Leah: Hey visionaries, welcome back to the Your Biggest Vision Show and welcome back to the What It Takes series. 

Today’s guest is the one and only David Nagle. If you are in my world in any way, you’ve probably heard me talk about him in some shape or form. 

He’s taught me a tremendous amount. Personally, I’ve been lucky enough to have been coached by him, been to his events, um, and he’s also been on the podcast before. 

So we’re very grateful to have you back. David, thanks for being here.

David: That’s an honor to be here. I’m really happy to be here.

Leah: Awesome. So, for those of you, if you just, um, I, I’m just gonna sum up David in a few sentences cuz I have so much I wanna get to, uh, with the context of today. 

But David is a mindset master. He knows so much about how the universe works. He helps people learn about universal law and personal development to reach their highest level of success. And, and I can attest to that because he’s definitely helped me a lot in, in a lot of areas of my business and in my life.

 And as you guys have been following along, you know, that I have been doing this series about what it takes. And David, I think, is gonna have a perspective that really no one has had before. We’ve had people who have been in business for a few years, David’s been in business for quite some time. He’s made many, many, many millions of dollars. 

And not only has he had the experience himself, but he has an inside look at other successful businesses. 

So I think he’s gonna have a lot to share with us. So, David, thanks again for being here. And my first question for you is, why do you think people crave this idea of I don’t have to hustle?

David: I really, I love this question. I really do. And it’s something that I have dug into for a long time. Like, where does this actually come from? 

Now I will tell you that I don’t know that I have honestly found out, um, the exact idea of where it comes from. I think that there’s multiple components to this that create this. But one of the places that I think that it comes from is, I think we set kids up, uh, in a way where we give ’em a mix, a mixed message, right? 

So every generation’s a little bit different based on beliefs and values. We’re in a generation right now that’s very, very different from the one that I grew up in because I came in, I was born in 65, so I was right. I’m not part of the World War II generation.

I’m just after that, right? I came in just after, as matter of fact, when I went to school, they even said we were the very tail end of that generation, but I think we’re more like X than an, than anything else. But we had a very hardcore value system when it came to work ethic that was still very much in place.

 However, there were suggestions that were planted in our mind, in our youth that indicated maybe not, and I call it the Santa Claus Factor, right? So part of it is this, we many kids are raised with superstitions like Santa Claus, tooth Fairy, Easter Bunny, which is the idea that you really don’t have to do anything except be good, be a good person, and you’ll get, and you’ll get good things in return. 

And that’s not based on cause and effect at all. So when kids go through that, you’re planning this idea in their mind.

And I think that there’s something very radical that happens depending on the child, and depending on how that person is raised in that household, at some point or another, they’ve gotta find out the truth. 

And when they find out the truth, they also find out at the same time their parents have been lying to them about something that’s a very big deal to a kid, right? Christmas is a big deal to a kid. Uh, if you’re raised with an Easter tradition or a tooth fairy tradition, those are big, those are big deals to little kids, right?

 And, and it, I think it causes a question in the mind of a child, like, how much can I trust what an adult is actually telling me? I feel like I’ve been snowed. You know, many kids find out because they go to school and some kid knows already, right?

You start to get, you know, into third, fourth, fifth grade, some kid says, Hey, there’s no Santa Claus , right? And you come home and you’re like, well, maybe there’s no Santa Claus. Of course. Yeah. Right? 

And the, and part of the, part of the, uh, the, the myth, the superstition, it, it, it’s damaged within that, within that person. Instead of raising them with the idea of what cause and effect is all the way along the line. 

Now, there’s another place that I think this shows up, and I think that it shows up if we get a mixed message around a victim mentality. I was raised with that mixed, mixed message, right? So I am very grateful that my father was basically the one that did not have that idea in his head. And even though I wasn’t around him that much, I was, he, he, him and my mom split up when I was 13.

So I saw him work hard. He worked incredibly hard. He worked six days a week, crazy hours. Uh, and then he was an entrepreneur of his own. I mean, he had like three or four different businesses, uh, after my parents got divorced, and I saw how hard the guy worked. 

So I got that message. 

