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Your essence is determined by your skills, your knowledge, and your desire.
So many people are afraid, but they don’t understand fear, and fear interferes with
who we are.
When I was 31 years old, I had everything I ever dreamed of.
I was worth over a hundred million dollars, and ironically, it was the first time I ever
felt empty.
I ended up losing over a hundred million dollars and going bankrupt.
I want to figure out how we can prevent ourselves from going down that same path.
You need to be more, do that, and I promise you, you will make a lot of money, help a
lot of people, and have a lot of fun.
Yung and Profiters, welcome back to the show.
And today I have the honor of interviewing David Meltzer for the third time.
Now, David has been supportive of me since I first launched this podcast six years ago.
We’ve known each other for that long, and it says a lot about David’s character.
He helps nobody’s.
He helps the young guys, and he’s all about being of service, and he’s all about giving
back.
And you can just tell he really cares about helping other people live better, more happier
lives, which is something that we’re going to speak a lot about today.
David is the CEO and founder of Sports One Marketing, which is a sports marketing firm.
He’s also a best-selling author.
He is the host of the Playbook podcast, and he also dabbles in TV.
He has a Bloomberg TV show called the Two Minute Drill.
Now, David is an expert in all things entrepreneurship, and one thing that I love about David is that
he’s always evolving.
He’s always growing, and I know that since I haven’t talked to him in five years, he’s
going to have so much new perspective to share with us about entrepreneurship.
And back when I talked to him in 2019, I wasn’t even an entrepreneur yet, so I didn’t even
ask him questions related to entrepreneurship because I had no idea what it meant to be
an entrepreneur at that time.
Some of the things we’re going to dive deep on is fear-based consciousness, ego-based
consciousness as entrepreneurs, how we can avoid that, which is something that David went
through early on in his entrepreneurship journey.
We’re also going to talk about two annoying things that entrepreneurs have to do.
Number one, be honest with ourselves.
Number two, be repetitive, and we’re going to find out why those are two important things
we have to do.
Without further delay, here is David Meltzer.
David, welcome to Young and Profiting Podcast.
Thank you so much.
It’s such a privilege and a pleasure to be here.
I’m so excited for this conversation.
So Young and Profiters, David has been on the show.
This is now the third time that he’s been on Young and Profiting Podcast.
So he first came on in episode 31.
We took a deep dive into his career.
Then he came back on episode 47, and we talked about his new book, Game Time Decision Making.
But David, the last time that we talked was 2019.
That was before the pandemic.
It feels like that was 10 years ago, so I feel like there’s a lot of catching up to
do.
I also feel like all of my listeners have probably changed by now, so I’m sure they
haven’t heard any of your content, so I figured we’d actually go through your story today.
So why don’t we start with your childhood dreams.
I learned that you actually had a dream of becoming a football player when you were younger.
So how far along did you get with those dreams, and what got in your way?
I really wanted to figure out the best way to get rich, because the only thing that was
missing in my life was money.
All the difficulties, the stresses, the challenges were around financial difficulties.
My mom was a single mom raising six kids, working two jobs, packing our dinner in a station
wagon, driving around, filling up turnstiles at convenience stores with greeting cards just
so we could eat.
So I picked being a football player, not knowing what I know today, and beyond people laughing
at me scoffing at me and making fun of me, I actually got a scholarship and played football
in college, but it didn’t take me very long in college to realize, in fact, the very first
play as a freshman I got ran over by Christian Okoye, who later was the AFC Player of the
Year, called the Nigerian Nightmare.
But that’s when I realized I’d better figure out another way to make money, because I realized
that although your desire determines the Delta in your life, and you should always know that
you never will overachieve your own self-image, that your skills and your knowledge determine
your basement, and that if you don’t align the basement with the Delta, that you’ll be
limited in this lifetime of the capacity that you have in order to achieve high achievements.
And so I immediately realized my mom was right, doctor, lawyer, or failure, that I was going
to be a doctor because I had a higher basement with my skills and knowledge to be a doctor
than I did a football player.
But then I realized very quickly that I hate hospitals, and my older brother gave me some
valid information at 18 years old that doctors had to be in hospitals, even sports doctors
had to be in hospitals.
And that’s where I had one of my greatest takeaways of my life.
When my brother told me, “David, at 18, you need to be more interested than interesting.”
And I find a lot of people with their content, with social media, they really try to be interesting,
and it’s like the 19-year-old life coaches out there.
I advise those kids, look man, you’ve got to be more interested.
You don’t know what you don’t know, and it takes a lifetime of lessons in order to facilitate
what it takes to teach people about life with the dummy tax and situational knowledge.
So I went to be a lawyer, and I ended up graduating law school doing very well, but not becoming
a lawyer once again, because I was always guided by how could I make the most money
I could to buy my mom a house and a car.
So something related to this story, your mom giving you advice to become a doctor, is something
that actually stuck with me all these years since you’ve last been on your podcast.
You told me, even the people that love you so much, they might have the best intentions.
They give you bad advice, and that’s something that I’ve said and carried with me probably
a thousand times since you’ve told it to me.
So talk to us about how you filter the advice that you receive now.
Well through appreciation, understanding that the easiest and fastest way is to find people
that sit in a situation that you want to be in and ask them for direction.
You see, the difference between the two types of ignorant people is one, there’s ignorant
and humble people that will tell you that they don’t know what they don’t know.
But according to their experience, this is what they’ve learned.
And then there’s ignorant, arrogant people that they know they don’t know what they don’t
know, but they pretend to either out of envy, spite, or negativity, they will attack you,
laugh at you, scoff at you, or make fun of you.
But the most dangerous, ignorant, arrogant people are the ones that love us the most.
And that’s because they’re more afraid for you than you are for yourself.
And they give their advice out of fear, out of security.
And so although they love you more than anything, friends, family, etc., they actually are giving
you advice not out of experience, but out of fear that you’re going to get hurt.
And once again, reiterating that the ignorant, humble and ignorant, arrogant need to be deciphered.
But through appreciation, we can thank everybody for their advice.
Because even if their advice is with negative intent, we need to appreciate the fact that
they care enough about us to not like us.
I have three daughters and a son and my girls are closer in age and they’ll fight and they’ll
say really nasty things to each other as sisters.
And they’ll look at me for some sort of validation and always say, “Wow, you guys are making me
so happy.”
And they look at me like, “What the heck is that talking about?”
I’m like, “If you guys care this much about what each other thinks, then I’ve done my
job.”
You must really love each other to say such nasty things over one little comment or some
little incident that you really must care a lot about each other.
So appreciation to me is the tool, the perspective lens, whether someone’s giving me advice.
I always say thank you.
And then I go and treat advice like a handful of sand.
I appreciate what I have in my hand, but then I go ahead and allow the advice that isn’t
aligned with where I want to be or better to fall through my fingers with appreciation.
And I think a lot of young people, well, I should say anybody that has parents, we don’t
always appreciate the love and intent of the bad advice that our parents are giving us.
And if we just would take a second to say thank you so much for caring this much about
me, I will take that under consideration.
Instead, we get defensive, we react to fear, and we attack the people that we love the
most and we resent them, or worse, we take their advice and then we resent them when
we end up getting what they want, not what we wanted.
Another bad prescription to a good relationship by not having a correct relationship to advice.
I love that.
I think that’s such good perspective because you’re not saying just ignore their advice.
You’re saying take what you want from it, leave what you don’t want from it, and also
appreciate where they’re coming from, which I think is just so healthy.
So David, you went to law school like you said, and you ended up becoming a millionaire
before you actually completed your law school, which I think is amazing.
And I thought you dropped out of law school, but I found out you actually completed your
law degree and built a company on the side.
So tell us about that experience.
When I graduated law school, well, before I graduated, I had two job opportunities.
I wanted to be an oil and gas litigator, which was the highest paying job out of law school,
which is why I wanted to be an oil and gas litigator.
It wasn’t like I loved oil and gas or maritime law or even litigation.
I wanted to make a lot of money to buy my mom a house and a car.
But actually, the head of the maritime department, who I studied law and Greece with, professor
Yiannopoulos, he told me about this new thing called the Internet in 1992.
And he told me that if I could get an interview with the company, the largest legal publisher
in the world, that was putting all of the statutes and case law secondary materials
online that I could make a fortune by being a lawyer who sells law materials.
So I went ahead and ended up getting an offer.
They only hired four people out of 2,500.
Once again, I didn’t listen because you needed four years of litigation experience to even
apply for the job.
I just went ahead and applied anyway and convinced them that I could sell in nine months out
of law school.
Before I passed the bar, my mom made me take the bar because she didn’t think the Internet
was anything but a fad.
She told me this was the biggest mistake of my life and that the Internet would never
work.
