DREAM THINK DO I Motivation, Encouragement & Strategy

My guest is TJ Anderson. He is a behavior change specialist, a health hacker, and founder of Elevate Your State, which is a growing community of health-conscious leaders online. TJ is dedicated to helping high-performance entrepreneurs, business professionals, and health-conscious leaders to merge the fundamentals of a healthy life with cutting-edge science and strategy, so you can stay on top of your health game. His new book, called The Art of Health Hacking, has been endorsed by people like J.J. Virgin and Bulletproof Coffee's own Dave Asprey. In short, he's killing it, and he's helping people to live better and healthier lives. Listen To The Podcast: RESOURCES: The Art of Health Hacking Book: https://amzn.to/2QhGWj0 Elevate Your State Website/Podcast: www.elevateyourstate.co Youthing Song on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TVr1EZZ-gJQ Dry Farm Wines: http://www.dryfarmwines.com/elevateyourstate Healthy Holiday Recipe E-Book: https://drive.google.com/open?id=14zMwfBqEClBe2UQl2Yx4_EbP5kfvkjzJ INTERVIEW: TJ, welcome to DREAM THINK DO. Oh, Mitch, it's an honor and a pleasure to be here. Thanks for having me. Absolutely. This is just fun, man. I know you've been healthy since the day we met. Has that always been a thing for you? I don't know that we've ever talked about childhood stuff. Did you grow up being healthy, or was this later in life kind of thing for you? Good question. Well, everyone’s childhood is different, and I would say health is relative across the spectrum. I had a great childhood, but my personal, own desire and passion related to health improvement, health consciousness, et cetera, didn't really start until after college. That's when the fire ignited. After college, I realized how the unhealthy lifestyle I was living in college wasn't the best for me. I actually realized through my parents. My mom inspired me through creating my own meals. It really starts in the kitchen, how much nutrition impacts health. That was after college. Awesome. So some people have always just been geared toward healthy living. For others, it’s a major event in their life. Maybe somebody else close to them started to have health issues, or themselves started to have health issues. Yours was a little bit more gradual but, man, it's become a major focal point for your life, for your own life, but also helping people all over. Definitely. The inspiration really came for health right when it came for entrepreneurship, so the passion for both took off at the same time. At times, I would notice my parents running their own business, and how that could add a lot of stress on to one's shoulders if they don't navigate it in the best way. It's not easy. There's no playbook about how to be a healthy high performer. I used to be the health guy that was just all into health and fitness and looking good and feeling good. Then, when I went down the rabbit hole of what's possible for using our health as an asset in our life, with how well we're able to think clearly and have the energy necessary to work and perform at the top of our game, I've really started, through the book and in all my work, it's really connecting the dots between how our decisions, our habits, our behaviors impact our performance, both in the present moment, but also for the further, for longevity. Absolutely. Well, that's funny, because I remember it. Just as you're saying that I remember you had invited me to be a part of one of your first entrepreneurial groups, right? You were trying to help a bunch of entrepreneurs get healthy and stay healthy. I'll just never forget. I remember one of the interactions. One of the guys was sort of confessing, “I did this to try to get six-pack abs, but the thing that I'm actually benefiting from is clarity.” He said, “Yeah, I'm losing some weight. I'm feeling better, but,” he's like, “I had no idea the positive effects on my clarity of thought, my reduced anxiety,

My guest is New York Times bestselling author, Sara Bliss. Sara has written 11 books.  Everything from Hotel Chic at Home, to The Thoroughly Modern Married Girl. She's also co-authored books like Pretty Powerful and Beauty from the Inside Out  with wellness and beauty guru, Bobbi Brown, Sara has some great ideas flowing. Her most recent book is where we're going to focus today. It's called Take the Leap, and it comes out in a few weeks, but it's currently available for pre-order wherever you grab your books. In Take the Leap, Sara actually interviewed people who transformed their lives for the better. These are people who went from a "normal" career, to find or create something they loved. Listen To The Podcast: RESOURCES: Book Take the Leap: Click Here INTERVIEW: Sara, welcome to DREAM THINK DO. Thank you. I'm super fired up to be here. I love it. It's one of those where I love the title. What started you on the