Undercover Billionaire Glenn Stearns on What It REALLY Takes to be SUCCESSFUL | Impact Theory

[Music] people hop because they don't stick to it they don't go through the pain they don't go through the fear and then they end up in a cycle that goes over and over and over again right and the ones that are successful and i don't just again mean financial but the successful and fulfilled they fight through the pain they stay later they work through it they sacrifice and then they feel proud because it works it will work when you do the right thing and you struggle and you don't give up this episode is sponsored by skillshare and the first 1 000 people to click the link in the description will get a free trial of skillshare's premium membership enjoy the episode hey everybody welcome to another episode of impact theory today i am joined by uber entrepreneur wildly successful and the star of undercover billionaire i am with glenn stearns glenn thank you so much for joining me today hey nice beer tom dude i'm really excited to talk to you what you've accomplished is really impressive it would be really impressive if you'd come from a wonderful upbringing wealthy family but i know that things were a bit of a struggle in the beginning i'd love for you to walk people through that but in the context of answering this question is the american dream alive or is it dead absolutely alive i look at my life and i look at a lot of people that i know because i'm very interested in helping uh children of adversity and so there is still a clear pathway to be able to make it you know i grew up in a household that had struggled with addiction and alcoholism and my my uh father worked the graveyard shift my mom cleaned homes and it was a checker at a grocery store you know so uh um i didn't know any different right didn't know that there was just you know i knew there was a great big world out there but you know we grew up struggling and um what town was this this was in silver spring maryland so it was kind of the outskirts of dc and and we had bars on the windows and you know brick apartment buildings and um it was just a lifestyle that again like i said i didn't know any different i failed fourth grade uh by the time i made it to eighth grade i had a child yeah so that was again a normal for me and then uh once i got probably about that age about 14 15 i started realizing you know there was more to life i was in a lot of um pain i guess you could call it over emotional pain yeah just having a child and that was a weird adjustment and so i was falling in my father's footsteps i had an intervention in my own high school with my teachers and my mom playing with drugs and alcohol drinking and crazy yeah what age did you start drinking 14. whoa yeah and so you know i'm just doing what my dad did i'm doing what my uncle my aunt my grandfa you know everybody else did right and then um ended up deciding to go to college no one in my family had ever gone and i went not because i'm this brilliant high achiever it was because my girlfriend was going you know and uh and i found that to be the case a lot of times where you know it's not how you start it's how you finish and so by being uh in a place that you know gave me opportunity being in college was this wonderful first step of getting out of my neighborhood and out of my old life you know and and i'd love to say again that i just quickly adapted but i was still the party kid you know and and um but anyway then it just quickly one day right after college ended i i remember being in a bar in the middle of the night laughing hysterically at something very juvenile and um in the middle of that laugh i remember thinking god laughed at the same dumb stuff last night and the night before and it just was boring what age are you at this point i'm probably uh 22 just out of college or still in just the week yeah right after graduating yeah just what am i gonna do i guess i keep partying and having fun you know what did you study uh economics okay yeah in business and uh yeah and then i just that day that night and i've said this but it's in the middle of my deepest fog i had my clearest you know kind of aha moment of i don't want to do this anymore you know i just want to why do you say deepest fog i was in the middle of the bar at late at night you know so literally literally literally yeah and that next morning i said to my roommate i said hey why don't we drive across country let's go to california he said all right let's go you know and so we got in the car and drove and before we get to the bench and the sort of you know how do i get this part of the story define for me what the american dream is um you know i think it's really about having the ability to realize that you can do almost anything right that you're not constrained by a government or a religion or anything that keeps you in a place that can find you you know and so i i mean happiness to me is not about money right it's about the satisfaction that you are doing something larger with your life and feeling very confident in the fact that you are leaving a mark in the world you know and we've gone all over the world and i've seen very very happy people um and yet they don't have a lot you know so i don't think it's defined by by money yeah i think it'll be important in this to really for people to understand your story to tease out two concepts so one you've got sort of happiness fulfillment you've got the sort of eye opening moment that you have with your health battles which of course we will get into but then you've also got what you just defined which i am personally um intoxicated by this idea of you can build whatever life you want it can be bigger than your circumstances where you came up and i think part of why because i i think that right now the prevailing idea is that the american dream is dead or it's non-functioning or something right and so defining it i think becomes very important i think your definition is fantastic why though isn't the truth that it