Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: Everybody is missing something in life. I felt prisoner to my own success. Change is hard. Change is hard. I get it. Change or die.
[00:00:08] Speaker B: I'm gonna change things.
[00:00:10] Speaker A: So what the hell can we change? If we can see things differently, we can have some different results.
[00:00:14] Speaker B: Only on NOW Media Television networks.
[00:00:21] Speaker A: Welcome to Be the Giraffe. I'm your host and guide, Chris Jarvis. If you are looking for ways to stand out and reach higher in business, with money, and in life, then you're in the right place. On Be the Giraffe, we meet the innovators who dare to be different and stick their necks out.
We learn how they broke free from the herd and used their long necks to find better paths. Today we have an exciting show. My guest is Dave Steck. I've had the amazing pleasure of getting to know Dave.
He is the author of Just Be the Bank and the founder of Access Insiders and the Steck family office.
He's invested in 81 companies, so he knows a thing or two about a thing or two.
Most importantly, he's an amazing human being. As evidence, he's taught his sons how to be even more successful than he is, with a multibillion dollar exit to their credit. Dave, welcome to Be the Giraffe.
[00:01:12] Speaker B: Well, thanks, Chris. I'm grateful to be here.
[00:01:14] Speaker A: I'm very lucky to be here. I wrote a book about Be the Giraffe, which is about being different and sticking your neck out. And the more I get to know you, the more I figure that maybe you should have written the book because you were living this life and you have so much wisdom to impart. It's a shame the show's only an hour, but please tell me, what does the audience need to know about standing out, about reaching higher?
[00:01:41] Speaker B: Well, I guess the first thing I would say is you always have to look at where you start and where you end. And at least from my perspective, I started in a trailer park for the first 20% of my life, and my parents had 8th grade educations. My mom was one of 10 kids, my dad was one of four kids. Those 14 siblings had 660 children, and I was the only one to go to college.
The problem, of course, with college is that they teach you how to work for other people.
And only when you become an entrepreneur, only when you become a business owner, only when you have to hunt and kill and eat, do you really realize that you are in control of your own destiny, not someone else.
And that was what I wanted for my sons. I wanted them to be able to make money, do Good. Have fun every day on their terms.
And fortunately, they have.
[00:02:35] Speaker A: So you've created this fantastic. I mean, fantastic life for yourself. We talked a lot about your philosophy, which we're going to get into.
You've done great work for them. They've been uber successful.
You've got a lot of interesting projects. I'm sure we're going to talk about some of them. It didn't start this way. And so you. You said you grew up in a trailer park. You had very humble beginnings, but something changed. Like what? What was that journey? What.
What caused you to do things differently or to take a different. When did you realize that you had to break free from the herd, not be one of the 60 cousins? Like, you're the only one who went to college, so you did something different. That couldn't have been easy.
[00:03:12] Speaker B: Yeah, and I don't think it's any one thing at any one time. It's sort of a consecutive series of things that happen in the course of your life. But my first one was in the trailer park.
My dad got hurt on the job.
He was an iron worker and fell from the fifth floor of a building and was out of work for 22 months for the first time in his life.
And we ate mayonnaise sandwiches every day. We couldn't afford three. We had two every day. And for 22 months, that's all we had.
And the good news is, I still like mayonnaise.
And the better news is that I had two things that I developed during that period of time. One, a hungry, burning desire to be filthy, stinking rich. I had no idea what that meant. I just heard about millionaires. I thought, I've seen it on Beverly Hillbillies. It must be doable.
And the second is I wanted to be a great dad, not a biological father. My parents were like my John Wayne and Greta Garbo. I mean, they were like the big dogs for me. And even though they were very humble by other people's standards, they injected in me four things that I never lost. One, my dad, his integrity and his work ethic. And my mom, her. Her love and her passion for more.
And those four things just kind of guided me through life. And I got to a point one day where all of a sudden, I'm sitting in a cubicle and I'm completely overwhelmed in corporate America. And I wrote down four words that changed my life.
Grateful, but not content.
So every morning I wake up, I'm like, the happiest guy on the planet. I'm the luckiest guy on the planet. But I'm not content and I never will be.
[00:05:01] Speaker A: I love that. The.
The grateful.
