BiggerPockets Real Estate Podcast - 313: How to Be Happy AND Grow a Massive Business with Entrepreneur Jesse Itzler (and Josh!)

Episode Date: January 17, 2019

You want to crush it in real estate investing. But you also want fun, adventure, and time for yourself and your loved ones. Can you have both? Our guest today says, “YES!” Jesse Itzler is a serial entrepreneur who’s worn a lot of hats: rapper, founder of a private jet company (sold to Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway), partner in a coconut water venture (sold to Coca-Cola), ultra-marathoner, and part-owner of the Atlanta Hawks. Jesse shares his plan for 4x-ing your productivity, what he learned from living with a Navy SEAL (and writing a book about it!), and why investors must learn to “fall in love with the process,” rather than the product. You’ll learn his trick for scheduling memorable experiences and why you should develop your own “happiness meter.” Oh, and stick around to hear Jesse’s hilarious story about performing in front of 600,000 people—and forgetting the words. This show is packed with wise counsel for anyone who is or wants to be a hard-charging entrepreneur, but also craves more balance and bliss. Download this episode, and share it with a friend or family member who would enjoy it! When you do, tag us on Twitter (@jrdorkin, @brandtonatBP, @biggerpockets) or Instagram (@jrdorkin, @beardybrandon, @biggerpockets)! In This Episode We Cover: Jesse Itzler’s backstory The moment of the most happiness -41 bucks story! How to measure happiness with the “Happiness Meter” The “3-Hour Rule” What Kevin’s Rule is and why you should create “moments” Advice for making the most of life Why you should think through: What do I want to be known for in the next 5 years? How to reach out to people who you aspire to meet His advice on growing multiple business A way to redefine failure The Misogi And SO much more! Links from the Show BiggerPockets Forums BiggerPockets Webinar Atlanta Hawks Marquis Jet Zico Coconut Water Jesse Jaymes – Shake It Like A White Girl (Video) Spanx The Happiness Meter by Jesse Itzler at TEDxHickory (Video) 29029 Everesting Josh’s Instagram Josh’s Personal Website Brandon’s Instagram Books Mentioned in this Show Living with a SEAL by Jesse Itzler Living with the Monks by Jesse Itzler Fit For Life: A New Beginning by Harvey Diamond Rich Dad Poor Dad by Robert Kiyosaki The E-Myth Revisited by Michael Gerber The ONE Thing by Gary Keller The 4 Disciplines of Execution by Chris McChesney, Sean Covey, & Jim Huling The Wealthy Barber by David Chilton Tweetable Topics: “If you have health, you have hope. If you have hope, you have everything.” (Tweet This!) “In most areas of our life, there’s a way to measure almost everything.” (Tweet This!) “As we get older, it’s very hard to create newness.” (Tweet This!) “If it’s not important to you, it’s not going to happen.” (Tweet This!) “People buy into stories more than products.” (Tweet This!) “As a parent, praise your kids’ effort, not the result.” (Tweet This!) “Money is fun to make, fun to spend, and fun to give away.” (Tweet This!) Connect with Jesse Jesse’s Website Jesse’s Instagram Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This is the Bigger Pockets podcast. Show. Show. 313. Are you taking to my show again? Are you taking my show again? Come on. All right.

I'm going to let you take my show. Let's do this. All of us, all seven billion humans on the planet want the same thing. They want to feel good. You want to feel good. And I do things to try to make me feel good. That has to do with my health, what I eat, working out, my relationships, what I think about, learning.

growing, crying, all that stuff. I try to do it all. In the next five years, I just want to continue doing that. I don't really care about what I'm known for. I just want to feel that way. You're listening to Bigger Pockets Radio, simplifying real estate for investors large and small. If you're here looking to learn about real estate investing, without all the hype, you're in the right place. Stay tuned and be sure to join the millions of others who have benefited from BiggerPockets.com. Your home. for real estate investing online. What's going on, everybody? This is Josh Dorkin.

Host to the Bigger Pockets podcast here with my co-host, Mr. I was once a host, Brandon Turner. What's funny is we both started this. We started recording and we both looked at each other like, wait, who's going to do the this is, you know, anyway, we figured it out. You take it. You got it. It's good to have you back today.

What's up, man? I am, I'm super, super excited to be back, especially for today's show with a guest that I'm a just. just an absolutely huge fan of. So it's great to be back. Great to see you. Unfortunately, the beard continues to grow, frightening children everywhere. I did trim this the other day.

You know, I got some new beard oil in the mail. Well, you know, Christmas gift from Heather. You know, she got it to me. And, you know, it's actually John Cooper beard oil, which I just discovered. John Cooper is the lead singer of a band called Skillet, and he has beard oil. And I like Skillet. So she got me his beard. beard oil, which is, I think we should have Brandon Turner beard oil and we'll sell it on

Bigger Pockets. This is a great idea. All right. I'm co-founder. Of the beardy Brandon beard oil. All right. Anyway, yes. So, those those don't know, Josh here was the host of the Bigger Pockets podcast for five years.

By the way, we just crossed six years of the podcast officially. But anyway, we're here for five years. And now you come back for, you know, occasionally, especially shows that you're excited about. Today's guest, actually you introduced me to his books. And then I read them and I loved them. And you were like, we should get Jesse on the show. Absolutely. I am also founder of Bigger Pockets.

Oh, yeah, that's right. You also the founder of the world's greatest website, biggerpockets.com. So the greatest brand. You've got a few things going for you entrepreneurial-wise. You know, good. Oh, boy, man. Well, it's definitely good to be back. Good to appear.

And I'm psyched and it's good to see you. And thank you, everybody for listening. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you very much. Thank you all for listening. But before we get to today's show, let's get to today's quick. And today's quick tip is very short, simple, and sweet. Think of one person in your life who is an entrepreneur who's trying to grow a business, trying to do something great, and send them a text message with this podcast. Every podcast like service or if you're watching this on YouTube has the ability to share the episode. So shoot it to

one person right now, unless you're driving, do it when you stop. But this show is going to help so many people. Jesse, the guest today is just real about entrepreneurship and probably the most successful entrepreneur we've ever had on the show, period. So you guys are going to love this. Have you ever lost a DSCR deal because the financing just took too long? Red flags popped up late. The lender needed more time. The deal fell apart. Well, our friends at Dominion Financial just launched a program to help prevent that. With their new express rental loan, you can close in 10 days or less. And they still offer their price beat. guarantee, so you can get great pricing and a timeline you can count on.

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traditional insurance companies aren't always built to handle these claims quickly or smoothly. That's why more real estate investors are turning to steadily. They focus exclusively on landlords, whether it's a single-family rental, a burr-builder's risk policy, or mid-term holiday guests. You get fast quotes, flexible coverage, and protection for property damage, liability, and even loss of rental income. Now is the perfect time to review your rates and coverage. Get a quote in minutes at biggerpockets.com slash landlord insurance. Steadily, landlord insurance designed for the modern investor. All right, all right, all right. Let's get to this thing. So our guest today is Jesse Isler. He's a serial entrepreneur, bestselling author

of the two books, Living with a Seal and Living with the Monks, both fantastic. Josh and I love them. co-owner of the Atlanta Hawks NBA team. He sold his company Markey Jet to Berkshire Hathaway. That would be Warren Buffett's company. Yeah, Warren Buffett's company. He's also with a partner in Zico, which sold to Coca-Cola, that was like a coconut water, I think it was coconut water company. One of the original white rappers, actually, go to YouTube.