path to writing Take the Leap? I have written about so many different things, I mean everything from beauty, to travel, to health. But profiles have been the one consistent thing that I've done for almost 20 years. I noticed really early on that a lot of successful people had had these entirely different lives before they found their greatest success. I thought it was really fascinating because it basically tears through this myth that so many of us have, that all successful people somehow follow this linear path that they know what their passion is, or they start really young. Yeah, they were clear on it when they were five years old, right? Exactly. I think for those of us who don't feel that way or aren't on the path that they want to be on, it's super inspiring. I was a little bit lost in my own career, and kind of all over the place. I found these stories really comforting. I started collecting them. I would tell them to other people and everyone always had the same response, "Wait, I didn't know that. I didn't know that Carolina Herrera, the designer, didn’t start her business until she was 40." You know there are so many cool stories like that, and that's really where the idea came from. I love it. I couldn't agree more. I think as a purveyor of strategy, and I know you provide a lot of strategy in the book too, strategies are great, but I think people need more stories in strategy. Yes. Like if we have this story, then we'll figure out the strategy. I think that's what there needs to be more of in the world. That's why I was so excited about what you're doing with the book. Now, I see a title like Take the Leap, and I know the subject is all about getting that clarity and going for it. But one of the things I had to ask you is do you write this from the vantage point of always being a risk taker? Or, do you write this from the vantage point of maybe being risk-averse and having to learn how to take a leap like that? I am probably a little bit more of the latter. I'm a little bit of a homebody. I literally live on the same block that I grew up on. No kidding. That's amazing. That's awesome. At the same time, I ended up taking leaps in my career literally every week. That's how I've managed to stay afloat as a writer. I mean anyone who is a professional writer will tell you. The whole landscape of the job has shifted. When I started, it was not that hard to get a publishing deal if you were a well-regarded, not necessarily even famous, just you know, if you were a working writer. Now they really want you to have a huge platform behind you. What I used to get paid for a magazine article versus what I get paid now, those are like two very different numbers. So I had to really hustle and I developed this whole kind of branding side of my business where I did ghostwriting, or I'd consult with brands on everything from PR, I've launched websites for them, I help them with content. I wrote this books on hotels and have been covering tr...

INTRODUCTION: My DREAM THINK DO guest this week is Karen Wickre. Karen has been in leadership of a few companies you may have heard of. She was the Editorial Director of Twitter. Before that, she was with Google. She's a 30-year veteran of Silicon Valley and has been an advisor to multiple startups as well. She's a lifelong information seeker and serves on the boards of organizations like The International Center For Journalists, The News Literacy Project, and The Yerba Buena Center for the Arts. She's a proud introvert.  And as a result, she felt compelled to write a brand spanking new book called Taking The Work Out of Networking. It's a guide for anyone who wants to trade in the much-loathed and often abused common practices of networking and replace them with the valuable habits that can lead to better relationships, stronger connections, and kick butt networks. Karen has captured some innovative new ways for anyone, introverted or not, to embrace their true nature and create enduring, reliable, and critical connections. Listen To The Podcast: RESOURCE: Book Taking the Work out of Networking (Click here) INTERVIEW: Karen, welcome to DREAM THINK DO. Thank you so much, Mitch. I'm glad to be here. So… I get a sense that this book is one that you wrote that you wish you would have had at the beginning of your career. I think that's right. In fact, I kind of wrote it because I thought, "Why don't I just put down all the stuff I know since people are always asking me for introductions and career advice." I don't even have to be the only one who does this. Other people can do this, too. Yeah, it’s like you wrote the book to save yourself some time, like, "Just read the book. It's all in there." I love it. And it was an interesting exercise. How do you explain this stuff? So I tried to unpack it. You know, some method to the madness. I love it. So you write from introvert's perspective. I am also an introvert