The Genius Of: Ed Mylett

i'm irwin rafael nick madison this is the genius of podcast on today's episode i have a special guest his name is ed milette ed is a entrepreneur a peak performance expert and his focus is on helping people discover their genius and maxing out their peak performance i met ed through a mutual entrepreneur who's also a friend his name is edwin already edwin reached out to me and said there is this man you need to meet he has an extraordinary ability to start companies to help other people find their entrepreneurial capacity and i just know that you would really resonate with him well it took a little while but when i met ed we just hit it off right away i just love his passion his intensity his intelligence his drive and his belief in the capacity of other people and so i want to invite you to join me now on the genius of edm today i have a special guest who is um a new friend and an incredible human being i'm so excited to watch this entire podcast with ed mylett ed it's so great to have you with me irwin brother honored to be here and honored to be on the inaugural podcast so this is wonderful yeah for me it's so exciting to talk about the genius of ed mylett now i know you would not call yourself a genius but it never hurts when someone else identifies the genius in you and wants to show i'll take it especially coming from you you know a part of our our uh intent during this podcast is not only to unwrap a little bit about your genius and how you discovered how you stepped into it but also to help those who are listening to uh become more aware of their own genius and to have that genius within them awakened and i know that's really central to who you are as a person you've been focusing so much of your life on awakening and and unlocking the greatness in other people now i i want to kind of begin maybe at the beginning of your story and because you really do have quite an interesting journey and now i noticed you were born in diamond bar california now if i just said you're born in california that sounds really epic anybody knows diamond bar it's just a kind of a small town and outside of la what was it like growing up in diamond bar well interesting a lot of blessings one i was actually i was born in boston we moved there when i was very very little and i grew up there all my life but one of the really unique blessings you know in hindsight there's so many blessings in our life that are appearing in front of us i just think erwin you know this too like they don't show up looking like we think they might look or at the time we think or maybe they come at us in a difficult time but one of the great blessings in my life was that down the street there was this little hispanic girl and i came back from kindergarten the first day and i told my dad i said daddy there's a little brown girl in my kindergarten class i think i'm going to marry her that's no no joker and i and i ended up doing that about 20 years later and so wow one of the great things about growing up where i was is my wife grew up right down the street from actually a few streets over but we went to the same elementary school and then started dating in high school so but growing up there was lower lower middle income i guess is what you would say but irwin you know like most people i don't come from a perfect family i come from a loving family as you know and i know you know this but my dad had a drug and alcohol problem my entire childhood and adolescence and so i grew up in a loving home with good parents but certainly a lot of anxiety a lot of strife worry fear um you know all those emotions that we probably would rather not experience i did have as a child in addition to being loved but it was certainly stressful i remember my dad you know yelling and me thinking gosh i wonder if the neighbors can hear all this you know and be being ashamed and embarrassed a little bit in our neighborhood so but the good thing about my neighborhood very diverse african-american couple next door japanese couple next door uh indian gentleman lived across the street from us eddie padilla lived two doors down who's obviously uh he was mexican and so i had a very diverse upbringing uh and learned a lot about different cultures growing up too oh that's that makes such a difference when you grow up with people who are different than yourself it allows you to see yourself and others i think in a much more holistic way but i also know that um my father as well was an alcoholic and um and i know that that creates its own dilemmas creates its own challenges i love the way described a loving home but not a perfect home what were some of the uh environmental dynamics that helped shape who you were as a person a lot of times people see someone like you and they see you incredibly successful very powerful very confident um what was your inner narrative when you were younger did did you feel that same way then what a tremendous question no the complete opposite in fact if i do uh exude a little bit of that now it's because i had to work so harder and just become a baseline functioning person with my confidence when i ended up going away to college because i had none of it but as you said i don't you call it genius and i and i i'll accept that it's very difficult to think about myself that way but one of my certainly one of the talents i certainly have is my ability to read people and be present with them i love people and that was a great gift of having an alcoholic dad because by the time i was about four with three little sisters when my dad's key i knew how the key hit the locker went whether i got sober or drunk dead i could help by the sound the key in the lock wow and when he would walk through that door i would because he would leave and go on these binges my dad and you go you protect your sister and your mother's like i'm the man of the house at four right but when he would walk through as a little boy i remember looking up at him and thinking i'd read him is this drunk dad who's going to be a little bit aggressive and i want to keep mom and the you know the girls away from him or is this sober dad is going to want to go play catch in the backyard and we're going to have a great time and so i would read him and be present with him and i think that's something to this day that is maybe one of the two or three things that i am still to this day utilizing and everything that i do that maybe is a talent that i have that's unique born out of that adversity because i had a dad like that so i grew up insecure fearful worried i'm not a real big guy as you know i'm i'm not six foot four so i didn't have any of those things i don't have incredible iq so i did okay in school but not great there was just i grew up as a little boy just thinking there was nothing special about me and and also frankly doubting whether there was a god like why would why would there be a god if i have to live like this why would i have to be in this house why would my dad be like this because my dad was such a good man and a loving man and a smart man and i admired him so much and i just remember thinking god why would you give him this affliction that just is destroying our lives you know and it just gave me this i think the overall word i would use earl was maybe sad i think i was a sad child a lot of the time a sad child and i don't know that i was a child very long i kind of was a little grown up little guy you met me at eight or nine years old i don't think i behaved like a child anymore because of those things thrown upon me yeah i think a lot of times when we think of our childhood we want to think of that childhood innocence or that um irrational joy that we're supposed to experience when we're young we don't think about having a job having a career worrying about the future worrying about money worrying about all the problems in the world and you know when you describe yourself as being a sad child that means that in sense the way the world came on you sooner i agree irwin i would say that that's