EverydaySpy Podcast - How to Gamble Big and Win

Episode Date: December 28, 2021

The last week in December is a time when people everywhere stop and reflect on what they want to do differently in the new year. In this episode, Andrew shares a few success stories from the field and asks a different kind of question for you to consider. Whether you are in school or in business; raising a family or raising seed capital for a new venture, there is value in knowing one important answer before you ring in the new year... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

My name is Andrew Bustamante, and this is everyday espionage. My family and I just recently wrapped up the Christmas weekend here in the United States. And for anybody who is Western culture, then you know how awesome Christmas can be. There's family and there's food and there's holidays, there's gifts, there's music, and there's movies. And the thing I want to really talk about is that I've had these three very interesting client experiences all over the same two to three days. days that are Christmas, Christmas Eve, Christmas Day, and of course, the day after Christmas. And there was an interesting trend that stood out to me through these three client interactions that I absolutely wanted to share with you before the New Year. So let me just tell you three

very short stories. So the first client reached out, and I had worked with this client. Towards the end of November, they were a cryptocurrency millionaire, which meant they had millions of dollars in cryptocurrency, but not millions of dollars in hard. fiat currency. So with all of that cryptocurrency, they were debating whether or not they were at a position where they could leave their day job and cash in their crypto to become an actual cash currency millionaire, whether it's euros or dollars or yen. They were trying to make this decision and they were trying to balance the risk between cashing out while they were crypto millionaires in the end of November versus waiting and cashing out in January or March or the third

quarter of 2022. So for those of you who know my stance on crypto, I find crypto to be a very interesting tool for exchange, but I don't believe that cryptocurrency carries its own real value as a currency. And there's lots of reasons for that, and you can research me if you agree or disagree. It's kind of irrelevant to me. But there were all sorts of reasons why I recommended that my client look at leaving their day job and becoming and dedicating themselves and their time and their talent full-time to managing their crypto investments. Now, the client came out, and just to give you a sense of what time costs with me, that client paid $4,000 a day to just sit with me for two days, about eight hours each day,

and talk about strategies to leave, to leave their job, to invest, not to invest, to kind of work through this massive life decision. And there was a point when I explained to him that the cost of continuing, to wonder whether to invest in his own cryptocurrency talent was more expensive than the cost of either choosing to stay in crypto or choosing to get out of it. There was just an opportunity cost that was happening as he let life pass by day to day, still grinding away at a day job and still stressing out over crypto trading. And in between, he's making no action at all. And the act of non-action has a cost.

So when we talked about that, then a light kind of switched on. And he realized that all of his plans and all of his ambitions to meet beautiful women and to travel the world and to build this giant repertoire of experiences, none of it was happening. Because he was still working nine to five and he was still up late trading cryptocurrency and he was still stressing with the volatility in the crypto world. and he wasn't actually investing himself into anything. So after we had our conversation and he came to that realization, he walked away dedicated to action. And we made an action plan for him. And he ended up texting me over Christmas on Christmas Eve

to tell me that he actually took action on his action plan early and that he had resigned from his job. He had dedicated himself full to crypto. And for those of you who are following the crypto market, Bitcoin has actually taken a massive crash since the end of November. So even in the face of a massive crash of his primary cryptocurrency, he was still able to find the courage and the commitment to leave his job and gamble full on himself, right? He's gambling on his own talent, his own skills, his own risk tolerance, even in the face of a crashing crypto market. So that's the first client.

The second client actually sent me a message on Christmas Day. in the morning. And with that client, he had been a medium-level, medium-tier professional in a growing startup. And there was a lot of change going on in the startup. They were debating who was going to make C-suite executive, who would be CEO long-term. Should they go public? Should they not go public? How much should everybody get paid? And this client has been a good friend and a good client for many, many years. And he was going through the process of deciding whether or not he should stay with that company. Because staying with the company meant that. that he would continually have to go through all of these gyrations of what the company was going

to do, what the company wasn't going to do, and where he was going to land. And is that taking care of himself? Is that taking care of his family? He works 12 to 15 hours a day. He works six days a week. The company is a high-stress, high-profile company because it's tied in with military infrastructure and civil infrastructure and national security and national defense. So I totally understand the pressures that are on him.

because he is essentially doing something that only a handful of people in the whole country could ever do in terms of his intelligence and his talent, but also in terms of having the invitation to sit at the table. And here he was wondering whether he should stay or whether he should leave that job. And for him, we had multiple days of conversation. And then there was a light switch that clicked. When I told him that the real challenge he was facing may not have anything to do with the company, but the challenges may have to do with himself because he is an intelligent, smart, go-getter,

he was successful at everything he had ever done. And now here is this company that he is not in a leadership position to influence, but the company itself is showing signs of being indecisive. The company itself is showing signs of being lost. The company itself is not self-confident, even though my client himself has always carried himself as a self-confident action-making, decision-making individual.