who's learned to do extroverted things, but when it comes to reenergizing, taking care of my inner introvert, there's a lot of alone time, lot of quiet time that's needed. Would you say that you have always kind of known you were introverted, understood that about you or is that something that's more of a newer revelation to you? HELPING INTROVERTS STAY ENERGIZED I think it's not super new to me now, but I think as a kid I thought of myself as shy and my friends would say, "Are you kidding me? You're not shy." Because I always had information, I always knew what was going on. In high school kids would say, "What's happening on Friday night?" And I would know because I was friends with all the kids. So I was like the information source. That was an early signal about this kind of thing, but I didn't want to be the center of attention, and I did hang back. I liked to be in the background. So that's always been true. Anyway, it took me a little while to divide off the stereotype of shy from what's an introvert. An introvert, as you just suggested, is someone who recharges and get their energy from alone time and quiet time as opposed the other end of the spectrum, the extrovert, give me another party. Yeah. Exactly. I'm going to get my 10 closest friends together and we're going to re-energize, which, to me, is not energizing. Yeah. Enough already. Right. That's really the young definition from the 20s that a lot has been built on. Now I've read a lot about this, thanks in part to Susan Cain, whose 2012 book Quiet really paved the way. We're all on a spectrum. It's not a sort of you're either this or that. Now I've done enough reading to tell you that you are probably like me, a social introvert, which is a different flavor, but along the spectrum. Exactly right. I love it. I do some speaking, especially on college campuses. Nothing against extroverts, but I actually think introverts tend to be better networkers, tend to be better connectors just for that point that y...

INTRODUCTION: Today, we are welcoming back my friend, Sonia Hunt. You maybe remember Sonia from way back in episode 60. Sonia is a digital media entrepreneur who has led a successful career in developing brands for global companies in the food and wine, entertainment, technology, and consumer electronic areas. She runs her own digital agency called, Noie Media. Sonia's been recognized by Fast Company as one of the most influential people in the internet, and tracker.com has named her as one of the most influential people in the healthy living sector. Sonia also spends a lot of her time focusing on helping people with severe food restrictions. You may remember from our earlier conversation that she is a foodie, but she also deals with over 30 allergies herself, and that has become a personal passion for helping people in this area. In fact, her mantra is to stay safe, live healthily, and eat well, and her Ted Talk on this subject has over a million views, so go check that out if you haven't. Listen To The Podcast: RESOURCES: Website: soniahunt.com INTERVIEW: Sonia, welcome back to DREAM THINK DO. Awesome. Thank you so much for having me. I'm always very grateful. Absolutely. Episode 60, so much has happened since then, holy cow. It's amazing. It’s been great to see your trajectory You've got a book coming out, and I can't wait to talk about that a little bit, but really I want to get into this subject. I know defining success has been really important for you because I know you've wanted to create this life that you want. Has that always been a priority to you?  How did this become important, or when did this become important for you? I would say it's always been important. There are probably times where I have lost track or sense of it, and kind of gone down the wrong avenue, I would say. I mean, my life I really feel has been just an evolution to get to the person that you see or hear before you today, which I think is really the best version of Sonia Hunt there's ever been. In the last one to two years has really been the best version, like all the way around, 360. Having two parents who were immigrants that came here, and their first two kids are daughters. My mom was very adamant about telling us daughters that she wanted us to be educated, and get our own jobs, and make our own money because you need to be able to take care of yourself. There's always a high bar, you know I come from Asian parents, who, you know it's all about math and science, and excelling in those areas, because they equate that with monetary freedom. Right? Sure. If you're a scientist, maybe you'll be a doctor, and you'll be super rich, and then you're awesome, you're set. Stuff like that. Ironically, my sister became a doctor, and I became an engineer. How about that? Yeah. It worked out. It kind of worked out. It’s interesting - obviously, our history plays a part in who we become. Our