Our current academic landscape is designed to create order and structure. I don’t think initially the schoolhouse was a place where young people were funneled and squeezed through a system designed for the brightest and most obedient children. I think it was a place where education was the goal. Where teachers were teachers, because they had a passion and a gift for it. The best teachers I had, that I remember, are the ones that when they teach you about their given subject, they became animated and fill the room with love and light! The teachers that I tested, and normally on some level broke, were the ones that showed up to chase a paycheck, benefits, or retirement. They were the ones that had long forgotten their “Why’s.” It wasn’t about recognizing who I was or what I needed to excel. If I had been challenged and channeled appropriately, in line with my gifts, my graduating GPA of 1.9 would likely have looked much different.
If you are reading this and thinking, “I know a young person like this!” Let me just say there is hope. It is our responsibility to challenge these young minds and figure out how to meet them where they are. It is essential that we elevate them to their given potential.
I believe that most of my teachers despised me. I think it was because I would calculate within the first couple of weeks how many assignments I could miss. I would calculate what I needed to get on my test in order to pass their class with a C or D. Those calculations dictated my effort. Some of their responses to a student like me were pretty entertaining.
To hit the highlight real, in second grade a had a teacher that constructed a box made of cardboard. She put me in the box, I was forced to do my work in the box. I wasn’t allowed to communicate with my fellow students during the course of regular lesson time. She would regularly take away my recess privileges as well. She has a special dark place in the memories of my childhood. It amazes me that she couldn’t see how hurt I was, and how much I just needed a hug. I will never forget this teachers name. I have watched as my wait staff has served her and her husband inside of one of my restaurants, all the while wondering if she ever remembers tormenting an already destroyed little boy.
Sixth grade was the first time I had a teacher threaten physical harm to me. Her exact words were, “I want to shove your little head through that locker, but I can’t afford to pay my husband to defend me in court!” She was shaking mad! Her little 120 pound frame tensed from head to toe. With fists clenched, this otherwise mild mannered early 60’s teacher, was ready to fight me. However, like I said, fear is a feeling that falls pretty dead on me. In those days I didn’t feel it at all. So I responded with a slight chuckle, “I can’t believe that he would charge you!”
In seventh grade one of the male teachers, who had mistakenly thought I shot a spitball, had to physically be removed by a neighboring teacher when I refused to take the blame for it. I pointed out that the real reason he didn’t like me. It was actually, because I didn’t find it necessary to answer the same 15 ridiculous questions ever other day. I went on to inform him that he should only explain stuff one time. I also explained that if he spent as much time teaching every class as he did talking with the jocks about basketball, maybe I would be willing to match his effort. **Side-note he was forced to apologize to me in front of the entire class because in this rare instance, I was actually not guilty.
The fact is, my teachers would teach something one time and I got it. Then they would move on, but never fully moving on. There was always a regurgitation of the same things that we’ve already been taught. The way my mind worked is that once I learned it, there was no need to go over it repetitively. I didn’t realize that schools were designed to educate to the slowest person in the room. So for me, I was bored. I got to see the difference between that mentor, that teacher, Mrs. Moore, and my second grade and third grade teachers, my fourth grade teachers, my fifth grade teachers. It allowed me to recognize those special souls that go to school to love first and teach second.
These follies continue on throughout my entire middle and high school career. At the end of the day I was as intelligent as most of the other kids. I just didn’t care about school. I cared even less for having to conform to the rules and standards of the other kids around me. I felt like I hadn’t heard a single thing that interested me as a young person.
You need to see that every single one of those experiences will give you an opportunity to see beyond the confines of our mental boxes. Regardless of whether or not your childhood was full of caring and loving adults or if like mine you were the product of a combination of personality types, you can always extract lessons from both the good and bad of your past. Savvy?
Watch and Learn
I had another teacher in high school that really stands out in my mind. Her name was Holly Cassellman. She recognized me for who I was and she recognized me for who I could be. Mrs. Cassellman had a firm hand in the way that she handled her students, which I needed and appreciated. She also took the time to speak into my world. Mrs. Cassellman recognized what I was going through. She downloaded and thought about me specifically as an individual and then spoke into my world. Mrs. Cassellman took the time to understand my situation and did little things that showed me that she cared. She was a great teacher that focused on her students before the content she was teaching. There are lots of others short term mentors that filled a role in my life. Those are just a couple of examples.
I moved out of my parents home when I was 17 years old at the beginning of my senior year. Holly, I started calling her Holly Cassellman after I graduated high school, Mrs. Cassellman at the time, gave me a book, What to Do Now That Mom’s Not Around. I don’t know why that was on her heart to give me a book. I don’t know what made her think that she, you know doing that would make a difference in my world. Mrs. Cassellman might not even remember that gift today, but for me that book was exactly what I needed. It gave me some nuggets on how to just operate as a fully functioning adult on my own without paternal supervision, without the little things. The book taught how to clean a pan. It offered me just little bits of advice, even how to sew a rip in pants. These were just little things that she assumed somebody wasn’t teaching me, and she was absolutely right. That book was such a blessing that came at a terrific time in my life. The biggest thing that I learned from receiving a book that she might or might not remember giving today. I learned the power of giving a gift to someone that could never pay me back. She was a great mentor that took the time to know my situation and lift me to the next level.