Recently, when we first met, in our first conversation, I told you that I was going back east for the celebration of life for my mother. And you gave me some fantastic advice and told me that when your mother passed, you wrote a letter to her, and you shared that letter, which is a very personal thing. We had just met. Right. And then I took that letter, and I ended up writing letters to my sister and my mother for their ceremonies when I was back East. And I thought, wow, this is a special man who gave me this gift and shared your relationship with your mother with me, which I was then able to share with the 200 people who were at the ceremony, which I thought was very interesting. And I had also shared with you with my mother at the end, even when she was incontinent, she couldn't move. And she was in a real. She was not in a great place. A very proud woman.
She kept saying, I'm so lucky.
And there was this moment that she's telling me that as she's. She's dying and she's saying how lucky she is that it was even a moment to me a couple months ago, which it was, how can I be anything but feel lucky in life? That. That. That if she was that way with the situation she had, who the hell am I to not be grateful, you know, for what I have, but also not be content? Which I think that's a.
It's such a different attitude than the.
The victim mentality.
[00:06:27] Speaker B: Yeah. And I know this has nothing to do with the show, but I encourage all of you who have loved ones, which we all do, to write them letters.
Not emails, not texts, but actual letters, and help them understand what it is that you feel about them before it's too late?
Because most of the letters that I've written, at least on the death side, have been too late. Wouldn't it have been better to have communicated with your mom what you shared at her memorial service before she passed?
So when my sons went to college, I grasped the opportunity and ran with it to write them letters. And they were long and they were emotional, and they were heartfelt, and I was crying, and I had a box of Kleenex.
But I was on a mission to make sure that if I didn't breathe another breath, at least I got it out.
[00:07:20] Speaker A: And that came through in our first conversation because when I Literally, this past week at the ceremony, I shared with people that we're afraid to reach out to People, some people die too soon. You don't know. And other people die over a long, extended period where they're sick. And by the time you know that they're ill, they're not comfortable. They don't want to see you. They don't want that time.
And what I was sharing with the younger generation, which they would call cringe, the rest of us would call embarrassment or discomfort, is be. Is the greater feeling than discomfort. The one that hurts more is regret.
And I think that's a big part of your journey. My journey. But episodes about you is that regret for not having done something, and I know it's a big. That's a big thing for you, is the.
Is getting people to embrace discomfort.
[00:08:06] Speaker B: Yeah. I think there are two things that I'll pick up on and run down, run to ground with you. The first one is regret. And the second one is being comfortable.
Regret is a horrible thing. You should never have regret, because regret is focusing on the past when the future is only forward.
So if you're focusing on regret, you're always going to feel like the victim and never the victor. And you've got to always have a victor mindset. The second thing is too many people think that the end game is being comfortable.
Comfortable is the worst thing you can be because comfort is the silent thief.
The more comfortable you are in life, the more likely it is that you're going to be there forever.
[00:08:55] Speaker A: And by there forever, you mean in the same job, in the same role, in the same. In the same home, in the same circumstance.
[00:09:05] Speaker B: Right. So, for example, someone ends up at six figures a year and they've arrived.
Well, they're never going to go anywhere else if they feel comfortable because there's never this push to be on a quest for more. As I've always thought to myself, comfortable is where dreams go to die.
[00:09:25] Speaker A: Say that again.
[00:09:26] Speaker B: Comfortable is where dreams go to die.
So the more comfortable you are, the more likely it is that you're dying a slow death.
And unless you break free, unless you embrace being uncomfortable, you can never outsize your own mind. You can never get to the point where you become more than you ever expected.
And the truth is, all you really need are two things in addition to mindset. You either need to meet the right person or learn the one right thing.
And either of those things can take you somewhere you never dreamed possible. But when they both happen together, it is life changing. It takes you somewhere that in retrospect, you look at, and that's happened to our family a couple of times. It's rare, but when it happens, it literally catapults you somewhere you didn't expect to be. You're in an orbit that you never expected to be in.
[00:10:25] Speaker A: This is fascinating because people are so caught up with work life balance and they want to be comfortable even at a young age. What do you say to those people?