worked for you only because you came up before it broke yeah well i also believe that old adage whether you think you can or you think you can't you're right you know and you know i think there's been a lot of uh hype or or there's been kind of this sway in and our um culture that leads to people feeling that they are a victim and i don't really fall for that um yeah okay i'm a white male you know and so you go okay you don't have it well i didn't grow up with a silver spoon you know again i had a wooden spoon upside my head maybe but that's about it and so i don't think that um and yes it is harder for minorities and yes it is harder for a lot of different groups but if you decide you want to make something i think in this country there is a pathway to do that you can look at anybody from barack obama you know to our vice president today right that if you are a female or if you're an african-american or whatever that it may be hard i'm i'm not putting that out but there is a path if you really surround yourself with the right people and don't you know keep in your head that you're you can't do it if you think you can i believe you can so let's drill into that so obviously an undercover billionaire you do something that's very very impressive and not just for the cameras but you're stripped down to a hundred dollars you're dropped off in a town where you know nobody you don't have your phone you don't have your contacts and you're given 90 days which let me tell you as somebody that's built multiple companies that's absurd i have literally no desire to have to try to pull this off in 90 days with cameras on me um what is that path so when i think about i'm most interested in the people that have the deck stacked against them the hardest and i want them to understand right that there is a path out of that so i was giving a talk at google one time there's an african-american guy in the front and he asked me do you think it's harder for me and i said it seems self-evident to me that it's harder for you but now what and getting focused on that idea that you're talking about that first it's what i call the only belief that matters so if you think you can you can because your behaviors are going to follow that belief but if you think you can't you can't because your behaviors will follow that belief but now let's assume that they're able to believe how what is the path and is there a path is there a gazillion paths like what does that mean well when i look at my career and i started i didn't understand where i'd end i didn't you know i didn't know i didn't have a lot of mentors i didn't have this idea that i want to achieve this certain goal i and as i grew and i found people that could mentor me and be a part of my success i began to really formulate a plan that says i want to how did you get mentors i grew you know again i came out to california where i just started looking around and seeing names of people on buildings and all this and i started seeing them in the paper and i would literally go hey you want to go to lunch you know out of the blue out of the blue i'd go to charity events and try to meet them and just want to just say hey i just want to ask you some questions a lot of them were in their 70s and the interesting thing that i have found because i've become the membership chairman for so many charities now because i kind of was in this middle ground i wasn't the old guy and i wasn't the new guy i wasn't my 20s or 30s and when i was in my 40s i was membership chair for every charity you could ever imagine but it was bridging the gap right and what i found that these older successful people they want to give back they want to tell their story but a lot of people when they're young they think oh they don't want to talk to me they're too big they're too important they're you're too busy right and it could be farther than the truth if you just ask you never know and i'd love to just pick your brain just love to know your story how you got there and what happens they say absolutely it's did that seem self-evident to you like i just need to talk to because i know so you're on in fact now is probably the time to tell the bench story you see the big beautiful house i think that'll help people understand that step well yeah i don't know if yeah i think over time asking became much easier right and an example is when i first drove out to california i literally found myself on a bench over the pacific ocean in corona del mar beautiful homes beautiful cars people everything you could ever imagine and i thought i want this life you know like you know i again grew up pretty hard and i'm thinking wow like how do you get this and there's a man in the yard and he's trimming his rose bushes and i went up to him i just said what did it take to get this house you know i said i'd love to have something like this i think i can do it what is it what did you do that's when he politely told me he was the gardener and he was not the owner but he said i thought the man he says i think the man's in real estate so i want to get into real estate right i have no clue but i just thought if if real estate can get you here i want to get into real estate and but the point to that story more is just asking right just going up to people and saying what do you do how'd you get this and then is that something i'd be interested in you know and i've asked a million questions by the way and i've had people turn me down on answers or have people give me answers that i wasn't interested in or whatever right but but it's just you slowly start to build your own idea of what you want you know and and um you know and i've found what i found interesting a lot of times is i also i was young and i'd say i'm gonna be the hard charger that's i saw it in wall street that's what they did and i'm like i'm not real good at being a dick you know so okay i'm going to be the soft you know and what you got to do is be good at being you right you don't have to be somebody else and your transparency