How Dr. John Demartini Crushed Life's Toughest Challenges to Unlock His Full Potential | E100

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They told me I'll never read. I love reading.
They said I never write. I love writing.
Dr. John Demartini, human behavior specialist with over five decades of experience.
He is an international speaker, an author, an educator, the founder of Demartini Institute. I was born with an arm and leg turned inward and deformed.
I had dyslexia. Also had a speech impediment.
I slept under a bridge. And then I nearly died at 17.
I ended up being told by my teacher that I would never be able to read, never be able to write and I thought no I'm gonna mask this thing called reading, studying and learning. I'm not gonna let any human being on the face of the earth stop me.
I've spoken in 161 countries now. Everything they told me I would never do I'd end up doing.
Give yourself permission to shine not shrink and you don't need to get rid of any part of yourself. All of you works.
How do you maneuver Susie's challenges and keep sane? First of all, there's a thing called... Dr.
John Demartini, human behavior specialist with over five decades of experience. If you look at YouTube, you can't even figure out how five decades even make any sense.
But he is an international speaker, an author, an educator, the founder of Demartini Institute, in which he's teaching, reached

millions in over 100 countries. And I'm really excited about this conversation.
You will too, listeners, because we are sharing an amazing passion of elevating people. So, John, I'm so excited to have you on the show, and I want to take you back in time, rewind and take me to John, the child that is struggling with learning disabilities, with dyslexia.
Take me there for a second. How did you grow up? Born in Houston, Texas, 1954.
I'm going on 71. I was born with an arm and leg turned inward and deformed.
I was also had a speech impediment. I didn't know that until I was about a year and a half.
At age four, I was, well, one and a half to four, I was wearing braces on my legs and putting fingers and buttons in my mouth to speak properly. I had challenges also when I tried to go to school.
My first grade teacher put me in normal reading, then remedial reading, and then finally with a dunce cap. There were dunce caps in the 50s, 60s.
I ended up being told by my teacher that I would never be able to read, never be able to write, never be able to communicate, never go very far in life. My parents didn't know what to do with that.
The only way I made it through school is by learning to ask questions, which I'm known for today. Because I had braces, I've wanted to be freed and travel, and I've traveled an incredible amount of them.
I've done more traveling than most people. And barely making it through elementary school, learning to ask questions to the smartest kids.
I dropped out. I left home at 13.
I was a street kid. Where are your parents at this point? I would be so devastated.
And I know that you eventually have a really good relationship with your mom. There's some beautiful stories there.
But what happened at that moment? What did they do? I mean, they probably freaked out. My parents saw that I was going to have problems in speaking and learning, reading, dyslexia.
My dad tried to teach me practical things. When I was nine, I ended up creating my first company.
I had nine employees when I was nine. My dad was teaching me how to be an entrepreneur, kind of street kid.
I had to pay $7.50 a week to live at home. Whoa.
Pay food, clothing, and rent. It's interesting because I'm so grateful for that.
My dad said, I want you to know how to deal with the real world. He made me save money on a coin collection set.
He got me a piggy bank when I was nine. And I still have that piggy bank.
And it's never been open since 1963. I need my kids to listen to that because

they want allowance. I need them to pay the bills to be here.
But John, why do you think the instincts

for them to teach you that, that's so interesting? My dad thought that, I had a little landscaping

company, thought, well, maybe that's what he'll do because he can't read very, I didn't read until

I was 18, really. I was making it through elementary school by asking smart kids questions.
What did you learn? What did you get out of that? And if I heard it, I could get more sense out of it. Reading it wasn't making sense.
I couldn't put words together. But if I heard things, I did a little better.
I ended up leaving home and hitchhiking out to California when I was

14. I got into surfing.
I just said, I'm going surfing. And I figured out how to do little odd jobs, make enough money to go surfing.
At 14, I lived in California and down in Mexico. Were you scared? Were you scared to be alone at age 14? No.

Yeah, I mean, I had a close call.

I've been shot at.

I've been stabbed.

I've had a few things, close calls. And I hung out with some really savory people at times as a teenager.
Back in the 60s, you know, in the 60s, you had some interesting times. Well, also, nobody knew what dyslexia is.
We just had Richard Branson a few months ago, right? Nobody knew dyslexia. Nobody could put their fingers on, okay, they're not reading as well, but they're really, really smart.
They're going to absorb it in other ways. There wasn't that notion.
So you surf all day. I lived out in California.
I flew from Los Angeles to Honolulu. I slept under a bridge.
Then I park bench. The park bench is still there.
I went and visited recently. The park bench is still there.
The bathroom is still there that I used to go to. I found an abandoned car.
I lived in an abandoned car. I lived finally in a tent in the jungle.
And I was surfing. Were you happy? Do you feel like you were happy or were you miserable?

I don't have this idea that that was terrible. I was on an adventure.
My mom gave me a notarized piece of paper. She got a notary to sign it saying, my son is not a runaway.
He's a boy

with a mission and a dream. And he wants to go to California.
He has no relatives there,

but he's going to surf. Oh my God.