[00:10:34] Speaker B: Yeah. When people talk about work life balance, the first thing I think is, what are the three things I want every day? And I really had to be very intentional about what these things were during the course of my life because I want to. Sure. I want to make sure that my son's understood. You see, what you don't learn, your kids will inherit.
What you don't become, your kids will inherit.
So it's not okay for me to retire. I've early retired three times. I suck at it, as my sons remind me. And the fourth time I thought I was going to early retirement, my sons called me out and they said, pops, you suck at retirement. What you need to do is rewire, not retire.
[00:11:21] Speaker A: So let's go to that. So we're going to talk about that in the next session. We are going to talk about Dave's fantastic attitude, how he gets uncomfortable to reach all new heights, and how it affects his family. So make sure you come back.
There are many twists and turns along the better path, and this is one of them. We'll be right back with more Be the Giraffe.
Welcome back to the only show where standing out is the standard Be the Giraffe.
So many interesting thoughts about that.
I'm going to give you free reign to go with with how you've reframed your family's legacy, your family as a business, the things that you've done that have completely changed the lives of everyone related to you.
[00:12:28] Speaker B: Well, I think the first thing that's important is that you have to start your kids young.
And I happened to sit down at the kitchen table when my boys were 5 and 7, Josh and Blake, and I said, look, boys, we're going to learn some things that are really important that you're not going to fully understand yet, but we're going to talk about it every year until you get it.
And it starts with two triangles.
The first triangle is what I call the happiness triangle. And in order to be happy in life, you've got to want to make money, do good, and have fun. If you can do those three things every day, it's going to be a great day.
And which of those is the most important?
Well, when I survey already, Successful people who all make six or seven figures a year, who have seven or eight figures of net worth, but they've got one or two zeros less than we do, and they're looking for direction. And I always tell them, there's one of those that's more important than the others, which is it? And they always guess, do good, because they've been programmed into thinking that that's the right answer. And I say, well, if it's not that, what would it be? And they say, to have fun.
And I say, you just don't get it. It's all about making money. And you shouldn't be apologetic for that, because the more money you make, the more good you can do. The more fun you can have, by the way, the more money you can make to do more good and have more fun. So if I had been in my trailer park trying to do good, I would have had a very limited capacity to be able to do that. But now I can do enormous good. I can support enormous numbers of people and causes because at the end of the day, I felt as though to optimize your family, you really wanted to start with yourself first, then your family second, then your causes third. And ultimately that will lead to a legacy that you can live today and plant seeds in a garden that you'll never see.
And that was important. So we created a family office when we had enough wealth to be able to do that. And so we treat our family now like a business.
It's no less loving. In fact, it's so much more loving and intentional because we have a mission, vision, values, strategies, objectives, key results and priority initiatives. And people say, what the hell are you thinking? Well, if you're as intentional with your family as you are with your business, how can you not be successful?
If you've been able to operate and build successful businesses, which we've been able to, ultimately it allows you to have your kids outgrow you, and that's what you and I want.
[00:15:19] Speaker A: So I love. In the first segment, you talked about mindset and the importance of mindset, and we talked about that a lot last night.
This is a contrarian mindset. I mean, this whole idea of, we think, the putting. I certainly embrace the idea that I'm going to put myself last. I'll do things for other people. If I'm making money, I must be being selfish. We talked about my desperate attempts to leave financial services many times. And I keep coming back for different reasons, healthier reasons, I think, but the unhealthy at first, then Healthy later. But this is a contrarian, I think. Before we get into how important contrarianism has been in your success, please tell the audience about the contrarian view of family and money and that this doesn't make you a bad person. Some of that is really important because we have bad feelings about money or that we may inherit from our parents. I think all of this ties together well.
[00:16:11] Speaker B: Remember I said there were two triangles that I wrote down? Well, the first one was make money, do good, have fun. Those were the three tips on that triangle. The second triangle was the money game.
Now, I could have said how to make a boatload of money, but my kids wouldn't have really embraced that. But when I added the word game, all of a sudden they became interested and it became the money game.
And I said, there's really only three things you need to learn about winning the money.
To generate more cash, otherwise known as income. To accumulate more wealth, otherwise known as assets that throw off income and go up in value and keep it. Now, you're a master at keeping it. Not to say you're not great at other things, but that's your superpower. You know how to teach other people because you've done it yourself.