If you're not Google him or Google him because you won't appreciate it, but yeah. Go to YouTube and type in, shake it like a white girl. You're going to see 1991, I think it is, Jesse. and one of the greatest videos ever made. He's also married to a massively successful entrepreneur named Sarah Blakely. You might recognize her name. She's the founder of Spanx, which she started with like $5,000 in her like basement, with no outside investors grew up to a billion dollar company.

She's also one of the guests on Shark Tank. So this show is, by the way, by the way, he is also the guy who came up with the Go New York Go New York Go jingle for the New York Knicks. I'm sadly still a New York Knicks fan after all these years. But yes. Yeah, he's pretty big deal. So this show is not about real estate today. I mean, I don't think we mentioned the word real estate.

Yeah, I don't think we do. Anyway, but it's about entrepreneurship, success, happiness, mindset. What separates people that succeed from those who fail? I mean, we go through so many things today. You guys are going to love his stories. You're going to love all this stuff. I love things like his three-hour rule. It's fantastic.

Happiness meter. Yeah, happiness meter. How he's up an 18 different couches. like when he was trying to build his businesses. He talks about how the average American only lives like 78 years and you're going to love this show. And oh, one more thing, it's super important. There are some, we'll call them adult words used in this episode,

some R-rated words. And just a warning, we did not beep them out. So if you're listening with kids in the car, this might not be the best episode to play right now, but definitely listen to that episode when the kids aren't in the car. With that said, let's get to the interview with Jesse. All right, welcome Jesse to the Bigger Pockets podcast. to have you here. Great to be here, fellas.

Yeah, to be here. So this should be a lot of fun. I think people are going to love hearing your story. I mean, I just got finished reading both your books because I knew this was going to happen. Fantastic. But most people don't maybe know who you are. So did you mind giving us like a two-minute recap? Like, who are you? What do you do? How did you get to where you are today? I know, condensing 50 years and did a couple minutes. I'm happy to. Serial entrepreneur. I started out in the music business as a, believe it or not, as a rapper was signed to a company called Delicious Final.

And then I started, I shifted out of music into private aviation. I had a private jet company called Marquis Jet, which we sold to Warren Buffett's NetJet. Then I had a coconut water company I was involved with called Zico. We sold it to Coca Cola. I married four kids, author of a couple of books, ran 100 miles, endurance athlete, just trying to do as much as I can while I'm on this planet, man. So I'm chipping away at my lifetime goal, which is leave nothing on the table. I love it.

So through all of that, right? I mean, you've accomplished more than most people would die to accomplish in their lifetime. The one thing that stands out to me about you is the moment of happiness, at least in my interpretation of my studying of you, the moment of happiness is the day you made 41 bucks hanging out with your buddy, Myron, and your sister. Can you tell us all about that and why is it? And was that the moment of the most happiness in your life? Well, let me go to the end of the story first.

No. It was just, it was a moment of appreciation and it set me on the course of being an entrepreneur. I realized from that moment that if I took a big risk, felt a lot of fear, overcame that fear and did something I loved, I could be rewarded. And that became addicting to me. But it wasn't a moment I would say of just happiness. I feel like super happy. I feel super lucky to have the opportunities that I have.

The health, you know, there's a little quote, if you have health, you have hope, if you have hope, you have everything. I feel really fortunate to be where I am and to have the parents that I had that gave me that opportunity to try things and experiment and have a long leash to pursue what I want to pursue.

But the story you're talking about specifically, I was, I don't know, like 15 years old. I grew up in New York and Long Island and in the 80s and breakdancing was big. I got really into music, really into breakdancing. I know I don't look like it, but I was good. And not doing like the regular shit. I was doing advanced shit.

And I decided that like if I went to Washington, D.C., and got outside of like New York, I could probably make a lot more money because there's no way the kids in D.C. were going to be as good as the kids in New York. We invented the shit. So I convinced my sister who got a driver's license to drive my partner and I, Myron, who you mentioned,

up to Washington, D.C. And the plan was boombox, find a parking lot, set up shop, and rake it in. And the whole drive down, I was really scared. You know, I was like start getting all the self-doubt that I still have today. But as a 15-year-old, I didn't understand how to really deal with it. And that was, well, what if the kids aren't as good as are better than us? What if no one shows up? What if we're driving 10 hours round trip for no reason and all those kind of questions

and having a lot of doubt about the whole idea? But anyway, we get there, we set up shop, boom, put the boom box down. in this parking lot in Georgetown, 14 years old, 15 years old. Myron is probably a year older than me, 16 years old. He starts spinning on his head. We get a crowd. The music is banging. He passes it to me.

I'm doing my thing. The crowd's getting bigger. I take off my hat. I pass it around, start collecting some money. And by the end of the day, we had collected a bunch of money. And after I gave my sister the gas money and we put aside money to eat dinner, we split $42, $41 each. And I gave it to Myron.

And, you know, he counted it. it up like a little kid, you know, counted it like 20 times to make sure I didn't shortchange him. And when he realized that we both did, in fact, have $41 equally, no, he gave me a bear hug and he looked at me and he said, Jess, we're fucking rich. And I just remember that moment, and I felt really rich. And I never had 41 of my own dollars, really. And that, the context of the story you're telling is about 20 years later, we built the world's largest private jet company in the world. We did $5 billion in sales and we sold it to, you know, I think what every entrepreneur wanted would want to ultimately maybe for their legacy sell to Warren Buffett and Netsch at a

Berkshire Hathaway company. And at that moment, I was asked about it. I didn't really feel much different than I felt that moment. I know it sounds like, no way, bullshit, but it's true. Like it wasn't like my habit. Yeah, it wasn't like all of a sudden everything in my life changed and everything was better, you know, I could just have a bigger plate of brown rice. And a lot of stuff happened in between those points from when I was 14 or 15 years old, up until that moment in my life.

And I had some exits before that too. But a lot of happened, good and bad. But the happiness wasn't dictated. We all know money doesn't buy us happiness. You know, of course, it buys us a lot of things. And sometimes you can become happier. But in my case, you know, I've always operated from a really big place.

of gratitude, really big place of gratitude. And I've always loved the journey. You know, I've been addicted to the process. And the passion's been around the process. Now, that's awesome. Yeah. So the reason happiness, and one of the main reasons that we had you on is like, I'm fairly obsessed with the topic of happiness right now. As an entrepreneur myself, I went through a pretty horrible year last year. My daughter, who was nine at the time, got very sick, was pretty much, she had a surgery. She ended up parallel. from the neck down, I had to step away from work. And over the course of time, you know, she has been able to recover. And it really made me think, like, what is life about? And what is

happiness? And I've spent my time studying happiness and trying to figure out what it is. And that's kind of how I came across you and your book Living with the Seal, which we'll talk about because I'm into exercise and running and health stuff now. But I do want to transition a little bit on happiness. In your TEDx talk, you talked about this thing called the happiness meter. And I loved how you talked about how we can evaluate our own personal happiness. And you talk about taking the different buckets in your life and evaluating them. Do you mind running through that really quickly with people? Because I think it's really worthwhile. Sure. Again, I think that, you know, in most areas of our lives, there's a way to measure

almost everything. We get on a scale to measure our weight. We have tax returns to measure financial statements to measure our wealth. We have an IQ test to measure our intelligence, but there's really no test on happiness. And I was just thinking like, well, why? What's an easy way to kind of rate where you're at at any given point? And more importantly, to identify what's making you unhappy. Because if we could fix what makes us unhappy, we would all be so much happier, right? Some of that's not fixable, but a lot of that we own and we can fix. So I did this at a talk, I was doing a big talk for a bunch of Wall Street guys, uber successful audience,

uber wealthy. So you would think if you equated money to happiness, everyone would be super happy. And I just said, look, I did a very simple test. I said, you know, the topic came up in Q&A. And I said, let's just try this. Everybody think about everything that's going on in your life. Think about all the buckets of your life.

