You posted something a few weeks ago, and it said, half the battle in life is believing the future looks bright,
especially when nothing around you suggests it will. The easiest thing to do is to blame others, assume bad intent, and expect the worst. Those who believe the future looks bright tend to create it. How can people, when they're in that moment, that darkness, where nothing seems fair, how can they find the light? What's the alternative? It's the first question. What other choice do I have? So I I got two choices in that moment. I can sit there and think
nothing's gonna go right. Poor me. It's unfair. I cannot believe this happened. I cannot believe in and if you have that mindset, you're guaranteed to get the results that you're you're thinking. Things are not gonna work out for you. So what am I gonna do? I'm gonna sit there. I'm gonna be like, listen, at least I have this.
At least I have that. At least I got this going on. We were in the army one time in boot camp,
and me and this one guy, he just got a letter
from his wife leaving him.
And I will never forget, we're in the bunk. You know, we got sixty, seventy of us at this one floor.
And I'm looking at him, African American guy, probably 25, 26 years old. He's crying.
And I go up to him. I'm 18 years old. I said, are you good? He says, no, man. I'm not good. I said, what happened? Hands me the letter.
His wife
left him
for another guy that he knew. They were friends. So
imagine you're in a setting where you don't have access to call her for six more weeks because it's the second week of boot camp that we're in.
There is no texting.
There is no let me FaceTime her. There is no WhatsApp. This is 1997.
I joined April. I eventually got into boots. This is like first week of May, second week of May.
What do you do in a situation like that? Imagine you're running. What are you thinking about? We have imagination.
What are you visualizing as a man that your wife is hooking up with him, and what is he doing to your wife? This is your wife. She just left you.
And you have to stay focused, and you have to do push ups, and people are screaming in your face. What am I going to do about it?
Super,
super difficult for him. And I sat there and said, listen, man, can you walk? Yes. Can you talk? Yes. Can we do this? Yes. I said, look, man, let's just kind of start with that and get back at it.
To me, the idea of optimism,
you know, feeling that everything's gonna work itself out. I grew up in a very difficult environment
where I didn't have a lot to look forward to. But to me,
I look forward to one thing on the weekend. That
song,
it's NBA playoffs ninety.
NBA basketball or NBC, Ahmad Rashad,
the Lakers.
I look forward to watching a game on Saturday.
That was enthusiasm.
No matter how bad Monday or Tuesday was. So that came back to here
now growing and building a business. You always have to look forward to what's happened what's happened in the future, and that optimism will give you more chances in life. You know, I played the victim for a lot of my life, and I was in jail for for selling drugs,
and my cellmate got me into fitness.
And I remember he was asking about my story because he's like, you're gonna work out with me someday. I was in the middle of opiate detox. Horrible, horrible for weeks.
And he's like, well, what happened to you? Like, what did you do? And I'm like, my parents got divorced, kids picked on me.
He's like, no. Like, what did you do? And essentially, he was he said to me, he's like, quit being a his exact words. And I was like, what? He's like, you're blaming everybody else for your problems but yourself.
And he's like, you have the choice to change. You have two choices. Be a man, look yourself in the mirror and say you got yourself here, or be a little go cry in the corner and say, well, listen, that conversation changed my life for because for years, I was blaming the boogeyman for everything.
And it feels good because then it takes your power away. It, like, you don't have to be accountable anymore, but it's a trap that so many people fall into for years, if not decades. It's so true. It is so true. Just right now,
I came from a the second sit down I'm doing with Terrence Howard, the actor,
and this is the first time I've seen him say,
you know, his first time he went on Cosby Show.
They did his part, and Bill Cosby afterwards said, hey, man. That was a very good part. I think you could maybe be a regular here.
And then he goes and tells all his friends, hey, guys. I wanna be on Cosby. I wanna be he's 19 years old.
And then
no episode with him in it.
So he's furious. He comes back. He goes to the studio, walks in, sees Bill Cosby, says, hey, can I talk to you? He says, come into my office.
He says, I noticed you didn't use my clip. I was in Cosby, you said I'm gonna do great. He says, yeah, not everything makes it in.
He says, but you said I'm gonna be back on, you said we had something. Yeah, but my thoughts changed.
He says, but you made this promise, and what about this? He says, yeah. And I changed my mind.
So he says, from that moment when I left,
I kept blaming him for everything.
And then I realized, guess what? If you don't change your own way of doing things, you know, sometimes things are not gonna go your way. Sometimes you are doing the right things. Sometimes the other person just doesn't wanna give you that opportunity. Sometimes a client changes their minds. You'll close a big deal. You're about to get a $10,000 check, and you're all happy you're going to the bank, client calls and cancels. Now what do you do? You were already counting the bills, your car payment, your phone, your this, your that, and no. Now I changed my mind.
These things are gonna happen.
But if you think long term,
and you're able to make it past the tornado, and you take personal responsibility,
you have a fighting chance. And you have quite the transformation story as well. You were a partier. You were somebody that didn't take life too seriously. And I know when people party I'm a former drug addict, so I understand that those habits can be ingrained in you, and it can be hard to make
change because you've been doing certain things for so long. Like, how did you go from living in that, you know, that Ford Focus store you tell off Yep. Dad's heart attacks to kind of really changing things? So if you ask my friends and you say, my friends from high school,
or even my friends from army,
was Patrick a guy that smoked weed? They would tell you, Patrick never smoked weed. I never smoked weed until I was 22 years old.
I smoked weed with a girl
and a friend.
I probably smoke weed five times in my life.
