Why 'Prey Drive' Will Change How You Succeed | Michael Burt DSH #1152

Man, I gotta trademark that.

And I believe in more vuja de versus deja vu, which is like a fresh twist on an old way of thinking.

And there's 20 motivational theories.

I deconstructed those theories.

I codified those theories.

And then I said, I'm going to come up with my own theory, which is there's a drive inside of you that drive can be activated.

And I'm going to trademark those two words, pray drive.

And that became really popular, those two words.

All right, guys, Coach Burt here from Nashville, former women's basketball coach.

Thanks for coming on, man.

Absolutely.

Yeah, you've been killing it.

Author of 22 books.

Yes, started early, started at 25 years old, really just to explain what I was doing as a basketball coach.

So I had no intention of writing 22 books, just started and really enjoyed the process and enjoyed packaging a method.

And I think that's what a lot of people need is a methodology.

Absolutely.

A few of them really took off, right?

A few of the books.

Yeah, a few of the books.

I flip the switch, became a Wall Street Journal bestseller, which is really the psychology of activating what we call the prey drive, which is your instinct to pursue.

And I trademarked those two words.

It's prevalent in an animal.

An animal has a prey drive.

And when I saw those two words, it's the animal's ability to stalk, capture, and kill prey.

And when I heard that, I'm like, man, I got to trademark that.

And I believe in more vuja de versus deja vu, which is like a fresh twist on an old way of thinking.

And there's 20 motivational theories.

I deconstructed those theories.

I codified those theories.

And then I said, I'm going to come up with my own theory, which is there's a drive inside of you that that drive can be activated.

And I'm going to trademark those two words, pray drive.

And that became really popular, those two words.

Yeah, I love pray drive stuff.

When I was a kid, I grew up without a father.

My parents got divorced, and I was a basketball player, but I played super timid.

I wasn't aggressive at all.

I didn't have that drive in me.

Yep.

Dude, like, take it to the basket or whatever.

But now as I'm older, my game's completely different.

Got the confidence back.

And I'm a way better player.

Where did that drive, where was it initiated?

It must have been through business mentors or something, maybe friendships.

But yeah, growing up without that father figure, it affected me, my confidence and in personal life and in sports.

Yeah.

Well, I was raised by a single mom and had me when she was 16 years old.

Wow.

And she was tough, man.

She taught me, we don't whine, we don't complain, we don't make excuses.

She wouldn't let me miss a day of school growing up.

And I hated that really until later in life.

And I was really thankful that she instilled kind of a discipline in me and a toughness in me.

So a lot of my prey drive actually came from just watching her survive.

Wow.

And watching her just get up every day and go get it, man.

So you were like really just go straight at it type of kid?

Yeah, I mean, she always, I mean, she was a kid having a kid, right?

She was only 16 and she always talked to me like I was an adult.

Wow.

And, but she was really disciplined and tough.

And I do believe that some of Prey Drive is kind of conditioned.

You know, a lot of people ask me, like, why do some people have it and some people don't have it?

A lot of it is

just

conditioning, right?

Like environmental scripting, like what you're exposed to as a kid, right?

I had a lot of great coaches.

So I was raised on a baseball field, in a gym.

So when my mom was working, I was in a gym or on a baseball field.

And those coaches really served as kind of a father figure for me.

That makes sense.

So do you think everyone has it?

You just got to activate it.

Someone has to activate it.

I do think most people, I think everybody has it, number one.

I think most people don't know how to activate it and, or they've never been exposed to something that would activate it.

And I kind of found that there were five activators when I was writing the book.

Fear is an obvious activator.

And so think of fear of loss, huge activator, right?

If you fear losing something that you really care about, it'll activate the prey drive.

Competition, big activator of prey drive.

And a lot of people are just competitive, man.

They want to be the best.

Like competition brings out the best in people.

It brings out the worst in people.

Then you've got environment, like the environment you're around when you're thinking bigger, exposure, like this is why you need to be going to conferences, have business coaching, because you're exposed to bigger think.

And once you see something, it's like, man, there's a big world out there.

And then embarrassment is an activator of pre-drive, right?

It's like I'm personally embarrassed by where I'm playing at.

I remember when I first started getting around big-time people, like whether it be a Cardone or any of those people, at first I was like, God, it's just such a bigger world.

I'm playing so small in comparison to what I'm capable of playing, you know?

And so embarrassment can be an activator.

So those five activators, people typically have a primary activator and then a secondary activator.

And I think a lot of that has to do with your upbringing upbringing as well, your conditioning as well.

100%.

Yeah.

When did you meet Cardone?

First met Cardone in 20,

I want to say 2013, 2014.

I had a radio show on the Fox business affiliate in Nashville.

I was constantly looking for people to interview and I was walking through a Chicago airport and saw 10X and I go, man, it looks like a great book.

Picked up the book.

I'm like, dude, looks good.

He's got great hair.

He's got great hair.

And I called his office and, you know, and had him on my show.

All right shout out to today's sponsor specialized recruiting group.

Navigating the professional job search is hard.

You know the perfect job is out there.

You're just not sure how to find it.

The good news is you don't have to go at it alone.

You just need specialized recruiting group.

Connect at srgpros.com.

We're here to guide you and help you find a role that fits all without costing a dime.

Meet specialized recruiting group offering a tailored approach to find your next role.

Go to srgpros.com and get on the right course.

Your local specialized recruiting group team knows which businesses are hiring and can offer you a path to contract and full-time roles.

