Identify Your Genius And Leverage It with Mike Zeller

Transcript

Mike, it’s so great to have you on the show.

I’m honored to be on the show and it’s always great connecting with you. I love connecting with other brilliant business minds and you are one of those guys. I’m excited to dive in.

Let’s start by talking about your mastermind and why you have a mastermind group. What do you hope to get out of a mastermind and what you think the top benefits are?

You and I were both part of a Tony Robbins’ Platinum Partnership Group. From that experience, we both came to experience the power of proximity and power being around other people that are doing great things, that are dreaming bigger, that are pursuing things in a resourceful, creative, loving and supportive state. To be able to recreate that is one of the most fulfilling things that I do. Arguably, the most fulfilling thing that I do is my Rising Stars Mastermind. I was talking with a guy, another entrepreneur, we talked about the power of proximity and the power of exponential relationships. It’s like you get to reach into the future, grab a hold of the future and pull it to you. That’s the power of accelerated learning with masterminds, with coaching and with continually investing more deeply in yourself and surrounding yourself with other great people that help you level up. That’s how I like to think about it and why I do it ultimately.

An exponential relationship or an exponential connection is going to move your career, your business, your life path or whatever you’re focused on ahead by leaps and bounds. It’s going to significantly cut the time, the efforts and the hard slog required. One introduction, one connection, one lunch or coffee with somebody could cut five years off of your career path, of the hard slog trying to make it and you have one relationship that cuts all that time out of it.

It’s been so fun seeing so many people in my mastermind and other groups that I’m in and in my experience with Tony Robbins. I’m sure you see it with your groups and the programs that you’ve created. It’s like a shift in one relationship. You look at a great example in history. Henry Ford was a tinker and a failed entrepreneur until he became friends with Thomas Edison. He was in this unofficial mastermind group of all these great industrialists. You look at the people in the group, Edison who founded GE, Ford, Andrew Carnegie and Rockefeller. All these guys interacted with each other during that day and age. Ford and Edison especially spent a lot of time together. Henry Ford’s career and his business took off when he started spending regular time with Thomas Edison and these other guys. Before, he was struggling and limping along failure after failure.

That’s a great example to bring up. That reminds me of the TV series called The Men Who Built America. Have you seen that?

That sounds great. I haven’t seen it.

You’ve got to add that to your list because it has stories not just of Thomas Edison and Henry Ford, but also JP Morgan, Andrew Carnegie, John D. Rockefeller, Cornelius Vanderbilt. These are amazing stories of how these different lives intertwined and how they made such a difference to our country, our economy and to history. They were so influential and they had interesting beginnings. For example, John D. Rockefeller almost died. He could have perished on this train wreck that happened except he missed the train by one minute and he never misses a train. He was going to have a meeting with Vanderbilt and he missed it. He missed his appointment with death and his appointment with Vanderbilt. Vanderbilt then didn’t hire him. I forget the exact story but it just comes to remind me that there are no coincidences. Everything is meant to be part of our history and our path, like the expression that Tony uses, “Life happens for us, not to us.”

Even you and I are a good example of this. I get to connect with one of the smartest guys in the country on SEO because of a mastermind, which is that being you of course. You gave me that giant encyclopedia book that I’ve read a section of. I’ve read a good chunk of it and that wouldn’t have happened if I wasn’t in proximity and now I get to have a conversation with you. We get to learn that life is so much about relationships and we shortchange ourselves by passively accepting the people we have in our current friend group or peer group instead of intentionally creating what we want.

It’s the expression that you are the average of the five people you hang out with the most. If you wanted to be a different, more evolved person, then change your peer group.

I think it’s true for all facets of life. Your relationship quality or health quality, your finances and your emotional and mental state are dependent on the people you spend the most time with.

Who has been a big influence in your life besides Tony Robbins, of course, who was the intersection for both of us to meet through his Platinum Partnership? Who else has been a huge difference-maker in your life?

I would say in terms of the close level, one of my best friends. He was my best man at my wedding, Matt Grimes. He’s soon to be a professor of entrepreneurship at Cambridge. He is one of the smartest guys but also one of the most heartfelt, soulful, generous, and kind people I’ve ever met. I get to spend several weeks a year with him and his wife, and my wife. We travel together frequently and he challenges me. We did a destination wedding because he said, “Mike, if you do a wedding in your hometown, people from your past come. If you do a destination wedding, people from your future come.”