or your authenticity should i say it it it will reveal itself and then people will come into you if you are who you really are right if you're a good person you have morals you have integrity all those things that we really need if you believe in karma and you believe the fact that good things happen to good people then you will if you are again if you're out there and open i think you'll attract people and when you attract the right people right then you know you can go faster you can do the things that you're really interested in doing all right so step one is believing that you can do it right so you thought i might as well ask because i think i can actually pull this off i don't know what this is quite frankly but i think i can do it and i just need somebody to point can i say something show you that step one because we're talking to people that maybe haven't gone to step one right you have to believe i if i just convince myself that if i keep thinking this way it will happen because by the way the first few times you might get thrown back on your butt and go okay it didn't work for me no you have to get you have to be you have to keep doing it right it's not always going to be okay i have confidence in myself i had a a lifetime of not having a whole lot of confidence yeah i wanted to ask you that so did did you because you're dyslexic right so i imagined that that wasn't easy to establish a mental vision of yourself that was positive so did you ever worry that you weren't smart enough to pull this off all the time okay and what what happened was whether it was being young and you know again just take failing fourth grade i can look at two things worst thing never happened to me it's embarrassing i'm at the age where everybody knows i'm a dummy or wow i got whole new friends you know i've got this whole new set of friends which ended up happening to me which in two weeks i'm gonna have 45 of them come out to my ranch this is from eighth grade so i'm still friends with these people right i have a child in 14 worst thing in the world right oh my god my life is over or wow i've got a beautiful young child you know and it's about how you think you know to think of it like i didn't think of it like that in the beginning that's my point when did that change it just as life went on i realized what i thought was horrible became wonderful and why do i spend energy on things i cannot control i had to fail fourth grade why am i going to be upset about it again i think about this after the fact and realize don't spend energy on things you can't control so as my life got as i moved along i started wasting less energy on things like that and then realizing find the silver lining what good came out of this issue you know and i've had a lot of them right so okay so i can't change the things that i could probably cry over so what what lesson did i learn you know and then and now my life in the last 15 years 20 years has been really focused on all the the learnings you know and not the woe is me stuff because we all got those yeah that that's a pretty radical transformation so i i really want to make sure that people don't look at you as the after picture and think this is the before so obviously we've talked about the hardships dyslexia is an ongoing thing so how do you how do you think about your weaknesses and address because speaking for myself so my big fear was that i wasn't smart enough to be successful like that was at some points in my life almost crippling right and so i really had for me i had to learn about the brain i had to learn about brain plasticity and that that gave me the get out of jail free card of not needing to tell myself that i was too dumb anymore because it was like well maybe you are too dumb right now and that's fine because you can get better did you do you have a strategy for dealing with something like dyslexia i i think you look at the whole scarcity and abundance kind of concept right and i found that when i would instead of focusing again on the fact that maybe i'm not the best reader maybe i don't retain a lot very you know a lot of things well instead of that the fact that if i find smart people and it's very cliche but it's very true and i surround myself with them that i end up looking smarter right because and and you watch some people and i would it can give you so many examples of people but i won't okay that that are in fear that if i surround myself with someone smarter than me it'll make me look dumb right and and so they surround themselves with people inferior and then your whole company or division or whatever you're in fails right versus people that have enough confidence to say wow you can fill in the you know the blind spot i don't have or my weakness and you fill it all in and your whole company rises or whatever you're doing your whole project rises because all of you combined to make this uber you know quick fast smart um project go right and so that became pretty evident to me because i didn't have a lot of the skills that why don't i let those people do it you know why don't i bring in more people and the more talent i brought in the quicker we went you know and the less time we wasted and i went all right i think i'm on to something here you know and then to admit it hey i'm not the smartest guy in the room you know i'm the chairman of my company i hate running the meetings i don't i don't like being the one that has to tell people what to do i'm not good at that i have i like the the vision right i like i got an idea let's march up this hill that's fun to me but the details let's let people that like to do that better than i do do it it's interesting i would put you into a certain category of entrepreneur if i didn't know what you did on undercover billionaire because there are people that have like a really extraordinary ability to galvanize a team to gather talent to surround themselves and then it's basically like all right hey i'm the one that sort of raised the money and put everybody together and