Don't see the role you're looking for on the website.

Well, they also recruit for confidential roles.

So give an office near you a call to learn more.

Take the next step in your career by starting srgprose.com.

Oh, I was doing the interviewing because I was always interviewing somebody big.

And when I was finished, she said, man, you and I should be doing things together.

Wow.

And that led to me ultimately speaking at 10x in 2018 at Mandalay Bay.

That was the second one, right?

Second one, yeah.

Yeah, that was early on.

But I, but, but I did an original event with him in Riviera Maya, Mexico.

It was Bradley, Cardone,

I mean, like 75 people in like 2013.

And I was just, you know, the biggest thing he did for me was I was just, he made me think a lot bigger.

And he said one day, he said, man, your market is not Nashville.

Your market is planet Earth.

Go back and figure out how to sell your products to everybody on the planet.

And that piece of advice was like, you're thinking too small, man.

And that was good.

I needed to hear that.

I needed to, because at that time, I was really selling Coach and Sean like, like people had to come physically, right, in a room.

And I could get 100 people in there.

And that opened me up to, you know, now we have customers all over the world, Croatia, Dubai.

But it was really from that statement that he said to me.

That's incredible.

A lot of people have these limiting beliefs, right?

Yes.

We were talking before we started how your, your life goal was to be a D1 coach.

And that was, you would have been happy with that.

But now look at you now.

yeah my my i mean it was kind of unintentional it's like i was winning high school games i was building kind of a national powerhouse i loved it i never thought about money i never thought about anything i lived in a little two-bedroom condo that i loved and i love coaching man i just wanted to be the best at that and around

probably three years into being a head coach because i got the head coaching job at 22 wow so i'm at this yeah i'm at this big second biggest high school in tennessee And I'm using all this unique methodology.

I'm bringing in Stephen Covey of Seven Habits of Highly Faith.

I love that.

So it's like I'm teaching these 14-year-old kids seven habits, good to great, five dysfunctions of teams, power of intention.

So imagine playing for somebody like me at 14 through 18, and I'm spending five and a half hours a day with you, and I'm teaching you all these life and success.

So people were constantly saying like, man, what are you doing with these kids?

Because they could see how the kids played.

You know, you're into

athletics, so you understand it's like they had chemistry, they had discipline, they had prey drive.

So people would watch my teams play and go, what are you doing?

That prompted me to sit down and and write my first book at 25 years old.

And it was called Changing Lives Through Coaching.

We don't sell that book today.

We don't want anybody to buy it because it wasn't very good.

And I didn't have a lot to say at 25, but it got me, something crazy happened when I wrote this little book.

I wanted to write it for coaches, but coaches wouldn't buy it.

It's like, cause coaches are stubborn.

Even if they're losing, they still don't want to, right?

But it got in the hands of business people.

And business people started to call me and say, man, will you come speak to my team?

And it was like Dell Computers and State Farm Insurance and National Health, like big companies.

And I would go speak for an hour and they would give me a check.

And I made more in an hour than I made in a month.

And so that prompted me to go home and go like, man, what, what skill do I have?

And I really had the skill of activation, activating a prey drive in people, building competitive intelligence in people, inner engineering people on how to really win, like at a deep, deep level.

And that's what these companies saw in me.

So companies started offering me, you know, six figures.

And I'm like, man, I'm not leaving until I win a championship.

And so I stayed till 31.

And then I retired at 31.

I had written four books at that time.

And then I retired from athletics at 31 years old.

Wow.

That was a high school championship?

Yeah.

In Tennessee.

Tennessee, yeah.

All right.

So women's team, right?

Yeah.

What made you choose women over men?

They're easier to coach.

No,

the truth is I started in boys and something told me, I was coaching at 18 years old at elementary school and something told me, expand your resume.

Coach girls in the summer.

I coached girls one summer.

I loved it.

They wanted to do what I asked them to do.

There, not as much ego.

And it just happened that a women's coach hired me to be an assistant.

Wow.

And so I just stayed on that side.

Yeah, speaking of ego, I feel like with all these crazy NIL deals these days, I'm sure the ego is at all-time highs with these players.

And I think,

you know, it's easy to tell kids what to do.

They try to do what you ask them to do, right?

They may have ego.

They may have confidence problems.

They may have have issues just like everybody does but it's even harder building great teams and adults right and and when you when they went to nil

you know it's like why did nick saban really retire he really retired because he didn't want to deal with that right it's gotten away from what college coaching was which is preparing young men and young women for the future getting an education whether you agree with college or not i mean you know i went to college for nine years so it's like it's like it's like i kept pursuing degrees because i knew i'm like i need to get business degrees i need to learn more about business.

But the truth is, I think where we're going with that is probably privatized education.

Like, if my daughter wants to be a great podcaster, you know, like I'd send her to somebody like you and say, go study under this dude for two years.

Like, that's your college.

Yeah.

That's where I see the future going.

100%.

You see guys like Jordan Peterson starting their own universities.

I'd rather pay Grant Cardone to mentor my kid than send him to college for a business degree.

Yeah.

And I think, I think, you know, when you're, when you have kids, you start thinking, okay, who is going to best put them in a position to be successful and if they could speed up like like if they could really speed up the cycle and I always say if I wrote a book for 18 to 25 year olds it would be go for the mentor over the money

like who's coaching you matters

right like like that really sets you up for success who's coaching you and the better the coach the better the player yeah and these days you got to be careful there's a lot of gurus and coaches on Instagram well there's a lot of people who've not built anything right it's people saying that that they've built teams, but they never built a championship team.

