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This special episode of The School of Greatness is brought to you by TikTok Shop.
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Now we talk a lot on this podcast about purpose and mindset, finding the things you want to do, things you re passionate about, and getting the right mindset to achieve those goals.
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For a lot of you, we know those goals are entrepreneurial.
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We re partnering with TikTok Shop on this episode, all about side hustles, because TikTok Shop can help you launch and grow your business.
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TikTok Shop offers a powerful new way to sell and shop on TikTok.
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It s really cool.
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Brands and businesses of all sizes can reach new customers, collaborate with creators, and drive more sales by showcasing their products and selling directly on TikTok.
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Visit tiktokshop.com slash podcast to discover more.
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That s t-i-k-t-o-k shop dot com slash podcast.
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And stick around later in the episode to hear more about TikTok Shop and how it helped a member of the School of Greatness family bring one of their passions to life.
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Before you try to sell somebody something, figure out what they care about.
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Yes.
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Spend time learning about them.
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You should always win the relationship, even if you lose the sale.
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If you focus on making sales, you re going to feel pressure.
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If you focus on building relationships, man, it s going to be great.
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Welcome to the School of Greatness.
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My name is Lewis Howes, a former pro athlete turned lifestyle entrepreneur.
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And each week, we bring you an inspiring person or message to help you discover how to unlock your inner greatness.
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Thanks for spending some time with me today.
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Now let the class begin.
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Welcome to this special masterclass.
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We ve brought some of the top experts in the world to help you unlock the power of your life through this specific theme today.
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It s going to be powerful, so let s go ahead and dive in.
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So, once you figure out what your side hustle is, how do we start the process of monetizing our side hustle?
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Dude, that s such a good question, because that s the thing, right?
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We want to make money.
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We want to help people.
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We don t want to be the desperate salesperson.
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Please buy my thing out of pity.
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Yeah, we don t wanna be the needy guy.
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And this is something that I ve spent my whole life doing.
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I went door to door.
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So I worked in retail sales when I was like, from my time I was like 16 years old.
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And then I ve spent five years going door to door, 14 hours a day, six days a week, interrupting people.
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14 hours a day, door to door.
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14 hours a day.
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door-to-door, you know, interrupting people and like, you know, pretty intrusive.
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As I sometimes say, being a door-to-door salesperson is like being the human version of email spam.
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Right, right, right.
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Like a telemarketer.
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Yeah, a telemarketer.
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Yeah, it s like telemarketers are, you know, than us.
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We bug telemarketers when they re eating dinner.
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And then we built a sales coaching company to eight figures, teaching salespeople how to sell, how do you generate leads.
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And then brand builders, we do more like marketing and digital lead generation.
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But whether you re like a Fortune 100 company
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a personal brand, a professional service, or just a person with a dream for a side hustle, this is the question.
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How do you make that first sale?
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How do you get money?
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Where do you find the people?
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Before you answer that, what was the greatest lesson you learned going door-to-door for five years?
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About yourself and about selling in general.
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You know, there was this thing that we used to say all the time, that the answer s behind the next door.
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You never stop.
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There s always another door.
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You ll find the answer in the next place.
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Yeah, it was always like, but that part of it I think actually is good because this is true about sale.
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I mean, a part of the good news for both marketing and sales
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is that they are both a numbers game.
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They are a numbers game.
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It s not like it won t work, right?
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Like you have the fear like, is anyone gonna buy this?
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No, somebody will buy, no matter how bad you are or how crappy your thing is, if you talk to enough people, which is not what the goal is, but that people will, they really will buy if you keep going.
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The truth about most sales is it s,
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people think of it as like combat.
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Like, you know, I either have to put the magic marketing words on the page or I need to say like the voodoo mind trick to like convince you to buy something.
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And then it s kind of like this battle.
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And it s more like an Easter egg hunt.
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Where it s like there is some number of eggs out there in the field that have candy in them, and no matter if you did anything or not to deserve candy being in there, they re just there.
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You just have to go find them.
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And there s a lot of empty eggs along the way.
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There s a lot that you re going to open and it s empty.
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And so that is one part of it.
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But the biggest problem, the biggest problem that people have in selling is that they re self-centered.
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The reason we don t sell more is because we re focused on, how do I make money?
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How do I convince people?
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And we approach it wrong.
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And I would say that sales has been taught wrong, done wrong, promoted wrong.
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I mean, we re big fans of cleaning this up and changing the way that people think about it.
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I think we re also self-centered in the fact that we re afraid of people saying no and how it will make us feel about ourselves when they say no.
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Absolutely, yeah.
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When I say self-centered, part of that is kind of like the, you know, I don t necessarily mean selfish, like I m gonna take in for me instead of you, although there s a part of that where it s like, you know, the sale is convincing people to buy something they don t want, right?
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That s not what we re into.
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But it s also fear is self-centered.
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Fear is extremely self-centered.
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You only feel fear when you re thinking about yourself.
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We say there is no fear when the mission to serve is clear.
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When you re focused on helping someone else,
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You re not worried about it, right?
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I mean, it s like if there s a car accident and someone s on the side of the road, you run up to them.
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You re not thinking about how does your hair look or your clothes or is your outfit cute?
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You re going to help somebody.
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We re always at our best when we re serving others.
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And one of the magic, one of the magical powers of service is that being focused on service releases our insecurities.
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It s so true.
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This is something I learned speaking on stages.
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I said there s probably different levels to my speaking life.
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There s the 13 years ago, being terrified to speak in front of three people without stuttering and sweating and being nervous.
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And me saying, okay, I need to go learn how to get some reps speaking in front of people so I m not nervous.
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So I joined Toastmasters, which you famously got second in the world for.
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I love how you famously bring that up every time we talk about second place in the world.
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Second place at the World Championship of Public Speaking.
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True story.
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No big deal.
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and I did that for a year and I gained confidence through the actions of repetition of showing up of preparing of Reviewing my my speaking film and just improving through reps over time.
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Yeah, and I remember for about Seven eight years.