Before I even got my results of the bar examination, I had already made a million dollars, bought
my mom a house and a car, and within three years, we exited for $3.4 billion to Thomson
Reuters in 1995.
And that led me into a different trajectory, a divine direction with a lot of great lessons
and a lot of great successes and also some severe failures along the way from those lessons
I had to learn.
Wow.
$3.4 billion back then was even more money than it is now and even now that is such an
enormous amount of money.
So talk to us about the wealth that you acquired.
What was your life like at that point?
How old were you and then what did you end up losing in return?
I made a few million dollars from the exit at 25 years old, but then I branded myself
not a lawyer, but a technology guru expert and went to the Silicon Valley, raised hundreds
of millions of dollars, and by 1999, when I was 31 years old, I had everything I ever
dreamed of.
I was worth over $100 million.
I owned a ton of real estate stocks.
I was running Samsung’s phone division, so I had a fulfilling, purposeful, passionate
and profitable position with an up and coming data device, which was actually in 1999 a
Windows CE device.
I worked with Microsoft, Bill Gates, and Googs, and Bomber at the highest level relationships
in all areas of telecom, but it was interesting.
I also had married my dream girl from the fourth grade, so not only did I have financially
everything I ever dreamed of, but personally, I had everything I dreamed of.
And ironically, it was the first time I ever felt empty.
I always felt purposeful and passionate and fulfilled.
Even when I was broke as a five-year-old, when my dad left, I was very fulfilled.
I just was missing money.
Now I had more money than I ever dreamed of.
I had everything that I ever dreamed of, and for the first time I felt empty.
And so like a lot of young individuals that have everything that they dream of or even
more, self-sabotage seems to be a great reaction to that fear of emptiness.
And so I started surrounding myself with the wrong people and the wrong ideas.
I started self-medicating myself for the pain and emptiness that I felt with drugs and alcohol,
which were also aligned with the people that I hung out with.
Ironically, after Samsung, I ended up running the most notable sports agency in the world,
and they made the movie Jerry Maguire about the firm that I ran, Leigh Steinberg Sports
and Entertainment.
And in that position, now I had my dream job on top of having everything I dreamed of financially
and personally, and I had three daughters under the age of 10.
But luckily, I had four people who truly loved me in my life.
I had my mom, my dad, my best friend, and my wife, and all four of them were the only
ones that told me the truth.
It came to a point where I hated all four of the only four people that truly loved me
enough to tell me the truth because I didn’t like what they were saying.
And through that, I was prepared for all the causes that I created that were not aligned
with where I wanted to be.
And so two years before I lost everything, I ended up losing over $100 million and going
bankrupt.
Two years before that, I was faced with an ultimatum that changed my life and my perspective,
saved my life, saved my perspective, saved my marriage as well, thanks to my dad, my
best friend, and my mom.
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Well, I’m happy they turned you around from that.
I know that last time we talked, you said that in this terrible time of your life, you
were living in an ego-based, fear-based consciousness.
Can you help us understand what that means?
I think a lot of entrepreneurs listen to this show, and I want to figure out how we
can prevent ourselves from going down that same path.
I love this interview because a lot has evolved over the last five years since 2019.
The concepts that I had, like ego-based consciousness and the conscious continuum, have also evolved.
I’ve been able, through a lot of intention, facilitate simple descriptions of what I tried
to portray back then that probably confused the shit out of a lot of people.
The idea is this, that so many people are afraid, but they don’t understand fear, and
fear interferes with who we are.
There’s a paradigm shift in life, and it’s something that I try to empower, especially
young people.
The biggest energy suck, which is amplified by social media between knowing who you are
compared to what you want people to think you are.
I am versus this is what I want people to think I am.
There’s a huge energy suck, and in between that is understanding what am I doing to interfere
with it.
Instead of I want to get more happy, more healthy, more wealthy, more worthy, I am happy.
I am healthy.
I am wealthy.
I am worthy.
What am I doing to interfere with it?
The first thing in this ego-based consciousness was to figure out what I’m afraid of.
What I’ve learned in the last five years is that it’s a really deep journey to figure
out what you’re afraid of, because there’s past lives.
There’s genetic fears that you’ve inherited.
There’s energetic fears you’ve inherited.
There’s womb trauma.
There’s infant trauma.
There’s toddler trauma.
There’s teenage trauma.
There’s 20s, 30s, 40s, 50s, 60s, and 70s trauma.
It’s very difficult to decipher what exactly am I afraid of that’s causing me to interfere
with my potential.
In this realm of ego-based consciousness, I instead have found a more instant and obvious
way to recognize the interference, the ego-based consciousness that dissipates our possibility
or potential, that creates a distance of resistance between us and what we want or think we want
in our lives.
It’s the way we react to fear.
What need to be right or need to be offended, separate, inferior, superior, anxious, frustrated,
angry, guilty, resentful, worried, all of these different feelings.
When you’re pissed off, it doesn’t take a therapist to figure out you’re pissed.
You know instantly.
It’s obvious.
I now use time as a dependent variable and use my time with wisdom and faith to shorten
the distance of resistance between me and where I want to be or better.
This newfound technology or practice of identifying the clues of when I’m pissed off or ego and
the patterns of my ego in order to shorten the distance of resistance through wisdom
and faith have accommodated the majority of my day.
I only spend minutes and moments resisting what I want, only spend minutes and moments
accelerating in the wrong direction away from what I want.
It’s a very simple process to understand not only ego-based consciousness, but why so many
people are not where they want to be or better because they’re actually in their own way.
So good.
Let’s get a real example of you.
Somebody cuts you off on the road.
How do you react?
What goes on in your head?
It’s a good example because people are like, “Are you so zen that you don’t get pissed
off?”
No.
I mean, pissed off is everybody else.
And so I love the fact that you use that example because it’s probably the easiest.
When I get cut off, I immediately get pissed off and I want to flip off the person that
has cut me off.
And what I do instead of resisting it, trying to go over it, under it, through it, around
it, logic it, all the things that create more resistance, I simply stop.
I breathe through my nose and out through my mouth, reminding, remembering, and recollecting
where I do want to be or better.
And I look and ask myself, “Have I ever done that before?”
“Oh, you mean cut someone off, Dave?”
“Yeah, you have.”
Maybe that this person also is on accident cutting you off and maybe you should use gratitude
and forgiveness instead of attack and reaction of fear, being angry or upset, resentful or
guilty or offended or whatever else people are, and not waste your time, emotion, and
value on creating resistance but instead stop, breathe, drop, and then roll back into where
you want to be, the airport on time, instead of elevating and escalating where you may end
up if you react in the wrong way.
And then how is this related to going against your true purpose or becoming who you want
to be?
Well, your potential is who you want to be.
And I use time as a dependent variable in this realm, meaning that when you look and
understand that there’s two different times that create conflict in our life.
One is man-made constructive time.
We got shit to do today.
I’m sure your calendar and my calendar are packed with activities of today.
But some of those activities are in more of an infinite time zone that we’re making an
investment into our longevity or into future lives or to lessons that are much bigger than
paying our bills or making a lot of money or helping a lot of people or having fun today.
And so what I do is teach people to use the 24 hours that you’re guaranteed every day,
except for the last day of your life, you’ll be cheated seconds, minutes, or hours.
So number one, put a framework around the 24 hours that you’re blessed with every day
and then utilize that 24 hours today with number one.
What do you want today, according to the actual circumstances of today, by learning and aligning
the lessons of the past with where you think, and I’ll repeat, where you think you want
to be in the future.
And so as we prepare for our day and we ask, what do I want today, according to the temperature
and the interest rates and the flat tires and the relatives that call us or whatever
else there is in circumstantial today, align it with the lessons from the past in the trajectory
I call it divine direction in divine time, understanding divine detours also occur with
where I think I want to be or better.
Now I’m maximizing my progress by focusing in on my behaviors of today, knowing that
good behavior is simply behavior that’s aligned with where I think I want to be and bad behavior
is that which interferes with where I think I want to be.
My good behavior could be your bad behavior, Hala, determine upon our ages, our circumstances,
our business, whatever it may be, my good behavior may be your bad and your bad behavior
be my good because it’s defined by where I want to be, not where you think I should
be or what’s missing or what I don’t have.
And so many people, they’re looking to attach their emotions to outcome and evaluate their
success by outcomes that they don’t understand or know.
For example, when I lost everything, nobody could imagine what it’s like to lose over
a hundred million dollars, but imagine having to go tell your mom not only that you went
bankrupt, but you lost her house in the bankruptcy because you didn’t take your name off of title.
And the only reason you ever wanted to be rich was to buy your mom that house.