Your weight, your health, your relationships, your finances, your job, where you live, the city you live in, your parents are getting older, your daughter's situation, whatever's going on, put it all in a giant blender, okay, and mix it up. And then on a scale of one at 10 with the Dalai Lama, a 10 being the Dalai Lama of happiness and a one being someone that's at rock bottom, what's your number? And the majority of the room, I would say probably 90% of the room was a seven, seven, I'd say

seven-ish, maybe a little bit lower, but seven. And proud of it. You know, I'm seven at a ten. And I was like, amazing. But if my son comes home with a 70, a 7 out of 10 on a test, that's like a C minus, you know, in the most important bucket of your life. So most people think they're like, okay, I'm doing pretty good, but like, well, that's a C minus. But what's amazing about that test is your brain immediately when you do that exercise goes to a 10. It wants you to be a 10.

So it goes to a 10 and boom, the two or three biggest things that make you unhappy appear in your head and take you down to a 9, 8. seven, six, whatever it is. So if you do the test at home and you're like, okay, I'm an eight, it's so clear because you're like, it's my weight, it's my relationship, or whatever the two things are that just popped in that got you to that number. So it's like the simplest method to identify, not just like where you're at on a one to ten, but more importantly, what's broken? Like if you go into 2019 and just said, say to yourself, what's one thing I want to fix

in my life to make my life better, you'll come out of 2019, way better off. One thing. Like, what's the one thing? Okay, I have to communicate more with my wife. I want to get aligned on how we parent. I want to, you know, double my ink,

whatever it is. If you fix that one thing that's totally messed up, you're going to be so much, you know, so much happier. It's awesome. I love that. Hey, can I get personal for a minute? Can I ask, where do you see yourself on scale 1 to 10,

your happiness? What's your number? I'm really, I'm really fortunate, man. I feel really, really most of the time, I'm very, very happy. I have two parents that are alive. I mean, knock on one on everything, healthy kids, you know, I'm capable. Not everything goes right. I get a lot of egg on my face. I take challenges. I fail. I have, you know, things that bother me, people that turn on me, people that love me. I have everything that everybody has. But I process it really well. And I process it and come in. I net out in a very good place to be totally honest.

I feel very lucky about that. Let me shift the question slightly then. What are you working on this year? Like what fires you up? What's that next level you're trying to get to? I'm assuming there's always room for growth, right? So we're headed. Yeah.

So my life is all about building my own personal life resume. I don't believe in resumes in the traditional sense. I believe in like, what's your body of work, building your body of work, and maximizing the opportunity. I do not want to be 70 or 80 years old look back on my life and be like, man, I live the 80% version of me. I want to see what the 100 or 90 or 110%. So this year, I just turned 50, big birthday for me. I have a monster year plan.

I'm doing a documentary. I'm writing another book. I'm launching a business that I think could save 10 billion gallons of drinkable water. I have a coaching course. I do 50 speaking events a year. And I spend 50% over 40 hours a week with my kids and my family. That is a really, that's a, and I have a lot of other projects and support. I'm taking care of my parent.

I mean, a lot of stuff is going on. It's a big year for me. And every year is a big year for me. And, you know, the way that I do that, the way that I approach that is I have a system. I have an optimization system that I use. It's really efficient. And I get everything out of my head. It lives on a piece of paper to create.

space and energy in my head, I fucking attack it, man, like a wild man. And that's how I do it. It's awesome. That's awesome. So part of that is this big, giant, big ass calendar that you walk around with, right? It's right here. Yeah. Yeah, we got to see it. Hold on. Let me get it. I didn't know you guys going to hold on, hold on. Yeah, man. I got it. I got it. Here it is. I mean, if you're listening and you're not watching this on YouTube, jump on our YouTube channel. Check it out. Bam. It never, it never leaves far from me. It's in the airport. Everywhere you go, right?

Everywhere I go. Yes. Because I'm visual and I'm old school. I need to see it. I can't operate on a computer. Writing it down, I went through every month. I wrote down every day. What's going on?

My whole years plotted out. And it shows a tremendous amount of intent. Someone said to me, you want me to digitize it for you and put it in. I was like, digitize it. I want to own it. I want to own it. I want to spend four days writing it down in my calendar. So I complete it. I don't want to hit send. Yeah. So how do you, one of the biggest things that we tend to find that I tend to find when I talk to people is they bitch and they moan and they complain. They're like, you know, I'm building a business. I'm doing this. And, you know, I was guilty of it. I worked 100 hour weeks for eight years. I didn't take a day off. It was the worst thing I ever could have done. And I didn't have any balance with my life. I had no balance. I didn't spend time with my wife that I wanted to spend. I don't spend time with my kids that I wanted to spend. But you're doing more in one year than most. most people do in 10.

So how do you balance that time with your kids, with your family, and accomplish all the things that you want to accomplish? I have a very, very simple rule that anyone can do. Most people listening will probably say that's impossible, or you have a team of nannies, but I don't. I don't. The answer is I take three hours a day for myself. And I call it the three hour rule.

And it's cumulative. So that might be, I'm gonna go for a run in the morning for an hour, take 20 minutes to read later in the day, Before I go to bed, I'll take a 30 minute walk or just sit and do nothing, whatever. But when I'm in my time, I'm not guilty that I'm not with my kids. I'm not guilty that I'm not with my wife. And when I'm with them, because I was able to do what I wanted to do during the day, I'm fully present. So I'm where my feet are because I don't want to resent my wife or my boss or anyone for taking away the things I love to do.

I'd be a terrible parent. I'd be a terrible employee or boss. So I know if I get my run in, I can journal, I read, I do my things. Then my wife wants to go sit in an opera for two hours, even though I hate the opera. I'm good because I was allowed to do the things that were important to me. That made me happy. Take that away from me and I'm miserable. So like if you can't take 10% of the day, 10% of your own day, your own precious time,

the one thing we all have, the same 24 hours in a day. If I can't carve out two or three hours, cumulatively to take. to take care of the stuff that I love to do that makes my day bright and, you know, energized and fulfilled, then my life is completely out of whack and I feel like I would have to really reevaluate what I'm doing. So that's what I've been doing. I've been doing it forever. I didn't realize I was doing it.

It was unintentional, but I've always been, I've always done it. And it makes me a way better parent and boss, friend, son, because, again, I've been able to able to do some of the things that I wanted to do during the day that are important to make. Yeah, I wanted to ask, do you, like, you talk a lot about being present and you obviously love your family and you're very, very involved with them. Do you have any like tips, tricks, hacks, whatever thing? I mean, the three-hour rule is awesome. It's like anything else you can help our audience. I mean, there's people listening going, I don't spend enough time with my kids. When I am with my kids, I'm on my phone. I'm always scrolling, Facebook, Instagram, whatever.