When I'm on the phone with a prospect and they say, I'm looking at you versus so-and-so versus so-and-so, I go, man, I've actually built championship teams.

I know how to win.

I've inter-engineered people.

I've built a multi-million dollar company.

You know what I'm saying?

Like, it's not me just saying it on Instagram.

I've actually done it.

Right.

And as a high school coach, you can't recruit, right?

So you got to deal with what you're kind of dealt.

Yeah, and it's a public school.

So I had to take the kids that came to my school, that were zoned to go to my school and figure out how to win with them.

And I think that's really where the best coaches are.

I don't think the best coaches are in college.

I think there's great coaches in college, but I think the really great coaches are in high school.

Wow.

That's an interesting take because you assume that the college ones are like some of the best.

Well, I mean, I think there's really great college coaches, but I think a lot of college coaches sometimes look down on some of the high school coaches when the truth is, some of some of my buddies that were high school coaches could absolutely outperform.

Right.

They were just that good.

I could see that.

Yeah.

Who do you have as your goat of coaches?

God.

Sports.

When I come up, it was Phil Jackson.

I was going to say Phil Jackson.

It was like, that was an era when he was coaching.

And, you know, like I kind of grew up with Patino and

Phil Jackson and Calapiri.

Like, those were all great coaches at that time when I was growing up.

Pat Riley was with the, with the Lakers.

Pat Riley wrote the book, The Winner Within, which I think is probably one of the best coaching books, actual coaching books that talks about cycles of winning and how they won championships versus just somebody ghostwriting a book and it's okay.

Right.

Because winning is cyclical, right?

Yeah.

Like you see, the Spurs were hot for 20 years.

Now they're not that hot, but they're coming back.

That's right.

It's not like.

Well, I mean, you look at the school I coached at.

They went on to win seven state championships after I left.

Yeah.

Seven of the next nine.

How did that make you feel?

Good?

No, no, it made me feel like I built something.

Okay.

Because when I got there, it was not a place you expected to win.

It hadn't won in 30 years.

So to spend 10 years building something that was really dominated, I mean, that's really part of, you know, I was watching your interview with Brandon Dawson this morning, and he talked about Collins when he wrote Good to Great.

Collins talked about the difference between a level four leader and a level five leader.

And a level four leader is all built on their personality.

When they leave, it all goes down the drain.

Like everything goes down the drain.

A level five leader builds something that sustains.

There's a legacy there.

And so them winning, you know, seven of the next nine state championships makes me feel like we built a strong foundation, that the expectation of winning was there.

Yeah.

I got to say, coaching is probably one of the tough tough jobs in the world.

You look at the average career of professional NFL coaches, it's like two years.

Same with NBA, I believe.

It's tough.

Well, I mean, you're really hired to be fired.

I mean, I mean, at the end of the day, it's like, you know, and I get it, man, you're paid on performance and your ability to get people to do something.

And so it's a very, it's like, you're only as good as your last game.

Right.

It's tough, though, because like you said, you need time.

It took you 10 years.

Like, you need time to build something.

So if they're only giving you a year.

It took me three years to get it to where it was stabilized.

Right.

And that's what I see with a lot of programs of rebuilding.

It took me three years to get expectation and change the culture.

And then it was like, get better, better, and better.

And then I kept getting beat.

And this happens in the business world.

I kept getting to a plateau and I kept getting beat by the same person.

And this is where you don't go back and try harder.

You go back and try different.

They say a good plastic surgeon never makes more than 2.2 millimeters of change.

They never make more than seven changes.

Right.

And it's, so it's strategic moves that you make.

So when I would get to the same place, I finally sat down with people who won championships and said, what am I not doing?

Right.

It's like in the business world when you show incremental growth, you get to the same place year after year after year, and you never sit down with somebody who says, what am I not doing?

And they could see it.

So these coaches were like, you're not doing this.

You're not doing this.

You're not doing this.

And one dude's like, man, you play weak teams.

You win 25 games.

Everybody tells you how great you are.

And that hurt.

You know, I was like, dude.

And then, but he was like, go back and play better teams.

You'll get beat, but your teams will be battle-tested.

And that's what I did.

So I made that shift.

I dropped all the weak teams.

I played the best teams all over the country.

I went to California.

I went to Texas.

I went to Arizona.

I went to Florida because they play different.

They play different in different parts of the country.

It's finesse in California.

It's tough in Texas.

You see where I'm going?

Yeah.

And we lost some of those games, but the next year we went 38-3 and won a championship.

And I didn't do anything different.

I just tried different.

I didn't try harder.

It was

pure strategy.

Yeah.

And how have you been able to apply this kind of mindset to the business world?

Because that's a way different world.

What I figured out was that there's so many things that you learn in athletics.

There's intensity in athletics.

There's winning and losing.

There's immediate feedback.

There's a lot of prey drive, right?

Like as soon as you, it all goes to zero at midnight in athletics.

So you could play on Tuesday night, feel good about yourself, listen to everybody tell you how great you are and get lazy and get beat on Friday night.

When I got into the business world at 31, I noticed there wasn't a lot of intensity.

There wasn't a scorecard.

There wasn't immediate feedback.

It was moving at a slow pace, man.

And it's like, so companies the first four years were hiring me like a Navy SEAL.

It'd be a $2 billion bank.

It says, we want to do $5 billion.

You got 500 people and you're in charge of all the strategy.