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I was getting now paid to speak for my credibility for my expertise through LinkedIn and everything else and
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I would still get nervous for a week before a big speech.
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Then I got better over time and it was like, okay, it s only two days before I m nervous.
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Then it was a day before.
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And I remember it stayed a day before, but it wasn t nerves of excitement, it was nerves of insecurity.
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It s like, I m afraid of what people are going to think about me.
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And I remember asking a coach of mine that I had hired for a while, he was a good friend of mine, and I said,
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I m about to go on stage in an hour.
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I don t know why I m still so nervous.
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Like, I ve been doing this for 10 years.
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Shouldn t I be over this by now?
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And he said,   Cause you re focused on the way you look, not on serving other people in the audience. 
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And the moment, exactly what you said, the moment you start focusing on service, knowing that you will probably forget something, you might make a mistake, and not worrying about those things, know that something might happen that s not perfect, but when your heart s on service, it s hard to be nervous, as you say.
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Isn t that something you said?
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Uh-huh, yeah, years ago on our very first interview together.
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But yeah, that s it.
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And so somebody watching right now, it could be like, okay, well, how do I make the money?
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How do I get the lead?
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But this is how you get the lead, is you serve first.
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So in a digital world, you provide value first.
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Value, value, value.
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Value, value, value.
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Give out.
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It s the three E s, right?
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You re putting out content that is either educational, encouraging, or entertaining.
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and typically some mix of all three.
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motivational, encouraging, or entertaining.
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The digital marketing strategy that we employ at Brand Builders Group for Rory Vaden Personal Brand and for all of the clients that we teach these personal brands is teach everything you know for free
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One bite at a time, but in all random order.
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Right?
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So it s not packaged in the right order as you would have in a book or a course or a workshop or an event.
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Right.
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You know, we ve said this before.
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People don t pay for information.
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They pay for organization and application.
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Yes.
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And we have a thing called the services spectrum, which basically says, you know, information is down here.
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It s free.
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The organization is here in the middle.
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You can charge a little bit like in a course or a book or, you know, like a membership site.
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But applications up here at the top are just like a coaching program or consulting, you know, like done for your services application.
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Information is social media, podcasting, blogs.
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People don t pay for information.
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But you re just giving them bite-sized chunks of information.
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You re teaching everything you know, but not all at once and in the right sequential order.
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People pay for the right order.
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That s organization.
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One of the reasons people hire us at Brand Builder s Group is because we have a very set curriculum, the Brand Builder journey, and we say,
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One of the biggest problems with personal brands is that people do the right thing but in the wrong order.
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They re like launching Facebook ads the first month and it s like that s step 76.
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You re like, you skipped all of this.
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They don t have a funnel yet, so they re launching it to nothing.
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Yeah, you re driving it back to nothing.
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You re spending all this time on social media driving back to nothing.
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So the first thing is find your uniqueness, figure out what you re good at, then extrapolate that into a product, create your service, your product offer.
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You may already have that.
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And then after that, it s like, okay, how do I drive traffic?
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And there s two worlds here.
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When I think of marketing and sales,
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I think of the online world and the offline world.
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And we ve done both, which is rare.
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Most of the people have done one or the other.
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And it s like, I ve done the door-to-door thing.
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I worked for a startup IT company doing inside corporate B2B phone sales.
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Then when we started our former company, we did phone sales like B2B for small businesses, and we did free presentations, and we sold.
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But the fastest mechanism
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to generating a lead is to do a free presentation.
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demonstrating your value, your expertise, it s giving people a sample, and then offering them the next step.
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Here s what it is.
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It is the food court.
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When you go to the food court.
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I want some orange chicken.
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And the orange chicken on a stick.
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Man, it tastes good.
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I want the whole thing now.
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It s a sample, and if you want more, I m right here.
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See s Candy gets me every time.
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Gives you a free piece of candy, just go into the store, and you re like, ooh, I want the whole box.
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Yeah.
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It s a free presentation.
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You could do this through many different mechanisms.
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It used to be free workshops in person.
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Speaking, and by the way, like when I say this is, this is what everybody does.
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Like this is what Jim Rohn did and Tony Robbins and Brian Tracy and Tom Hopkins and like everybody in the personal development industry.
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They used to go do, this is how we built our former company.
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This is what people in real estate industries do.
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They do it.
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They teach at a free seminar, a 90 minute live free training.
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Financial advisors do this.
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Yes.
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come to my free dinner presentation on 10 Keys to Retirement.
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Why?
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Because it works.
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You re giving value and you re leveraging the law of reciprocity.
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As I give to you before instead of ask, the way you make sales
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is by giving so much that at some point they like ask you to buy versus showing up and asking all the time.
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In fact, we use a rule called, we call it the rule of 10 and this is a pricing, this is more of like a pricing thing.
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But you know, people get really weird around price and asking for the money and you know, when it comes to collecting the credit card or if you re on like a webinar or a Facebook live or if you re
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It doesn t matter if it s Facebook Live, it s a webinar, it s a video funnel, or it s standing on stage, or it s talking to one person, you gotta be convicted in the value you re bringing, and the way you do that is by over-delivering.
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The number one way to drive your own conviction
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is over delivering.
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And everyone teaches sales as like the voodoo mind tricks on the person you re talking to.
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The real game is winning the battle in your own mind and being convinced that what you have is valuable.
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And the rule of 10 helps you do that.
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So basically, when people are putting together their first offer, they tend to swing for the fences and go, I m going to charge for a $2,000 video course or something.
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And they say, well, I saw a video and my coach told me charge what you re worth.
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That s terrible advice.
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Don t charge what you re worth.
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What should we charge?
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When you re starting out, don t charge what you re worth.
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Charge what you can get.
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Charge what you re convicted on.
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Charge what you can massively over deliver upon.
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Yeah, yeah.
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If I m charging what I m worth, there s going to be a bit of reluctance when I deliver the price.
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They re going to feel it and it s going to massively reduce the percentage conversion.
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Yeah, someone once told me charge what
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10X the value.
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Yeah, that s the rule of 10.
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Charge one-tenth of what it s worth.