We did a destination wedding, my wife and I, and it was magical. It was in the rain forests of Costa Rica and that was a peninsula. It was to die for. Of course, we got married on the beach in the rainforest and it was incredible having monkeys there and these exotic birds and everything else. It was beautiful.

He’s helped me believe in myself. I think that’s one of the other powers of those great relationships. If you’re a great friend and you’re an empowering resourceful state, you believe in each other and you help each other become more of who you’re called to be in.

I work on cultivating exponential relationships myself. Some of my best friends have come from the Platinum Partnership family. It’s being in a place of constant learning, growth and contribution by going to different masterminds and going to different seminars and things that are focused on improving myself. The personal development stuff means that I have lots of opportunities to meet high-quality people. Some of those have become lifelong friends.

Besides exponential relationships, there’s another term that I’ve been hearing a lot about and that’s exponential technologies. I know that Peter Diamandis is a friend of Tony’s and he’s got Abundance 360, his own mastermind group. He’s also Cofounded Singularity University with Ray Kurzweil and that’s an interesting organization as well. Exponential technologies, those are the technologies that are going to make a huge difference to humanity, to society and to the planet in a very short time period because it’s the Law of Accelerating Returns. Things speed up in terms of technology evolution over time because of Moore’s Law and because of Metcalfe’s Law. Moore’s Law being the fact that every eighteen months the processing speed either doubles or the price for the same processing speed halves. Metcalfe’s Law is about the power of the network. The value of the network grows exponentially with the size of the network. If you have 1,000 fax machines or 1,000 email addresses in the world, it’s only moderately valuable. When you have let’s say 10,000 or a million, then it becomes exponentially more valuable and then it becomes world-changing. What are some exponential technologies that you’re excited about?

There are many of them but obviously the power of robotics and the power of all these bots. Automated machine learning is going to overtake so many elements of our marketing, where the human designs an algorithm to think for you. That’s happening in so many pieces of digital marketing. It’s in the early stages but it’s taken off. That’s going to shift things. I do love the future in terms of transportation because you and I both spend a good bit of time in LA. I don’t like sitting in traffic and I know in the next five to ten years we’re going to have human flying drones carrying us around in LA and we’re going to be flying over the interstates, not worrying about that. That’s all going to be automated. It’s not going to be a human driving those machines. That’s going to be fun.

Have you heard of the Hyperloop?

Yes.

There are two companies that are the biggest pioneers in the space of Hyperloop technology where they evacuate the air out of the tube and there’s a bullet train thing inside of the tube. There’s no friction and it’s therefore very fast and efficient and apparently, you will be able to go hundreds and hundreds of miles per hour. You could go maybe from let’s say LA to San Francisco in 20 minutes to 30 minutes. It’s going to be amazing. Hyperloop Transportation Technologies, HTT, is based in LA and some of the key people are part of a mastermind group called METal: Media, Entertainment, Technology Alpha Leaders. That’s a great group. It’s a bunch of guys who are Alpha leaders who want to make a difference in the world. They’re in the technology sector, they’re in the media sector, running for example television or movie studios or companies like that.

Are you in that one?

I am in that one. I’ve been in METal for five years. It’s been a great group. I’ve spoken there a few times and I’ve met some amazing people through that group like Jay Abraham for example, who’s been on my other show, Marketing Speak, a couple of times. I met him at METal and we’ve become friends. So Human carrying drones, I’ve seen some video of that. That’s quite fascinating. That’s going to be a big game-changer for us. Even just drones that carry deliveries for us. Amazon is making a big push in this area of drone delivery. There are lots of exciting changes to come. Are you incorporating machine learning or bots or anything into your current business model?

I’ve used some different bot technologies for Instagram growth but of course, Instagram perpetually is a bandit but I’ve tested some of those programs. There’s another software piece. One of my mentors, he actually leads the marketing mastermind, David Rice. He’s more of a behind the scenes Jay Abraham type of guy where he oversees and develops marketing and operations for businesses. He’s got an incredible software. I had my buddies at DrAxe.com look at it and they’ll do $135 million this year. I had them look at it because they’ve got three and a half million emails and they looked at the software. They were blown away at the capabilities. It can assimilate almost all of your major software components in one platform that also uses AI to sequence your emails and sequence some of your taglines and subject lines and follow up sequences. I don’t understand it all but I cannot wait until I have a business to incorporate that with. One of the other ventures that I’m involved with is a company called Goalcast. They’re arguably one of the world’s most viral video companies. That’s another exponential technology using social media. They get about half a billion video views a month on their platforms.