true you know some of it may be my recollections right there were probably times i'm sure even for you there were times of joy there were times when i was a little boy but i can't find those in my memory i can remember those the other times yeah and that if you give me my emotion even as we're talking i i can feel it sort of in my body right now taking me back to those times because if someone i haven't been for a very long time but that little guy he's right here all the time you know he's right here and through you know prayer and personal growth and learning some tools and stuff in my life i can keep that those emotions at bay most of the time but i'm very familiar with them still well you said something really interesting and and i've noticed it before in some of our conversations where you talked about in a sense developing this um this intuition at a very young age to be able to read a room read an environment read people and years ago my wife asked me did i believe that humans were capable of of almost anything and i and i i remember his find her i think we're capable of anything we need for survival wow that so oftentimes what ends up becoming our genius is something that we develop in our struggle to survive and it's actually the crisis in our life that begins to create the the incubator for what later becomes our genius and really you've lived in the world of sales you live in the world of really reading people and reading environments and situations and and this this capacity that you needed to survive as a child actually became a huge talent that allowed you to thrive as an adult no question by the way you have that same you know you and i are new friends but i think one of the reasons i love you so much and i feel so connected to you in a very unusual way one you're special but two is i think you have some of these similar traits i think you and i are very similar in many many ways and i don't i get emotional when i say that because it was born out of those things and in hindsight like what a great blessing i would not trade those times in my life for anything because it's helped me in small ways connect with people that i probably otherwise would have never connected with and maybe help them you know maybe given them some hope in their life but certainly most of the things i have were born out of necessity now that you say that i never really looked at it that way but you're very much right about that yeah there's this fascinating uh study of this uh the baca people they're a tribe that their children have a phd level knowledge of botany because they live in one of the most dangerous ecosystems in the world and i've always been fascinated by the unlimited capacity of children to learn what is necessary to survive and to thrive i think what happens so many times is that we become almost we can become embittered because of the crisis as we face you could you could have lived your life bitter because your father is an alcoholic or you could have lived your life always as a victim because of what you had to face as a child but instead you stepped into that environment and let it shape you to make you stronger rather than to leave you paralyzed i think a lot of that irwin has to do with the meaning you attach to an event and if you don't take control of the meaning of what an event was in your life and you let it define you or you let it be a negative attachment you know mother teresa had this amazing saying that she would say that one of her great blessings was that when she was with somebody when they would pass away if they were even in a car accident let's say it was one of the honors of her lifetime whereas most of us would say my gosh i saw this accident someone passed away it was a tragedy same event she would take away a different meaning and i think the other thing that that for me is that i did tell myself as a little boy is that i function well in stress i function well in chaos the positive part of that if i could be honest is that i do function well when there's a lot of things going on and people are losing their heads i can typically remain cool and make a good decision whether that's business or family the negative side of that candidly as i've gotten older and i really evaluated myself from what i do i sometimes have a tendency to create chaos and stress in my life because it's a place that i'm familiar with so even when things are going great and could be very peaceful ed milette will find a way once a while to create a little stress a little chaos in his life because he functions well in it and it's sort of a home for me and so now that i'm kind of cognizant of that although i function well in it i'd prefer not to be in it if i can as much as possible and i'm sort of i can go i'm doing it again here i go and i'm kind of conscious of that so i think that's something everybody should evaluate in themselves do you create some of these things repetitively because it's a pattern of yours as a child or maybe an adult some type of an event you just fall back into that pattern yeah it's interesting because a huge part of what motivated me to do this podcast the juniors of is going through the process of writing my book the genius of jesus and in that book i talk about how genius seems to be both touched by badness and touched by the divine and in as much as the unique genius each one of us in many ways is a reflection of of of being created in the image of god it can also be a reflection of almost like the madness inside of us and we have to be careful sometimes that we do not become too comfortable in the shadow of our genius and i i cannot wait to read this erwin because i cannot tell you how much as you say that that i know that to be true i know that to be true i also know that some of these geniuses we possess if we're not careful there can be a line where it is used for favor and good things and god's kingdom and and increase in our lives and some of these things we can use and spin them in their negative the ability to influence people for example absolutely you know that that's a tremendous genius to have how you utilize it is pretty darn important so i want to talk to you about the journey between your sadness and your meaning because you said you're a very sad child and then you said what helps you through that is finding meaning in the pain yes so somewhere between ed who was a sad child and ed milette who is a business icon there's that person trying to figure out what's going on in their life can you unwrap a little bit of that journey from sadness to meaning i know exactly the first moment it happened i'm not a believer that there's just a moment and everything changes necessarily but there are there are moments like when i met that little brown girl in my kindergarten class that was a moment right the next 80 years of my life likely in this body were defined by meeting that girl so it was a big part of my life yes i do know what happened and again it's god's blessing so everyone you're gonna believe this but my dad gets sober goes to his first aaa meeting first meeting to get sober i'm now living on his couch i flunked out of playing baseball i had an injury i'm living at home i'm eating out of his refrigerator he comes home from the meeting and goes hey i got you a job tomorrow morning and i said well what is it what is it he goes you don't get to decide what it is you're eating out of my refrigerator you're going there tomorrow morning anyway he goes it's called mckinley i don't know what it is it's in san dimas when you get there tell them tim sent you i said who's timmy goes the guy next to me at the meeting last night i show up it's 6 00 am i walk i say hey i'm at my led i'm here for the job they go what job i go i have no idea i don't know what you people do here the lady goes well we're an orphanage wow i went in an orphanage i said well i'm just supposed to come here and say tim and you're supposed to know what i'm doing i'm not kidding you when she goes well i have no idea what you're talking about