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Exactly.
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If it s $10,000 worth of value, then charge $1,000.
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And if it s $1,000 worth of value, charge $100.
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If it s $100, charge $10.
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So you always have, if it were a bank account, you always have this balance with people.
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And it starts for free.
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It starts on social media, which is amazing.
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The power that social media gives us, it s not that you have to reach millions of people.
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It gives us a mechanism to push a button and deliver value.
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It s like a chicken or the egg.
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How do I build an audience?
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I want to provide value, but I don t have an audience.
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No, you provide value first.
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If nobody is watching, you record and you teach value.
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You deliver it, and people will engage with that.
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Now, we have a process, which I m happy to talk about, of converting comments into customers.
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So, you know, I don t know if you want to take this more like online or if you want to do like more offline.
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I think online is cool.
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Okay.
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Yeah, yeah.
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So let s talk about that.
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So, you know, it starts with the mind, okay?
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Self-centeredness is the problem.
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Service-centeredness is the solution.
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Yes.
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You never feel fear when the mission to serve is clear.
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You get your mind right.
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Then you go, okay, I m going to go out and provide value.
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pumping out value.
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We have a thing called the content diamond, which I know I ve talked about on other episodes.
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We can touch on that.
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But anyways, you re putting out value.
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And now what happens is people like and comment.
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And what most of us do is we go, six views.
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And it s just like, I mean, and we get self-centered again.
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And we go, I only have six views.
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Jay Shetty gets like six billion views.
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And it just makes me feel awful because I m thinking about myself.
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I mean, unless you re just doing the thing where you re going to do it for years and years and years and one day you ll have more audience, but even it s like if you want to really impact lives, impact lives.
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Like that s what pisses me off is people are like, I want to impact lives.
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And it s like, great.
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Okay, let s put a video out there.
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Why don t I have any followers?
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Well, I don t care.
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I m not getting paid to do it.
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Focus on one at a time.
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One person.
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You said you wanted to impact lives.
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Impact lives.
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There s no barrier to impacting lives.
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There s no barrier.
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It s easier than it has ever been in history to impact lives.
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I m curious for people that aren t entrepreneurs or they haven t done entrepreneurial things, because you and I weren t entrepreneurs.
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We kind of became one.
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Should they just go for it?
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Should they test something first and try to get a few sales on something?
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What do you think is the best approach now in today s time?
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So I talk a lot about how I sometimes don t necessarily know what I want, but I know what I don t want.
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Which is what?
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Like when I was in corporate America, I sat down at a table just like this, and my boss said, here s your five-year plan.
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They never once asked me, what do you want?
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What s your next move?
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Where do you want to go?
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And I wanted to go to corporate.
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Like I wanted to move back to Minnesota, be in Minneapolis.
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But here I was in a store, a glorified HR person,
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that had to bring the garbage to the dumpster at the end of the night, wearing red and khaki, which, by the way, I hate red and khaki.
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And sometimes I think that people get really lost, because they re like, well, yeah, if I knew what my passion was, I could go figure out a way to make money, but I don t even know what my passion is, right?
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And sometimes I think knowing what you don t want is just as important as knowing what you do want.
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And sometimes it s an easier place to start with.
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Like, I don t want 10 vacations.
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days a year.
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I don t want to work weekends and nights like you know and so it s like trying to figure those things out.
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But the other piece of that is that we have to like start to be open in saying I ve changed.
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Right.
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I m evolving.
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Maybe I wanted this thing for a while but now I want something different.
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It s like we get so attached to our identities that the thought of like saying oh I m different or
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I know I said I wanted this, but it doesn t feel the way I thought it would.
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And so I want to pursue something different.
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It s like this.
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There s this notion.
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Dr. Maya Shanker was on my podcast and she talks about identity foreclosure.
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And it s like the reason why you hold on to genes that don t fit you anymore, because you remember how you invested in them or the reason why you get the degree, even though three years into it, you know that you don t want to do the profession.
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It s this idea of like, so I got to make it worth something.
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SPEAKER_02
But instead, then we re wasting our future.
2
SPEAKER_02
Right.
2
SPEAKER_02
And so... You call it identity closure?
2
SPEAKER_02
Identity foreclosure.
2
SPEAKER_01
Foreclosure.
2
SPEAKER_02
Like as in I m foreclosing this piece of me.
2
SPEAKER_02
I am shutting it down because I am no longer who I was.
2
SPEAKER_02
And it s fascinating because even being here with you today, having a book coming out, you re seeing a changed mind.
2
SPEAKER_00
Yeah.
2
SPEAKER_00
You didn t want to do this.
2
SPEAKER_02
At all.
2
SPEAKER_02
I mean, you are the one person who truly witnessed how much I said I wouldn t do this.
2
SPEAKER_01
Yeah.
2
SPEAKER_01
You re like, just go launch a course and make a bunch more money and have less stress.
2
SPEAKER_02
Yeah.
2
SPEAKER_01
Thanks for joining us on this special side hustle episode brought to you by TikTok Shop.
2
SPEAKER_01
And I want to take a quick break from the episode to highlight a TikTok Shop success story.
2
SPEAKER_01
Jordan from my team created an amazing children s picture book called Mirror Face, which he s been selling directly on his own website.
2
SPEAKER_01
To reach new audiences and drive more sales, Jordan signed up for TikTok Shop and has seen a huge lift in book sales.
2
SPEAKER_01
Go support his book as well as thousands of small businesses like his who are also on TikTok Shop.
2
SPEAKER_01
And now is your time to sign up for TikTok shop too.
2
SPEAKER_01
Entrepreneurs, if you re just getting started selling your products, this is a great way to let people know about your new business.
2
SPEAKER_01
TikTok is such an incredible tool for building and growing an audience.
2
SPEAKER_01
And now with TikTok shop, it s a super simple way to convert your viewers to actual customers through shoppable videos and live shopping experiences.
2
SPEAKER_01
Later in the episode, you ll hear more about some of these world-class brands using TikTok Shop every day.
2
SPEAKER_01
It has easy-to-use tools that can help businesses of all sizes.