You know, some people have really parents that go, oh, I wish they'd have done this. I'm really grateful for my parents.
They were pretty amazing. Yeah.
I mean, it's brave. My dad said, he said to me one time, he said, by the time you're seven, you've already got your formative years and done.
And I want you to know how to be an entrepreneur. He didn't use that term, but how to be on your own and self-sufficient.
And I knew how to do that. Even if I had to panhandle money, I still figured out how to do it.
And I used to bark on the Lure Street in Honolulu on the South Shore. I used to bark at Lure Street and make enough money to go to Three Brothers Smorgies Board.
For $1.75, you can eat until you can drop, you know? I learned how to be, I guess you could say, a survivor, self-sufficient, whatever. So learning how to ask for what I want and learning how to figure out how to sell what I needed kind of became a thing on the street.
So I'm grateful for that. I wish I could take my kids and drop them off on the freeway and they would do that.
But they ended up getting the American Express sanctuary party, going shopping and going out to dinner, you know. Exactly.
Mine would call an Uber. That's not helping me.
But did you feel lost or scared or what am I doing with my life or not yet? I had moments. I mean, I had moments where I got picked up by some really interesting characters.
I had gangs attack me. I mean, I had moments, but I wouldn't change a thing.
I figured that the way I look at life is it's all on the way, not in the way. And anything you can't say thank you for is your baggage.
Anything you can say thank you for is your fuel. So I always say, how did this help me fulfill what I'm up to? And those days I wanted to go surfing.
And then I nearly died at 17. Oh, we'll talk about that because that's a big fuel.
Because again, I can see the bricks that formed John. That's incredible to who you became.
And that did become a fuel. So talk to us about that moment at age 17.
I was surfing a big day at Laniakea on the North Shore, and I ended up having some alkaloid cyanide kind of poisoning from what I was eating. It affected my diaphragm, stopped my diaphragm.
When you're riding a big wave and your diaphragm stops, it was a scary moment. Let's put it that way.
Wow. My board was crunched and splintered.
I ended up on the rocks and I ended up hitchhiking back from Lanikaya into Haleiwa. And then I ended up falling unconscious out in a parking lot at this grocery store.
And I woke up three and a half days later in a tent. Somehow somebody recognized there was and brought me to my tent.
I don't have any recollection for those days. But then a lady found me in the tent and I was pretty sick.
And she's the one that helped me recover and took me to a health food store to get me some carrot juice and decent food. And then I ended up going to a yoga class where I met Paul C.
Bragg. He's the one that started Jack Elaine's career and impacted Donald Trump and many, many people.
I mean, I could just go down the list, this guy. And he, one night in one hour with a message, inspired me to believe that someday I could become intelligent.
Tell me for a second, that accident, did you already say to yourself, this is my sign or not yet? You needed to meet Paul for that. Well, I remember when I woke up from the unconscious in the tent, face down in a really not a healthy sight.
I remember saying to myself, if I make it through this, I want to do something more with my life. That was a rough moment.
But when I met him, he said that what we think about, what we visualize, what we affirm, what we feel, what we write out and define and clarify, and what we act upon determines our destiny, determines how we want our life. And we can decide.
It doesn't matter what it is. It's just what's inspiring to us, what's truly meaningful to us.
How do we define that? And at the time, I was assuming right before that happened, I assumed I was going to make surfboards with Dick Brewer on the North Shore at Country Surfboards. And that was my fate.
But that night, I really had the first time belief that maybe I could overcome my learning problems and someday become intelligent. And that was like amazing moment.
And I went on a visual guided imagery meditation he took us through. And I saw myself standing in front of a million people speaking.
I have in my office in Houston, Texas, on the 52nd floor of Williams Tower, this five-foot by four-foot painting that Andrew Tischler from Melbourne, Australia painted of this vision. Wow.
It's really inspiring. It was such a lucid, tear-jerking, epiphany moment that I just knew that I knew that I knew this was it.

What's more interesting is that you were so far away from it.

Now, you weren't already a speaker for 4,000 people, and now you're imagining a million.

Like, you were so far of it.

I had a speech impediment.

