beautiful lifestyle too. Everybody wins.
Last question. What’s the best piece of advice you have ever been given or the best piece of advice you have ever given?
Life is not about you. It seems the opposite, but it’s not. When you make life about you, you lose your life, but when you give your life away, you gain it. It’s contradictory, isn’t it? If you think about it, if you don’t make your life about you, life happens, and it happens beautifully. It’s not about us.
I had a gentleman on the show who was a gastroenterologist. He was a doctor, and his life was so much about his two daughters that he has. When they grew up and left, he felt lost and said something similar to what you were talking about. He said he meditated for three days. He was lost. He has your same why. It occurred to him during that time. He said, “The joy is in the giving. That’s where you get your joy. It’s not in all the stuff I have. It’s in the giving that you receive joy.”
What money gives you is comfort, and comfort is nice. Don’t get me wrong. Going on a private plane, sure it’s first-class and nice, but that doesn’t make you happier or fulfill you. It gives you little moments of comfort, but if you are willing to live without that comfort and you are willing to focus on helping somebody else, the level of hardship that you can sustain grows so much that nothing touches you.
I feel almost like I have a shield right now where the enemy can throw any darts that he wants and it’s going to melt away. The level of suffering that I was able to sustain and that got me out of is so deep. When you go to hell and you get rescued from hell, nothing scares you anymore. I’m not afraid anymore. I don’t have anxiety anymore.
I call them demons, all those psychological problems. A demon is a thought that torments you because it gives you bad emotions and you cannot do anything to stop it. That’s why people get addicted. White people get addicted. They are not getting addicted because they are bad people. They are in so much pain from their suffering, from these tormenting thoughts that they take something that numbs their brain and their body to get some relief.
Thank you so much for being here and sharing your story. It is totally fascinating. I’m fascinated with it. I appreciate you being here and spending time with us. I’m sure we are going to be in touch with each other.
Thank you so much. Anytime.
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It’s time for our new segment, Guess Their Why. I want to talk about Oprah Winfrey. All of you know Oprah Winfrey. She is very famous. She’s had the network, the TV show, she’s written lots of books, and she’s given away lots of different things, but what do you think Oprah’s why is? I often use her in different presentations that I have.
If you go back in her life, she had somebody very close to her break her trust. We see this very often with people with the why of trust that it has happened. I believe that Oprah Winfrey’s why is to create relationships based upon trust, to be that trusted source, and to be the one that others can count on. If you can count on her and she can count on you, the sky is the limit. If you break her trust, you are not going to recover from that one.
I believe Oprah’s why is to be the trusted source, the why of trust. What do you think? You can write it on whatever platform you are reading to. Thank you so much for reading. If you have not yet discovered your why, you can do so at WhyInstitute.com with the code, PODCAST50. You can discover your why or your WHY.os at half price. If you love the show, please don’t forget to subscribe and leave us a review and rating on whatever platform you are using to read our show. Thank you so much. I will see you in the next episode.
David is the founder and CEO of multiple businesses. Most prominent among them is his longest-running company, ISU Corp. ISU is a custom software solutions company with clients ranging from start-ups to multi-million-dollar conglomerates like General Electric and Heinz. Located in Canada’s Silicon Valley, ISU Corp increases entrepreneurs’ net profits with exceptional custom software solutions.
We have been granted awards like the “Best Innovative High-Tech Enterprise Software Company of the Year” from Global 100, and ACQ5’s “Game Changer of the Year” to attest to our excellence. Most recently, ISU Corp has been chosen as a recipient of the Canadian Business Excellence Award for the fifth year in a row as a recognition of our outstanding company culture and effective process (2018-2022).
David Mansilla is passionate about inspiring others. A priority in his life is sharing his experiences in hopes of encouraging a new generation of entrepreneurs to reach their full potential. David is the host of The Break Free Podcast, where he invites a diverse set of guests to bring audiences valuable knowledge on living life on their own terms, whether it’s professionally or personally.
David is also a #1 international bestselling author for his book, Breaking Out of Corporate Jail. David’s trials and tribulations will deliver valuable insight into how to leave your corporate job and how to navigate your own business once you take the leap.
The world is complicated as it is. Why make life harder? If you are one that makes everyone else’s life easier, then you must have the WHY of Simplify just like today’s guest. Dr. Gary Sanchez is with Greg Scheinman. Greg has more than 20 years of experience launching and leading businesses to success. He takes us into his journey, following a path of the least resistance that led him to create Team Baby Entertainment, INSGroup, and ROW Studios. Currently, Greg is the Founder of The Midlife Male, a media company and performance coaching program helping men maximize middle age. He shares how he is simplifying how they can find success through what he calls the Six Fs. Find out how Greg is living a harmonious life and exploring authenticity. Learn to look at midlife from a much simpler view, seeing age not as something to fear about but something aspirational.
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Watch the episode here
Listen to the podcast here
The WHY Of Simplify: Navigating Towards Midlife Success With Greg Scheinman
In this episode, we’re going to be talking about the why of simplify. It’s a veryrare why. If this is your why, you are one of the people that makes everyone else’s life easier. You break things down to their essence, which allows others to understand each other better and see things from that same perspective. You are constantly looking for ways to simplify from recipes you’re making at home to business systems you’re implementing at work. You feel successful when you eliminate complexity and remove unnecessary steps.
You like things direct and to the point, “Don’t give me the fluff, just hit me with the facts.” I’ve got a great guest for you. His name is Greg Scheinman. He has twenty-plus years of experience launching and leading businesses to success such as Team Baby Entertainment, INS Group, and Rose Studios. Team Baby was acquired by Michael Eisner. INS group was acquired by Baldwin Risk Partners. He is currently the Founder and face of Midlife Male, a media company and performance coaching program, helping men maximize middle age. His weekly podcast and newsletter reach 15,000 people. He is a bestselling author, coach, athlete, and most importantly, a husband and father to two amazing sons.Greg, welcome to the show.
It’s great to be here. Thank you for having me. That doesn’t sound as simple as you read.
You got to simplify that. Where are you right now? Tell everybody what city you’re in currently.
I’m in Houston, Texas. I have been in Houston, Texas for 21 years now. My wife was born and raised here. I am a born and raised New Yorker who happily has migrated and now has a life as a Texan.
Let’s go back to your life. Take us back to when you were in high school. What was Greg like in high school?
Right up until the end of high school, life was pretty simple. I was born and raised on the north shore of Long Island. We were in an upscale community. Mom and dad were together. I have two younger brothers. We’re privileged, very much so, with no hardship. We went to the school closest to our house. We went away every summer to camp and played ball up in New Hampshire. Life was very simple and good. I was popular in high school. By default, things came pretty easy to me back then.
Were you into sports?
I did sports. I was athletic. I swam and played tennis. Later on toward my sophomore, junior, and senior years of high school, I got very into fitness and lifting weights. I had knee surgery early, so it got me into lifting weights and taking care of myself. I’m always athletic and happy. In my senior year, my father got sick. He got cancer and ultimately passed away not long after. That’s when simple got very hard. Heading off to college was the first real trauma and the first real hardship, losing an actual father figure, the changing of the family dynamic, and going off on my own to college, all at the same time.
Where did you go to school?
In the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. It was the best school I got into. I wanted a big ten-atmosphere. It’s a great school. I knew a few people there. I had a good experience when I had gone out to visit. That was where the dividing line in the country was set. I didn’t want to be too far away from my mother at that point.
I don’t know if you heard what I said, but I said it’s too bad. The only reason I said it’s too bad is because I went to USC. USC has a big match-up with Michigan. I heard a lot from people that went to Michigan about those rivalries.
You guys are better than us for quite some time. Now we’re starting to get good again. When I was there, we were really good. We hit a rough patch for many years. We’re starting to get back again.
It’s the same with us. We hit a pretty rough patch and now we’re getting back. A lot of money is now being poured into it, good and bad. I don’t know how I feel about that. You’re at the University of Michigan, what did you major in there?
Partying and drinking. That was it for a while. I spiraled out of control while I was in college. I didn’t have anybody looking over me or paying attention to what I was doing. I’m short of making sure that I passed and continued to have school paid for and taken care of. I didn’t over-index in academics. I was a Communications major while I was there. I thought that I wanted to be in entertainment and film. I was gravitating towards anything that did not seem serious, and that didn’t seem like I had to put a lot of work in. I was the guy who was looking for the simple way, the easier way out, or the path of least resistance. Let me do what comes easily and naturally to me.
Midlife: I was the guy who was looking for the simple way, the easier way out, or the path of least resistance. Let me do what comes easily and naturally to me.
Did you end up with a degree in Communication?
I did. I also was in a rush for whatever reason to get out of there early. I ended up graduating in three and a half years rather than four, and staying and using the extra time to have more fun. It was always what’s easier. I could take a course that’s less challenging, pick up the credits, and get through it. I always thought I had to have the way. There had to be an angle. I did graduate early. From what I remember, it was a positive experience at school, but I was also dealing with a lot of personal trauma, loss, and grief that I wasn’t addressing.
You graduate with a degree in Communication early, then what happens to you? Were you off to get a job? Where did you go from there?
I guess that’s the path as a young man that you’re supposed to follow, which is graduate college. I come back to New York where I’m from and you’re supposed to get a job. What did I do? I wanted to get a job in the entertainment industry. I thought I wanted to be a film producer and get into that industry. I got an apartment in Manhattan, a shoebox-type apartment. I ended up getting my very first job right out of college as Harvey Weinstein’s assistant at Miramax Films.
I landed on Harvey’s desk right out of college as the number four assistant. I know somebody that knows somebody. The next thing I know, I’m there as assistant number four. When you think about mentorship or father figure or who is the next man in your life post-graduation, dad wasn’t around anymore, this was what I got hit in the face right out of school. I landed on Harvey’s desk as the number four assistant. Within a couple of months, I ended up being the number one guy. They promoted one and fired another that refused to travel with a female. The next thing I know, I’m the guy.
What is he like?
I guess one of my crowning moments was I have the distinction of having told Harvey to F-off 30 years before the #MeToo era. My rationale for that was my father would roll over in his grave if he knew I let somebody talk to me and treat me that way without taking care of the situation.
What do you mean by that?
This comes up a lot. I never saw Harvey do anything illegal. That being said, I believe everything that I’m hearing and everything that he’s doing. When I was with him, this goes back 30 years, he was a prick. He was already on the list of worst bosses to work for in America. All of it was there, but it had not transcended and crossed the threshold into illegal, immoral, or everything that has gotten him exactly where he deserves to be now. It was a completely inappropriate and hostile work environment.
I’m a 21-year-old kid and most people put up with it because they wanted to get promoted within the industry. I was either too egotistical, narcissistic, ego-driven, stupid, immature, or whatever to think that that was the only way I could succeed in the industry, or that could possibly hurt me if I got up and left, so I did it anyway. That’s what I did. I left, but I still ended up producing a few movies on my own. I accomplished my goal of dedicating them to my dad, seeing his name up on the screen, and doing that. It then became a little bit of, “Be careful what you wish for,” because it wasn’t what I wanted. It wasn’t the healthiest lifestyle. It wasn’t what I saw myself doing long-term.
What do you mean by that?
Early on, you don’t know what you don’t know. Because I didn’t have a family business to go into anymore, I didn’t have anybody necessarily advising me or mentoring me and getting great advice. I had this opportunity to try different things, good and/or bad, and wing it and be curious. I believed we’re bought into certain stereotypes, perceptions, or ideas that I thought, “It would be this,” and it turned out to be that once you tried it. I didn’t like the downtime between projects. Do you know what they say about acting and film sometimes, “They don’t pay you for the acting but they pay you for the waiting?” There’s a lot of time in development and waiting around. I’m somebody that requires a little bit more movement.
You leave Harvey Weinstein and you start doing some other movies yourself. Is that when you got into Team Baby Entertainment?
What happened was I thought I was going to get out of the entertainment industry. I made a few movies and sold them to a production company. From there, we had a little bit of runway. Ultimately, around that time, I met Kate, who is now my wife. We decided to relocate to Houston, Texas where she was from. I wanted to get out of New York, LA, and all the other Miami stuff that we had done. Houston was where she was born and raised and we decided to settle down here. That’s where the impetus for Team Baby came from.
When we had our first child, our oldest is 19 now, I’m there like a lot of entrepreneurs. Where do you get ideas and how do things happen? You’re sitting around with nothing to do. In this case, I have nothing necessarily to do but I know I need to do something because I now have a family to take care of. This runway is going to continue to get shorter if I do nothing. Sitting at home as a new dad, what are we watching? We’re watching Sesame Street and Baby Einstein. For reference, I’m 50 years old. Go back, give or take, 25 years at this point.
There’s picture-in-picture on these giant TVs. In one little tiny picture, I got ESPN on because that’s what I want to watch. In the big picture, you got the kid plopped down in front of you glued to Baby Einstein and Sesame Street. I’m sitting there going, “What if we combine these? There got to be other dads at home that like sports and saddling their kids overall. How do we brainwash them into becoming fans of our teams or using the things that we’re into to help our children or do this? It’s a win-win for both of us.” That was the impetus of Team Baby Entertainment. We created this line of sports-themed children’s DVDs that caught fire. If you were a Yankee fan, we had a baby Yankee DVD narrated by George Steinbrenner.
If you were a USC fan, we had Rodney Peete. Rodney Peete narrated our Baby Trojan DVD. Matthew McConaughey did the University of Texas. We created this whole line of children’s DVDs and that’s what blew up. I ended up partnering with Michael Eisner after he left Disney. We were the first acquisition he made. We’re building up the company for a period of years before ultimately selling the rest of it to him. He put it in with the Topps baseball card company, which he had acquired along the way. We saw quite a meteoric rise, and then we saw a collapse when the DVD market was changing and things were becoming app-based and going online. I got to see all sides of that. It was an interesting dichotomy in my identity.
From there, did you switch over to INS group?
I did the exact opposite. I decided to go from risk taker to risk manager. All this risk was making me stressed. I didn’t want to move back to New York. I didn’t have another million-dollar idea. We’re sitting back here in Houston, I have two children, and this rollercoaster of life is happening. I’m like, “What am I going to possibly do next?” This is a theme that has come up in my life a few times. When I don’t know what to do, I typically like to go out and talk to people.
If I don’t know the answers, let me start asking better questions to people that might be able to help me because I’m a simpleton. It’s like, “Give it to me simple.” I knew how to make things and how to produce things. That’s what I had always been doing. Here I am, back in Houston without an idea what to do again so I started a television show. I said, “I want people to talk to me. What’s the best way to get important people who are smarter than me and more successful to talk to me? Let me bring a camera and a microphone.” Typically, people like talking about themselves and want to do that.
I started calling very important people in and around the Houston area. I’m asking them if I could spend a day with them, “I have a television show. I interview entrepreneurs and risk-takers. I would love to come and spend a day with you and learn.” They started saying yes. This was Jamey Rootes who ran the Houston Texans. This was Deborah Cannon who ran Bank of America and was the Chairman of the Houston Zoo. The list went on and on. McClelland, who ran H-E-B, the largest chain of drugs store. I made a bucket list of whom you would want to talk to.
I then went to PBS. I said to PBS television here, “I’ve got a 30-minute talk show interviewing the top entrepreneurs and risk-takers in Houston. Can I put it on TV?” They were like, “What do you mean?” I’m like, “Seriously. I’m going to bring you fully completed episodes, 30 minutes long. Here’s the guest list. Here’s who’s on it. All I need is some airtime.” They’re like, “Okay, if you’re telling the truth.” They checked out my background. They’re like, “This guy actually has made some stuff. We’ll give you Thursdays at 7:00.”
I then went back to more people and said, “Now, I’m Greg for PBS. I’ve got 7:00 PM on Thursdays.” We ended up doing 24 episodes of this. Along the way, I joined INS Group which was short for Insurance Group. I was a client of the firm and I knew the principles for years. It felt like the least creative and least entrepreneurial thing I could possibly do after I had done everything I had done, but also seemed responsible as a man, as a husband, as a father, and as a provider.
Remember, this is what we’re supposed to do. We’re supposed to follow this path. I’m like, “Maybe this is the time I’m supposed to follow the path, residual income, build a book of business, and have somebody paying for my benefits and a 401(k) rather than me. These seem to be the right things to do.” We had a conversation. They encourage me to join the firm. They’re like, “You can ensure anything you want, Greg. You can make it as entrepreneurial as you want.” We became partners. I ultimately invested in the firm. That was the best move I’ve ever made in my life. I had been smart enough to work out an arrangement with them so that I could have a seat at the table.
If I achieved this, I could have equity. I was able to invest in the firm and achieve certain benchmarks. That turned out to be the best move I ever made. I used the talk show to interview these types of clients and prospective clients. I didn’t know that at that time, but that’s what it became. That’s how I built my book of business within the firm. I never controlled anything there. I was a smaller partner with incredibly smart people and successful people that surrounded me.
I learned a ton. It never was a great fit for me personality-wise, dress code-wise, office-wise, and everything. There’s a lot in my book about that and what I coach guys on. I work on now about authenticity, being able to differentiate yourself, and working within a system or getting out of it. I spent fourteen years there until the firm was acquired, which is what also allows me to do what I do now. It’s a longer answer than you want. Thank you for listening.
That’s good. For those of you that are tuning in, Greg’s why is to simplify, make things simple and easy to do, and understand. How you go about doing that is by challenging the status quo and thinking differently, and putting on no limits. Ultimately, what you bring is a way to contribute and add value to other people. Your why is simplify. Your how is challenge, and your what is contribute. Once you were done, it’s now INS Group.