Then when I was at Bally's, I worked with a guy who worked with a
cocaine guy,
and I did two lines
when I was 21, 22 years old
at a club in 3rd Street in Santa Monica,
and then I did half a pill of ecstasy.
That is it for me with drugs, just so you know. So to the average person, they'll laugh at that and say, what, you haven't tried this? No. But everybody around me, my friends, they all were into it. My deal was alcohol and women. I drank a lot. I would finish a bottle of tequila in the army every week. Literally every week, I drank a bottle of tequila. So that was my thing. We'd go in Nashville, Tennessee, party, do all this other stuff.
And then one day, you know, I I
see the life I'm living,
and I'm starting the benefit that I had is I got into reading books very early. 21, 22 years old, when I got out of the army, I got into reading books. And I said, you know what? I'm gonna read these books. Rich Dad Poor Dad, How to Win Friends and Influence People, Think and Grow Rich, Laws of Success, Psycho Cybernetics.
Anyways, I started feeding, you know, power versus force. I'm like, wait a minute. What the hell am I doing with my life? I shouldn't be doing any this stuff. And then came church,
and then came
changing disciplines,
and then came me dating a girl that we're about to get married, and after being together for two and a half, three years, I told her the magical words, and I said, before we get married, I wanna do something. She says, what do you wanna do? I said, I wanna go one month without sex, you and I. She says, what? I said, I wanna go one month, no sex, you and I. She starts laughing.
I said, no. I'm I'm dead serious because I love you, but I wanna be married to you. I want you to be my wife. Let's go see if we can do one month or not.
First week, it's Friday night at a big expedition.
We get back from the movies. It's 11:00 at night. We typically would sit out there in the parking lot, and we would have some fun. She said, what do you wanna do? So I gotta drop you off. She said, you really don't wanna do anything? I said, I wanna know. Let's see what we can talk about. We didn't have a lot to talk about. Don't get me wrong. We had a very good connection together.
But long term, she wanted to go the Hollywood route, I wanted to go a complete different route.
Long story short, that didn't work out. And, you know, she's happily married today, I have three beautiful kids, I'm happily married, I got four kids myself.
But I made different decisions because I wanted to get the real meaning of life for me. I really wanted to find that what that potential for me look like. So I cut out video games early on in my after the army, I was not a video game guy. I cut out the party stuff. I cut out my obsession with women,
and then I said, let's
replace it with books, business, health, and faith, and see what it does.
And then my life changed in ways I never imagined.
The life I live today
is still a movie to me. This isn't something, if you ask any one of my friends that I went to high school with, not one of them would say I was gonna end up being here right now. None of them. So it was some of those choices that I made where I cut out the bad habits, the bad things I had, and life changed for me. Choose Your Enemies Wisely. One of my favorite books I've ever listened to, by the way.
And if people listen to that or read it, I highly recommend, they'll know that you didn't just go from point a to point b. There was a lot of zigzags in between, a lot of loss, a lot of heartache and stress and financial stuff.
Like, do you believe in order to get from, like, the point a to point b that people see, like, you have to compound small wins and continue to go through adversity? I don't think you have a choice. I I really don't think you have a choice. I think the guys
that are winning at the highest level,
that thick skin comes from somewhere.
Your your ability to go through difficult times comes from somewhere.
You you'll see stories about comedians who won,
and they're crushing it. And then in a podcast, when they get vulnerable, they'll talk about how difficult their upbringing is. Mhmm. Look how funny Theo Von is. You watch Theo Von, you're like, this guy is just ridiculously
funny. He had a challenge in upbringing, a different kind of a weird one. Look at Kevin Hart, tough upbringing with his father. You you you look at all of these guys, you know, and then you see some of the guys that make it to the highest level and they win.
And I realized a pattern that they had three things in common.
The people that become the greatest at what they do,
one, they had experienced unconditional
love from one person. That's all, you know, typically it's their mom. One person had to offer you unconditional love. You keep screwing up, they still love you because it makes you say, how can the love exist? I've let this person down so many times. She still loves me. Thank you. Number two is someone that no matter what you do, you will never get approval.
I got my college degree, but you weren't valedictorian.
I made a $100,000,
but you don't have a college degree. I just started my own business. We did 1,000,000 a year. Yeah. But you don't own a house. I just bought a big house. Yeah. But it's in a bad community. I just no matter what you do, that person's never gonna give you the approval. And then the last one is you choosing the right enemy. You choose the right enemy.
It brings out the best in you. You choose the wrong enemy. It can bring out the worst in you. I've seen people choose the wrong enemy, and they destroy their lives. I've seen people, you know, choose the right enemy and they just sometimes people choose
those that believe in them as their enemies.
And sometimes people choose somebody that wants the best for them, but just because they challenge you and push you as an enemy, that person's not an enemy. That's an ally. You are not choosing the right enemy. That's somebody you wanna be close to. Just because they're always challenging you and pushing you, that's not an enemy to you. You're delusional.
You wanna choose the person that's easy and you can be accepted around them no matter what you do. It's okay. Relax. Oh, it's okay. Eat this. Oh, it's okay. Don't do oh, it's okay sleeping. Oh, it's okay to do that. Yeah. But that's your enemy,
not the other person.
The person that's pushing you, challenging you, confronting you,
directing you to say, hey, man, you complain too much. Hey, man, your language is weak. Why do you talk like that? Who talks like that? I just don't like him. You know, he's my enemy. No, that's your ally. So
unconditional love, no matter what you do, won't get the approval. And last but not least, choosing the right enemy. You do that, you know, typically tends to produce a very strong,
ambitious human being.