2
SPEAKER_01
And visit tiktokshop.com slash podcast to discover more.
2
SPEAKER_01
That s t-i-k-t-o-k shop.com slash podcast.
2
SPEAKER_02
And so it s like we are so afraid of changing and not just changing, which is scary and uncertain.
2
SPEAKER_02
We re afraid of people seeing us change.
2
SPEAKER_02
We re afraid of being like, I know I said this one thing, but I don t believe it anymore.
2
SPEAKER_02
And I think that change is like growth and evolution.
2
SPEAKER_02
And like, we re in this thing called life school.
2
SPEAKER_02
School of Greatness Life School where we are learning and if we re not learning and evolving, like, what are we doing?
2
SPEAKER_02
We re missing this opportunity.
2
SPEAKER_02
But I would say for those people who are like, maybe I have this idea or whatever.
2
SPEAKER_02
Do it as an experiment.
2
SPEAKER_02
Don t attach money to it.
2
SPEAKER_02
Don t attach deadlines.
2
SPEAKER_02
Look at how I wrote the book.
2
SPEAKER_02
Do it in a way that proves to yourself that one, you re capable of taking action, but in a way that doesn t necessarily paint things as like black and white success and failure.
2
SPEAKER_02
Look at everything as an experiment.
2
SPEAKER_02
I m going to try this thing.
2
SPEAKER_02
All it s going to do is yield a result and that result is going to guide my next step.
2
SPEAKER_02
And I feel like nowadays it s like, we have to define, is this a success or is it a failure?
2
SPEAKER_02
No, no, no, no, no.
2
SPEAKER_02
I ve done many things and failed.
2
SPEAKER_02
I ve tried many different things and been like, oh, that was not, like I did senior portraits one year.
2
SPEAKER_02
Cause I was like, I can make bank shooting seniors.
2
SPEAKER_02
I hated it.
2
SPEAKER_02
Did it for one summer.
2
SPEAKER_02
I was like, never again.
2
SPEAKER_02
Was it a failure?
2
SPEAKER_02
No way, it was just a point on the path that was guiding me forward.
2
SPEAKER_02
And so I feel like getting really open to like trying things.
2
SPEAKER_02
And the other part of that is that every single time I ve tried something different, it s always been a side hustle.
2
SPEAKER_02
I ve not abandoned the nine to five to jump all in on something.
2
SPEAKER_02
I ve used the nine to five to fuel the other something.
2
SPEAKER_02
Then when I did courses, I use the courses to fuel the podcast.
2
SPEAKER_02
And when I did the podcast, you know, it s like they all pour into each other.
2
SPEAKER_02
And it s like, we re so quick to neglect something because it wasn t the perfect fit when it s like that can propel you forward if you lean on it and it ll give you
2
SPEAKER_02
This ability to not feel the desperation that makes us say yes to the wrong things or do things that were never meant for us.
2
SPEAKER_00
Right, absolutely.
2
SPEAKER_00
What was the biggest identity foreclosure you ve had in the last few years?
2
SPEAKER_02
Getting rid of my Abercrombie jeans from when I was 18.
2
SPEAKER_02
Truly, I remember how expensive those suckers were, and how I saved every pretty penny, and I told myself someday they ll fit again, and guess what?
2
SPEAKER_02
They don t, and they re not even in style anymore.
2
SPEAKER_02
But I literally, no, I mean, that was part of it.
2
SPEAKER_02
But I think for me, moving back home, which is something, Drew and I met in college in Wisconsin, lived in Wisconsin for over a decade, and moved back home to Duluth, Minnesota.
2
SPEAKER_02
You know, one, I never thought I d move home.
2
SPEAKER_02
There was just something about it where I was like, ah, the people that are there are still doing the same things, still the same people.
2
SPEAKER_00
Different mindsets, stuck in a ways, or whatever, yeah.
2
SPEAKER_02
And I have noticed, too, a trend, and I m curious, when you go back to Ohio, if you stay where you grew up, do you kind of revert to your old self?
2
SPEAKER_00
A little bit, yeah.
2
SPEAKER_00
I really love it though.
2
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, I do, because I ll hang out at the restaurants and I ll just talk to the people just like I m there.
2
SPEAKER_00
You know, like I m from there.
2
SPEAKER_02
Yeah.
2
SPEAKER_02
It was funny though, because whenever I would go home, like in college, I d find myself sleeping on the couch again and watching MTV and eating ramen noodles.
2
SPEAKER_02
Things that were not a part of who I was, but there was just this comfort, like this is what I do.
2
SPEAKER_02
I never thought I d move back home and I had this vision
2
SPEAKER_02
After our second loss, I hired someone to help me unpack the grief because I was
2
SPEAKER_02
Skipped like denial and went straight to anger after our second loss So just was like what is wrong with me?
2
SPEAKER_02
Why is this happening?
2
SPEAKER_02
You know, I was very public about her first loss and felt like there was purpose there Yes, the second one you were like, this is yeah creation and anger.
2
SPEAKER_02
Yeah, and I was like, I got a lesson already I don t need this again, right and I was like praying to God like Where is your redemption song because I want to like prove how great you are and now you ve let me down again and like I don t even know where to go from here and I hired this person to like
2
SPEAKER_02
help me unpack my grief because I was like, I m angry, I hate my body, I don t know what to do.
2
SPEAKER_02
And she like led me through this exercise and we were like sitting together and we would get on the phone once a week and every time I wanted to like hit ignore, you know, like I was just like, didn t wanna do the call.
2
SPEAKER_02
Yeah, cause I was just like, I know this is gonna suck.
2
SPEAKER_02
And we re like on the phone and just like, okay, we re gonna do a little exercise and I want for you to close your eyes and like breathe.
2
SPEAKER_02
And her name is Erin Treloar.
2
SPEAKER_02
And she runs a really cool Instagram called Raw Beauty Talks.
2
SPEAKER_02
And it s all about like coming back to your body.
2
SPEAKER_02
And so she s like having me breathe.
