On this episode of Investing For Freedom, Mike discusses challenging your personal best. Mike encourages us to get out of our comfort zones and put ourselves in bigger rooms with higher-thinking people. Mike mentions how you never want to be the smartest person in the room, and he shares with us a recent experience where his personal best was challenged.
“Where can you go in your daily life, in your circle, where you can be challenged to think in different ways?”
HIGHLIGHTS:
0:00 – Intro
0:48 – Mike poses the question “When was the last time you put yourself in a room or found yourself in a situation where you were challenged with your personal best?”
1:28 – Mike shares a recent experience with us, in which he felt his personal best was being challenged
2:08 – You don’t want to be the smartest person in the room
3:41 – He who fails the fastest usually wins
4:35 – If you always go to the same place and surround yourself with the same people all the time, they become an eco-chamber
7:34 – If you have money sitting in a bank that’s not getting at least 3-4% return then you’re actually losing money due to inflation
10:19 – Where can you go in your daily life, in your circle, where you can be challenged to think in different ways?
11:54 – If you don’t put yourself around higher thinking people and put yourself in bigger rooms, you will not be able to challenge your personal best
FULL TRANSCRIPTION:
Thank you for joining me on The Investing for Freedom Podcast. Today, I have a question for you that stems from a mastermind event that I was just at, in some situations and circumstances that we were put in during that mastermind by Chris Harder. So here’s my question to you.
When was the last time that you put yourself in a room or found yourself in a situation where you were challenged with what I will say as your personal best or a personal record? It’s interesting because a lot of times, you know, in the fitness world you’ll see people post their prs, their personal record, or even if you use a fitness app or whatever, it’ll, you know, it’ll show you when you’ve achieved a personal record. But what was interesting, I had this revelation in this mastermind this last week that, you know, we don’t find ourselves in rooms a lot that really challenge us on our personal record or personal best, you know, when it comes to business you know, our skills as an entrepreneur, pitching deals, whatever. And so I found myself this week just really challenged by Chris Harder in the room that we were in. So this was the final meeting for you know, the mastermind that I was in with Chris, which was a yearlong, Kara and I both did it. And we signed up in January of it started in January of 2020, but because of COVID we just finished the make-up meeting. So we were in a three-day meeting with Chris and some of the people that are in the mastermind and it was just an amazing couple of days and it really just stretched me and it challenged me. And so that’s where I’m coming from with the question.
You know, I’m one of those people that I’ve said this forever, one of my mentors says, you know, that you don’t want to be the smartest guy in the room. So I’m always looking for a bigger room. I’m always looking to surround myself with people that are smarter than me, that are better than me in the areas that I’m weak or areas where, you know, I don’t understand things that I want to go into. This has been kind of a natural gift for me, but I think a lot of my successes come from when I know that I want to do something or achieve something that I don’t currently understand or know, I’m always looking for, who’s doing that. And I want to just you know, if there’s a hack that I could give you, it’s just find somebody that’s already doing what it is that you want to do. And you know, whether that’s a coach, whether that’s formal mentoring or you just mirror and watch what they do, most people don’t, I’m not saying go rip their stuff off or, you know, just copy it. It’s funny because we’ve got some people that are out there literally just, you know, like screenshotting copying and just using the exact verbiage and wordage. And I’m not telling you to do that. Don’t do that because that’s flat out plagiarism.
But there’s nothing new under the sun as Ecclesiastes says, and most people don’t care if you kind of like, figure out, just watch what they’re doing and dissect what they’re doing, and then just make your own version of it. People just don’t care. And so the reason why I’m saying all that is like, again, we don’t put ourselves in places where, you know, we challenge ourselves. And I think a lot of that is actually ego-driven because, you know what if I start putting information out there and what if people hate it? And what if it sucks? And you know, what if I fall on my face and what if I fail and these like, just negative questions. So the reality at the end of the day, though, those are all ego-driven things. And I’ll tell you right now, he who fails the fastest, usually wins. The thing is we don’t see, we don’t get to see the failures and the challenges all we get to see is the winds that certain people have. And that’s why I love being in rooms because not only, you know, are people more usually open, they share their losses and their wins. They’re open, they’re vulnerable. That’s one of the values of masterminds is that we get to be in rooms with people where we get to share our challenges, our struggles. And we also, I learned so much at these masterminds by hearing other people’s struggles and challenges and how other people in the room, you know, advise them to solve their problems, whether it’s like a Chris Harder, you know, helping them to put it on the guy that’s putting it on and helping them to solve their problems, or whether it’s a guest speaker that comes in, Chris had amazing speakers at this event.
But here’s the thing, back to the personal record and getting stretched. If you just go to the same place and surround yourself with the same people every day, every week, you know, whether it’s a W2 and it’s your manager, and it’s the people that are on your team, or whether you’re a business owner and it’s your employees that you’re surrounding yourself with, or the same circle of friends, if you don’t get outside of that, it’s an echo chamber, right. We just hear the same stuff over and over. And so it’s so important and I just want to really share this with you, that you get outside of your comfort zone, that you get in rooms with people that are not exactly like you, that are going to stretch you and challenge you to do better.