I had to have a guy named Jackie Royd that I was living on the North Shore with, who was a friend and a surfer. He's the one that read for me.
I had difficulty reading. He used to read for me.
I always wondered, why are you asking me to read, man? You can do it yourself. I said, well, no, I like the way you read.
I didn't want him to tell him that. He didn't know that until maybe eight or 10 years ago in Los Angeles.
I met up with him and he didn't even know that I had learning problems. He didn't grasp it.
And it's incredible, John, because the people that don't know you don't realize that from this kid that was dyslexic and until age 18 couldn't read or 17, whatever. And now what you read, I don't know, 30,000 books and you wrote a lot of them and right.
And you speak in front of thousands or tens of thousands. I mean, it's incredible to see that change.
I could look at surf pictures in a surf magazine and I could look at the girly magazines. I could visualize pretty fine.
I just didn't read and articulate and add meaning to things easily. But when I met Paul Bragg, I got to study with him for like three weeks every single day.
And he really did inspire me. And he gave me kind of like a formula.
He gave me a statement to give to myself and say to myself every day. And I started on a journey that was a new trajectory.
And I had no idea where it was going to lead, but I just had this sense that this is the new path. And it's not that I didn't like surfing.
It's just that all of a sudden I really had this belief that if I worked at it, I could overcome this learning thing. So what happened? Flying back to LA and hitchhiking back to Texas.
And when I got to Houston, my mom and dad didn't recognize me. They went, oh, because I had long hair and a beard, you know, it didn't look like a little teenage kid.
They taught me into taking a GED, and somehow, miraculously, I guessed and I passed. I literally guessed and passed this test.
I don't know how I did it. Just guessed.
And then I thought that was going to work, guessing, and when I tried to go to a junior college to try to take classes, try to go back to school, and I failed. I got a 27 on a test.
And I remember driving home crying, thinking maybe this whole thing is an illusion. All I could do is hear my first grade teacher saying, I'm afraid he'll never read, write, or communicate, never go very far in life and all that.
And I shattered the vision about being a teacher. And I thought, I guess I'm going back to surfing.
And my mom saw me on the living room floor when I got home. She saw me on the floor and she said, what happened, son? What's wrong? Because she hadn't seen me cry in a long time.
And I said, mom, I blew the test. I got a 27.
I need a 72 to pass. And she just looked at me.
And then she finally said something that only a mother could say. She said, son, she put her hand on my shoulder and she said, son, whether you become a great teacher, healing philosopher and travel the world like you dream, or whether you go back to Hawaii and ride giant waves like you've done, or whether you return to the streets and panhandle as a bum that you've also done, I just want to let you know that your father and I are going to love you no matter what.
We know what you've gone through. We're just going to love you.
And it took a pressure off me because I feel like I started letting myself and them down because I thought I was going to go back to school and all. But when she said that, my hand went into a fist.
And I look up and I saw that vision that night that the guy painted. And I saw it and I thought, no, I'm going to mask this thing called reading, studying, and learning.
I'm going to mask this thing called teaching, healing, and philosophy. And I'm going to do whatever it takes.
I'm going to travel whatever distance. I'm going to pay whatever price to give my service of love across the planet.
I'm not going to let any human being on the face of the earth stop me. I got up, I hugged my mom, I went to my room, I got a dictionary out, a Funk and Wagnall's dictionary, and I started memorizing 30 words a day.
And I would read it, write out the word, write out the definition, pronounce it, put it in a sentence, 20 times each for each of the 30 words, 600 of those repetitions. And at the end of two years, I had 20,000 words new in my head.
And I was reading dictionaries and reading encyclopedias. And now it's just under the 31,000 books now.
And I just never put the books down. And I grew my vocabulary.
I learned on how to resolve some of the dyslexia. I learned that if I take people that I really look up to, that I really admire, that I really do extraordinary things, instead of living in their shadow, but to stand on their shoulder by identifying where I already have what I see in them.
Instead of thinking, well, I don't have this. I want to someday get it.
I would just go, where do I display and demonstrate the traits that I admire in them? And I document where and when until the quantity and quality matched in my mind. And then instead of living in the shadows, I was able to play in the playing field of opportunity.
And I didn't subordinate and try to be somebody I was, and I was able to be me. And all of a sudden, little by little, you could see on the audio recordings that I was doing, the dyslexia was dissolving away.
Today, people don't even believe I did have that now hardly. But if I let you listen to some recordings back in my 20s and 30s, you'd go, whoa, that's obvious what's happening here.
That is absolutely incredible that you were able to recover, basically, and you learn. And I think you also had this beautiful gift at age 19 that instead of asking for something, you actually wanted to read and to learn and to grow, right? What was it? Remind me.
Well, the very first book I picked up when I was 18, this is right at 18, right? My birthday. I got a book called Chico's Organic Gardening and Natural Living.
I saw this at a little health food store because once I went to that health food store, I went back there. And I saw this at a health food store on this little swivel thing.
And it was a long-haired hippie guy with this other farmer named Chico. And the guy looked like me.
And I thought, if that sucker can ride it, I bet I can read it. So I picked up that book and that was the first book I ever went through the entire book page by page.
I can't say I read every part of it, but I actually went through the book and looked at pictures and read what I could of it. And that inspired me to eventually get into organic gardening also, which was interesting.
But that was the very first book I ever tried to read. I got another book by Adele Davis on nutrition, and I finally put that down.
I was too much. But I just started to go to that dictionary and read, and now I've got a pretty good vocabulary and I can speak nonstop.
And you've wrote many books. I'm still recovering from finishing my first.
But tell me for a second, John, entrepreneurship is really, really hard. I mean, it has its hard moments.
You've been at it. Apparently, it's even more than 50 years now that I'm looking at your childhood, right? How do you maneuver through the challenges, through the hardships, through the fears? Like, did it ever occur to you, darn it, I don't want this.
I'm going to work somewhere. Or that wasn't even a thing.
Like, your vision was so clear. Was that speaking in million people? Like, where did entrepreneurship catch you? The very first student I had was a 375-pound Afro-American woman.
She was this really lovely, inspired lady that asked me to teach her yoga. Okay, because I was studying yoga.
When I met Paul Bragg, I figured I'm going to study this thing called yoga. And, you know, I had a yoga instructor.
So that was my first student. I was 18 years old.
She came up to me and asked me to do it. I thought, okay, I'll teach.
Then I had a guy who came up to me and saw me meditating out on the sun, and he asked me if I could teach him meditation. Now, that guy's been with me 52 years still.
He's still there. Whoa, that's incredible.
Yeah, he's a doctor today. Now, what's interesting is then I had about 17 students get out of a class and surround me at a library and wanted me to mentor them on mathematics that I was studying.
It was only algebra because I had to start over, but they wanted me to do it. So I started teaching in the library and tutoring when I was 18.
I was learning 20, 30 words a day, 30 words a day. And I just kept growing my vocabulary.
And people started saying, this guy is really committed to learning. Most kids were going to school, you know, parents, you know, they just do the basic

minimum.

Force them.

No, no, no, no.

I was there every minute, every hour I was using my time.

And I excelled because of that.

I went from the bottom to the top.

Then when I went to the University of Houston, I started to do yoga under these trees.