This chapter isn’t designed to brag about my specific mentors, or how I was a pro at pissing off a bunch of people inside of education. It is designed to demonstrate that you have likely been surrounded by mentors your entire life. It would be a fantastic use of a couple of hours to simply go back and document as many teachers that affected you both positively and negatively. What lessons did you extract that can still serve you today?
Within twelve months of graduating high school, I had opened my first company legally. I also ran a very profitable side line business reprogramming satellite cards to give the holder of the card, unlimited channels. I was selling around ten of those a week at $250 each. It was really a great, little less than legal, opportunity until the satellite company figured out what was happening and started sending a kill signal every eighteen minutes. Again, I’m being real. I wasn’t perfect. I didn’t sit at the feet of Steve Jobs or Bill Gates. I didn’t grow up in silicon valley with a bunch of super influencers. It isn’t a necessary ingredient to your recipe for success.
It has been a valuable lesson that I have taught my daughters. If they want to accelerate faster, amass wealth quicker, be a thought leader, and influencer, then they have to constantly be watching for mentors throughout the educational process. Not only acknowledging key educators as mentors, but also being mindful enough to commit those educators best lessons into their personal arsenal. I would give you the same advice. Retroactively, go back and see if you can find lessons that have been there all along but never accessed mindf
ully. Savvy?
I’m An Adult
What do you know?
After high school, I met my wife. We got married very young. Although her father probably wishes, or wished at the time definitely, I don’t think anymore, but at the time wished that my wife would have picked someone else. When I met her, I knew what was going to happen and I pursued her with absolutely everything that I had. She didn’t have a chance. I understood strategic seduction. I understood framing conversations. I understood the art of closing. I understood expanding the gap, showing the pain point, closing and bridging the gap. I understood a lot of things in respect to communication and sales. I didn’t know what to call these strategies. I didn’t understand them as theories or principles, but I understood how to use them. My grandfather and other key mentors in my life up to that point had challenged me, had pushed me to negotiate for everything.
The first group of mentors are relatives that are caring, loving, and very steady, giving, pushing, and sprinting alongside of you. They are challenging you to accelerate as fast as you can. My mother was an example of the second group.
My mother had the best intentions; however, she also had tons of issues. Learning to communicate with her prepared me for every mental obstacle you could imagine. She represents good intentioned relatives that do their very best but challenge you every step of the way. I would ask her if I could go out with my friends. I would even suggest that I would be back at 11 o’clock. No way would my mom let that fly. She would want me home by 9:00. This gave me the perfect opportunity to exercise my negotiation tactics. I would have to talk through all of the points of why it was logical and made sense for me to be allowed to stay out until 11:00 P.M. You think everybody gets to do this, right? Most people accepted the original curfew as that’s the rule. My grandfather had taught me that you don’t truly want something unless you ask for it at least three times. So, I learned to negotiate. Every single time I wanted something, my mom made me earn it. It was probably the single greatest gift she gave me: not just my mother, but a mentor.
My mother consistently challenging me helped me learn how to communicate. It added to my arsenal, which later in my lifetime, was useful whenever I wanted to pursue a wife that was way out of my league. God knew what I needed in my life, who I needed in my life, what I was manifesting and bringing together. Due to my belief systems and my expectation of my gifting from this role, I fine tuned my communication strategies. Through my wife, I met my father-in-law, who had created multiple businesses. Gene Finch had been in the lumber yard business, the salvage business, and had an assortment of passive income avenues under his belt. A very brilliant, accomplished man and served as probably my second greatest influencer. My father in law recognized something in me that no one else had. Gene acknowledged that spark in me for what it was. He labeled me as an entrepreneur, just like him.
We’ve now covered family members as mentors. We’ve covered educators. We’ve covered chance encounters, in-laws, and other relatives. Let’s direct our attention to friends as mentors. Friends are a unique set of mentors because friends are people who we can align and grow together. In most cases, our peers are our friends. They’re in the 33% that hang with us. Every once in a while, you’ll become friends with someone that is on a different level, the next level. Sometimes five times or even ten times ahead of where you are currently. These friends will recognize your works, and they will see in you maybe what you see, but maybe not. They might see more in you than you see in yourself at that time. Those friends step in and they become foundational friendships and relationships that’ll last an absolute lifetime. Those mentors go beyond business. Guys that will speak into your personal life are invaluable. Often they will teach you about faith. Even better they will teach you how to treat your wife. Hopefully, they will be married and that marriage will teach your wife how to treat her husband. These mentor friends will speak into your life because they know you intimately and they are strides ahead of you in the game of life. Or maybe they’re just, from a wisdom standpoint, light years ahead of you.