I used to represent a slaughterhouse in Corpus Christi, Texas. This is when I knew that this business was not for me the way that I was doing it. I would have to go down to Corpus Christi, Texas, and I represented a slaughterhouse down there. I would show up at the gate to have a meeting there. I would hand them my card and they would see INS on the card.
In Corpus Christi, Texas at a slaughterhouse that employs 2,000 people, the security would radio to the back. You would see people leaving and running out because they thought the INS was there as opposed to the guy who was the insurance agent. The card design was wrong and the pronunciation was constantly wrong. I would’ve to tell them, “Your people could all come back. Nobody is getting deported today.”
You’re out now of INS group and now you’re onto your next thing, which is Midlife Male. Let’s talk about that for a minute. What is that about?
What happened during my time at INS Group was I continued to search for a way to bring creativity to a professional service business. The way I operate and think is different from most out there. While I want things to be simple, efficient, and effective, the manner in which I go after simplicity is hard for certain people to understand. This was always part of the bone of contention, even with my partners and so on. I have a tough time doing “things.” To me, it seems like the normal way to do things the way I want to do them. Habitually, I can do that consistently but that seems a little bit different out there. What happened was I started writing. The TV show became a podcast.
People stopped watching TV and PBS. My book of business got big and podcasts became big. I said, “I’ll start a podcast,” so the TV show became a podcast. Those conversations on the podcast started to transcend business and insurance, and become very deeply personal. I wasn’t interested that much in insurance. I was interested in personal connection, networking, content creation, relationship building, and all of that, That’s where the conversations went. I rebranded under this moniker. I still don’t know who coined the term midlife male. These are conversations with midlife males and it’s like, “That’s like you.” I was like, “Okay,” so I kept it.
I rebranded around the moniker of Midlife Male and the podcast became a newsletter. It started going out every week, which was like a tree falling in the woods for a while. It was therapeutic. It was a way for me to express myself. I talked about redefining and reframing success. What was happening to me was that the metric for success was not salary and title, and what I had been taught to believe in chasing these things. It was a more holistic view of what success looks like in happiness. I was finding myself. I was looking and leaning into what that authenticity was.
When you chase authenticity where it does not exist, it’s exhausting. I found myself exhausted constantly. What salary and title became was what I started to call my six F’s. It was Family, Fitness, Food, Finance, Fashion, and Fun. These were the things that I was interested in. These were the guys I would bring on the show. I would then write about what I learned from these conversations, and how I could aggregate it from everything out there. I curate it down to what landed with me in the simplest ways and then eliminate everything else to create a personal operating system, and a way for me to live that seemed like it simply made sense.
That started getting read by people and circulated around. The podcast started getting listened to. The combination of the podcast and the newsletter, 100 episodes later, became my book. We’re 200 episodes and growing. That became a coaching program for guys reaching out and saying, “Can you help me?” That has gotten into speaking and it’s this combination of this why and how, which is so brilliant with what you do and taking the assessment. Having to take the assessment into the why is so interesting and so fascinating.
We hear so much about finding your why. What I get is they found their why. I get why you want to be a better husband. I get why you want to be a better father. I get why you want to be in better shape. Where a lot of these guys are getting hung up is on the how. That’s a lot of what Midlife Male and what I’m doing is structured for. How can I help men maximize middle age in the how portion? I help you find and identify your why. A lot of the guys I see, they’ll have it or they’ll do something. Now, how do we go from why into how and into implementation? What are the daily positive action steps that are going to get you to realize that why and the outcome that you’re looking for?
We got to get real on this stuff. Can you quit your job and follow your passion? It theoretically sounds great, but it might be the most galactically irresponsible thing you can possibly do in middle age if you don’t have any money and you got kids and an overhead. How can we strategically and tactically make a plan for you to transition or do certain things? There’s a lot of white space between being overweight, out of shape, not moving, and being jacked and physically fit.
How do we make these steps and set them up so that it’s realistic, quantifiable, achievable, and measurable? To me, it’s super interesting stuff that’s out there. That’s what the conversations and the coaching are about. All of this is designed to provide hope and possibility. More importantly, the probability and likelihood of succeeding once you also know what success looks like to you.
How do you define success now?
For a while, I thought it was about needing to reinvent myself. What I’ve learned now is that it’s more about releasing myself than it is about reinvention. It’s about acknowledging and recognizing what fills my tank and what empties it. Back to my six F’s, they are my balanced or harmonious allocation of what my life’s portfolio looks like versus over-indexing in any one area. It’s following the five rules that I created and live under which provide simplicity, structure, and a framework.
Midlife: Success is more about releasing yourself than it is about reinvention. It’s about acknowledging and recognizing what fills your tank and what empties it.
Knowing what’s important is the most important. For me, that always starts with family, my wife, and my two boys, breaking the cycle of what I went through with my father, my brother, and other situation, with health, sustainability, and longevity. Finance and money are super important to be successful. How much do you need to do what you want to do, when you want to do it, and with who you want to do it? That is it in terms of success for me.
There’s other fun stuff that is a marker of success. What do you put on your body? What do you put in your body? These things matter. They matter to me. Are we having any fun? What are we doing any of this for if we’re not having any fun? To me, success looks like all of those things. It’s revisiting them every single day to remind myself that it is about what you’re doing and living every day, and not this destination or outcome that is seemingly out of reach or so far ahead. That’s what gets lost so much in the definition of success. It’s defined by outcome, achievement, or a milestone moment, and it’s not.
Success is being able to live your message every day and having those normal days that feel good to you. My wife and I were talking about it because Sunday was a nice day for us and it didn’t involve anything special. It didn’t involve spending a lot of money or we weren’t on vacation at some beach. There were no rainbows and unicorns or anything, but it was just a nice day. We exercised, I got the car washed, we walked the dogs, and had breakfast. She went out and did some of her stuff. I went out and did some of my stuff. We regrouped and had a nice wine. We’re like, “This is a nice day. How many of these can I string together?”
I love your take on balance. If you want to accomplish something in your life, does balance exist?
It’s a double-edged sword. It’s a fantastic subject and a fantastic question. I love this area. It’s like consistency. What does it look like? Are we talking about balance in a day? Are we talking about a balance over a year? Are we talking about balance in our overall life? It’s the same thing with consistency. What does it look like? I can say I want to be consistent and work out seven days a week. To me, that’s perfection, not consistency. I’m never going to be perfect. Does consistency look like seven days a week or I’m failing, or does it look like I look at my schedule, Monday off, Tuesday with my trainer, Wednesday yoga, Thursday off, and Friday? I can literally look at it and go, “That’s what consistency and that’s what success looks like.”
It’s the same with balance. Overall balance is BS. Harmony is a better word overall. I think that balance needs to be looked at contextually. If I say, “I’m going to sleep 7 to 8 hours at night. I’m going to spend 30 minutes in my sauna, do three minutes in my cold plunge, eat perfect breakfast, lunch, and dinner, exercise for an hour, do a podcast with Gary, rehearse my keynote, be the ultimate father and husband, and do all these,” there is no way that could be perfectly balanced. I can hit everything, but I’m going to burn out from that. That’s not balance in a day.
If I say, “In a week, here’s what I’m going to do. I’m going to exercise five times a week. I’m going to take two days a week off. I am going to sign in for the cold plunge. I’m going to do it four times a week. I got three days that I can miss throughout. I am going to attend 90% of my son’s games. I am going to record a podcast on Monday. I’m going to do my newsletter on Friday and coach my clients in between.” When you start to stretch it out, back to making it simple, achievable, measurable, and quantifiable, now you can have harmony. We underestimate what we can do in a year, and we significantly overestimate what we can do in a day.
That’s what trips a lot of people up, especially in the hustle and grind 24/7, sleep when I’m dead, and social media pressures of seeing everybody doing so much. I look at some of these guys’ morning routines and I’m like, “I’m exhausted.” Seriously, I couldn’t do that. I look at them going to bed routine or the evening routine. How is this sustainable? Some guys might have bigger engines. Everybody’s got a different bandwidth or capacity, but that’s what the system is set up to do. It is to figure that out. What success looks like for you is different than it does for me, and so on and so forth. The rules still apply. The framework in the system still works. You get to develop your own personal operating system by following these rules.
It gets back to that saying, “What’s the best exercise you could possibly do or the one you will do?”
That’s exactly right. There is no perfect way to eat. There’s no one way to do anything. There’s no one way to be successful. There’s one way to fail when you stop trying and learning. There’s an easy way to fail, but the beauty of this is that there are so many ways to succeed. How do we know that? Look around. At this point, I’ve interviewed 200-plus of the most successful men on the planet. Every one of them does something different.
Fundamentally, they operate very similarly whether that’s morals, ethics, structure, preparation, consistency, and accountability. What they do for a living, their backgrounds, family situation, and financial situation, all of these things are different. I can promise you this. If you put them all in a room, they’re going to get along. What makes them part of the same tribe or like-minded men are these other character attributes that have made them successful. They’re also going to be in there talking about their shortcomings and their failures and not their successes, and sharing and helping the other guy.
Those are almost universally consistent with everybody that comes on. Is there anything I can’t ask you about? I always ask that question too. Is there anything you don’t want me to ask about? Is there anything you don’t want to talk about? I have never got one, “Do me a favor. Don’t talk to me about this.” They’re like, “I’m an open book. Bring it. I’ll talk about anything.”
Greg, last question. What’s the best piece of advice you’ve ever given or the best piece of advice you’ve ever gotten?
That’s good. I need to use that too. That’s a good question. This might be the best piece of advice I’ve ever gotten. It’s to use this question if you want to learn something. I don’t think it’s a singular piece of advice. I’m going to try to answer your question as directly as I can. My dad wrote me a letter shortly before he passed away. In that letter, it said, “There may be men out there with more money than I have, but there is nobody richer than I am when I look at you and your two brothers.” I’ve held onto that as far as what’s important. I thought that was good advice.
The metric for success is not purely monetary. My dad was a successful guy for the majority of his life, but it put things in perspective for me. That letter sits on the side of my bed where I sleep and on the wall, right next to where I am. It has helped me with my two boys and focusing on what’s important. Live your legacy, not wait until you’re gone. That was the best advice. As far as maybe the best advice I’ve ever given, it’s the same. I would take that statement and pay it forward.
I see and work with a lot of men who unfortunately I feel are squandering their time. They’re missing those big moments, the small ones, and the ones that add up with their kids and their wives. They’re choosing to stay in the office a little bit later versus making it to that game. They’re choosing to let the other dad coach because they’re too busy. They think that sponsoring the team is the same as being around the team. They think that it’s a one-week vacation in Mexico when it’s the other 51 weeks that matter. To your point about balance or harmony, we go back to rule number one, “Knowing what’s important is the most important.”
It sounds a lot like it’s being the man in the arena.
It absolutely is. It is about living your message. First, you got to understand who you are and what your message is. My book goes into this a lot. You got to get real, raw, naked, and vulnerable. Take that real hard one look in the mirror and decide what kind of guy you want looking back at you. None of us start with perfect and it’s never going to be, but what are you willing to do each day to get better, have your actions match your words, or get that reflection to feel differently? I love that phrase, “You got to be in the arena.”
The man in the arena versus the critique on the side talking about the activity, you’re the man in the arena doing it.
It’s also like the Jim Rohn quote, “The signature of mediocrity is not an unwillingness to change. The signature of mediocrity is chronic inconsistency.” I get that you want to change. I don’t even think it’s the chronic inconsistency. I think you are consistent. You’re just consistently making the wrong choice. How can we take the willingness to change and what you’re consistently doing or not doing and put them in the right order and the right prioritization? You got all the skills to do it.
Are you finding that people are not willing to explore authenticity until they’ve experienced enough pain? Is it related to the amount of pain they’ve experienced or the loss they’ve endured? I don’t know if I’m asking this correctly, but is it an avoidance of pain or wanting to seek pleasure that allows people to explore authenticity?
One of the answers I give most frequently is maybe or it depends. Who’s to say what somebody’s degree of pain or trauma is and what’s real to them? The other saying is, “If you take all your problems and throw them out on the table and we all put them out there, what are you going to want? You’re going to want your own back.” I’ve got death in mind. My brother went to prison. I struggled with alcoholism and body image. Throw it all out there. I don’t know what everyone else is throwing out there, but I do know how to at least handle mine to an extent and work on that.
I do think of a few things on there. I feel like the younger guys that reach out to me, and when I say younger guys, I’m seeing a lot more guys in their 30s that are successful but are looking at 40 and they want to see what’s around them. They do not want to go in down that midlife crisis path. They’ve seen it either in their father figures, their fathers, their fathers-in-law, or their bosses. They’re much more proactive in addressing vulnerability, authenticity, and emotion, asking for help, and looking around, “Can you save me $500,000?” I have a lot of respect for that.
In a lot of those cases, they’re not unpacking a lot of baggage. They’re not saying, “I’m coming to the table with all these problems, trauma, and everything.” It’s like, “This is important stuff to pay attention to. I want to avoid trauma, pain, and loss. What can I do to learn and get ahead?” It’s not a sign of weakness. It’s a sign of strength to talk about these things and to get ahead of them.
The guys right smack in their 40s in a lot of ways are very set in their ways and not as comfortable with admitting, “We don’t have all the answers. We’re not who we thought we were going to be. This is not where I thought how I was going to be living. This is not what I thought I was going to look like.” They struggle with opening up on that. They’re trying to continue to do the same things and expect a different result.
The guys in their 50s are coming out the other side. They’re like, “I’ve weathered the storm in a way. Now what? I do have some money. My kids are out of the house. I’ve been married for many years. What do I do for fun?” On that authenticity side, “What do I want to do now?” That takes work to figure out. “I used to think I like to paint.” “Why don’t you try painting again?” We give up hobbies, passion, and things because we think that’s what we’re supposed to do when time and life get in the way. How do we bring some of those things back authentically? Take some work. Go back and figure out who you are.
Is there such a thing as avoiding a midlife crisis? Is it even healthy to avoid it?
We feel like we have to put a name or a title on everything. I know some very old 30-year-olds and I know some very young 60-year-olds out there. I don’t think that it’s just about a number. I get asked all the time where middle age is. Men’s Health put out an article and they say it’s 37 based on a life expectancy of 75. It’s not as simple. Is it a real thing? Yes. Does it affect guys at different ages and stages of their lives? Absolutely. Can you avoid it? 100%. Can you get out of it and course correct if you’re right smack in the middle of it? Absolutely. Is it a death sentence? No.
Can you start seeing aging as not something to fear but something aspirational? Absolutely. I believe all of these things are true. We just have to embrace possibility and probability. It’s not going to happen by default. It’s going to happen by design, and you have to be willing to do the work. I genuinely believe my best days are in front of me, not behind me. I believe I have more energy at 50 than I had at 30. I feel I know where I’m going now more clearly than at any other point.
All of those take a lot of time. It still takes constant work, constant reinforcement, conversations with men like you, going back and revisiting the why, adopting and working on the how, testing and retesting over and over again, and believing that that’s also where the magic happens. It’s not, “This is where I have to be at 55.” As Jesse Itzler says, “Be where your feet are.” It’s like, “This is where I am right now on Monday at 3:00 in the afternoon. The phone is on Do-Not-Disturb.” Spend some more time being present and engaged. When we get off this, this energizes me versus drains me.
We don’t spend enough time taking our own temperature on things. Don’t you like the way you feel around certain people? Maybe you shouldn’t be spending so much time around them. Don’t you like that activity? Maybe you should cut back on that activity. A lot of those things are scary if we think we got to change our peer group. Maybe, but you can. That’s the other thing. You truly can. My friends, my peers, my lifestyle, and my actions now are very different than they were 10 years ago. It’s very different than they were 5 years ago, and they’ll be different 5 years from now.
Greg, if there are people that say, “I love what you’re talking about and the whole idea of having someone to coach me through this process,” what’s the best way for people to get in touch with you, follow you, and see what you’re up to?
I appreciate it. I am not hard to find. You can go to MidlifeMale.com. All the information is there. A lot of free stuff is out there. My newsletter is free every week, and the podcast is also. I have the No BS Guide to Maximizing Midlife and Getting Back What Matters Most, which is a free eBook that you can download. You can email me at Greg@MidlifeMale.com. You can DM me on Instagram @GregScheinman or LinkedIn to talk about coaching, workshops, speaking, or any of those things. I try to get back to everybody through social or other ways that they reach out.
You can buy the book on Amazon. That’s where everybody is getting their books these days. You can buy your copy of the Midlife Male at Amazon. There’s an Audiobook version. I try to be accessible to everybody out there and understand that we are all in this together. I’m no different than the guys that I am coaching, speaking to, writing to, and working with. We’re just sharing experiences.
The Midlife Male: A No-Bullsh*t Guide to Living Better, Longer, Happier, Healthier, and Wealthier and Having More Fun in Your 40s and 50s (Which Includes More Sex … and What Guy Doesn’t Want That?)
Greg, thank you so much for being here. I appreciate you taking the time to be on the show. I look forward to following you because I am that midlife male. I’m probably a little past midlife male, but it’ll be fun to follow you.
Not by the way you act. As I say, we’re all in this. We’re right there. What are guys like me looking for? We’re always looking ahead too. That’s the awesome part. Thank you so much, Gary. I appreciate it.