come back when you know and i go to get to the door and i grab the door you know i turn back i go well i think he's probably a pretty big drinker because he was with my dad at an a.a meeting last night and she goes oh drunk tim that's cottage eight i go okay cottage eight and i walk in this is where my life changed i walked into cottage eight it was mckinley home for boys and there were 10 boys in there that became like my sons as a 21 year old man these boys were all molested by their family parents incarcerated or were dead and they have these eyes or when you have them i have them anybody who comes from some kind of dysfunction i just think we have these different eyes just a little bit like just love me you know just love me care about me believe in me and these little boys turned and looked at me as they're getting ready for school who's the new guy and my journey started there these boys needed someone to love them care about them believe in them and show them how to live a little better and i'd take them to school i'd pick them up i was there to take them trick-or-treating i was there when they opened their presents on christmas day i wasn't prepared for any of this right i didn't have any background i'm not a psychologist there's nothing like but my heart changed i went from being this kind of ego driven baseball guy to oh my gosh i love making a difference i love contributing i love these boys what i found as i got older and by the way my business career started i got hired into the financial firm while i worked there and i stated that i stayed at mckinley for a year but i found out you know what most adults are saying to you when you meet them just love me care about me believe in me show me how to live a little bit better and so that's sort of been the work of my life since then but my heart really changed uh in those moments and in that couple years that i was at mckinley it just shifted me into a different human it got i got out of myself and into serving other people and i found most of my insecurities dissipated when i stopped thinking about me all the time that's talking about them yeah you know for so many years we've tried to help people see that the the path to healing is actually serving and so often times when people come and they're wounded and broken they want to be served and they cannot figure out why they can't be served enough to be healed and actually the process of healing really happens when you begin serving other people when you stop thinking about yourself because when you talk about being sad i was one of those depressed kids you know and i was in a psychiatric chair that i tried by the time i was 12 years old i i was depressed all the time i was that sad child and i began realizing that a huge part of that sadness is that you're spending way too much time thinking about yourself and and you're just getting lost in this inner world it's it's self-indulgence in the most negative uh expression and amen in the moment you see someone who needs love more when you went to the orphanage all of a sudden you saw someone whose life in a sense was in worse shape than yours needed yes more help more love than you and it's just such a powerful transitional moment in your life yes but you said at the same time that's when you moved into financial services yeah that crazy now that was good i was gonna say go ahead was that something you thought oh i really want to be in financial services or was that just not that's hilarious so you're gonna laugh this is so funny background i get i get to have to go to this meeting for this financial comment last thing i ever want to do and you know me pretty well by now like i'm not i'm not a a math person by any means nor was i a business major in college i was a a communication major so i walk into this meeting and the gentleman given the meeting after my background i flunked chemistry in fact i got a d in chemistry because they eventually just wanted to get me out so i could go play college baseball so i'm the compound chart all these things are still running in the back of my head right so i go to this financial mean this guy's putting all these things up on the screen compound interest in rules of 70 and i'm like oh man this is a chemistry deal i kept he was a filipino gentleman with a very heavy accent that was sort of pitching the firm and i thought he was saying acid management but what he was saying was what he was saying was asset management but i don't get any of this and i'm seeing these compounds up there and then at the end he goes but you can do this you can help people we're changing the world there's big money to be made we recognize you there's competition i'm like well i like that part i call my girlfriend at the time who's now my wife i said babe they said we can do this together i don't have any idea what it is but i'm going to do the people and the and the competition and all that stuff i need you to do the chemistry piece and we go back into the interviewer and and my wife can't tell a lie i can't do it she i'm poker facing we figure about timothy this was asset management financial and she goes you dummy it's not chemistry it's financial what did you guys go i thought he said acid i'm sorry so i started this kind of prolific financial career having no idea what the heck i was getting into initially and then obviously i took if you call it genius i took the things that i do well communicate i'm an intense person i'm pretty compassionate you know i'm a hard worker i care i kind of took what i was doing at that mckinley and the problem was when i started to really make money and i was in this debate this conflicted part of me where i was like well i'm making this money part-time in the financial thing i'm making six dollars an hour working at the orphanage but i finally concluded you know i could go help the parents of people like these children and maybe their families will stay together and you know what if god will bless me with a bunch of resources i'll go do things for thousands of children that i could only do for these 10. and so it was a difficult decision but i finally made the transition into the business world wow you know it's interesting because i i feel like so often times when people talk about finding their destiny or their calling or their purpose that a lot of times it still sounds pretty self-indulgent it's still about my destiny my calling my purpose and ironically it sounds like you just picked the opportunity in front of you and did and brought all of yourself into it and there's a there's some sense where you didn't choose financial services they just sort of chose you and it gave you the platform to actually begin to express your genius a hundred percent and i also believe that you know the other thing i think so i know i don't have a lot of options and i think there's a lot of people listening to think well i don't have a lot of options so you know maybe there's no genius in me right i didn't have a lot of options i wasn't anything special but you know what i found something once i started him i like how i this is what happened irwin i like how i feel about the difference i'm making for other people here and i i think there's an element of that that's somewhat self-indulgent in other words i felt better about me when i could make a difference for another person and i think what it was doing is holding off at bay that other person you were referring to but here's the crazy thing and i know it's been true for you too i've never gotten tired of it everything else in my life that's been for me for me i want to get in a a house i want to get a jet i want to get some money i i get tired it wears out it's not it's not it's people say well money won't make you happy well that's a lie that's not true money can temporarily make you happy you ever buy a new pair of shoes or i got some of your clothes that feel pretty darn good right what it will never do is fulfill you right and there's a huge difference between happiness and fulfillment and the fulfilling