I’ve watched a video that Christian Mickelsen did with Goalcast. He’s been on the show as well. He got 3.5 million views or something for that the last time I checked. It was still climbing. You know the folks at Goalcast then?

I do. I’ve actually been consulting with them for about six months organizationally to my core. I’m more of a business architect. I think through and I help the founders and leaders design the business around their guests, plug in the holes where they’re weak, and also develop the marketing and the business model around where they want to go. I can act as a bit of a CEO consultant and then also more of like a CMO in some regard. I’m actually becoming a partner in the company to help them grow in scale. Christian’s video that you mentioned, I actually connected Christian with them to get him featured and he’s got 4.8 million views.

You’re the reason why he’s got a Goalcast video. He’s in another mastermind that I’m in as well. We met originally through Platinum Partnership, but we’ve been seeing each other more recently at Neil Strauss’ Secret Society called The Society. He’s joined that and he was asking The Society brothers to check out the Goalcast video as it was going live to spread the word about it and everything. You are like a business architect. You’re helping companies like Goalcast. Are you helping David Rice with his software company to go to the next level?

I think he could use some help in simplifying that idea so it’s super compellingly clear. He hasn’t hired me for that. I’ve been nudging him and encouraging him, “Let’s distill this down.” They’re growing fast and they’re kicking butt currently. They haven’t heard me yet, but I’m in his mastermind.

What’s his mastermind called?

He hasn’t named it. He just calls it David Rice’s Marketing Mastermind and we’ve got twenty people in the group. It’s the normal $25,000 a head type of deal. If you know Marc Anthony or Mike Rice who created the Digital Marketer’s courses and a bunch of John Assaraf’s courses. He’s got a pretty amazing online course creation program. There are some interesting people in the group for sure. David is super well-connected and knows all the big players in the marketing world too. He doesn’t have a name for it unfortunately, he should brand it though for sure.

I’m still unclear what the software that he has does. What makes this so magical?

That’s a question that I’ve asked him too. I have sat through hours of explanation on it, but I don’t have that. It’s how important it is for us as business owners and marketers to get that one or two sentence explanation on it. He can pretty much guarantee inbox placement at 99%, 98%, versus the Infusionsofts of the world are like 68%, 71%. It’s just how the software works and then they do all the other re-targeting pieces, all the other ad copy stuff is somewhat built into the software too. I can’t explain it in a clear, compelling way, which is why David needs my help.

When I had a software as a service for my previous agency, it was very important to have a crisp description, an elevator pitch for it. This was gravity stream technology I had invented to do an end-run around the issues that you have with implementing SEO in a large company and enterprise. Oftentimes, it takes at least many months, if not years, to implement SEO and it doesn’t need to be that painful. It doesn’t have to be that expensive. It can be over $1 million dollars to implement stuff that you would think like, “This should be pretty straightforward to make your URL search engine friendly and to do a pretty basic SEO.” No, it’s a twelve-month, eighteen-month process. It’s over $1 million dollars with these big eCommerce sites.

My technology would put a middleware layer there and using a reverse proxy, we would swap out search engine unfriendly stuff with search engine optimized stuff. It would alleviate their need to implement at their web server level because of this middleware layer. We charge on a cost per click basis and so it was pay-per-performance. If we didn’t perform, if we didn’t drive lots of a new Google search traffic, they didn’t pay for it. We had clients paying us even seven figures a year, like Zappos. Nordstrom was another client that was using this technology and it was all pay-per-performance. It’s a huge game-changer in the industry that was always focused on a set monthly retainer, $10,000 $15,000, $20,000, whatever it is per month. You have a pay-per-performance model. It was a game-changer. That was a big reason why that company got acquired, my previous agency NetConcepts.