You know, one of the things that I did was I thought about what would make me angry
when I would work out. Like, after I got out of jail, that's what helped me get through. It was like the people who bullied me in childhood and stuff that happened to me.
Then I found that that got me so far and I had to choose different enemies because I found myself just angry at the world because I was constantly thinking about the people who wronged me and I caught myself at times slipping back into the victim mindset. There's a lot of people that go through adversity as a as a as a kid, and they're trying to turn that pain into purpose. How can they make that leap from,
like, using that as fuel to then moving it into the next direction? Listen. You got anything
I can use to drive you at the beginning, I'm gonna do it. Anything. When I over the years, I've recruited and built a lot of different insurance agencies in America, I would
use a method called the lock on method. I would look at a person and say, is this somebody for me to put 90% of my time into?
And typically, the things I would look at before I put my time into that person is, has this person played sports before?
Why?
If you played high school football, high school basketball,
high school baseball,
travel soccer,
and you played it in your teens for four years,
here's what you generally experienced.
You experienced your coach pushing you, challenging you.
You experienced losing.
You experienced injury.
You experienced
teamwork. You experienced what it was like when a guy blocked for you or you're about to lose the game bottom of the ninth inning, but that shortstop made the cash through to first. Without him, you were about to get the loss because of him. You're a hero. The pitcher, you're like, man, I'm it's good to have good people in your life if I didn't have that shortstop. So you realize you need people.
I saw patterns of people that played sports three, four years with a tough coach.
They were generally easier to work with and coach than somebody who never had that experience of playing sports. They were sensitive. A person that didn't play sports, they were typically sensitive if you gave them feedback. You know? They were typically someone that was soft. If you had a little bit of military background,
drill sergeants kind of pushed you and got that stuff out of you. So to me, as I sit down and go through it, that's a choice the individual's gotta make. You know, it's truly a choice. You're headed towards a terrible life.
You're gonna lose decades of your life, and you don't even know it. So make the better choice for yourself. But,
know,
I Mario Aguilar, one of my guys, bought me a gift,
a
Xerox
management manual, sales manual from 1969.
Why Xerox?
If you look at which companies produced some of the best salespeople in
the last sixty years, Xerox is always on the name that comes up. If you go right now, chat GBT,
what Fortune 1,000 companies produced the best salespeople? Who has a reputation for that The last sixty years, you'll see Xerox will be in the top five list. So guess what? Why is that? Systematic,
a guy at the top taught people follow-up,
taught them how to confront, taught them how to do customer service, customer experience. If you look at management, Jack Welch. If you worked under Jack Welch, people wanted to recruit you because they knew, especially if you had worked under Jack Welch's if your resume said, report it direct to Jack Welch for seven years. Oh, you want this guy. You come here. We'll put you and give you a heavy position. Why?
If you made it under a Jack Welch, that means you are a Jack Welch. That means you can handle the tough love. That means you can handle being pushed. That means you can handle the pressure. We want somebody like that. So to me, you know, the same way you look at a resume and somebody's had four jobs in four years, I'm like, I'm gonna be the fifth job. Why am I hiring you? You know, it's the same way you're going to be judged
for the choices you make, whether you like it or not. And if you want the kind of credibility and respect when you walk into a room, sometimes that takes years to regain. But the reality of it is just like in the in in Christianity,
nondenominations,
they'll say this. There's there's such thing as, you know, I'm a born again Christian. You'll hear that phrase. There's a born again executive. There's a born again CEO. There's a born again founder. There's a born again father. There's a born again husband. Hey, from today on, that's it. The old guy's dead. Decision is cutting away. I'm gonna make a decision to cut away from the old me. New person is here. Every day I'm working on developing a new guy, I'm good. I know I've made mistakes, I'm gonna be making better choices moving forward. Then at first people don't believe you. They think you're full of shit. They're like, whatever. You're gonna go back to drugs. You're gonna go back to drinking. You're gonna go back to not taking care of your money. You're gonna go back to gambling. I get it why you don't trust me. It's a fair judgment that I deserve because I've been doing this for eighteen years. I get it. But wait for me six months. Six months later, oh, wow. Interesting.
Is he gonna break again? One year later, wow. He's changed. Two years later, three years later, everybody forgot.
And it's just an old story. I
had a guy with me that's been working with me for twenty years. He had such a massive alcohol issue.
Six years ago, I'm picking him up from prison.
And it's 03:30 in the morning, I'm pulling up in my blue Rolls Royce in Oak Cliff, Texas,
which is the worst part of Texas,
Dallas. Terrible. The prison's there. I go, and everybody thinks I'm a lawyer. He gets in the car, we're driving back to his house, I'm dropping him off, thirty minute drive, saying, you're not saying anything. I said, I have nothing to tell you. You typically have a lot to tell me. I said, I have nothing to tell you. Pat, you have to talk to me. He's crying in the car. You have to tell me something. I said, have to tell you nothing.
No. No. I'm I said, moving forward, you're not reporting to me. You're probably gonna get fired. You're out of the circle. You're not gonna work with me directly.
They're probably gonna fire you unless if you commit to something with them. I'm no longer I said, you're not grateful for your life. I said, you're not grateful for what God's given you, and I can't do anything about it. You lack perspective.
We come back. He says, give me one last chance.
Every night, you need to go to AA meeting. Every night for a year, he goes to AA meetings.
The guy that sat down with him was my previous CFO. He has a tough conversation with him.
He accepts.
He went from about to kill himself with his story to now he works with us. He does very well. He makes a million dollar of your income, beautiful wife, beautiful kids, beautiful family.