So I said, we're going to focus on generating cash, which come in three forms. Passive, active and income and recurring. And we're going to accumulate more wealth and we're going to keep more.
And at the end of the day, I'm going to give you the choice.
As they got older, I said, we can either stay small and keep it all.
We can go big or go home, or we can just add a zero.
And of course, they voted to go big or go home. And I said, hold on. Yeah, they're young and they don't have any money, right? So I said, hold on, since I'm the only one here with any money, we're going to add a zero.
And I always ask people, if I could help you add a zero, would you put me on your Christmas card list forever?
And it's actually a great question because that's what everyone ought to do, whether it's your income or your net worth. If you can just add a zero, that's a great life. 10 changes your life. And that's what I wanted my sons to understand, that while making money isn't everything, it makes everything better as long as you're a steward of that capital in a good way.
[00:18:10] Speaker A: And so for clarifying for the audience by adding a zero, that's somebody who makes 100,000 going up to a million or making 50,000, going to 500,000 or being worth 10 million and going to 100 million or being worth 600,000, going up to 6 million. We're talking about one more zero in your net worth or in your income.
[00:18:27] Speaker B: Correct.
[00:18:28] Speaker A: And that's game changing.
[00:18:29] Speaker B: And by the way, it also transcends to life because if you can add a zero to your happiness, and while that's not easy to quantify, it should be qualified because at the end of the day, people always talk about, oh, you know what?
I spend quality time with people and I say, you're so full of it, you don't understand it.
You can't spend quality time with them because you can't manufacture quality.
You and I, Chris, have to focus on investing, not spending. We have to invest more time in quantity because the quality moments will then appear.
But if you invest less quantity, you're never going to see the quality because you don't know and you can't manufacture quality.
So what's different for you and I is that our kids quality moments are different than yours and mine.
It may be playing Legos with your kids and that's like the highlight of their life. And for you, you say, oh, God, I've got to do that again.
But it's okay, because you're investing quantity and eventually the quality will appear.
[00:19:40] Speaker A: So right now we're in the generation where, like, the microwave goes too slowly, right? It heats food too slowly. So there's an impatience. There's. The younger generation is very much focused on quality of life, which we already talked about, the need for discomfort to grow.
But now there's this need to have everything happen immediately. So what do you say to that generation that's wanted to happen fast, but looking at your need that you have to have quantity of time and experience and patience in order for the quality stuff to come out of it.
What kind of advice do you have there?
[00:20:15] Speaker B: Yeah, well, you said quantity and quality and patience.
I'm about quantity and being impatient.
I am on a quest for more.
And when you think about your life, your kids and mine are at the beginnings of their life where you and I aren't going to go anywhere anytime soon, we hope, but we're at the beginning of the rest of our life.
And so for me, it's all about focusing on what are the big things that I want and how can I get them sooner.
You know, if you think about it, it's about compressing time because time, especially for very successful people, financially, time is the Real currency, it's not money.
Because once you have money, you realize that time's the most important thing you've got.
Time is the one thing that's worth more tomorrow than it was today because there's increasingly less of it as you go through your life and it becomes the real currency and the day after that it's worth more and the day after that it's worth more.
So you've got to compress time. You've got to be willing to be impatient.
But it's not about instant gratification because all you're doing is stealing from the future when you gratify yourself today.
[00:21:34] Speaker A: In the next segment, I want to Dave to take us through his power of six, which is amazing, to help you get your business, your life, everything to the next level. You want to stand out, find a better path, reach higher. Stay tuned. In the next segment, Dave's got.
We're back with Be the Giraffe and the view from up here just keeps getting better.
Welcome back to Be the Giraffe with my guest, Dave Stack. We have gone through so many interesting things.
Dave has a, has built a mysterious nine or ten figure net worth, which is which nobody knows exactly how much, but more importantly is he has taught other people how to make money, even celebrating his kids building a multi billion dollar business. So Dave likes to give back and I'm not going to steal his thunder, but when I was reading a bunch of your work and the material you've shared with me, you have this very cool power of six and I do like that you give me homework. There's numbers involved, there's always a learning back and forth which I really appreciate.
