You Have to Get Uncomfortable and MOVE
2009. Struggling actor working on a TV show. Told yall about that. Not in the TV show, I was basically scenery, but it was a job.
My buddy actually was the star of the TV show and I’ve been known to do things a little spontaneously at times. Very grateful to have a wife that supports that, that puts up with that. My buddy on the TV show had been shooting in Los Angeles and was actually moving to New York and I was going to be going out to LA to visit a friend, do some acting training, and he said, “Hey, my car’s still in LA. Would you want to bring it to me in New York City?”
My immediate thought was, “Maybe. Can I take my time with it?” and he was like, “Yeah.”
Now, I had started my business and in that time when I was on the TV show we had downtime in the green room, that’s when I had started my hustle on social media. Pretty new. Back then, what I could do was literally go on Facebook and search who had P90X in their profile and jump in and start a conversation because none of you guys were on there yet.
We’ve heard all the last two days, right? Early land grab. Go be somewhere before other people. It’s so easy when you’re first. Right now, it’s like, “Oh, well, everybody’s here. There’s other opportunities. Where aren’t people?” And all I wanted to do was go have conversations.
So I had a little bit of success with the business, but it really wasn’t where I wanted to be and I’d seen other people come in since I had started passing me and it was a theme in my life. Again I am failing at something! Because by this point in my life I’d already dropped out of college three times trying to pursue an acting career. Three maxed out credit cards. Way over $60,000 in debt. Bringing in no income to my marriage. And here I go again with the same pattern.
I’m watching somebody pass me again. I’m watching people have success.
Self Pity or Action, It’s Your Choice
And I’m starting to see that the common denominator is this guy and all sorts of self doubt so I can wallow or I can keep taking action. I can feel sorry for myself or I can just keep swimming not really knowing what direction I was going in, but I would know I would just keep moving.
So, Los Angeles, I have an opportunity to jump in a car, haul a couple of my buddies that are in here today with me (and thank you for being my friend this many years later). In 2009, I was like, “I don’t know how everybody else is building their business,” because very early on in this business, there wasn’t this. I may have 10 guys here that are in my organization, but that’s not what this is about.
I had this conversation with Mark this morning. Early on in this business, this was a very ‘hide your answers’ business. “You won’t know my playbook. You won’t know how I build my team because this is mine and I’m going to protect it.”
The last two days has been the absolute opposite of that of everybody saying, “Here’s my answers. Please take them.” Because what I think what has happened is, “If I share my playbook with you and you have success, you’re not taking from me.”
It’s not a limited amount. It’s not that this is how much success is available in life and if I pour some in your cup, there’s less for my cup. That’s how too many people have been running this business and that’s not the case at all. You’ve heard over and over and over and over, “We’re just getting started.”
So I didn’t have anybody that was willing to share a playbook with me early on, but again it was, “Do I feel sorry for myself that people are passing me? Do I want for somebody to come save me? Do I wait for somebody to give me the secret answer? Or do I step into that role and say, ‘I don’t know what the hell I’m doing, but I’m doing something.'”
Stop waiting for everything to be perfect
So we load up in a car and this was the idea. The idea was, “Um, sure, let’s drive to New York, but let’s stop at a few places along the way and we’ll fit clubs.” Fit clubs was kind of a big thing then so I was like, “Well, let’s do that! It’s working for other people. So we’ll do fit clubs in LA and Phoenix and El Paso and Dallas and Memphis maybe and we’ll end in New York City. That’ll be awesome and we’ll document it along the way. We don’t know what the hell we’re doing on social media…” I totally think that if we’d done this now, wow…
Did we know what we were doing? Nope.
Did we have the perfect plan? Did we have it all laid out? Did we know exactly what was going to go on? Nope.
Did I know that I couldn’t afford it at all? Did I know that the people that were with me could less afford it than I could at the time as well? Why? Just cause I was willing to max out another credit card. It wasn’t that I had the money, but if I was going to bet on something, I was going to bet on me. So we loaded up the car.
I met Dave Ward through this because as I was trying to plan out what this path was going to be, I was like, “Oh! Phoenix! That’s like the hub of the Fit Club Network. I’m going to do a Fit Club, fucking A, I’m going there! We’ll just get a bunch of Coaches and it’ll be awesome!”
So I’m sending emails along the way, “Hey, we’re going to come there. Why don’t we team up and make a big thing?” Because from the very beginning what I loved about this community was that it was a community. I was attracted to this not because I was looking for a business, I was looking for a family because mine was very torn and there was a lot of pain involved.
Did we know what we were doing? Did we have the perfect plan? Did we have it all laid out? Did we know exactly what was going to go on? Nope.
This one, loved me before I loved me. Saw something in me before I saw something in me so I just assumed, I figured everybody thought of it that way. “Cool! We’re just one big happy family! We’re all going to make sure each other wants to win.”