parents, obviously are a huge influence on who we become, but it sounds like that was foundational for you, that expectation that you're going to be successful. Exactly. The foundation was there. The expectation was set, for my sister and I, and then for my younger brother. My sister is even more successful than I am, you know, and in her own field, and so we truly took that to heart. But I would say the part that was always missing, I'll call it the spiritual side of success. I came to Silicon Valley right out of school, this year I can't even believe it, it's 20 years for me here in the Valley. Silicon Valley is definitely a place when at the time when that I came was during the dot com age, and everything was focused on building, and making more money, and making the company more money, and growing in title, and doing that all super rapidly. All of what I call that spiritual side was just lost. Success means you're rich, you're moving up the chain, you're getting to work at the greatest companies,

Secrets To Sticking With A Dream Hello and welcome to a very special episode of DREAM THINK DO. This is episode 200. That's right, we've hit 200 deep dives and interviews. Pretty crazy to think about. If this is your first DREAM THINK DO... welcome. I am so honored that you're here. And if it's your 200th... or somewhere in between… THANK YOU! Thank you so much for being a DREAM THINK DO-er. Thanks for being on this journey WITH me. I couldn't do it without you AND wouldn't want to do it without you! It makes this episode so much more special knowing that you're out there and a part of this. Listen To The Podcast: RESOURCES: Dream Job Redefined Book: Dream Job Redefined BIG Dream Gathering (www.bigdreamgathering.com) BIG Dream Gathering FB Page: https://www.facebook.com/bigdreamgathering/ SOLOCAST: With this episode, I do want to celebrate a little bit, but I also want to pull back the curtain and share some stories, some highs, and lows and some favorite memories. Plus, I also want to dig into something a little bit bigger. Something that’s important. Something that can help you as YOU go after your dreams and goals too. First… it's good to celebrate, and we're going to celebrate. With this particular episode, as we celebrate, as we remember, I also want to spend a little time digging into the subject of knowing when and when not to stick with something. Two hundred episodes, it means we stuck with it, but I can tell you, there are times where I really thought about quitting. I've been talking with a lot of people lately, and that just seems to be in the air. I'm not sure whether it's the season, I don't know what it is. But I've talked with people who are thinking about making career changes, whether it's shifting jobs, whether it's shifting positions within a company, or changing careers altogether. I've talked with people who were thinking about quitting. Quitting training programs, or quitting their degree, or quitting their advanced degree. I've talked with some people who were thinking about quitting a big dream, something they'd been working on for a while, and they're kind of in the messy middle, I call it. The honeymoon period that comes sometimes when you start a dream is over for them, and it’s the messy middle, the hard part of not quite sure whether it's going to work out, not quite sure they should keep going, and they're thinking about quitting. Here's the thing. I'll be the first one to tell you, sometimes it is right to quit, but we're going to dig into this concept of when you should quit and how you make that decision. If that's something that you've wrestled with, or maybe you're in the middle of it right now, we're going to spend some time on that together, because that's what we do. That's what we do. We move forward, we make things better. We truly dream bigger, think better, and do more, and we do it together. That's where we're going today. Sound good? Good. All right. All right, let's do this. So, 200 episodes, it's amazing. Still kind of boggles my mind. I can tell you my first goal was just 10 episodes, just get 10 episodes done. I liked it. But it was too early to tell whether it was going to be a benefit to people, whether people would appreciate it, enjoy it, use it, engage. But that was my first goal, just 10 episodes. I got those done even before we hit publish - before we went live on iTunes – and I found myself really enjoying the process, almost feeling selfish a little bit that I was enjoying it so much. But I thought, "Well, maybe, maybe we're on track." Then my next goal was 50, just 50 episodes. I told myself that at 50, if I was not enjoying it, if it seemed like it was more work than it was worth, if it didn't seem like people were really engaging, then I was just going to quietly put it up on a shelf, call it a success for getting 50 done, and just walk away. Then we hit 50. Actually, it's almost funny.