I could literally take the same people, add no new people, not fire anybody.

and get a 30 or 40% increase with the same people they had.

Wow.

Just with coaching.

And it taught me good people with great coaching can get better, can perform at a higher level.

So once I started doing that for banks, then word spreads pretty quickly.

They tell other people, this is the guy you got to bring in.

And so that's what I did for the first four or five years of the coaching company.

That's incredible.

So it didn't matter what industry they were in.

It didn't matter.

It was just mental coaching.

Well, it was mindset, but it was systems.

It was structure.

It was aiming point.

It was direction.

It was motivation.

Like some of these people, you know, did the same thing every day.

There was no prey drive.

There was no motivation.

There's no energy.

So the business world needs a lot of what's in the athletic world, persistence, intensity, right?

Prey drive.

The athletic world needs a lot of business, packaging, marketing, right?

That's really what the game is today.

So there's a crossover there that I saw, and I go, man, I can capitalize on this.

Yeah, well, in the corporate world, you probably see a lot of people just coasting by.

They're comfortable, right?

They don't feel like they need to work harder.

And there really is, you know, where there's no prey drive, there's no profit.

I like that.

Where there's no passion, there's no profit.

So what people do in corporate America is they get into the role.

They're really not getting coached.

So how would they get any better?

Right.

Like, I mean, think about how many podcasts you do.

Think about how much better you are today than you were six months ago, just through pure repetition.

Right.

Role play, testing, simulation.

Well, most corporate people are not getting coached.

There's no improvement.

They're not getting any better, but people want more results out of them and they're not going to get any better on their own.

Yeah, because people stop learning after college.

They think that's it.

The average American reads less than one book a year.

Only 46% of people actually read a book cover to cover.

Wow.

Of the people that only read one book.

So it's like

they're not going to get any better.

It's foolish to think your team is going to get better without any coaching.

And there's a lot of people today.

Let's take coaching, for example.

There's over 800,000 people in the United States who call themselves a coach.

The average income of those coaches is $47,000 a year.

Now, do you want to get business coaching from somebody making $47,000 a year?

I don't know.

But that's what people are doing.

They're life coaches.

They're business coaches.

They've never built anything.

They've never won anything.

And that's what's happening.

And so what that's done is it's commoditized the coaching world, and it's made everybody seem like a commodity.

And that's not true.

I have a different skill set than a lot of the people I compete against or do events with, right?

Based on my unique past, my unique unique experiences.

So everybody has their skill set.

Elliott, Cardone, Robbins, all the greats have a skill set.

But what makes a coach different is their unique past.

And you are paying them for that past.

Their past helps you build your future.

So all of those years of me studying under Covey, whole person theory, body, mind, heart, and spirit, inner engineering, building winners from inside out, really knowing how to play really is what people are paying me for.

They're paying for the $10,000 hours you spent before you became known.

That's right.

All the blood.

And it's funny is, you know, there's a lot of theory about the 10,000 hours.

And, you know, they say you can fast, you know, speed up the 10,000 hours if you have intense practice with no fear of failure.

That's why

people that do skateboarding or things like that will break arms and legs and they just have so many reps that they could actually speed up mastery.

But it was in my 10th year that we won a championship, which is typically 10,000 hours.

Yeah.

It was in my 10th year of business that we showed a significant breakthrough in the business.

So I think that there's a lot of,

I think there's a lot of

stick with that theory, just to be honest with you.

You can speed it up, but with very intense practice, no fear of failure, and it always comes back to who's coaching you.

If you study rapid transformation, it is who's coaching you, how hard do you go, how intense is the practice.

So maybe you could do it in four to six years if you had the right mentorship.

I could see that.

Yeah.

I think you still need the time no matter what, but if you have that mentorship, it could accelerate it for sure.

But 10,000 hours for me is always work ethics what been able to separate me from everyone else.

Yeah.

When I first started doing live radio, I was, I was, man, I was,

I was just terrified.

I'm like, I'm doing live radio.

It's live.

Like there's no editing.

You know, so I hired a coach and it was like a major country music artist.

It was his coach and she would sit right across from me in the studio.

and take notes the whole time.

And on the break, she would coach me.

And when I was finished, she would coach me.

And I thought, man, that was a good, that was a good move because she said don't say this you're confusing listeners here you can't say it like that like it was you know that's really what i needed well done yeah you were proactive yeah rather than reactive yeah live radio that's terrifying it was great though but but it allowed me to meet people like cardone it allowed me to meet marcus lamonas and nito cabain and some of the great people because everybody wants to promote what they're doing so all i had to do was say i got you know, Marcus Lamonas on last week from The Prophet.

And they would say, okay, I'm on.

When can I be on?

That's how I drew the show today.

Leveraging past.

absolutely you were podcasting before it was even big then i was podcasting when it was not even called podcasting it was it was like google like you know like google and we tried to live stream it it was on radio and we filmed it but it was in the early days yeah i would go into a studio every week and and do this wow you ever think about starting it up again i do a pod i don't do a podcast as much as i should we got a great podcast studio in asheville at the greatness factory um and i do i'm starting to do it more where i really sit down and interview people ashell's a great city to podcast yeah there's a lot of talent in and out there.

I just went there for the first time a few months ago.

Yeah, your people were telling me.

I said, we got to get you to the greatness factor.

I do.

Yeah, I do want to get out there.

How many people are going to hold there?

It's got a 109-person state-of-the-art theater.

Nice.

And then it's got a podcast, brand new podcast studio that's really cool.