So, Phoenix was really our first stop. At LA we got together, went and met up Tony Horton on the beach, did a little work out, but the first ‘Who’s going to show up?” was Phoenix and I sent this Dave Ward guy that I saw, “Well, they got a giant team!” All I see is that he and Monica are fit clubs for days. They know what they’re doing, maybe I can learn from them. Awesome!
Cool. Well, we’re going to set this up. We’re, not the ones making money. Not the big Fit Club Network team. We, the we’re on a credit card we can’t afford team, we’ll pay for the hotel, we got the projector, we’re bringing everything in the world to this thing. We got a film crew and we show up to this hotel and nobody shows. It’s me and my crew in my road trip that we just did a workout together then found a bar on the roof of that hotel and just got blind drunk. That’s basically what happened.
Somewhere in the midst of that night, I think about on drink three, I think I found a laptop and I found Dave Ward’s email address. “Yo, dude.” I was mad, I was really mad. “Thanks for helping.” Something along those lines.
It’s like that bad drunk text you send some girl or something. It was that. It was totally that email which I think was responded with something equally as, “Fuck off,” in a very lawyer way of doing that. It was much more flowery.
Nobody showed, but the road trip continued. To be really honest with you guys, it really wasn’t much better at any of the other stops along the way. We didn’t really know what we were doing. I didn’t know how to market. It really does amaze me sitting backstage as I was thinking about this story going, “Wow, in 2009, I couldn’t get 3 people to show up in a hotel in 5 different cities and there’s 500 men sitting in here.”
Now, had I waiting to know how to get 500 guys in a room, do you think this ever happens? No.
You don’t need permission to live your dreams
So, wait till I know how to do something or jump into action and figure it out along the way?
It’s been well documented and I’ve kind of shared my story along the way that waiting for permission, waiting for somebody else to step into a leadership role, waiting to think that somebody else was going to come build my business for me, or that somebody was going to finally shared that one secret phrase or that one secret script or, “OH! It’s this website that everybody’s going to that they’re not telling me about.”
It finally dawned on me that nobody’s coming to save my life or save my business. So I’m going to take action and figure it out along the way.
Not more planning.
Not more, “Well, it could be this. Well, we could do it this way. This onboarding system…”
It was just, “Let’s dive in.”
We keep getting back to the theory of what is the secret sauce? It’s not a tactic. It’s not a script. It’s not a system.
Grew up in West Texas and in West Texas, my family had this generational swimming pool that my grandmother and my mom and then I all learned how to swim and I think of it this way. I think of this family this way. It was The Seahorse in Lubbock, TX and I took swimming lessons as a kid. I was probably about 5 or 6 years old, about the age that my son is now, and you would take swimming lessons and at the end of the lesson you would have this big ceremony.
If this was the shallow end of the pool and there was a rope that went all the way here and then a rope that came back down this direction here and in this middle section, was the deepest end of the pool with the diving board here. They would say over the loud speaker and interrupt everybody playing at the pool and say, “Excuse me, we have a new crop of soon to be graduates of these swimming lessons. Please give them your attention. Thank you very much.”
Which meant that everybody shut down and looked at the diving board. All I remember seeing was deep water. The dangerous end of the pool that I was never supposed to go into (that’s what my mom had told me). What you had to do to graduate was that you had to go to the edge of the diving board, jump in, and swim to the other side. Everybody watching.
Sink or Swim
Because you signed up for swimming classes so you’ve told people that what you want to do is learn how to swim. The goal is for you to swim. You got your training over in the safe part, but now here it is. Are you going to graduate and learn how to swim or are you always going to stay in the kiddie pool with your floaties on? Which is what I had done to that point.
What happened was, you got probably a ten second count to make that decision on your own. To go to the edge of the diving board, jump in, and go to swim, but at the end of that ten seconds, that super friendly, awesome, rock-star swimming teacher of yours that has been so supportive and so friendly and so helpful became brutal. Because at 10, do you know what they did? “Sorry, Jimmy. It’s 10.”
There you go and you hit the water and panic takes over. All you feel is cold water. Action. Massive action. Every lesson has gone out the window. “This is your technique. You want to inhale and exhale.” It’s, “Dude. Go. Figure it out.”
But somewhere in your gut, you also know that the people watching me aren’t going to let me drown. Once you calm down in the midst of it and you start swimming and that massive action, is it pretty? No. Are you moving? Absolutely, because there’s urgency. It’s life. I’m like, “I’m going to die or I gotta do something.” Your’e standing on this diving board right now guys.
We keep getting back to the theory of what is the secret sauce? It’s not a tactic. It’s not a script. It’s not a system.
If you look at the history of my career, that road trip happened, ended in New York, I think we may have signed two Coaches. It cost us a ton of money. No results. I wasn’t attached to the result. I was attached to the activity because without that road trip, anything else in my career after I don’t think happens because I put in sweat equity and I was just willing to fail and it was! It was a colossal failure and I was a terrible leader. I yelled at them half the time. I got really pissed off about stuff. I had a fuse that was about this short. I was awful.