INTRODUCTION: Today’s guest is THE Willie Morris. You may remember Willie from Episode 84. He's got an awesome story. Last time he was on the show, he was running Faithbox, which was a monthly subscription service that he co-founded with Gary Vaynerchuk. Since he was on… they’ve been able to grow it and successfully sell it. Before that, Willie worked with a number of startups and a few smaller companies, companies like Amazon and Boeing. Maybe you've heard of those, right? Doing some amazing things. Currently, he's a partner at a company called Luduss, where they invest resources, time, and capital into companies and people they believe will have a large impact on the world. He's developed a solid following on the interwebs. He's on Instagram. He's got about 40,000 followers there. He's a true creator on the YouTubes. He kicked that off by posting one video a day for 365 days straight! But now has an incredible community happening. He has really developed a DREAM THINK DO life. Listen To The Podcast: RESOURCES: Website: morewillie.com Social Media: @morewillie INTERVIEW: Willie, welcome back to DREAM THINK DO, buddy. I'm back! Yeah, buddy. I love it. It's a small group of people who get to do it twice, and you are truly one of them. It's just been too long. You've been traveling the globe since the last time we talked. Yes, a lot has happened over the last year. No joke. I know last time you were on, I said give us an average day which has gotta be almost laughable, but let's try to do that again. What's an average day for Willie today? Yeah, for sure. One thing too, I actually didn't co-found Luduss. Curtis Martin started it, but I just came on as a partner, COO role. An average day for me, I wake up at 5 AM every day. I started this whole 5 AM challenge a couple months ago and so 5 AM the alarm goes off, I'm up, I have about 45 minutes where I just have a nice, quiet time. Generally, I just sit and look out the window at New York and the sunrise when it was happening at five, now it's still dark, so now it's just some quiet time for myself to gather my thoughts for the day and all that kind of good stuff. I'm going to interrupt you just for a second because I'm curious, with that, is that also time, where you're reading, is that time where you're just intentionally ... you're just quiet. Just quiet thinking. It's literally just thinking time. That's awesome. It's also hydrating time, so I'll try to drink some water when I wake up, especially because I go to the gym right after. Sometimes I'll jump online and check out social media, anything I missed out on, but I try to really skew away from that in the morning before the gym just because it's nice. I feel like in most of our lives we don't have time just to think. If you have quiet time, people think you're meditating, or praying, or doing something that's very focused. I just want time to think, and let my mind wander, and just stare out the window, and zone out for a little bit. I love it. I think that’s huge. It's funny, somebody challenged me the other day and they said, "When's the last time you were bored?" I'm like, "I can't think of the last time I allowed myself to get bored." He's like, "You should try to do that." He wasn't just saying sit around and be lazy, but he was saying just that, give yourself time to just sit and not fill it with something. So I love how that’s becoming a natural or a consistent part of your day, that's cool. 100%. I think I put some thought into what's going on the rest of the day and try to get excited about it. I've been trying to really cultivate this future mindset and living in the future mindset, rather than past mindset because I think we spend so much time thinking about what happened and how we're going to move forward from that, rather than just being excited about what the future has. I think that shift happens as we get older because th...