But on the other side of the family, I got a different message. And the message was, basically capitalism was not good. That, um, rich people were not good, successful people were not good in the, in the, in the sense that when I was little, every time I started to really become interested in something, they would inadvertently talk me out of the thing that I was interested in. They would tell me, oh, you gotta go to school for a really long time. Hmm. Or You gotta be really smart to do that, David.

Or you gotta know somebody. Or those people, they’re really crooked out there. You don’t want to hang around those individuals. But they never would redirect me into anything would that had like, some holistic idea in their mind.

 So I found out later on that, you know, they just had this kind of paranoia about life where, where this wasn’t true, but the, I but there was this, this entitlement that would seep in, right? Yeah. Like this idea of I deserve to get this or don’t do more than you’re paid for at work. It’s like, where’s that coming from? 

Like, my father counteracted that, thank God, but my mom and her side of the family really had this idea like, this is what it is. Don’t do a penny Moore’s worth. And, uh, and my early jobs were that way.

Leah: Yeah.

David: Some of ’em were union jobs and you did not do more than what the contract said. If you did, you’ll jeopardize your wellbeing with the people that you worked with. So, um, there was a, there was an entitlement, there was a victimization idea. 

And of course we’ve got this thing called the Santa Claus Factor, which sets up in, in the mind that there might be another way of doing something. Now what does that do? I think what a per now, cuz we’re talking about people now that say that they wanna change, they want to go out there and they wanna start to hustle. 

They wanna be a business owner, they wanna be an entrepreneur, and they start to move in that direction and they become extremely susceptible to convent, to people preaching a message that fits their internal value conflict in life.

Leah: Right? Right.

David: And they, they have a tendency to wanna believe the thing that’s easier versus the thing that seems to be more difficult.

Leah: Right? Right. It’s of course, easier to buy from the person telling you this can happen in a month.

David: Exactly.

Leah: Of course, right? Yeah,

David: Exactly. Yeah. And all you have to do is change your thinking, right? You don’t have to, you know, you don’t have to actually work.

Leah: Right? Right. It’s, um, uh, it’s, I’m gonna play your own devil’s advocate here, because I think, so when I was starting out even from you, one of the things that I learned, you know, I had such a negative relationship with money when my business started, I had just an extremely low sense of an understanding about increasing abundance and, and how this can move through me.

 I had a very narrow vision of where money could come from, which was essentially my nine to five job. And that was, you know, why I was considering going to law school. And, uh, it, it was just, I was, I, I’ve come very far is I guess the, the point I’m trying to make.

 But when I was beginning and when I was afraid to take out any debt to go, you know, to, to start my own business, which I now realize how backward it is, um, people like you would say things like, it’s just as easy on the spiritual realm to make a hundred thousand dollars as it is to make a thousand dollars.

And that’s very triggering to someone who feels like, you know, it’s not , right? Yeah. Because I literally couldn’t be working any harder than I am right now. So what, how, what am I doing wrong that’s making it so, you know, so different? 

And now I of course see it, it is completely different. Having made seven figures, having made, having completely changed my relationship with money, I can tell you that I don’t work necessarily more hours than I did. I just work better and smarter and more efficiently. 

And most importantly, I’m very willing to do personal development and mindset work around this type of thing, which is, I think we, a lot of people get it tripped up. They’re like, they think hard work just means hours put in, which obviously it doesn’t, otherwise people like firemen or teachers would be, you know, being paid, paid, paid so much money. 

But what would you say to someone who comes to you and says, I’m hearing on the one hand that I need to work harder and have a better work ethic, yet on the other hand, I’m being preached spiritually that these things are simple.

David: So there’s, so there’s a couple of components that I’d like to kind of flush out, if that’s okay. Please. Um, so in, in Think and Grow Rich in Napoleon Hills book, think and Grow Rich, he says, there’s a part in there where he says, remember, um, no more time or effort is required to aim high in life to, uh, to go for increasing abundance and prosperity, then is to accept misery or poverty. 