Like, that's a major problem today, especially in America. Do you have anything that you can advise you give people on, like, how they can be more present in the lives of their family? Yeah, I mean, I think there's a lot of hacks. There's a lot of, I mean, I'm not an expert in this, but I'll just tell you what works for me. For one, I only take calls twice a week. So the old me, let me back up. Let me back up. I have a new system because I operated the same way as single Jesse for 40 years and it worked. But now I have four kids and a wife and I can't operate on that same system like I want to go out and watch a football game or play basketball. I can't do that anymore. more. So I had to rip up the playbook, rip up my system and create a new system, right? Like, your system as you evolve, your system evolves. So if anybody's listening, the system changes as you change. As your daughter got, went through her thing, your system changed. Absolutely. Right? You had to spend more time. You had to re-evaluate your priorities and all that kind of stuff.

So one of the things that I realized is I want to do four times as much as anybody else this year. I want a 4x. The average American lives to be 78 years old. I'm 50. If I'm average, I got 27 summers left. Okay? I want to do this much. If you're watching on YouTube, it's this much.

My time is this much. It doesn't work. So either I have to get more time, stay healthy, extend my life, whatever, or I have to be mega efficient and operate at 4X speed to get it all in what I want to do, right? So I had to change the system. So the first thing I did is I had to create efficiencies. So rather than taking calls all over the day, all at every time of the day and interrupting time with my family, I got, oh, got to leave guys. I got to be done at one o'clock.

I got a call. I said, I'm only taking calls in these time slots. That that doesn't, like, I'm taking control of my life. Now, I'm an entrepreneur. I work for myself. I recognize people who have other five jobs. They work for people. So everyone's system is different.

but I would change my system, but this works based on where I am in my life. So just by doing that, I know that that's my call time. I don't have to worry about it. I have no calls after, you know, 2 o'clock in the afternoon. So that's one thing that became very efficient to me. And I do a lot of things like that. I do a lot of things that maximize my time and my efficiencies. That's one of them.

I make sure that I schedule one-on-one trips with my kids every year. I make sure that I have a thing called Kevin's rule once every two months. I take a weekend away or do something that I would do that I wouldn't normally do if I didn't schedule it. So that guarantees that I'll have five experiences, new experiences this year, which means if I live another 30 years, it's 150 experiences that I now have that I wouldn't have had. So I think the bottom line is this. As you get older, we live in routine. As you get older, it becomes really hard to create newness. You have to, you're young.

You're in your 30s, man, so it's different. But when you get, when you get, wait 20 years, when life is a part of a routine, maybe not in Hawaii. But, you know, when that happens, it's hard to create newness. You have to work on it. Honestly, otherwise you live in a routine. You end up you're seven years old and you're like, what the fuck happened, man? I've been doing the same stuff for 20 years. So I work really hard at creating newness, really hard at it.

I schedule it. I think about it. and I take it really serious. I'm not saying that like we're on a podcast and let me give some sound bites. I'm not selling anything. That's how I live my life. And it's important to me. If it's not important to you, it's not going to happen.

Yeah, yeah. No, it's great. And I fully believe this. Look at my calendar. Yeah, it's crazy. Hey, so a couple of quick things. One, really quickly, the name Kevin's rule. Why is it Kevin's rule?

I have a friend of mine who's a police officer, Kevin the cop. He's in my book. And I went on a trip last year with my son who was eight and his daughter, who was eight. And we camped out at Mount Washington. Mount Washington is one of the, it's coined the world's worst weather in the winter. And it was minus, I think, 20 degrees. We were in a sleeping bag that protects you up to minus 40, sleeping outside in the snow. My son, his daughter, me, myself, Kevin the cop. And I was like, man, this is unlawful. This is a lifetime. This is one of the moments that I was talking about. And I said to Kevin, how often do you do this? Like this is unreal. This is the best weekend. I'll never forget this. How often do you have moments like this? He goes, oh, well, and I'm talking about a guy, blue collar, man, blue collar. Officer K-9 unit, Suffolk County, one of the happiest guys, I know. He goes every year I go since I graduated college, I go on a trip with my college friends. I'm like, oh my God, I barely ever see my college friends. I mean, so by the way, tomorrow, I'm taking my college friends to the Bahamas. Nice. That was the first thing that I changed. I'm like, well, I could do that. I've done that. Then he said, and every other month, I take one weekend where I set up a trip where I wouldn't have taken. And it could be anything. It could be I'm going fishing on the pier in the city. I'm going to museum. I'm going to run a marathon. It doesn't have to be like I'm traveling the world to go see Italy.

but I do something that I would have done instead of watching a college football game, I go and I create something that I would have done. I'm like, I could do that too. And so when I came home, I'm like, I'm going to implement Kevin's rule. Kevin's rule is I'm going to go on five or six weekends a year, friends, family, whatever,

and that's what it is. Which, by the way, in my calendar, it's the first thing that I marked up. I said, what are the five things I want to do? Then I went to the weekends. I circled them. And I said, okay, there's 52. two weekends, these five are carved out for this stuff with my family, friends, et cetera. I'm taking

one of them tomorrow. That's cool. That's great. And if you don't do that, you're never going to get to it because everything else is going to push it away. So I love that. Never happen. Josh and Josh here, Josh and I were in, I don't know, Uber, I don't know, a year ago, whatever. We had this really, really great conversation. One of the best conversations I ever had. And it was on that, like, when you're a kid or when you're in college, amazing memories and times just happen naturally. right? The younger you are, the more natural those amazing things happen. You know, like you grab some buddies and you go out and stay out until four in the morning and you still remember that 20 years later. The older you get, the less, it's like you were saying a minute ago, like you get in the

routine, the less those moments happen. So what I love about you're saying is like just what we were thinking, you have to create, you have to like create those moments because they won't create themselves very often. It just doesn't happen, but most people don't take time to create those moments. I love that you're doing that. Yeah, I mean, there's only really two kinds of moments. There's the ones that are memories. There's ones that happen that you have no control over. You'll remember 9-11 forever where you were 9-11, but you had no control over it. And then they're the ones that you create, you know, the ones that you schedule and you create. And those are the ones you do have control over. Yeah, that's great. It's great. So when you talk about

changing how you do things with your time blocks, you know, living with a monk, which was your second book, right? That book, you went off on this adventure. You told your assistant, wanted to go live with some monks and had her set it up and plan it and you went off and I'm not going to ruin it and spoil it for everybody, but you ended up living with some monks out in New York. And it was awesome, at least my read of it was. But there were all these lessons that you took away from it. And I think, you know, a few of the ones that stood out to me were the amount of hours that you've got in your life and time is ticking. You already talked about that you've only got supposedly 27 years left. I'm sure you're going to be around a lot longer than that. The other was monotasking.

That definitely stood out to me. But being away from your phone, it's in the book title, what turning off my phone taught me about happiness. Did that play a role for you in changing your scheduling of how you communicate with people? Because I think a lot of people would say, how the hell could I do that? How could I go without my damn cell phone and chatting with people and being on Insta and everything else all the time? Yeah. Well, I'm still on. email. I am still on email, but I've made it a note or a goal to be off email in the next 30 days. What does that mean off email? Well, I have an assistant and unless it's an emergency, I really don't want to see it, you know.

Now, I don't know how realistic that is, but maybe it'll cut it down 80%. But a lot of my emails are insignificant. I was just with my wife's grandmother who's turning 97. I went to visit her and I'm sitting in where she's sitting in this facility now. And I was thinking of myself, I wonder if she's thinking about her emails from four or five years ago. Like, I mean, I know it's not going to mean anything to me, what I'm worried about or thinking about today. Of course, it doesn't mean you can't ignore it.