now you guys go and actually build this thing but you have that very striking ability but then you also have the ability to create a vision to march forward to put very strategic steps into place take us back to the beginning of undercover billionaire you're sleeping in your truck you're not even sure what business to do how did you begin to cobble those ideas together so that you can actually get something done so let me take you back a step on that too for a second if you don't mind so here i am doing my business for a long time and become um fairly large and successful and all the things i thought were wonderful and then i get hit with cancer and at that point my focus became a completely different focus what's the most important thing right and that's my family so i said i'm going to sell my business and i sold it to a very large private equity group and i focused on the family and by doing that i was then able to realize that when i got back into business the the problems weren't very large in business no matter what compared to cancer compared to your life right so now it's just problem solving right so let's get in the room let's figure it out and then if you look at it because i remembered 2007-8 which was the worst financial crisis in our lifetimes and i was dead center of it and when i got cancer because i used to say i never in my life when i go back to that and when i got the cancer i went what i would do to go back to that because that was fun i just didn't i wouldn't have called it fun back then very painful we're going to lose everything but it was all about getting in people's faces let's figure this out together going to new york and all the wall street guys and all the every lawyer and everybody that was out there but it was living right it was it was doing things so when then you take that and you and you realize we're not dying it's just problem solving now all of a sudden the fear i guess that business had on me for a while why lose everything you know you know and and i don't know if you've ever had it you know you build something and you're feeling great one day and the next day you know these lawyers are going to come and you know and and there's always what can us what can bring us down well once that went away and i started realizing that's just part of the game then the fear of that went away so now i can go out and create and do things so when it came to undercover billionaire and i went out what had happened was people kept asking if i wanted to do a show my wife and i did a show 15 years ago and by luck someone called if we wanted to do it we did it it's called the real gilligan's island um i ended up winning it she came in second place long story but for years after that people kept calling hey we want you to do another show do you want to do a show and i said look i'm a business guy you know i did that for fun but that's okay i tell you a show i would do strip me from everything take away my name my money my contacts i bet i could rebuild it again because i was getting tired of hearing that you know that the american dream was dead and whatnot and i also wanted to do it because i wanted my children to see that you life is not easy that when you do get into a hole it's not about laying there and feeling like the victim it's about getting up and pulling yourself up out of the hole and figuring it out and so i wanted that and i would say if you want to do a show with me strip me of everything and throw me in the middle of nowhere and i would do that over and over again to these production houses that would call me and then discovery called back and said if you really want to do that show you put your money where your mouth is i said sure and they and they've put some little constraints around well how about 90 days i'm going well it's kind of tight you know i said well how about if we start with like five thousand dollars is it how about a hundred dollars and it kept getting tighter and i said okay let's see what happens you know and um so off i went i did it i didn't think much right which is the story of my life right i didn't plan i just thought i'll just show up and see what happens and um and i like that you know i like having my back against the wall and i like that feeling and we all i think we all do well at being successful right we walk around we give our money to charity and you know we we do things that make us feel like we're good who are we when everything is taken away from us and in 2007 and eight when everything was taken away in that moment i was in the darkest hole you know and looking around and thinking the whole community and industry is looking at me who am i now i kind of like that feeling why because that's the real you that's interesting it's it's when when you are not built up on the fakeness of money and people kissing your ass and all those things who are you as just a human being and so that moment when i was at my darkest in 2007-8 literally it's a longer story than we have right now but i stood up and said let's let's go and literally went in front of everybody's face and never hid and said how are we going to get ourselves out of this as many of you know i'm all about constant self-improvement growth mindset and a relentless focus on progress and skill acquisition that's why i'm super excited to tell you guys about skillshare skillshare offers classes designed for real life and all the circumstances that come with it these lessons can help you stay inspired express yourself and introduce you to a community of millions creative self-discovery and expression can settle your mind and spontaneous acts of creativity can help break up the routine of a day indoors skillshare is an online learning community that offers membership with meaning so much to explore real projects to create and the support of fellow creatives skillshare empowers you to accomplish real growth with thousands of classes covering dozens of creative and entrepreneurial skills for instance they have an amazing class by