2
SPEAKER_02
And she s like, I want for you to envision like the most vibrant version of yourself.
2
SPEAKER_02
Like you are happy and energized and alive.
2
SPEAKER_02
And it didn t just stop at like the vision.
2
SPEAKER_02
She s like, you know, like put your fingers in your finger slots, like step into your feet.
2
SPEAKER_02
Like I want for you to be there and like feel what it feels to like be fully alive and to enjoy your life.
2
SPEAKER_02
And she said this line and it was like, like a dial on a stereo.
2
SPEAKER_02
I want for you to turn your intuition up and turn the noise of the world down.
2
SPEAKER_02
And I was like envisioning all of this.
2
SPEAKER_02
And in the vision, I saw this little girl and pancakes and a Persian rug.
2
SPEAKER_02
And I was wearing jeans and a white linen shirt.
2
SPEAKER_02
And I opened my eyes after the vision.
2
SPEAKER_02
I was like bawling.
2
SPEAKER_02
And I said to her, she goes, you know, what came up for you?
2
SPEAKER_02
And I was like, I think we have to move.
2
SPEAKER_02
And she was like, what do you mean?
2
SPEAKER_02
And I was like, I love the house we re in, but there s this bedroom and it was always gonna be our baby s bedroom.
2
SPEAKER_02
I get so emotional, but then I m like, every time I walk by it, I just think about what hasn t happened.
2
SPEAKER_02
And I was like, I just, this vision of like this long table and like this rug and this baby, and like, I see it.
2
SPEAKER_02
And I was like, I think we ve got to move.
2
SPEAKER_02
And that day, because I m a quick action taker.
2
SPEAKER_00
Literally.
2
SPEAKER_02
I get on Zillow and I type in Duluth, Minnesota.
2
SPEAKER_02
And Drew and I had never talked about moving home.
2
SPEAKER_02
Like it was like, maybe we ll move to Minneapolis someday.
2
SPEAKER_02
Like, you know, kind of stay in the city.
2
SPEAKER_00
Where were you living at this time?
2
SPEAKER_02
We were in a really small town in Wisconsin called Fort Atkinson.
2
SPEAKER_02
And we had great friends and stuff, but we didn t have the support of a family.
2
SPEAKER_02
And I found this house on Zillow and I text my family text thread as a joke and say, maybe this will be the Kutcher Craftsman.
2
SPEAKER_02
Like it was this beautiful home in Minnesota.
2
SPEAKER_02
We had never talked about it.
2
SPEAKER_02
Drew is out on a run and his phone starts blowing up because my family s like, move home.
3
SPEAKER_00
Oh my God, he s like, what?
3
SPEAKER_00
We never even talked about this.
3
SPEAKER_02
Yeah, he gets home and he s like, what is going on in your family text thread?
3
SPEAKER_02
Like, it s going crazy.
3
SPEAKER_02
And I was like, did you see the listing?
3
SPEAKER_02
He s like, what listing?
3
SPEAKER_02
And I was like, I saw this house in Minnesota and I thought he would be like, you know, maybe three years from now.
3
SPEAKER_02
And he, and he was like, oh, we can do that.
3
SPEAKER_02
And I was like, what?
3
SPEAKER_02
And you know, it s crazy because I didn t necessarily move because of the vision, but it was like the first thing where I was like,
3
SPEAKER_02
You know, where we are is not working for me.
3
SPEAKER_02
The craziest part is this, Lewis.
3
SPEAKER_02
We didn t move for like seven, eight months.
3
SPEAKER_02
The day after we moved in, I took a positive pregnancy test.
3
SPEAKER_00
Wow.
3
SPEAKER_02
It was literally, I always say I m like, it s like I had to move home.
3
SPEAKER_02
and be grounded at home.
3
SPEAKER_02
It just felt like this crazy moment where it was like, I m home and I m ready and this is it.
3
SPEAKER_00
And that next day you moved in.
3
SPEAKER_02
That s crazy.
3
SPEAKER_02
It s crazy.
3
SPEAKER_00
When was this?
3
SPEAKER_02
April 1st of 2017.
3
SPEAKER_02
Oh my gosh.
3
SPEAKER_02
Or 2018, yeah.
3
SPEAKER_00
So it was like... It s like right after the mastermind that, yeah, it was that next year.
3
SPEAKER_02
And it was like... And here s the thing that s so wild about my journey because, you know, one in four women experiences pregnancy loss, is that when you re in it, I mean, it is dark.
3
SPEAKER_00
I can imagine.
3
SPEAKER_02
And I often think about it s like if you were like walking through like a warehouse and it s just like pitch black.
3
SPEAKER_02
and you re literally just like inching step by step, like you don t know where you re going.
3
SPEAKER_02
And it s like, you just, you have a flashlight, so you can only see like directly in front of you.
3
SPEAKER_02
And once you get through it, it s like somebody turned the lights on and you see where you were and why you were there.
3
SPEAKER_02
And I hate the line, like everything happens for a reason, because when you are in it, there is zero reason why, yeah, there is no reason why that happened.
3
SPEAKER_02
But our like three year waiting season,
3
SPEAKER_02
I can see now with hindsight was required for me to build a life that supported what I was waiting for.
3
SPEAKER_02
When I first was pregnant with my first pregnancy, I was shooting 25 weddings a year.
3
SPEAKER_02
I remember we were in Hawaii and I looked up the due date and I was like,
3
SPEAKER_02
I can t be due then, I have like four more weddings.
3
SPEAKER_02
I m gonna like have to cancel on these.
3
SPEAKER_00
Like I literally was like.
3
SPEAKER_00
It s like you were sabotaging your body.
3
SPEAKER_02
It was like I didn t know how I would do it.
3
SPEAKER_02
You know what I mean?
3
SPEAKER_00
Your body s like we re not gonna let you do it then.
3
SPEAKER_02
Yeah, like it s crazy.
3
SPEAKER_02
And then the second time around was a huge wake up call because I found out that I had lost the baby but my body was still pregnant and I had to show up and shoot a wedding the next day.
3
SPEAKER_00
Oh my gosh.