You can't ignore it. It's part of your real life. But a lot of it is meaningless. And that's not going to really, it's just, it's just not where I'm at today in my life. So I'm trying to avoid that, minimize that, and create a system where I could literally, live off of it. And I remember about five years ago, I was with the owner of the Baltimore

Ravens. And he was telling me that he doesn't get any emails. He has the people that need him have his text. And if they need them, they text them. And his assistant handles everything else. And I'm trying to build a process where my assistant knows me good enough that she can respond to everything and handle it unless it's an emergency anemia. She can answer for me. And that's that's that. Now, again, I'm at a different place in my life than I was 10 years ago. But for changing the process, changing the system to where you are, you always evolve, that's something that's important to me. Yeah, yeah, I think it's great.

You know, when I was in high school, one of my close friends said one of the most profound things that I've ever heard. And it's always stuck with me. And he talks about, you know, looking at your life as if you're doing so from your deathbed. And so most people don't take the time. to think about anything ever. You know, so the first thing you got to do is stop and think, right? Take, take moments, take an hour, take a half hour, think, go on a walk, do something. Once you're doing that, one of the things that I like to do is say, if I'm looking back

in my life from my deathbed, who's around me? It's my wife. It's my kids. Hopefully, you know, some other family, maybe my closest friends. Those are the ones that matter. You'll be haunting me with that beard down to your toes. So those are the people that are around you that really matter at the end of the day. Those are the ones that count.

And so go ahead and live your life in a way where you're supportive of those people. You're there for those people. Everyone else, be nice to, be kind to, be a good person. But those are the ones that matter. How do you build a life-centric with those people in mind and yourself in mind? And that's always stuck with me and it's always helped me drive me forward and help me ignore a lot of the bullshit. Yeah, I mean, I think for most people, it takes, when people have tremendous change for the better in their life, it usually comes after something tragic, a death, an illness, a revelation, a drug addiction, something happens that causes this tremendous change. And I never felt like I needed that to evolve or to change. And most people, humans are like a book. They live their life. There's a beginning, a middle, and an end. And the beginning chapter, we reflect on. We'll go back and reflect on it, but it's done.

The middle section, that's where we are now. All three of us in our journeys, we're in the middle section. That's real time. It preoccupies us. That's where our worry lives, et cetera. Very few of us give, we're never going to die. You don't think about like you're going to die. Like you're like 32 years old, now you think you're going to live forever and you got a long road ahead of you.

And I hope you do or this and that. I'm sure that neither of you two guys have picked out your grave site or your plot or planned your funeral. I bet nobody listening here has done it because we don't think about it. We don't want to think about the end of our life. We live forever. It's not happening. It's so far away. But it's not, man. It's not. It's like we live here like poof. Poof. So like I'm aware of that. That's my driver. I'm here for a short window, man. I'm aware of my own mortality. I'm a relationship with time is a special relationship and that's my driver. And when you talked about earlier, like, what do you want to do this year? I want to do everything this year. And I mean, I'm almost, I'm almost operating in a

matic place where it's just like I want to do so much because I have so much appreciation for the opportunity that I want to like every day. It's like, come on, man, what can we do? What can we do? And I don't know if it's good or bad, but I'm aware because, you know, you guys laughed about well, 78 and this and that and maybe, you know, hopefully, no, hopefully I have more, maybe I have less, but let me just say this. When I was on Mount Washington with my kids, with my son and Kevin and his daughter, I didn't see any 70-year-olds up there. When I was walking up there, I didn't see any 70, I didn't see any 65-year-olds. Like that window to do the stuff that we're all physically able to do and love to do, it shrinks, man. And it goes so damn fast.

So I'm playing for now. I'm not playing for 80. I'm playing for now the opportunity that's in front of me right now. I love it. I love it. Did you know you can go on vacation and actually earn money? Because while you're out exploring new horizons, your home is sitting there, dark, silent, and wildly underemployed. And it could be making you extra cash. And Airbnb makes that possible with something called the co-host network. If you're away for a while, or you live far from your place, you can hire a vetted local co-host with real hosting.

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this podcast. That's indeed.com slash rookie. Terms and conditions apply. Hiring, Indeed is all you need. Here we are after the new year and there's all these topics about goal studying and all that. And one of the blogs I, or blog posts I read the other day, talked about a good way to set a goal to figure out what you want to do is ask the question, what do you want to be known for in five years?

I'm curious, Jesse, what do you want to be known for? like maybe five years, 10 years, even when you die. Like, what's your, I want to be known for this? I don't really think like that. I think there's so many buckets and so many ways to answer that. How I want to be looked at for my kids is different from the world. I mean, like I said, I'm working on a really big project right now where I think I've had the potential to save a tremendous amount of drinking water

that's being wasted. And that's something that I think would be an amazing legacy to lead behind and be like, you know, what did I do? I save 10 billion gallons of water and distributed. to people in the states in need of clean water, that would be like amazing. So that's been a big part of my shift and focus. I have an online teaching course that I love if anyone benefits from it. That makes me feel really good. So I think we all want the same thing. And you talked about it earlier on, you know, becoming like a happiness guru is really important to you. But at the end of the

day, I think everybody listening wants the same thing. All of us, all seven, million humans on the planet want the same thing. They want to feel good. You want to feel good. And I do things to try to make me feel good. That has to do with my health, what I eat, working out, my relationships, what I think about, learning, growing, crying, all that stuff. I try to do it all. In the next five years, I just want to continue doing that. I don't really care about what I'm known for. I just want to feel that way. That's great. That's great. I want to read something. You know what, Jesse, Seale says? No, I'm not cool. I'm sick of this shit. Seal pounds his fist on the bed. You're too pretty man. Too cute. Fuck you. What? Go grab a chair, the most uncomfortable chair you can

find. I have no idea what he's talking about, but I go and get a wooden chair, one with no armrests, out of my home office and return to his room. This is perfect, Seale says, sit down. I sit in a chair. Now go grab a fucking blanket, he says. Wait, what? He doesn't really think I'm going to sleep in a chair. You got to get out of your comfort zone. Jesse, he says, enough of this comfy shit.

Fuck this Park Avenue, bullshit. He repeats himself under his breath. Fucking Park Avenue, bullshit. But we live in Central Park West. This book, I have spent, when I read this book, I've laughed harder than I've ever laughed reading a book. My wife, I would wake up my wife in the middle of the night while I'm reading the book. And she's like, what?

Okay, read it to me, read it to me. And we enjoyed it so thoroughly. Thank you. What inspired you? So the book is Living with a Seal, 31 Days Training with the Toughest Man on the Planet. What inspired this book? Tell us the story. First of all, you're bringing back good memories or bad memories.

I loved writing it. So as I hear you reading it, I just remember laughing at that particular part, a lot of parts. I didn't set out to write the book. I met this guy at a race. I was really inspired by his drive. He had struggled at the race. He had broken some bones. He was peeing blood.

He weighed a lot. And it was an ultra marathon that I was running. He was running. And I decided I wanted to meet him. I could learn from someone like that. And I went out to lunch with them and realized, like, I'm never going to kind of get the secret sauce that this guy has. He was a Navy SEAL. And I asked him if he would come live with myself and my family.