Nice to Meet You! 3 Keys to Meeting New People RESOURCES: Dream Job Redefined Book: Dream Job Redefined BIG Dream Gathering (www.bigdreamgathering.com) BIG Dream Gathering FB Page: https://www.facebook.com/bigdreamgathering/ Listen To The Podcast: SOLOCAST: Well, hello. It's nice to meet you. Welcome to DREAM THINK DO. I will admit, I don't typically kick off the podcast saying it's nice to meet you. Although I do believe that it is nice to meet you.  I use it, though, today for a couple of reasons. One, again, to reinforce, hey, it's nice to meet you, especially if this is the first time listening to DREAM THINK DO. I'm so glad you're here. If you're a longtime DREAM THINK DO-er, and/or if we've met before, welcome back. I'm glad you're here. Secondly, I say nice to meet you because that, in fact, is the theme of this show. That's right. This particular episode, this deep dive, is all about strategies for helping you meet someone new. Because it happens. You know, maybe you're wanting to meet new people because you're wanting some awesome people in your life, some new good friends to try stuff with, or great people to connect with professionally, or you want to learn from cool people doing cool stuff, then awesome. Or maybe you need to meet some new people because you want to expand your network, or you're exploring new jobs or new careers, or you're entering into a new era or a new organization. And maybe you're feeling like a stranger in a strange land and you're wanting to find some like-minded people around you. That's where we're headed. I will say if you're an extrovert, stay tuned. These concepts are going to help you. I can tell you I lean a little bit towards the introvert. If you're an introvert, you know what I'm talking about. I appreciate meeting new people. But as an introvert who's learned to do extroverted things, I always have to revisit my tool chest, so I can maximize the opportunities as I'm meeting new people because yes, God's great sense of humor is that my day job as an extrovert involves meeting new people all the time. So I need the tools that we're going to talk about today. These tools will help you to connect with people, to feel more comfortable, and to be able to put others at ease as well. This will greatly, even wildly, increase the chances for conversations with the kinds of people that you want to connect with. Let me paint a picture for you. Let's say you're walking down a hallway, you're walking towards the door. Behind that door, you know, is a room filled with people. You don’t know most of them. How are you feeling? Are you excited at that thought? Are you smiling at that thought? If that's you, cool. That probably means you are an extrovert. That's great. Some of these strategies are going to help you. They're going to help you love people well, love those conversations that you're having, and take them to new heights. So stay tuned. But let me check back in here. Let's revisit this scenario hallway. Double doors at the end, big meeting space on the other side. You're hearing a dull roar of people talking. How are you doing thinking about this? Are you freaking out inside just a little bit? Are you throwing up just a little bit? Maybe some part of you wants to walk away from that room. You have emails to check, a book to read, Office is back on Netflix. You just started your favorite episode. Right? Whichever way you respond, hang with me here because the things we're going to talk about today are going to be tools that help no matter where you're at on that spectrum. Introvert, extrovert, ambivert. That's that new category in the middle. Wherever you're at, we're going to get you some strategies to help. Meeting new people can be exciting. It can be amazing. It can also be a little nerve-wracking, but it's important. No matter what, it's important because we can't go after our dreams alone.

My guest today is Pete Vargas. Pete has trained hundreds of people to become powerful and successful professional speakers. Just listen to some of these stats: Since 2003, Pete and his team have helped speakers book over 25,000 events that have reached tens of millions of people and generated over $40 million in revenue. Pete is the founder and CEO of Advance Your Reach, a company that helps speakers, authors, and entrepreneurs find and book stages so that they can share their message, scale their expertise, and reach the world. Pete is very passionate about helping thought leaders who have a message to truly build a business and a brand that allows them to reach the people they feel called to serve. I wanted to bring Pete on to dig into some specific ideas to help you reach more of the people you want to help. So let's get to it. Listen To The Podcast: RESOURCES: Website: www.advanceyourreach.com/dtd   INTERVIEW: Pete, welcome to DREAM THINK DO, buddy. Hey. I'm excited to be here. Thanks so much for having me, Mitch. Well, I love your story and I want DREAM THINK DO-ers to hear more of it. I think sometimes when they hear about speakers reaching thousands and thousands of people, bringing in millions of dollars in revenue, all of that, it might be easy to think the start was easy for you. But you didn't start as a professional speaker. You started this whole journey in a much different way. Give us a little of your genesis story. Yes. What I would first say this is not just for professional speakers, but it's for anybody who is trying to attract customers. That's what I'm excited to share with you. I believe the fastest way to attract customers in a powerful way is through stages. So the first thing I want to encourage everyone who wants to do more speaking, and then encourage everyone who wants to attract more customers. Mitch, one of the reasons why I care about stages so much is my background. One of the earliest memories for me was my mom and dad yelling and screaming about who was going to keep me and who was going to keep my sister because they were getting divorced. I remember being four or five years old and it was like a tug of war going on with my sister and I. My mom got my sister and my dad got me. Over the next five to 10 years, my dad was both verbally and physically abusive. He would leave me in the trailer when I was in second grade. I knew what it meant every time when the Dallas Cowboys lost, and I tried to hide. It was a really abusive relationship. So my grandmother, his mom, said, "Enough is enough. You're coming to live with me." It's exactly what I did.   