And people come gathered up around me and started asking me questions because I guess I look kind of like a weirdo. And 100, 125, 150, sometimes 400 people would gather every day.
So I would start to do classes. And what's interesting, the very place that I used to do these classes, University of Houston, now has the Bauer School of Entrepreneurship building on top of the space.
And that building was inspired by two of my students to build. And they asked me to come and speak there at the opening.
They didn't know that I used to teach on the base of this building. How special is that? Oh my God, what a beautiful closing.
It was a tearjerker. It was a tearjerker.
When I told him that, I didn't know that I had inspired the formation of the college at a class I did, but they didn't know that I used to teach on that spot. If you're feeling stuck, underpaid, or unappreciated, or you're simply ready to take your career in life to the next level, I have the perfect solution for you.
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Now back to the show. One of the beautiful things that you talk about is also how you're a master delegator.
Like you're able to somehow get people to do everything else and you just go and do what you're incredible at, which is the reason why you can change a lot more lives. Can you talk to us a little bit about that? When I graduated from professional school, because I was teaching six or seven nights a week in my apartment at professional school, and every opportunity to teach, I was doing.
And then when I graduated, I went out into practice and it was interesting, about two weeks into practice, I was doing everything. I had one assistant that I hired, but I was doing everything.
That's what's so hard about entrepreneurship. That's so hard.
You put all the hats, you have all the hats, right? I started out doing everything. I didn't have a lot of business savvy.
I think I took one little class at University of Houston on a business class, and I really can't say that was my forte. I was studying biology and pre-med and more of the sciences and humanities and stuff.
I got in there and I was doing everything. I was doing a bankruptcy conciliation.
One day I was doing a bankruptcy conciliation and they said, we got a new patient. And I said, I got to finish this bankruptcy conciliation.
I said, not yet. And I thought, wait, my patient's number one.
What am I doing a bankruptcy? And then I thought, this is insane. I could hire somebody to do this for 20 bucks in those days, 1982.
And I could be going out and doing way more in my clinical. But I got it that day.
That really ridiculous thing of trying to get a bankruptcy. And so I went over to Walden's bookstore and I went through the business section, right? All these books.
And I found this book called The Time Track by Ellen McKenzie. It was on time management.
And I read that, devoured it, dog-eared it, and I summarized that book. And it changed my life because imagine this.
Imagine a piece of paper or a series of them, and they've got five lines, six columns in it. On the far left column, I wrote down daily actions.
I wrote down every single thing I do in a day, personal and professional. And then I imagined what I might do over a three month period, everything that I did.
And I made a list of everything. And as I was doing this, and this was like many pages, I did a lot of stuff.
And I didn't do vague stuff like sales or marketing or this. I broke it down into the daily actions, the actual actions of what I did to make that come true.
And when I was writing that, I was thinking, man, I am majoring in minor stuff and minoring in major stuff. I am doing low-party stuff.
It was obvious as I was making this list, this isn't going to build my business the most efficient way. What am I doing this for? When I did that exercise, I went to the second column.
How much does it produce per hour? And I extrapolated the best I could. How much money is being made by each of these actions? And then I had a real wake-up call.
The very thing I went to nearly 10 years of college for wasn't the most productive thing I could be doing. The clinical, in the cubicle, working with a patient, I was limited to about maybe $1,800 an hour.
But if I go out, I always say a man with a mission has a message. If I go out and I do a presentation and educate people, the larger the audience, the more patients, and I could delegate clinical to clinicians.
And I went bang. When I saw that, I realized I'm majoring in minors, majoring majors.
And I made a list of everything I did and what it was producing. And I had 30% of them that were zero income.
Wow. That makes a lot of sense, by the way.
It's interesting. Yeah.
When I got through that, I realized, and I looked at that even at home because I'm doing stuff that's making nothing at home instead of going and producing and hiring people to do that, right? So I realized that and I prioritized that list. And the top one was speaking.
The second one was training doctors to do the clinical work and teaching them how to do it. And the third one is then only working with the highest, most influential, most powerful people is prioritize patients.
When I got through that, I then I went to the third column and I did, how much meaning does it have on a one to 10 scale? 10 being, I can't wait to get up and do it. I'm inspired by it.
I love it. And one being, oh God, I got to do it.
And I broke it down and I pre-prioritized that according to meaning because, you know, when you're doing something produces per hour, you're serving other people's values. When you do something that's meaningful, you're serving your own values.
You've got to have a win-win sustainable fair exchange to make it where you can't wait to do a service. They can't wait to get it.
So I pre-prioritized that list of meaning. And then I looked at where there was overlap.

What was the most meaningful and the most productive?

Luckily for my case, there was overlap.

And I realized, wow, the most meaningful and the most productive were just facing me.

I was looking at them.

And after prioritizing that, I went to the next column.

I said, well, if I'm not doing it, I'm doing other priority stuff, low priority stuff. I'm holding myself back from producing the most.
So I said, well, how much does it cost to hire that person and delegate that? And I learned from that book, a lot of great stuff about what to do about that. And then I took not just their salaries, but three to four times that was really the cost.
You know, the space usage, the training, the insurance, the bonuses. There's a lot.
Yeah. Three to four times the amount.
And so I wrote down how much would it cost to delegate everything to somebody who's masterful at it, that loves to do it, that's high profile on A person, not a Z person. And then I prioritized that according to spread, what it cost versus what it produced.
Then I did the next column. How much time is actually allocated for that per day? What's really the time I'm going to do it? So I can really structure a job description accordingly.
And then the last column was the summary of all the variables and prioritization of all the variables. And then I divided that into 10 layers.
All that list, there were multiple pages. I divided into 10 layers and I created job descriptions layer by layer.
You delegate the lowest priority stuff first and the highest priority you end up duplicating last. You're the last person you delegate, what you do, right? So I just did this.
And in 18 months from opening my practice with one assistant, I had five doctors, 12 staff members, and my net income was way more than tenfold. And I was doing what I loved.
And I was doing something that was meaningful. I wasn't overwhelmed.
I wasn't frustrated. I wasn't.
And I learned that if I fill my day with high priority actions and dedicate my life to what's highest in priority, my day doesn't fill up with low priority distractions.