simon sinek called presentation essentials how to share ideas that inspire action if there's anyone that should be teaching that class it is simon cynic this is a perfect example of the unique classes you can find on skillshare you can also find classes on illustration design photography video freelancing entrepreneurship and so much more and skillshare is also incredibly affordable an annual subscription is less than ten dollars a month and right now the first 1000 viewers to click the link in the description we'll get a free trial of premium membership so you can explore your creativity don't miss this one guys sign up right now what do you mean it's your problem glenn i go no you say oh you're 30 million bear stearns i said how are we going to get out of this because i don't believe i owe it to you you know and and we would go over battles over the loans let's say i gave them stated income loans they said it's my problem because they failed how am i supposed to check the income when you told me it was a state you know so we would battle over the stuff and little things like that would happen and and instead of digging my head in the sand it'll go away let's just fight it out right now and so we did that on everything and then it worked and so when it came to now we move forward and it's undercover billionaire i said i want to be stripped of everything and i want to be in a hole again and i want to show my children what it's like to climb out and i will tell you in the middle of that hole i didn't realize that there would be millions of eyeballs on me like i didn't think that part out and i can see myself when i've watched the show staring off and i'm realizing at that time i know exactly what i was thinking like maybe i can throw the show because it will never be on because i am going to fail and the whole world is going to watch me fail which means what i did in the past was luck it was all the things you fear in life of going you know am i really that good or was it luck right and so it was a moment where i said i want to run i want to hide i don't want to face these demons and these things because i'm going to look bad and and again that was the moment when i go this is the time to stand tall right and so digging out and it worked really well and everything turned out to where i'm very proud of the show it became probably one of my proudest moments of my life because the fear and having that devil on your you know give up give up just you can throw this you can you know they they won't ever have to make the show all those kind of things we all face that in our lives it's just not with millions of people watching right it's just we i don't this job wasn't what i thought it would be maybe but the job over across the street's better that career over there is better and people hop because they don't stick to it they don't go through the pain they don't go through the fear and then they end up in a cycle that goes over and over and over again right and the ones that are successful and i don't just again mean financial but the successful and fulfilled they fight through the pain they they stay later they work through it they sacrifice and then they feel proud because it works it will work when you do the right thing and you struggle and you don't give up right and so it all became very uh meaningful because it my children then got to see this and that's all i cared about and then when it got bigger than that and then the whole world i've had thousands of people say wow so inspiring thank you it got me to think about what i need to do i didn't even dream that that would happen you know and i'm so thankful to hear other people who have been touched by by that it's so incredible to it's so easy to look at somebody else and think well they could do it but i wouldn't be able to do it because they don't have the kind of fears or the self-doubt or the limitations that i have right and that's part of what makes your story so incredible is a you're honest about like i was actually thinking about taking a dive and just like making sure that the show never came out right um and then you don't and i want to know is grit something that comes naturally to you or have you developed tenacity over time i would say that it has developed over time and i didn't understand it in the beginning you know i didn't know what would was happening to me right again all of the hard things that happened in my life i'm very grateful for because it did lead me to a place where now it doesn't seem to be that hard and so i happen to have a podcast called grid happens right and it's very but it's about that grit and it's about the determination not giving up feeling um that you're not alone and what you touch on i i love that's the best part of why i like to tell my story i don't like to lead with success i like to lead with vulnerability right i like people to go god that guy can do it i got a 2.1 in college i did a little better he did right or whatever right or i didn't go to college okay you know i barely went to college you know i mean you know i learned about paying the bills through college i didn't really learn you know much in terms of you know economical statistics or whatever you know how do you you're you've got the mental fortitude that you're building up over time you're learning really powerful lessons at a time this is mostly i'm sure pre-internet so you're cobbling all of this stuff together yourself how then do you begin to get what is on display in undercover billionaire where you're pivoting where you're asking things like who's my buyer instead of just what business do i find interesting like when do you begin to learn these business lessons yeah there's been a lot of hardship in my career as well as successes right and and so when i look back on everything that happened to me i always thought this was the end and then there was aha right and then something would just take me to another level you know and i mean like a million things i would sit in the meeting