And if somebody would have told me at that time, look, you just don’t understand or know
how losing everything, including your mom’s house is the best thing that is ever going
to happen to you.
It’s going to save your life.
It’s going to save your marriage.
It’s going to promote you, protect you and love you to make you a world thought leader,
to write eight books, to have all the, all this is going to happen because this shitty
thing occurred.
Well, you are human.
And at the time that these outcomes occur, that’s suck.
It’s almost literally impossible to feel promoted, protected in love.
And that’s why each day I work on my faith to know that there’s something bigger than
me.
I don’t care what religion, philosophy, spirituality or theories you believe in.
All you got to believe in is something that’s bigger than you that loves you more than your
mom protects you at all times and promotes you because it’s omniscient, all powerful and
all knowing in its core.
And so for me, the faith combined with the wisdom of living life has allowed me to accelerate,
to aggregate the right things around me, and most importantly, to create exponentiality
in my outcomes, even though I don’t know or understand how any of the outcomes are actually
going to promote me or protect me or love me.
I just have faith that they will, and it’s just a matter of either man-made constructive
time or infinite time that’s going to reveal, which is called a revelation, the salvation
that faith and wisdom provide us in the long run of where we want to be in our divine direction
and divine time and see our divine detours as divine, not punishment.
Wow.
That was such a good explanation.
I couldn’t have ever imagined that that’s where you’re going to take it, but it’s so
true.
I love everything you said, and it’s so clear, David, that you’ve really dedicated the last
several decades of your life helping others, and you actually have a mission not to just
help people and make a lot of money, but to actually help make people happier, right?
And there was a point in your life that you were just telling us that you were very, very
unhappy.
So why do you feel like people need to be happier, and why has that become your mission?
Well, initially it became my mission because my daughter, when she was 12, had one of her
friends commit suicide, and I couldn’t understand what would cause a 12-year-old to kill themselves.
And I went and did research to find out that it’s the fastest growing cause of death for
everyone, all ages, all demographics.
And so whether you call it joy, happiness, fulfillment, passion, purpose, or even profitability,
I don’t care, I know that I have a capability of teaching people three things.
How to make a lot of money and live in abundance with the perspective of making a lot of money.
Two, how to help a lot of people.
And three, how to be positive, how to have fun with it.
And I’ve paid the dummy tax to learn those lessons, and I know that if I can empower a
thousand people like you in your lifetime to empower a thousand people, to empower a thousand
people, to make a lot of money, to live in abundance, to have the perspective of abundance
by helping a lot of people and having fun, enjoying the consistent every day.
Enjoying the persistent without quit.
Enjoying the pursuit of your potential, not what other people want or what’s missing
or you don’t have, that I can create a fulfilled, passionate, purposeful, profitable world,
a happy world, a joyous world, a collective consciousness because a thousand people like
you times a thousand people like you times a thousand people like you equals a billion
people.
And that’s a collective consciousness.
One particle of light will overcome a million particles of darkness if we can change the
world together by empowering each other to be a community or neighborhood of people that
want to help each other and know people that can help each other, we can actually change
the world.
And that’s why I went on this mission to help facilitate through all the things that I do
from 17 and a half, almost 18 years ago, when my wife woke me up and said, “Hey, you’re
going to end up dead.
You are going to end up in a bad place and unless you take stock in who you are and who
you were and what you want to become, I don’t want to be around it.”
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As you may know, a lot of people that listen to this show, David, are entrepreneurs.
And what you just said about being honest with yourself reminded me of something I’ve
heard you say where you said entrepreneurs have two annoying things that they always
have to do.
One is to be honest with themselves and two is being repetitive.
So let’s dig into this honesty a bit.
Why do we need to get honest with ourselves?
Because the truth vibrates the faster and sooner or later, the truth is going to come
out.
And all we’re doing is creating obstacles, voids, and shortages by lying to ourselves.
We’re not telling ourselves, we can’t find outside of us what we can’t see inside of
us.
And so if you think that somehow your bullshit is helping you, it’s only helping you in the
instantaneous reaction to the fear that you have, it’s not helping you pursue your potential.
Remember, your potential is your truth.
Your essence is determined by your skills, your knowledge, and desire.
When you’re honest with yourself, you are only adding the number one criteria of being
successful, which is credibility of your potential.
Remember, your basements determined by what?
Your skills and your knowledge, your delta determines how far you’re going to get, which
is your desire.
When you are not honest with yourself, you’re interfering with your desire, with your skills
and your knowledge.
And sooner or later, it’s going to come up and turn out and you’re going to end up and
have to go where?
Back to the back of the line.
You cut the line by being dishonest, you’re going to have to go to the back of the line.
It may not be for a long time.
And people may wonder, why that person is lying to themselves?
Why are they so successful?
Well sooner or later, it all comes crumbling down.
And the longer it takes for the truth to come out, the further the fall, which was my truth,
for a hundred million dollars, that’s a big fall and almost costing me my life with the
shame, blame and justification that’s attached to the dishonesty of being an overseller,
back-end seller, liar, manipulator and cheater with good intention.
I wasn’t a bad person.
I gave tons of money to charity.
I helped my family, but in its core, I lied to myself all the time and I was just afraid.
I was afraid that I wasn’t worthy, I was afraid that I wasn’t enough, and it carried through
genetically and energetically until I became honest with myself and started working on
that every single day.
And I still spend minutes and moments in my bullshit.
Instead of days, weeks, months and years, just minutes and moments, and then I catch
myself and I forgive myself and I move back into the right trajectory.
I think this is such a powerful lesson for entrepreneurs because I’m an entrepreneur.
I run a podcast network and I have some of the biggest legends that you probably know
in my podcast network like Jenna Kutcher and Amy Porterfield and John Lee Dumas and I see
other networks cheating and I see them buying downloads and selling downloads and I’m tempted
every day.
Well, everyone else is doing it, but then I remember that you said it so beautifully.
If you’re dishonest, you might get really successful, but then if something goes wrong,
it comes crashing down, your reputation is ruined and you’re at the back of the line.
And so slow and steady wins the race in entrepreneurship and as entrepreneurs, it’s easy to cheat.
There’s lots of ways to cheat in every different industry.
I laughed too at the 500 Top 10 Podcasts in Business or Entrepreneurship, a ranking.
I actually changed the signature on my email because so many people put “Top 10 Forbes
Speaker, Number One Podcast” in this, all this bullshit that doesn’t mean anything.
I actually changed it to “Rest Ipsilocorter” and I encourage people when they become honest
with themselves and also have a commitment to consistency or being repetitive that you
think about what “Rest Ipsilocorter” means.
It means that which speaks for itself.
And so if what you do speaks for itself and the test of time allows you to have the credibility
does that mean it’s going to be perfect?
No.
There’s always 10% of the people that are going to hate you, but there’s also 10% that
are going to love you no matter what.
For me, it’s that 80% that by being honest and consistent will learn to love you just
the same way you should learn to love what you don’t like or don’t love.
Because if you learn to love what you don’t like or don’t love and you learn to love what
other people don’t like or love, you do it consistently every day, persistently without
quit.
Life will tell you all its secrets.
You’ll get all the cheat codes and it’s those cheat codes that have made the difference
in my life to make my life easy and identify the dis-ease or the dis-easy in my life, the
interference that I create myself by not being honest and not being consistent.
David, I know another cheat code in entrepreneurship is relationships and being a good networker.
I’d love to understand from your perspective, what are the types of relationships we should
surround ourselves with as entrepreneurs?
One of the biggest myths of entrepreneurs is from Napoleon Hill, who’s one of my favorite
mentors.
He said, “You’re the aggregate of the five people that you spend the most time with.”
I’ve changed that in my life to understand that we have teams, that there’s more than
just the five people that we spend the most time with.
It’s according to the subject matter topic or expertise that’s of most value to us.
What team do I want around me?
What neighborhood do I want to live in?
What position do I want to play?
At 56 years old, in my family, I’m the point guard or the owner or the coach.
I don’t want to be the water boy, but when it comes to other areas of my life, like
private equity, for example, something that I’ve learned later on in life as a venture
capitalist and investor, I started as a water boy, maybe the towel boy, and I’m moving up
to a second string six-man off the bench, but there’s a lot of people that know a lot
more about it, but I’m surrounding myself with the right team.
I’m picking the right position to be on that team and working my way up to differing positions
that would be most beneficial to me.
As an entrepreneur, not only surround yourself with the right people, the right idea, but
by the subject matter topic or expertise, pick your position because, remember, as an entrepreneur,
the fastest way to get to where you want to be or better is either find someone that’s
already there and ask them for directions or help somebody else get there.