And if I fill my day with high-priority actions and dedicate my life to what's highest in priority, my day doesn't fill up with low-priority distractions. And if I delegate anything that requires external motivation, some sort of extrinsic need, you know, McGregor said there's theory Y and theory X.
Anything that requires an incentive or a motivation from the outside to get me to do, I delegate. Because anytime you do low-priority things, you devalue yourself.
Anytime you do the highest-priority things, you value yourself. And when you value yourself, so does the world.
So I basically prioritized things, delegated the hell out of it, and I was freed and liberated. And my net income went up.
And during that time, I also learned from a financial planner about money management. I learned nine questions.
Sometime we'll have to do a show on that. These nine special questions that turn you to financial freedom.
I learned these nine questions. We should bring you to do a show on that.
That is interesting. I like to do that because it's a good one.
And I did these nine things and I started to accelerate my savings, my investments and just kept leveraging and which just drove my business up and created it all over the world. So it was amazing what happened when I learned to delegate.
There's no way you can live an inspired life unless you delegate, no possible way. If you help other people get what they want to get in life, you get what you want to get in life by you helping them find out what they love and only hiring people that have highest on their values, the thing you want to delegate.
So they can't wait to get up in the morning and do it. So you don't have to micromanage.
And do that thing that you hate. Yeah.
They have to love it. So, I mean, they have to have an orgasm on where you want to vomit.
Totally. You know? Thank God for my team that loves whatever, spreadsheets and all the things that I hate.
I haven't done a bank conciliation since 1983. I haven't even written a check since 1983.
I don't even know that stuff. I delegate everything.
Even I tell my girlfriend, I said, look, I'm not the greatest in lovemaking. If I delegate lovemaking to George Clooney, would you still love me? She says, I'll love you even more.
So I just delegate things. I need that for my husband.
George Clooney is not bad at all. I only have three or four things I'm good at.
Teach, research, write, and travel. That's it.
Oh, and I love to travel. And you travel, you put me to shame.
And I think that I'm a pretty good traveler. And by the way, I think you also delegate driving.
Is that so? I haven't driven a car in 35 years. How the heck do you do that? I don't even have a home.
I've sold all my homes. I had 11 homes one time.
I sold all my homes. My wife wanted them.
She passed away, so I got rid of them all. I live on my ship.
I sail around the world on my ship. That's it now.
I basically delegate stuff. I haven't driven a car in 35 years.
I haven't cooked because it's not what I love doing. I love teaching, researching, writing, and traveling.
And guess what? They told me I'll never read. I love reading.
They said I never write. I love writing.
They said I would never go very far. I've traveled 21 million miles by flights and 2 million by sailing.
They said I would never amount to anything. Well, I got multiple.
Not bad. Yeah, 50 times financial independence now.
So everything they told me I would never do, I'd end up doing, but I never got to thank the woman who told me I would never do it. Oh, that's a good one.
I started in my head, in my mind, thank you for giving me a void that drove my values. But now the beautiful thing is that you took that and that became your fuel to find the thing that makes people just go supersonic, right? You know, I have a value determination process on my website.
You may have seen that already. It's a 13-question kind of thing that helped me.
Because 46 years ago, I asked myself, what is it that makes people walk their talk and not limp their life? What is it that, why do some people do what they say and others don't? What is it that drives people? And I devoured the literature in that field. But I found out that most people, when they looked at their values, they were looking at what it ought to be, as David Hume used to say, what it ought to be instead of what it is.
I want to know what it really is. Not what it ought to be, what it is.
So you can then structure your life according to what's truly self-determined. And I learned how important values were.
I've been teaching all about them for 46 years, because the hierarchy of your values dictates your destiny. Tell me what they are and tell you where you're going to spontaneously go.
And that to me is so, so, so important, John, because I obviously lived whatever society thought, right? Society thought that I should be an engineer. So I was an engineer and I would write code and I would be excited about cloud and data centers and whatever crap I was supposed to be excited about.
But that was how society has you wired, right? And it takes almost like this massive momentum to move yourself and to dare to say, you know what? That doesn't actually inspire me. I want to do something different and I don't care what it looks like, but that is the scariest thing that I don't care.
It's really scary. If you don't give yourself permission to be the most authentic you, you're going to be second at being somebody else instead of first being you.
You want to find the one thing, as Gary Keller says, the one thing that absolutely inspires you. You know, Warren Buffett tap danced to work because he loves finance and wealth and, you know, numbers and stuff and financial statements.
That's what he loves. That's why he's great at it.
I love researching and teaching. That's why I've done well with it.
If you hadn't said to John, let's be an entrepreneur and let's open up a cupcake manufacturing company and deliveries for it. Oh God, I would suck.
I'd be going to Social Security looking for some sort of a handout. Me too, especially the cooking is so not me.
And you know, people say, well, that's because you're wealthy. You can afford to delegate.
I said, I didn't become wealthy and then become delegating. I delegated to become wealthy and people don't get that.
It doesn't cost to properly delegate. It costs to improperly delegate.
But that's why I wanted your story because your story is so inspiring, John. But I will go there for a second because one of the things that you'll see is, I mean, sometimes fear is real.
Like, I don't know how to pay the salaries. I don't know.
It's a crappy year. How do you maneuver through these challenges and keep sane?