It's about an 8,000 square foot building.

It's got everything from lounge, co-working, private suites.

Then it's got a level I call Disneyland for Business Adults.

I love it, man.

Beautiful.

Theater, podcast studio, cool rooms called the Money Lab, the Dream Foundry.

I give everything a unique name.

Yeah, you went hard on it.

You spent $25 million on real estate, right?

Yeah, I've bought about in my life, about $25 million worth of real estate between unique properties, greatness factory,

lodges to do cool coaching at, that kind of thing.

So I took the money from the coaching business, built a successful business, took the excess cash from the coaching business and started.

buying real estate.

Then I started using the real estate to do coaching.

And I call that intentional congruence, where everything feeds everything.

So it's like, I love real estate.

I love coaching.

How do we build a greatness factory where there are real estate's appreciating?

It's really like a deal factory, right?

And then how do we coach there and make it a cool experience?

So all the real estate that I own for the most part, I use for coaching as well.

That's brilliant to think that far ahead.

Yeah.

You're like a chess player.

Well, it's like cool.

It's like come to my, you know, we have this beautiful lodge, this 8,000 square foot lodge out in Tennessee that people love.

And it's like perfect for learning.

Sits on 27 acres.

And it's like, okay, let's buy this lodge and let's use it for coaching.

So

here's how this investment worked.

$293,000 down to buy that lodge, made back $500,000 in the first six months in coaching.

Wow.

And it's like, where could you get a return like that?

See, using the real estate in a different way is really a creative strategy that we use a lot.

That's a great way because a lot of people buy real estate and they sit on it and then it pay it off.

It takes forever.

It takes 20, 30 years.

And if you look at the greatness factory, the per square foot, most bankers would never understand this, is that I don't look at it per square foot because because if I'm charging $6,500 for 160 square foot office, I want you to think about that.

Okay, it's crazy.

It's crazy numbers.

But for that office, a person gets to use the theater once a month.

They get to use the podcast studio four times a month.

They get to have all these amenities.

So a person that is a thought leader goes, man, this is a great deal.

I'll take the office plus the theater.

And that's how you make the numbers work.

Plus the networking component of it.

They're around good people.

That's right.

I like that idea.

It's like a WeWork, but on steroids.

Well, I study WeWork.

I was telling your team out there for about four to five years, I mean, at a very deep level, I put my team in a WeWork for nine months to do research, and I looked at what I liked, what I didn't like.

They had studies that showed about 70% of people that work in WeWorks have no meaningful exchange with each other.

So when the whole concept is, and I think Adam Newman, by the way, the guy who founded WeWork is brilliant.

I mean, he raised more capital.

He raised, you know, $10 billion.

I mean,

he was brilliant.

And people say that model didn't work.

They They had revenues of $1.7 billion.

They had 400 locations.

They had 400,000 members.

What didn't work is they spent 1.8 billion.

And they were buying all these other companies

that didn't make any sense.

They grew too fast.

Yeah, but the concept worked.

And thanks to Newman, guys like me come along and go, it's a great idea.

This is where that Vujade comes in.

Vujade is bringing a fresh twist to an old way of thinking.

Like I did Pray Drive.

Okay, so the Greatness Factory is like a fresh twist on this.

Every member gets access to coaching.

Every member gets access to these events.

So it's not co-working because I think coworking is becoming outdated.

It's like a deal factory.

It's like a private country club for entrepreneurs that want to be in there.

Yeah, like a mastermind slash like investment fund.

That's right.

Yeah, we've raised about $10 million in the Greatness Factory in the first seven months.

Wow.

Just from members, just from people doing deals with each other.

That's incredible.

Yeah.

That's why I started the WhatsApp group for my podcast.

I want people to collaborate.

Think about the collective power of all my previous guests in one room.

Well, I mean, I think what you're building with interviewing some of the most talented people in the world is, hey, you got a seat at a big table, number one, literally got a big table, but you got a seat at a bigger table.

And then

how you package and monetize that, should you choose to, is unlimited.

Yeah.

From events to masterminds to, I mean, think about if you just did something and brought all of your best guests together and their specialty, what people would pay to be in that room.

Yeah.

Yeah, it's endless, right?

I got to get with you on some ideas there.

Well, somewhere along the way, I picked up the skill of packaging.

And packaging is anything the consumer can feel, touch, taste, or see.

A lot of people have great intellectual property, which is their past, their know-how.

What they don't know how to do is package that past,

market that past, and then monetize that past.

And so that's a formula that I've kind of created.

I help people find their X factor.

What is that unique factor about you?

How do we package that X factor?

Maybe we package it into 12 different monetization strategies, right?

12 different profit centers.

How do we market that X factor?

And ultimately, how do you monetize at the absolute highest levels?

I love that because a lot of people struggle with that.

Like just keeping it honest, a lot of people have tons of followers, but they're broke.

I know so many people that have millions of followers.

They're chasing the fame.

They're chasing the views, but they have no money.

Yeah.

And I'm all for becoming known.

Like, I wrote Person of Interest, which is one of my best-selling books.

It's a small book about, it's actually the smallest book that I've ever written that probably sold the most copies.

It's just how you become known.

But the way you become known is for a skill.

Okay.

You have a hard skill.

That skill can solve a real problem.

And if money changes hands when problems are solved, the more you refine that skill, the more demand there will be for that skill, and the more you can charge for that skill.

And the money is in proportion to the size of the problem.

Right.