No, no more effort. My mentor used to say that there was no more effort. And that’s a very confusing statement, right? It really is confusing, but it’s a very factual statement. The problem is, is that you have to help a person work through what that means. And so here’s what I’ll say to somebody. I’ll say, okay, look at it this way. What are the problems that you currently have in your life?

The ones that keep repeating themselves over and over again. You don’t work hard to create those problems. They just keep showing up. It’s the same thing every day. Now, those ideas and those patterns of subconscious behavior were established in your youth. 

That’s why it doesn’t seem like there’s any effort. You may work hard with different things, but when it comes to the problems that you keep experiencing, you look at it and tell me if you actually, like, are you struggling to bring them into your life? Are you working extra hours to make things worse? And the answer’s always no. 

But it, like a light bulb, will start to go on with the person. And it’s, and it’s like this, when you internalize the correct things versus the things that cause problems, you will bring the right things that you want just as easily as you do the problems now without any conscious awareness around it.

Um, and, and, and I think you said it beautifully, you don’t necessarily work more hours, but you work differently. There’s a different intelligence to it. People don’t realize that in order for any person to become more successful than what they can do all by themselves, you have to learn and understand the art of leverage, right? All success is based on leverage. 

Unless it’s just you, like if you’re a gymnast or an actor or an actress or whatever. But even the financial part of those things, that’s all based on leverage, right? So leverage is leveraging time, increasing abundance, people, resources, and knowledge. Those are the things that get leveraged in all of business in order to make a lot of money or make big impact, or both, right?

 And that’s, and that’s what a person has to learn. Now, the difficulty is where is the part, the part that we call hard? Like, can we say, you have to work really hard, where are we experiencing that? And here.

Leah: Right? That’s right.

David: It’s not in the phone call, it’s not in the

Leah: Dm. It’s easy to write an email.

David: Yeah!

Leah: Yeah. It’s, it, it’s this. I always tell my clients like, they’re so afraid to send a sales email. And it’s like, you could send an email to your aunt in three minutes. The act of typing is no different.

David: Right? And in fact, the things that it actually takes to make this sale from a skillset perspective, most of those things we learned by the third grade, right? We learned how to spell, we learned how to read, we learned how to talk to people, we learned how to ask for what we want. 

That’s all the same. It might, there might be a skillset set in the ways that we do some of those things, but really the struggle is in our mind. 

And it is the difference between our subconscious mind attempting to keep us in the same thought pattern and life pattern that we were raised with versus the one that we say that we want. The battle’s always happening inside. It’s never an outside battle.

Leah: Right? Right. I don’t know if you remember this, David, but it very much, this was one of the most profound things you ever taught me. So I went to North Carolina to do a VIP day with you in 2020. 2020, I think it was after the, uh, you know, in the full swing of the pandemic.

 But, um, it, it, it was, I was able to travel at that point. And I was at, I think, a very common place for people in the coaching and personal development space where you have, I had found success. I had reached six figures. I had had, um, you know, a lot of my dreams had come true. 

But I was still kind of like, in this almost, I didn’t know which way was up phase of like, yes, I’ve done so much, but like, where do I go next and how do I really make this something and how do I get to another level and how do I stand out?

And I kind of remember talking to you about that. And I think the question I asked you was just like, look, I believe that there’s enough room for all, but truly, how am I going to stand out given all the people that are doing similar things and that are calling themselves experts and that are on social media?

 And I just remember, you looked me in the eye in my soul, and you were like, listen to me very carefully. You have to work harder than everyone else. And that really stuck with me. 

And I wrote it on a sticky note and I put it on my desk and I, and I sat with it for so many weeks. I mean, I put it there for a long time until I moved from that apartment actually, and, and got rid of the desk. But I want everyone that’s listening to this story to know that I knew that you did not mean pull more all-nighters or write more Instagram stories or just do more, do more, do more.

What really I extracted from that, from you telling me that, and from everything I’ve learned from you and from what I sat with, was to be willing to go to uncomfortable places mentally, mentally more than other people will. And in a complimentary way, you have to work to put your ego aside.

 And that skill, especially that secondary one of putting your ego aside, is perhaps the best trait I have developed that has gotten me to seven figures, because that has allowed me to hear no more than I ever have before to get to seven figures. Like I really think people need to hear that, that I get rejected more than ever. Right? 