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It is time for our new segment, which is Guess Their Why. My wife and I have been watching the series, The Crown. If you haven’t seen The Crown, it’s about Queen Elizabeth. At least so far, it’s all about Queen Elizabeth. She took over the reins of England when she was in her early 20s. She recently passed away. I wonder if you know anything about her, what do you think her why is? I can tell you what I think based on what I’ve seen so far. She thinks differently, pushes the limits, and changed things to the way that she wanted and were different than what was typical or traditional.
They didn’t have a woman leading these older men at that time. Here she comes along in her early 20s, has to figure things out, and make some big changes. I believe that her why is to challenge the status quo and think differently. My wife has the same why, challenging. She’s very much similar to her and connects with her, at least on what we’re seeing on TV. What do you think? Does that jive with what you are seeing?
Thank you so much for tuning in. If you’ve not yet discovered your why, you can do so at WhyInstitute.com. You can use the code Podcast50 and get it at half price. If you love the show, please don’t forget to subscribe. Leave us a review and rating on whatever platform you’re using and I will see you in the next episode.
Greg Scheinman has experienced the highest highs— two seven-figure exits from companies he founded or helped build, success as a high-level executive— and the lowest lows— the loss of his father, panic attacks, depression, and alcoholism.
Through it all, he’s developed a method for maximizing your life to fulfill your potential and start living during a time when too many believe they’re “past their prime.”
If you want to find your genius, you need to figure out who you are and what you’re amazing at. Once you find that you can put yourself in a position where you can succeed the most. Life gives you so many clues on how to find your genius, like a murder mystery, you just need to find and organize them. This is your zone of genius. Dr. Gary Sanchez’s guest, Mike Zeller exemplifies the WHY of make sense. Mike is a business architect and entrepreneur mentor who helps professionals find their zone of genius. He is the founder of Symposia Mastermind and is the author of “The Genius Within“. Learn how to find greater clarity in yourself so that you can be in your zone of genius. Learn what the WHY of make sense means for Mike today!
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Watch the episode here:
Listen to the podcast here:
The WHY Of Make Sense: Unlocking Your Best Self By Finding Your Genius With Mike Zeller
Welcome to the show where we go beyond just talking about your WHY, andhelping youdiscover and live your WHY. If you’re a regular, you know that every week, we talk about one of the nine WHYs.We bring on somebody with that WHY so we can see how their WHY has played out in their life. In this episode, we’re going to be talking about the WHY of Make Sense or to make sense of the complex and challenging.
If this is your WHY then you are driven to solve problems and resolve challenging or complex situations. You have an uncanny ability to take in lots of data and information. You tend to observe situations and circumstances around you and sort through them quickly to create solutions that are sensible and easy to implement. Often, you are viewed as an expert because of your unique ability to find solutions quickly. You also have a gift for articulating solutions and summarizing them clearly in understandable language.You believe that many people are stuck and that if they could make sense out of their situation, they could develop simple solutions and move forward. In essence, you help people get unstuck and move forward by helping them solve their problems.
I’ve got a great guest for you. His name is Mike Zeller. He is a business architect and entrepreneur mentor. He helps professionals find their zone of genius and rewrite their subconscious to fuel momentum towards life’s purpose.He has mentored over 200 high-level entrepreneurs from all over the world, helping add tens of millions in revenue to his clients. An entrepreneur himself, he has founded or partnered in over twenty ventures across multiple industries including technology, real estate, digital marketing and more.
Collectively, his businesses have achieved more than $100 million in sales in the last several years. He partners his business strategy with a heavy emphasis on social entrepreneurism, including one venture that gave away $300,000 in cars to single mothers in need. Mike has trained under masters of the industry such as Tony Robbins, Russell Brunson and Jay Abraham. As a master NLP practitioner, he uses his core methodology to help entrepreneurs and creatives get unstuck from emotional roadblocks to become more fully integrated and build unstoppable momentum. He has been featured in Business Insider, Forbes Coaches Council, Thrive Global, Huffington Post, and on Fox Radio. Mike, welcome to the show.
Gary, I’m excited to be here. After that intro, I sound a lot more impressive than I feel.
It sounds like you have done a lot of things. Where I think we should start is take us back through your life, maybe back to even when you were in high school. Where did you grow up? How did you get on this path of entrepreneurism and end up where you are now? Let’s start back there.
I was in love with baseball in high school. I was devoted to becoming a professional baseball player at one point. That’s where self-discipline, desire, hunger and that fuel to challenge myself grew. My dad was an immigrant from Germany with an eighth-grade education. He moved to America, not speaking a word of English during post World War II. He was born in 1940. His parents were anti-Hitler but they still had to have a picture of Hitler hanging in their house. Otherwise, they could be arrested by the Gestapo and a lot worse could happen to them. They had a picture of Hitler hanging in the back door in a closet. If someone came in, they could say, “We have our picture of Hitler in the back.” I learned this story from my dad.
Find Your Genius: People need to find their genius. There are clues scattered throughout their lives. The challenge is most people haven’t organized and synthesized those clues yet.
If I go back to some of the roots and things that are imprinted upon us that you don’t even realize where they come from, my dad was eligible for nutrition deficient camps. Even though he was a German boy and his parents had a general store, which is a precursor to grocery stores. He came over to America with this hardiness and this resilience where they had one serving of meat a week. They would have potatoes, vegetables and things like that.
I’m not terribly old or anything like that but when I was growing up, he taught us a lot of that. He taught us to be resilient, disciplined, frugal, hardworking and industrious. I got a lot of that, but he was also self-employed at the time I was growing up. He owned and raised harness horses and was one of the best in the country, so I wanted to eventually be self-employed. Eventually, I knew I was meant to be an entrepreneur. I thought I was going to be in the restaurants. I got into real estate and started building a mini real estate empire.
At age 32, I listened to Tony Robbins’ Personal Power II. He talks about doing incantations and affirmations. My seventh affirmation was that I mentor and lead some of the brightest and best people in the world. I was like, “I don’t know how I’m going to do that. All I’m doing now is real estate.” I was like, “I’m supposed to write this down.”
Three years later, I had started at that point six more businesses. After a mini-sabbatical in Buenos Aires, Argentina that was inspired by The 4-Hour Workweek, I started getting tons of people reaching out for mentorship and coaching. My first paid client at the time was doing $25 million a year in eComm. He’s the cofounder of iHeartDogs. I loved it and felt like I need to figure out a way to make this viable and make sense in helping entrepreneurs grow. That’s a long story.
You were early on into sports. That was your thing. Did you go off to college or no college?
I went to college. I went to a private liberal arts school and played baseball in college for a bit. I am still very attuned to sports. I’m hosting a Clubhouse room called The Sons and Daughters of Hall of Famers. Jim Brown’s daughter is coming on, Gill Russell’s daughter, Sugar Ray Leonard’s son, Joe Montana’s son might come and share. I love the game of sports.
That will be interesting because the pressure that’s got to be on the son or daughter of a legend has got to be intense. I’m fortunate that I had two daughters and I didn’t get to put pressure on them to be these amazing athletes because that wasn’t in their makeup. I realized that quickly when I was coaching soccer to five-year-old girls. I turned to put my daughter in the game and she’s down at the end of the field chasing a butterfly. I realized all this pressure that I could apply to be a great athlete is not going to apply to them. What was the first business that you got into?
Besides a couple of network marketing businesses, I would say real estate investing. I’ve built on a little real estate portfolio.
Who got you into that? Why did you pick that of all the things that you could have picked why real estate investing?
One of my mentors at the time shared with me Carleton Sheets’ No Down Payment Program. It says, “97% of America’s millionaires made their millions in real estate.” It was one of his core premises. Whether that’s true or not, I don’t know but I got in the game. I loved the power of leverage, the tax write-offs, and all the other things that come with real estate. I’m a big believer in real estate.
It was interesting when I listened to your story, the quick version of it. It’s very similar to my path. I did Tony Robbins’ Personal Power when I was in my twenties. I took the No Down Payment course. I took a lot of those same things. It’d be interesting to see if most entrepreneurs were on that same path. I saw some different multilevel marketing things way back in the day. I quickly learned that maybe that wasn’t the best way. You probably figured out it didn’t make much sense.
I didn’t want everyone that I talked to be a prospect of my downline.
You didn’t want them to scatter when you walked in?
Yeah, exactly.
Find Your Genius: Your genius is where you can be one of the best in your marketplace. This has to be deeply aligned with your values, life experiences, relationships, and strengths.
What kind of real estate were you involved with?
It is mostly residential. We did a few flips but frankly, the flips were hard. Even though Nashville is a great market, it is still a very hard market to make good margins on. I eventually owned an office building. I had an office building that was sold in 2020. I loved investing and I still do. Besides cryptocurrency, that’s the thing I want to heavily invest in over the next twenty years, as well as other companies.
You jump in there, figure out the best way to do it, do that for a little while, and then onto the next.
One of the things that I started noticing, especially as I reflect back, is I have 4 or 5 friends that have $100 million-plus real estate portfolios. I didn’t love the game as they did, but I loved other things that they maybe don’t understand or get to. When we go into finding your genius, I think there are clues scattered throughout our lives. The challenge is most of us haven’t organized and synthesized the clues that, “You’re a genius over here and you’re not so much a genius over here. In fact, you suck over here.” We have some basic understanding of those things but you have to get even more precise. One of the fundamentals, as I look back at my entrepreneurial journey, is that I see over and over that those people who accomplish extraordinary things put themselves in extraordinarily right positions. I think there are clues in your life, my life, and everyone’s life as well.
I bet you see scenarios where they put themselves in situations where they weren’t living their genius.How long can somebody take that? You did real estate for a while and then jumped into it by accident. It sounds like personal growth, mentoring and helping other people achieve their success. In that area, is thatwhere you learned about the zone of genius?
One of the businesses that I started when I came back from Buenos Aires was a socially-minded car dealership. We had a goal that was twofold. It’s to create the most ethical, honest, straightforward, and the best value car buying experience in the Southeast, which we did. Every car we sold helped us give away another car to a single mother in need. We gave away over $300,000 worth of cars. We started a digital marketing agency that was designed to help my businesses and other businesses grow and stretch. Another venture was the men’s fashion line, then a sustainable fashion line, and then an office/coworking space.
I started asking myself, “What parts of the business am I good at?” I also started getting clues about what parts of the business I’m not so good at, which are some operations, legal, administrative tax sides. I hate those things. It’s not in my wheelhouse. I can do them and I can discipline myself, but only for so long. I get bored and I want to go over here and create something else. I lost over $1 million as well.
After I had all this growth, doing $30 million a year in revenue, I personally lost over $1 million in a pretty short time period in 2018. It sideswiped me because I was playing out of my position so much. I realized that my genius had gotten me to a certain level but I didn’t have the right partners, collaborators, etc. Now I had more people asking as well as I was getting more advice-seekers approaching me. I’m like, “I can’t tell you where and what you should do without knowing your values, strengths and weaknesses.” I thought, “All the personality tests gave us different clues.” I loosely created a process to organize and synthesize the clues.
You figured it out. You made sense of this complex thing called, “What’s my genius?”
I’ve got the most complete process ever created for someone who is hungry to figure out their genius more precisely. I’ve yet to find someone that doesn’t have a massive breakthrough when they do the whole thing.
How do you define your genius?
My genius is where I can be one of the best in the world or best in the marketplace that’s deeply aligned with my values, life experiences, relationships and my strengths. It’s those four pillars. We all have webs of relationships. Our network is our net worth, some might say. The third thing is our defining life experiences. Why does someone who goes through the same university or goes through the same experience in terms of the same education or whatever do something radically different?
If we look back at Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos, why are they both in a race for space? They were fascinated with space in their teenage years and wanted to do something. They dreamed of going to outer space. One of my favorite stories is about Theodore Roosevelt. At the age of 22 or 23, unfortunately, his first wife dies giving birth and his mom dies 24 hours later. He’s like, “I can’t take it.” He was a politician at the time, a Congressman or something. He let his aunt raise his daughter for the next six months because he’s like, “What am I going to do with an infant? I’m a rough rider type personality.”
He goes out West to North Dakota and South Dakota. He camps, hunts and lives in the wilderness for months. Fast forward many years later, he becomes the President of the US. He preserves the national parks. He preserves more natural acreage and is a bigger advocate for wildlife than any other president we’ve ever had because of those types of experiences.
Find Your Genius: The universe is made up of waves. The challenge is to create a new pattern or wave. You can do this by creating new perspectives and new perspectives create aha moments.
The first thing was unique talents, the second thing was your important relationships, and then the third was your life experiences. What was the fourth again?
It’s values and passions. What do I stand for and what do I stand against? What lights me up? What am I insatiably curious about? They all give clues. The goal is you synthesize and organize all the clues. They are scattered throughout. If you get them all on one table or one worksheet in my case, now you have all these clues organized and you can see patterns emerge. You’ve probably read Jim Collins’ Good to Great book, Built to Last and all that. What is it? Jim gathered a bunch of data and he didn’t go in assuming certain things. He had some guesses but he looked in and said, “What patterns are going to emerge from the data, about the companies when they went from good to great.” There were some patterns that he didn’t even expect.
What happens is you have greater certainty and greater clarity. One of my clients that I took through a whole day session on it is a former executive of the federal government. She’s retiring and she’s had as many as 80,000 employees underneath her. She said, “Mike, this is one of the biggest a-ha moments in my 34-year career. She went through the process even though she is pretty self-aware. She spent tens of thousands of dollars with coaching programs. She read countless books. She gets up at 4:30 AM. She does her disciplines and things like that. Socrates said, “To know thyself is the beginning of all wisdom.” If you can master yourself, you can master the game of life.
What was the turning point for you? Why did you decide to go on this path?
I remember when I first became a man of faith in college. I became a Christian in my junior year. I remember speaking and organizing an event. I was like, “I think my purpose in life is to unleash people’s God-given potential.” I did ministry for a while but I felt like, “I’m not supposed to be in ministry.”
What made you believe that?
It was almost like a divine download. I had a whisper. Sometimes in life, we get whispers and nudges. It doesn’t have to be audible. It’s just, “There was something meaningful here. I’m supposed to connect with this person.” When I was 21 years old, I was mentoring college students. One of the guys I was mentoring was two years younger than me. He says to me one day, “Mike, you’re the best mentor I’ve ever had.” I was like, “Wow.” His dad was a bestselling leadership author. His dad was pretty legit and way far ahead of me. I was like, “That’s pretty awesome.”
When you get connected to your heart and spirit, you get clarity if you’re willing to still yourself, still the outside noise and listen. Tune yourself and ask yourself. Your body doesn’t lie. If I take this pen right here and I put my hand down and I try to stab it, my body will not stab itself unless I’ve somehow bypassed it. A Navy SEAL might be able to bypass it but I can’t bypass that very easily because our body is designed not to harm itself. Our body is also very honest, but most of us are attuned to our mind more than our body. Our minds can lie and it lies all the time. We get all these word tracks, wounds, stories and false beliefs.
I have a Claim Your Power Meditation on YouTube that you go through and you get more connected to yourself, your weak-ass self and your most powerful self. You release the weak-ass version of you from controlling and guiding your life. It’s all about asking your heart and your body. What is the name of your badass self? I’ve got Magic Mike, and I’ve got Weak-ass Willie. Magic Mike is more powerful, I promise you that.
You create your own name for the badass version of yourself and then you put that one on your shoulder or what? How do you use your badass self?
We’re both sports fans. We know Kobe Bryant had Black Mamba. Bo Jackson had a guy named Jason from Friday the 13th. He’s a nice guy off the field but when he’s on the field, he’s going to run over and destroy people. It’s how he thinks. You flip into a different mentality. One of the early clients that I worked with on this was a big Instagram influencer. She had 600,000 followers on Instagram. We sat down for twenty minutes in our session. We were out in LA and she breaks down in tears. She said, “Mike, I’m completely stuck on my message.” I’m like, “What am I going to do? I got a crying girl in my hands.” I realized, “I can take her through this process.”
I took her through the process and I got her connected to Oprah Winfrey. I asked her, “Who do you admire who knows their message?” “Oprah Winfrey.” I had her visualize experiencing, being and delivering a message as Oprah. By the end of that, we go back to her. She’s created a whole new brainwave. We’ve got wavelengths. The universe is made up of waves, sound waves and light waves. As entrepreneurs, what are we? We’re up and down. It’s a roller coaster to some extent. Our women have a cycle and it’s a 30-day cycle. They’re up and down. There’s a time of the month they’re crazy and want chocolate. The universe is made up of waves.
The challenge is to create a new pattern or a new wave. In that Law of Physics, an object in motion stays in motion unless acted upon by an outside source. We can create new patterns and new waves with new perspectives. New perspectives create a-has. Why did the founder of Red Bull discover Red Bull when he’s in Thailand? He’s tired and he has a big meeting. He asked the taxi driver to pull over so he could run in and get an energy drink. The taxi driver says, “Get this Red Bull. It’s good.” He goes down and gets a Red Bull can or whatever with a little Red Bull on it. It is something similar to what it is now. He was like, “This works.” He comes back and creates that brand. He was in a different brainwave, pattern and perspective. I help people create new patterns around finding their genius and anchoring to their most powerful identity.
When they have their most powerful identity, they can use that as a sounding board. How do they use it once they have their badass self?
Find Your Genius: Don’t let a thought or pattern that doesn’t serve who you actually are, stay in your mind. You can let them come in, but do not let them build a nest.