So you become famous with no hard skill, then over a period of time, it's like, I like this person, but why would I pay money for them?

Like, what would they do for me?

What problem would they solve for me?

It's like the TikTok dancers.

Yeah.

And if you can't solve a problem, there's no monetization.

So

I think the way you become known is you have a skill.

You learn how to market that skill, package that skill, and market that skill.

And we probably have 18 to 20 different profit centers just from my one skill.

And that skill is activation, activating a boldness inside of people, activating an imagination inside of a person, activating a prey drive inside of a person.

I boiled that down to one word, activation.

Yeah, wake people up, man.

A lot of people got ideas, right?

People go through their whole lives not acting on it, but you're able to tap into that, wake them up.

That's cool.

Yeah.

Not a lot of people can do that.

Well, and I think it came from who I studied.

I've tried to figure out where that skill came from.

I think I was just fascinated from 18 to 25 by Covey, who was so good at packaging concepts.

And then I was coached by a guy named Dan Sullivan and

through strategic coach.

And they taught us: give everything a unique name, make everything a unique process.

So at the Greatness Factory, we have a Dream Foundry.

We have the Money Lab.

We have the Level 10 Podcast Studio.

Like everything's got a name.

Yeah.

Love that.

Man, you paid for some of the best mentors of all time.

What made you,

because you said you were 18 when you had the first mentor?

Yep.

That couldn't have been cheap, right?

I went to a free coaching clinic, and it had like 800 coaches.

And the guy said, if you don't read another book this year, pick up a copy of The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People.

I went, got the book, read it, didn't understand it.

It's hard to read for an 18-year-old.

It's hard to read right now.

It really is.

But I fell in love with the depth of Covey.

Like, I read a lot of self-help books today, and it's like reading a kindergarten book to me because

I like...

breadth and depth and real methodology, right?

Like not cotton candy.

And

so when I read Covey, it spoiled me because I studied Covey for the next eight years, went through all the certifications, paid the money, and that gave me a huge competitive advantage because no other high school coach out there was doing that.

No other high school coach was going to the business world and bringing the business world to the athletic world.

And they would ask me, they're like, man, what are you doing?

And I'm like, man, I'm coaching the whole person, body, mind, heart, and spirit.

And they thought, you should see how they looked at it.

They made fun of me.

I had my own website.

This is back in 1999.

I had a website, had a speaking page, and those other coaches were brutal to me.

They would call me Mr.

Motivational Speaker,

and

I mean, they were mean, man.

Look at you now.

But now they all call me and say, Hey, how do I get my team?

How do I get my team back?

I got boy in high school for the same stuff, you know, trying to be unique and different.

Yeah, but that's how you know you're on the right path.

Yeah, and you don't know that at the time.

It's like, man, why are people being like this to me?

But the truth is, I learned something about competition.

When I retired, my greatest competitor called me and said, will you come work with my team for a week?

Wow.

This is a person who wouldn't speak to me, wouldn't look at me, I thought hated me.

Like it was like war, right?

And I'm like, you want me to work with your team?

He's like, yeah, man, we want, I love what you do.

He said, you were just a big threat.

You were a big competitor.

And they paid me to come spend a week with his team.

I mean, I ran the practices.

I did all the meetings for one week, and it was my greatest competitor.

That's crazy.

Yeah.

Wow.

So he saw past the rivalry and saw how good you were.

It's like, man, you know, I couldn't beat these people for a long time.

And then when I started beating them, it's like, you do have to actually back it up with results.

Right.

You can't just talk about doing it.

You got to go do it, man.

Yeah.

And it drove me crazy when I was a young coach and the championship coaches wouldn't talk to me.

They wouldn't look at you because they had a ring and you didn't have a ring.

And it's like, what do I got to do to get in that club?

Yeah.

Wow.

I didn't know it was like this at the high school.

Oh, yeah.

And Tennessee, because Pat Summit was the head coach at Tennessee Women's.

Yeah.

And she was such an icon in women's basketball that Tennessee women's basketball is just a major sport.

If you go to different states, like it's like football's here and lacrosse is a big here, or you know, but Tennessee is big, big football and big, uh, big basketball.

That makes sense.

I remember seeing her on ESPN growing up as a kid.

Yeah.

It was a big deal, right?

And she set the tone.

So everybody, you know, if you were in women's sports, you wanted to be like Pat Summit, man.

It's like, how do you win like her?

How good are you?

How good were you at basketball?

You know, I was a good little point guard.

I really was.

I knew I was going to be a coach early in life.

My baseball coaches said, when you grow up, you're going to be a coach.

My high school basketball coach called me professor.

He's like, the way you think, you're always leading.

You're always helping the younger kids.

You're always directing.

So I was a point guard.

I didn't have your size.

So I was a little point guard, but I was scrappy.

You know, I was tough and gritty.

And I knew at 15 years old, I wanted to be be a coach.

That's how young I figured it out.

We're going to have to play a horse one of these days.

I need to get out and practice some, man.

It's been a while.

And my daughter, my oldest daughter, became a cheerleader, which is so ironic.

I wanted to be a basketball player, but she wanted to be a cheerleader.

So now I go to basketball games and watch my daughter cheer.

I love it, man.

I know.

Is she going to go to college, you think?

I think she could.

I really do.

She's got the skill.

She's got a lot of drive.

She's got a stubbornness about her that I think will serve her well in some ways.

And she does have an aiming point of wanting to go to college and on a scholarship.

Okay.

Yeah.

Where do you think she gets the stubbornness from?