So my dad came back into my life in my teenage years. I wanted to try to make things right with him through my teenage years. We tried everything. We tried church. We tried counseling. We tried his seven siblings telling him, "You've got to make things right with your son." I remember my grandma and grandpa always telling them, like always calling him “mijo,” which means son, and saying, "You've got to make things right with your son." Nothing worked. So through my teenage years, I kind of gave up on it. I went off to school, to college. I thought I was going to be the next Jerry McGuire. I thought I was going to live that “show me the money” life, because two professional athletes, Emit Smith and David Robinson, had made such an impact on my life. My thought was if I could go represent athletes that are making an impact in the lives of people, I'm helping make the world a better place. But little did I know, Mitch, that it would be your community that I was going to help in getting their messages out into the world. At that time I didn't know that. At the end of college, I had two job opportunities. Go to Dallas, Texas into the corporate world and make really good money, or go to Harvard, Texas and be a youth pastor. My pastor called and asked me to take over the youth group.

Today’s guest is Colin Murdy. Colin is the founder of the Murdy Creative Company. Murdy Creative makes these freakishly cool... beautifully simple leather binders. I'll tell you, I came across Colin and his story on Instagram. I was not aware of him, not aware of his company, not aware of the binders, any of that, but I'm scrolling through the Instagrams, as one does, and all of a sudden this pic with this gorgeous binder comes flying by. I am a sucker for high-quality leather goods, so I see this thing, and I am hooked. I take the bait, click it, and I realize these things are beautiful, but I'm also realizing there is this great story behind it. The more I dug in the more I realized… this guy is a true DREAM THINK DO-er. I knew I had to have him on the show, so now we’re all up to speed. Listen To The Podcast: RESOURCES: Website: murdycreative.co INTERVIEW: Colin Murdy, welcome to DREAM THINK DO. Thank you so much for having me. It's great to be on. Absolutely. Okay, you hooked me early on because I see the binders. They're gorgeous. I have one on my desk. It's right next to me. It's become my blankie. I love it, but it's that thing, and I click through. I start reading your story, and I'm like, "Man, we're like family!" Because you started experimenting with this idea in high school, right? Absolutely. It's funny how you kind of get into things and you didn't really mean to. I was actually a theater kid, and I did band, and I was in a lot of advanced math and science courses. When you do that, your schedule is really full in high school, and so I didn't really get an opportunity to take an actual art course. I always wanted to take a real live art course. The only one that was able to fit in my schedule was the experimental art class, and I thought, "This is going to be awesome. I love experimenting." I had no idea what it was going to be. It ended up being all of these old traditional styles of art, screen printing and all types and all these other cool things. One of them was this thing called stab bookbinding. I had been an avid journaler since my brother went off to college. My older brother, Marcus, went off to college my sophomore year of high school, and so I thought to myself, "This is awesome. I can recreate movie props that I love, and I can have ... I can take control of my destiny, and I can do all of these things with the journals that I like to write in and I spend all those dollars on. I can make my own." That’s how I got into it almost by accident. It became a hobby, and I was selling them on Etsy. I started another company in the middle there where I thought it was going to be huge, but then it failed. I'm still making books on Etsy, and people were still ordering them. Things kept moving forward, and then it developed into what it is now. I love it. That's a huge thing we talk about on DREAM THINK DO: the power of experimenting. I think, especially with entrepreneurial dreams, to find the passion but also look for the proof, and the proof is always will people buy it, right? Absolutely. Am I creating something that people will buy? We’ll get into the experiment that didn't work, at least in the way you thought. But you learn from those as much as you learn from the successes, right? Now, as people hear your voice, they probably realize you're not 76. Let's just say high school wasn't that long ago. Can I ask how old you are? Actually, I am 24. Awesome. So this whole experiment started in high school. At what point was it where you said, "Yeah, I'm just going to throw some stuff on Etsy"? Was that while you were still in high school still in that class, or was it while you were in college? Well, I've always been a big believer that if you like doing something as a hobby, if you can figure out a way to make that hobby pay for itself, that's always the best policy. Some hobbies can get really expensive if you don't properly capit...

