When you were around 30, what was the thing that you were most fearful of?
If you’re in transition… Well, for me, I was working for a guy at that time and I knew it was a dead end.
I’ve never said this before, but I actually went back to my treatment center that I went to when I was 25 and chilled out for two weeks.
I quit the job.
I had been on the road for 18 months and I thought I was burned out.
I was working a lot and I wasn’t crushing it—it was crushing me.
I had a lot of people around me telling me, “You’re burning out. You look bad. You look tired, man.”
I was always going somewhere, traveling…I didn’t have a life.
There was no life. I was on the road, I was a ROAD warrior.
And I was unhappy.
I didn’t have a woman in my life and had no chance of having kids because I was living like a gypsy.
So, I went back to that treatment center and said, “I just need a place where I can chill.”
I was lost…I was terrified… I was in transition again.
I was leaving my job to go do another job—and now I had to work for myself.
I knew it was time for me to go work for myself, but I was scared and only had, at that time, maybe $20,000 or $30,000 bucks.
So, I didn’t have much money and I had no income now.
If you were somebody right now that was in transition or didn’t like where they were and they wanted to make a move, what advice do you give them?
The sooner you make that move, the better.
You have to do what I do every day…quit thinking and do it.
Just do it.
Nobody really knows what that means…it’s just an ad in society now.
If I have discovered any kind of mastery in me at all, I am borderline, I hate to say this about myself, but I think that I am possibly close in the vicinity of genius when it comes to marketing.
You break a lot of rules that traditional marketers follow…so like where do you think that brilliance comes from?
I don’t mean to sound arrogant but everybody has the ability to be genius.
In fact, if you’re not a genius in something, you’re actually just not owning it, not developing it.
When I was selling cars, I didn’t have an ad budget or the internet.
So, I was a guy who was like, “Who can I call today that would buy a car from me?”
I’m trying to hit my number.
Did you feel at that point like your life literally depended on you succeeding EVERY day?
If I didn’t successfully sell cars, guess what I was going to end up doing? Probably use drugs again every day.
My life depends on me winning because I think that’s a common denominator between a lot of really successful people…they develop the idea like there’s no other option.
There needs to be a threat in the environment in order for somebody to be propelled to go.
That uneasy feeling is actually healthy. That slight bit of anxiety or paranoia or whatever you want to call it—that edge, is required to get people to do new stuff.
Does money make you successful?
Money gives you a sense of confidence when you have $1 billion worth of real estate that nobody can take away from you—they can’t break the partnerships, so the internal revenue service can’t take it from me. The government can’t take it from me and it’s just going to spit cash flow at me forever.
But ultimately there are people who have money that are miserable—so money is NOT the only ingredient of a successful life. But make no mistake about it, money is a part of success.