Another thing I think is interesting about machine learning in particular and AI is that machine learning is something you can implement in business. There are some great technologies out there, some are even open source. TensorFlow for example. You can start playing with it and see where you can eliminate some more human elements that are a lot of labor or require a lot of repetitive tasks and scale something inside your business that way. One company that I’ve invested in is using machine learning or AI. It’s an algorithm that helps you with cryptocurrency portfolio management and where you want to invest and when you want to pull out and when you want to put more in. It’s called Token AI. That’s pretty cool technology too. They’re about to do a public launch actually, it’s TokenAI.io. They even have named their AI. They call it Juliet. She helps you manage your cryptocurrency portfolio.

Let’s move onto another topic and I know it’s one that Tony is very big into and that’s energy management. He’s able to be on stage for hours upon hours without even taking a break to go to the bathroom. He’s like a machine, and it’s all about his energy management. How are you utilizing energy management in order to get peak performance in your business and your life and your relationships and everything?

I would say for me it’s a lot about rhythms and it comes down to remembering that we are more human being than human doing. You look at nature. Nature has a rhythm. It has this spring, it has a summer, it has a fall, it has a winter. It has rhythms built into it and those rhythms set the stage for the life cycles. If you screw up, like if you’re in Tennessee and you skip winter, you skip fall and leaves don’t fall off the tree, it screws things up. Also you look at a polar bear, for example. Polar bear, if it’s on display in the zoo every single day a week, seven days a week, its coat actually starts turning yellow. It’s because it’s living in violation of what it naturally needs. If you look at human beings, we’re meant to have play time or meant to have work time, we’re meant to have downtime. We’re meant to have energy exertion time. It’s that cycle of energy exertion and energy renewal. Look at the four quadrants: spiritual, emotional, mental and physical.

I’ve got a lot of this thinking from The Power of Full Engagement. In The Power of Full Engagement, you just get this great analysis from the sports psychologists that work with some of the top athletes in the world. What they discovered is that there are energy management and rhythms to the top athletes. Just as important as exertion cycle is the renewal cycle. Yet for us in our normal work life, how often do we think of like, “I’ve got to get my energy all the way back up to peak for me to kick butt and crush it. What’s my downtime going to look like?” We know we need downtime, but we’re plugged into our phones, our social media and our notifications all the time. 90% of us wake up and we turn our phone on and see, “Who Instagrammed me? Who Facebooked me? Did I get any text? What’s my email?” Versus, I love to stay in airplane mode. I’m in the Airplane Mode in the mornings up until [8:30] or [9:00] where I’m not interacting with the world. I’m actually renewing myself so that I can step into my day, deliver, be present and kick butt. I’m starting from a state of my cup is filled up versus my cup is empty.

I also keep my phone in Airplane Mode a lot. It’s not just because I want to be productive, but it’s because I want to be healthy and the EMFs are very bad for your health. They disrupt the cellular membranes. I recently learned about this at the last Bulletproof Conference, Dr. Mercola was talking about EMS. I met Brian Hoyer at that Bulletproof Conference. I had him on the show. It was a fascinating episode. We deep dived into EMF exposure and how it affects the cell and how it affects your health, and then how to minimize the exposure that you get. For example, you might want to paint your bedroom with a special paint that blocks EMF. You’ll probably want to unplug your router and modem over the course of the night because you’re not going to need it. You’re going to be sleeping, so don’t douse yourself with EMFs where you don’t need it. Also if you have your router in your bedroom, that’s even way worse. If it’s close to your bedroom or on the other side of the wall where it’s right near your head, definitely move it and also unplug it at night or put it on some timer.

There are smart meters that are bad for your health as far as the EMF exposure. There’s a lot you need to know so that’s a great episode to listen to. At least on an iPhone, you can be on Airplane Mode and still be connected to your Wi-Fi, so you’re not getting the data from your cell connection, but you’re getting it in from your Wi-Fi. You could still have notifications, emails coming in, WhatsApp messages and calls. You could still get distracted and your day disrupted with all that. How do you keep that in check? Do you completely in Airplane Mode turn off the Wi-Fi as well or do you let some of that stuff in?

I turn off the Wi-Fi as well. My Bluetooth is off and my Wi-Fi is off. When I have a date night with my wife, we do that. When I’m in the gym frankly, I go Airplane Mode all the way. Sometimes if I need to read or download something, say a podcast or a book or whatever that I’m reading then I’ll slip, but for the most part, I’m in full Airplane Mode and the universe cannot reach me.