But by the way, we forgot
any of the stuff that he did seven years ago, because he proved to us that he's truly changed.
Does that make sense? So the judgment that we were giving him,
he removed it.
And that's kinda how life works. He recreated
his reputation.
And everybody can do that based on their choices, but it's not easy. It's very, very hard to do. And I've heard you talk about, like, McConaughey's famous quote where it's like, your hero should be your future self. Do you think it takes something like that to create this future identity of yourself? This thing is so fun. This life it I mean, sometimes you're, like, going through such a season, and sometimes you're going through such an amazing season. And then sometimes you're sitting there with a person and having a great conversation.
And, you know, this morning, I wanna watch my daughter. She was four years old doing a a show at our school,
and she was part of the tiny dancer at the church. She she was dancing. I'm standing right there just looking at her, and I can't wait for her to see me and say, daddy's here. You're safe. And then I walk to the side, and she spots me. She runs up, just throws herself at me, lifts her legs up. I'm hugging her. We're sitting there having a good moment together. My son is over here. We're laughing. My other daughter's there. We're laughing at how she's moving, how she's dancing. My wife is sitting over here. And no one exists around me at this time.
Life
is amazing.
But my dad is 83.
My biggest fear at six years old was possibly losing this guy. His time is coming up. He's 83 years old. He walks different.
You know, he he his body is very different. It's frail. It's not the same as it was, but we still have good conversations together. I'm 47. I'm not 37. I'm not 27.
Body's different at 47 than it was at 37 than it was at 27. You know? You and I are five days apart, you're all you're an October 13 baby. I'm an October 18 baby, but things change. But it's also like, that's cool.
You know, you sit there, you realize how amazing we got this one chance here,
and it's not always gonna be great. It's not. But if you don't look at this and say, man, let me go enjoy this thing called life and
get some experiences and,
you know, do something that it can make an impact, so when one day I'm no longer here, yeah, they'll eventually forget about you, because that's kind of life moves on. We're all coming here, and then you move on. But at least some impact is left.
At least you build something you're proud of. People look back and say, that's my dad. That's my mom. You
have to think about your mortality and what kind of an impact you want to make. So to me,
if you don't see the bigger picture of how lucky we are to have a shot at building a good life, even though after we screwed up, you like gratitude, you like perspective, but just take a step back and realize
we are some of the luckiest people alive.
Even if you've got nothing, you still have more than a lot of people that are billions of people
don't have a lot of things that you have, trust me. But that gratitude, it's hard to do when life is tough. It's not easy. You gotta still find a way to do it. No. When you have nothing going for you, that's like the only thing you can really lean on, right, is gratitude's been great for, like, your legs and your arms and your And
I think that people,
have a hard time because
they want to think positively, they want to be confident, but yet their bank account has nothing in it. They don't have a relationship. They're out of shape, so they have no real metric to look at. Like, my life is going in the right direction.
How can people get past that? Starts with you. Make a change.
You know, start keeping your word. Increase your credit score. You know, the same way we have a credit score when you buy a house
or you buy a car, it's because you don't keep your word of making that car payment. So your credit score score drops. You did not make that mortgage payment on time. Your credit score drops.
Everybody is judged on how well of a job you do keeping your word.
If you're a project manager, does it get done on time?
If you're a general contractor, do you build a house on time?
If you're a kid going to school, do you go to school on time? If you're a father or mother picking up the kids, do you pick them up on on time?
If you're a CEO running a Fortune 500 company that's a publicly traded company, do you deliver on your estimates that you had? You know, what you were gonna be doing? If you're president, you deliver on the policies that you said
everything
is about keeping your word, and it starts off with the smallest thing.
I'm gonna walk I'm gonna go and walk outside twenty minutes. Okay. Great. Did you keep your word? I did. Great. Do that one month straight. Your respect goes up.
You know, I'd like one of the things I had every time I had one of these health people on the podcast, I change something big about my health. I had Paul Saladino on about a year ago. Last time I had Celsius, I used to drink two or three Celsius a day. Haven't had a Celsius drink since that day. K? Then I had
Gary Breck on change with him, what he said. Then I had Doctor. Rhonda Patrick on two weeks ago.
I've been fasting every day.
I moved up my dinner. Typically, I have dinner around seven, 07:30. Now I have dinner at 04:45. I don't have dinner late. Unless if I'm going out with somebody and entertaining, and maybe I'll have some oysters, something like that. But I try to bring my dinner to 04:45.
I don't eat anything in the morning, including piece of gum, including honey in my tea,
including any water that may have sugar in it. No. It's just regular water, regular tea. No. And guess what? I feel better. I feel hungry. I feel like I'm in a hunt at this. So to us, hey, you keep your word when you're making small little commitments,
you start seeing respect goes up. You know what? When I say something, things happen.
When I say what I'm gonna be doing, everybody builds a reputation. Some people have a reputation for being
tough.
Some people have a reputation for being good at making money. Some people have a reputation for being fun.
Some people have a reputation for being a womanizer.
Some people have a reputation for being good with the way they write, or text, or call, or speak, or podcast.