part of my life has been other human beings other people that i've been able to make a connection with and by the way they've helped me tremendously do you have any times to this day again i can't even talk about it how many times to this day i uh times a month i will think about walking through that door of mckinley or little jose or little joseph or little raul that i to this day they're all in my life now they're grown men but i think about that time all the time because it altered me so i think about them all the time you know it's funny years ago uh when i used to do a lot more business consulting i had this um group of young entrepreneurs come to me and and as i was walking through like why they were doing what they were doing they said we want to be rich and and i said so when you so why do you want to be rich and they said so we can be free to do whatever we want to do and i said so what do you want to do and they said we don't know yet you know we just want to be rich so we can do whatever it is that we want to do if if you don't even know what you want to do now and what makes you think that money is going to somehow give you the insight to know what you want to do then i think the tragedy sometimes is that people think that creating wealth will actually create their freedom yes but if you don't even know why you're doing what you're doing you won't all the money in the world can't buy you your why irwin i'm more i no more people with money that live in more fear now of losing it than they do uh focusing on the freedom of having it i can tell you that because i live near them right i'm blessed to live in nice places and i can also tell you that my dad used to tell me as i was starting to accumulate some money but i was working on me you know i had found my faith i had you know started to read the word i had started and also in addition to that working on things in my mind simultaneously right techniques and thoughts and reading good books and feeding my spirit and my dad would always tell me if you can't be happy where you are now you're taking you to that big mansion you think you want to buy and it's going to be the same guy and all you're going to want to do you're going to rearrange the furniture and it's going to be that same man sitting there staring at the wall and so and it was so profound that i also come from a family who puts zero priority on material things zero priority nor does my wife so i think that kept me somewhat grounded and i have had times in my life where i've accumulated abundance and not still i've gone through stages or phases like human beings do have a relationship with myself i have a relationship with god these are relationships sometimes they're better than others right these these relationships ebbs and flow but i've certainly had times even after i accumulated money and supposedly know all these lessons where i've screwed these things up as well but i do sort of have a belief system a standard by which i try to live my life that sort of serves me mo i think most of the time now i hope it's okay for me to say this but you have what 30 something different companies that you're involved in and i i know you i don't know if you make that really publicly or not not a lot but that's okay that's right um for a person to be successful with one company that's an extraordinary thing if you can do it two or three times that's quite impressive but but the fact that you have your fingerprint on 30 plus different companies it tells me that you've simplified things because a lot of times what happens is people think that genius makes things more complicated but actually genius simplifies things and you you begin to see the things that actually matter and you're less less confused by all the peripheral things that really don't matter if i were to ask you ed what would be the core of that genius that you're able to take from from company to company from challenge the challenge from crisis to crisis what what what's the core essence of that genius how would you describe that it's i love that you use the word genius i've always used giftedness i think if you ask anybody in newman business they say ed has an unusual confidence and belief system in other people's genius in other words i surround myself and i take full advantage if you want to look at it that way of the genius i i'm pretty good at erwin at identifying the genius traits in other people sometimes things they've intuitively thought about themselves most of their life but no one's ever pointed it out and no one's ever attached it to a role or a job so as a leader i feel like my job in an organization is to find the genius in somebody get them to believe that that's part of their genius because i think we intuitively know once it's pointed out to us you know what i am compassionate you know what i do care i am funny i am beautiful i am resilient these geniuses we sort of know but sometimes if another person says hey this is a genius of yours i call it a gift but genius is a much better word this is a genius of yours and then i get to apply that and i trust it and it's it i be i don't be overboard but it is a part of my faith in my businesses in that i really believe god created each of us special i really believe this i truly believe it and so i will fully empower somebody to utilize their genius in my businesses that would be a major part i think anyone will tell you that an unusual amount they're accountable i monitor it we report to one another but i let you lead i let you make decisions and that would be and the other thing i would say is that i um i'm a good i'm a pretty good visionary at selling the vision of where we're going in each of these companies this is where we're going i i'm willing to repeat it over and over again i'm willing to every way i can to get the word out of what our cause i often say that i'm evangelical about our mission as a company and each one of these companies i'm enrolling people in the vision of the business and the difference we make and it is never about profitability it is always about the cause the profitability all that stuff it'll wear out on people the cause people will continue to fight for over and over and then maybe the third thing is i'm decisive i do not buy into the theory that this is the right decision all the time and this one won't work you know what i've found often times in business both could work both can work in other words there's right and wrong in life i'm not saying that sure what i'm saying is we're going to call this shot we're going to call this shot so people are so fearful what if i make the wrong shot what if i make the wrong decision here's the truth if you've got great geniuses around you and you're committed to your vision and you're good people you can most of the time make either one work eventually it's not a death sentence and so i'm not afraid to make a decision because i'm not afraid that it might be wrong we can course correct we can come back i'm willing as a leader as a father as a friend to go hey i made a mistake i made the wrong decision you know what we're gonna fix this i'm not perfect but i'm not afraid i'm a pretty decisive person typically i love that because i think about how if you were mozart and your genius was music but now what required was mathematics a lot of people would say i'm mozart so i'm not going to hire einstein and uh or if you needed to create a work of art you'd go i'm mozart so i'm not going to hire picasso and so even our genius can become the ceiling it can come to lid on our success wow is that not true wow and i think what i'm hearing you say in you wouldn't say like this but you're a picasso who's not intimidated by teeming with a with a mozart and teaming with an einstein and teaming with the da vinci because you want their genius to actually become a chemical compound with your genius to create something you couldn't by yourself i'm actually fascinated by them i'm interested in them do you know what i mean i don't want everyone around me to