with the government with all of these contractors and i would be one of the contractors and they'd be complaining we can't do this anymore because they would all be yelling about some little you know issue and uh i'll give you an example real quick they would they would notarize deeds they said we cannot notarize the government's deeds anymore unless the government comes and signs in front of us and this is illegal and they would just you know and they're all complaining and i yeah i agree with i thought so when the the meeting ended i got up and said why don't i bring my notary in every day at lunch to just sign the deeds so we end up signing tens of thousands of deeds a year making all the money and i paid her you know an extra you know whatever to come in on our lunch time right and our company thrived off of that it was just there are these little things that other people see as problems and you can go but it's pretty clear that there's a opportunity right here that's one of the more interesting things to me about your mentality so it's like with investing they say you know when there's blood in the streets that's when you buy and when other people are you know just like trying to gobble things up that's when you sell at a time where everybody else was closing down you were opening up how do you find the opportunity i've always ran into the fire you know literally when i was a kid i remember uh my sister ran into the laundry room in our because they would like five times they caught the laundry room on fire whoa and one time my sister run in there she was like three and i was out there and everyone was like the fire was coming out of the building right and no one was doing anything about it and i ran in there and crawled on the floor and found her and dragged her out whoa and it would be like why didn't anybody else do that like i did i remember always for some weird reason running against the crowd i don't know why right but it would just go the opposite way i can you know my dog ate the little you know electric cord and it was flopping around and everyone ran they were afraid and i i ran over there and i pulled it out of the wall right like i'm going why doesn't anyone else they always run away and i i don't know why but then i began to like the fact that when people ran away i'd run the other way and so then business that would happen and became very clear to me when everyone dove out the window i thought look at all of this opportunity look at all this talent nobody's gobbling up this talent i could never get these people in a normal world and so i opened five offices of failed companies november 07 opened five more with each with like 20 to 50 people in each office and i did that the next year and then we shot to the moon you know because everyone else had set on the sidelines for two years and i gobbled up all the talent yeah that to me so it's very interesting that that started out very early for you um that definitely did not start early for me but you do begin to realize okay in in disruption there is opportunity and one of the things that given the way you talk on undercover billionaire i'm guessing that this is true for you as well so what ray dalio calls principles that you do something in life and you realize okay that worked that didn't work and so you begin to formulate these things the next time i encounter this i will act in this way right and one of the like hard and fast beliefs that i have is in disruption there is opportunity so you want to look for that moment where everybody else is either annoyed that a change is coming along so think of social media so one of the the key elements to my success was recognizing social media was a business tool when everybody else just thought it was a you know distraction right and so when people get annoyed or pissed off about something it's like that's the very thing i want to go look at because there's something that's causing a disruption in their life which is why they don't like it let me tie this to the horatio alger award that a you're a recipient of but you're also part of that committee that looks for people that have overcome extraordinarily difficult situations people that can see an opportunity and difficulty to me that's like the thing right like i said earlier the only belief that matters is that you can pull it off so somebody that's in that gnarly gnarly gnarly situation how what is it that allows some people to see the opportunity and stops other people from seeing it because i know that in you guys have had i don't know if you call them students recipients whatever that they did well but their brothers and sisters imploded right and we have studied that tried to figure out why why in the same family you'll have three brothers and sisters that are in jail or die of drugs and one that just uses education as their way out right and they say i don't want to be anything like this family what is the difference they've gone through the same hardship they've been and endured so much adversity why do they stand out and i don't know if we've ever found this answer yet you know but what i do know is that person that young person that has said i'm going to take tools and better myself to get myself out of this situation i want to invest in that person and so that's where i put my energy personally and the horatio alger association does that right we get 40 000 applicants a year to help and these are all people who have gone through a lot of severe adversity and we help maybe 35 to 4 000 3500 4 000 students a year by giving them scholarships to college and then we have a um when we go through our award ceremony we have about 110 or so scholars that are national scholars that we bring in and we we meet we mentor and we spend three or four days with them every year in washington dc and then my wife and i have gone and done other events with them outside of the association but i am fascinated with that person i feel like i've led a similar life but i did it by accident right like i