You've had a significant impact on my life in a very short amount of time. So again, thank you for being here. Please tell us about this power of six story, how you got this, what it means, and most importantly, how people watching can actually significantly impact their intentionality, their impact, their success by using this, this, this fantastic thing that you came up with.
[00:23:09] Speaker B: Yeah.
Many of you have probably seen the movie Jerry Maguire. Who hasn't? Everyone loves it. I love it.
And I had my Jerry Maguire moment as well. It was in the middle of the night and I woke up in sort of a cold sweat and I just started writing and it was because I had one of the original Palm pilots, a Palm 5X, and the battery went dead one day and so I went down to Radio Shack and I got a replacement battery. And who knew at the time that when the battery went dead you lost all Your contacts.
Well, for whatever reason, my backup didn't back up, and I lost 3,000 contacts. And I was devastated. I mean, how am I going to contact anybody? How am I going to get in touch with you?
[00:23:59] Speaker A: For context, imagine for the young people, your iPhone dies. There is no icloud. You have no Snapchat, no text, no phone, no website passwords. You have nothing. It's just.
It's as if your life has been a you.
The universe has just blocked you. Like, that's essentially what happened.
[00:24:17] Speaker B: That's exactly right. And you can imagine how angry you would be. And I was in the middle of the night, and I woke up, and as I was writing, I was realizing, my God, it doesn't even matter, because those people aren't out of my universe. They're just out of my contact list.
But here was the big thing. I realized that everything I'd ever been taught was wrong around networking.
It's not about a lot of people in your life. It's about less people and deeper relationships. It's about quality people, not quantity people. All those things kind of started surfacing as I was typing this thing, and I realized, we are going to change our family's future by doing fewer, bigger things with fewer better people through fewer deeper relationships and avoiding at all cost the masses of asses, eliminating those that we had in our life. Because all of us are dragging around people in our life that we don't have the courage to get out of our life.
And those become dilutive.
And I wanted to have people who are accretive in my life. I wanted people who could help me get to where I was trying to go quicker while I helped them.
And all of a sudden I realized, how many people do I really need to do that? How many Chris Jarvises do I need in my life?
[00:25:42] Speaker A: Most people would say fewer than one.
[00:25:47] Speaker B: But I came up with the number six.
And it was so weird. I don't know why I came up with six, but I did.
And later my dad passed away.
And my dad died on June 6th of 2006. He died on 060606.
And that's why I shared that with you, because I meant to share that with others. There's no book. There's nothing to buy. It's all about how do you get to where you're trying to go quicker. And the truth is, you need fewer people in your life that are better people than you do. More people. And every networking book on the planet tries to teach you you need more people in your life. But how many deep relationships can you have?
And I concluded probably six.
But if I could teach those six to find their six, and if they met my milestones, as I called it, I created six filters. I won't work with people with uncontrolled eid.
I'm sorry. Won't work with people with uncontrolled greed. I won't work with people with uncontrolled egos. I won't work with people I can't implicitly trust. I won't work with people who aren't great at what they do. I won't work with people who aren't committed to win and committed to me. And I won't work with people I don't like.
And once I embraced those six filters, all of a sudden my universe of contacts came down to such a small number of people that I didn't have to look over my shoulder when the future was forward, worrying about what was going to happen.
And it literally changed my life. And then my sons created their six, and as you said, one of them was one of the four founding partners in a little company that started and became in a few years, a $3 billion company. How crazy is that? And it's all about focusing on the fewer betters, not the masses of asses.
[00:27:51] Speaker A: Yeah, that was a big point for us because of the chapter avoid the masses. And the asses was like, okay, there's a story here.
And how hard was that? So go through that process, too, because that was. You've got a process in applying the power of six, which is even you ranking the people.
Usually when you talk to people in the mindset space, in the transformational space, it's about everybody. You see the best in everybody, and you're looking for the best. And you're trying to find happiness everywhere and be very mindful and find peace and be okay with the situation you have. And you go in a very different direction.
[00:28:26] Speaker B: I do.
[00:28:27] Speaker A: And so.
And it serves you well. And it's not to be empty because you're having. We developed a very deep relationship in a short amount of time, but also realizing that that may push somebody else out. But just talk about that, like, the importance of.