be me i'm our little group of men that you know that we've gathered with a couple times and they're working i'm fascinated by these guys like they're different than me and so i i want to empower people i'm just this it's it's amazing that you wrote the book on this topic because i've used a different terminology but like it has been it has been rather the key to any success that i may have had is really believing that people have a genius in them that they have a giftedness in them and i don't giftedness sometimes i think maybe wrong because it gives this connotation you have to work at getting better at it yeah maybe we call it a proclivity but it certainly becomes a genius when it's manifested for the good of others no question about it and i think that's definitely the root i'm fascinated by people and i love if i'm in an uber my my drives my wife crazy i want to talk to the driver where are you from and she'll tell you within 30 minutes i'm telling them they're genius you know i want to know i just i just had a guy pick me up just really quick this guy picked me up from tel aviv older gentleman you'd get in his car was pretty beat up it wasn't very clean frankly he wasn't very clean you know he hadn't shaved in a long time and you would make an assessment about this person we start talking came to this country he's got a daughter at yale a son that graduated from harvard another one that's going to penn why is he driving the uber he's driving the uber to pay their tuition he's driving the uber to pay their tuition he's retired now and he's got children that young because he married his first wife passed away anyway this man said this guy's this guy's genius is how much he loves his family what he's willing to do for his family this is a beautiful man i think i'm so blessed i got the 30 minutes with him so that's sort of what i do in business like i would do in an uber and do it in the interview when i hire you all right so there are people listening right now and they'll go oh ed my let please identify the genius in me unlock it but i want to go to the other side for a moment you had to have interacted and worked and even cared about people who never really stepped into their genius and you could see it but maybe they could never see for themselves or they could or never make the choices to actualize that genius at the highest level what what would you say are some of the key things that keep a person from stepping into their own personal genius it's a great question i think there's a a lack of identity or confidence that they really have it um a fear of the power of it is the other side of it you know to some extent just to some extent are there's an identity we all carry for ourselves it's like a it's kind of like a thermostat sitting on the wall of our life and i feel like there's this genius that could be 150 degrees but if we believe we're a 75 degree no matter how good our results start to get we turn the air conditioner of our life back down somehow and cool it back down to what we believe we deserve wow and i've watched this happen over and over again in people's lives you call it self-sabotage or maybe you really believe you don't deserve abundance but business starts to go pretty well you know this you've seen this everyone in people too wow things are going really really well a year later you come back and they're back at 75 degrees again they've unconsciously cooled it back down again is that because they're afraid of what that might do to them is it because they just don't believe they deserve it and they're worth it you've seen people who have 75 degrees of fitness maybe they're a little bit overweight and you see them and all of a sudden my gosh you look amazing you've lost 25 pounds what did you do oh i'm doing this or that or you see them a year later they've gained it back plus five pounds because they cooled their life back down so i think simultaneously with having this this genius in us and identifying it is starting to believe that we can increase our thermostat setting of our life that we deserve it that we're worthy of it in my case my prayer eat most evenings is that that god wants this in my life but when i look at my son max i feel like a magnified by a billion times that's how god looks at me i want my son to be happy i want him to contribute i want him to make a difference i want him to use this genius he's got to make a difference in other people's lives to fulfill his heart right so i want that for him i have to assume my father in heaven wants that for me and so i i remind myself of this regular higher if we climb high in life you've climbed so high with all the books and the people you've reached in your life and your your your ministry and all the different things you've done you know the i think sometimes the higher we climb we better work on that identity and that identity for me is that i i just really believe that god's brought me this far he wants me to continue he wants me to do more he wants me to grow so many people i just don't think believe that and they put that air conditioner on and it's a vicious cycle in their life your son's name is max that's correct and you wrote a book called max out i did any connection between the two very very much so so the name came from we're trying to figure out what to call him and about three days before he was born i watched a gladiator and maximus i said all right that's a guy name all right i'll go with max and then this little boy came out it's interesting in life you know my son's very different than me very different than me he's he's he's more kind than me he's smarter than me he's not quite it doesn't burn quite as hot as his dad you know i mean i don't i got this thing you know and it was interesting when he was a little boy me figuring out how to love this boy even more that wasn't like me if that makes any sense i think sometimes as parents you know we connect easier with the child who's most like us max is my best friend now he's my f you know my family is but max and i are very very tight sure and um so when i wrote max out i really wrote that book because of sort of the theory of our relationship is we're always trying to max out our fun max out our experience max out our contribution max out our faith max out different things and that came from his name but the blessing in my life with my son because my daughter is very much like me my son is a great lesson as a parent is we often like people like us we often surround ourselves with people like us but the beauty of life if we use this word genius is to surround ourselves with different types of geniuses absolutely because that gives our life variety like that neighborhood i grew up in and my son is one of the first people if you looked at my business life or when he's 19 19 years ago most of these geniuses that ran my businesses looked talked and sounded a lot like me it was just a blind spot for me i liked him much who i'd hire once i had this little precious boy he was just smarter more patient kinder softer in many ways but stronger inside than me it made me realize there's lots of other geniuses in the world that i should have in my life and in my businesses so max has had a lot to do in a way he had no idea he did with my business success because i love these other geniuses in people speaking of other geniuses what what's um is there's any significant life lesson that stands out to you that you've learned from someone else yes i sure might my dad ironically i watched my dad i believe humans can change and i didn't believe that when i was young i believe humans can change dramatically you know i think i'm watching the minority because i keep hearing people say people don't change people don't change people don't change and and i'm with you ed because i've changed and so i have to believe people could change because i changed same here and i and i watched a man fight for his family to get sober to control his life i watched a man who was pretty angry guy turned into the kindest man the most