I’ll give you an example. One of my clients is Renee Batten. She’s a former Army veteran or a Navy veteran. She’s a powerhouse woman who has written a bunch of books. Her alter ego is Barbuda. We were talking and in many parts of her business, she’s doubled and tripled her income since working together but she hadn’t made some leaps up in our marketing. I was like, “Renee, who’s leading your marketing department? Is it Barbuda or is it Renee?” She’s like, “It’s not Barbuda. It’s Renee.” Barbuda leads with power, magnificence, strength and courage. She doesn’t play small. You have different energy. It’s the beauty of the human mind that is different from the animal kingdom.
I remember when my dad made us watch animal shows. You see a wildebeest getting caught by some lions and then all of a sudden, it somehow escapes the jaws of the lion and runs off. The lion is too tired to chase it down. Two minutes later, it’s eating grass. You’re like, “Mr. Wildebeest, what the heck’s wrong with you? You were just in the jaws of a lion and now you’re eating grass.” We wouldn’t do that. If we almost die, we’re not eating a sandwich two minutes later because our minds are different.
In the animal kingdom, their minds are designed to release energy faster. I’m studying trauma a lot. Healing from Trauma is a great book that talks a little bit about this. As humans, we hold on to it. We also have the superpower of we can transport our minds into a different space with imagination and creativity. If we can do that, then we will lead and create from a radically different space.
Our marriages and relationships can be different. We unlock our divine human potential in a different way. That’s why I think this higher version of ourselves that’s within us is the real version. Sometimes we’re like, “If I step up here and I imagine myself there, that’s the imposter.” No, your current reality is most likely your imposter. What if we flip the perspective? What if my current reality or the one that wants to play small, the one that wants to hide, the one that wants to not go for it is the false version?
Once you have definedwhat the real version of you is and named, then you can step into that?
What I do is I have people write out, “How does this version of you walk and talk? What is this version of you wearing? Are they wearing hand-me-downs pre-owned clothes? Are they wearing Gucci or whatever they are wearing? What type of music does that version of you listen to?” Do you do affirmations?
I start my day off with, “I am Magic Mike. I am a wealth magnet. I am attracting, earning and saving millions of dollars. I am worthy of extraordinary.” I’ve got 2 minutes and 22 seconds of affirmations of declaring “I am,” even though some of those things have not happened fully yet, but I’m speaking where I want to go. Our words are our commands so I speak those into existence based on my zone of genius partly as well, then they are in alignment.
I’m designed to be a creator and not an accumulator like Warren Buffett. The Wealth Dynamics test is one of my favorite personality tests. It shows you your natural pathway to wealth. If I’m creating and building in alignment, the powerful phrase “I am” subtly commands your body to move in that direction with energy and music. I like energy and music. It changes our brain waves as well.
Tell us about Magic Mike versus Weak-ass Willie. When did that transition happen from Weak-ass Willie to Magic Mike? What was that like for you?
Both of them still show up. Weak-ass Willie is when I lost a lot of money and then I had all these people I had to pay and all these things. I had some significant shame around that. I had my tail between my legs. I’m not going to take care of what I need to take care of if Weak-ass Willie is leading my life. I started creating that alter ego of Magic Mike. I had a client call me Magic Mike because of the magic I was creating in her life. I said, “What does Magic Mike do? How does it lead? How can you show up more before I go into meetings or podcasts interviews, and before I do this or this?”
I’m like, “Do I want Magic Mike to lead or do I want Weak-ass Willie?” When Weak-ass Willie shows up, I’ll literally say, “Thank you for sharing your good desire.” It’s always for protection and wanting to keep me from harm. I’m like, “I see you and I hear you but I’ve got to advance. I’ve got to be on the offensive and lead. I can’t retreat. “Thank you. Magic Mike, you take the reins, drive the car, drive the bus in my life. Let’s roll.”
It is very much like sports.
It goes down into visualization, commanding, reinforcing and not letting a thought or pattern that doesn’t serve who you are and how you want to show up stay in your mind long. We all have them come in, but do we let them build a nest in a home?
Find Your Genius: Greater clarity leads to greater confidence. Greater confidence leads to a greater conviction. Greater conviction leads to greater courage. Then you will have higher-level commitments to yourself and others.
It’s “I can’t” versus “I can.” I was a world champion in racquetball and at every level that I went through at every stage, I faced the “Am I really good enough?” You have to overcome that by believing it. What worked when you were at a lower level does not work when you get to the next level, which does not work when you get to the next level, so you’ve got to reinvent.
You’ve had to do that a few times in your career. I imagine you’ve gotten closer as well to your genius and to your purpose. There is always more to unpack using the lessons of our wins and failures.
What I like about what you’ve done is that you’ve figured it out. You’ve codified what people were doing that found success versus what people were doing that didn’t find success. You said, “This is what these people are doing. Let me show you what the heck they’re doing so it makes sense to you and then you can go do it.”
It’s do-it in your own unique way and your own unique path. The other thing that’s cool about this process is when you do it, now you’re going to have even more deep alignment. If you’re resolved and convicted in your spirit, you show up more courageously. You show up with greater confidence and greater commitment. It all starts with clarity. It’s the first of the five Cs. Greater clarity leads to greater confidence. Greater confidence leads to a greater conviction. With a greater conviction, we show up with more courage, then we make higher-level commitments to ourselves and others.
I’m sure there are a lot of people reading right now that are in that stage themselves where they are making that shift or the transition from what they were doing to what they wanted to do, and it’s scary. It’s sometimes easier to write it out and play small. If you’re talking to them right now, they’re reading and they’re teetering on, “Should I go for it? Should I not go for it?” What is the first step they should take?
Socrates is one of the wisest men who ever lived. He mentored Plato and Aristotle who gave us in essence, Western Civilization, the philosophy of democracy, and the capitalistic system as well, and human growth and human potential. He said, “To know thyself is the beginning of all wisdom.” King David said in Proverbs 16:32, “It’s better to have self-control than to conquer a city.” Another wise man, Dee Hock, the Founder of Visa. When he started writing for Harvard Business Review, he found the very best leaders in the world and did something that ordinary leaders did not. That was that they focused more than 50% of their leadership energy on leading themselves.
Back to what I said before, “Extraordinary results are predicated not necessarily by the most extraordinary people but people being in extraordinarily right positions.” You think of a great sports team. They are extraordinarily aligned. Why will the Brooklyn Nets probably never win an NBA championship with Kevin Durant and James Harden consistently? They don’t have a complementary team. They got two great stars but it’s not aligned with the rest of the team.
Extraordinary success comes down to people being in extraordinarily right positions. If you get yourself more in the right position, which I think that’s where I had another client go through the test and the course before I had the book out. She was like, “Mike, I would have doubled my salary if I had gone through this first because I would have had so much greater clarity around where I kicked butt and I would have asked for more.” She renegotiated her salary after being at the job for a month.
Figure out who you are and where you are amazing because you can put yourself in a position where you can succeed the most. I would say pick up the book because it guides you through the whole process but go through the personality tests. The reason I’d take people through five personality tests is they all give you different clues. They measure different behaviors and strengths. Doing the other inventories around relationships and defining life moments also give you other layers of clues. The more layers of clues, the more patterns you will see.
Once you know yourself, then making decisions is easier, and then you have clarity, confidence, conviction, courage and commitment. That’s exactly what we believe. The first step is self-awareness and the first step in self-awareness is knowing your WHY because once you know your WHY, all the rest makes sense and fits together. In your case, we know you are somebody who believes in making sense of complex and challenging things. You’ve done that in every area of your life all the way along, from being the guy that helped people through their problems when you were young, to the person that’s continually doing it now. You did it in real estate and you did it all the way along in your journey.
Knowing that, we could predict that you’re eventually going to figure something special out, and you did. You took something that is complex, challenging and overwhelming. “I have no idea what to do and I don’t know where to turn,” and you said, “Let me hold your hand for a second. Here’s where you go. Here’s your step. Figure yourself out and then we’ll figure the rest out.” I got one last question for you before we go there. What’s the best piece of advice that you’ve ever been given or that you ever gave someone?
Something that changed my world was when I was nineteen years old. I went to Peter Lowe’s Success Seminar. I heard guys like Zig Ziglar, Colin Powell and all those legends of afar. One of them said, “Spend 30 minutes a day reading. Do it in the first part of your day. Do it in the morning. That way, you start your day off with some fuel in the tank. You put some deposits in your bank account.” I’ve done that in every season of life since then. I’ve read 1,500 books now. I love learning and growing. As a result, I can honestly say that I mastered a lot of different subjects.
There is another guy, Brian Tracy, when I was twenty years old in the middle of a finals week. He said at his seminar, “If you read a book a month in your chosen field, you’ll be an expert in three years. That’s 36 books.” I was like, “I don’t want to wait three years.” I’m a little more impatient. I was like, “I’m going to master a subject in one year.” The first one I mastered and worked on was leadership, sales and marketing, spirituality, relationships, human psychology and all those others.
Choosing a field and becoming a bonafide expert goes far. You want to learn, lean into that and become a master. Don’t be a dabbler. You can dabble in some things and that’s okay. That’s experimentation, but choose a handful of things to become a master at. Once you master something else and you want to explore and master something else, master that. The top one-percenters earn disproportionately more than everyone else. We all can be one-percenters. If that’s 36 books, you can read 36 books in a subject and not take yourself up but apply it. That’s was the best advice I’ve ever received.
The Genius Within: Your Natural Pathway To Impact, Fulfillment, & Wealth
One of my mentors says it this way. He says, “Learn less and study more.” It’s pretty much what you said. You don’t need 500 books on 500 subjects, take one subject and go 500 books deep, and then you become the master. If there are people that are reading and they’re like, “I love what Mike had to say. How do I get ahold and work with him?” What’s the best way to connect with you? What would work best for you?
If you want a free Six-Step Guide To Finding Your Genius, I’ve got a free six-step guide. You can text Genius U to 474747. You’ll get a link to opt-in and get that PDF. Also, GeniusWithinBook.com or it’s on Amazon. I’m @TheMikeZeller on Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube, and MikeZeller.com as well. It’s a pleasure being on your show, Gary. I love your approach and am excited for this next chapter of your life as well.
I’m so glad you were here. Thank you for taking the time and I look forward to staying in touch. As you come through Albuquerque, look me up and we’ll go get some Mexican food here.
That would be great. I love it.
Thanks.
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In our last segment of Guess the WHY, I want us to think about Patrick Mahomes. He is the quarterback for the Kansas City Chiefs. They won the Super Bowl and had a great year in 2020, and not such a great year in 2021, but I’m sure it’s going to end better for him. What do you think Patrick Mahomes’ WHY is? He’s the guy that can throw the sidearms and can run and passes well. He seems to think faster than everybody else. He always seems one step ahead.
For me, his WHY is the same as our guest’s, Mike Zeller, which is to make sense of the complex and challenging. So much comes his waybut he quickly synthesizes it. He quickly gets on the right path, makes a decision and makes it happen. That’s what people with the WHY of Makes Sense do. Thank you, all. If you’ve not yet discovered your WHY, you can do so at WHYInstitute.com. Use the code PODCAST50 and you can get it for half price. If you love the show, please don’t forget to subscribe, leave us a review and a rating on whatever platform you’re using. Thank you and I will see you next episode.
Mike Zeller is a business architect and entrepreneur mentor who helps professionals find their zone of genius and rewire their subconscious to fuel momentum toward their life’s purpose. He has mentored over two hundred high-level entrepreneurs from all over the world, helping add tens of millions in revenue to his clients.
An entrepreneur himself, Mike has founded or partnered in over 20 ventures across multiple industries, including technology, real estate, digital marketing, and more. Collectively, his businesses have achieved more than $100 million in sales in the last 10 years. He partners his business strategy with a heavy emphasis on social entrepreneurism, including one venture that gave away $300,000+ in cars to single mothers in need.
Mike has trained under masters of the industry such as Tony Robbins, Russell Brunson, and Jay Abraham. A master NLP practitioner, he uses this core methodology to help entrepreneurs and creatives get unstuck from emotional roadblocks to become more fully integrated and build unstoppable momentum. Mike has been featured in Business Insider, Forbes Coaches Council, Thrive Global, Huffington Post, and on Fox Radio.
Shaahin Cheyene always searched for a better way. He is the brilliant mind behind the legendary smart drug known as herbal ecstasy. He’s earned over a billion dollars in revenue because of it. But what if you were to discover that Shaahin’s family had to escape to survive and ended up finally migrating to Los Angeles, California? At 15 years old, Shaahin left home with nothing but the clothes on his back! Join the conversation as host Dr. Gary Sanchez uncovers Shaahin’s powerful “why” of wanting to contribute better processes and systems to the world. It pushed him from a place of desperation to a place of prosperity. Tune in and find a better way!
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Herbal Ecstasy: The Search For A Better Way To Party With Shaahin Cheyene
Welcome to the show, where we go beyond just talking about your why and actually helping you discover and live your why. If you’re a regular reader, you know that every week, we talk about one of the nine whys and then we bring on somebody with that why so we can see how their why has played out in their life. In this episode, we’re going to be talking about the why of better way. If your why is better way, then you are the ultimate innovator. You are constantly seeking better ways to do everything. You find yourself wanting to improve virtually anything by finding a way to make it better.
You also desire to share your improvement with the world. You constantly ask yourself questions like, “What if we tried this differently? What if we did this another way? How can we make this better?” You contribute to the world with better processes and systems while operating under the motto, “I’m often pleased, but never satisfied.” You are excellent at associating, which means that you are adept at taking ideas or systems from one industry or discipline and applying them to another, always with the ultimate goal of improving something.
I’ve got a great guest for you. His name is Shaahin Cheyene. During the Iranian revolution of 1978, Shaahin’s family had to escape to survive and ended up finally migrating to Los Angeles, California. At fifteen years old, Shaahin left home with nothing, but the clothes on his back and created over $1 billion in revenue by inventing the legendary smart drug known as Herbal Ecstacy. These childhood experiences had a major impact on his perspective of freedom, hard work, and entrepreneurship.
Shaahin went on to invent Digital Vaporization, the forerunner to this day’s vapes and a start a number of successful businesses with a couple of notable failures. He is the Founder and CEO of Accelerated Intelligence, Inc., a major Amazon FBA seller with millions in sales and the Lead Coach at Amazon Mastery, where he teaches the entrepreneurs how to crush it on the Amazon platform. He is an active YouTube creator.
Shaahin is considered one of the leading global minds on what’s next in eCommerce, Amazon and the internet. He is described as the Willy Wonka of Generation X by The London Observer and Newsweek and is one of the most forward thinkers in business. With his Amazon Mastery course, he acutely recognizes trends and patterns early on the Amazon platform to help others understand how these shifts impact markets and consumer behavior. Shaahin, welcome to the show.
Gary, it’s my honor to be on. Thank you for having me.
Take us back through your life. Let’s go back and give us your story, how you got started and how you got to where you are because it sounds like it was a struggle at the beginning for sure.
We came to the United States in the late 1970s, early 1980s as immigrants. We immigrated here through Germany to the United States. Iran was on top of the heap, we came here and all of a sudden, we learned that we were third-class citizens in a country that didn’t appreciate Iranians during the whole Iran-Contra thing. We had Ronald Reagan trickle-down economics and Oliver North. Iran-Contra was not a friendly environment.
I grew up with a big chip on my shoulder because I was constantly getting my ass handed to me in school. I would go to school and get beat up every day. We grew up in a neighborhood that was up and coming, the little enclave of Los Angeles called Pacific Palisades. In the early ‘80s, it was much more hippie than it was well-to-do and gentrified. My folks managed to get a house there. It was fairly inexpensive. It was a totally beat-down house. They bought the house and we started fixing it up. As we started fixing up this old house, the neighborhoods started booming.
More and more people started moving to LA. LA was in a building boom. All this wealth started cropping up, literally all around us. We’re in this old house. My dad worked at a pizza shop and then at dry cleaners. We were solidly poor and there was all this wealth around us. I remember grown up there. We didn’t eat out at restaurants. We didn’t buy new clothes and all that stuff. When my brother and I got clothes, we would wait for somebody to walk into my dad’s dry cleaner and pray that person was like cool that they would not pay their bill, so we could get the clothes when they defaulted on their bill or just left the clothes there. We’d always be 2 or 3 seasons behind on whatever the fashion was.
I remember a friend of mine whose dad was a wealthy doctor, invited me over to eat. I was like, “Cool. What’s your mom cooking?” He’s like, “No, she’s not cooking. We’re going to a restaurant.” I was like, “Okay.” We went in there and he gave me a menu. I looked at him and I said, “How the heck does this work?” I can order a pizza and a hamburger and that man’s going to bring it to me. Explain to me how this works again. This is incredible. That’s how it was. I didn’t have any of this wealth, but around me was tons of wealth.
By the time I reached fifteen, I remember thinking to myself, “I want that stuff. I want the Porsche. I want the Ferrari. I want the beautiful blonde sitting in the car next to me in the big house on the hill.” All that great stuff, great vacations and all that stuff. What’s the path? I went and I talked to my parents and I said, “How do I get that?” They thought about it. As any immigrant family will let you know, the pinnacle of success is becoming a doctor.
My parents told me, “You become a doctor. You go to a school.” I was like, “Great. Sign me up for that. I’ll be a doctor.” They’re like, “Okay.” I’m like, “How long does that take 2, 3 years?” They’re like, “No, it takes 8, 10, 12 years. Specialty, 14, 15 years.” “What happens then?” “You got to get a loan. You’ll be in debt for another ten years. You’ll be fat, old and bald like the dude next door. Maybe by the time you’re 50, you’ll have a mortgage, a wife and eight kids.”