Both of these, I have this icon of reaching up and someone pulling up a seat for me above
me and me reaching back and pulling up a seat for someone that’s below me, that’s the fastest
way to create a neighborhood of people that want to help each other and know people that
can help each other.
All the content that I do, and we were laughing about having over 1900 podcasts with a playbook,
we’ve had 4,300 interviews on office hours, I have four TV shows on Apple TV, so many
different interviews, but the only purpose of all the content that I do is to build community,
is to build a community of people, whether it’s the free Friday trainings, the group
stuff that I do, one-on-one consulting business advisory.
It’s all about a community of people that want to help each other and know people that
can help each other.
And I’ll tell you why, because if you can build a community like that, they will buy
from each other and sell for each other for life.
And there’s nothing that will guarantee your success more than a community of people that
are buying from each other and selling for each other for life.
And the bigger you have that community, I promise you, you’ll make a lot of money, you’ll help
a lot of people, and you’ll have a lot of fun.
Okay, so one last question, and then we’re going to start to close out the interview because
I know that you have to go.
So you are one of the most prestigious business coaches.
I know several people who have used your business coaching.
Not everybody can afford such a world-class business coach like you.
What’s your recommendation to get a mentor?
Find out, first of all, who sits in the situation that you want to be in, in the particular
topic, subject, matter, expertise.
My oldest coach myself, and I have many coaches, is my sleep coach, because a third of my life
has spent sleeping.
It allows me to recover and access information, those cheat codes that we were talking about.
So I’ve had a sleep coach for 17 and a half years.
I want to be in the hall of fame of sleep.
I used to want to be in the football hall of fame.
Now I want to be the best sleeper in the world because it means more, and it’ll give me more
out of my life.
And so to that end, also don’t be afraid just because someone is a prestigious coach or
he’s the highest in their field.
A lot of people like me, my friends who sit at the highest levels and your friends, Hala,
we do the majority of what we do for free.
I do free lives every day.
I do ask meaning things every day.
I do free meetups and hold court in every city.
Over 200 cities a year, I have a group that meets on Monday.
I have free Friday trainings for almost 25 years.
That might be older than you.
I’ve been doing this stuff, but if somebody wants proximity and intimacy with me and to
take that time, I have to charge, but I also have to guarantee me as a profit center.
If I’m going to charge you, whether it’s in a group setting, $97 or I’m going to charge
you for a $27 video or I’m going to charge you $20,000 plus equity to give you a business
advisory, I’m going to guarantee profitability.
And then I think that’s an important essential thing to look for in a mentor.
Look for the people, don’t worry about what they charge.
Ask them for help or if they know somebody that can help you and you’ll get to where
you want to be a lot faster than having to pay the dummy tax yourself.
Can you talk to us about service?
Yeah, being of service is understanding value.
A lot of people get confused about being of service and they give and not understanding
that they can’t give what they don’t have.
So being of service is understanding what people like and what people don’t like.
See, there’s only two ways to provide value.
It’s to understand where someone is today and what is going to help them and what’s not
helping them because the only way to derive service is to give people more of what they
like or take away what they don’t like or part of what they don’t like.
And so if you want to be of service, you need to be of value.
To understand value is to give people what they like or take away what they don’t like.
In order to do that, you have to be more interested than interesting.
You have to ask them, “Hey, what are you doing today?
What do you like about it?
What don’t you like about it?
Would it help you if and you know someone that can help me?”
When you understand the open-ended question template and value at its core, you will live
your life of service.
You will live in that world, as I suggested, of more than enough of everything for everyone.
Okay, so I end my show with two questions I ask all of my guests.
This also gives you an opportunity to just give whatever advice that you feel like entrepreneurs
really need to hear.
So the first one is, “What is one actionable thing our young and profitors can do today
to become more profitable tomorrow?”
Ask for help in person on the phone via email, traditional and social media, one time a day.
Be consistent of asking for what you want in person on the phone via email and media
once a day.
That’ll be 28 asks a week, 112 asks in a month.
On average, each of those people will have 1,000 people in their community.
So you’ll reach 112,000 people a month that are aligned with wanting to help you.
And if just a small percentage of those people actually do, it’ll accelerate aggregate and
compound exponentially the outcomes that you have.
Most people have no problem giving, but they certainly can’t confirm their faith in more
than enough of everything.
So ask for help, make it a committed, consistent behavior, and I promise you, you will make
a lot of money, help a lot of people, and have a lot of fun.
And the last question is, “What is your secret to profiting in life?”
Kindness, abundance in itself.
Just be kind to your future self.
Do good deeds.
When everything tells you to lie, manipulate, cheat, oversell, backend, sell, be kind.
Be kind to your future self.
Do the good deed.
The more you give, the more you’ll be given.
The more you’re given, the more you’ll receive, and the more you receive, the more you can
ask for.
And when you ask for more than more, you’ll be able to give more than more, be given more
than more, receive more than more, and then you’ll ask for more than more than more.
So instead of living in a zero-sum game, like all great negotiators, all great transactors,
thinking that they’re giving more and receiving less is a zero-sum game.
There is no scarcity.
There’s more than enough of everything.
So I always say, be kind to your future self and do good deeds.
I do want to offer all of your community.
I know I haven’t been here a while, but I’d be more than happy to send my book to everyone.
Pay for the book.
Pay for shipping.
I’ll sign the book if you want.
Email me for anything you need, but I will send you that book, david@demelzer.com.
Put it in the notes.
I’d be happy to send you my book for free.
Pay for shipping.
Don’t worry.
I’d love to be of service or value to your young community.
I love it.
David, where can everybody learn more about you and everything that you do?
David@demelzer.com.
Everywhere it’s David Meltzer.
You can Google me.
Bless to have plenty of content out there.
But my best way, I answer all my emails myself.
So if you email me, david@demelzer.com, I’ll be of service and of value.
Thank you so much, David.
Thank you.
I’ll see you soon.
Could you imagine losing more than $100 million?
Or better yet, realizing that it might be the best thing that ever happened to you?
David Meltzer has had such a fascinating career, with some huge ups and downs.
And often it’s those low points that really make us who we are, that give us perspective
that we need to keep going.
Thanks to his own experiences, David now has some valuable life lessons to share.
And I personally really love his perspective on how to take advice from others, whether
it’s good or bad advice, helpful or unhelpful, try to appreciate where it’s coming from
and recognize it for the gift that it is.
I certainly could take that advice.
Sometimes it’s also useful to take things one day at a time, literally.
Focus on that next 24 hours.
Give it a framework.
What do you want to accomplish today?
How does it fit within your larger goals?
And finally, above all, be truthful with yourself.
It can be so tempting to take shortcuts, especially when you see others, including your competitors,
taking them.
But like David said, sooner or later, the truth comes out.
And the longer it takes to do so, the harder the fall.
Just be patient and be kind to others and to your future self.
Everything you’ve given of yourself will come back to you in the end and then some.
Thanks for listening to this episode of Young and Profiting.
If you listened, learned and profited from this conversation and want to get started
giving yourself, then why not start by sharing this episode with a friend or a family member?
We love it when you spread the show by word of mouth.
And if you did enjoy this show and you learned something, then please take a couple minutes
to drop us a five-star review on Apple Podcasts.
Nothing helps us reach more people than a good review from you.
We never charge.
We don’t have subscriptions.
We do this all for you, our dear listeners.
If you prefer to watch your podcast as videos, you can find us on YouTube.
Just look up Young and Profiting.
You’ll find all of our episodes on there.
If you’re looking for me, you can find me on Instagram or LinkedIn by searching my
name.
It’s Hala Taha.
And I also want to thank my amazing YAP team who work so hard every day to make this podcast
what it is.
You guys are incredible.
Thank you so much.
This is your host, Hala Taha, a.k.a. the podcast princess, signing off.
Thank you.
Bye.
[BLANK_AUDIO]
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Your essence is determined by your skills, your knowledge, and your desire.
So many people are afraid, but they don’t understand fear, and fear interferes with
who we are.
When I was 31 years old, I had everything I ever dreamed of.
I was worth over a hundred million dollars, and ironically, it was the first time I ever
felt empty.
I ended up losing over a hundred million dollars and going bankrupt.
I want to figure out how we can prevent ourselves from going down that same path.
You need to be more, do that, and I promise you, you will make a lot of money, help a
lot of people, and have a lot of fun.
Yung and Profiters, welcome back to the show.
And today I have the honor of interviewing David Meltzer for the third time.
Now, David has been supportive of me since I first launched this podcast six years ago.
We’ve known each other for that long, and it says a lot about David’s character.
He helps nobody’s.
He helps the young guys, and he’s all about being of service, and he’s all about giving
back.
And you can just tell he really cares about helping other people live better, more happier
lives, which is something that we’re going to speak a lot about today.