I wanted to build a reputation that when Patrick says he's gonna do something, he's gonna do it. Because both your enemies,
your friends, your family, your allies, benefit from it. If your enemies know when you say, here's what we're gonna be doing, they're like, oh, I definitely don't wanna hear it from him. There's a benefit of building a reputation. When you say you're gonna do something, you do it. So being consistent and not being a victim are two common themes we talked about. And keep your word. And keep your word. Yeah. What other, like, big life decisions do you think are important for people? Cut out the drugs. If, you know, you can cut out the alcohol, you know, cut out any of that stuff that slows you down. Change some of the people around you that are negative and are crap magnets, including some family members. You know, change your language. I audit people on the words they use. I'm like, don't use weak words like I'm tired. Don't use weak words like, you know, I I'm just so tired. I'm just I'm like, oh my god. Stops. It's a turnoff when somebody talks like that. Right? I can be sitting next to somebody and I talk to them just by the way they speak. I catch weak words. And when you catch weak words, a person with weak words can't manage
others. And if you do, you can't in a high standard environment. So you gotta protect the words that's coming out of your mouth.
You know, sometimes you slip, you're like, well, why am I talking this way? No. No. Upgrade the words. Upgrade your environment.
I can't go on on this for for hours and hours, but those would be some of the things I would share. That was one of the biggest shifts I made was changing the people I spent time with. I I say that you gotta spend time with people who have common futures and not common pasts.
And that hit home with me because I was a guy who partied all Love that. Yeah. Common futures dot common past. Yep. Because
as a kid, you know, I I partied a lot, did a lot of drugs, and that was like my my crew. Where are you from? You're From Maryland. Maryland. Yeah. So were born and raised in Baltimore. Yeah. Born and raised in the Baltimore area. Yep. And so that's all we did, and so that's what I was used to. And so it wasn't it was when I when I stopped doing drugs and I got into fitness,
I would go hang out with my old friends and there was something different. Like, they would go and do drugs or drink a bunch or whatever. And I was like,
why does this feel weird to me? Why does this feel like an awkward first date when I have nothing in common with these people? And I had to make that decision that's like, okay, they're in my past life. I need to cut these people out. They're not bad people. They're just not aligned with where I'm going in the future, and that is has really stuck with me in something that I've used to be successful. Good for you. Respect to you. It's not easy to do. It's very hard to do. But if you're able to do it,
life changes. You know, sometimes for us
I had I had one of my guys that I've mentored for over twenty years, no longer, but I used to mentor this guy a lot. He he's probably one of the
10 people in my life that have spent the most actual
hours with me. It's in the thousands of hours that this person spent with me.
One day, we're having a conversation. He says, you know what? I don't know why,
but why is it so important to me what you think?
I wanna get to a point that I could care less about what you think about me.
I said, really? Yeah. I said, why do you think you care about what I think
why do you think you care so much about what I think about you? I don't know, but I don't like it. I said, okay. Alright.
I said, so what's wrong with that? Tell me what's wrong with that. And he starts kinda going through the whole thing. Alright.
I said,
see,
if you make a list of people in your life
that you rank them by,
who on that list do you care about and what they think about you,
and you rank them.
Like, I care
what my kids think about me, but in what areas.
Not the fact I'm tough with them. I'm gonna stay tough with them.
But I care about the fact that they're gonna go out there, when a kid offers them drugs,
for them to sit there and say
and the kids that are offering them drugs say they don't have a good relation with their dad. I want them to say, man, my dad's gonna be hurt by this if I do it. I love my dad. He loves me. I can't I'm good, guys.
That I care about that. Right? If I go and I think about my dad,
I wanna make my dad proud.
So I care about that. But my dad didn't want me to leave the previous company, start my own insurance company because he was afraid. He was afraid I was gonna lose everything. I already had a great life.
I was already traveling the world. He's like, what are you doing? What you're gonna give all this up to go start your own company? I am. Why?
Because I don't like what this other company stands for because of three people.
He says, so you're gonna leave? He says, yes. He's called my pastor. He called everybody.
He says, Pat, you can't do it. I said, dad, I'm doing it.
But I did it partly for him.
I wanted to make him proud.
But guess what? I care about what he has to think about me. And then all of a sudden, I noticed who's not on the list.
And I said, why do I care so much? Oh, done.
This guy, why would I care about what they think?
It it became so simple when you make a list of saying, are the top 10 people that you care about
what they think about you? This should be a short list. But that also doesn't mean everything you do.
Not every decision. My I have relatives that were not happy about my me marrying my wife because my wife's white, and I'm Middle Eastern. And I grew up around Middle Eastern minus my time in the military. In the military, I was around everybody. But in, you know, high school, was around Armenians, Assyrians,
Iranians.
No. I married
my wife. We got letters. She got letters saying, how could you marry somebody like Pat? Do you know about his temper and all this other stuff and how hard charging he is? He's you want something like that?
And I got letters. Why would you marry a white girl?
The the day before I got married, I'm getting letters about why are you getting married?
Man, I'm good. My dad loved her. I love her. We have a good relationship. We've been married now for it'll be seventeen years in June. Do I think we're gonna be married together for forty years? I don't know. We take it one year at a time. Every I've been saying this since our wedding day. When I got married, I looked at everybody. I said, I don't know if we're gonna be married for twenty years. We're taking it one year at a time. We've been taking it one year at a time for the last sixteen and a half years. Right?
Four healthy kids. We're happy. Life is good. We're growing. We're doing our thing. But to me,
it's very important to make a list of the people
opinions you carry. You have to be honest with yourself because some people are on that list that you shouldn't care what they think.
And that list shouldn't be 50 names, 200 names. It should be a very tight list. Max, 10 names. Healthy, five names. For me, I have four kids. I have more family, so that got a little bit bigger, but around 10 names is where it needs to be. And then you'll
walk better, you'll make decisions easier,
you'll second guess yourself less,
you'll take responsibility more, and like, no, I'm good. Here's what we're gonna be doing. Alright. Great. You'll lead better if you're able to do that. Do you think the path you took to change your life is repeatable for people who wanna who are feeling lost? For others to do. Absolutely.