You think like once you’re at this big successful place, people are saying yes all the time. That’s not the way it works. . You know, it’s because I’m willing to hear no more.

It’s because I don’t take that personally. And to that extent, there’s just marketing things I’m willing to do that people won’t, you know, sometimes I’ll tell people, oh, well you should get on more free sales calls if you wanna make more sales. 

And they’re like, well, I don’t want to, I feel like that’s wasting my time. And it’s like, you’ve gotta really be able to put that aside. So those were the two things I really extracted from that was like, work hard to put your own crap to the side and work harder on your mindset than most people are willing to do.

David: Yeah. That, you know, it’s interesting because people think about business based on some kind of magical thinking when they’ve never been raised in what business looks like, and every company on the planet, everyone gets more nos than they get yeses. Hmm. Right?

 Even if you take a company like McDonald’s, right? More people drive somewhere else every day when they pass it than they actually go in and actually get any food there. Every company gets more nos than they get yeses.

 Um, I think that in the idea of, of, you know, really working harder than what other people are actually doing and doing the, when you were talking about putting your ego aside, there’s, I think there’s a question a person has to ask for themselves, and it’s why do they want success? Because I think a lot of this can be cleared up for an individual where they get out of the confusion if they understand this principle, if they’re really honest.

And you talked about the ego. If they’re really honest about why they want success, most of the time it has to do with acceptance. They equate in their mind success with feeling good. People will accept them. People will say yes to them, money is in there also. 

But that one has more to do with safety than it has to do with really the way that they wanna live their life. And you could tell that just by the way they answer the question, if you ask ’em how much money do you really wanna make? And you see that they’ve not actually tied that to anything specific, which happens a lot in the early timeframes. 

But the key is that if you understand that your, that really what it is that you want inside is to feel good by going out there and building this business and being seen, you understand why you have difficulty with sales, right? Because you enter sales. It’s not, you’re not accepted, rejected.

Leah: It’s not about acceptance.

David: That’s right. Yeah. So you’re gonna constantly get rejection. And, and I think that’s why people will say that I don’t like sales because they wanna be accepted instead of really understanding how solid they need to be in themselves to be an influencer and what it, and there’s a difference between influence and manipulation.

 To really influence somebody else to be able to do something to better their life as a skillset, you have to learn, right? Mm-hmm. , it’s not something that you just have at your fingertips and you’ve gotta be willing to say no to the person. 

And you have to be willing to accept a No. I mean, really, ultimately the, the, the, the best place to be in is to work yourself through to the mastery level to really you whether you are accepting the client or not. it’s not in their hands anymore.

Leah: Right? Right, right. But you’ve gotta push through so much rejection to get there. You have to work so hard. Yeah, you do. 

So with that, I, I, I wanna, I wanna ask you, David, when you, I’m gonna use the h word. When you look at your early years when you were really getting this off the ground, you have I know you, I, I know in your story you had four young kids.

 I believe that you were the sole, uh, provider for your family. There was a lot on the line for you to leave your job and, and start your own business. Um, what did hustle look like for you? How often did you work?

David: I worked seven days a week for seven years straight.

Leah: Yeah.

David: Straight. I didn’t, there was not a day off. Now that does not mean that there weren’t times where I would go to my kids’ ball games or swim team or something. Like I would always put that stuff into my schedule to the best of my ability. But I worked seven days a week, including holidays for seven years. Yeah.

Leah: For seven. Would you do it again?

David: Uh, a hundred percent. I would do it again the same way.

Leah: Do you think you needed to do that to get to where you are?

David: I do think so, because what it taught me was the fundamental skills that you need to be able to recover from any problem in the business.

 And that is communication and sales. If you, if you understand sales like the back of your hand, I don’t care what problem you’re going through, you’re not gonna have a financial problem because you understand how to work through that issue. And that’s really the biggest stress causing one outside of legal issues. Right. Right, right. 