My wife and I have a couple that we’ve known for over a decade now, Dave and Kathy Copeland. They have two wonderful kids, Josh and Jessica. We met this family through our church. We were fortunate enough to join their small group and instantly we were just attracted to their common sense approach to their faith and to family. From the outside looking in, I watched as the Copelands operated. They displayed almost a mafia mentality inside of their family. Loyalty to each other that was so thick and palpable that you couldn’t be in the room with them without noticing. It was evident that they were a family that was in love with one another. The Copelands taught us lessons about nearly every category of my life. Dave and Kathy have spoken both into my world and into my wife’s world. When they speak, we listen, because we looked at them and recognized they had what we wanted. To us, the Copelands have the perfect family; they truly love and care about others while having total business success.
Life offers pastors, coaches, and lots of different opportunities to meet people that will sharpen you in the area that is their trained expertise. About the same time that we met Dave and Cathy Copeland, we started attending a church in Chillicothe, Missouri, Cornerstone Church. I understand this isn’t the path for everybody. This was just our path. This is just my walk, so that you can look. I share these stories with you, not to try to direct you down the same path as me, but instead, to get you thinking about where in your life are incredible mentors hiding in the background. Where in your life can you be seeking mentors. Or like us, when we started attending a non-denominational church we were introduced to the pastoral team. At Cornerstone Church this was a husband and wife team.
Within just a couple three years, those pastors stopped being our pastors and started to be our friends. We had built such a strong relationship with them that our conversations became very two-way. As I accelerated in business, we would talk about our business ventures. I would talk to the husband about the business of church. When I needed help and reassurance in faith-based mentoring, I knew I could pick up the phone and give the pastor a call. He would freely and gladly give me his time, to a point that he would drive from the church to my office and spend time with me. The two of us spent hours talking about life, balance, family, business, and God’s word.
Never underestimate the people who are in your world right now offering up sage wisdom. The main litmus test for you should be what we talked about earlier in the book. What does this person have to gain from their advice? Then finally, is that little voice inside of me agreeing or screaming “RUN!”? Savvy?
Pay to Play
Finally, paid mentors. Paid mentors can be the greatest asset or the greatest waste that you can pursue inside of this entire mentor conversation. I have paid several different mentors. All of them I’ve been extremely mindful, careful, and heavily researched before I wrote a single check. I needed to make sure that what they were teaching was exactly what I needed to fill my life and fill my void. When you think about business as your body and all of the body’s moving parts, you’ll focus on certain body parts. Whenever you’re lifting weights trying to build out or trying to slim down there are different strategies to proceed. You might recognize, man my legs are a little weaker than my upper body. I need to focus on legs. Now in the world of business, it’s no different. I’m really great at marketing, but I suck at my family life right now. Or I’m really great inside of my physicality, but my business is really struggling. Whatever the case may be, you find mentors that fill those specific gaps.
When there’s a skill set or something that you feel is necessary for you to be able to step into and grow, to add to that muscle base inside that part of your business, those are the mentors that you pursue. Just as a little drop of advice from me, being able to communicate about a subject does not make someone qualified to be a mentor. Being able to post a Facebook advertisement does not qualify somebody to be a mentor. A mentor is someone that has been in t
he battlefield in the center of the trenches. A true mentor will understand the fight. A business mentor will understand what it takes to win. They’ve been down the path. The specific muscle group that you are trying to build, they have done before, and they have done it successfully.
For me, I’ve got three different guys that have really stood out in my mind that I have paid considerable amounts of money. I am talking about spending hundreds of thousands of dollars. The first guy, which I spoke about earlier, Wake Up Warrior, Garrett White, was that first mentor that I needed. Garrett’s insights and wisdom in respect to what he calls the having it all lifestyle, was exactly what I needed. Although I felt that I had pinnacled in life at the time, I was miserable. Back then, I didn’t recognize what it was that I needed to embrace to step out into power again and sprint toward my next business success. Garrett White was exactly what I needed. His team of coaches will forever have a special place in my heart. A couple of those guys I stay in communication with every single day.
Secondly, Russell Brunson is one of my personal mentors. I mentioned him briefly almost in a jab manner earlier. Russell’s material and Russell’s software service platform is brilliant. What Russell has created to allow people to communicate is over the top. He allows penetration deep into the internet and into social platforms to present yourself or your skill set as a product or a service is brilliant. The way Russell communicates via his digital marketing is next level shit. I have a great friend of mine, named Jacob Hiller. Jacob created a junk manual before anybody knew what a click funnel was. He produced an e-book on how to slam dunk a basketball. If you’ve never heard of Jacob Hiller or don’t follow him online yet, go ahead and do that right now. His Instagram is @JacobHiller. Hiller is a brilliant guy that introduced me to click funnels long before I was ready for that to even be something that I was interested in. When the time was right, the skills were in place, the muscles were weak in that marketing area and today’s internet economy, I needed to step up my game. So, Russell was the perfect mentor for me.
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