Yeah. You know, like, the other day, we're doing an exercise. It's a good question you just asked.
And one of my the managers here, her name is Taylor. She's phenomenal at what she does.
Me, her, Aaron, and Mario, we made a list.
K? And they're asking me, Pat, I wanna be better at managing my guys. What do I do?
I said, great. Before we talk about what you can do, she's talking about how can I become better at duplicating
others
to succeed?
Right? Duplicating others. So what you're asking is, is it
repeatable? Is it duplicatable?
Can somebody else
get the same kind of results? And here's what I said.
I said people we recruit,
what do we get
that we don't do, that they bring to the table? What is not
that you can't duplicate?
And they're sitting there thinking, I don't understand the question. Okay. What do you bring to the table that I didn't help you get?
My IQ? Yes. It's got nothing to do with me duplicating. Like, I can't duplicate IQ.
My EQ? I can't duplicate EQ. EQ personality.
I can't duplicate the personality.
So you and I can't be like Theo Vaughan. That's his personality. Right. You and I can't be like Marcelo Hernandez, the comedian. We can't be like, you know,
a Matthew McConaughey or Tom Cruise. That's the personality. You can't duplicate that.
Then character,
honesty,
integrity,
that your parents did that to you, and your choice, your faith, your decisions, that's not my responsibility. That's on you. Authentic, some people are fake. Some people are authentic.
I can't. If you're authentic, that's you get the credit for that. Right? And we wrote a couple other things here. Then it was like the next part is on what to duplicate.
One of them was nonverbal.
The other one is verbal. Meaning,
caught, taught.
K?
So what you bring to the table, personality, DNA, character,
talent, IQ, EQ,
we don't get credit for that. Right? Then
what you can catch from working with me, the impact I make of teaching you. Hey, Johnny, here's what you need to do. Read this book. Follow the script.
This is your schedule. Here's how many calls to make.
Follow the structure. Dude, okay, that's teaching.
And then it's catching.
Catching is if you spend the entire day with me today from morning till now,
you'd walk away saying, holy This guy's schedule is back to back.
It's way more than what I'm gonna say on this podcast. Every time somebody comes here to our property and they come and walk around, we have three different buildings. One of them we're about to sell,
which was a bank we bought, and the podcast said it was in the vault. The other one is a building we bought that we turned into our cigar launcher, private member,
which now we're turning into a restaurant, and then this 11 acre campus that we bought. Not a land, lease to be on the land. Right?
When somebody comes in, you're like, oh my god. What do you guys do?
What is this?
This is really what yeah. Holy I didn't know you guys said this. We do. Then somebody will come and monitor and see how I work. And then they say, oh. And by the way, when somebody comes and watches how you work, they make one of two decisions.
One of them is, oh my god.
This is what it takes? I'm not doing it.
Or it's gonna be, wow. I got the blueprint.
Let's go.
But one of those two decisions is gonna be made. So duplicate this. Can somebody repeat this? Number one, the stuff that's your DNA, personality, character, all this stuff, no. That's on you. I can't be like you. You can't be like me in that area. I can't be like you. You can't be like that in that area. Caught.
If I watch you do a 100 episodes of podcast,
I can see how you prepare for it. I can see that you have notes here that you wrote down. I can see the format that you follow to write the notes down. I can catch how you do this. Then I can catch how you prep. Let's just say I'm your driver or your right hand guy, I drove here with you, and I saw what videos you watched of me. Do you go to filters, most views? Do you watch those videos first? Do you go to Twitter to see my last 100 tweets? Do you go to Instagram to see what stories I put up to see what's the most freshest thing on my mind? I don't know, but there's a format. Look at how you started today's podcast. You got a tweet or a Facebook post that I put put up two weeks, so you started with that. That's a format. I can catch that from you. Right?
90%
is catching.
10% is teaching.
It's not even close. Well, I think it goes back to your environment, who you spend time with. Right? Because I think You know what I'm saying when I'm saying 90% is catching and 10% is teaching? Like,
somebody told me this quote twenty five years ago. There's more caught than taught in parenting. There's more caught than taught in parenting.
My daughter was two years old. One day she comes. She's like, what the heck? I said, what'd you just say?
What the heck?
Brooklyn.
I said, babe,
what'd you where did you learn this from? And then my wife said, babe, you always say what the heck.
She caught
this phrase, what the heck. School calls me saying, hey, your son dropped a few bad words today. Really? Tell me which ones.
Well, the s word and the f word. I said, will take responsibility for the s one, not the f one. The f one, learned the school, the s he learned from me. And the teacher's like, oh, wow. You're very straight up. I said, no. What do you want me to tell you? I said a lot around the kids, and I probably shouldn't. So that's me. He caught that from me. But I don't say f around them, so he picked it up from somebody else. Okay. Well, thanks for that. Well, father, can you please slow down? I said, well, think about it. You know? But I'm being honest with you. So to me, the replicating part
is you is caught
is taught.
Taught is important, but oh my god, catching it is so critical.
And it goes back to the way you carry yourself, right, in setting the example and being the model. And that's why they say in parenting,
like, modeling behavior
is, like, one of the most important things. Like, just kinda just how you just referenced that. It's very true. This is why for me, when I would do conference calls, my kids are watching me.
If I'm in the car, they're around me, I want them to hear daddy negotiate.
If I'm
running a meeting, if the kids don't have any school and no practice and no sports, they're at the office here all day. They're running around. They're picking stuff up on what's going on. How do we run a media company? How do we run a consulting firm? What do we say in the boardroom? What's being negotiated? Why did dad handle that that way? Dad, why did you fire that person? Dad, why did you hire that person? Dad, why did we make that investment?