gentle man the most giving man and the person that i by far in my life is the best man i've ever known is my dad if you'd asked me that at 15 he wouldn't have been on that list but you'd ask me i watched this human being literally transform themselves and and become a completely i believe that man was always in there yeah that's a part of his genius but he found him and he worked on it and it grew and grew and grew and my dad is the most amazing person i've ever known helped thousands of people get sober was in thousands of people's lives just remarkable so a great life lesson for me it's why i do this if you think about i'm an entrepreneur but really what i try to be is somebody who can help you believe you can change your life through the different tools and resources foundation of faith and that's because of my dad so my life lesson is my father in many many ways now sometimes our life lessons is observing someone in our life that we don't want to be like that was the first half of my dad's life wow he spent 40 years as one human being he spent the second 40 years as a completely different person and so that's the life lesson for me people can change oh that's so so profound yeah i've always felt it part of what motivates even this podcast is that for so many people their genius is trapped underneath the rubble of their failures and and of their fears and other regrets and sometimes it takes having other people come into your life and begin to pull the boulders aside so that you can begin to rediscover who you are i cannot help but imagine that a huge part of your dad's motivation to be a changed man was his love for you and watching you become the man that you have become it's kind of a beautiful thing to to see that in some ways you know all of us are connected to each other whether we like it or not when someone says they're not hurting anybody except themselves they're living in an illusion uh and you know you're tied by a rope to your father and he can try to pull you under into whatever choices he made and at the same time it's almost like you can pull him forward by the choices that you made and it's just a great reminder that when we don't give up on each other we don't just save ourselves we save those uh that we love it's amazing you so i just share something with you i just remembered along those lines wow irwin geez every time you talk to me something like that breaks through for me my dad uh told me he was getting sober i wasn't i think it was like 17. we were at a drive-through at a carl's jr and it was for my birthday my actually you know my dad's sobriety theta is so funny 4 11. uh so are enough 411 what's what's the what's that uh what's the the pot date what do they call it because birthdays 4 11. what is the weed day you know whatever the national pot day is the day my dad got sober 4 20 4 20. yeah my dad's sobriety date is 4 20. so for the last 40 years of my life my dad would not celebrate his birthday on his birthday he would celebrate it on his sobriety birthday oh wow and it was 4 20. but i didn't realize what 420 was cause i've never smoked pot until a couple years ago and my buddy told me was you realize your dad got sober on national weed day i said i had no idea but i remember when my dad we were at we're the carl's jr and my dad said hey um just want you know i'm gonna go away for a few days and i'm gonna um i'm gonna get sober for our family now my dad had tried many many times but he had never told me he was going to do it and i never because i wasn't very older god i would share this with your audience because i'll never forget i said i this was literally the holy spirit because it wasn't me i literally said i said hey dad you know your past does not disqualify you from being happy in the future i have no idea where that came out of me but your past doesn't disqualify you and my dad cried my dad i only saw my dad cried twice and that was one of the times when he cried and was this little car at carl's jr wow and he goes i'm never going to forget that and i just since you just said what you said i think we carry around these boulders we it's almost like a weapon we use against ourselves we keep hurting ourselves i did this i had this failure i hurt this person i made this mistake you're just going to keep hurting yourself with it these are these bags you carry put them down aren't you tired of carrying these bags around with you of your past set them down write a new chapter of your life you know put the bags down that doesn't disqualify you it doesn't disqualify you from being happy and successful and making a difference it does not disqualify you and my dad proved that and so i would want to share that with everybody today that's so so good ed your your life is um it's a tapestry of of adventure and success entrepreneurship to um huge risk and creation but when you come to the end of your life how do you want to be remembered i don't i won't be probably remembered but i want obviously you know you will be remembered i will not let that stand up in the universe if you're here we're here you're here you're here you're well i want to make sure that i answer that fully by the way i'll probably go before you so please yeah talk about me a lot when i'm done what i mean but i want the lord to look at me and say well done good and faithful servant i want that really badly but i have this other hallucination that i kind of live by and it's my version and and so i do think about this i'm sort of known for what i'm about to tell you but when i was 45 i went to dinner my daughter's the one like me and we walk in i'd started to kind of get more well-known in the public space and it's my birthday and my daughter snaps at me and then she says dad what's up with this midlife crisis and i said what honey she was the midlife crisis you know you're on social media you're taking selfies you're kind of dying your beard now i don't know what's going on with you but i think you're going through a midlife crisis and i said you know what bella i am but i was in a crisis i had a young life crisis too and i had a 30 year old crisis i said daddy wants to replace himself every year so the max was little weird this car wash this man every weekend was there reading the newspaper or when he says to me one time he says how old your little boy and i said he's six and he goes well enjoy the six year old because when he turns seven that six-year-old's gone forever which his parents we know that to be true and when he turns eight the seven-year-old's gone and i didn't mean to be flippant i don't know where this came from i said to him sir when did that process stop for you what age and he kind of put the paper down he looks at me goes what i said when did you stop replacing yourself every year and he says uh i don't know i said you should figure that out and for me bella as i'm talking to her i've tried to do that every year in my life that daddy's now i'm 50. a 49 year old should be gone forever not his principles not his standards not those things but that version of me should be upgraded and improved because here's what i feel like when i pass away i want to get there with the lord to go well done eddie you knocked it out of the park good and faithful servant but i think he goes by the way remember that genius i created this is who you could have been i'd like you to meet him and the genius version of me is standing there the things i could have done the places i could have gone the memories we could have had the accomplishments the contribution the way i feel the way other people felt the difference i made in the world i want you to meet him eddie and when i meet that guy i want to go i caught you i caught you man and he goes i've been watching you you did it man congratulations to me heaven a virgin of heaven irwin is me catching that guy a version of hell is i meet him and we're total strangers wow i didn't make that difference i didn't make the contributions i didn't have the memories we didn't have the moments and i understand the