So if you understand increasing abundance, then it’s never, it, you, you don’t get into that worry place of not knowing what to do. Oh my god, something happened and we gotta come up with this amount of money. Like, you’ll just come up with it because you know how to do it. It’s, it’s not like that’s one of the biggest lies I think in humanity, that money and increasing abundance is a difficult thing to earn.

There’s nothing difficult about it at all. If you understand what to overcome inside of yourself to be able to do it and be able to do it ethically. I, I, here’s the one thing that I would change. I would learn how to hire quality people sooner. Hmm. That I didn’t know. 

Um, I really didn’t start getting quality people working with me until about the seven year mark. And that’s why it took seven years. I, not that I didn’t hire people, I did, but I, I didn’t really understand what I was looking for in those timeframes. So I would have people, I thought they were good work with ’em for a year or two. 

And that’s, you know, seven years is not as long as you think it is when you’re in the, I’m working with these people and you’re thinking to yourself, they’re gonna get better. They’re gonna get better. They’re, and you find out they’re not getting any better and you don’t know, you really don’t know what you’re doing when it comes to hiring. 

Cuz that’s a skillset also. That’s the one thing that I would change. I think that I would have gotten to the place of not having to work seven days a week a a bit sooner had I understood how to hire and fire faster.

Leah: Right. Right. Uh, it has been hard for me. It is not intuitive. It is something, like you said, it’s something you definitely have to learn. Yeah,

David: For sure.

Leah: Um, when you, how much money were you making at the seven year mark when you could kind of switch a little bit?

David: Um, around I was making a few million a year at that point.

Leah: You were, okay, so you wow. You really cranked for seven years. Oh yeah.

David: Yeah. I made a million a year all by myself.

Leah: Yeah. Wow. 

David: Without any team whatsoever. I had, I had my, my ex-wife was doing our books. I didn’t have anybody else working with me. Uh, and that came, that came really quick. That was like, there were, because here’s a strategy that I used and I was just explaining this to someone the other day. I wanted to get to the point where I didn’t have to worry about the money and increasing abundance. I needed to be able to do other things in the business. 

And I couldn’t do those at the same time if I was, if I was constantly making sales. So I was forced very early on through two, two ch through two things that happened. One was that I wasn’t making enough to keep up with taxes, personal bills, and have enough money to expand. Okay. 

And I had to learn that what I did learn was this, I was actually making it hard because my belief system was based on a hard work ethic.

So I think I’ve, I think you’ve heard me say this before. I got to this point, um, where I wanted, I was making about 50,000 a year and I wanted to turn it into 50,000 a month. Right. So this is like the first year. 

And I was really trying hard, I was working like, like 18 hours a day trying to make sales all around the world, working time zones, you know, doing the whole thing. And it wasn’t happening. And I realized after two months that there was no way I was ever gonna get there mathematically by what I was doing because I wasn’t charging enough. Mm-hmm.

So that then I had to confront, am I worth charging that?

Leah: And didn’t you do like 15 to six figures, like a crazy jump?

David: Yeah, yeah. Yeah. I w I charged, I charged, my seminars were $495 and my coaching was 4,600 and I went from there to 15,000. That got me over 50,000 in the first two weeks. And then I went from 15,000 to a hundred thousand.

 So, but, so get this, what I was doing was working so well in our fourth year we did, we did 5 million in three months. Wow. That’s when I had the embezzlement happen when somebody embezzled the money. Yeah. Right. Another, another partner that we were working with, they embezzled the money at that point, but we did 5 million in three months. 

I mean, the making of the money and increasing abundance was not the issue. It was having the right support team around me to be able to manage everything else. Cuz I wasn’t good at marketing. Right. I wasn’t a marketer, I was not a copywriter. I was a hell of a salesperson and I was great at speaking.

 But those other, those other things that were very necessary to like, create long-term expansion, to really build a solid list. I didn’t have those skills and I really didn’t have the time to do ’em either. I’m very, I’m right. I’m just, that’s not what I’m good at.

Leah: When you look back at those seven years, how many days a week would you say you were actively selling something or trying to close a sale? Every day. Every day. So this is, I think, the biggest disconnect that I see right now. 