David is the CEO and founder of Sports One Marketing, which is a sports marketing firm.
He’s also a best-selling author.
He is the host of the Playbook podcast, and he also dabbles in TV.
He has a Bloomberg TV show called the Two Minute Drill.
Now, David is an expert in all things entrepreneurship, and one thing that I love about David is that
he’s always evolving.
He’s always growing, and I know that since I haven’t talked to him in five years, he’s
going to have so much new perspective to share with us about entrepreneurship.
And back when I talked to him in 2019, I wasn’t even an entrepreneur yet, so I didn’t even
ask him questions related to entrepreneurship because I had no idea what it meant to be
an entrepreneur at that time.
Some of the things we’re going to dive deep on is fear-based consciousness, ego-based
consciousness as entrepreneurs, how we can avoid that, which is something that David went
through early on in his entrepreneurship journey.
We’re also going to talk about two annoying things that entrepreneurs have to do.
Number one, be honest with ourselves.
Number two, be repetitive, and we’re going to find out why those are two important things
we have to do.
Without further delay, here is David Meltzer.
David, welcome to Young and Profiting Podcast.
Thank you so much.
It’s such a privilege and a pleasure to be here.
I’m so excited for this conversation.
So Young and Profiters, David has been on the show.
This is now the third time that he’s been on Young and Profiting Podcast.
So he first came on in episode 31.
We took a deep dive into his career.
Then he came back on episode 47, and we talked about his new book, Game Time Decision Making.
But David, the last time that we talked was 2019.
That was before the pandemic.
It feels like that was 10 years ago, so I feel like there’s a lot of catching up to
do.
I also feel like all of my listeners have probably changed by now, so I’m sure they
haven’t heard any of your content, so I figured we’d actually go through your story today.
So why don’t we start with your childhood dreams.
I learned that you actually had a dream of becoming a football player when you were younger.
So how far along did you get with those dreams, and what got in your way?
I really wanted to figure out the best way to get rich, because the only thing that was
missing in my life was money.
All the difficulties, the stresses, the challenges were around financial difficulties.
My mom was a single mom raising six kids, working two jobs, packing our dinner in a station
wagon, driving around, filling up turnstiles at convenience stores with greeting cards just
so we could eat.
So I picked being a football player, not knowing what I know today, and beyond people laughing
at me scoffing at me and making fun of me, I actually got a scholarship and played football
in college, but it didn’t take me very long in college to realize, in fact, the very first
play as a freshman I got ran over by Christian Okoye, who later was the AFC Player of the
Year, called the Nigerian Nightmare.
But that’s when I realized I’d better figure out another way to make money, because I realized
that although your desire determines the Delta in your life, and you should always know that
you never will overachieve your own self-image, that your skills and your knowledge determine
your basement, and that if you don’t align the basement with the Delta, that you’ll be
limited in this lifetime of the capacity that you have in order to achieve high achievements.
And so I immediately realized my mom was right, doctor, lawyer, or failure, that I was going
to be a doctor because I had a higher basement with my skills and knowledge to be a doctor
than I did a football player.
But then I realized very quickly that I hate hospitals, and my older brother gave me some
valid information at 18 years old that doctors had to be in hospitals, even sports doctors
had to be in hospitals.
And that’s where I had one of my greatest takeaways of my life.
When my brother told me, “David, at 18, you need to be more interested than interesting.”
And I find a lot of people with their content, with social media, they really try to be interesting,
and it’s like the 19-year-old life coaches out there.
I advise those kids, look man, you’ve got to be more interested.
You don’t know what you don’t know, and it takes a lifetime of lessons in order to facilitate
what it takes to teach people about life with the dummy tax and situational knowledge.
So I went to be a lawyer, and I ended up graduating law school doing very well, but not becoming
a lawyer once again, because I was always guided by how could I make the most money
I could to buy my mom a house and a car.
So something related to this story, your mom giving you advice to become a doctor, is something
that actually stuck with me all these years since you’ve last been on your podcast.
You told me, even the people that love you so much, they might have the best intentions.
They give you bad advice, and that’s something that I’ve said and carried with me probably
a thousand times since you’ve told it to me.
So talk to us about how you filter the advice that you receive now.
Well through appreciation, understanding that the easiest and fastest way is to find people
that sit in a situation that you want to be in and ask them for direction.
You see, the difference between the two types of ignorant people is one, there’s ignorant
and humble people that will tell you that they don’t know what they don’t know.
But according to their experience, this is what they’ve learned.
And then there’s ignorant, arrogant people that they know they don’t know what they don’t
know, but they pretend to either out of envy, spite, or negativity, they will attack you,
laugh at you, scoff at you, or make fun of you.
But the most dangerous, ignorant, arrogant people are the ones that love us the most.
And that’s because they’re more afraid for you than you are for yourself.
And they give their advice out of fear, out of security.
And so although they love you more than anything, friends, family, etc., they actually are giving
you advice not out of experience, but out of fear that you’re going to get hurt.
And once again, reiterating that the ignorant, humble and ignorant, arrogant need to be deciphered.
But through appreciation, we can thank everybody for their advice.
Because even if their advice is with negative intent, we need to appreciate the fact that
they care enough about us to not like us.
I have three daughters and a son and my girls are closer in age and they’ll fight and they’ll
say really nasty things to each other as sisters.
And they’ll look at me for some sort of validation and always say, “Wow, you guys are making me
so happy.”
And they look at me like, “What the heck is that talking about?”
I’m like, “If you guys care this much about what each other thinks, then I’ve done my
job.”
You must really love each other to say such nasty things over one little comment or some
little incident that you really must care a lot about each other.
So appreciation to me is the tool, the perspective lens, whether someone’s giving me advice.
I always say thank you.
And then I go and treat advice like a handful of sand.
I appreciate what I have in my hand, but then I go ahead and allow the advice that isn’t
aligned with where I want to be or better to fall through my fingers with appreciation.
And I think a lot of young people, well, I should say anybody that has parents, we don’t
always appreciate the love and intent of the bad advice that our parents are giving us.
And if we just would take a second to say thank you so much for caring this much about
me, I will take that under consideration.
Instead, we get defensive, we react to fear, and we attack the people that we love the
most and we resent them, or worse, we take their advice and then we resent them when
we end up getting what they want, not what we wanted.
Another bad prescription to a good relationship by not having a correct relationship to advice.
I love that.
I think that’s such good perspective because you’re not saying just ignore their advice.
You’re saying take what you want from it, leave what you don’t want from it, and also
appreciate where they’re coming from, which I think is just so healthy.
So David, you went to law school like you said, and you ended up becoming a millionaire
before you actually completed your law school, which I think is amazing.
And I thought you dropped out of law school, but I found out you actually completed your
law degree and built a company on the side.
So tell us about that experience.
When I graduated law school, well, before I graduated, I had two job opportunities.
I wanted to be an oil and gas litigator, which was the highest paying job out of law school,
which is why I wanted to be an oil and gas litigator.
It wasn’t like I loved oil and gas or maritime law or even litigation.
I wanted to make a lot of money to buy my mom a house and a car.
But actually, the head of the maritime department, who I studied law and Greece with, professor
Yiannopoulos, he told me about this new thing called the Internet in 1992.
And he told me that if I could get an interview with the company, the largest legal publisher
in the world, that was putting all of the statutes and case law secondary materials
online that I could make a fortune by being a lawyer who sells law materials.
So I went ahead and ended up getting an offer.
They only hired four people out of 2,500.
Once again, I didn’t listen because you needed four years of litigation experience to even
apply for the job.
I just went ahead and applied anyway and convinced them that I could sell in nine months out
of law school.
Before I passed the bar, my mom made me take the bar because she didn’t think the Internet
was anything but a fad.
She told me this was the biggest mistake of my life and that the Internet would never
work.
Before I even got my results of the bar examination, I had already made a million dollars, bought
my mom a house and a car, and within three years, we exited for $3.4 billion to Thomson
Reuters in 1995.
And that led me into a different trajectory, a divine direction with a lot of great lessons
and a lot of great successes and also some severe failures along the way from those lessons
I had to learn.
Wow.
$3.4 billion back then was even more money than it is now and even now that is such an
enormous amount of money.
So talk to us about the wealth that you acquired.
What was your life like at that point?
How old were you and then what did you end up losing in return?
I made a few million dollars from the exit at 25 years old, but then I branded myself
not a lawyer, but a technology guru expert and went to the Silicon Valley, raised hundreds
of millions of dollars, and by 1999, when I was 31 years old, I had everything I ever
dreamed of.
I was worth over $100 million.
I owned a ton of real estate stocks.
I was running Samsung’s phone division, so I had a fulfilling, purposeful, passionate
and profitable position with an up and coming data device, which was actually in 1999 a
Windows CE device.