Chris did this thing for us, to us, with us. He basically brought it and two of his friends who have successful businesses one of them just exited, they’re both investors in multiple businesses and he basically put on a mini shark tank for us. And it was so cool because you got to see number one, people that have never raised capital or have never thought about borrowing money or raising investor money, you know, other people’s money, a lot of entrepreneurs, just bootstrap things. And, you know, from where I sit, I’ve always not always, but, you know, from the time I was young and started my business at 24, we were growing so fast that I quickly had to find access to capital and nontraditional capital because banks don’t always want a loan growing businesses. It’s crazy. I heard Donald Trump say this one time, but you always need to be borrowing when you don’t need it. Because most of the time when you actually need the money is the worst time to go get it. Whether it’s from an investor, whether it’s from a bank. Banks, actually for the most part, a lot of times we’ll give you money when you actually need it, because your financials are not in a place where they actually want to lend to you.
And so if I could drop that little piece gold nugget in there, like Donald Trump said, you know, go get the money when you don’t need it, get the line of credits you know, talk to private money investors, get your money structured when you don’t need it, because when you do need it, it’s challenging sometimes. But anyway, a lot of these entrepreneurs who were in Chris’s mastermind and again, I’ve raised a lot of capital over the years. I’m all about other people’s money and people have even asked me, well, Mike, if you’ve done so well, why are you taking on investor money? You know, why do you pay hard money? Well, I don’t, number one, if you’ve listened to me for any period of time, you know, that I’m not sitting on, you know, millions and millions and millions of dollars at any given time, because I don’t necessarily believe in the banks themselves. I’m actually scared to have a bunch of money sitting. And so that’s not the primary driver behind me anyway. It’s, I wouldn’t do that even if I had millions of dollars, I’d be trying to figure out where to put it. You know, even if it’s short-term, you know, Bitcoin or lending it against gold or, you know, something even more secure.
But I’m always putting money to work because money that’s sitting in a bank earning 0.02% interest is idle money. And as we know, inflation and everything else just raging out of control. If you’ve got money sitting in a bank that you know, or anywhere for that matter, that isn’t even, it’s not getting you at least 3% to 4% return, then you’re actually losing money. That money is being devalued. That’s why Robert Kiyosaki’s always saying, savers are losers. Because if you’ve got money sitting in a bank and you’re only earning 0.03%, or even let’s say you could get 1% on it. And inflation’s 3%, you are actually, the value of your money is going down every year. So that’s why he says savers are losers.
But anyway back to the shark tank pitch. So a lot of these entrepreneurs had, you know, had never raised capital. They never you know, have pitched anything to investors. And so it was just really fun, not only to watch them, but also you know, for me, like I quickly put together, you know, a deck and got to practice, we’re getting ready to launch a fund around HVAC. So I got to practice, you know, my pitch on the tank, but watching some of these entrepreneurs who literally some of them are in transition and are pivoting their businesses. And so literally Chris told us the night before the shark tank pitch that we were going to, the day before that we were going to be doing it. And so literally some people came up with business plans that didn’t even exist at noon the day before, and then pitched them the next morning. And these just brilliant, amazing business ideas that were again, phenomenal business plans, but they weren’t non-existent yesterday. And it really just let me pull this together. It really showed me that we don’t have to spend weeks or months or years mapping out a business strategy. And we don’t put ourselves in positions or rooms, or even you know, slow down our mind and take the quiet time enough to even consider that there might be a business plan in us that we haven’t even thought about.
And literally I watched some entrepreneurs come up with a business plan, do the research, figure out how to put a valuation on it and sit in front of real sharks, people that are real investors and pitch this deal. And Chris put actually $5,000 on the line. So whoever won would get the $5,000, I didn’t win. And that’s what was so crazy about just watching this is there was every single entrepreneur or person that was in that room that got up and pitched to the sharks, did a phenomenal killer job. Some of them existing businesses, some of them non-existing, some of them, you know, ancillary things that they decided to add onto their business. It was amazing.
And so here’s what I really want to say to you. If we hadn’t put ourselves in that room, that mastermind room, and do you have to join a mastermind to do this? Not necessarily, but my question to you is, is where can you go in your daily life? Where can you go in your circle where you can be challenged like this to think in different ways like we were challenged by Chris Harder. So I’m going to leave you with that. If your environment, if your friends, if your current business does not allow you to challenge yourself the way we were challenged, then I would encourage you to go find a place, go find a group, go find a mastermind, go find a community of people that will challenge you. And maybe it’s even just getting on Instagram and listening a little different when somebody says, hey, I would just encourage you to do XYZ. Maybe you should stop and actually do that. But you know, if you can’t find a place or if you can’t really, it’s really, it’s challenging, you know, I would’ve never, I would’ve never thought about like a shark tank type pitch if I wasn’t in Chris’s mastermind. And so it is challenging to do it on your own.
So I’m going to leave you with that. Where can you go? What environment can you put yourself in, where you’re challenged to think differently than what you’re currently challenged to think, or, you know, raise the bar, set a new personal record for yourself in business, entrepreneurship, income, revenue, way of thinking, whatever it is, how do we level up our PR, our personal best, our personal record in the business arena or in our financial arena. And I’m just here to tell you that, you know, if you don’t put yourself around higher thinking people and in bigger rooms, it’s just not going to happen. So hope that helps.
