DREAM THINK DO | Motivation, Encouragement & Strategy

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,

My guest is Frank McKinney. Frank is an Ultra-marathoner, he's and actor and a speaker, and he's a "philanthrocapitalist." That's right, he spends a whole lot of time giving back. In fact, he and his wife founded the Caring House Project Foundation, which is a non-profit that provides housing, and self-sustaining existence for homeless families in the Caribbean, South America, Africa, Indonesia, and here in the United States as well. For example, at the end of 2017, they finished their 24th self-sufficient village and sheltered over 10,000 people in Haiti alone. How cool is that? Frank has been featured on Oprah, 20/20, CNN, Discovery Channel, Travel Channel. He's been featured in 2,500 plus TV and print stories. Listen To The Podcast: RESOURCES: The Other Thief Book: https://amzn.to/2NR26jv Website: frank-mckinney.com INTERVIEW: Frank, welcome to DREAM THINK DO! You know, make that 2,501. Yes, exactly right, and extra hash mark! Hey, folks, I'm honored, I'm excited. I'm coming to you today from my oceanfront, tree house office. Too bad we're not on video because I'd spin the camera around and show you. I'm sitting 25 feet above sea level with 12 windows surrounding me in this tree house that I work from. Yes, this is where I wrote all six of my books, where I design my houses, and where I'm talking to Mitch today. Not because of DREAM THINK DO, but because of Mitch Matthews' smile. The guy has the best smile. I appreciate that greatly, and I wish I was sitting in the tree house with you. And gang, he's literally up in a tree in a beautiful, beautiful office. It's the coolest. Literally. He showed me before we hit record. He showed me his ocean view, which I do not have in beautiful Des Moines, Iowa. So, I love it, man. We met years ago, I was trying to think of the year where Dr. Molly Marty invited us to both speak at her conference in Chicago. The more I've learned from you and gotten to know you, the more I've been impressed. So I've just been so excited to have you on. I finally get to ask you some of these questions I've wanted to ask. How about that? I'm ready man. That's the whole reason I have a podcast, to finally ask the questions I want to ask. Let's talk about this, now, because I know, you know, DREAM THINK DO-ers as we talked about before I hit record, these are rock stars around the world. These are entrepreneurs, and leaders, and globe changes. A lot of them are fighting back from tough starts, right? They haven't just been given an easy life. They've had to really take a stand and really make a mark wherever they're at. And you are one of those people. You are one of those people who has truly shaped a life that's ... it's trite to say, but it's outside the box. You've blown up the box. But you're doing great things, you're building these million dollar homes, you're helping people all over the world. It almost sounds like you're royalty, but you didn't grow up in royalty. You grew up in pretty humble beginnings. You didn't grow up in these million dollar homes doing philanthropy as a kid. So, give us a little picture, a quick snapshot of Frank as a kiddo. What I want to hear is what was at least one moment where you decided, "I'm gonna do something different with my life." Well, first of all, let's start with asking the question, why does there have to be a box at all? Right! Either inside the box, or everybody says, you work for a nine-to-five, and you've got a job, then you must be inside the box. There's such a thing that's called and intrapreneur. Somebody who has entrepreneurial but they're inside a company. But they're in a box. But then you've got an entrepreneur who's outside the box. Forget the box. No box. We don't have a box. But back to my childhood. I mean, I was in juvenile detention multiple times before I turned 18 before it got real. When I realized if I kept it up I'd end up someplace other than a little fu...