I worked with Microsoft, Bill Gates, and Googs, and Bomber at the highest level relationships
in all areas of telecom, but it was interesting.
I also had married my dream girl from the fourth grade, so not only did I have financially
everything I ever dreamed of, but personally, I had everything I dreamed of.
And ironically, it was the first time I ever felt empty.
I always felt purposeful and passionate and fulfilled.
Even when I was broke as a five-year-old, when my dad left, I was very fulfilled.
I just was missing money.
Now I had more money than I ever dreamed of.
I had everything that I ever dreamed of, and for the first time I felt empty.
And so like a lot of young individuals that have everything that they dream of or even
more, self-sabotage seems to be a great reaction to that fear of emptiness.
And so I started surrounding myself with the wrong people and the wrong ideas.
I started self-medicating myself for the pain and emptiness that I felt with drugs and alcohol,
which were also aligned with the people that I hung out with.
Ironically, after Samsung, I ended up running the most notable sports agency in the world,
and they made the movie Jerry Maguire about the firm that I ran, Leigh Steinberg Sports
and Entertainment.
And in that position, now I had my dream job on top of having everything I dreamed of financially
and personally, and I had three daughters under the age of 10.
But luckily, I had four people who truly loved me in my life.
I had my mom, my dad, my best friend, and my wife, and all four of them were the only
ones that told me the truth.
It came to a point where I hated all four of the only four people that truly loved me
enough to tell me the truth because I didn’t like what they were saying.
And through that, I was prepared for all the causes that I created that were not aligned
with where I wanted to be.
And so two years before I lost everything, I ended up losing over $100 million and going
bankrupt.
Two years before that, I was faced with an ultimatum that changed my life and my perspective,
saved my life, saved my perspective, saved my marriage as well, thanks to my dad, my
best friend, and my mom.
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Well, I’m happy they turned you around from that.
I know that last time we talked, you said that in this terrible time of your life, you
were living in an ego-based, fear-based consciousness.
Can you help us understand what that means?
I think a lot of entrepreneurs listen to this show, and I want to figure out how we
can prevent ourselves from going down that same path.
I love this interview because a lot has evolved over the last five years since 2019.
The concepts that I had, like ego-based consciousness and the conscious continuum, have also evolved.
I’ve been able, through a lot of intention, facilitate simple descriptions of what I tried
to portray back then that probably confused the shit out of a lot of people.
The idea is this, that so many people are afraid, but they don’t understand fear, and
fear interferes with who we are.
There’s a paradigm shift in life, and it’s something that I try to empower, especially
young people.
The biggest energy suck, which is amplified by social media between knowing who you are
compared to what you want people to think you are.
I am versus this is what I want people to think I am.
There’s a huge energy suck, and in between that is understanding what am I doing to interfere
with it.
Instead of I want to get more happy, more healthy, more wealthy, more worthy, I am happy.
I am healthy.
I am wealthy.
I am worthy.
What am I doing to interfere with it?
The first thing in this ego-based consciousness was to figure out what I’m afraid of.
What I’ve learned in the last five years is that it’s a really deep journey to figure
out what you’re afraid of, because there’s past lives.
There’s genetic fears that you’ve inherited.
There’s energetic fears you’ve inherited.
There’s womb trauma.
There’s infant trauma.
There’s toddler trauma.
There’s teenage trauma.
There’s 20s, 30s, 40s, 50s, 60s, and 70s trauma.
It’s very difficult to decipher what exactly am I afraid of that’s causing me to interfere
with my potential.
In this realm of ego-based consciousness, I instead have found a more instant and obvious
way to recognize the interference, the ego-based consciousness that dissipates our possibility
or potential, that creates a distance of resistance between us and what we want or think we want
in our lives.
It’s the way we react to fear.
What need to be right or need to be offended, separate, inferior, superior, anxious, frustrated,
angry, guilty, resentful, worried, all of these different feelings.
When you’re pissed off, it doesn’t take a therapist to figure out you’re pissed.
You know instantly.
It’s obvious.
I now use time as a dependent variable and use my time with wisdom and faith to shorten
the distance of resistance between me and where I want to be or better.
This newfound technology or practice of identifying the clues of when I’m pissed off or ego and
the patterns of my ego in order to shorten the distance of resistance through wisdom
and faith have accommodated the majority of my day.
I only spend minutes and moments resisting what I want, only spend minutes and moments
accelerating in the wrong direction away from what I want.
It’s a very simple process to understand not only ego-based consciousness, but why so many
people are not where they want to be or better because they’re actually in their own way.
So good.
Let’s get a real example of you.
Somebody cuts you off on the road.
How do you react?
What goes on in your head?
It’s a good example because people are like, “Are you so zen that you don’t get pissed
off?”
No.
I mean, pissed off is everybody else.
And so I love the fact that you use that example because it’s probably the easiest.
When I get cut off, I immediately get pissed off and I want to flip off the person that
has cut me off.
And what I do instead of resisting it, trying to go over it, under it, through it, around
it, logic it, all the things that create more resistance, I simply stop.
I breathe through my nose and out through my mouth, reminding, remembering, and recollecting
where I do want to be or better.
And I look and ask myself, “Have I ever done that before?”
“Oh, you mean cut someone off, Dave?”
“Yeah, you have.”
Maybe that this person also is on accident cutting you off and maybe you should use gratitude
and forgiveness instead of attack and reaction of fear, being angry or upset, resentful or
guilty or offended or whatever else people are, and not waste your time, emotion, and
value on creating resistance but instead stop, breathe, drop, and then roll back into where
you want to be, the airport on time, instead of elevating and escalating where you may end
up if you react in the wrong way.
And then how is this related to going against your true purpose or becoming who you want
to be?
Well, your potential is who you want to be.
And I use time as a dependent variable in this realm, meaning that when you look and
understand that there’s two different times that create conflict in our life.
One is man-made constructive time.
We got shit to do today.
I’m sure your calendar and my calendar are packed with activities of today.
But some of those activities are in more of an infinite time zone that we’re making an
investment into our longevity or into future lives or to lessons that are much bigger than
paying our bills or making a lot of money or helping a lot of people or having fun today.
And so what I do is teach people to use the 24 hours that you’re guaranteed every day,
except for the last day of your life, you’ll be cheated seconds, minutes, or hours.
So number one, put a framework around the 24 hours that you’re blessed with every day
and then utilize that 24 hours today with number one.
What do you want today, according to the actual circumstances of today, by learning and aligning
the lessons of the past with where you think, and I’ll repeat, where you think you want
to be in the future.
And so as we prepare for our day and we ask, what do I want today, according to the temperature
and the interest rates and the flat tires and the relatives that call us or whatever
else there is in circumstantial today, align it with the lessons from the past in the trajectory
I call it divine direction in divine time, understanding divine detours also occur with
where I think I want to be or better.
Now I’m maximizing my progress by focusing in on my behaviors of today, knowing that
good behavior is simply behavior that’s aligned with where I think I want to be and bad behavior
is that which interferes with where I think I want to be.
My good behavior could be your bad behavior, Hala, determine upon our ages, our circumstances,
our business, whatever it may be, my good behavior may be your bad and your bad behavior
be my good because it’s defined by where I want to be, not where you think I should
be or what’s missing or what I don’t have.
And so many people, they’re looking to attach their emotions to outcome and evaluate their
success by outcomes that they don’t understand or know.
For example, when I lost everything, nobody could imagine what it’s like to lose over
a hundred million dollars, but imagine having to go tell your mom not only that you went
bankrupt, but you lost her house in the bankruptcy because you didn’t take your name off of title.
And the only reason you ever wanted to be rich was to buy your mom that house.
And if somebody would have told me at that time, look, you just don’t understand or know
how losing everything, including your mom’s house is the best thing that is ever going
to happen to you.
It’s going to save your life.
It’s going to save your marriage.
It’s going to promote you, protect you and love you to make you a world thought leader,
to write eight books, to have all the, all this is going to happen because this shitty
thing occurred.
Well, you are human.
And at the time that these outcomes occur, that’s suck.
It’s almost literally impossible to feel promoted, protected in love.
And that’s why each day I work on my faith to know that there’s something bigger than
me.
I don’t care what religion, philosophy, spirituality or theories you believe in.
All you got to believe in is something that’s bigger than you that loves you more than your
mom protects you at all times and promotes you because it’s omniscient, all powerful and
all knowing in its core.
And so for me, the faith combined with the wisdom of living life has allowed me to accelerate,
to aggregate the right things around me, and most importantly, to create exponentiality
in my outcomes, even though I don’t know or understand how any of the outcomes are actually
going to promote me or protect me or love me.