didn't say education was my way out i fell in the education barely graduated but i learned lessons along the way right i learned how to get a pell grant how to you know these kind of things these kids are determined these kids are focused on knowing that you know if i you know can get myself a good education i will be able to get a great job and i'll be able to live a different life and so i absolutely am fascinated by those people and they'll be tomorrow's leaders because they also you got to think right when i've had a many friends but one especially that i can tell you he never touched adversity his family you know had really helped make sure he had a very easy life and at the age of 40 leading his business it had a very big turn and he couldn't get out of bed for two weeks right and thought the world was over and yet once he got through all that he really got some thicker skin and he learned that's you know he had lived a pretty extraordinary life never to face any real adversity here are these kids that face so much adversity early on that when they hit a business issue or something it's going to be like yeah this is this is nothing did you ever ask him what he was most concerned about like when the world is ending quote unquote like what that really means yeah in this case he ran his family's business and he thought he'd let his whole family down because the family business got attacked with a lot of lawsuits because of a situation and he thought it was over you know and and i took him to an event uh where we had a young girl who had frederick's ataxia to attack the nervous system and we were doing a fundraiser and i put my arm around him i said that girl she's got real problems like you got a few lawsuits like what do you think he says don't have a big deal dude like i go yeah i think you're gonna get by you'll be okay yeah no joke and he you know crushed it in his business you know he got nervous he opened another business worrying about that now he's got two great businesses you know i mean yeah you just he led to some wonderful things for him so when you're you have time with these horatio alger um scholars what are like a few key ideas that you try to impart on them well what i what i i do is i again i lead with my vulnerability i explain situations that happened to me when i was young that i think they can relate to my dad fallen asleep drunk at the wheel and i'm driving and wrecking the truck right you know things like that right and so i'm driving the truck while he's asleep i wrecked it but um and uh but you know like things and they go i i can relate to that you know i remember talking to the girl i said you got something in your eyes she goes no my my mom's boyfriend stuck a hypodermic needle in my eye you know and you're like i shouldn't ask that question you know and and uh you hear these these things but so i will lead with you know having a child at 14 failing fourth grade things like this and then i think they break down a little and go well he's kind of like me and then they go maybe i can keep going you know and they they already know they're on the right path by the way you know they they're they've got you know scholarships to amazing colleges and now they're here you know justice clarence thomas is there to greet them at the supreme court you know he's a member of horatio alger and there's a lot of very successful horatio alger i mean ronald reagan to condoleezza rice to colin powell you name it you know um have been members of the association and uh or our members and so they're pinching themselves you know and so yeah we get together and just try to get them to realize they are extraordinary people you know and and because that's what the world is again is we find people that don't want to give up when it gets hard it'll get hard for everybody you know yeah that to me is one of the most interesting things in terms of what's the idea that you want to get across with somebody is if you don't give up you've got a chance to figure it out right i tell my business students it's not about how often you're wrong it's about the duration that you're wrong because if you make a lot of little mistakes but you quickly adjust and get on the right track then fair enough but if you stay wrong out of willful willful ignorance because you don't want to look stupid or whatever so you tell people not to bring it up and right then you're going to go out of business and so yeah one of the key things for me for entrepreneurs anyway i mean i'll say this benefits everybody but don't value yourself for being right value yourself for identifying the right answer faster than anybody else and certainly an undercover billionaire that was something you were really good at how do you think about that pivot like how do you not let emotions get in the way how do you like because at one point you guys were going to be a micro brewery and then you end up being a barbecue joint and like how i mean with so much writing on it so little time how do you go up i was wrong and then just immediately focus on something else well it's funny because i was nervous about how that could look to people because i don't want the answer to be when it gets hard you give up right because that is not the right answer but in my case what the people around me didn't realize is i had 90 days i couldn't get up you can't even tell them that no interesting no one knew why i was driving and pushing so hard right and so but i knew i just could not do that so if there is an if you're in a dead end and there is no way then you know when you need to pivot what i learned through that is i thought i still love the idea of beer but why don't i take the best beers because this is there they had the um local breweries all that's the hub was eerie there were so many of them i thought why don't i just go out and i can highlight all the local breweries and it seems like barbecue is the answer because i've seen people lined up down the road at this one barbecue house so if they like barbecue