You won’t have time because you’ll be selling your hours. You’ll have to wake up at 5:00 AM and come back at 8:00 PM. Maybe by then, you’ll have the house in the car, which by the way, the bank will own, you will not. Very quickly, I discovered that it was not going to be a path that worked for me. Very unceremoniously, I packed up my stuff in a single backpack and I left. I left the keys on the counter. I didn’t come back. I burned my ships. I decided I was going to go out and find my fame and fortune in the world. As a kid, I was fifteen with no friends and no money. This was pre-internet, pre all those times.
Take us into that decision. What was going on for you when you decided at fifteen, I’m going to walk out and do this on my own? What was going on for you?
Growing up again in Los Angeles, at school, I never fit in. I never belonged. There was never a group that I belonged in. As an adolescent, I got involved in multiple criminal activities that adolescents would get involved in. We went to liquor stores and we had this little Greek kid and he was very small. He would walk into the store. He would fit just right under the sensors. He’d wear baggy clothes.
We would create some kind of distraction on it. We’d open up a Coke, spill it and something would happen. The store owner or manager, whoever’s monitoring the store will get busy. He would stuff his pockets with nude magazines, with those little tiny bottles of liquor, cigarettes, glue or whatever we could get. He would rush out under the sensors and we would just pay for the Coke or whatever and get out. We would sell that stuff in school.
Herbal Ecstasy: Any immigrant family will tell you that the pinnacle of success is becoming a doctor.
We always get busted. We were terrible at crime. We had no business being in the crime business. They would put us in detention. Here we are, these little juvenile criminals in detention. Who’s in detention? More juvenile criminals. It was the best business we had ever done. We would get caught again. They didn’t even have second detention to send us to. We’d be going back and forth through that. By the time I was fifteen, I realized, “Crime was not good for me. I am not good at crime. I’m a failure at crime. I will not be doing a crime. I need to go out there and figure out something to do.”
My why was I wanted the wealth. I wanted success. I wanted to climb the ladder. There was not a path for me to do that in those days. I was going to forge a path. I was going to make a path. I was going to go out there with machetes and cut the entire forest down until there was a path for me. That’s what I did. I started sleeping in abandoned buildings, which was much more glorious than it sounds, and on the beach as well. Sometimes abandoned buildings near the beach, because LA was in a building boat.
I quickly learned that if you could watch realtors, when they opened up the buildings, there was a code to these boxes where the keys were held to these mega buildings that they were building. You could put that code in, get the key, sneak in at night, sleep and leave in the morning. By the way, I don’t espouse anybody to do this. It’s highly illegal, but I would do that. I would sleep in this luxurious building, maybe the plumbing didn’t work or the electricity wasn’t on. I wake up in the morning and get out.
Eventually, I got into the electronic music scene. I learned that I could sleep at clubs behind the speakers, which was another great thing for me, in front of the speakers is very loud but behind the speakers is super quiet. I started hanging out there thinking, “I got to learn something about making money.” I had the books. I had the fortitude to read Think and Grow Rich. Og Mandino, Tony Robbins, Wayne Dyer. I read every self-help, personal development, old-timey, new timey, all of those books.
I knew that there was a possibility for me to break the mold, to break out of what one of my mentors called TikTok. To get out of that world and get into a new reality for myself. I didn’t quite know what the path was in those days. Hanging out in the clubs, I realized that there was money being made. I thought to myself, “It’s got to be the promoters.” I tried throwing a couple of parties. I started looking at the promoters. I was like, “These guys are broke as hell. Everywhere where they’re going, they don’t have money.”
They’re bailing before the party’s over, so they don’t have to pay people. They’re not driving fancy cars. These are not wealthy individuals. I thought, “It’s got to be the musicians because musicians make money.” Nobody in those days appreciated DJs. People who played other people’s music. Which led me to how did these things happen? Week after week, night after night. I looked around and I was like, “It’s got to be the property owners’ real estate.”
Nope. These were all break-ins. All these warehouses were borrowed from some big corporation that owns 50 warehouses and whatever. We’d figure out a way to get in then some guy would climb the power pole and steal power. Another guy would turn on the water main and there’d be plumbing. The party would go on until the morning in these warehouses. I thought to myself, “There are these guys that hang out at the door all the time.” They’re well-dressed and have several beautiful women with them. They sometimes have bodyguards. They had nice cars, nice apartments. What are they doing? What do you think they did?
They were the doorman. They were the gatekeeper.
They were the drug dealers. They were the ones that were dealing the illicit substances and subsidizing the failure of everybody else to keep these parties going because it was highly profitable for them. Drugs are a very lucrative business. I thought to myself, “Let me do that.” I realized I was bad at crime. I looked back to my adolescents, my younger self talking to my older self, “You sir, should not be doing crime. You get caught every time.”
I pictured myself in multiple prisons around the world and thought, “No, I can’t do that.” It hit me. What if I could create a legal drug? What if I could create a version of the most popular drug at the time that there was no supply of because it had just been made illegal called ecstasy. I didn’t get the memo that it was impossible. I went out there and I did it. I managed to get myself a girlfriend with no money and nowhere to live.
I figured out how to get a girlfriend. I managed to convince her to let me cook up prototypes in her kitchen while her dad was out at work. I think he was like the principal or the superintendent of some school district or somewhere. The guy would leave. I would sneak in through the back, a window or door or something. I’d come in and cooking it up in the kitchen. Finally, we got a formula that worked. I didn’t have enough money to buy a capsule machine. She and I would be rolling them up into little balls, and all kinds of people would be coming over. We’d be giving them, “Try this, try this, try this.”
Finally, we got a formula that worked. I called everybody I knew and I said, “This is amazing.” I called authors, writers and all types of people. I found them in the yellow pages, in the phone books in those days. I would call people up and ask them for advice, ask them to come try it. When we had a formula that worked, I knew this was my second reason why I was going to be successful. I had to burn my ships again. I did it once when I left home and I had to find a way to sell the stuff, distribution.
It led me back to the clubs. I had a backpack full of these little baggies filled with these little balls that we hand-rolled to look like pills. I had a little insert card in them with a butterfly in those days. I didn’t know what I was going to call it. I walked up to the biggest drug dealer in the club. These days, if you have tattoos on your face, they call you Post Malone and you are a platinum record star, girls love you, you are harmless. You’re probably a TikTok star or YouTube star. You remember in the ‘80s and ‘90s, should you have tattoos on your neck leading to your face, you are most certainly a criminal, a freak or both.
Nobody had tattoos on their faces. Tattoos were not visible in the ‘80s unless you were a sailor or a part of a gang or something. This guy had tattoos on his face and on his neck. He had those three little tear things, which I think meant he killed somebody in prison or killed three people or some crazy thing like that. He had the gold teeth. He had the bodyguards. He had the girls around him. It was straight out of the movies. Here I am, this teenage kid with this baggie full of herbal goop, walking up to this man who sells bonafide drugs from a criminal enterprise.
I walked up to him and he’s like, “What do you need kid? I got nothing. We’re all out. We’d been out for days.” I said, “No. I’m not a consumer. I want you to sell my stuff.” He said, “What the heck is wrong with you? Are you a cop?” He’s like looking at me. The guards are patting me down looking for a wire. I said, “No. I’m definitely not a cop, but I want you to sell this stuff.” He’s like, “What is it?” I’m like, “It’s just like ecstasy. It’s fantastic, but it’s legal. It’s herbal. It’s natural. You’re not going to go to jail, sir.”
In that moment, he looked like he was about to kill me. There was no happiness in this man’s face. Although, I don’t think I ever saw happiness in his face. By the way, I write about this in my book, Billion How I Became King Of The Thrill Pill Cult, which was just released. In that moment, I remember thinking to myself, “You are not leaving that spot until this man buys whatever it is that you’re selling. You are either going to die tonight or get him to sell what you’re selling. You are going to make a sale.” I didn’t move. I’m sure he said other things to me.
At that moment, two people walked up to him, two party goers. I remember them asking him and there was a negotiation that went on. He motioned to me, the bodyguards moved aside. I thought, “What’s he pointing at?” He’s pointing at the bag of pills. I handed him the bag of pills. He grabbed the bag. He grabbed my backpack, which was filled with pills and said, “Come back in two hours.” He handed it to them and had an exchange. He said, “By the way, kid, you better not be messing with me. Don’t leave the club.”
I’m having a little bit of a freakout and pretty certain that my young life was going to end there and then in that club. I came back a couple of hours later and I didn’t know what to make of it. The bodyguard motioned me to come forward. The girls moved aside. I moved forward. I’m standing there, sweat and bullets looking at this guy directly in the eyes. I can’t tell what’s going on. I do notice in the background, people are partying, happy and having a good time. I see the empty baggies everywhere. This guy probably emptied out 30 of them himself.
I’m looking at the guy going okay and he looks at me straight in the eyes, the silence for about 30 seconds. He says, “Kid, how soon can you get me more?” All the tension was released at that moment. That was it. It went from 1 drug dealer to 10 to 1,000, to 10,000. We were all over the world. I had all the buildings in Venice beach. We were renting them all. We had telephone operations, telesales operations.
I was making this stuff for $0.25 a unit. We were selling it for $20 retail. Mostly cash business, mostly direct to consumer in those days, completely legal. We got calls from Urban Outfitters, Tower Records, GNC. We were selling in any store you could possibly imagine. Larry Flynt from the Hustler Enterprise, the famed pornographer bought our product to sell to all the sex shops around the world. We were being sold in 32 countries. We were in over 30,000 doors.
What was it called? I’m trying to think about it back then.
The drug dealer looked at me at that moment too. As he was handing it to his first customer said, “What do you call this stuff?” I had a moment where I was like, “Holy crap.” I looked at him and I said, “Herbal Ecstacy,” and the name stuck. It was called Herbal Ecstacy. I remember one day, I was in my teens. We’d been in business for some time and the news broke that we had broken the billion-dollar mark. This was pre-internet, pre-Facebook, pre-mobile phones, pre-access to free data, pre-access to any of that stuff. We had broken $1 billion.
Sam Donaldson was in a limo outside of my office waiting to get me on Nightline. He drove over, the great Sam Donaldson. Montel Williams had sent me tickets to be on his show in New York. CNN wanted to have me on, Wall Street Journal has a reporter outside. We were the hottest thing. Everybody wanted to know how this long-haired teenage kid had broken $1 billion in revenue. We were on the cover of Detail’s magazine. We had two Newsweek covers, LA times, New York Times. You name it, we were there.
The London Observer did a feature piece on the cover. They called me the Willy Wonka of Generation X. I stepped into my office. I would normally sleep 2, 3 hours on those days. I would usually fall asleep on the factory floor, on the floor one my offices, or the call center, anywhere just because I was intent on making this company successful. I remember having a panic attack when the news broke because I did not know what $1 billion meant. Not theoretically or hypothetically, I literally didn’t know how much money $ 1 billion was. I barely knew what $1 million was. That was my panic in those days.
I figured out what it was. I started doing all the publicity. We did all the shows. I write about it in my book, Billion How I Became King Of The Thrill Pill Cult. It was absolutely a wild ride. I wrote about how the mob tried to take over the company at some point. The Japanese mafia, the Yakuza tried to get involved. We had government intervention in the company and it was a wild rollercoaster ride leading to an interesting several years, to say the least.
Why couldn’t somebody just copy it?
A few people tried. We had the formula patented in those days. We had trademarks, but we were first to market. You could copy my product, but you couldn’t copy me. I was the long-haired, rebellious kid doing the TV, doing the media. It’s like Coca-Cola. Can you make brown sugar water and sell it to the masses? Probably. Can you compete with them? Not really. They’ve got first to market and distribution. We had that cinched up.
What’s the best part of building a $1 billion company and the worst part of building a $1 billion company?
The best part is the $1 billion, which has fantastic. Money is great. I tell people often that the greatest injustice you can do to yourself in America is to be poor. The poor pay more for everything. The poor are penalized for being poor. The rich very rarely pay for anything that the poor pay for and are incentivized to be rich. If you believe have a choice, please try to be rich. I’ve been broke and I’ve been extremely wealthy. It is far more fun to be extremely wealthy.
Herbal Ecstasy: Disrupt You!: Master Personal Transformation, Seize Opportunity, and Thrive in the Era of Endless Innovation
A good friend of mine talks about the root of all evil, where they say money is the root of all evil. He used to like to say that, “The guy that said money is the root of all evil didn’t have any.” The guy that said, “Money can’t buy you happiness didn’t know where to shop.” It’s true. It’s a blast and super fun. You’re hearing it from somebody who’s done it and who does it.
The worst part of it was trying to figure out who likes you for you, who genuinely wants to be your friend and who wants to be around the fame and fortune. I can only imagine what somebody like Jeff Bezos, the Founder of Amazon or Elon Musk has to go through because it must be very difficult to forge long-term meaningful relationships with people. You must have a solid vetting process because, in those days where you are super happy, super successful, there’s a big buzz around you, everybody wants to be around you.
When trouble pops up, there are only a few that will stick by you. Those are your real friends. That’s the most difficult part is realizing that there are people in the world that are not interested in you, but only in self-enrichment. Having your BS detectors refined to a point where when you reach those levels of success, being able to fair it out, the people that are the fakers is absolutely essential. I, unfortunately, didn’t have that in my teens. As I got older, I’ve developed it and my BS detector has gotten a lot stronger in the years to come after Herbal Ecstacy.
What happened to Herbal Ecstacy? You’re on top of the world and then what?
The government doesn’t seem to like very much when a young Iranian kid, in his teens develops a drug that is unregulated. They don’t like the idea of not being in control. What they did, along with some big pharma companies is they lobbied against us. Laws were passed. Our ingredients were banned. It slowly fizzled out. We had a bunch of different products in those days.
From there, I went on to solve a different problem. I went on to solve the problem with smoking. I figured, “People have been smoking for hundreds of years. Smoking creates smoke char and carbon monoxide. There’s got to be a better way.” It turns out that you can heat any plant substance, tobacco, cannabis, whatever and get the active elements, what you need, the cannabinoids, the THC, the nicotine without burning it, without heating it to 1200 degrees but you had to have the system for regulating the temperature, I patented that.
We developed the first world’s first vape. Digital vaporization was invented by me in those days. I patented it. I wrote the first book on it. That is the forerunner for all the technology that you see in vapes. We invented that industry. It didn’t exist before us. I created those patents. I wrote a book. That company went public. I decided, “I want to get back into the pill business.” At this point, we were having our first kid. I thought I got to figure out a way to make my brain sharper.
I want to be limitless. I want to function optimally, even as I’m aging, because aging is BS. I want to beat it. Maybe I won’t beat it. One day, I’m going to die. It’s all our destiny. Until then, I want to die with my boots on and sword drawn and be a badass. I came up with this pill called Excelerol. We’ve got two versions. One called Excelerol, one called FOCUS+, which was a nootropic, a brain supplement. It’s still available on Amazon. It works great but, in those days, it’s very expensive to produce. We use real ingredients. It was like $120 a box of this stuff.
I was looking for distribution thinking, “How am I going to sell this?” We sold some to GNC. We sold some to the different avenues. This was in the early days where this guy named Jeff Bezos was getting somewhere with his company. You could email Jeff, Jeff@Amazon.com and he would respond. We heard through the grapevine that Jeff Bezos was opening up his platform, the bookstore, Amazon.com to third-party sellers. People like you and me to sell whatever we wanted to on those platforms.
I thought, “That’s cool. That’s timely. Let me try putting this stuff up.” It took me fifteen minutes. The whole process of opening a seller account, listing the product, the whole thing. I put the product up, Excelerol and I went to sleep. I didn’t think much. I thought maybe I’ll get a couple of orders in the next few weeks. I’ll work on this. I woke up the next day we had thousands of orders. “This is interesting. Who is this Bezos guy?” I read up on Jeff Bezos. I learned that he’s not this nerdy Silicon Valley guy that we see that we think he is.
This guy is a beast. This guy’s a leader in the industry. This guy comes from Wall Street. This guy comes from one of the biggest Wall Street firms with expertise in acquiring top talent and bringing cheap money from Wall Street, billions from Wall Street into Silicon Valley. He’s building this platform. This is no joke. This was never a bookstore. This is a key to world domination in global commerce. When I realized that, I decided I was going to devote the next several years of my life to mastering the Amazon platform. That’s what I did. I learned everything there was.
I spend most of my days impacting other people to sell on the Amazon platform. I teach a course where I train people, how to do everything from how do you find the perfect product? How do you sell it on Amazon? Why do you sell it on Amazon? How do you create a business that creates these predictable recurring revenue streams? Which is what I do and I love it.
As I listened to your story, you’re always in search of a better way. You find a better way and then you share it. You did that with the Herbal Ecstacy. You’ve done that every step along the way. Take us into your mind or do you just see a problem? Do you have a problem and you want to solve it, and then that’s what leads you to it? What got you in those different directions?
For me, sometimes that’s the case. My superpower is that I am a predictor of trends and a very accurate one particularly when it comes to consumer products. I know what’s going to be hot five years from now. I know what’s going to be hot ten years from now.
How do you do that?
I don’t know how I do it. I think it’s my obsessive nature. I am an obsessive human being. When I get interested in something, I dive deep. Back in the days, where people read books, I would be at the bookstore. I would be spending thousands of dollars on books. I would not come home any night without having a stack of books on topics that I was interested in. I still do it to this day. I order on Amazon. I will watch videos. I will read books. I will get audible. I will watch the TED Talks. I will dig deep. I will go into my new detail about a topic that I’m interested in.