And I’d love to hear you, your 2 cents when you work with people that are, I would say in the first like three years that are wanting to make more, they just don’t sell enough or they’re not trying to sell enough. Right. Or they’re thinking that sales come from their website being up or whatever. 

And you know, I, and you’ve probably never heard this, but I have, um, one of my clients has gone from zero to seven figures in, I think it was 18 months, something spectacular. I mean, she completely crushes her way, way beats me. 

Um, but the big lesson I always pull from her is that she will tell me, she’s like, yeah, I have a slow day today. I only have two sales calls. And I’m like, this is what I’m talking about , because there’s so many people out there that have two sales calls in a month, and then wonder why they’re not getting the type of sales they are.

 Right. So what do you, why wouldn’t it mean, I would love to just hear like, what would you tell someone who, how, how often do you need to sell every day?

David: So this is, this is what I’m gonna tell you what I did and the reason why I did it. I wanted to be so good at sales that there was never any situation that I was in, uh, or any problem that I was occurring that I couldn’t make a sale. 

So I challenged myself to make sales on every day of the week, including holidays. Right. Because I didn’t want any place to get an excuse to get in my head. I was scared to death that some excuse would start taking over my mind and I would talk myself out of my own success. I saw it happen in my life previously, and I saw it happen to so many other people. 

And I’m like, I’m not doing that. I am gonna prove I’m gonna live this increasing abundance idea. Those sales are here, they’re here all the time. You just have to be willing to put in the work to do it.

 So one of the first things was, I’m gonna sell every day of the year, at least one sale on Christmas,  on, you know, whatever holiday, at least one sale. Right. Um, because people would come up to me like, I would try to hire people to do sales and they’d be like, well, nobody’s buying because, you know, kids are going back to school and Thanksgiving’s coming up. And I’m like, that’s all nonsense. It’s total nonsense.

Leah: Wrong.

David: Yeah, yeah, yeah. And, and, um, it would, I got, I was so serious about it that I changed our schedule for doing seminars and I put a seminar in January, so that means we had to sell to fill that seminar all through the holiday season. And I kept it there for 10 years. I’m like, I’m not buying it. You can sell any time. Right. So I did that and what I tell my clients is this, I say, look, you want to have this skillset so ingrained into your behavior, how you think and what you see, that it’s never a question. 

The last thing that you ever wanna do is have to get up in the morning and go, oh my God, I have to make sales today. Right. You should love it. You should learn to love it and you should become the best you can possibly be at it. Right. 

And that’s a person, well, as you know, a person has to overcome a lot of internal challenges and rewire a lot of beliefs around sales in order to get there because most of us get really negative beliefs growing up around salespeople.

Leah: Yeah. Yeah. It’s, it’s truly, it’s probably where I’ve seen the biggest shift for me. I used to get nervous for calls. If they didn’t go well, I would kind of take it personally. It couldn’t be more different. 

Now, one, it’s probably my favorite part of business, frankly, which I never thought I’d be in a position saying that ever. And two, if, if it’s a no, it’s just, I, I mean, it, it’s not e there’s not even enough about it to say that it doesn’t bother me because it’s so neutral and just something that I kind of like try to take, uh, from, to learn from and then move on with my day, which yeah. Which has definitely been a huge change. 

Okay. My last question for you is, I’m curious to hear what your definition of hustle, and not even just hustle, but like doing what it takes. What do you still do? You know, you’re all these years in business, all these millions, uh, uh, later have, you have a fabulous team, you have all these success stories. 

What do you think you still are willing to do that most people either don’t know or aren’t willing to do that just still makes your business grow every day?

David: Well, one of the things that I’m willing to do is sell, right? Yes. Still. I, I don’t sell by getting on the phone every day. But I’ll tell you this, and this is the, this is God’s truth. If something happened and everybody walked out, I’d be on the phone instantly making sales. 

Right? I would not go backwards. I would, you know, I would find, I would make the sales and I would find the right people to fill those positions instantaneously. That would not be an issue for me at all. Right? 

Now I’m in a, I’m in a great place and it took, it took a long time to get here because I didn’t want to end up like my mentors where they’re in their eighties and it’s still all about them. Right. So, so the company can’t do anything because everybody’s attached to buying.