And she said yes. And he moved in, you know, shortly after, like right away. And five years later, I wrote the book. So I didn't, it wasn't, there was no like, I'm going to go live with the Navy SEAL and write about it. It was, I love the experience. I learned from it. We became friends for years. I decided someone approached me to write a memoir, a book about really a business book,

about my journey at Marquis Jett and some of the other stuff that I had done. And as I started to write it, I realized, you know what, this, I do want to write a memoir, but this would be an amazing way to do it. And that's what happened. What I loved was, there's a lot of things I took away from the book. I think most relevant to our audience, you saw this guy, you were fascinated by him. him. You asked somebody who he was. You called him out of the blue. You know, you flew out and met, met the guy, you know, flew across the country to sit down and talk with the guy. And he was,

at least in my read, he was pretty abrasive at first, you know, didn't want anything to do with you kind of thing. And you flew out there, invite him to come live with you. And, you know, you made all this happen. Now, most people, you know, our audience is most, mostly aspiring or active real estate investors. And a lot of people are scared to pick up the phone and call somebody who's got a house on the market or somebody who might have a house on the market. But you had the balls to go out and fly across the country to a dude who didn't really want to talk to you on the phone. How does somebody get on the phone with somebody? How do you overcome that fear to chat with people, to talk to people, to reach out to people that you aspire to meet and connect with and overcome

that fear? What do you do? I think it's just like going into a really cold ocean of water, pool of water, it's you just go. If you start talking yourself out of it, I think it'll come up with a million reasons why you shouldn't. So I've always just been like, give me the phone, give me the phone. Not preparing a speech or thinking about it.

I've always just kind of, let me get my foot in the door and figure it out later. I didn't go to California, San Diego, to sit with the seal and with a plan of, you know, we're gonna live together and write a book. That's just, I got my foot in the door and one thing led to another, and then we had a best seller.

So that's one thing. The second thing is it's just like anything that involves the fear of embarrassment or any kind of fear. It's one of the tools that I use and I have several is that it goes back to my own mortality. Like nobody on this planet is going to be around than 100 years from now, very few of us. So do I really care if someone doesn't, if I'm in the real estate game and like what happens on a phone call? I mean, come on. Let me give you an example. I was in the music business for years.

And one part of my journey in the music business is I was writing theme songs for professional sports teams. And I wrote a song for the Denver Broncos called Salute in 1997. And every time they sort of scored a touchdown, the Broncos would salute into their, it was a big deal. It was all over, it was like the first trend in like Super Bowl celebrations. I wrote a song about it, caught on. It was huge.

The Broncos win the Super Bowl. I'm in Vegas. They call me up and they said, would you like to perform the song at the parade tomorrow in Denver? So I said, absolutely. I said, how many people are going to be there? 685,000 people. Bigger than live aid. 685,000 people.

I'm like 20-something. Right. I'm 20-something years old. I fly from Vegas immediately to my apartment in New York because no one could get in FedEx, the instrumental that I needed in time to get to Denver. get the instrumental, don't even change, get on the plane, fly out to Denver with my partner that we're going to sing this song. We get out there, 685 people. I'm sitting backstage about to go on.

And they hand me the microphone. I'm shaking. I'm shaking. I can, I'm so nervous. I can barely hold the microphone. And my friend says to me, you're okay? I said, no, I said, I can't go on. He goes, why can't you go on?

I just peed all over my leg. He goes, are you serious? And he looks down. He goes, holy shit. And they go, ladies and gentlemen, all the way from New York City, please welcome, and they throw us on stage.

So I go on, I'm like, stain leg, I'm like, the mic is shaking. I start singing the words. I'm rocking. Place is blowing up. Everyone's saluting. It's going unbelievable. Best moment of my life.

And I forget all the words. I forget all the words. And about three days ago, I'm going through old videos, and I see the video. And I'm like, oh, my God. And I haven't. I have it on tape.

I'm going to show it to my assistant. And I'm showing my assistant. And I said, you know what the lesson is from this story? Because I was thinking about maybe telling this, sharing this with a corporation I was going to speak at. I said, you know what the lesson is? The lesson isn't preparation. Everybody knows you have to be prepared. And I wasn't prepared.

The lesson isn't like life throws you curves and you have to deal with it. Everybody knows that. You got dealt a very severe curve, unfortunately, with your daughter. And we've all had that. And we've got to deal with it. Everybody knows that. The lesson was after 20, what was it, 77, 87, 107, 107, 22 years. Got a 980 on my SATs.

That's how I have to count. After 22 years, I didn't remember the story. The lesson was nobody cares. Nobody's talking about it now. It's over. What's the worst thing? Yeah. What's the worst thing that happens if you pick up the phone and call?

somebody. Yeah. And that was the lesson from this. I failed in front of 685,000 people and no one's talking about it anymore. Who gives a shit? Everybody went on. They don't worry about their taxes, their family, their kids, you know, having anxiety and all the other stuff that we all deal with. And this is just a moment and no one even really even knew. And that's the powerful lesson. So now I can't call up somebody on the phone. Are you kidding me? Come on, man. Nothing's going to happen if you don't. There you go. That's good. So let me tie a related question. And do you have other advice or advice for entrepreneurs? Most of our audience are people trying to build, you know, wealth, financial freedom, that kind of like a business or whatever. But people, I mean,

I don't know. You know the stats or you've all heard the stats about most businesses fail. So what, what have you done that's worked so well to grow multiple businesses that have all succeed? Not that everyone that succeeded, but the ones that have, what have you done? I think the common trait for me, similar to a lot of entrepreneurs, was I took a chance. First of all of them failed. I've had plenty of egg on my face along the way. I think that I've always been the business plan. Like, it's on the business plan. What do you mean by that? I mean like if I had to raise money or sell something, it was never the deck that I had or the PowerPoint presentation. It was my partner or myself that people were going to bet on. And they had to buy into me. I think that people

buy into stories more than products. People like, you know, if you have a good story or history, that's really important, even maybe more important than the product. Things take time. Early on, I thought like in today's world of Instagram, it's like everything is, or social media, it's like you think that everything happens overnight and there are get rich businesses and there are overnight success stories, but not a lot. Not a lot. Most 99% of them are grinds, man. I slept on 18 couches between the ages of 19 to 22, 18 different friends put me up and housed me in my struggle to go from where I was to where I wanted to go. It takes support, it takes belief, it takes determination, it takes thick skin, and that's not for everybody. And anyone who thinks

like anyone can just do it, no, you can't, man. Some people are better suited, you know, knowing they have a paycheck coming every week. And some people are. adrenaline junkies and they want the challenge they want the risk and they like living on the edge and that's more me you know that's not my brother my brother likes to go and get a check and know that he's going to you know go home if i you know everyone has their own their own lane so and i think it's important to understand that takes time man i remember when we went with zico into the president of coca cola's office and the president of coca cola said it will take eight years to build this brand that's So maybe now with social media, things are accelerated, but I would say it's probably five.

I look at Lyft, like where Lyft is today, when they started five years, a lot of companies maybe could, but usually that's what it takes. It's not like six months and we're like rocking and rolling then. So you have to have patience. And I think most importantly, as an entrepreneur, it's really important to understand that people talk about passion all the time, but I think passion is greatly misunderstood. I think the passion is not necessarily around your widget, whatever your widget is. The passion is around the process.

Like, you're an entrepreneur. That's what you signed up for. When all your friends are at happy hour and you have to lick stamps and put them on the envelope and send out all the stuff, that's what you signed up for. If your passion isn't built around the willingness to do that, whatever your end goal is, it's going to be a real struggle. because there can be a lot of should I go to happy hour or should I stay in the office? And if you always choose happy hour, someone else is going to choose the office and they're going to beat you. Yeah, that's great. That's great. Let's talk about failure for a second. One of the things that stood out to me most in the monk book was a moment you talked about your wife, Sarah, was at the dinner table and her father was asking what she failed at.

and the takeaway every week, right, there's this discussion about failure and the takeaway being failure becoming tied to not trying rather than the outcome. Can you dive in a little bit on that? Yeah, I mean, I think my wife was very lucky. Her father emphasized redefined failure as not trying versus the outcome. And every day he would ask or every Friday he would ask my wife and her brother, what did you fail out this week? And my wife would like, oh, we didn't try out for the, I didn't try out for the Chile. You know, I tried out for the Chile team and I didn't make it. And he would high five her.