I think the ranking of people in your life or seeing who's still contributing does create a bit of awareness and some intentionality and some mindfulness of where am I today? Because you're aware of what's actually happening in this relationship without just saying, I have 10,000 friends on Facebook, and they're obviously not friends.
[00:29:03] Speaker B: Right.
Think about everybody in your life.
Most people don't think that they fit into one of three buckets.
There's the 8020 rule. So, so let's take the 80%. The 80% are people who are okay with being mediocre in their life. It doesn't mean they're bad people, it's just that they aren't on a quest for more. And that's okay. But that's not where I am because it doesn't serve me to be mediocre, it doesn't serve me to settle, and as sure as hell doesn't serve my family moving forward to be one of the masses of asses I want to outperform. I want my kids to see that because what they don't learn is as a result of what I haven't taught them.
So at the end of the day, I took the 80:20 rule, which is the Pareto principle, and I called it the double Pareto principle. So there's the 8020 rule and then there's within the 20, the 8020 rule. Now mathematically it's 80%, 16% and 4%.
Well, how many people are in the 4%? Well, just do the math. That's one out of every 25 people. Those are the Chris Jarvis's of the world.
Ultimately that's who I want to focus on because their world, if they apply the power of six, means that their six are equal to or better than my six just mathematically.
And so as a result of that, it doesn't take long to create a very small powerful community to do fewer bigger things with fewer better people through fewer deeper relationships. And that's ultimately what the power of six is all about. And by the way, there's nothing to buy, but if people want to Access it, it's accessinsiders.com TP06 and they can get it themselves.
[00:30:58] Speaker A: The power of six because great hour of six.
I love that. And, and that's so.
I feel like people are looking for lightning in a bottle right there.
That love at first sight idea that I'm just going to keep meeting a lot of people and hope something clicks. And you only get that topical thing versus really exploring, being intentional. You're not spending more time, you're spending more time with fewer people, which allows you to get to that deeper thing. And I assume that also applies for knowledge industries, how you become good at something that it's not about trying, it's not about taking piano lessons for six weeks and then taking violin for six weeks and then taking the trumpet for six Weeks, and then the drums for six weeks. There's. There's something to diving into something.
[00:31:42] Speaker B: Yeah. I think you always have to go deep and be very focused on anything if you want to be great. As I teach my kids, it's more likely that you'll be great at something you love. If you go deep, then good at something you don't.
I don't want to be good at anything. I want to be great at everything.
Now, as a practical matter, everything is a broad universe, and I know that's not possible, but I'm not going to accept the ability not to be great at everything.
And then I'll choose those things that I love.
I think Steve Jobs said every day, and this is my son's big thing.
Every day he wakes up and he asks himself, am I about to do what I love?
And if the answer is no, too many days in a row, you're never gonna be great at that.
So if the answer is yes, keep on that path, because you're more likely to be great at something you love than good at something you don't.
[00:32:43] Speaker A: I love that.
So Dave's Power 6 is finding six people in your life who are better at something, better at what you do than you are, or have complimentary skills and do things that are different from what you do. Or synergistic. Or synergistic in some way.
This is why we have the show, and this is, for me, the selfish reason is to meet people like you who are doing things differently, doing things successfully, have different approaches, are having greater impact, can impart great wisdom. I mean, this is the purpose of this.
And so I know you have so much more to go through. So now I want to get into, in the last segment, what are things people can actually do? What are you doing for people now? What are things that people can apply? Because this is all invaluable, strategic mindset, purpose, philosophy that people need to embody. But I know you have a million takeaways of things to give, so we're going to rapid fire through, you know, Dave's sales. 616 fantastic must dos. And we'll see if we get those done in the next segment. So stay tuned. Next segment, you're going to learn how to elevate your perspective to see that better path and start taking it on. BE the Draft with Dave Steck. I'm Chris Jarvis. We'll see you in the next segment.
Be bold, be curious, but most importantly, be patient. We'll be right back with more Be the giraffe.
This Is Be the Giraffe with Chris Jarvis. It's time to evolve and elevate.
Welcome back to Be the Giraffe. I'm with the Oracle, Dave Steck.
This has been spectacular. We just talked about the power of six and doing more with fewer people and really being intentional.