First of all, there's a thing called a fantasy and an objective.

And people confuse those.

Let me just elaborate on this because this is a great one.

Because fear is not your enemy.

Everybody talks about how bad you got to get rid of fear, overcome your fears.

Fear is not your enemy.

Fear is your friend. It's letting you know when you're pursuing get rid of fear, overcome your fears.
Fear is not your enemy. Fear is your friend.

It's letting you know when you're pursuing a fantasy that's inauthentic and is trying to get you back to that which is a true objective where you embrace both sides of the pleasures and pains in the pursuit of something meaningful. It's a guide.
And what we do is we go out and look for a fantasy. I'll use this example.
imagine you're getting in a relationship and you meet this guy

and you think oh oh, my God, this guy ticks off all the boxes. He's got more positives and negatives and you get infatuated with him.
Now, your intuition is whispering inside, you know, don't rush it. Be careful.
Keep your eyes open. Who is this guy? Find out about it.
But no, your impulse of your amygdala is going, oh, I got me the guy, you know, found that worm thing. And you've got a bit of a fantasy.
You've got a fatal attraction, you know, you've got Glenn Close on your hand, as we'd say. But then you find out over the days, weeks, months, or years, they find out it wasn't what you thought, and there's now the downsides.
But, you know, any relationship over time will make you learn that there's things you like and things you dislike, and they're nice and balanced. And you're never going to get one without the other.
But a fantasy is you're going to get an advantage over a disadvantage, a positive over negative, a pleasure out of pain, and a one-sided thing. And the Buddha says the desire for that which is unobtainable and the desire to avoid that which is unabortable is a source of human suffering.
So people suffer when they go after fantasies and unrealistic expectations that aren't really executive have, not real objectives. See, when you're living by your highest values and you're prioritizing your life, your blood glucose and oxygen goes into the forebrain, activates the medial prefrontal cortex, the ventral portion, and creates an objective, reasonable mind that's not emotive, not impulsive and instinctual where we distort subjectively our reality.
We're now seeing things as they are, not as we fantasize them to be. And when we do, we set real objectives.
And the purpose of the executive center in the brain is to transform fantasies into true objectives. And the second we set up a fantasy with a pleasure without a pain, we are designed to have a phobia and an anxiety and an uncertainty to come up to let us know we've done that.
So our phobias are really basically let us know we're addicted to affiliate. Our nightmares are letting us know we have a fantasy.
When we set true objectives and we mitigate the risk and we calm down the fantasy and we now have a strategy, we increase the probability of achieving as an entrepreneur. And that means we're not going out with a fantasy that we know better than the customer we know what they need let's just project that onto the customer we go out there and actually do the research to find out what people are willing to buy what do they want and we actually meet and find sustainable fair exchange and equity between ourselves and other people where we can't wait to deliver it they wait can't wait to get it.
So there's a demand and supply balance. The second we do, we're on our way.
But many people have fantasies that they know better than the market and better than the people. And then they end up having anxieties and fears because it's not having a demand.
And they're wondering, what are we doing? And they think they've got to do more slick marketing or something. But that's not it.
It's meeting people's needs. That's what an entrepreneur is.
Caring enough about humanity to actually find a problem that humanity is facing, a niche that you can't wait to get out and solve, and dedicate in your life to solving it. And the greater the challenge you solve that you go after, the greater the potential business you got.
Eventually, it's about solving a real problem, right? And it could be a $1 problem for a million people, or it could be a million dollar problem for one person, but it needs to be a real problem or somewhere in between, right? But at the end of the day, it needs to be a real problem. But I will say, like, if you still went to whatever, 2000, 2008, I don't know, there were some down times, even if you have an incredible market fit, and you have an incredible business model and you have amazing clients from time to time it's gonna be but it's scary what do you do i didn't have that in 2008 and nine were big big years i didn't have it for you but about a year ago maybe when the inflation was starting to kick in i noticed that there was a change because I was doing a lot online and people wanted live events again.
So I had to revamp because I was on my ship just sailing around the world doing online things. All of a sudden I'm going, oh, I'm going to go over to another location now and fly somewhere, you know.
So there was an adaptation there, but it was basically caring about the market enough to meet the market's needs. That's all it is.
If you don't meet the market's needs, business goes down. And there's no forever, it's never have to worry about.
It's a moving target. Life is changing.
People are changing. Needs are changing.
You have to care enough about humanity to meet their needs and keep up with it. That's the entrepreneur.
That's the game. I had a challenge in 2003 when we started to go to war, when George Bush wanted to go to Iraq.
I had about a two-week lull there. All of a sudden, people just stopped.
I didn't really see anything in my life in 2008 or 2009. That didn't happen.
I boomed during that time. But I did have it about a year ago, a year and a half ago, I started noticing a downturn.
That's what resilience and adaptability is about. But you know, I was speaking in Iran to the government of Iran a number of years ago on change management.
I had the government there. Yeah, I had 200 government leaders and I had 400 leading entrepreneurs there and 22 ministers of the state.
That's so surreal. That's so crazy.
That's amazing. Yeah, it was really kind of, it was like sitting at the United Nations.
Everybody had their own microphone and speaker, and it was really amazing. But my topics was on change management.
I said, when people are engaged and inspired by what they do, they make incremental change very fluently because they're congruent with what they do, and their fluency is proportionate to their congruency. But when they're not inspired by what they do and they're an amygdala and they're holding on and attaching to job duties or whatever, then if you try to change them, they say, well, you didn't pay me for that.
And because they're not engaged, they're not inspired by the outcome. And so I was explaining on how to increase engagement and how to have a higher according to values and link job descriptions to values to engage people to have resilience and adaptability for change.