Dad, what do you think? Well, I think we made a mistake lose that. We did lose money, and we made a mistake. But what could we have done differently, dad? What do you think we could have done differently?
It's constant
because shadowing is an edge. It's massive.
If if if I can work around somebody and shadow them,
and if I can do that three months, six months, twelve months, two years, are you kidding me?
Are you kidding me?
Why is it that the VPs end up becoming so many vice presidents become presidents? Because they shadow the president.
You know, they're they're in the room.
They're seeing, oh, that was a dynamic with China.
But that was a dynamic
got it. Let me store it here.
I shadowed. I saw it. So very important.
So you got boys. We're
in like a men's mental health epidemic, I think, right now with suicides and addiction.
Like, do you think that is, and what can men do differently
to be to kind of not fall into some of these unfortunate traps? We're listening to what people are telling us on how to raise kids. It's a bunch of nonsense.
And we're being told how to raise kids by people that don't have kids,
or or that are extremely sensitive.
Oh my god, don't raise your voice.
Oh my god, don't argue. Oh my god, no. No means no. No. I'm gonna raise my voice,
and we're gonna have some tough conversations.
And why? Why? But why you do that? Because how do you think coaches talk to you? You think a coach is gonna say to you, honey,
please try catching the ball next time. Catch the flipping ball.
We've done this practice route a 100 times.
Run the route. What are you doing?
Right? So, oh, okay. That's the reality of life. What do you think it's like? You didn't hit your numbers three quarters in a row. You think the boss is gonna come in? It's okay, Johnny. We'll give you one more quarter. No. No. No. Hey. Next quarter, you don't hit your numbers. This is it. I'm telling you right now. There's nothing I can do about it. You're gonna get fired because you haven't hit your numbers.
And, you know, you're not working the way you were before, and I don't feel the intensity,
and you tell me where you wanna go from here. We'd love to keep you. We'd love to have you be with us for twenty years, but you're making it very hard for us to keep you right now. So I don't know. It's your choice is on you. Where do you wanna go with this? You have to confront.
So to me, I love when we argue, because when you argue with your kids and you debate with your kids, you're teaching them what? You're teaching them debate.
You're teaching them how to sell. You're teaching them how to negotiate. You're teaching them how to ask for something. All skill sets that's gonna help them advance in their lives.
When when I say no,
I don't say, don't ever ask me again.
I say no. I said no.
No.
And then he comes back with a different creative. And I asked myself, how come he's not coming back asking for it?
Come back and ask for it. Renegotiate.
Why are you not coming back? The kids are almost confused. Like, well, you said no. Why are you giving up so early? Come back and renegotiate with your daddy. Give me a creative way of saying yes to you.
Okay. Okay. I'll come back to you. Alright. What is it? What if we do this, this, this, and that? No. I'm not good with that. But if you do this, I would be open to this. You'd be open to that, I would.
So what if we did that? Okay. Now we're talking the same language. If that's the case, I'm good. Or I could I'm teaching follow-up,
because you gotta learn follow-up. Half the battle with life is following up.
So you gotta follow-up with clients, you gotta follow-up with boss, you gotta follow-up when you're closing the house, you gotta follow-up with a deal that didn't go through, you got it's follow-up. And then, you know, the the the the fighting intensity side to be okay in the storm, because life, you're gonna be in storm. Now don't get me wrong. Some kids are born. We have four kids. One of them is very calm. One of them is very intense. One of them is very philosophical.
One of them has just got a temper and competitive,
psycho psycho competitive.
So, yes, you manage them in a different way, but you still
you still wanna raise your boys to be tough because,
you know and and by the way, teach my kids about politics, I teach my kids about debate, my kids read
books. You know, my oldest son is right now going through the Bible, the Koran, and the Torah. He's already read At The Strike. He's already read is it Dante's Inferno, I think it's called. He's already read he's he's had five, six hundred books over. He watches Hillsdale College to get the history of the constitution, to get the history of politics.
I'm
shaping their mindset, so when they go into the real world, and let's see what you wanna do with it, you pick and choose. But you
gotta work with them to be tough. I think it's a soft society because one,
fathers are not that involved, they're not selling the right belief system, they're scared, they're walking on eggshells. Then by the way, if you see my kids, like today my 12 year old, I'm in the chapel watching a four year old daughter, he's sitting on my lap. Not because I asked him to sit on my lap. We have a relationship, we have a bond. I don't know what's gonna happen next five, ten, twenty years because they're gonna go through their own thing, they're gonna have different influences, some of the influences they get are not gonna like me, some of them are gonna be girlfriends,
all your dad cares about is money, they're gonna date somebody that their parents are not fans of where I'm at because I'm loud with certain opinions that are. They're gonna go through this phase, and it's okay. It's okay as as they go through it, but as long as, you know, we're shaping them to be tough, respectful,
long term, we have a fighting chance with them. You know, the show is called The Adversity Advantage, and and the reason is a couple things. One, to show that adversity has purpose in life. And two, it's like what not to do. Because I think a lot of people's problems
are they're caused by what they do during adversity. They drink a bottle of wine every day. They have too much sex. They do all these things, spend a bunch of money. What do you do when you have a bad day? Like, do you have, like, a recipe, like, to to to kind of recalibrate yourself when you're having a bad day? Yeah. When I have a bad day, I'll come in, and the if you wanna know the immediate way to get rid of all of it for me is my kids being around me. And I know it's not something that's duplicatable or replicatable with everybody,
but if I've got kids with me, I'm good.