principle of my faith is that i'm accepted i understand that i understand that christ died for my sins i'm not i'm not going anywhere near that but everyone knows what i'm talking about right i'm saved by the grace of god okay but i want to be clear about this i still want to catch that guy god made me with a purpose he made you with a purpose he made you with a genius to speak your language irwin i think we have a it's not a responsibility it's a pleasure it's fulfilling something in us in our heart it's an expression of our spirit to fulfill that genius and when my breaths in this body are done i want to have done that no pun intended maxed out i want to have maxed out and i don't want to meet that guy and be complete strangers because god put people in my path i walked into mckinley for a reason i've had business failures for a reason i met that little brown girl for a reason right i met the people that i met in the uber the other day for a reason and so i want to be the fullest expression of me hopefully a reflection of god's goodness in people's lives by using the genius he gave me and so that's a version of heaven in my mind while i'm here on earth right now so that's sort of uh what i'd like to be remembered by i guess if i'm going to be remembered i i i love that and that by the way every time i'm around you every time i'm around you i want to become a better version of myself and i i think that's a part of your geniuses inspiring everyone around you to not settle for less and go to you and and i think the person is only listening superficially will think it's about money no and when it's really about living your life with fullness and uh to be fully present to be fully alive and to not waste any time and one of the things that you and i have in common is that we all we both have a morbid sense of death we do i do we are we're both ancient samurai you're right up each day today is a good day to die yes yes how did that how did that develop in you because you do have that sense of both being fully alive and aware of the temporary nature of this life i i wish i knew exactly where it came from but i if i'm being candid sometimes i'd i would close that door as a little boy in my room because i could hide in there erwin and i would contemplate why we exist just like you did when you were searching for those answers that's why i connect with you so deeply and i would just think is there a purpose to being here and i thought about death quite a bit now as i've read by the way i've had some child psychologists and people on my show they tell me that children often think about death but that there becomes a point if they have a beautiful upbringing where they begin to think more about other things you and i weren't afforded those other things and so i think i stayed in those thoughts that are common for children by the way to think about death they wonder where did i come from when does this end that's a normal thing for a child i just think for me sitting in that room hoping there wasn't a bunch of chaos going on downstairs in my home i thought a lot about that in my life and for some reason this is what's bizarre it gives me comfort to think about it it gives me energy it gives me inspiration um it gives me the it's oftentimes my contemplation of death that makes me so grateful for this life and so it's not been something that's been detrimental to me nor has it been for you it's been actually the opposite it's a trigger a mechanism a pattern a thought that has served me very well now i'm a 50 year old man who's had probably millions of thoughts about my death i don't obsess about like i'm going to die but i certainly evaluate if i did what what was this story the one i wanted was this book of my life the one that god destined for me did i make the right decisions you know what are the mistakes i've made so certainly i think about that i don't know the moment it happened but i definitely know it's been millions of thoughts about it so so good all right someone's listening right now and they are inspired they're motivated they want to step into their greatness they want to step into their genius they want to uh begin to move forward and to live their life maxed out in the language that you would use yes where where do they start well the first thing is start get moving so uh you ca i can't teach you nork and irwin how to drive a parked car you have to get moving there's got to be some kind of motion so you've got to put something into motion clearly you have to have some idea some vision of what you would like to accomplish but i don't believe it has to be in its entirety you know if you if you asked henry ford when he started ford motor company hey you're going to build this car thing like who's going to fix them where the tires gonna come from how are they gonna get fuel eventually what if he had a thought through every single step you had to take in order to make that vision reality steve wozniak who is a founder of apple is a very good friend had him to some of my events they started that thing as a board company they had no idea there was going to be an iphone or even the internet or that they were going to be the most influential company maybe of all time what if when they started that board company they thought through all of the things that could go wrong or that they didn't know so stop focusing on all that you don't have the scarcity because there's there's there's a whole bunch of stuff you don't know can't have won't have and and no you don't know everything and no but know this as someone who's been down the road a little bit god has this amazing ability that once you get into a room and you get into a space and you're busting your tail and you're working hard he shows you the doorway into the next one and when you step into that room you've got more preparedness more resources more genius coming out of you than you ever imagined in fact that genius you have the more you step through these doors the more magnified it becomes the more beautiful it becomes its full blossom could become into frame if you keep stepping through these doors so where would i start i'd get moving i get some idea of what i want to do i take i want to start a business start it get something on ebay type up a business plan get a mentor follow some other podcasts follow erwin when irwin's book comes out you better get that thing right i would just start somewhere your deal is this everybody you know what to do you keep telling yourself you don't know what to do and have no idea because that's your defense mechanism for trying you know what to do you know what you need to do next you're probably going to write some goals down you probably got to get a vision maybe you got to call somebody and enlist them maybe you got to get on your knees and pray about getting clear on where you want to go and what you want to do so this lack of resourcefulness that we have as humans i don't know how much baloney yes you do there's an internet there's millions of experts out there i do not accept that you don't know that you know better than that get in motion get moving make some mistakes get back up and you know what you're gonna find out this expression of your genius starts to come out of you but if you're not moving if you're not serving other people it stays suppressed it stays small i don't believe any of you were born in your life to live small i'm not talking about millions of dollars i have a sister who's blind irwin she's diabetic she lost her vision she's a preschool teacher i don't know what andrea makes a year but it's probably forty thousand dollars a year she's a genius with children she's living an extraordinary life she's been a schoolteacher now for 20 years she's incredible at it she started out as a schoolteacher to be a teacher's aide until she got her real job so to speak but she got moving and when she got there she fell in love with it and has never left i haven't lived a better or worse life than her i'm not more or less than a genius because i have