Back in 2005, my guest, Shawn Askinosie left a successful career as a criminal defense lawyer to start a bean-to-bar chocolate factory and he's never looked back. Askinosie Chocolate is a small batch, award-winning chocolate factory located in Springfield, Missouri. They source 100%  of their cocoa beans directly from farmers across the globe. Askinosie Chocolate was recently named one of the 25 Best Small Companies in America by Forbes and Shawn himself was named by "O," Oprah's magazine, as one of the 15 guys who is literally saving the world. Very cool. Shawn and his daughter, Lawren, who is the Chief Marketing Officer for Askinosie, recently published a book together called Meaningful Work: A Quest To Do Great Business, Find Your Calling, and Feed Your Soul. One reviewer wrote, "'Meaningful Work is not only a book about saving the world, it's about how businesses can and should solve problems in the world, and how positive change begins with individual action." I love it. Listen To The Podcast: RESOURCES: Meaningful Work Book: http://bit.ly/2NU9KNc Website: askinosie.com INTERVIEW: I knew when I heard his story that I had to have Shawn join us for an episode. Shawn, welcome to DREAM THINK DO. Thank you, Mitch. Appreciate the intro and I'm looking forward to this. Me too! You know, I look forward to every interview, but some I look forward to just a little bit more than others. I've been really, really excited about this. Many DREAM THINK DO-ers, have navigated a career change, or are contemplating a career change. How did you go from defense attorney back in 2005 and decide you want to make chocolate? The way it started, I loved my job and I think a lot of your listeners can probably relate to what I'm about to say, but I loved it and I loved it for a long time. I did it for almost 20 years. I never lost a criminal jury trial. Wow! I specialized in super serious felony cases and built my reputation in the defense of murder cases. To say that comes with a little stress would be an understatement. No kidding! When you love what you're doing, it doesn't feel stressful until you stop loving it, and that's what happened. I stopped loving it But I didn't have any hobbies, I didn't have an idea of anything else to do. I'd always wanted to be a lawyer. The real struggle for me in this transition, which was five years long by the way, was a struggle of choices. I just didn't feel drawn. I didn't feel called. I couldn't find my vocation. It seemed as though the more desperate I became, the further away it was from my reach, so to speak. Then it was just like this vicious circle of, "What's going to happen?" I really prayed a very simple prayer that went like this: "Dear God, please give me something else to do." I said that, sometimes many times a day, but I said it every day for almost five years. It was just a simple prayer, one born of desperation. I had no hobbies at first, so I started some hobbies. I bought a Big Green Egg grill and did all the meals on the Big Green Egg and loved it. Then I started baking, making cupcakes. I made thousands of cupcakes. Then I started making chocolate desserts and I had no idea where chocolate came from, zero. But one day, I was driving to a distant relative, driving to her funeral, and it was out near my grandparent's farm about an hour from here in southwest Missouri. I just had this idea. "Hey, what about making chocolate from scratch?" I had no idea where it came from. Yeah, where does that come from? Yeah. And this is the doing part. Within three months of that light bulb, I was in the Amazon, learning how farmers influence the flavor of chocolate by how they harvest the cocoa beans. Then I started to wind down my law practice. I bought equipment from all over the world, completed my last jury trial, and here we are. That's incredible. I love that. I know we've been back and forth a little bit,