They're like, oh, you try it out, you didn't make it. That's amazing. And what he was doing was he was just deflecting, taking the pressure off of the end result and focusing on the effort and redefining what failure really is. I think as a parent that's so important, huh? It's really important. I mean, as a parent, we like to praise the effort, not the result, not like, oh, man, you dominated, not that my son dominates basketball games, he doesn't, for sure.

But using as an example, like, you know, as a parent to say, oh, you dominated the game, man, you amazing, man, you played a great game. No, you worked really hard this week. And I really showed all that effort really paid off. You know, see what happens when you praise that part of the journey. That's great. That's great. Well, you know, we've talked so much about all these things in the past and happy.

and hard work and opportunities. One of the things that I'm most fascinated about in your life is the ultra-marathoning, is the athleticism. After all this stuff went on with my daughter, I had one of those moments where I was with my middle daughter, and she was riding on her bike, and I started jogging with her and got to a point where, yeah, I was keeping up, but I was definitely a little winded. And I stopped. I looked at my Apple Watch and I'm like, oh, wait, is my heart supposed to be 185?

That seems high. And I'm like, let me go home. I Googled it. 185. I'm 40 years old. Wait a second. That's not good. That's like instant heart attack mode.

And I'm a skinny dude, right? I thought, you know, I'm skinny. I'm okay. And I had this realization that like I'm in terrible shape. I'm in the worst shape of my life. I've been running a company for 14 years. You know, I focused on that. my sole focus. I got a change before I drop dead. There's only 28, 470 days in our lives,

right? So I started running. I started getting fit. I just did a 10K, my first race ever in October and been reading all these great books and just super motivated. But you're doing the big stuff. I mean, you're doing the ultras. You just did this, you started this thing, Everest thing, which I'm fascinated by and want to try out. But what drives somebody to do not just like a race that's going to, you know, drive you and push you. But you do the races that break you. What drives somebody to do that? I think everybody's different.

I don't think there's a one-size-fits-all answer to that. I think everybody has their own reasons for those kind of challenges. For me, I started out with the goal of running two miles. That was my goal. And when I was able to accomplish that after a couple of weeks, two miles and under 18 minutes was my goal. I think everybody listening could probably, the majority of the people listening probably do that with a gun to their head. But after I did that, I signed up for my first race. I mean, it was a gradual progression for me. Same as you, you know, 5K, 10K, half marathon, marathon.

And then ultimately, I decided I was going to try to run this 100-mile race 2006. And I gave myself 90 days to train for it. And I finished it, 22 hours and 30 minutes. And it put me in a wheelchair for four days. And of course, I was like, I'll never do anything like again. And by the way, I have not run 100 miles since 10, but I am signing up for a race this year. Oh, nice. Yeah. But anyway, I think I, that was the best moment for me of growth in my life. The discipline, the training is an old Japanese ritual called them Mosovo.

And the notion around the Mosovo is you do something so hard one time a year that the benefit lasts the entire 365, other 365 days of the year. That was my Mizogi. and I found that it's lasted me a lifetime, not just from that one day. And I was like, whoa, if I could get more moments of like that and build on that and take the lessons learned and apply it. And also the thrill, I enjoy it. I like challenging myself. That would be amazing.

So since then I've done some, you know, of those extreme races. I've done a lot of stand-up paddleboard, ultra-paddleboard races. I started a company called 29-0-29 where we rent a mountain. you hike up the mountain, you take the gondola down and you repeat until you climb the equivalent of Mount Everest. And I just feel like there's a lot of growth that can happen from there. So that's become a part of my life. Looking for those kind of challenges. Love it. Yeah, I love that.

Go ahead. Go ahead. Go ahead. No, I was just going to say, it's like I have, I mean, I started at two miles. I'm not anything special at all. I just put the time in and change what I believe that I thought I could do. what I thought my limits were. And that's really the only fundamental shift between the guy that could run two miles and the guy that could run 100.

My body's exactly the same. I'm not very strong. Same legs I ran two miles on. The only thing that changed was I was like, I saw someone do it. And I was like, man, if they can do it, why can't I do it? Yeah.

And the same applies for everything in entrepreneurship, everything in business. That's the same thing. For all the real estate investors. You know, like that's why we do the show is to model and to motivate and give people examples of what other people just like them are doing. So I love it.

I think it's awesome. Hey, Jesse, what do you listen to when you run? Or do you listen to nothing? I know that the SEAL mentioned in the book that he doesn't listen to anything, but what about you? Nothing. Zero. That's my time.

Part of my three-hour rule, that's my time to think. And I don't want to be distracted by other stuff. I walk a lot too. And when I walk, I listen to podcasts, interviews, motivational, inspirational lessons. I like to learn. That's part of my efficiencies built in the process. Kill two birds with one stone.

But when I run, I feel like I just want to get this thing over with. So I don't want to listen to anything. I'm really focused on my pace and time. And I'm very mathematical in my approach to that. So I'm focused on that. I've been working trying to build up and I'm up to like, I think I did a 10 miles. 10 miles.

That was the most I've ever done. And I like wanted to die afterwards. But, you know, I listen to music and I'm wondering maybe there's a better way. Maybe I'll try it without running. No, I mean, some people, some people love it. But for me, it's just I prefer to listen to the, that's my time outside. I want to hear what's going on. That makes sense.

Hey, by the way, you mentioned podcasts. Do you? You don't have a podcast right now, do you or do you? No. Yeah, you should do it. You're good at this. You should do it. All right.

So I want to transition here. Normally we have a segment of the show called the Deal Deep Dive, and we have another one called the Fire Round. We're not going to do either of those today. But last thing before we get to over the famous, I'm curious. I actually want to ask both Josh and you this one. And this has nothing to do.

It probably won't benefit our audience. But I just like this question because sometimes there are, well, I'll just ask it. What do you love most about your wife? I want to know each of you guys. Like what do you love about your wife? And the reason I ask that, again, is because I think sometimes, I don't know, our wives maybe get like, I don't know what the word is. Like we talk about ourselves and our families a lot of times.

But like, I don't know how much does your wife help you on that journey? Go ahead, Josh. Man, not a lot of people like me. I'm pretty abrasive. Brandon, you can attest for this. That's true. You have a couple people. There's a few people. No, I mean, look, look, I've got some close friends, but at the end of the day, it's hard to find really, truly deep connections in your life. Maybe you've got five or ten across your entire lifetime. My wife is one of them. She supports me. She stands up for me. She stands up too much.

me doesn't put up with my bullshit pushes me challenges me to be better and for me you know i've lived my life in a way where i'm always striving to be better i'm always striving you know which is again why i'm so excited for this conversation with jesse you know i'm always trying to do bigger and better things for myself i want to leave my mark you know it's not like i want to be known for something either i just i want to leave my mark and and do good by the world and and she supports me in that i mean when i started bigger pockets. I had a buddy who would call me and just say, hey, Josh, I was walking down the street in New York. I found a penny. Let me mail it to you. You broke motherfucker. And I'm like, these are my friends. Like, that's cool. It's all good. But my wife, like, would never give me that.