And this is something that many entrepreneurs get trapped in and engaged in where they are not engaged. They get rigid in about, well, it worked over here.
It's supposed to work over here now. The reason somebody like this calls you is because from very early on, like before I even knew about what a personal brand is, you knew that you need to grow your personal brand.
And that to me is really inspiring. Like, yes, you also do good and you create amazing change and you know how to really cultivate that personal brand for yourself and write the books and go speaking.
And what

triggered you to understand that this is the future? At least for me, a techie, you know, I didn't even realize until I woke up and said, oh my God, I'm a nobody. What made you create that? I don't want to mislead people into thinking I have some sort of a knowledge about that.
I just wanted to travel the world and teach. I've spoken in 161 countries now, and I had a dream to go to every country on the face of the earth and share my research findings with people.
That's it. I just had one focus, research and have the most amazing synthesized information that they can't get anywhere else and deliver that and do it in a way that inspires people to get into action.
If I do that, my dad said, if I give a value to somebody and I give service to people, you will never worry about working. And my dad, when I was nine, I told him I wanted to buy a baseball and a glove and a bat.
He said, son, have you mowed the lawn? Yes. Have you edged the sidewalk? Yes.
Have you swept the garage and the driveway? Yes. Have you trimmed the hedges? Yes.
Have you done all the flower beds and weeded them? Yep. Have you tightened up the shale? You clipped the hedges? Yep.
He said, son, I don't have anything else you need to do. You're going to have to go to the neighbors to make, if you want to ask, get money, because you make money by serving people.
And I don't have anything else needs done. So you have to go to the neighbors.
So I went a couple of doors down to the place, and I saw an unruly yard, and I said, would like it trimmed and mowed and stuff. She said, how much? I didn't even know what to say.
I said this amount, and she said, well, that sounds reasonable. So I did it, and I had bee stings and burns and blisters, and then I got money from it, and I went out and bought the glove bat and ball, and my dad said, where'd you get all that? And I I said, well, I went to the Everest.
And he said, see, what did you do? I said, well, I mowed and edged and clipped the hedges and I did everything. And he said, what equipment did you use? I said, the equipment in the garage.
He said, son, I got to teach you about business. You're going to have to pay me for depreciation cost on that equipment.
So I said, oh, crap. I said, I got to pay my dad now.
And he made me pay for gasoline, all wear and tear. And I had to go and use the neighbors across the street and the next door neighbors and the mallows and the zoo broads equipment.
And then I told him there were different prices. If I use your equipment in the garage, it's one price.
If I do it this way, I started diversifying. And then I got me three groups of three kids helping me.

I made, after all costs, $45,

which is probably around $600 or $700 a day's money

as a kid when I was nine.

And then my dad said, well, now he didn't see me saving money.

So he bought me a coin collection set and a piggy bank.

So I started saving money and I filled up things

and I started to learn to save and do it.

And then he said, well, now you're going to learn the next step about being independent. Now you're going to pay for clothing, food, and rent, $7.50 a week.
That's $30 a month, $1 a day, basically. He said, but that's going to buy you freedom.
Now you can get up at 5 o'clock in the morning all i ask is you be home by nine o'clock at night you can go anywhere you want do anything you want it's your life so he was training so when i was nine i rode my bicycle 35 miles in different directions and then raced home when i was uh 12 years old i was started to do a little bit of hitchhiking stuff 12. 12, I started riding bikes many, many miles.
I started hopping trains at 12, going on 13. 13, I started hitchhiking.
You know, at 14, I hitchhiked across America and down into Mexico. So my dad trained me on how to be self-sufficient because he said, you're not going to make it in school.
I mean, I did a little bit of the drug scene in the 60s, like everybody in the... Like everybody else.
Everybody did that. When I first hitchhiked to California, I got a ride and I got my way into Austin.
I met this chick that I'd met on Freeport Beach. I found her number and I contacted this girl.
She picked me up. We went to dinner.
Then we went to a Ted Nugent concert at the Armadillo Club in Austin. So afterwards, she was a hot chick.
So we got to go backstage and I got to get stoned with Ted Nugent back in 1968. So that was my first day on the road going to California.
It was not that bad. Not bad.
But let me ask you for a second, John, because one of the things that we run into a lot in Leap Academy is that people, even though they give a lot of value, even though they mean really well, they don't know how to charge their worth. So the minute somebody calls them to speak or to do something, sure, I'll do it for free.
Of course, of course, of course. Right.
And there's this confusion between being nice and charging your worth. And to some extent, people will treat you the way you're perceived to be treated.

So if you're always coming for free, you're just going to be the person that is always

brought to free.

But then you won't be able to do more than two a year because, you know.