I go back and think about that time and I’m like, “Thank God they’re just still my friends.”
Stop over complicating it
I remember the time that I went to one of my first Summits and I was just a Diamond Coach. I’m watching my wife continue to go to a job that she hates and somewhere amidst that Summit as I’m talking to people to people and social proof around me, I understand what my first quarterly bonus would look like if I just got it done. In order to get that, I knew we needed to get another Diamond and it was like the heavens parted and I said, “We could bring in this much more money if I just did this? Do I got that clear?” Yeah, you need one Diamond, you’ll earn this much more money. It was like, “Oh, I’m here. What I need is there,” and it was just clear as day.
I don’t know what it was before and why I overcomplicated it, but it was like, “Okay. So that just means, 8 coaches. Boom.” Coming out of that Summit, I built my wife’s account to Diamond in a week. A week! Why? Because there was urgency. Because I had just jumped in the water and just started massive action. What did that look like? Did I create the perfect email funnel? Did I do just the right things on Facebook? Did I know what the system was? Did I know all this amazing shit that you’ve heard about over the last two days? No!
I knew I wanted to help my wife and so I was going to talk to every person I knew until I got from here to there in a week because I knew that was my deadline to hit that bonus. It wasn’t a ton of money. It’s not changing our zip code, but it took some stress off of somebody that I loved. It changed my life a little bit.
Throughout my career, there have been these weird glass ceilings that have come up at Diamond and 2 star and 5 and 10 and God knows 15 that I just need clarity to go, “Okay, where do I want to go? Let me see if I can find one person that is just half as excited about this as I am. Let’s go. Massive action. Let’s figure it out on the way.”
Because guys, we could sit here for 3 more days, we could have Facebook Ad trainings and we could do email funnel trainings and it’s stuff we talked about before we were setting this up. We were like, “Well, what do these guys need?”
Urgency.
Set and abide by deadlines
Urgency is the key. Urgency doesn’t happen without a date of when things are going to get done and why. What’s tied to that date? I remember the first time I ever decided to do a fitness photoshoot. It had nothing to do with the Beachbody Challenge. I used to be 100 lbs overweight. I saw some of my buddies…it really was my buddy Tommy Mygrant and his amazing P90X transformation. I was like, “I wonder what I could do if I really got serious about my nutrition and stuff.”
So you know what I did? I didn’t figure out what my macros were or anything. The first thing I did was pick up the phone for a photographer friends of mine and said, “Six weeks from right now, I’m going to be in nothing but underwear and you’re going to take my pictures. Now take my money.”
I put skin in the game. I put some urgency. You think I was tempted to drink a beer or eat a piece of pizza for the next six weeks? No. I was scared shitless to be in front of that camera. Same thing in your business guys.
You’re too comfortable where you are right now. Where you are right now, you’ve decided is good enough and if that’s cool with you, that’s cool. That’s your life, that’s your business, but what I had to do was look in the mirror and if I said, “I’m building this business to change my life to no longer be a victim, to no longer let somebody else determine my income or what I can do with my free time.” If I say, “I’m going to build this business to impact my family,” my wife at the time, the kids that we didn’t have yet, to say, “Okay. If I’m really going to do this, do my actions match what I say that I want or have I become comfortable?”
You have to make your situation so uncomfortable it forces you into the deep end of the pool.
So think about it right now. What is that thing when you think about your current situation, and guys, you may look at me or some of these other guys up there and think, “Well, you’re not uncomfortable anymore.” Ask my wife. I’m crazy uncomfortable every day. Because the next level creates a different kind of uncomfortability for me.
So, right now, what’s that thing you’re like, “What makes you uncomfortable?” So uncomfortable that you’re like, “This is scary!” The pool is scary. I’m not going to lie, it’s deep. There’s nobody. Your floaties aren’t on. None of us are going home with you. Nobody’s going to be there to rah rah you and make sure, “Did you do this?” the next day.
Motivation is overrated. Get moving.
I’m stoked you’re super motivated right now, but I don’t care. You’ve got to wake up on Monday and say, “Man. Life’s okay, but this sucks.” Something about this right here sucks to get me here and not the one more training and not that one more video and not one more planning session or one more brainstorming meeting with your friends because we had a great lunch and talked about all the shit we’re gonna do.
That’s what this weekend was for. This is over. It’s action.
I told you that at the very beginning. This is not a motivational event. This is an execution event, but I can’t control that. I’ve executed the past two days. Every dude up here has executed the past two days for you. Did you waste their time or not?
Get uncomfortable. I can’t do that for you. I can’t make you uncomfortable. I can’t make you so fed up with your current situation that you want to do more.
So the choice is yours. You’re at the diving board guys. Two days. You have all the technique training that you know and if you wait to perfect it in the kiddie pool, you’ll never jump here.
Jump in and trust what you’ve learned. I look forward to seeing you guys getting uncomfortable.
Thank you for the past two days. Let’s get together. Get together, find people and let’s make it a great one.