They want that person personally. Right. And as much as that can be an ego feed for someone, I mean, what are you gonna do if you get to the point where you do wanna retire, right? 

And you don’t wanna do it anymore? Are you really gonna be the person at, you know, at 85 and 86 like Bob was, you know, pushing yourself to, to do it esp and even when you’re sick like that, I don’t, I don’t wanna do that. 

Plus I think it limits the amount of people that we can reach, right? So I’ve spent a long time putting the right team together. I’ve got an amazing, uh, well, Steph Toss, who’s my c e o, she’s my partner, um, in, in business. And we’re moving the business forward with the ideology of the name of the company, which is Life is now.

That’s the name of my business. Although it’s always been like David Neagel seminars or whatever the real, the actual legal name is Life is now.

 So what I do every day is two things. One, I am still the product, but we’ve recently brought in Steph’s expertise as another product. So she’s also a product. The idea is to combine those two products to have a holistic thing that we can actually teach people. You know, cuz I did mindset and sales for years and she did marketing, right? So she’s marketing and team building.

 So we’re bringing those two things together. So I am, I am, I do a lot of speaking. I speak every week somewhere, either online or some, you know, on a stage, uh, to help propel the business to go forward. I fulfill, uh, the stuff that we sell that’s my responsibility to fulfill. 

And the rest of my time I’m studying to find out how to move the business forward with the different goals that I have. So that’s probably, the study’s probably four or five hours a night every night.

Leah: Wow. Wow. How many hours a week do you work?

David: Well, that’s a good question. I probably, so I usually start here in the office at about eight in the morning, and I leave by five or six in the, at night I go home, I’ll have dinner, uh, and then I’m working, but I’m working on a different area of the business. I’m studying different things because I’ve got different goals, right? Mm-hmm. . So that’s, that’s what it, that’s what it looks like.

Leah: So you’re working quite, quite a bit right now. Maybe not all the time that you have a lot of hour scare clocking in right now. Yeah. Do you have any thoughts on four hours

David: To that? In all fairness to that, I’m divorced, so I’m not in a relationship and my kids are all grown, right. So my time is my own. Right. Right. I, if I was, if I was, if I was still in a relationship or my kids were little, that would be a major priority to me as I kept it a priority for many years.

Leah: Right. Yeah. I mean, I, you know, I have a one-year-old, so I don’t, I I I’m not wor I’m working less than I ever have right now. Yeah. Um, but there’s still pieces that I do put in, be it time or just specific things that Yeah. I just don’t see everyone being willing to do. Um, what do you think of the four hour Work Week?

David: I think it’s, I think it’s dumb. I’ve never bought into it. I’ve never, you know, Tim is a great guy. He wrote that book. Um, I don’t, uh, so here’s, here’s the thing. I actually have a split idea on this. 

I think that for him, if he’s really done that in his life, I think that’s genius because he’s not a guy that’s gonna sit around and eat Cheetos and watch television all day with, with the other 20 hours. He’s gonna use those hours in a productive way. 

But when you sell it as the four hour work week, people who don’t wanna work now are thinking this is a way for me not to have to work and make millions of dollars. And that’s not accurate.

Leah: Right. Really, it’s a book a about leverage. Right. It’s that’s what it’s about. It’s not about checking out a reality and sitting on a beach and expecting millions to pour into your inbox.

David: That’s right. That’s absolutely right. It’s all about leverage. Yeah. It’s all about leverage. There’s no way that you could do what he does in that timeframe without leverage, like I said, half hour ago. I mean that

Leah: That’s right. And then, right, that’s what you said. And then once he’s in that pl, like the whole book that he, the, the whole system that he wrote about or reality that he wrote about, he’s leveraging what he can do so he can do more things and then leverage those things as well. Exactly.

Think your point Exactly. And what you’ve continued to do your whole career.

David: Yeah.

Leah: My final question for you is, have you ever seen a successful business, let’s say above 500 K in 

annual revenue where the founder had not had a season of good old-fashioned hustle?

David: No.

Leah: Never.

David: Never seen it.