I will look to where the opportunity is. My friend, Jay Samit, who wrote the book, Disrupt You! and his new book, Future-Proofing You. He is a former executive at Sony. He talks about solving the bigger problem. For me, it came naturally the solving the bigger problem because I start with curiosity. I’m not looking for a why. I’m not looking for a reason to do what I’m doing. I’m following what my fascination is. I follow that fascination and see where it takes me. This brings me to what we teach at Amazon Mastery. My FBA seller course, which is FBASellerCourse.com for anyone who’s interested.
I’ve got a free one-hour course that I’m happy to share with any of your audience. What we teach is to find the distribution first, find what the market is hungry for. Find the competitors, find their vulnerabilities, then it’s easy for you to put a product out on the market. It’s low hanging fruit. That’s how you win. If you come out with a product and then you’re like, “How am I going to sell this thing?” That’s the long road.
You’ve got to educate people. Education is the kiss of death when it comes to product launches because you’ve got this thing. You’ve got a mousetrap. It’s better than every other mousetrap out there. I don’t know that as your consumer. You have to spend all your money educating me. What happens while you’re spending money educating me?
Somebody else comes along.
The competitors are selling and selling. People’s attention span is short in the days of TikTok, Instagram and the internet. What most entrepreneurs don’t understand, probably the single most important thing, comes from us being taught. This whole generation is being taught that you matter, that everybody cares about what you’re interested in. Nobody cares about you. People care about one thing. I, they care about themselves. That’s it?
Nobody cares about you, your story, your brands. All that stuff is BS. All they care about is what you’re going to do for them. When you go on Amazon and you buy a product, that person, if it’s one of my students will be an expert at crafting that story in a way whereby the time you get to that listing, you’re already clicking buy it now. The way that product is presented has pre-suaded you to believe that it’s your decision to buy it.
We are decision architects. That’s what we do. The old models of selling are dead. The old models of disruption selling and knocking on people’s doors and shoving stuff down their throats are dead. We’re in the Amazon era where we believe as Robert Cialdini in his book, Pre-Suasion talks about pre-suading people and becoming decision architects.
Give us an example of a product that you did this with so that we can see it in action. Somebody took a product and took it to Amazon after they found their market and it took off.
Excelerol would be a good example of that. FOCUS+ is one of the supplements that we talked about. Another example might be matcha tea. We’re one of the largest producers of matcha tea in the country. We make a specific matcha tea called Matcha DNA. Matcha is a green tea. It’s high in antioxidants. It’s got all these benefits. You can just Google it and learn about all these doctors and celebrities. The Kardashians are drinking it. Gwyneth Paltrow is drinking it. We started off by I’m a big matcha drinker. I thought, “I’d like to buy some matcha. Can I get some on Amazon?”
I looked on Amazon and there wasn’t any. There was a couple of brands that were expensive and they were just the big bulk market ones from Japan. I thought, “Fukushima just happened. I don’t want to buy anything from Japan. There’s radiation out there, allegedly.” I’m going to go with Chinese tea. The Chinese are good at teas. That’s the one thing I am going to buy from China.
I went out there and I found a supplier that produces it for us. We started selling matcha tea on Amazon. Went gangbusters. We sold tons of it. I did my research. We researched that there’s a huge market of people looking to buy matcha tea. There was no supply on Amazon. Now there are a million sellers selling it. We’re still the leader, but there are $ 1 million sellers selling macho.
I thought, “That’s a market that we can feed.” We went out there and we started introducing matcha. This is another thing that I teach my students is that you want to capture all areas of the market. We’ve got multiple brands that we sell in multiple categories. We sell the most expensive one. We sell the cheapest one. We sell the mid-level one. We knock ourselves off.
We sell knockoffs of our own product. We do all kinds of things to make sure that we dominate in that field. That’s what you have to do. If you want to win, you have to find a niche. You have to exploit the weaknesses of your competitors. You have to come in and dominate that niche and maintain, and hold on to that dominance.
When you talk about dominating the niche, how do you do that? What I think I’m hearing you say is, you found something that you were passionate about, went on Amazon and researched it and found that nobody’s dominating this market. “We’re going to go dominate it.” You created a better product, took that product to the market. You found ways to keep competing with yourself to be both sides of the coin almost, to push your brand up. Is that what you did?
That amongst other things. I remember I had at this point been selling on Amazon for a little while and there are certain hacks, and tips and tricks that we teach on how you get your product to rank, how you get your product reviewed within their terms of service. How you can successfully get that product visible and selling on the Amazon platform, that’s what we did.
It’s very interesting because Amazon is a very effective place to sell products. The one thing that I would say to you that maybe I would push back a little bit on in your description is the passionate part. I was interested in the tea. I was a fan of the tea. Maybe you could argue that I was passionate about it or maybe not. I’m thinking, “I’m passionate about hanging out with my family and my kids.” I’m passionate about all kinds of stuff that doesn’t make me money. It’s one of the most common myths that people tell you.
Scott Adams talks about it in his book, How To Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big. Scott Adams is the writer of Dilbert, which is probably one of the most famous comic books in the world. Passion is something that they pitch people because they don’t want to tell them that they’re a little bit smarter than that. When they ask these big entrepreneurs, they say, “What’s your secret?” I go, “It was just passion.”
They don’t want to tell you that, “You know what? I’m an aggressive cutthroat. I cut three guys below me and I’m just a little bit smarter than you. I got access to a trust fund. You’re never going to make the billions that I make.” No one’s going to tell you that. It doesn’t look good for Mark Zuckerberg to tell you those things or Bill Gates to tell you those things. Instead, what they’re going to tell you is, “You just got to have a lot of passion and drive in life.” I know people all the time that have become billionaires, multi-millionaires from products that they do not give a care about.
Herbal Ecstasy: Inspire somebody to stop selling their hours and let their money work for them intelligently.
The passion part of the component, it’s nice to have. I’m passionate about a nice steak meal, a nice rare fillet mignon grass-fed steak. It’s not going to make any money. I’m passionate about tea. I’m passionate about doing this stuff. I’m passionate about talking with you on this show. This is fun. This is a great show. I’m excited to be here. You have to separate that from the activities that make you money. Making money as a system, it’s a formula. It has very little to do with what you are passionate about. If you’re interested in something, your interest, your fascination in something opens up a pathway, a journey to things that could make you money, but it’s not a precursor for success or wealth.
You’ve separated passion out from your business because you can be passionate about so many different things, but interest is definitely necessary or is it interest necessary?
Not really. I know lots of people who make money doing things that they have very little interest in. I know a guy who runs a very high-end fashion brand of women’s clothing. He doesn’t wear that. Every time I see him, I’m like, “Where’d you get your clothes?” He’s like, “H&M, Ross.” I’m like, “You run this like multi-million-dollar clothing company.” He’s like, “I don’t like that. I like to wear sweats.” He’s like, “I get good sweats at Ross and they’re 50% off.”
What do you see then as the key ingredient to making money?
I don’t think there’s any key ingredient. I don’t think there’s anyone thing. You got to have grit. You got to have resilience. The one thing I would say that’s key is you got to be able to go out there and take some punches. You got to be able to be knocked down. The people I see coming through my Amazon FBA Seller course, the people that come through my Amazon Mastery course, the ones that come in with the attitude of, “I’m going to throw my chips on the table. I’m going to see where that little roulette ball lands and maybe it’ll land on one of my numbers.” Those are the ones that fail.
The ones that come in and are like, “You see that nail, I’m going to drive that thing through that piece of wood.” Maybe I’ll use a hammer, if that doesn’t work, I’ll use a sledgehammer. If that doesn’t work, I’m going to shoot that nail. I’m going to hit it with a rock. I’m going to drill through it and then put it in. It doesn’t matter. That nail is going in. If you go to business with that attitude, you are going to succeed. You are not there to try. There is no participation trophy in business. There are people out there who will eat your lunch.
One of my favorite quotes is that “While you are sleeping, your enemies are planning your demise.” I write that quote in my book, which is one of my absolute favorite ones. It keeps you on your toes. You got to always be on your toes. The world is predatory. There’s no sleeping in the Savannah. You’ve got to be always on your toes, but more so than that, there’s no hack to hard work. There’s no hack to getting out there and doing the work.
There are all kinds of people on social media, preaching things. They want to sell you a course. They don’t want you to get rich. Even a lot of the people out there who sell their Amazon courses, mine, by the way, which is free and I will give it to you if you reach out to me. They don’t tell you what they’re doing to make money. They tell you what they want to tell you for you to think you’re going to make money, but them make money off you by selling you whatever it is they’re selling.
It’s like the stock market guys. I was a highly leveraged commodities trader. I did extremely well. I traded hundreds of millions of dollars in commodities, gold, oil, pork bellies, all that stuff, coffee futures for years. I tried all the different courses. I realized at a certain point that the guy selling the courses are making more money, selling the courses than they are in the markets. I was making more money than them in the markets. It’s like that. There is no hack to hard work. You got to get out there. You got to put in the sleepless nights. I paid my dues. I’ve slept on the factory floor.
I’ve gone from millions to a billion to broke to millions again. I’m continually on that path of learning of self-discovery of figuring out what I need to do to take myself to the next level. I have no illusions to think that I don’t have to wake up tomorrow and work hard at something. The fact is I’ve put myself in a place where I can relax and do the stuff that I love to do. It’s only because I spent all those years doing all that stuff that I didn’t want to do.
I love what you’re saying because you’re not sugarcoating it. Here’s what I have been thinking about as I’ve been listening to you. You said this at least twice. You said, “I burned the ships.” How critical was that to you having the motivation, the grit and the desire to get up every day and go do it when things didn’t look good?
As my friend says, “You got to go all in.” I don’t believe in half-assing things. I love watching these historical shows where you see these historical battles. You see these guys. These were guys who most people don’t know. The Vikings controlled England for nearly a thousand years, maybe longer. They ruled England. England was ruled by Vikings for 1,000 or more years. You look at that and you’re like, “What did they do?” This is before even naval navigation. These guys went on these wooden boats that they carved out from trees, left everything behind. They went out. Their swords were drawn for glory. That was it.
They burned all their ships. They were there to win. They would colonize places where they landed. That’s what you got to do. I think people have to be intelligent about the decisions that they make. If you’ve got a family, if you’ve got to feed the kids or whatever, you can’t leave everything and go off on some crazy venture. You need to have stability but it’s that stability that’s going to allow you to have the bandwidth to succeed.
We talk about foundational thinking in my course. I tell people, you got to have four pillars, a four-legged table much more secure. Three-legged table, not so good. Two-legged table, not good at all. One-legged table, you’re a tripod. The first leg should be a career, a job, a trust fund, whatever it is money where you don’t have to worry about eating. You don’t have to worry about your family being taken care of. You don’t have to worry about if you want to take the wife out for a nice dinner, that it’s going to give you problems or the girlfriend or the husband or whatever.
The second pillar, you should have some money and cashflow-positive real estate. I tell people this all the time, “You got to buy at the right time when the market conditions are right. You got to find great deals, but you can do this with little or no money. I’ve bought houses on credit cards. I bought houses on eBay. There are all kinds of things you can do, but leaning towards cashflow positive real estate.” If you can’t get into it for whatever your restrictions are, you can at least start learning about it.
The third one is compounded interest. Why is Warren Buffett one of the wealthiest men in the world? Berkshire Hathaway is one of the most successful funds out there. It’s because of compounded interest. He’s been investing since he was a kid. If you leave money in and you compound interest over time, that’s going to add up to something. The fourth pillar, the fourth foundation, is an e-commerce business. I recommend Amazon. Amazon’s what I do. It’s one of the best, but it’s not the only one. We teach people how to sell on Etsy, Walmart, eBay, Poshmark, all these different marketplaces that are popping up. If you have these four pillars, these four foundations, nothing could ever shake your world.
You wake up in the morning, “The real estate market tanked. No problem, you’re cashflow anyway. It’s okay. It’ll get back up. We wait for a cycle.” “The boss fired me. No problem. You got your compounding interest money. You got your real estate.” “All those stuff failed. You got your e-commerce business,” and vice versa.
If you have those foundations, you might be unsettled for a little bit in life, but you’ll never be knocked out. If you look at these guys, Elon Musk, Warren Buffett, Jeff Bezos, look at what they do best, it’s diversification. It’s building those foundations. Those guys have hundreds of pillars. Do you think if Amazon went down tomorrow that Jeff Bezos would be crying? He’s got so much money. He’s got so many things he’s going. These guys are good. There is no one thing that’s going to shake their world. That’s what you have to do. You’ve got to build your life in a way where you can never have a day that’s that bad.
What is the chain that keeps you going? You’ve already done this multiple times. You’ve got the money. You’ve got the stuff. You’ve got the family. What’s keeping you motivated? I can feel your energy. I can feel you’re fired up. Ready to go fight, create something and go do something. What is it that’s keeping you going?
That’s a good question. I spend most of my time traveling with my family. We go to all great places. I’m a family man. We collect cars. I collect exotic cars, Porsches. Me and my son, my seven-year-old like to go out into the garage and fix these cars. We don’t know what we’re doing, but it’s fun to look under the hood and take a look at that. Spending time with my family is what fires me up. It’s what excites me. Outside of that, at work, I get excited about two things. One is when somebody buys a product that I’ve built, designed or developed.
The second is when somebody calls me up and says, “Shaahin, I made an extra 60,000 this month on Amazon. Thanks to you. I can quit my job. I can walk in tomorrow and tell my boss to beat it.” That excites me, when I can inspire somebody to stop selling their hours and let their money work for them intelligently. I’ve got students that have 3, 4 Vas, virtual assistants in Nicaragua, Venezuela, in South and Central America, in South Asia, Southeast Asia, working for them, running their business and they’re on the beach. They’re traveling. Those VAs are running that business. While they’re sleeping, they’re making money.
If I can empower people to have that freedom, I always say, “Freedom is the ultimate luxury. The new luxury is time.” If you have all that money and you can’t take a break, have a nice lunch with your significant other, take your kid to the park, do whatever you want, when you want with who you want, you’re not really wealthy. That’s why the cost of a private jet somewhere is exponentially more than a first-class ticket on any airline because it offers you the ultimate freedom.
In my world, what I would say is your energy comes from when you find something better and then you share it. People love it because they appreciate that you shared that better way with them and it’s brought them results. It worked. It was better. I feel the same way when I can share something that’s better and people love it. Even a better restaurant, even a better anything. “Have you been to this place?” They love it. It brings me a lot of joy. I can see you doing that same thing on a bigger scale. The last question for you. What’s the best piece of advice that you’ve ever given or the best piece of advice that you’ve ever gotten?
As far as advice goes, the best advice I’ve ever gotten is topical and it’s time-sensitive. The advice that I got as a young person might not apply now. With that said, in very general terms, I could say, don’t work in a vacuum. Build a mastermind or join a mastermind. Like with my Amazon Mastery course, we have a mastermind where people sign up with us. They’re immediately with a hundred other people that are selling on Amazon. Find a mentor. Getting somebody who is where you want to be and incentivizing them to conspire for your success could be the ultimate hack to getting there a lot faster.
If people are reading and they want to get in touch with you, how is the best way for them to do that?
You can email me directly. We have the one-hour Amazon Mastery course. I’ll offer that to all your audience for free. It’s normally $200. We’ll give it to them for free. Just use the code WHY and email me at DarkZess@Gmail.com. That’s my direct Gmail address. I get emails to zero every day. I will answer all emails directly. You can also check us out at www.FBASellerCourse.com or ShaahinCheyene.com. My book Billion How I Became King Of The Thrill Pill Cult just dropped. You can get that on Amazon and check that out. We also do a show. We’ve got a podcast called Hack and Grow Rich.
If you want to check out Hack and Grow Rich, make sure to like, and subscribe to us, dislike us, whatever you want to do. Give us some love, give us some attention. You can get us on Stitcher, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, wherever podcasts are heard. Gary, if someone’s reading this on our channel, how can they get ahold of you and subscribe to the content you’re producing?
Herbal Ecstasy: Love the path you’ve been on, including the ups and downs.
Have them come to WHYInstitute.com. The best thing for them to do would be to go Discover Their Why. They can use the code Podcast50 and Discover Their Why for half price. It’s only $47. You’ll see all that you need there. You can connect with me there as well.
Thanks for having me on.
Thanks for being here. I love the path that you’ve been on, the ups, the downs, the stories, the realness to it. You’re not trying to sell something that requires no work because that doesn’t exist. If you were to have told me, “I’ll do everything for you. It’s not going to be any work for you. Give me your $1,000, and you’ll be rich.” Not a real story. You’re like, “You’re going to have to go work your butt off. You’re going to have to put the hours in. There’s no substitute for burning the ships and jumping in with both feet, going all in and getting it done.”Thank you so much for being here. I appreciate it. I’ll look forward to reading your book.
It has been fun. Thank you so much.
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It’s time for our Guess Their Why segment. I want to think about Walt Disney. What do you think Walt Disney’s why is? He imagined a place where people were happy. He imagined Disneyland, Disney World and he built it when people told him he shouldn’t. He wanted to contribute to the youth. He wanted to contribute to people’s imagination. He wanted them to have a great experience and to have a great time. I believe that Walt Disney’s why is to contribute. To contribute to a greater cause, add value and have an impact on people’s lives.
When I think about him, he was able to surround himself with other people that he brought with him. His brother, Roy, who was the how guy, but lifted them up. He lifted up the people around them to be creative, to be fun and to be funny. That’s what somebody with the why of contribute would be. What do you think Walt Disney’s why is?