When I come home, I see them, pain goes away immediately. At least that's for me.
But I, you know, I I don't I don't know if I
like, last week, we had a couple days where I'm like,
yeah, I'm not feeling good about what's going on. And then all of a sudden, I'm like,
no, I can't keep going like this. I called an emergency meeting. I took my three executives. We went out to dinner. I said, guys, let me tell you what's on my mind, and I need your help with this. Here's what I'm thinking about. I laid out my concerns, what I'm frustrated with.
And I said, I I I want us to have a clear road
to a billion, to 10,000,000,000, to a 100,000,000,000. We don't have a clear road right now to a $100,000,000,000. We're having this conversation about valuation
and what we wanna build. What we wanna build, we have a big vision. So,
okay,
if we drop everything we're doing
and we only did one thing,
what would it be? And they say to me, da da da. I said, okay.
I said, so go a little bit more. How how much could this scale? Well, we did this, like right now we're getting a lot of companies that are coming to us because our consulting firm is booming, growing exponentially. We have 10,000 clients from 64
countries
that we do engagements for, and they range from $50,000 to a $3,300,000
engagement. And some of the companies come in and they say, hey, can we give you some equity? Can we do half cash, half this? And the companies that have been with us for two or three years will entertain it because we know the operators.
And so now we're getting to a point where people are coming up to us saying, hey, we'd like you to open up a fund, and we wanna give you half $1,000,000,000 to go, because we have so many companies that are coming to us. You make the investments, you take the risks, you manage it, and then for us, we'll bring the CEOs in, we'll help the CEOs become better CEOs, we'll deploy to them exactly
the variable comp we have, the benefits program we have, how we do our calibration, how we do our marketing, how we do all here's how we do everything. This is all yours. Why? Because we own 50% of the company. Because we own 100% of the company. Because we own 25 of the company. So now we're deploying everything to you. And we sat there and said, what if we did this for twenty years? What does twenty years from now look like? And it was like, this is the range where we'll be in. I said, that's believable. Okay, great.
So
it's as soon as possible
trying to talk to somebody
to process the issue, what we can do
to make that issue or the problem better. I wanna talk to somebody. What do you think about what happened? What could we have done differently? What about this, what about that? If we have a bad day because,
I don't know, market dropped or tariffs got canceled by Supreme Court or Bitcoin is down 50%
or interest rates went up,
I can't control that kind of stuff. My frustration typically comes when we make bad mistakes or when we make certain things that's not moving.
That's
typically my
format on what I do next. You control the controllables, which I think is all you can do when you're faced with hard times. I think so many people, they over index
in the problem in itself and what they can't control instead of spending time on, like, the things that they actually have the control over. It's true. What would you say to the the Pat and the Ford Focus, knowing what you know now? You gotta go through it. You just gotta go through it. You know, part of life
with faith
is
the reason why we respect people who win at the highest level
is because,
you know, the the people will ask, did you ever think that you were gonna do something big? Like, you know, even the song for a podcast song is, did you ever think you would make it?
Right?
I knew I was different.
Like, I knew I was different. I knew, like,
the the fire I had in my belly to wanna be somebody was so out of control
high.
It was so high, but then
on the complete opposite side, I had no credibility to say I was capable of doing something big with my life.
I didn't have anything to say, well,
I was a high school quarterback. We took the, you know, team to the state championship. I never played organized sports. I'm six four,
two fifty. I have never played organized sports. How is that possible?
I never played organized sports. I don't have,
you know, where I was in the army and I went to, you know, Delta Force, a special force. I don't have that. I didn't have a 4.5 GPA. I had a 1.8 GPA.
I don't have a 1,600 s a t or fifteen eighty s a t. I don't have that.
I I didn't have anything to look at to say so it was always a guessing game. Why do you think you're so special? Why do you think you're meant to do something big with your life? Why?
So I'm like, I don't know,
but I cannot get rid of this feeling in my belly. I can't.
I feel like my blood is boiling all the time because I wanna go out there and do something big with my life.
Almost gave up, almost went back into the army, ended twenty years, and that's all I was gonna do. Because I looked at the $34,000
pension plan I was gonna get when I was 40 years old. I almost did it. I almost went back into the army.
So to me, it started off with that fire in the belly.
And then
I remember when I hit made $250,000,
and I started getting very good at the business and insurance,
that's when I was kinda like,
I
think I can do a 100,000,000.
I think I can do it. Why?
I don't know why. I just think I can. What makes me think you can do it? I don't think I'm gonna stop until I do because I trust my way of making decisions.
And then that led to next step and next step and next step and next step. But even today, where I'm at today,
my
aspirational
vision of where I wanna be in ten years,
Still a little bit like, it's kinda crazy for you to think that you're capable of doing that. Who are you? Why don't I believe it? Yeah. But who are you? Well, look what I've built in the past. Okay. But this is a complete different industry. I get it. That part of the unknown and the faith and the doubt that whether you're gonna pull it off or not,
that's the hell week. That's the excite that's why you get the credit from people to say, man, you made it. Man, you won. Man, you pulled it off. So
I think I think a person's gotta go through the parts of the battle of the doubt, close to giving up, and that's all part of the test to tell the story later on to realize the credit goes to that moment that you were about to give up, you didn't. That's where the credit lies. I'm looking forward to seeing what unfolds for you in the future. Pat, thank you so much for coming on the podcast. Don, thank you. Love this convo. I really enjoyed it as well. Thanks for having me on. Appreciate Got it. Thank you.