I just have faith that they will, and it’s just a matter of either man-made constructive
time or infinite time that’s going to reveal, which is called a revelation, the salvation
that faith and wisdom provide us in the long run of where we want to be in our divine direction
and divine time and see our divine detours as divine, not punishment.
Wow.
That was such a good explanation.
I couldn’t have ever imagined that that’s where you’re going to take it, but it’s so
true.
I love everything you said, and it’s so clear, David, that you’ve really dedicated the last
several decades of your life helping others, and you actually have a mission not to just
help people and make a lot of money, but to actually help make people happier, right?
And there was a point in your life that you were just telling us that you were very, very
unhappy.
So why do you feel like people need to be happier, and why has that become your mission?
Well, initially it became my mission because my daughter, when she was 12, had one of her
friends commit suicide, and I couldn’t understand what would cause a 12-year-old to kill themselves.
And I went and did research to find out that it’s the fastest growing cause of death for
everyone, all ages, all demographics.
And so whether you call it joy, happiness, fulfillment, passion, purpose, or even profitability,
I don’t care, I know that I have a capability of teaching people three things.
How to make a lot of money and live in abundance with the perspective of making a lot of money.
Two, how to help a lot of people.
And three, how to be positive, how to have fun with it.
And I’ve paid the dummy tax to learn those lessons, and I know that if I can empower a
thousand people like you in your lifetime to empower a thousand people, to empower a thousand
people, to make a lot of money, to live in abundance, to have the perspective of abundance
by helping a lot of people and having fun, enjoying the consistent every day.
Enjoying the persistent without quit.
Enjoying the pursuit of your potential, not what other people want or what’s missing
or you don’t have, that I can create a fulfilled, passionate, purposeful, profitable world,
a happy world, a joyous world, a collective consciousness because a thousand people like
you times a thousand people like you times a thousand people like you equals a billion
people.
And that’s a collective consciousness.
One particle of light will overcome a million particles of darkness if we can change the
world together by empowering each other to be a community or neighborhood of people that
want to help each other and know people that can help each other, we can actually change
the world.
And that’s why I went on this mission to help facilitate through all the things that I do
from 17 and a half, almost 18 years ago, when my wife woke me up and said, “Hey, you’re
going to end up dead.
You are going to end up in a bad place and unless you take stock in who you are and who
you were and what you want to become, I don’t want to be around it.”
And when I sat on my bed the next day, hating my wife, hating my mom, hating my dad, and
hating my best friend because they all told me the same thing, that I was lost and I was
going to end up dead, I realized that day that I don’t hate any of them.
I hated myself.
I was the one that was the liar, the cheater, the manipulator, the overseller, the back
end seller, and I was going to live my life and take stock in the values that I had.
I was going to practice those values every day, non-negotiable commitment to consistent
behavior and execute on them the best I can by utilizing time, infinite and manmade constructive
time to be productive, accessible and gracious, to live in divine time with divine direction
and be blessed with divine detours to protect, promote and love me.
We’ll be right back after a quick break from our sponsors.
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As you may know, a lot of people that listen to this show, David, are entrepreneurs.
And what you just said about being honest with yourself reminded me of something I’ve
heard you say where you said entrepreneurs have two annoying things that they always
have to do.
One is to be honest with themselves and two is being repetitive.
So let’s dig into this honesty a bit.
Why do we need to get honest with ourselves?
Because the truth vibrates the faster and sooner or later, the truth is going to come
out.
And all we’re doing is creating obstacles, voids, and shortages by lying to ourselves.
We’re not telling ourselves, we can’t find outside of us what we can’t see inside of
us.
And so if you think that somehow your bullshit is helping you, it’s only helping you in the
instantaneous reaction to the fear that you have, it’s not helping you pursue your potential.
Remember, your potential is your truth.
Your essence is determined by your skills, your knowledge, and desire.
When you’re honest with yourself, you are only adding the number one criteria of being
successful, which is credibility of your potential.
Remember, your basements determined by what?
Your skills and your knowledge, your delta determines how far you’re going to get, which
is your desire.
When you are not honest with yourself, you’re interfering with your desire, with your skills
and your knowledge.
And sooner or later, it’s going to come up and turn out and you’re going to end up and
have to go where?
Back to the back of the line.
You cut the line by being dishonest, you’re going to have to go to the back of the line.
It may not be for a long time.
And people may wonder, why that person is lying to themselves?
Why are they so successful?
Well sooner or later, it all comes crumbling down.
And the longer it takes for the truth to come out, the further the fall, which was my truth,
for a hundred million dollars, that’s a big fall and almost costing me my life with the
shame, blame and justification that’s attached to the dishonesty of being an overseller,
back-end seller, liar, manipulator and cheater with good intention.
I wasn’t a bad person.
I gave tons of money to charity.
I helped my family, but in its core, I lied to myself all the time and I was just afraid.
I was afraid that I wasn’t worthy, I was afraid that I wasn’t enough, and it carried through
genetically and energetically until I became honest with myself and started working on
that every single day.
And I still spend minutes and moments in my bullshit.
Instead of days, weeks, months and years, just minutes and moments, and then I catch
myself and I forgive myself and I move back into the right trajectory.
I think this is such a powerful lesson for entrepreneurs because I’m an entrepreneur.
I run a podcast network and I have some of the biggest legends that you probably know
in my podcast network like Jenna Kutcher and Amy Porterfield and John Lee Dumas and I see
other networks cheating and I see them buying downloads and selling downloads and I’m tempted
every day.
Well, everyone else is doing it, but then I remember that you said it so beautifully.
If you’re dishonest, you might get really successful, but then if something goes wrong,
it comes crashing down, your reputation is ruined and you’re at the back of the line.
And so slow and steady wins the race in entrepreneurship and as entrepreneurs, it’s easy to cheat.
There’s lots of ways to cheat in every different industry.
I laughed too at the 500 Top 10 Podcasts in Business or Entrepreneurship, a ranking.
I actually changed the signature on my email because so many people put “Top 10 Forbes
Speaker, Number One Podcast” in this, all this bullshit that doesn’t mean anything.
I actually changed it to “Rest Ipsilocorter” and I encourage people when they become honest
with themselves and also have a commitment to consistency or being repetitive that you
think about what “Rest Ipsilocorter” means.
It means that which speaks for itself.
And so if what you do speaks for itself and the test of time allows you to have the credibility
does that mean it’s going to be perfect?
No.
There’s always 10% of the people that are going to hate you, but there’s also 10% that
are going to love you no matter what.
For me, it’s that 80% that by being honest and consistent will learn to love you just
the same way you should learn to love what you don’t like or don’t love.
Because if you learn to love what you don’t like or don’t love and you learn to love what
other people don’t like or love, you do it consistently every day, persistently without
quit.
Life will tell you all its secrets.
You’ll get all the cheat codes and it’s those cheat codes that have made the difference
in my life to make my life easy and identify the dis-ease or the dis-easy in my life, the
interference that I create myself by not being honest and not being consistent.
David, I know another cheat code in entrepreneurship is relationships and being a good networker.
I’d love to understand from your perspective, what are the types of relationships we should
surround ourselves with as entrepreneurs?
One of the biggest myths of entrepreneurs is from Napoleon Hill, who’s one of my favorite
mentors.
He said, “You’re the aggregate of the five people that you spend the most time with.”
I’ve changed that in my life to understand that we have teams, that there’s more than
just the five people that we spend the most time with.
It’s according to the subject matter topic or expertise that’s of most value to us.
What team do I want around me?
What neighborhood do I want to live in?
What position do I want to play?
At 56 years old, in my family, I’m the point guard or the owner or the coach.
I don’t want to be the water boy, but when it comes to other areas of my life, like
private equity, for example, something that I’ve learned later on in life as a venture
capitalist and investor, I started as a water boy, maybe the towel boy, and I’m moving up
to a second string six-man off the bench, but there’s a lot of people that know a lot
more about it, but I’m surrounding myself with the right team.
I’m picking the right position to be on that team and working my way up to differing positions
that would be most beneficial to me.
As an entrepreneur, not only surround yourself with the right people, the right idea, but
by the subject matter topic or expertise, pick your position because, remember, as an entrepreneur,
the fastest way to get to where you want to be or better is either find someone that’s
already there and ask them for directions or help somebody else get there.
Both of these, I have this icon of reaching up and someone pulling up a seat for me above
me and me reaching back and pulling up a seat for someone that’s below me, that’s the fastest
way to create a neighborhood of people that want to help each other and know people that
can help each other.
All the content that I do, and we were laughing about having over 1900 podcasts with a playbook,
we’ve had 4,300 interviews on office hours, I have four TV shows on Apple TV, so many
different interviews, but the only purpose of all the content that I do is to build community,
is to build a community of people, whether it’s the free Friday trainings, the group
stuff that I do, one-on-one consulting business advisory.