So how do you maneuver to be able to charge your worth, basically, and live up to that? Did it take something specific from you? Was it just a muscle that you built? I was 23 years old. I was doing classes at my apartment every night.
I would speed read books. I get up at two o'clock, do yoga to 2.30, speed read books to 6.30, read four to seven books.
By then I was speed reading. At 6.30 go jog and come back clean up go to class at the end of class when i finished the clinic at 7 p.m i came across the street to my apartment and i taught every single night what i read that morning and i had this little bowl out at the door and it said love donation oh and i said love love donation, like pay me.
If you get a value, pay me. And I think I got five bucks the first night.
I said, that's not going to cover my bills. And so I said, minimum love donation, five bucks.
And I think I got 10. 10.
And then I said, a minimum load of emission, $10. And then I think I got 10, 10.
And then I said a minimum love donation, 10 bucks. And then I think I got 20.
And then I said, minimum love donation, 20 bucks and still got 20, 30 bucks, 40 bucks or something. And then I finally got pissed off, which is purposely inspired spiritual service, educating the divine, if you will.
I'm just making up something here. And I said, minimum fee, 20 bucks.
And the night I put minimum fee, 20 bucks, I got $360 that night. Wow.
And I go, whoa, that's interesting. I'm waiting for other people to decide my worth, and they're making sure they don't decide it.
They're waiting for me. And so when I did that, I went, hmm, each time I raised it, I got a little bit more.
And then when I valued myself, I got a lot more. So I gradually started to go and increase that.
Well, I made a goal. I actually wrote out an escalating amount that I wanted to keep doing.
And I used to carry cash in my pocket

on what I wanted to make in a day.

And I eventually carried 30,000 a day

and I made 30,000 a day.

I started charging 30,000 a day for my service

and I got it.

But I had to do it in steps.

I couldn't go from $20 to 30,000.

Because I think people will eventually pay you

what you believe you're worth, not they believe.

Now, some people won't be able to afford you. That's okay.
But they will pay what you believe you're worth. And I think that was such a beautiful example.
Again, speak up. I realized that until you value, don't expect the world to.
And I realized whenever you want to change it and raise it, I had an exercise I did. Write down 100 benefits to the clients of the new fee and 100 drawbacks to the clients of the old fee.
And then make sure you deliver something of extra value and make sure you have something that nobody else can do it. See, if they can get the same thing from somebody else, they're going to go to the lowest price.
But if they can't get what you have to offer, so I made sure that I read things, learned things, presented things, outlined things in a way that nobody else would do. I didn't copy anybody else.
I stayed away from matching anybody else. I didn't subordinate to anybody else.
I just went for original ideas that served. I said, since I was 20, I create original ideas that serve humanity, original ideas that serve humanity.
And I basically just kept focusing on something they never get anywhere else. I asked people to this day, my signature program, the Breakthrough Experience, which I've done 1,232 times.
I said, how many of you learned something today and yesterday that you could have gone your entire life and never have learned if you hadn't have been here? Every hand goes up every week. So I make sure that they can't get

anywhere else. If you do and you can distinguish yourself, it's easier to help sell that.
But based on everything that you went through, what is the biggest advice that you would want to hear when you were younger? Well, I can't say I would change anything. It was all for a reason.
It was all for a reason. Perfection.

But I would say to somebody today, identify what your values are. Your life demonstrates them.
And don't try to be injecting the values of outer authorities into your life and try to live by what you ought to do. Live by what you are.
Be true to yourself. Give yourself permission to be yourself, because the magnificence of who you are is far greater than all the fantasies you'll impose on yourself.
Now, see, whatever's highest on your value is spontaneously inspired to act on. You literally have spontaneous action potentials in the ventral medial prefrontal cortex when you're living congruently.
It really shows it. Science shows it.
So the second you do, you spontaneously want to act and you're most effective and efficient at doing something you can't wait to do. So finding that one thing, as Gary Keller says, that really lights you up, that you can't wait to bring to the world, to me, that's the first place.
Then dedicate yourself to prioritizing your life and working your way up slowly but surely by delegating everything else and getting on with doing what you love doing. If you do that, you have a higher probability of getting to have an inspired life.
Otherwise, you won't. You're going to be doing something out of duty, deontological duty instead of ontological design.
I'd rather live my life by design than I would by living it by duty. Quiet life of desperation is by duty and life of inspiration is by design.
And speaking of life by design,

where are you right now? You said some pretty inspiring places. I'm in Santa Catalina,

magnificent 1887 Palace Hotel Resort. I'm here with my beautiful girlfriend.
We just flew in

yesterday from Melbourne, Australia. I'm waiting for my ship to pick me up when it'll be here in another couple of days.
And I'm going to stay here at this magnificent resort until it gets here. I start a program tomorrow on value applications training in the United States from here.
And then the second that's done, I'm back on my ship and we'll be sailing and off to, I believe we're going to Tenerife and then over to Madeira and then over to Morocco and then back to Portugal and Gibraltar and Cadiz. So I just do what I love doing, which is teaching.
Teaching and traveling. John, this is so, so, so inspiring.
Thank you for coming in the show, sharing all the wisdom, sharing the inspiration and showing what's possible when you're actually doing what you love and you just continue. So

thank you, John. Thank you for the lovely questions.
Thank you for whoever's out there.

Give yourself permission to shine, not shrink. Do what's extraordinary, not ordinary.
And just know

that you don't have to be second to being somebody else and you don't need to get rid of any part of

yourself. All of you works.
from your own career, watch this 30-minute free training at leapacademy.com slash training.

That's leapacademy.com slash training.

See you in the next episode of the Leap Academy with Ilana Golan Show.