My two girls are just like me, man.

And my son is like the nicest.

My son is four years old and he just walks up and goes, I love you, dad.

He's like the sweetest looking.

And my girls, this true story, we're sitting at breakfast one day and my two-year-old daughter's sitting there and she just looks over at

her brother.

He's four years old and just punches him right in the face.

It's like my girls are just tough and mean and in a sweet, you know, in a, in a, in a, like a tough way.

And my son is like this, just the softest, gentlest little kid you'll ever imagine.

Maybe it could have been from your mom.

You said she had some tough love on you.

She really did.

Maybe it's cycles.

And I didn't, you know, and I didn't, I didn't know that until I just thought that's how everybody was raised, you know, but but mom really did instill, like, I remember saying we don't whine, we don't complain, and we don't make excuses.

Wow.

We dress up, we show up, we grow up, and we always deliver.

And that's how, that's how we do it in this house.

So that's kind of how she raised me.

That's huge.

A lot of people have victim mentalities.

And I think, you know, there's, I study a lot of psychology.

There's a lot of learned helplessness.

And it's just where people just give up, man.

Right.

They give up on their dreams.

They give up.

And the prey drive has gone dormant.

If it was activated at some point, it's like my buddy Tim Story says, he'd be a great guest for you, Tim Story.

You know, life can knock the shout out of you.

You know, you come into the world screaming and life just kind of beats the shout out of you.

And it's like you just, you know, you just, you just get knocked down so many times you kind of have a learned helplessness.

Yeah, that's so true.

Yeah, I always wondered what caused some people to just persevere versus give up because I've always had the mindset to not stop.

I don't know if that's genetic environment.

You know what I mean?

It's probably a combination.

There's three phases of prey drive.

The drive must be activated.

And I go into the book and flip and switch what I think activates it after 33 years of coaching people.

There must be a persistence to that drive, which is

the ability to sacrifice.

The word passion means to sacrifice.

So you're willing to stick with something long enough.

It's like suck the sour to get to the sweet, you know, and then there's an intensity to a prey drive, which is veracity of attack.

It's like, I'm going to set an aiming point and I'm going to freaking move toward it and I'm going to lock in until I see it through to its conclusion.

And in the book, I go through the habits of the top 1% of performers and remarkable boldness, which is striking fearlessness or psychological flexibility, the ability to move forward with something, even if you don't know if it'll work.

Then you've got intrinsic motivation, which are deep because goals.

I don't like

find your why.

I think Simon Sinek's really smart,

but I actually believe you can know your purpose and still be broke.

I think you can know your purpose and still not be motivated.

Interesting.

This is after 33 years of coaching people, man.

Wow.

I believe what you need to know, instead of finding your why is, you need to find your skill.

And then you need to find a problem that you could wake up and solve every day.

And then you need to know what's called a because goal.

A because goal is a deep reason you do something when you don't feel like it.

I do this because of this.

I love that because finding your why is tough, but finding your skill, you know, that's more achievable in my opinion.

Yeah, because so many people, I would go speak around the country and

people would say, man, I hadn't found my why.

I feel like a loser.

Or the truth is, I believe you could know your purpose.

Like, I know I was put on this earth to help people reach their potential, right?

It's all I've ever done since I was a kid.

but that doesn't mean I feel like doing it every day.

Just because I know my purpose doesn't mean I'm automatically motivated.

So I believe it was like, what's your why?

What's your why?

So one day I picked up the phone.

I called my top five students.

I mean, my top money earners, they're stone co-killers, man.

And I said, what's your why?

And every one of them said, I don't know.

Wow.

Here's what they said.

It's just who I am.

This is just who I am.

I get up and I go get it.

It's in me.

It's deep.

So you got remarkable boldness, intrinsic motivation, great connection skills.

Think about all the people you've interviewed and how good their connection skills are.

The top ones, right?

Very good.

Okay, so that's a habit of the top 1%.

Then you move to grit and resilience.

And then you move to the ability to lock in and see something through to its conclusion.

Those are the top five habits of the top 1% of performers.

And if you know those top five habits, you can go, man, I struggle with remarkable boldness.

It's like I'm not bold.

Like Musk is bold, right?

Trump is bold.

Like you see all these people.

Cardone is bold.

Like people that do big things are bold.

They have a flexibility, a psychological flexibility to move towards something.

Bradley's bold.

They have this flexibility to move towards something.

They don't care what people think about them.

Okay.

That's remarkable boldness.

Intrinsic motivation, deep,

deep.

Connection.

They treat everybody like family.

Okay.

Ability to lock in.

I see it and I move toward it.

That's the persistence of prey drive.

And then you've got grit and resilience, which, you know, if you, if you had kids, which one of those would you, which one of those would you give your kids?

Think about that.

Those five you're saying?

Yeah.

That's a good one, man.

I think not caring about what you think for a kid, because I got bullied every day growing up and I used to care a lot about what people thought about me.

No one gives a shit, dude.

They only care about themselves.

So when I made that switch, game changer.

Yeah.

Because the truth is, I can go to a speaking engagement, and here's what the percentages tell me.

If I use the law of diffusion, which I do, tells me 2.5% of the people are going to see me and do something with me, they're looking for a guy like me.

13.5% of people need to see me one to three times.

34% of people need to see me three to seven times.

34% need to see me seven to 15 times.

16% of people ain't never going to do anything with me, no matter how good it is.

So imagine when you speak at something knowing that you don't, it's like people come up and say, man, it's an incredible presentation.