3
SPEAKER_02
And so I had to pretend like I was the happy, you know, the happy wedding photographer.
3
SPEAKER_02
And so when I look at those losses, they were massive teachers in my life.
3
SPEAKER_02
But by the time I was pregnant for the third time, I had built a life where I was able to move and I wasn t tied to anything and I had no clients to answer to and I had built that.
3
SPEAKER_02
And so there s this quote that I heard from a preacher and it s like, sometimes
3
SPEAKER_02
the season of waiting is just as important as what it is that we re waiting for.
3
SPEAKER_02
I think a lot of people find themselves in seasons of waiting and it s really easy to want to like twiddle your thumbs and just sit there, right?
3
SPEAKER_02
Like just wait and wait and wait.
3
SPEAKER_02
But I think we waste it and it s like, I worked while I waited and I don t mean like I hustled.
3
SPEAKER_02
I worked towards the life I wanted for when the time came.
3
SPEAKER_02
And it was so evident when it happened.
3
SPEAKER_00
That s inspiring.
3
SPEAKER_02
crazy story and it s one that I don t tell often and there s a line in my book that says like okay I know this story is wild but like you don t have to move zip codes to start living more into yourself.
3
SPEAKER_02
One of the things I realized after that vision was, my vision was jeans and a white linen shirt.
3
SPEAKER_02
And I looked down and I was wearing sweatpants and like a college t-shirt.
3
SPEAKER_02
And I was like, you know what?
3
SPEAKER_02
Maybe I just start putting on the jeans.
3
SPEAKER_02
Maybe I don t have the baby and the pancakes and the Persian rug, but maybe I can just start dressing the way that I would dress if I was vibrant and alive and healthy.
3
SPEAKER_02
Maybe I just take a tiny step of becoming.
3
SPEAKER_02
I can t control the outcome of having a baby, but I can control showing up as a more vibrant version of myself right now.
3
SPEAKER_00
Absolutely.
3
SPEAKER_00
You said during the season, the dark season, that it s hard to think about, this is all happening for a reason, right?
3
SPEAKER_00
What do you think we can think about during a dark season?
3
SPEAKER_00
If someone deals with anything dark in their life,
3
SPEAKER_00
what should they, how should they be processing and thinking about it as opposed to, oh, well, maybe this is happening for a reason.
3
SPEAKER_02
I don t think that, yeah, I agree.
3
SPEAKER_02
I don t think that language is helpful when you re in it, right?
3
SPEAKER_00
Right.
3
SPEAKER_02
Because there are so many tragedies and things that shouldn t happen or that you shouldn t have to experience.
3
SPEAKER_02
There s this line in my book that talks about grief because we talk about it.
3
SPEAKER_02
And it says that a lot of times people want to move on from grief.
3
SPEAKER_02
You re waiting for life to feel normal again.
3
SPEAKER_02
You re waiting to feel like yourself.
3
SPEAKER_02
And I say grief isn t something that we re meant to move on from.
3
SPEAKER_02
It s something we re meant to move with.
3
SPEAKER_02
We re meant to pick it up and carry it with us, even if we re inching forward.
3
SPEAKER_02
Like we re getting stronger because of the things we ve been through.
3
SPEAKER_02
You re not meant to come out on the other side of grief the same person you were when you went into it, right?
3
SPEAKER_02
Like what a wasted opportunity for tragedy.
3
SPEAKER_02
And in my life, loss has probably been my greatest teacher, right?
3
SPEAKER_02
Like I look at those like lost pregnancies and I m like, they were like somehow like looking out for me.
3
SPEAKER_02
And it doesn t mean that it wasn t hard or that I literally think about those babies every single day.
3
SPEAKER_02
But if I wasted that and like didn t use it, that would be a real loss.
3
SPEAKER_00
That s the tragedy.
3
SPEAKER_00
What was the habit or the switch from one year to the next that started to bring in more abundance financially?
3
SPEAKER_00
Not in an incremental 20%, but it was like, boom, this was 5x, 10x.
3
SPEAKER_00
What was that habit or mindset shift for you that started to develop more income?
3
SPEAKER_01
So there s like the science and the art kind of both sides.
3
SPEAKER_01
So like the science side is just the leverage.
3
SPEAKER_01
So the amount of money you make is proportional to the amount of leverage you employ in your life.
3
SPEAKER_01
And so, you know, four types of leverage.
3
SPEAKER_01
This is not mine, this is Naval Ravikant s, but I ll just say that.
3
SPEAKER_01
So you ve got labor.
3
SPEAKER_01
I use four C s because it s easier for me to remember.
3
SPEAKER_01
He says labor, I say collaboration.
3
SPEAKER_01
So funny that you said that.
3
SPEAKER_01
But it s just getting other people to basically use their time, right, for your cause.
3
SPEAKER_01
The second level of leverage is other people s money, is getting people to invest in your thing.
3
SPEAKER_01
And then the next two are, so these two are permissionless, the first ones.
3
SPEAKER_01
You need to get someone s permission to work for you, and you need to get someone s permission to give you their money.
3
SPEAKER_01
The other two are permissionless, so you can do them on your own.
3
SPEAKER_01
One is media, which is what you have here, because the cost of making one video and having one person see it versus a million people see it is the same cost.
3
SPEAKER_01
And then the other is code.
3
SPEAKER_01
So I say content and code, so those are my four Cs.
3
SPEAKER_01
So collaboration, capital, content, code.
3
SPEAKER_01
And those are not binaries.
3
SPEAKER_01
Am I using other people?
3
SPEAKER_01
Am I not using other people?
3
SPEAKER_01
It s to what extent am I using other people?
3
SPEAKER_01
Am I, do I use other people s money?
3
SPEAKER_01
Yes or no?
3
SPEAKER_01
No.
3
SPEAKER_01
It s how much of other people s money am I using?
3
SPEAKER_01
And so each of these are continuums, not binaries.
3
SPEAKER_01
So like somebody could just use other people s money and be a billionaire because of the extent they use it.
3
SPEAKER_01
But those are the types of levers that exist.