It’s important especially for date night. I cringe when I see people with their phones out and they’re half paying attention to their significant other or the person they’re out on the date with. They’ve got their phones in their hand. It’s just crazy. Even just putting the phone on the table is bad. The quality of your conversation will be less than if you put the phone away. Even if you’re not touching it, it’s just there sitting and it’s in view for you and your date, it lowers the quality of the conversation and the connection.

I’m a quality time guy for my love language. It’s especially bothersome for me. What happens is if I hop on my phone, other people at the table are on their phone. I test it out at dinner. If you go out with a group of five people, one person pulls out their phone and you triggered everyone else to pull out their phone and check their phone.

It’s contagious like yawns. Your top love language is quality time. Did you read the book by Gary Chapman?

Yes.

The 5 Love Languages are, besides quality time, there is also physical touch, acts of service, words of affirmation and gifts. My wife is big into gifts. It doesn’t have to be big. It needs to show that I care and I have thought about her if it’s flowers or just a small something. It shows her that I love her in a way that means something to her. Whereas for me, physical touch is number one. That’s my primary love language. I don’t feel as connected if she is not physically touching me. She knows that and she will go out of her way to make sure that I feel loved in that way. It makes a big difference. Your kids will have different love languages and you need to know what those are so that you can communicate with them in the way that they feel most loved and appreciated. It’s a game-changer.

My wife is words of affirmation. I forget that a lot so I have a Post-It note in my bathroom mirror that says, “Give her words of affirmation.” If I get quality time and physical touch, I’m pretty golden.

Besides the love languages book, is there another book that’s been really particularly impactful in your relationship with your wife?

Some Alison Armstrong stuff.

I had her on the show. It was an incredible episode.

You’ve had some great guests on the show.

My all-time favorite is Byron Katie. She is amazing. The four questions and the turnaround that she calls The Work. I’m sure it saved so many lives and it’s changed millions and millions of people’s lives and minimized or reduced suffering for countless people.

Any of Alison’s stuff and that whole framework of minimum and having different needs and nothing being wrong with that and just honoring that has been a game-changer for our relationship. Some of our close friends, their marriage was essentially saved because of some of the processes of the feminine and masculine and learning how to respect and appreciate each other’s differences.

We all have aspects of masculine and feminine in each of us. One of the things that was a huge epiphany for me that I learned from Alison is you can injure your partner’s masculine, like if I injured my wife’s masculine aspect, then she could look me straight in the eyes and tell me, “I hate your guts.” If she can’t even look at me, if she just crawls into a ball and wants to go and hide somewhere, crawl into the covers on the bed, I know I’ve injured her feminine. That is a game-changer because the way that you de-escalate and help her to feel safe and loved and cared for and fix the situation is vastly different if you’ve injured her masculine versus if you’ve injured her feminine.

That’s a great distinction. I actually haven’t heard anyone say that before. It’s pretty profound.

There’s a whole process that a woman will go through. A feminine woman, if you’ve injured her feminine where she loses her words, she can’t articulate why she is so upset and if you keep badgering her, “Come on. Spit it out. What is going on? Why are you so upset?” and she can’t do it, eventually by you needling her, you will trigger the rage monster. Which is what Alison Armstrong calls the inner critic, the voice that rents a space in the brain but doesn’t show up until things get really hairy. If you’ve unleashed her rage monster, she will bring up stuff that you thought was done and dusted and resolved years ago. Suddenly, it’s rearing its ugly head again like, “I thought we were past that?” To answer with that kind of tone or that kind of response of, “I thought we were past that,” is just going to escalate things even more. You need to know how to navigate these different stages where you’ve triggered the rage monster yet and it’s like she is along for the ride and she can’t believe what she is saying. It’s not her, it’s the rage monster. She is like, “What? I can’t believe that I just said that.” She’ll feel so bad afterward like, “I can’t believe I said that to you.” “That was your rage monster.”

If you understand this process, this is just human nature. It’s not like you are married to a crazy person. This is normal. This is because you did not de-escalate earlier. You did not help her to feel safe or to feel understood or even just heard earlier before the rage monster was triggered. You actually poked until the rage monster came out. That’s a really important stuff. Is there a particular book or course or anything that you recommend of Alison’s?