My guest today is Mike Michalowicz, who has just written another great book, and it's going to disrupt this nasty cycle of the grind. The book is called Clockwork. Here's the thing. Mike can be trusted. If you've read any of his other bestsellers like Profit First or The Pumpkin Plan, you know he's hilarious, wildly transparent, and incredibly strategic, especially as he talks about his adventures of building and selling multiple million-dollar businesses as well as helping many entrepreneurs around the world. I have appreciated his wisdom and strategies, especially in the area of making your business more profitable, so when I heard he was going after the subject of time... I knew I had to get him on the show. Listen To The Podcast: RESOURCES: Clockwork Book: https://amzn.to/2wOwpkn Profit First Book: https://amzn.to/2M1bH5F The Pumpkin Plan Book: https://amzn.to/2NoQKpM INTERVIEW: Mike Michalowicz, welcome to DREAM THINK DO, buddy. Thank you, Mitch, so much for having me on your show. Absolutely. All right. The new book is called Clockwork. There's some timeless wisdom in here, but especially for entrepreneurs, helping them to build a business so that they can actually breathe, so they can actually have more of the life they want, all of that. Why go after time? What was the catalyst for you to say, "All right, it's time to go after this subject?" It's time to go after time. Right. I just noticed that I did that, right? I was going to break into Time After Time, but nobody wants to hear me sing, so… Good song. Yeah, right? A good song. Anyway, I had a realization when I was reading about Maslow's hierarchy of needs. Basically, he said there are these foundational needs we have, which are like food and water, and it builds up to shelter, and belonging, and self-actualization, but if we are missing a base function, like if we don't have any food or water, we will ignore everything else to get that priority. That's the base need of all of humanity. Well, I believe there's this Maslowian hierarchy of needs for business, for entrepreneurs. I think what the base is, the oxygen, if you will, is sales, meaning we need sales coming into our business to sustain. If there is no inbound revenue, nothing else matters because our lives are in jeopardy, our corporate, our business life is in jeopardy. Once we have some degree of sales, then the next level up, what I consider the nutrition, the food, and the water, is profitability. Sadly, I discovered something about my own business that I think applies to entrepreneurs in general: When I didn't have profit, meaning there was no money going into my pocket, I thought the solution was more sales, so I'd actually push harder to sell more. In fact, if sales is oxygen and profit is food and water, I was starving to death but instead of getting nutrition, or profit, I was trying to breathe in more air. I was gasping for air, more oxygen, more sales. What a business needs to move up this hierarchy of needs is sustainable sales. We need predictable profit. That's the next level up in the hierarchy of needs. Once a business achieves those two, then the next level of needs is time. Many entrepreneurs work simply to sustain the business, and that's it. It's a perpetual work. The demands on us are ridiculous. We compromise any form of life. We just work, work, work. Now, once we have sales and profit, now it's all about capturing time so we can bring back a balance so that we can live life the way we want, and we can work in our business the way we want. Instead of doing everything, we can become selective. That's why the subtitle for Clockwork is Design Your Business To Run Itself which, in turn, frees you up to do what you want, when you want in life and in business. That's beautiful. As I was reading through Clockwork, one of the things that struck me - I've seen that in businesses that are struggling,

My guest today is Bernie Swain. Bernie is the founder of the Washington Speakers' Bureau, one of the most successful and well-respected speakers' bureaus in the world. Since launching in 1980, the bureau has represented US presidents, prime ministers from Great Britain, countless American and world leaders, business and economic visionaries, authors, media personalities, sports legends. Bernie's bureau represents some of the most successful people and well-respected minds in the world. He knows their well-told and well-known stories as well as many of the behind the scenes stories too. Recently he put all of that in a book called What Made Me Who I Am. In this book, Bernie does an incredible job of collecting a series of lesser-known stories from well-known people. Tales of grit, determination, sometimes involving love, sometimes involving luck, but great stories of real people doing extraordinary things. So I wanted to have Bernie on to talk about his story and some of his favorite stories from others as well, so let's get to it. Listen To The Podcast: RESOURCES: What Made Me Who I Am Book: https://amzn.to/2NapMPn INTERVIEW: Bernie, welcome to DREAM THINK DO. Thank you, it's great being here. I appreciate the time you're sharing with me. It's an absolute honor. Often when I have people on for DREAM THINK DO, they walked out a dream and sometimes it was a lifelong dream. Something they dreamed of doing as a little child, but if I'm understanding your story, you weren't five years old dreaming of someday having a speakers' bureau. No. It sounds like this started in a completely different fashion. It was totally different. In fact, I was in my early 30s when the change took place. No one in my family, to give you an idea of where I started from, and maybe this will tell the people that are listening to the podcast, that no matter where you begin from, you can succeed in life. No one in my family ever attended college before. In fact, my mother and her family were farmers who grew up in Central Virginia and basically lived off the land. My father, with five sisters, a brother and assorted relatives, grew up in just a two-room house in the poorest of mining towns in West Virginia. When my grandmother couldn't take care of him, he spent part of his childhood in an orphanage. So, when I was in high school, there was never really any conversation in my home about my going to college. That wasn't a given. Yeah. My family, I think, expected me to do well and find a job and succeed and be happy, but there was never any conversation. I had a teacher in high school. He was the athletic director and the football coach and he encouraged me to go to college. In fact, I would have never gone if it hadn't been for his input and influence in my life. I wanted to be just like him. I wanted to be something as a football coach or an athletic director or teach physical education. So, he set me on this path and I went to college and graduated from college. My first job was the football coach and the junior high school ninth grade phys ed teacher at the junior high school I had previously gone to. Wow. I spent a year there and went back to school to get a master's degree and then went on to become the intramural director at George Washington University, and then the assistant athletic director. I was months away from becoming the athletic director at the university when a friend of mine sent me a copy of Fortune Magazine. In the magazine was a story about this lecture agency called Harry Walker. In the article, it told how Harry Walker went to the Gerald Ford White House and signed Gerald Ford, who was the president at the time, Henry Kissinger and Alexander Haig to speak for him after they left office. At the end of the article, Henry Kissinger is quoted as questioning the high commission rate that Harry Walker wanted to charge and says, "Why don't I simply sign with one of your comp...