3
SPEAKER_01
And so as my income went up, it was by proportion of the amount of leverage I was employing.
3
SPEAKER_00
Really, how are you, what of these four were you leveraging the most?
3
SPEAKER_01
So in the beginning, I had no leverage because I was an employee, right?
3
SPEAKER_01
I was using my own time.
3
SPEAKER_01
The next thing that I started doing was I became self-employed, right?
3
SPEAKER_01
So I had a little online training business that I started in between my quitting my job and starting the gym.
3
SPEAKER_01
And so when I started the gym, I started getting labor was the first.
3
SPEAKER_00
Other people, yeah.
3
SPEAKER_01
Not a lot of it, but I got some of it.
3
SPEAKER_01
And so that gave me that first next tier.
3
SPEAKER_01
I went from making.
3
SPEAKER_00
Part-time interns.
3
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, I went from $5,000 a month to I think about $30,000 a month.
3
SPEAKER_01
So that was the big jump.
3
SPEAKER_01
It was just, I had a team.
3
SPEAKER_01
I made a small team, but I had a team.
3
SPEAKER_00
Now that s overall in revenue.
3
SPEAKER_00
That s not your take on that.
3
SPEAKER_00
That s in sales.
3
SPEAKER_00
You might have been losing money already.
3
SPEAKER_01
I was probably making $20,000 a month at that point.
3
SPEAKER_00
For yourself?
3
SPEAKER_00
Yes, for me.
3
SPEAKER_00
After the expenses, the team and everything.
3
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, that was then.
3
SPEAKER_00
What did that feel like going from five to 20?
3
SPEAKER_00
Did that make you feel something different?
3
SPEAKER_00
Was there a shift inside of you when you took that action?
3
SPEAKER_01
No, because for me when I started this, it was all about vanquishing my father.
3
SPEAKER_01
So it was all about...
3
SPEAKER_01
I was a Middle Eastern father, only child.
3
SPEAKER_01
So I was raised by a single dad, it was just me and him.
3
SPEAKER_01
That was it for the vast majority of my life.
3
SPEAKER_01
And so he s Middle Eastern, came here with $1,000, became a doctor, or he was a doctor, came here, learned English from watching television.
3
SPEAKER_01
You know what I mean?
3
SPEAKER_01
Has the American success story, absolutely.
3
SPEAKER_01
That s amazing.
3
SPEAKER_01
And so I was born here, though.
3
SPEAKER_01
Speaking another language, too?
3
SPEAKER_01
French was my first, actually.
3
SPEAKER_01
There s a whole story around it, but anyways.
3
SPEAKER_01
French is your, how many other languages do you speak?
3
SPEAKER_01
That s the best one.
3
SPEAKER_01
I ll just leave it at that.
3
SPEAKER_01
But all of it was about making him proud.
4
SPEAKER_00
Right.
4
SPEAKER_00
Um, that s what you did.
4
SPEAKER_01
You set out to do that s what I was trying to do And then I think that throughout my like adolescence I realized that it was something that was always gonna be withheld from me So it didn t matter what it was.
4
SPEAKER_01
The goalpost would always move so that we never be proud enough, right?
4
SPEAKER_01
And it was just and it was because he wanted the most out of me And so like if I got let s say, you know a 99 on a test it wasn t congratulations It s what you get wrong.
4
SPEAKER_01
Oh, man, right and there was always what it was.
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That s okay.
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Like I m yeah, we re cool I m very happy with my life.
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Yeah
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And I realized that, and so this desire to gain approval turned into a very deep anger.
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Towards the world, him, yourself, other people?
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Mostly him.
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Mostly him, and most, like him and myself probably split.
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Probably 50-50, you know what I mean?
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And so it was like my earlier, I ll say quote, success,
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was purely fueled by rage.
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It was rage, you know what I mean?
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I was in the same boat, yeah.
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But there was probably some element of me that almost enjoyed the suffering because I just would get in the space.
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When you ask how did I feel by getting the extra $20,000 a month,
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First, my goal was to make as much as my dad, and then it was to make more than my dad, and then it was to make more than my dad had ever made in his whole life.
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And so once I had done that, I wanted the success to be unquestionable.
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There couldn t be a but, there couldn t be an asterisk, it had to be so undeniable
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that vanquishing was the word, right?
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And so for a five year period after I quit my job, my dad did not support.
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He didn t support me quitting my job.
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Why not?
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Even though you were off making money and building a business.
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Because he didn t, he s like, what are you, a gym owner?
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He s like, you went to Vanderbilt, you were on a management consulting career, you got above Harvard s mid-score for your GMATs.
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You could have had an incredible career.
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Of course.
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Gym owner doesn t sell well in cocktail parties.
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He s figuring himself out.
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Yeah, let s do this little gym as a side thing.
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Yeah, yeah, yeah, he ll snap out of it.
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And I mean, I made plenty of mistakes too when I had the gym.
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So it wasn t like all sunshine and rainbows for me.
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I had a lot of mess ups that I did.
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I got in bad partnerships.
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I mean, all the things that you could possibly do.
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And over that five year period of me scaling to six locations with my facilities, at the end of that whole thing, I ended up losing it all.
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Really?
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Yeah, lost everything.
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Six locations, lost the whole business.
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Yeah, well I sold five of them, I shut one of them down.
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Wow.
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Because I wanted to start doing this gym launch thing, which would be like flying around doing turnarounds.
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Because I started doing, that s when I met Layla.
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You find a gym that s kind of like not succeeding, you turn it around.
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And you would fly in.
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And you do a makeover.
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Exactly, bar rescue, same exact thing.
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Wow, should ve done a TV show with it.
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Believe me The many regrets I have right that would have been an awesome one.
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We did 32 turnarounds.
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Wow.
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It was almost two years.
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Yeah, and so We we started doing that.
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Anyways, I lost everything Because I took all the sale money and I put it into my last location and then the partner that I had there Siphoned the money out Because I was like, yeah, like well, I ll put all the money from the sale of these gyms into this thing like this doesn t matter It was my own mistake is on me But it was even then it was you know
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We ll see how this isn t real.