If you love this episode, if you love this show, make sure to go to the platform that you’re reading on and rate us, give us a review because it’ll help us to bring the why to the rest of the world, so that we can impact and help one billion people discover, make decisions and live based on their why. Thank you for reading, and we will see you next week.
Born in Iran Tehran in 1975, Shaahin Cheyene is an award-winning writer, filmmaker and a prosperous businessman who is committed to share his enthusiasm to accelerate intelligence through his most recent company and products. Cheyene is the CEO and Chairman of brain nutrition start-up Accelerated Intelligence.
As a teenager in the 1990’s, Cheyene jump initiated his career by inciting and leading the “Smart Drug Movement” with his invention of Herbal Ecstacy, a refreshing, herbal supplement made to energize the body. He realized early in his career about guerilla branding and he still makes use of it to sell his products today. Shaahin Cheyene has developed over 200 award-winning products, selling millions of units globally. After pioneering the breakthrough components for Herbal Ecstacy, he extended his company’s offerings with Ecstacy Cigarettes, an herbal substitute for tobacco that many have put to use to quit smoking. It went on to become the most effective herbal cigarette on the earth.
In the early 2000’s, Cheyene’s career naturally progressed and matured. He started to work with several major pharmaceutical organizations to broadcast the technologies and great things about herbal medicines to the mainstream. In this process, Cheyene was accountable for the proliferation of several plant medicines now applied to popular naturopathic health regimens.
In 2000, Cheyene invented, branded and developed a revolutionary new medicine delivery system called the Vapir Vaporizer. His creation quickly spearheaded the burgeoning vaporization industry. He also published the definitive book on the science of Vaporization, Vapor: The Art and Science of Inhaling Pure Plant Essences. Shaahin Cheyene credits the production of his top-selling health supplement Excelerol to his career-long love of naturopathic herbal solutions. He remains true to his objectives to nurture and assist in improving the health of everyone with herbal alternatives to harsh chemicals.
Dan Dominguez believes in the power of your why to make a difference in your organization. He exists to positively impact the lives of others. In this episode, he joins Dr. Gary Sanchez to share insights on contributing to other people’s success, making a positive impact in the world, thinking differently, and delivering solutions. Learn how you could change perspective, turn the complex and challenging into an opportunity to move forward and prosper in your organization.
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Contributing To The Success Of Others And Making A Positive Impact In The World With Dan Dominguez
If you’re a regular follower, you know that every episode, we talk about 1 of the 9 whys, and then we bring on somebody with that why, so you can see how their why has played out in their life. In this episode, we’re going to be talking about the why of contribute. If this is your why, then you want to be part of a greater cause, something that is bigger than yourself. You don’t necessarily want to be the face of the cause, but you want to contribute to it in a meaningful way. You love to support others and you relish the success that contributes to the greater good of the team.
You see group victories as personal victories. You are often behind the scenes looking for ways to make the world better. You make a reliable and committed teammate, and you are often acting as the glue that holds everyone else together. You use your time, money, energy, resources and connections to add value to other people and organizations.
I’ve got a great guest for you. His name is Dan Dominguez. He exists to positively impact the lives of others. He does that by challenging the status quo and looking at things from a different perspective. What he brings is the ability to make sense of the complex and challenging to help others move forward faster.
Dan’s diverse background as an academic scholar, college mascot, Army Ranger, sales leader, marathon runner, track and field, cross-country coach, and Rotarian allows him to connect easily with almost anyone. He does that as the Chief Growth Officer here at the WHY Institute. Dan and his wife, Monica, are proud parents of their two daughters, Jazz and Sophia, along with 24 sheep, 4 dogs, and 3 chickens.
Welcome to the podcast, Dan.
It’s great to be here, Gary.
This is going to be fun. I’ve been looking forward to this. Let’s start with telling everybody how you got to where you are now and how you got to the WHY Institute. Start back with your childhood because you’ve got a fascinating path that you took along the way.
It’s great to tell this story, Gary, especially from the perspective of my why, how and what. I grew up in Albuquerque, New Mexico in the South Valley. I went to Rio Grande High School. If you’re familiar with Albuquerque, the South Valley is more of the poor side of town. Even then, I remember always wanting to help people but always wanted to do things my own way. I was in the student council, but I was friends with all the game kids and I also played football. I wasn’t the kid that you could put into a group even in high school. I knew the football players and I knew the student council kids, but I also was an honor student. I graduated number nine in my class.
I was that kid that you couldn’t put in a box but I love to help. Where it comes from for me is I always had great teachers and mentors that took time to mentor me and help me. I grew up always wanting to give back. It led to me wanting to be in the Army. I remember when people said, “Why do you want to be in the Army? You have a full academic scholarship to the University of Mexico.” I said, “I feel like I want to give back because this country has been such a blessing for my family as immigrants. We’ve done so well to be able to do everything we’ve been able to do. I feel like I’ve got to give back.”
Here I was in the Army ROTC Program at the University of New Mexico, and then I had an extra semester that I had one class I had to take. I remember saying, “I’ve got to be here.” I tried out for the cheer team and I became the mascot. I am probably the only person in history to be the Commander of the ROTC unit at the university while at the same time being the college mascot.
There are many stories that make more sense now in my life since I know my why of contribute, my how of challenge, and my what of makes sense. Make sense gets me in trouble with my wife all the time because I want to solve problems. She’ll come to me with something and I say, “Here’s what you’ve got to do.” She says, “I don’t want a solution. I wanted you to listen.”
It’s been a long journey. I went from graduating high school to going to the University of New Mexico and going into the Army. Even there, Gary, I was a Quartermaster Officer. The Quartermaster Officer in the Army is a logistician. There’s no reason for a logistician to go to Ranger School, except that it was offered and I did it. “Why do you want to go to Ranger School? You’re not in the Infantry and Combat Army.”
I was one of those rare people that was a Quartermaster and also an Airborne Ranger, which I had no use for those battle skills as a logistician, but it was nice for me to have that background because it gave me a great perspective of what the warriors on the ground were feeling when we weren’t getting supplies to them in time. I’ve always been an out-of-the-box thinker and wanting to contribute to people. It’s funny because when I have that introduction, people are like, “You did this but you did that also.” That happens all the time.
You left out a little piece in there, at least I think you did. Weren’t you more than just one mascot?
I did both, Gary. At the time, myself and a good friend, Raven Choni, were the mascots. We were Lucy and Louie Lobo, and we’re two guys. Usually, it was a guy and a girl, but there were both of us that did it. You never knew who was going to be in which costume. I did it for one semester. It was one of the best times I ever had being in that mascot costume with the little kids where they don’t know that there’s a teenage guy or a 22-year-old guy inside the suit. They think, “You’re Louie the Lobo.” They want to say hi, get your autograph, and take pictures with you. It was a blast.
I’ve been going to the Lobo basketball game since I was about four years old. When you were the mascot, I was back here watching the games. I had some good seats where Lobo Louie and Lucy used to come by all the time. I do specifically remember there was a time when all of a sudden, Lucy got taller. Now I know what happened. That was you.
That could have been, Gary. You never know.
You went from an interesting high school to going to UNM, leading the ROTC, being the mascot, going off to be in the Army, and then becoming a Ranger. How long were you in the service? What happened to you when you got out?
That was about an eleven-year journey between the ROTC time, and the time I was on active duty. I spent three years on active duty with the 3rd Armored Cav, and then I was in the Reserves again. It was a total of about eleven years. It was a time when junior military officers were valuable to Corporate America. I remember being in the Army, and coming from my background, I was making $34,000 a year. I thought I was the richest guy in the world. They were giving me all this money. After going through college and you’re poor all the time, I was like, “This is great.”
This was also 1993 when the job market wasn’t great. A lot of my friends are graduating and don’t have jobs. I had a job, I could buy a car and do all those things that you do when you get your first job. A recruiter comes talking to us and targets junior military officers and says, “We’ve got opportunities for junior military officers with your leadership to work in Corporate America.” I get recruited out of the Army. Immediately, they double your salary and you can make bonuses based on how much you sell as a salesperson. I’ve always loved sales.
It was almost a no-brainer because I remember talking to Monica about it and saying, “Here’s the decision we have to make. I can stay here for twenty years and I’ll have retirement and all this stuff. The travel is about 50%.” She said, “When you say 50%, will you be gone half the year?” I said, “No, maybe two overnights a week.”
She’s like, “That sounds a lot better than being gone half the year and deployed. When you travel, are you going to be sleeping on the ground outside?” I said, “They’re going to put us up in hotels.” She said, “That sounds better. Is anybody going to be shooting at you?” I said, “No, they won’t be shooting at me. What’s the decision here? It sounds like a good idea.”
I left active duty service and went to work for a pharmaceutical company. We launched a drug called Prilosec. At the time, it was new. Nobody knew about it, and it was dangerous because it had a black box warning. Now, it’s over the counter. It was cool to be with a company that launched a product that revolutionized the way people treated heartburn.
That led to me meeting people in the gastroenterology field and becoming a device sales rep. I started selling endoscopes to a gastroenterologist for a few years and then landed at Baxter Healthcare, where I stayed for seventeen years. I advanced there, leading small groups of salespeople, to leading an entire national sales force at a high level and meeting our numbers every year. I’m doing a job that I love because we are helping patients all the time.
Contributing To Success: It’s not so much the challenges they’re having. It’s the contrast between knowing it now versus before they knew it. It’s a process.
This is a lot of fun. I tell people these were the two things that changed my life. In 2019, you and I were at the Country Club right after the Ryder Cup and we were talking. It was in October and it was a Saturday. I had a toothache and I said, “Gary, can you get me in on Monday? I’ve got something wrong with one of my teeth.” You were nice and you said, “Yeah, Dan. Call the office, we’ll get you in, and we’ll get you looked at.”
At that time, I had also made a decision that I didn’t want to be at Baxter Healthcare anymore. I wanted to do something different. I didn’t know why, but I was no longer happy. I was about 30 pounds heavier than I am. I was stressed. My wife and my young daughter were stressed. I wasn’t enjoying work. I made a decision I was going to leave that.
You found out through the grapevine and through our friends. I sit down at the chair and you’re like, “Dan, I heard you’re leaving Baxter.” I said, “I left. I’m done. I’m not working there anymore.” You said, “What are you doing?” I said, “I don’t know. I’m going to take some time off to find something I love. Whatever I do next, it’s going to be something I would do whether I was getting paid or not.” You asked the question, which was great, “Dan, do you know your why?” I said, “No. What is that?”
You explained to me what the why was but more importantly, you sent it to my phone. You said, “Take five minutes.” I took five minutes and I discovered that my why was to contribute to the success of others. Back then, you were busy with dentistry, so you didn’t take me through my how and what. I went through your online course to discover my how and what. I even paid for it. I went on and did it. I said, “This is me. I’ve discovered my why, how and what.” All of a sudden, a lot of things made sense to me.
You asked me the question, “Dan, do you like to help people?” I said, “Yeah, doesn’t everybody?” Similar reaction to our friend, Jerry. You said, “No, not everyone does. There are eight other whys, and everybody is driven by their why and they do what they do.” Suddenly, I realized that’s why I was unhappy in my corporate role. I didn’t feel like I was making a difference in the lives of the people that I was leading because I didn’t have the freedom to do things my own way, and it didn’t make sense. When stuff doesn’t make sense to me, I’m not happy and I have dissonance. I decided to leave.
It’s funny, my friends were like, “You have no plan. You left.” I said, “I have a little bit of a plan.” I took my financial package, looked at it and said, “How long can I not work?” My financial advisor said, “You can do it for a couple of years, Dan, and then you’ve got to get back to work and start putting money back into your retirement.” That’s what I plan to do until I met with you. We went to lunch at the Chinese restaurant across the street from your old dental office and we talked about it.
You were smart. You used my wife to contribute to talk to me in my language. You didn’t say, “Dan, I’ve got this great opportunity for us to do amazing things that are better and different.” You said, “Dan, I need your help. We can use someone with your skills in sales at a high level to help us get the WHY Institute to where we want to go.” As soon as you said, “We need your help,” I raised my hand and I said, “What do I need to do? Let’s do it.” I showed up at your coach’s meeting that you had that same month at the Canyon Club. I get to meet a bunch of WHY coaches and I was bought in from then on.
For those of you that are reading, Dan’s why is contribute, which is what we’ve been talking about. He wants to help and he wants to be part of other people’s success. He wants to contribute in a meaningful way. His how is challenge, to do things differently, not follow the way everybody else goes, and beat to his own drum. His what is what he does has to make sense. You can hear his how of challenging the status quo and doing things his own way, coming through loud and clear. We had your why, how and what wrong first. Remember?
Yes. I wanted to be the right way. This was before we’ve done everything that we’ve done to make the WHY Discovery and the WHY.os more accurate. At that point, I did an online course where I listened to you and then I got to pick my how and what off a list. I said, “I’ve got to be a right way guy because I was in the military. Trust is important to me. I want to trust people.” That’s not how you pick your how and what.
You thought you were getting a Chief Growth Officer with a contribute right way of trust, which would have been a good fit for you because you’re a better way, clarify and simplify. When we started looking at it, the more you saw the way I worked, you were like, “There’s no way you’re right way. You don’t follow rules.”
We started even looking at the way we behave at the golf course. You said, “Dan, would you go to the golf course and play the holes randomly?” I’m like, “Yeah, I would. Why not? That’s fun. You don’t know which hole you’re going to.” We realized that my how was more challenging the status quo. There were many things in my life that pointed to, “Dan, you like to do things your own way. If it’s something people aren’t expecting it, you’re more than likely to do it because that’s how we get things done and that’s how we contribute.”
I remember specifically being on the tee box in the first hole and I’m like, “Dan, how are you going to play this hole?” You’re like, “I’m going to hit it over there.” I’m like, “What do you mean you’re going to hit it over there? Are you aiming somewhere?” You’re like, “No. I want to get there. Wherever it is, that’s where I’ll play it.” I’m like, “I never thought of that.That’s the right way?”
I’ve done why interviews with hundreds of people. I’ve helped many people discover their why, how, and what, and there’s no way I could be right way. You hit it and then you will find it and then figure out what happens. Let’s have some fun with it. It’s fun to play completely differently every single time. That’s why I’ll never be a single-digit handicap or at least not consistently because I can go from a 73 one day to a 95 the next depending on the breaks I get because I’ll take chances that others probably wouldn’t.
It was interesting when we both realized that. I was buying into the whole right way thing because of your military and whatnot. As we started to look back, I said, “How did any of that path that you were on make any sense to a right way person?” Who’s going to go from boxer, to football, to ROTC, to mascot, to Army, to Ranger, to all the steps that you’ve done along the way? How does that fit together? When we realized it’s a different way to think, then it became so clear and you’ve gotten to live into that. Now, you have fun with it and you understand it. What was that like for you when you had it the way you wanted it versus when it was right?
The conflict, and you remember probably, was as a right way person, there were certain things you were expecting Dan to do. Then Dan probably showed up on time half of the time. He’s always running late because he’s doing something helping someone trying to do something extra. I wasn’t able to come up with the processes and systems and build them because that’s not my strength. I’ll be creative. I’m a connector. As a contributor challenge, I love to connect with people of all different walks of life. That’s why I talk in my bio about the fact that I’ve got such a diverse background. It’s hard for me to meet someone that I don’t have something in common with.
If you say college mascot, “He’s got nothing.” “By the way, I was in the military.” If you say, “You were in the military. What do you do?” “I was a Quartermaster.” “You don’t know anything about combat.” “By the way, I was a Ranger.” “How did you do that?” It always comes back to that. I was feeling like I was letting you down because you’d say, “Dan, did you get all that codified so we could repeat it?” I was like, “No, I didn’t do that. Let me try to work on it.” I’d sit down and five minutes later, something else would come up and I’d go work on that. You and I would meet a week later and that wasn’t done. I knew that I was in conflict trying to be right way.
Once you said, “Dan, your strong point is to do it your own way, be different, and bring us all those ideas.” I love our pairing because, as a challenge, I come up with lots of ideas. As a better way, you can call those down to the good ones. For a challenged person to have a better way around to help them get rid of those crazy ideas, the bad ones, and take the ones that are better and implement them. We’ve had a lot of fun with a lot of ideas that we’ve come up with within the nineteen months we’ve been working together.
You discovered your why, how and what, and then you had a revelation about why you left the corporate world. What was that revelation?
There were a couple of things, Gary. First, as a contributor, I want to help people. I was lucky that at Baxter where I spent the majority of my corporate career, I had bosses that were always good at allowing me to do my job my own way. It was always like, “Dan, here’s the quota. Here’s the timeline you’ve got to do. Lead your team. Don’t break the law. See you at the end of the year and let’s celebrate.” Those are good bumpers for me.
I then went into a situation where we changed leadership. There was nothing wrong with the new leader, he just had a different way that he wanted to do things. He was more of a, “Let’s do it my way. If you don’t do it my way, we’re not going to get along well.” When you put those barriers on a person who wants to help others at any cost, wants to do it his own way and it has to make sense, it was in conflict with my WHY.os. I suddenly started not having fun. I had the whole country. Where do you think I would want to have a meeting if it was December? I’d want to go to Florida, “Let’s go to Florida. Let’s go to Phoenix.” That’s where I bring my teams in, and we’d have our December or our January meeting.