and eerie let's make a barbecue rust and then there's a 50 000 person barbecue event coming up in the month so let's get into that event if we can let's open up a restaurant and let's take the beers from everywhere and bring them all into one location and then the light bulb came on and let's run up that hill everybody wow that's incredible yeah in that the 90 days to get your business off there is this idea of being unreasonable i don't know if you've heard the quote i love this quote so much i'm going to paraphrase because i can't remember the exact quote but basically the reasonable man conforms to the world the unreasonable man forces the world to conform to him therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man and strikes me as you you seem like the person that's able to make those unreasonable demands but in a way that where you've got your team excited they believe in what they're doing how do you pull that off and how do you think about being unreasonable so i uh i learned a few things from a good friend of mine that um richard branson who happens to have been in the news lately and i might have heard of him yes and a couple of things i'll just give you two really quick stories one is we were having dinner at my house and uh it got to be really late and um and he said all right looks like it's time to go we had a bunch of wine and he's ready to go and so we walked out to the car and the driver gets out very nervously and says sir i must have left the lights on because i just tried to start the car and the battery's dead and so as i see richard who is mr cool under all normal circumstances when nobody's watching and he has a little buzz now let's see what mr cool does so i'm like you know in the matrix i'm like going around him is he gonna is this you know cheek moving is he gonna to a big size he gonna rip this poor kid a new one what's he do and richard immediately gets the news you're screwed your car doesn't go anywhere and he turns to me he goes looks like we need another bottle of wine right and i'm like wow like that's the way you you handle people right that poor kid already feels bad enough right and um and then another thing that um i learned is he and i bought an island together is called um mosquito island and i had one point and he had the other point and i went there to look at how he was building his house and he said i'm gonna be in there by christmas and he must add a hundred workers in there and when i went there we couldn't get in the piles of boxes and trash and everything and it was just a zoo and i began to doubt his ability as an entrepreneur and everything i thought he's insane there's no because down the road not the road but another island over oil nut bay they were pristine not a nail on the floor as they built they were proud of their here he had boxes and you know i mean and people and i thought this is insane what he's doing and you know it just didn't understand it well five months later christmas he was in his house wow and three months after that all the other little details were done and his house is beautiful right and what i learned is that those homes take four or five years to build on an island because you island all the political stuff that goes on and getting things on and off islands and he understood that you make an unreasonable demand and you press people and you hold people that he will get things done and you know what even if it got done i bet you by spring he would have been a lot happier than three or four more years right and he's lived on that island he's lived on necker forever and he understands the pace he understands things that i didn't know until later but what it got me to realize is that when you two things that i realize one that's even more valuable than placing unreasonable demands and pushing people is telling people you believe in them there are so many people out there that don't realize their own ability and to say i know you can do this and when you first give them that power that they will that you believe in them the power of confidence for them they they will do so much more than they ever dreamed they could do when you do when you plant that seed people will shine and they will they will prove to themselves wow he was right he believed in me and i'm gonna do my best you know and so those are i think that's the the um important part is making sure you allow people to understand your belief in them you know and then you can move mountains that you never thought were possible i love that glenn where can people follow along with you join you as you build more incredible things uh you know everything is pretty much glenn stearns at glen stearns g-l-e-n-n s-t-e-a-r-n-s-o instagram facebook whatever the other ones are out there you know we uh we're all glenn glinster and so i love it man guys trust me when i say that this is somebody that you're going to want to follow learn from it is absolutely extraordinary what he's built multiple times in front of cameras even so there is so much to be learned with the attitude that you can do it it really is pretty extraordinary and his example proves that if you're able to get people around you and not worry about being wrong there really is no limit to what you can achieve and speaking of things you can achieve if you haven't already be sure to subscribe because we will help you move forward and until next time my friends be legendary take care

Channel: Tom Bilyeu

Views: 290,932

Keywords: Tom Bilyeu, Impact Theory, ImpactTheory, TomBilyeu, Inside Quest, InsideQuest, Tom Bilyou, Theory Impact, motivation, inspiration, talk show, interview, motivational speech, Glenn Stearns, Kind Lending, Undercover Billionaire, Grit Happens, impact theory podcast, interview show, motivational videos, grit, billionaires, billionaire lifestyle, billionaire starts with 100 dollars, what is the American dream, what is the American dream today, the American dream

Id: M7xylRAp_uw

Length: 52min 44sec (3164 seconds)

Published: Tue Jul 27 2021