It’s all about a community of people that want to help each other and know people that
can help each other.
And I’ll tell you why, because if you can build a community like that, they will buy
from each other and sell for each other for life.
And there’s nothing that will guarantee your success more than a community of people that
are buying from each other and selling for each other for life.
And the bigger you have that community, I promise you, you’ll make a lot of money, you’ll help
a lot of people, and you’ll have a lot of fun.
Okay, so one last question, and then we’re going to start to close out the interview because
I know that you have to go.
So you are one of the most prestigious business coaches.
I know several people who have used your business coaching.
Not everybody can afford such a world-class business coach like you.
What’s your recommendation to get a mentor?
Find out, first of all, who sits in the situation that you want to be in, in the particular
topic, subject, matter, expertise.
My oldest coach myself, and I have many coaches, is my sleep coach, because a third of my life
has spent sleeping.
It allows me to recover and access information, those cheat codes that we were talking about.
So I’ve had a sleep coach for 17 and a half years.
I want to be in the hall of fame of sleep.
I used to want to be in the football hall of fame.
Now I want to be the best sleeper in the world because it means more, and it’ll give me more
out of my life.
And so to that end, also don’t be afraid just because someone is a prestigious coach or
he’s the highest in their field.
A lot of people like me, my friends who sit at the highest levels and your friends, Hala,
we do the majority of what we do for free.
I do free lives every day.
I do ask meaning things every day.
I do free meetups and hold court in every city.
Over 200 cities a year, I have a group that meets on Monday.
I have free Friday trainings for almost 25 years.
That might be older than you.
I’ve been doing this stuff, but if somebody wants proximity and intimacy with me and to
take that time, I have to charge, but I also have to guarantee me as a profit center.
If I’m going to charge you, whether it’s in a group setting, $97 or I’m going to charge
you for a $27 video or I’m going to charge you $20,000 plus equity to give you a business
advisory, I’m going to guarantee profitability.
And then I think that’s an important essential thing to look for in a mentor.
Look for the people, don’t worry about what they charge.
Ask them for help or if they know somebody that can help you and you’ll get to where
you want to be a lot faster than having to pay the dummy tax yourself.
Can you talk to us about service?
Yeah, being of service is understanding value.
A lot of people get confused about being of service and they give and not understanding
that they can’t give what they don’t have.
So being of service is understanding what people like and what people don’t like.
See, there’s only two ways to provide value.
It’s to understand where someone is today and what is going to help them and what’s not
helping them because the only way to derive service is to give people more of what they
like or take away what they don’t like or part of what they don’t like.
And so if you want to be of service, you need to be of value.
To understand value is to give people what they like or take away what they don’t like.
In order to do that, you have to be more interested than interesting.
You have to ask them, “Hey, what are you doing today?
What do you like about it?
What don’t you like about it?
Would it help you if and you know someone that can help me?”
When you understand the open-ended question template and value at its core, you will live
your life of service.
You will live in that world, as I suggested, of more than enough of everything for everyone.
Okay, so I end my show with two questions I ask all of my guests.
This also gives you an opportunity to just give whatever advice that you feel like entrepreneurs
really need to hear.
So the first one is, “What is one actionable thing our young and profitors can do today
to become more profitable tomorrow?”
Ask for help in person on the phone via email, traditional and social media, one time a day.
Be consistent of asking for what you want in person on the phone via email and media
once a day.
That’ll be 28 asks a week, 112 asks in a month.
On average, each of those people will have 1,000 people in their community.
So you’ll reach 112,000 people a month that are aligned with wanting to help you.
And if just a small percentage of those people actually do, it’ll accelerate aggregate and
compound exponentially the outcomes that you have.
Most people have no problem giving, but they certainly can’t confirm their faith in more
than enough of everything.
So ask for help, make it a committed, consistent behavior, and I promise you, you will make
a lot of money, help a lot of people, and have a lot of fun.
And the last question is, “What is your secret to profiting in life?”
Kindness, abundance in itself.
Just be kind to your future self.
Do good deeds.
When everything tells you to lie, manipulate, cheat, oversell, backend, sell, be kind.
Be kind to your future self.
Do the good deed.
The more you give, the more you’ll be given.
The more you’re given, the more you’ll receive, and the more you receive, the more you can
ask for.
And when you ask for more than more, you’ll be able to give more than more, be given more
than more, receive more than more, and then you’ll ask for more than more than more.
So instead of living in a zero-sum game, like all great negotiators, all great transactors,
thinking that they’re giving more and receiving less is a zero-sum game.
There is no scarcity.
There’s more than enough of everything.
So I always say, be kind to your future self and do good deeds.
I do want to offer all of your community.
I know I haven’t been here a while, but I’d be more than happy to send my book to everyone.
Pay for the book.
Pay for shipping.
I’ll sign the book if you want.
Email me for anything you need, but I will send you that book, david@demelzer.com.
Put it in the notes.
I’d be happy to send you my book for free.
Pay for shipping.
Don’t worry.
I’d love to be of service or value to your young community.
I love it.
David, where can everybody learn more about you and everything that you do?
David@demelzer.com.
Everywhere it’s David Meltzer.
You can Google me.
Bless to have plenty of content out there.
But my best way, I answer all my emails myself.
So if you email me, david@demelzer.com, I’ll be of service and of value.
Thank you so much, David.
Thank you.
I’ll see you soon.
Could you imagine losing more than $100 million?
Or better yet, realizing that it might be the best thing that ever happened to you?
David Meltzer has had such a fascinating career, with some huge ups and downs.
And often it’s those low points that really make us who we are, that give us perspective
that we need to keep going.
Thanks to his own experiences, David now has some valuable life lessons to share.
And I personally really love his perspective on how to take advice from others, whether
it’s good or bad advice, helpful or unhelpful, try to appreciate where it’s coming from
and recognize it for the gift that it is.
I certainly could take that advice.
Sometimes it’s also useful to take things one day at a time, literally.
Focus on that next 24 hours.
Give it a framework.
What do you want to accomplish today?
How does it fit within your larger goals?
And finally, above all, be truthful with yourself.
It can be so tempting to take shortcuts, especially when you see others, including your competitors,
taking them.
But like David said, sooner or later, the truth comes out.
And the longer it takes to do so, the harder the fall.
Just be patient and be kind to others and to your future self.
Everything you’ve given of yourself will come back to you in the end and then some.
Thanks for listening to this episode of Young and Profiting.
If you listened, learned and profited from this conversation and want to get started
giving yourself, then why not start by sharing this episode with a friend or a family member?
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We don’t have subscriptions.
We do this all for you, our dear listeners.
If you prefer to watch your podcast as videos, you can find us on YouTube.
Just look up Young and Profiting.
You’ll find all of our episodes on there.
If you’re looking for me, you can find me on Instagram or LinkedIn by searching my
name.
It’s Hala Taha.
And I also want to thank my amazing YAP team who work so hard every day to make this podcast
what it is.
You guys are incredible.
Thank you so much.
This is your host, Hala Taha, a.k.a. the podcast princess, signing off.
Thank you.
Bye.
[BLANK_AUDIO]
David Meltzer was determined to get rich to buy his mom a house and car she never had. In college, he was able to use the emerging internet industry to his advantage and make over $100 million online but later went bankrupt before finding faith, kindness, and service. In this episode, David explains the mindset shifts entrepreneurs need to avoid failure and achieve long-term success. David Meltzer is the co-founder of Sports 1 Marketing, a Top 100 Business Coach, and former CEO of Leigh Steinberg Sports & Entertainment. He’s also the author of Game-Time Decision Making and host of The Playbook.
In this episode, Hala and David will discuss:
– David’s early career struggles and financial challenges
– Overcoming fear-based thinking in entrepreneurship
– Why you must align your skills with your goals
– Why kindness is your fast track to profitability
– Balancing personal fulfillment with financial growth
– And other topics…
David Meltzer is a Top 100 Business Coach. David regularly speaks at global events, helping others balance profit with purpose. He is the Executive Producer of 2 Minute Drill and Entrepreneur Elevator Pitch. His mission is to empower over one billion people to lead happier, more fulfilled lives.
Connect with David:
David’s Website: https://dmeltzer.com
David’s LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/davidmeltzer2/
Resources Mentioned:
David’s Book, Game-Time Decision Making: High-Scoring Business Strategies from the Biggest Names in Sports: https://www.amazon.com/Game-Time-Decision-Making-High-Scoring-Strategies/dp/1260452611
David’s Podcast, The Playbook: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-playbook-with-david-meltzer/id1271087930
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