She’s got a really good one, Keys to the Kingdom and The Queens Code. Her programs are especially phenomenal. Her books are not like reading a Paulo Coelho novel but they are super insightful and they are pretty easy reads.

You can get some of her audiobooks which aren’t actually books but you get them for $15 or $18 and they are recordings from her live trainings. Normally, you would pay hundreds of dollars for a recording of a four-hour seminar. She got one on Understanding Women that is really good. You can get it from the iBooks Store if you’re on a Mac or iPhone. You can get it from Audible as well. It’s a $99-program that you would get for $18 by getting it as an audiobook. Understanding Women is an incredible course. I took that. She taught that one and she has trained some really great people as well, so you probably won’t end up taking the course with Alison. You’ll get one of her trainers, but it will still be fabulous content and a really good training. I got to experience Alison teaching Understanding Women and that’s where I learned all the stuff about the rage monster. It opened my eyes. It was incredible.

We’ll move on to another topic and that is how to leverage your genius. I know Tony is big into leverage. In fact, I interviewed Mary Beth Mittleman and we talked about leverage, but that was in a health context. She does live blood analysis and dried blood analysis. It’s a nutritional microscopy and she’s done that on me. She does that for a number of Platinum Partners and she’s done it at Life Mastery and some of Tony’s programs. I think it’s part of the curriculum as well. We just talked about leverage. I want to talk to you about leverage as well but from a different perspective, like your genius leveraging, your capacity without burning yourself out and being able to scale. People don’t scale themselves very well. They try and burn the midnight oil and they burned themselves out, they get sick or just diseased and it’s totally unnecessary. What are your secrets to leveraging your genius?

The first part that I take my mastermind members through, we have a whole module called Discover Your Genius, which is basically you go through an in-depth analysis of elevating your awareness. If you gain clarity on who you are, where you’re a freaking world-class at or where you have the potential to become world-class at and then where you actually suck. We all have those areas of our life that we suck. The goal is not to become suck less, the goal is to be killer even more over here in this area where we crush it.

This is super important for our audience to understand that you understand first what your strengths and weaknesses are. Those weaknesses, you don’t try and fix, you don’t try and improve. You accept, “I suck at that.” Rather than expending effort on those weaknesses to get those elevated, you focus all your energy on your strengths.

You’re supposed to leverage and maximize your strengths or minimize your weaknesses or manage your weaknesses. That might also mean avoiding scenarios where you’re playing out of your weaknesses or your weaknesses are front and center. I’m not very good at managing, so I need to avoid essentially as much as many managerial-type responsibilities as possible even though I lead companies and businesses. I need to stay out of the management side of all those details because I’m not going to follow through nearly as well as someone else can.

You’re not going to give performance reviews to your team, for example?

I’m not going to be scheduling them and orchestrating all of the details of those, correct.

You’ll still give the feedback, you just won’t be the person who is architecting all of it. Is that right?

Yeah, I won’t be setting up scheduling and making sure we stay on track because I’ll forget when we did our last one and all those details. I’m a genius at starting stuff. I’m a genius at driving stuff forward. I’m very gifted at seeing the big picture and also building those key relationships and seeing the opportunities that are right there and then catalyzing confidence to step into those.

It sounds like you are a fast start if you are familiar with Kolbe.

I’m very high in the Quick Start. The five things we look at for getting clarity on your genius, the Myers Briggs test, the DISC Profile, the Kolbe Index, Wealth Dynamics is another one that most people don’t do, and then the StrengthsFinder. If you’re one of those guys that’s skeptical on personality tests and not sure how to use them or whatever, I can guarantee you, you just haven’t learned how to utilize them properly and haven’t revisited or didn’t. Maybe sometimes people don’t even take them properly. They answered the questions of how they would want the response to be versus how it actually is. When you gained clarity on your genius and couple it with your areas of passion, you start figuring out, “That’s where I make $10,000 an hour.”

There’s another test that I would add to the list and that’s the Fascinate Test by Sally Hogshead, who has also been on the show. The Fascinate Test is all about how not you see the world as the test taker, but how the world sees you. It’s important because if you want to bolster your position in an enterprise as an employee or in an industry as a thought leader, you need to know how the world sees you and how to put your best foot forward in that respect.