You told me a story about you doing a lot of research, getting really good at understanding economics. You went to the lawn school of economics.
You had a great idea, and it didn't get received very well.
So tell us a little bit about that and then what you did with that, because I think there's a lot of people who want to do things, but they're not getting great feedback. So the converse of the power of six, of finding the six great people to inspire you, motivate you, support you, is the rest of the masses of asses that hold us back. So you had it. You had a story. And I think since it led to so much wealth creation, I think it's worth sharing.
[00:35:26] Speaker B: Yeah, it was in 2002. I had just exited my third company that I had built and sold, and I was looking at what do I want to do next? And now I'd finally gotten a little bit of a war chest. So what was I going to do from an investing standpoint?
And I did a lot of research, but not on what to do or how to do it or even who to do it with, But I was looking from a timing standpoint at the right time to do anything.
Because timing is the most important word in investing.
Timing is the most important word in life. You and I met at the right time. We didn't meet a long time ago. We didn't meet in the future. We met now.
And so at the end of the day, I was invited to do the first ever State of the Union for real estate investors, because that's what I was studying, real estate, how to be successful in real estate.
So I was invited to do the first ever State of the Union at Harvard.
And this was very impressive.
[00:36:33] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:36:33] Speaker B: And In March of 2005, I stood up and I showed all my research, and I said, the market's going to collapse.
Now, for those who don't know, the market began its collapse in May of 2007.
So in 2005, it was the height of the market. It was on a tear. You could never possibly lose money in real estate until you did.
And so at that time, I'm projecting that the market is not going to go well.
And I pretty much got thrown out of the room because that's not what.
[00:37:10] Speaker A: People thought or what they wanted to.
[00:37:12] Speaker B: Hear or they wanted to hear because they were making money in their sleep, basically because the market was doing all the heavy lifting for them.
And so I got thrown out of the room pretty much. And three years later, I got invited back. Hey, here's the guy that told us to get out. Who many who got out. No one raises their hand. Out of 2,000 people, what are you going to do next? I'm going to go all in in Las Vegas. Well, for Those that don't know, 68% of all homes had dropped in price, 65% in Vegas in 21 months. It was a slaughterhouse. And so when I said, I'm going all in there, no one bought it. And in 2011, I'm going all in every. No one bought it. The point of it all was I realized that the way to be successful in life is to always be contrarian, to basically do the opposite of what everybody else said. And it made me think back to when I was at an event and someone shared some Social Security statistics on people in America. Out of every hundred people who are born 65 years ago that would reach retirement age, the Social Security administration reported that 38 had died, 53 were dead broke. And I thought, that's 91%.
Here's an idea. Don't do what they do, because you're not going to get to where you're trying to go quicker.
[00:38:38] Speaker A: So back to earlier when you talked about living for retirement. This idea that 91% of people will never get there or will get there with no money, and they've given up their whole life, everything for.
[00:38:51] Speaker B: And you know that better than anyone because you've studied it so much, and how to make sure that people don't find themselves in that sit situation.
Well, it turned out that maybe 5% were financially stable and a few percent were financially secure, and only 1% were wealthy. And I said, well, that's the group I want to be in. So here's an idea. I won't do what the other 99% do. I'll do this.
Well, one of the things I realized about being a contrarian is that when you're a contrarian, and you're right, you're a genius. And when you're a contrarian and you're wrong, you. You're an idiot.
Well, you're not always going to be right, but your goal is to be.
So you really have to embrace the notion of courage.
If you don't have courage around your conviction, then you'll never be comfortable being publicly wrong.
But if you put yourself out in the public with something that's completely the opposite of what everybody else thinks, you better be as confident, conviction as you can.
And you've got to be willing to have the courage to do it and to say it and to act it. Because as we talked before, what you don't learn, your kids will inherit, and what you don't become, your kids will inherit. So you gotta be willing to put yourself out there.
[00:40:11] Speaker A: Well, and that's. I think that's one of the. We talked about this at dinner last night, was that innovation and success is not a democracy.
[00:40:21] Speaker B: So true.
[00:40:22] Speaker A: Like, that's that idea that if you're gonna. If you ask people what they think of your idea, more than likely they're gonna say it's a terrible idea because they don't want you to get hurt. They don't. They're not taking the risk. It's like asking for advice is asking for advice on, On. On whether something is a good idea is a terrible way to frame it.