Leah: Yeah.

David: Never seen it. Any, neither

Leah: Heard

David: About it, but never

Yeah. Heard about it. Oh, y’all have people come to tell me this person’s making this much and they’re not doing anything and they’re traveling all over.

 And it’s like, I don’t believe it. They’re not, yeah. There’s nobody that’s running an ethical, honest business, uh, that’s doing what you claim.

 And you know, I mean, they have to, they have to have lease it hustled to put everything together in order to be able to do it. I do think that when it gets to a stable place and you got somebody running it, there’s a whole lot of freedom you could have. Right,

Leah: Right.

David: Doing it. You know, that’s for, I mean, look at somebody like Branson who’s got like 300 companies, right? He’s not running those companies. You know, he owns ’em. He, he hires the right people to run ’em and he just does his thing.

Leah: Right. There’s,

David: That’s two different things though.

Leah: Yeah, completely. I totally agree. Something that I, and that was my last question, David. I know I, I obviously could talk to you forever, but, um, I just want everyone to hear something I told David before we got on this call is that, well, I’m really grateful he was here to have this honest conversation with us.

And, frankly, I’m inspired by it, frankly. I love to work hard. I’m just not one of those people that is shahied away from it. It, yeah, it excites me.

 I think that there’s a very, um, purposeful feeling that comes with seeing something through giving it your all and really doing, seeing what you’re made of to, to, to bring something into reality. It feels very, um, uniquely human to me, if that makes sense. And I think it’s just such a blessing that we can, you know, have those moments of creation.

Um, but this is something I shied away from talking about because in a world where I was rising up in my business and I was trying to stand out amongst the many coaches, I sometimes admit that I was afraid to be honest about how hard I worked or how hard I believed you did have to work because there were, were so many other people telling you the opposite. 

And I thought, well, either, either they’re lying, but my clients are gonna go to them because that sounds easier. Or they know something I don’t know. And then I look like the fool because I’m over here saying, no, you still kind of have to put in the hours and do uncomfortable things and really put yourself out there. 

But I have come to a place where, because of all the clients I’ve seen, because of all the people I’ve talked to, because of all the people I’ve learned from like you, David, and because of my own story, I think it’s, I’m really proud to be able to speak out about the fact that there is nothing shameful about having a hustle chapter.

There’s something very prideful about having a good work ethic. And if you really want this, you have to look at where you’re talking out of two ends of your mouth saying, I want this and this and this, but I’m not willing to do this and this and this and this. 

Even this conversation is not meant to make anyone out there feel guilty or, um, stressed about how much they’re not working or how much they’re realizing they need to work. Let it empower you because when you really step into this, honestly the sky’s the limit. That’s how I, how I think of it.

David: Absolutely. I think we’re, I think we’re here to create and we’re here to grow. And the only way we do that is through work,

Leah: Right? That’s it. Right. It’s

David: At, when I was making the things that they love to do, you know, I did, um, I worked a lot of different kinds of jobs as you know, before I, I did this and I did this on more out of curiosity, I started down this road based on curiosity. 

Cuz I had a massive result in my life. I didn’t understand how I got it. And I wanted to learn to find out how that happened. And I fell in love with learning about the process of success along the way from the aspect of doing it, not from just studying it or reading it, but I absolutely loved to do it. So, you know, I think anybody can do that.

Leah: I agree. I agree. And, and I honestly can say that I’ve worked very hard, but, um, nothing has been harder than feeling stuck, broke, confused, lost. That was the hardest thing. .

David: That’s that’s the hard part right there. For sure.

Leah: That’s hard. Totally. Well, thank you so much, David. This was inspiring, enlightening. Very, um, informative. I really, really appreciate your time. And for anyone, uh, listening out there could, could you let ’em know where they can find out more about you and stuff?

David: Yep. They could go to the Successful Mind podcast. That’s where they could find out ex, you know, really get into listening to what it is that we do or that they could go to. Uh, life is now inc.com. That’s our website.

Leah: Awesome. Thanks so much David. Happy holidays to you. I so happy

David: Holidays. It’s pleasure to be here. Thank you. Thanks.

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