Now, I was like, “We’re going to have our meetings in Chicago because that’s where our headquarters is. We save on hotel and flights.” Who wants to go to Chicago in December? Not me and neither do any of my team. All of a sudden, my autonomy and my ability to do things my own way were gone, and it didn’t make any sense. I’m like, “If you’re going to tell me exactly how to do everything, why don’t you tell the people that you’re telling me to tell how to do things and then you can get rid of the middleman?”
I took myself out of that loop and said, “I don’t want to do that again.” It was great that I met with you. I remember it was October 21st, 2019 that I discovered my why, and my official last day at Baxter was October 19. It was serendipitous and then we had those great conversations. I got to meet some of the coaches that we work with and learn from them. I still keep in touch with them.
Let’s talk about this concept of bumpers because that came from you when we talk about somebody that has a challenge in their WHY.os. For those of you that are not intimately familiar with it, Dan wants to help, but he wants to do it his own way. You can’t tell him how you want it done because he’s going to find his own way to do it anyways. Tell us about this concept of bumpers because this came from a conversation you and I were having when we were struggling a little bit with saying, “How do we keep you on course?” It dawned on me and I said, “He was in the military. How did they keep him on course?”
The concept of bumpers for anybody, if your child or somebody you work with has a challenge in their why, how or what, you’ve got to understand that for us, tell us where the boundaries are then give us room to play. Don’t tell us exactly how to do it. Tell us what needs to get done, what are the rules, and then let us play. Then we’ll have some fun.
Contributing To Success: We don’t lie about what we do. We just highlight what appeals to you based on your why.I posted about my WHY.os day. My Friday was I woke up at 4:00 in the morning and I was on my computer answering emails. I set some appointments with clients. I work until 6:00 in the morning, then I had chaos going on because Sophia and Monica wake up. I have to get them out the door. They have from 6:00 to 7:00 to get ready. I spend family time with them from 6:00 to 7:00. I then had a golf tournament. I went and played golf tournament for about four hours and then I had some meetings.
I also had to meet with Sophia’s principal at school. I went to the school and I set up my computer at their school in a room that they allowed me to borrow. I did some appointments and I sent out some more emails. I did some more communication with clients. I then met with the principal. I had coffee with Monica. We picked up Sophia from test practice and then we went to dinner.
If you’re somebody who’s right way, that probably sounds like chaos to you. For me, it was so nice to say, “All I need is a flat surface and an internet connection. I can do my work from my car. I can do it from the office. We have a great office here at the WHY Institute, so I can go there and do it or I can do it from my home office.”
At the end of the day, what does Gary want? What do you want from your Chief Growth Officer? “Dan, let’s go make connections with people that want to join the WHY Institute. Let’s share our message. Let’s grow this business so we can help a billion people discover their why.” What does that feed? That feeds my why of contribute.
When I see what a difference knowing my WHY.os made for me, I want to give that to everyone I can. The best way we do that is to get amazing coaches like the ones we’ve got in our first 97 to 100 that we’re getting to help us get to 1,000 coaches and get us to thousands of coaches, so we can help the world know their why because it makes such a difference.
As you’re having the opportunity to talk to coaches around the world, what are some of the challenges that you’re seeing they’re having in helping people discover their why? They’re talking about the concept of why but what’s it like for them? What are you hearing when it comes to discovering somebody’s why?
It’s not so much the challenges they’re having. It’s the contrast between knowing it now versus before they knew it. I got off the phone with one of our newest coaches, Bill Summers, in Texas and he said, “Dan, I’m using the why, how and what as a framework for everything that I do.” He’s writing a new book and he’s organizing his chapters that way with his co-authors, “Tell us why you do what you do. Tell us how you do it and tell us what you bring.” That’s what’s nice about this process. What coaches tell me is when I know the why, how and what of my client, I can plan my coaching around their why, how and what.
For example, if you’re coaching Dan, you don’t want to give Dan a step-by-step, “This is what you’ve got to do every day,” plan. He’s probably not going to do it. If you tell Dan, “This is how you can help people. This is how you can do it your own way. These are the only rules you’ve got to follow. Do it your way. Does that make sense to you?” “Explain it to me.” Then you’re going to have a great client that’s going to be happy because you’re talking to me in my language. That’s what they find gratifying about learning their client’s why because they can talk to them in their language.
It’s what we call the platinum rule. Don’t talk to people the way you want to talk to them. You can talk to them about a better way, clarify and simplify. If their contribute challenge makes sense, you’re going to talk to them like you did to me, “Dan, I need your help.” “I’m not going to tell you how this is better. Let me tell you how this is going to help a billion people.” When you talk to me about that stuff, I was bought in. It’s the unfair advantage of helping people by talking to them. It’s not about lying about your product. We don’t lie about what we do. We highlight what appeals to you based on your why.
If they only spoke Spanish and you only spoke English, it would be tough to communicate. Imagine being in a country where you don’t speak the language, and maybe you had that experience when you were in the Army. You run into that one person that speaks English and you’re like, “It’s nice to talk to you. I can get something accomplished here because we speak the same language.” Has that ever happened to you?
That happens all the time. This is some stuff we talk about. I have found that when we share our top 3 of the 9 whys as our WHY.os, I have amazing conversations with people. For example, if I meet a fellow contribute, we talk the same language, so we tend to have a good conversation. If I meet a contribute challenge, then we have an even better conversation. It’s like we’ve been friends forever. If I meet somebody whose contribute challenge makes sense, we’re finishing each other’s sentences. It makes so much sense that we connect.
Alex, who’s a mutual friend of ours, got the same top three as me in a different order. I would have never thought that we would get along so great from looking at us. He’s an attorney and he’s a tall, athletic guy. He walks around like he owns the place. He’s different because his why is challenge. When I met him, I didn’t know what to think of him and I didn’t know that I would get along with him, but his contribute is strong. It shows in his work as a personal injury attorney.
When we worked with him to get to his WHY.os, I realized he cares about people, but because he leads with challenge, it doesn’t come across right away. The more I got to know him, the more we got along. When we figured out his entire WHY.os, we have the same top three in a different order. We clicked. We hang out and text each other all the time. We have a good time because we think alike. That’s a key factor that I’m sure our coaches are finding. When they talk to people who have similar whys, they get along great.
What was it like selling for seventeen years without knowing somebody’s WHY.os and now selling and connecting with people when you do know their WHY.os?
It is a completely different world, Gary. If I had this tool when I was in the Army to know my soldiers better, it would have been extremely helpful, but definitely in sales. It is nice to be able to present to someone in a language that they understand and they are listening for. In sales, especially working for a Fortune 100 company where we have a huge marketing program, everything we put out has to appeal to everyone. You’re throwing stuff against the wall and you hope something appeals to them.
When you know their WHY.os, you talk to them in what you know is going to appeal to them. This is what’s important to them. It doesn’t matter why it is. At WHY Institute, we found a better way to help people discover their why. It’s a clear way and it’s simple. We lead better, clearer and simpler. If I’m talking to someone whose why is mastery, I will spend time on the nuances. I will send them the full definitions of every single why because they’re going to want to know that.
Before we talk, they’ve already got their questions and they’ve done all the reading. I know that they’ve read our entire website and every link because that’s what they do. I’m concentrating on how this is going to help them learn at a deeper level and how to talk to their clients. The same goes for everyone in their whys. We adapt our presentation to that person because that’s what they’re listening for.
What’s it like for you to meet somebody now and not know their why or WHY.os?
It’s tough. I will give people the why even if I’m only going to work with them for a little bit because I want to know how they tick and what’s important to them. It’s interesting you say that because I’m working with Sophia’s school, and the principal is a nice lady. She was my oldest daughter’s third-grade teacher, so I’ve known her for a long time. I said, “Janice, I’m sorry but if you want me to help, I need to know your why.”
I had her take the WHY Discovery and we found her why is trust. All of a sudden, a lot of things make sense. Working with her, it’s trust, mastery, right way. It’s different from me. I needed to know that because now I know how I can help her. All this challenge stuff that Dan does, I have to tamp it down a little bit for her because trust is important. I can’t show up late.
Mastery is important. I can’t pretend I know stuff. I better know stuff before I show it to her in right way and follow the process. That’s how she runs a successful school and that’s what’s important to her. I know how I want to make sure I present myself to her, so she doesn’t say, “Get out of here, Mr. Dominguez. I don’t need you here.”
Let’s talk about relationships. How has knowing your WHY.os, your wife, Monica, and your daughter, Sophia and Jazz, helped you as a family to connect, work together, and understand each other in every aspect of the relationship?
Sophia knows her why, which is challenge. She’s an old soul. She’s read all the nine whys. She considers herself a pet why-ologist. She’s challenge, clarify and make sense. You’re thinking, “Why did you do this with your daughter?” She reads at a high level and we let her take the WHY Discovery. When we came out with our WHY.os, I said, “Let’s have her take it.” We had her WHY.os and it’s nice to understand why she always says, “Dad, why do I have to do it that way?” I’m that way and that’s okay. As somebody with the how of challenge, I don’t like it when other people do it to me. “I asked you to do it. That’s why you should do it.” “Why Dad? What if I can do it this way?”
Now, I understand both her and my oldest, who also had the why of challenge. I understand that they see the world differently. I understand I should allow them to and give them bumpers. As soon as you give them bumpers and let them run, “Don’t burn the house down.” That was simple, “Don’t break the law and we’re going to get along fine.”
With my wife being a why of clarify, I realized why it’s important for her to ask all the questions. When I left the Army, she’s like, “They’re not going to be shooting at you? You’re going to get to sleep in a hotel?” She asked all the questions to get me to come to my conclusion. She asked the right questions so that I understood the decision I was making but then she also understood. It used to drive me nuts how many questions she asked, but now I see it as a positive.
We bought a car, Gary. I knew that if we went to the dealership, she was going to take that poor salesman through a three-hour torture session. She has lots of questions about everything before we invested in that car. I did the smart thing. Knowing her why, I dropped her off with the dealer and I took Sophia, and we went and had lunch and did something else for a couple of hours.
Contributing To Success: The key to overcoming this challenge is for you to identify where you will be able to make the greatest possible contributions, and then commit to focusing your efforts on those areas.
When we came back and we talked to the nice gentleman who was selling us the car and she had all her questions answered, I didn’t have to sit through it because I knew it was coming. She was satisfied. We were able to buy our vehicle and drive it home after she asked all her questions. Once she was clear, we were able to move forward but I needed to let her have time to do that. In the past, I might have said, “It’s blue and it runs. We have the money. Let’s buy it.” That would drive her nuts. Now, I allow her to ask the question she needs to ask so she can move forward.
There’s one flaw with that plan. The flaw is you need to send her in to ask all the questions to beat him down so that by the time you walk in, he’s like, “Take the car for free.”
Gary, the gentleman we bought the car from is a mutual friend. I’m not allowed to disclose the terms but I can tell you, she did a good job with it.
Dan, you’re right in the mix of everything. What do you see is the future for where we’re going, what we’re wanting to accomplish, and how quickly we’re going to get there?
What’s been exciting is I’ve been here for a while, and I knew nothing about the WHY Discovery. I knew nothing about executive coaching and this world. You introduced me to a whole new world. Going from absolute zero knowledge to now having done more Why Discoveries than anyone else other than you and Jerry, and having worked with many coaches and learn so much. I see the immense value that the WHY Discovery and the WHY.os Discovery have for the coaches that we talked to.
We went through an exercise where we took testimonials from coaches. To hear them talk about the difference that the WHY Discovery and the WHY.os have made in their lives and the lives of their clients, gives me tremendous confidence that we’re on the right track. We’ve got a tremendous team working on the backend to make sure that our website works, all our links work. Everything that we send out looks professional and good.
When I look at where we were in December of 2019 when I joined the team and where we are in September 2020, we’ve made leaps and bounds, and where we’re going and the people we’re working with. We’ve got coaches from ICF, John Maxwell and Marshall Goldsmith. We’ve got coaches from every major coaching organization in the world. We’ve got people that are certified in Kolbe, DiSC, StrengthsFinder, and all the assessments that are out there, and they all say one thing, “As long as I start with why, everything else falls into place.”
I can’t wait to see where we take this. I don’t see us being able to hold back. We’ve been careful about not launching something big that we couldn’t handle the growth and that we had the infrastructure. Now that we’re building that infrastructure, I can’t wait to present this to the world at large and get to a billion people knowing their why.
Dan, one last question, what is the best piece of advice you’ve received or you have ever given?
The easier question is probably the best piece of advice I’ve ever received, and that’s someone you talked to, Paul Allen. He talked about how important it is to take advice from people that think like you. I would have never thought of that without the why. Somebody with a why of clarify, for example, could have great advice on how to do something, but it’s not going to resonate with me because I want to contribute. However valuable that advice is, I may not be able to apply it because it doesn’t resonate with me.
Those people that we connect with, it’s more important that we connect and take advice from people that think like us because it’s going to be easier to implement. Not that I couldn’t implement clarify advice, better way advice, or advice from somebody whose why is mastery, but it will be simpler and easier because they’ve traveled that same path that I have. I love that.
Not that I don’t take advice from other people, but I listen intently when I do get that opportunity to talk to people with my why, how or what because they resonate with me. It’s a lot easier advice to implement. Mike Koenigs, who you’re working with, I listened to him. He’s a challenge guy. A lot of what he says, I can take and implement. I work closely with one of our coaches, Melahni Ake, whose why is also challenge. She and I clicked. I can take some of what she does, the hacks that she has created to get through and be productive with the why of challenge. The same thing that probably Mike has had to do. It’s helpful.
Dan, thanks so much for being here and taking the time. I’m going to see you every day. We’ve wanted to do this for a long time because you get to meet many people but now, even more people are going to get to know you. Everybody loves you. It’ll be fun to see how you progress as we progress on this journey. Thank you for being here.
It’s time for our new segment, Guess the Why. I thought we’d do something fun. If you’ve been watching TV, one of the great series that’s out there is one called Ted Lasso. My wife and I have been watching that and a lot of our friends have been watching that. It is so funny. If you haven’t seen it, start watching it. I’d love to know your perspective on what you think Ted Lasso’s why is. I know what it is and it’s similar to Dan’s why, which is contribute.
He wants to help. He sees the positive in everybody. He wants to uplift the team, individually and as a team. He always wants to make things better for people in any way that he can, whether that’s picking up a broom and sweeping or sitting and having a conversation with somebody. He loves to make the world a better place by helping each person get better. For me, his why would be contribute.
Thank you for reading. If you’ve not yet discovered your why, you can do so at WhyInstitute.com with the code, PODCAST50. If you love the Beyond Your WHY show, please don’t forget to subscribe and leave us a review and rating on whatever platform you’re using so that you can help us bring this message to the world. Also, to help one billion people discover, make decisions, and live based on their why. Thank you for reading.
Dan Dominguez exists to positively impact the lives of others. HOW he does that is by challenging the status quo and looking at things from a different perspective. WHAT he brings is the ability to make sense of the complex and challenging to help others move forward faster. Dan’s diverse background as an academic scholar, college mascot, Army Ranger, sales leader, marathon runner, track and cross-country coach, and Rotarian allows him to connect easily with almost anyone and he does that as the Chief Growth officer at the WHY Institute.
Dan and his wife Monica are proud parents of their two daughters Jaz 32 and Sofia 9 along with 24 sheep, 4 dogs and 3 chickens.
David is the founder and CEO of multiple businesses. Most prominent among them is his longest-running company, ISU Corp. ISU is a custom software solutions company with clients ranging from start-ups to multi-million-dollar conglomerates like General Electric and Heinz. Located in Canada’s Silicon Valley, ISU Corp increases entrepreneurs’ net profits with exceptional custom software solutions.
Greg Scheinman has experienced the highest highs— two seven-figure exits from companies he founded or helped build, success as a high-level executive— and the lowest lows— the loss of his father, panic attacks, depression, and alcoholism.
Mike Zeller is a business architect and entrepreneur mentor who helps professionals find their zone of genius and rewire their subconscious to fuel momentum toward their life’s purpose. He has mentored over two hundred high-level entrepreneurs from all over the world, helping add tens of millions in revenue to his clients.
Born in Iran Tehran in 1975, Shaahin Cheyene is an award-winning writer, filmmaker and a prosperous businessman who is committed to share his enthusiasm to accelerate intelligence through his most recent company and products. Cheyene is the CEO and Chairman of brain nutrition start-up Accelerated Intelligence.
Dan Dominguez exists to positively impact the lives of others. HOW he does that is by challenging the status quo and looking at things from a different perspective. WHAT he brings is the ability to make sense of the complex and challenging to help others move forward faster. Dan’s diverse background as an academic scholar, college mascot, Army Ranger, sales leader, marathon runner, track and cross-country coach, and Rotarian allows him to connect easily with almost anyone and he does that as the Chief Growth officer at the WHY Institute.
00:17:25: Reading “Think and Grow Rich” – Paul’s expanded thinking.
00:27:49: Success of Paul’s Cleaning Company – Loyalty of employees with an average tenure of 11 years. 2
00:29:22: Importance of Awareness – Recognizing opportunities and being in the right place at the right time.
00:30:06: Growth of Cleaning Company – Amazement at the scale of Paul’s business.
00:59:29: Understanding Customer Inquiries – Parallels between Paul’s approach and the dental industry.
01:21:41: Influencing People – Importance of guiding people to the next step in one’s work.
01:32:28: Recognizing Value – Transformation people undergo once they understand their worth.
01:33:15: Levels of Service – Different services based on customer needs.
01:34:05: Value of Coaching – Impact on teams and their performance.
01:40:22: Not Giving Up Territory – Long-term effects of preserving one’s beliefs and values.