I’m going to add that one to the list.

I have candidates who are going to join the team potentially who made it through the various stages to become finalists. I have them take DISC and I have them take StrengthsFinder. If they come on board, then I also have them take the Kolbe Test. I just had a new person joined who is doing a great job so far. She took Kolbe. What it said though was that she’s in transition and she needs to take it again because it wasn’t showing her true colors. If you’re in a job transition or a life transition, you’re not going to answer the questions in the way that you normally would. It’s important that you do answer them with your normal modus operandi. I haven’t taken Wealth Dynamics. I know about it. What’s the value prop for taking a Wealth Dynamics assessment?

Wealth Dynamics, the cool part about that is it goes into your natural pathway for building wealth. For example, I’m a creator. There are nine different pathways. There’s trader, there’s a deal maker, there’s a star who wants to not necessarily be front and center, but then they want to drive a project forward and be a key player. There’s the mechanic who systematizes everything. I’m a creator. They actually tell you people in history that have built massive wealth through that profile like one of the other creators in history, Walt Disney, Steve Jobs, Elon Musk, Richard Branson. At one point, Richard Branson was negative £55 million overdrawn in his banking account with Virgin Airlines. Then you’ve got Walt Disney. In his 50s, he turns to his brother, Roy, and he wants to launch Disneyland. He was like, “Roy, we’ve got to go on. Let’s mortgage everything to make this happen.” Literally, they put everything at stake. They built their lifetime to make Disneyland come to life. Of course, it succeeded but that’s a little bit of the nature of a creator. They’re often all in, they’re risk takers.

Look at Elon, even Tesla is in trouble a bit. They built incredible cars. I have a Tesla. Elon, he took his $330 million from PayPal. He put $100 million in Tesla, $100 million in Solar City and $100 million in SpaceX. Multiple times, each one of them was on the verge of going out of business in the final hours, final days, final weeks. He was having to borrow money to pay for rent. That’s what creators do, we need other people on it. The other piece that Wealth Dynamics tells you is it also tells you who you need around you to have a chance to hit a homerun and to build a great business. The last little snippet that I’ll mention is it almost tells you the pathway. Think of a pathway as like, “If I step or if I jump in this current, if I jump in this river and the river current is just going to take me to where I want to go versus trying to fight upstream versus trying to get to the other side instead of going with it, my flow is to create.” I am going to be able to build wealth through creating. Sometimes in our mind, we try and be someone elsewhere. We’re like, “I need to be like this guy.”

Like Warren Buffett, “I want to be a master trader.” That’s not your path because that’s not how you’re wired and you end up beating your head against the wall.

The people that succeed the most in life, they’re most in alignment with who they’re most created to be, with who they most are, and not trying to be a second-rate version of someone else.

I’m a big fan of StrengthsFinder. That’s about $15, $18 to take that test so it’s very inexpensive. Do you know offhand what your top five strengths are?

Ideation is number one. I’m a relater, I like to go deep in relationships of course. Connectedness. I’m a Founding CMO of this partly tech company and partly counseling company in a way. Long story short on that, my genius in that company is I can see the 30,000-foot view and see where we are way off and where we’re on point and redirect. If I have to go in and manage all the nuances, I get zoned out. That’s the connectedness. I can see the interconnectedness of seemingly disconnected parts. Then belief, to my core I have to believe in something, and the fifth one is intellection. I just need intellectual stimulation ultimately.

It’s very telling when just off the top of your head what your top five strengths are. That’s a different kind of a person that is more tuned in and plugged in. My top five strengths according to StrengthsFinder are futuristic, input, ideation, strategic and learner. I think futuristic is a superpower. That’s how I see it. I can see where things are heading. I’m looking at the horizon as it’s a mental construct in actuality. The horizon doesn’t exist. The sky and the ocean and the land do not ever meet. We’re standing on a globe and we forget about that. Our linear processing minds think of everything as linear, but things are speeding up exponentially. You have the Law of Accelerating Returns and all that and we forget about it.