It's like, thanks.

Somebody comes up, size, yeah, it's okay.

Okay, thanks.

Right?

It's like, it's like, I don't get too high, I don't get too low

because

my confidence is not predicated on what you think about me.

My confidence is predicated on what I think about me.

You see where I'm going?

Yeah.

Confidence is a memory of success.

It's an internal knowing that I can create or manifest what I envision in my mind, right?

That's what confidence is.

It comes through consistent, ongoing, systematic repetition.

Okay, so when you write a book, some people are going to like it, some people are not going to like it.

When you go on a podcast, some people are going to like it, some people are not going to like it.

So you got to make up your mind that your confidence is never predicated about what another person thinks about you.

Because I always say never place your destiny in somebody else's hands.

Love it.

Because that destiny is in danger when it's in somebody else's hands.

Absolutely.

Especially these days with social media.

Yeah.

I mean, it could really ruin your confidence if you're not there mentally.

That's right.

Yeah, growing up, I lacked confidence for sure.

Well, we're working on a concept for kids called the Confidence Factory, which is a child of the greatness factory.

It's specific to teaching people how to build, maintain, and protect their confidence.

It's strictly for kids.

They pay a membership fee, just like they go play basketball, just like they go to gymnastics, just like they go to,

my daughter goes to, you know, cheerleading.

They would pay a fee to go to the Confidence Factory, and we're licensing that concept around the country.

That's needed.

I've never heard of something like that.

I know.

So our first one's in Maryland, just got funded last week.

Nice.

And I think it could be big, man.

That's so needed because a lot of kids are scared to open up to their parents about this type of stuff, you know?

And I, and I'm like, this is a funny story.

I was struggling with my daughter because she's very headstrong.

And I have to go, she needs a coach, like a life coach.

Right.

And I Google number one confidence coach for kids in Tennessee.

And guess who it was?

It was you.

Me.

And I'm like, we're screwed.

Cause I'm like, I'm like, I'm trying to hire a coach for my kid.

And Google's telling me I'm the number one coach for my kid.

And I'm like,

she's my daughter, man.

It's like, no matter how much dad knows or I'm like, you do know I was a great coach, right?

And she's like, dad, but you're not a cheerleading coach.

And, you know, it's like your kids don't, they don't look at you like that.

Yeah, she sees you as a father, not a coach.

Right.

And even in my hometown, people see me, no matter how many things we do in the world, no matter how many.

good things we do in the world, people in my hometown see me as a basketball coach.

Wow.

Yeah.

I mean, some of them's like, okay, went on to do bigger things, but most people, like when I go to the store or when I go to church or whatever, they see me and they're like, oh, yeah, there's Coach Bert, who's that high school basketball coach.

He's that motivational speaker.

That's what they say, which drives me crazy.

Yeah.

That's kind of like a negative like.

Yeah, it's like it's, it was great.

I don't, I don't, I think it was a great decade of my life.

I loved every second of it, but I started feeling like a level 10 person stuck in a level four vehicle.

Right.

Because you're capped.

And I knew I had a big engine and I wanted to take it to a bigger arena.

Yeah.

What's that next arena for you?

Probably building greatness factories

around the country or?

Yeah.

Building greatness factories.

The Confidence Factory could be good.

You know, I'm on the board of directors of a publicly traded AI company.

The CEO is here with me today, you know, and I think that could be really big called HITSI Healthcare Integrated Technologies.

I'm really enjoying that.

What does that company do?

Basically, AI technology.

The problem is people are living longer in their lives, but there's not enough workers to take take care of people as they live longer.

So the AI technology can track people in healthcare facilities that have fallen down.

It notifies people immediately.

Whoa.

A person who has dementia walks out the back door, it notifies people, and then it has biofacial recognition that tracks certain things throughout the day, the workers that are coming and going to make sure people are really doing what they're supposed to.

That's cool.

So you'll put this in all the elderly homes and hospitals and stuff.

And it's got other, so yes, in healthcare first, and now we're seeing application for it in school systems.

I could see that.

Well, the casinos have them here.

As soon as you walk in, they know they'll kick you out if you're banned.

That's right.

And so, so it's just got a big, big upside that I think could really, really be big.

So, I'm really enjoying being on the board of directors of that company.

That's cool.

Yeah, AI is definitely the future.

I use it every day.

Yeah.

I use it to help prepare me for podcasts.

Well, and the truth is, you know, I called my mom who worked in long-term healthcare, and I said, Tell me what the problems are.

And she said,

for every

23 residents, there's only one nurse.

There's only one person taking care of 23 people.

And she said, there's so much human error that's happening in these places that it's got to go to AI, right, to catch up with all of this.

So the AI can sit there and track when they take their medicine.

It can track when people fall down.

It can track all kinds of things that just get missed with human error.

I mean, third leading cause deaths.

Misdiagnosis.

And so it's like, you know, the longer people live, the less people there are to take care of those people.

So that's the big problem that this particular company solves.

It's called Healthcare Integrated Technologies or HITSEE for people that are looking up the stock.

That's cool.

We'll link it below.

Anything else you want to close off with, Mo?

You know, it's,

man, it's good being here with you.

I've watched your show.

You're really good at what you do.

You got a great place, and you've interviewed a lot of really talented people.

So it's an honor for us to be here with you, man.

Likewise, man.

We'll link your Instagram and social media below as well.

Thanks for coming on.

Absolutely.

Thank you.

I love it.

Come on.

See you guys.