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And then once I started, once GymWatch really started taking off, it wasn t until I think we did like 17 million in EBITDA, like profit take home.
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In one year.
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In one year.
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That my dad, I was 27.
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That s crazy.
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Yeah.
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My, my dad, my dad called me and he s like, are you sitting down?
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I remember like at this point, we were like not talking too much, you know what I mean?
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Maybe every few months it d be like a five minute phone call.
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And so I was like, sure.
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Yeah, I got time.
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What s up?
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And he s like, you re going to want to hear this.
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And I was like, okay, what?
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And he s like, I m sorry.
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And it was the first time he d ever apologized to me in my life.
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And um, what s interesting to me though, is that it didn t feel like anything.
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I didn t care.
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Why not?
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because I had stopped caring about what he thought about me a long time ago.
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And it was like when I quit my job was the day that I accepted dying to my father.
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Because very much to me at that point was, I was really, really sad at that point in my life when I had the job, because I had really done everything that he had wanted me to do.
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I finished Vanderbilt in three years.
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As president of fraternity, I had won writing awards.
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I d done like a bunch, like I d done everything.
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You know what I mean?
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I was vice president of the powerlifting team.
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Every club, all the stuff I could possibly do.
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While still being president and did it in three years, right?
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And got a management consulting job that was like a good job.
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had all the credibility and it just, I knew it wasn t enough.
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And I knew that.
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And so I knew that the choice for me was that I either had to die to him or I had to die to myself.
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Wow.
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And that was ultimately like the choice that, that I put in front of myself.
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And that was whenever I was like,
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maybe I should just, I was like, die to him or die to you.
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And so that was what gave me the confidence to break that, and then I physically moved, because I couldn t be in the same area.
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So I actually.
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You were 23 at this point?
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Yeah.
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So I called my dad when I was like in Ohio, and I m from Baltimore, so I m like, how?
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That s where I m from.
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It was for you.
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I called him when I was there, and I was like, hey by the way, I m doing the gym thing.
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He was like, okay, it s like, why don t you come over?
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We ll talk about it.
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Because he knew that if he came over with enough battering, I would be like, fine.
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I know this is a smart thing.
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I ll take the, you know, I ll apply to, you know, Booth and Harvard or whatever.
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And I ll get the, I ll do that whole thing.
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And that, because that was a cycle.
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I just kept doing that.
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And I was just like, no, I m not going to do it.
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So I was like, well, I can t, I m in Ohio.
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He was like, what do you mean?
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And then the tone totally shifted.
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And he was like, you always do these crazy things.
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And you re always like, he s like, you re never balanced.
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It s always extreme with you.
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There s no middle path, blah, blah, blah.
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And so anyways, I, you know, I did that five years gyms, lost it all anyways, and then started gym lunch.
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And then that s when, and then that really took off.
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And then, but when he called me and he apologized, and this is where I like, you know, I m ashamed of myself, but like, I could have just let it lie and been like, thanks, appreciate it.
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You know, cool.
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Instead, I said, I was like, you know, when people get up on stage and they re like, hey, you know, they get awards and they re like, hey, mom and dad, I just wanna say thanks so much for always believing in me.
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I was like, I won t say that.
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I was like, because you never did.
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I was like, the only time you accepted me, I was like, is once every other person on this planet had accepted it too.
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Oh my gosh, man.
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That s intense.
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On the phone, you said that?
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What do you say to that?
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He said, well, we ll see how long it lasts.
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Oh my gosh.
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So he was still kind of in competition with you.
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And to be fair, when he apologized, he said, you know, I m sorry, he said, but in my defense, if it had been in my time, I would have been right.
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And so, you know, but all that to say, like, I should have just said, like, appreciate the apology, you know, thank you.
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Because, you know, Tony Robbins said something that I thought was really impactful was like, for the vast majority of my life, it s been like, how my father shaped me or whatever.
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but rather than thinking like, what can I use from this dynamic?
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Like, what gift do I have?
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Yeah, like from his mother, kind of like beating him or whatever.
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Yeah, exactly.
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Like, what do I, like, what do I, you know, they re blaming for the good, right?
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And so like, I have so many things to blame for good from that.
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And I m very, very happy with my life.
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That is why $20,000 a month didn t feel significant to me because the goal that I had, my expectations weren t to make money.
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My expectation was that I had to make more than he had ever made.
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And so I had a very big vacuum to drive towards, which I think in a lot of ways was a gift because I blew past 100,000 a month, 500,000 a month, a million a month.
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I blew past those things because it was never about having enough money for me.
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It was about feeding this monster.
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But once I got there, I realized that what I had done was set up a game to win by my father s rules.
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And so then I- And you could never win.
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Right.
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And to be fair, would I wanna win a game that wasn t for me?
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And it was making you suffer.
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You re playing the wrong game.
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I m playing his game.
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And so I did win, but I won at his game, not mine.
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And so that was kind of what I think making that realization was kind of the slow shift that happened from there.
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So when you won the financial game or the game of like, I ve made more than you in a month or a year than you ve made your whole lifetime.
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How did that make you feel, and when did you realize you needed to start playing a different game, and what would that game become?
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Okay, there was three questions there.
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What was the first one?
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How did it make you feel the moment you crossed the finish line of the game of making so much more than he d ever made in a short amount of time?
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Relief, because we actually got our relationship back.
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Not like, you know, I wouldn t say we have like sunshine and rain, but like we have a functioning relationship I would say it s role-based like I m a father, you know, yes, but what happened was we are both very like strong personalities and it wasn t until I Think that he accepted me as often our relationship that we were able to kind of like move forward again
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Because before that, my dad s, he s a doctor, so he s always had decent money.
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And I wanted to be beholden to no one, including him.
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I didn t want his money.
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I didn t want anything.
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And so I think I had to establish my own, I had to really plant my own flag to be seen as a man in his eyes.
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And so I think once that happened, I think I thought there was some level of like, there s no conflict here anymore.
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And that wraps up our special side hustle
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