I have that in mind so much because I have this futuristic strength and it allows me to see where things are heading. You combine that with input where my brain is like a huge file cabinet. I can retain so many different things like marketing campaigns that were a decade ago. My ideation and strategic come in to morph something that I saw like, “There was a scavenger hunt that Budget Rent a Car did about fifteen years ago and we could do a scavenger hunt online in this way and tweak it in this fashion and it could be hugely viral and get you tons of links.” I’m a very much of a creator of different ideas, brainstorming and all that and in a very strategic way rather than tactical. 

Then I’m a learner. I’m constantly learning and absorbing new stuff, going to seminars. I’m a seminar junkie. I go to masterminds all the time and I’m reading all the time. I have a relentless thirst for knowledge and for a betterment of myself. If you take your StrengthsFinder assessment and then you give it to your team so that they know how to relate to you and work with you. Then you have your team take StrengthsFinder and you get to learn how best to relate to them like somebody who is a relater or somebody who’s got a woo or something different than what your top strengths are. You can work with them in a different way and leverage their strengths and then leverage yours and not tap into the weaknesses on either side.

For me, what I’ve noticed is when I have clarity on my strengths, clarity precedes momentum and momentum is power, and momentum is your friend. When I can communicate with clear positioning of who I am and where I deliver the most value, then I’ve just anchored in a distinction. My phrase for who I am is a business architect. I can look at our organization from the CEO and the CMO level and help people think through and design the business around where they want to go with their vision and their giftedness and help fill in the gaps. That gives me a lot of clear positioning. I interact with other entrepreneurs, versus if you don’t have clear positioning on your genius. Your genius is where you can get paid at a much higher level and it’s fun. I’ve had friends that are incredible and they got their PhDs and nutrition and all this stuff and they create nutritional products. They are some of the world’s best product formulators. They get royalties for these products that they’ve helped create because of these special ingredients because they know their genius.

Instead of trading hours for dollars, which is what so many people do. Do you want to say anything further about trading hours for dollars because that is a trap and it’s tough to break out of it if that’s your day in, day out?

I was talking with a guy, he charges $225 an hour and I was like, “Josh, you’re missing out on the power of leverage and you’re also locking in. When you think of hourly time, you’re missing out on the transformation. It’s almost like you’ve got this big beautiful sky above you, but you’re looking down at the bushes below the trees and you don’t ever lift your head above to see the sky. There’s this beautiful rainbow in the sunset. It is right there. The rainbow in the sunset represents the blue ocean that you can step into creating value for the world, but if you’re looking to it narrowly at what can you generate per hour, you’re missing out on some of the transformational impacts and transformational value that you can create.”

It’s a very myopic viewpoint.

Goalcast for me can be a billion-dollar brand easily. In three to five years, it’s there. I’m going to step in, I’m going to get paid decently. I’m going to get equity, I’m going to get the upside and I’m going to help all these other thought leaders build their brand and tell viral compelling stories. That’s tens of millions if I help them get to that billion-dollar evaluation.

It’s a billion-dollar opportunity for them that you’re going to help facilitate and you will get compensated in a way that’s not hours for dollars. It will be based on the value creation that you participate in. Let’s close this out with how could somebody work with you either on a coaching basis or participate in your mastermind? How can somebody tap into your genius and use it as a way to get leverage in their lives and their business and their relationships?

I’ve got several things that I have as an offering. I’ve got my one-on-one sessions with high-level entrepreneurs. I don’t do many of them. They’re not cheap. Contact me and we’ll see if it makes sense and then we’ll go over details on that. My Rising Stars Mastermind is designed for exactly that. You’re already a star but you’re rising. You haven’t summitted your peak yet. You’re on this end and I want to help you get there faster and help you bring the future-forward. If I look at The Power of the Masterminds in learning, it’s like you’re reaching into the future and you’re bringing the future to you. I love that. It’s a high-level group of six and seven-figure entrepreneurs in a variety of industries. You can go to RisingStarsMastermind.com. I’m also launching a mastermind accelerator program, which is a ramp-up, crush-it program that’s a little easier entry point too. If people were interested in that, you can find out all the information on MikeZeller.com. We’d love to connect with you. You can follow me on Instagram, @MichaelRZeller. Facebook, it’s just Michael Zeller. I’m honored to be on the show and connecting with you.

It’s an honor to have you on and to have you as one of my dear friends. Thank you so much, Mike.

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