more houses than my sister she's living her genius because she got moving and she's a lot better at it now than when she was in the beginning so i just say get moving make a plan execute a little bit make some mistakes if you're a person of faith here's what blows my mind last thing irwin if you are a person of faith and if you're listening to irwin you may be right you may not be here's the thing i see so many people irwin they got god with them at bible study on wednesday god's with them at church on sunday but somehow when they wake up monday morning and they gotta go become an entrepreneur or they walk into the business world now they're alone you're alone well you know what you take that power out of your life you take god out of your life you take the holy spirit out of your life you take that genius out of your life it is scary so i would just suggest to you you you have that same god with you on monday morning you have that same father in heaven on monday morning with you when you walk into a boardroom or a meeting or you're making that business plan you'll be amazed at the genius that'll flow out of you but maybe some of you were raised with this mindset that well that stuff's not for god baloney it absolutely is for god you're supposed to help people with the business you have you're supposed to help people with your life with your hobby with your craft with your charity with whatever you're doing so i would just say enroll god in your vision i i say this often i don't say this just because irwin leads a big old church my business partner is god here's the truth the reason some of my answers are what they are because there's entire times everyone in my business career where i was busting my tail doing everything you're supposed to do and it still didn't go well and there's other times in my career where i wake up and 90 days later we're in a whole different place and i can't explain it to you well only the only thing i could feel like the lord just picked me up during those times put me on his shoulders carried me for a while set me back down in a better spot and i'm a big believer in the parable of the sower i just believe this you keep planting enough seeds you know look the birds are going to get a few of them right the weather's going to get a little bit of them but there's a harvest but if you're not planting any seeds there's no harvest you got to get to planting some seeds so that's what i would say ah well that's that's more than enough that is so inspiring and you know just just for fun just a few random thoughts uh any any historical geniuses inspired you throughout your life yeah a few of them are super random um well obviously you and i believe that jesus is the greatest genius so that's a huge one but there's a guy there's a guy named napoleon hill that wrote a book called think and grow rich he's a very simple man who you know i just believe is a genius he inspired me because he wasn't the king he was like a king maker he was somebody that was a king maker also i love great music and so i and my dad got me later in life into classical music and that's a that's a very easy to identify genius in somebody sure so i have a very eclectic taste but like i love beethoven like i love beethoven it's that was a true genius but i but i also love nat king cole i love frank sinatra like i just had sinatra on before we started right i had the chairman of the board right i'm i'm a music lover i i uh adele is my neighbor and she's just she's in her backyard imagine this when you have a dell in her backyard singing karaoke some nights and it's this just angelic amazing voice i'm sitting there across the fairway like lord are you serious i'm getting adele again tonight now sometimes it's three o'clock in the morning i want to go over there and pipe her down but so these musical geniuses for me have been the most obvious expression of genius and then my hero other than my dad i think you know was dr king i wrote my dissertation in college on martin luther king why do i love dr king so much because he was a flawed man see god used a sinner for good in the world and it's a great example because we're all sinners see a lot of people that read about dr king they don't know this guy you know dr king had an interesting journey sometimes right yeah but he's the most transformational figure and has made the greatest difference as a human being probably on planet earth in the last hundred years or more why because he used his genius his incredible vision his incredible humility his incredible oratory skills his ability to enroll people in a vision right his relentless work ethic his ability to stay calm under pressure and duress he had a high degree of what i call equanimity he learned how to stay calm under duress and so to me that's one of the great geniuses like me he's a sinner he's made mistakes right all of us have and i think when we look at these heroes of ours these geniuses sometimes we think well this part of them isn't perfect or or we mistakenly think they are perfect and we're not like them and the more i read about dr king i'm very much like him in many ways he made his mistakes i've made my mistakes but he made a huge difference in the world and so probably of all the geniuses non-musical dr king has inspired me the most because i see some of my potential giftedness or genius similar to his in a very small way what a wonder wonderful unexpected uh array of individuals it's really really beautiful uh beethoven was the first album i ever had when i was around eight years ago and so i i grew up with classical music and of course have great admiration for dr king and and and such such a relevant uh icon for this moment in history as well and and that's how you know so you think their work his work is timeless his message is timeless he we wouldn't it be wonderful if another dr king emerged right now in our culture we we so could use that right now and so maybe hundreds of them could emerge but yeah i i love that because example because when you think of geniuses oftentimes you think in the worlds of in the world of physics or in the world of science or botany or music or art uh but mlk junior was a genius when it comes to moving us towards human ideals and you know when he spoke about you know social justice and equality and uh and really that's at the core of the genius of jesus is that the greatest expression of genius is when we become fully human and when we realize that the essence of our humanity is the most important aspect of who we are more than our gifting our talent our intelligence our our appearance and we need to take some time and focus on the essence of who we are and i love this conversation and i want to thank you so so much for um for saying yes to me a guest on my podcast and helping me launch our first episode of the genius off it's my honor and okay now that we're done i will tell you turns out you're anointed at this too so everything's gonna be good thank you brother hey love you talk to you soon all right god bless thank you so much for joining me for today's episode i want to thank ed milette for sharing his genius with us i want to encourage you to pick up his book max out your life strategies for becoming an elite performer and i want to encourage you to pick up my book the genius of jesus releasing september 14th and begin to discover the genius within you let me encourage you to subscribe to the genius of podcast on apple podcast and leave a review if you're watching on youtube leave a comment leave a review let us know what part of the conversation has made an impact on your life and if there's a special guest you would love for me to interview let me know well thank you so much for joining me today and remember every episode the genius of has one singular intention to unwrap the genius within you you

Channel: Erwin Raphael McManus

Views: 3,130

Rating: 4.9786096 out of 5

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Id: MGyEuPpkaDE

Length: 62min 35sec (3755 seconds)

Published: Wed Aug 11 2021