You know, she's supportive and loving. And you need that, right? You need people to rib you, but you also need people to support you. And she's always been. So I love that. And she just, you know, she's always there. And she's got my back. So that's it. I mean, she's also beautiful. And amazing and a phenomenal mother, but, you know, beyond that, that that's really it. Nice. I mean, just I could go on and odd. I mean, my wife checks all the boxes, you know, supportive, great mom, great daughter, great, great everything. Funny, fun to be around.

So she's just, and she's just a really amazing human. That's cool. You know, you mentioned there was a quote in one of the, I think it was a. living with the seal. It might have been living with the monks where you said, I think your wife said it, but I love the quote. It was like money is fun to,

what is it? Money is fun to make, fun to spend and fun to give away. Yeah. I love that quote. So I just wanted to throw that. I know I wouldn't get to find a place to fit it in today's interview, but I'm like,

I'm going to throw that out there because it's so good. She's good at all three. Yeah, that's awesome. That's very cool. So, okay, let's shift gears over the last time of the show because I know we got to get you out of here. And, you know, there's a surfing wave out there. I got to go fine.

So number, we're going to head over to the next segment of the show called the Famous for. All right. This is the segment of the show where we ask the same, or every guest, the same questions every week. We altered it just slightly for you since we're not doing a real estate related show today. So question number one is do you have a favorite book recommendation in like the personal development or fitness world?

Not necessarily business. That'll come in a second. But like the lifestyle fitness, that kind of world. Any book recommendations? Fit for Life by. Fifth for Life by Harvey Diamond and Maryland Diamond. Fit for Life and New Beginning by Harvey Diamond. That's the fruit book.

That's the one where you eat fruit all day, right? Until breakfast, until lunch. It's more than that, though. Yes, but there's more than that. It's a great book. And that's been a life changer for me. Probably the single biggest life changer for me. Cool.

Awesome. What about business book? Favorite business book? I'm just going to sound crazy. I'm scared to even go on record. I haven't read a lot of business books. I really haven't. I don't think I've ever read any business books, to be honest with you.

Nice. So it's, I mean, it's, for you, it really is this. What's like the biggest business book? I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. Rich Dad Porta had the E-Mith. Those are the one thing.

The one thing. I don't know. I'm obsessed with one right now called Four Disciplines of Execution. Completely obsessed, right? Like four times in a month. So anyway, I'll, I read a book when I was in college. I think I was in college.

Maybe I just got out of college called A Wealthy Barber, which kind of, heard of that. Yeah, which was like a third. It's like a three-year-old approach to financial planning and how to kind of save money and allocate money for saving, spending, and charity. And that helped me a little because I never took really any kind of financial courses in college or business courses. But yeah. All right.

That's a good recommendation. We'll take it. We'll take it. I'm going to send you some books, though. Okay. All right. What about hobbies apart from ultramarathons? Any other hobbies?

Oh my gosh. Yes. Let's see. Well, obviously, I like to run. I like to write. I'm doing a documentary right now. I love taking my friends and family away. That's a big thing.

I think part of the success is one of the, Big benefits of being, you know, having any kind of success as being able to treat people around you. So that's like a hobby. I love it. Love music. I like ski. I like being anything outdoors.

Yeah. Awesome. Favorite ski area. Sorry, I got to ask. They have skiing on the East Coast? What's that? There's crummy skiing on the East Coast. I like Stratton.

I like Stratton on the East Coast. Okay. I like Park City. and yeah. Right on. All right. All right. Last question from me of the day.

I think Josh has one more. But what do you believe sets apart successful entrepreneurs from those who give up, fail, or never get started? I know it's been the whole theme of today's show. But if you had to kind of sum up, what separates the successful ones from those who don't? Probably the last 5%. I think most people, I think most entrepreneurs are willing to do the standard 95% that will get you to a certain point. but that last 5% when the shit's thrown in your face and everyone's against you and everybody where that's the weed out phase where everybody quits those that keep going usually find the

gold and I think most people are willing to do the first 95% but I think very few are willing to do the last 5%. Yeah love it love it all right man before we get out of here tell us how people can find out more about you. How can they connect if they need to tell them about your books? Tell them what you want to tell them. You guys ask me about my wife, my hobbies, business books, and now you finally give me a softball. You give me an easy one to knock out of the park. Come on. Yeah. Thank you. I'm on Instagram at Jesse Hetzler. My name, J-E-S-S-E-I-Z-L-E-R, and my website is jessey at slur.com. I'm pretty simple. Awesome. Awesome. Well, listen, This has been a privilege.

Really enjoyed the conversation. Thank you so much for the time. Keep rocking it, man. Appreciate it, guys, man. Listen, 10 miles becomes 20, 20 becomes 50 and 50. And you see what, you know, you take it, see how far you want to take it from there. Stay the course. All right.

Thanks, dude. Oh, man, that was, that was like chock filled with like life tips. Yeah, that was really good. Yeah, yeah. If you, like, if you're looking for a chocker. chance to just think and learn about life, that was it. That was it. Now you've got to go spend an hour, spend two hours, spend five hours in silence and just kind of ponder what we talked about. Because I think these are the kinds of things. These are the kinds of conversations that really

change your brain. But you have to actually take the time to think about it. You know, don't jump on your phone. Don't go jump on your whatever, your devices and start doing stuff. Think. Take that time. What do you think? I would love. I would love. I love to think, but here's the funny thing. Right after we get done with this call, I've got a webinar to go host over on Bigger Pockets. There are 13,000 people. Yeah, or 13,000 people registered for the webinar. The biggest webinar we've ever done in BP was 8,000 registrants.

13,000 people registered who want to learn about investing in real estate. So if you're listening to us in the future, it means that webinar is over, obviously, but we do them every week, biggerpockets.com slash webinar. Now, one thing before we get out of here, in the quick tip in the beginning of the show, we talked about sharing this episode with somebody who you think would benefit. I want to just say that again, share it with someone you think it was benefit. And then do me a favor, shoot me or Josh a message on Twitter at J.R. Dorkin, right? It's at J.R. Dorkin.

It's at J.R. Dorkin. Or my insta is at J.R. Dorkin also. Yeah, okay. So either Instagram or Twitter, do me a favor. Let us know if you did. So we can give you a virtual high five. And, you know, follow Josh too. Josh is a good dude.

He's the best entrepreneur I've ever known. So that's legit truth right there. Cheers. tears are falling in my face. You've done some pretty amazing things. You're a pretty okay guy too, man. And I'm excited for our upcoming beard venture. This is very exciting.

The beardy, Brandon, beard oil from bigger pockets. The beardy brandy beard oil from bigger pockets. A little alliteration. Yeah, there we go. The BB, BB, BB, B. All right, y'all, thank you for coming today. Thanks for listening. There you.

Thank you very much. And we'll see you again next week. I'm the host, Josh Dorfkin. Son enough. Are you not going to cut me off? No, I'm going to let you do it. It's not off. you come back here.

So nice. You got to do what David Green does. David's thing that he ends every podcast is for BiggerPockets.com. Oh, no, for Brandon and then he makes up a nickname every time from you, a brand new nickname every time. So today for Brandon, B, B, B, B, B, B, B, B, B, B, B. I don't need anything. Fine.

End it the way you want to end it. Hey, Brandon. It's your show. Thanks, man. Thanks, Josh. You're listening to Bigger Pockets Radio, simplifying real estate for investors large and small. If you're here looking to learn about real estate

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