[00:40:41] Speaker B: Yeah. And I think the other way to frame that is that people feel compelled to be politically correct.
They feel like they need to tell you what they think you want to hear.
And that doesn't serve either you or them or anyone else. And I've always taught my sons, never be politically correct, but always be politically astute. At least know that you're about to step in it, and if you've got the conviction and step in it, it's okay.
So just don't be politically correct. It doesn't serve anyone.
[00:41:16] Speaker A: And you're not saying be politically incorrect. What you're saying is don't. Don't say the thing that you think somebody wants to hear. It's horrible, Right?
[00:41:23] Speaker B: It's for cowards.
Think about that.
[00:41:25] Speaker A: Right. Well, certainly in business advice, that. That's the point, too. That if you want. That's the point too, that if you want to get to that next level and be the giraffe and reach higher in business and life, you have to realize that people say they want to be an outlier. They want to be that person way off at the end who has more money. But my line I use on stage a lot is that people want to be an outlier, but they don't want to be an outcast.
It's like, I want to be one of the guys, one of the girls. I want to be like everybody else. I just want to end up with more stuff, which is just not how it happens. And you've been sharing throughout the entire interview about treating your family like a business, being intentional about what you do, not apologizing for making money. Realize the connection.
And there's so many thing things in that thread that are so important for if you want to be that 1%. When you looked at the Social Security stats, I want to be them. Which means 99% of the advice that's out there is not for me.
And my whole financial, you know, the financial practice for very wealthy people is all. Every day I get. Why doesn't my team do this? It's like, I don't know, Dave, you're worth nine or ten figures.
You must have figured something out.
I'm just going to hold the mirror up because it's the same. Why are you worth more than everybody else? It's the reason why my advice is different.
And so that, like, if everybody likes the idea, if it's conventional wisdom, it's probably unconventionally unnecessary when you get to a certain level, it is, I think so. With that point, one of the most important things that I want to make sure we have a little bit of time for is talk about this whole specific spending. You blew my mind in the car yesterday with this whole spending and that we don't ever spend anything. And that doesn't mean you're cheap.
Just tell us how you look at this.
[00:43:10] Speaker B: Yeah, people always talk about spending time. Hey, where did you spend your Saturday night?
Spend is one of the worst words you can have in your vocabulary.
Spend is like expense.
And if you spend time, you're basically expensing it. You're not investing it.
So our only word in our family that we use is investing. We invest in relationships. If I go to Costco and buy strawberries, that's an investment in my fulfillment because I love them and it turns out my health.
So everything that I do, whether it's time or money, has to be an investment.
So I will fly here. I will. I will invest the time with you in order to help people get to where you're going quicker.
And by extension, I hope those that you serve will benefit from it. Because I'm serving you.
I'm not looking for anything in return because I'm good.
But it's so important for all of us to focus on investing and only use the word investing. Because when you catch yourself using the word spend, you need to stop and say, is this what I should be doing? And you're going to find out it's not.
[00:44:32] Speaker A: I love that it's so important because that's the way you look at time.
You first you said time is more important than money, which we talked about yesterday as well. Time is more important than money. If you can save people time, you can become valuable to them, which can move up that. Move up that level. With your power of six people and then with your family, you're looking at everything as an invest and not an expense. With an expense is a negative thing. It's on a different side, right? It's in your P and L and it's not good.
So this whole investing is so important. And I love that you invested this time in me. And I would say for everybody who's out there, please invest more time. Watch this again.
Pay attention to anything you can find that Dave writes, including just be the bank. Really teach you about being the bank who's always the winner in the financial transaction. It's great knowledge. You should definitely invest the time in yourself, invest the time in your family.
Change the way you look at this. Change your mindset about your family. Change your mindset about money.
Change your mindset and perspective on what it is to be successful and make sure that the lessons that you don't learn don't get inherited by your children so you can change all of this. So I'm very excited, Dave. It was been a fantastic episode. I really appreciate the time.
It's been invaluable. Please invest in elevating your perspective, Invest in seeing a better path and invest in being the giraffe. We'll see you next.