So here he's in this point of cognitive dissonance where he's not in a leadership role, however he is in a company that he believes in, and the company is acting with values separate from his own self-values, which really boils down to a question of self-respect. Is the company respecting him at the same level that he respects himself?

And once we had that self-respect conversation, everything changed for him and he realized that what was happening was that he was letting the company dictate his sense of value to him rather than he himself controlling his own sense of value. And when I last spoke to him, which was in early December, he was debating and he was heavily on the side of leaving his company. Well then on Christmas Day, I get a message from him and he tells me to my surprise that he chose to stay with the company. Now, at first, you might be thinking, why would a person stay with a company when he realizes that the company doesn't value him? And that was exactly the question that I posed back. I asked what had changed.

And then he told me that he had negotiated himself into a C-suite executive position. He basically doubled down, gambled on himself, knew his own self-worth, knew his own value, knew his impact and what impact and vision he had for his role in the company. And he went to the board of directors and he told them, he laid out a vision for them. He took control. He put himself in exactly the position that he was best suited for, a C-suite executive leadership position. And he negotiated his own seat on the C-suite staff. That was what changed. Between our last conversation and what he did on his own, he found a way to make the company values mirror his values instead of continuing to struggle with a company whose

values did not reflect his own. So I was so proud of him and I was so excited for him because now he is sitting as one of four C-suite executives on a growing startup company that's scheduled to go public sometime in the next two to three years. In both cases, my clients faced the question of whether or not they were respecting themselves, whether they were, I like to use the phrase gambling on themselves. Were they willing to gamble on themselves? to shape their own future? Or were they going to continue to let the unknown keep them from taking any action at all?

Which is kind of like being in a washing machine where the clothes are just tumbling over each other over and over again. When you don't gamble on yourself, when you don't grab the reins yourself, when you don't take control yourself, you're basically leaving the control to someone or something else.

So then comes the third client. Now my third client was another, somebody who had been part of one of my freedom seminars. My freedom seminars are similar to that seminar I was telling you about with my first client where folks will spend between $4,000 and $5,000 a day to come out and spend somewhere between two and three days with me. And all we do is deep dive into their specific ambitions. Sometimes it's usually it's career or professional focused. Sometimes it's life or relationship focused. But I had a third client who was another freedom seminar graduate, reach out. And they reached out just to say hello and to wish me a Merry Christmas and to give

me an idea and they recommended that what I start doing is creating more opportunities for graduates of one of my live trainings to join me for a monthly call or a monthly coaching call or a monthly meeting or a meet and greet to kind of keep the relationship warm in the hopes that those those past graduates would continue to engage with the brand of everyday spy and continue to engage with me and ideally sell or buy into a more expensive product downstream. So obviously a very sales savvy client called me. Now, for those of you who have been, who have been listening for a while or who have met me in person, you know that I don't coach. I don't believe in coaching personally. I don't like coaching. I am of the opinion that people who are requesting coaching are people who

are basically unwilling to take the responsibility on themselves. And that's why they go when they find a coach where what I like to do is I like to mentor, I like to teach, I like to deliver the tools that you need to be successful on your own. I had a very successful mentor when I was in corporate America who used to say that the best job is the job that you work yourself out of because you prove that you are capable of more and you leave behind you a legacy of success. And that's exactly what I try to do with my business. That's why I refuse to coach individuals. I want to give you everything you need to be self-sufficient on your own so that you can walk away from me at any time

or I can walk away from you at any time and we both have total confidence that you will continue to be successful. So I decided to call this third client and I called them the day after Christmas to share that I appreciated their idea and I appreciated their suggestion and I was flattered that they would be thinking of my business on their holiday.

And I also called to remind them that it's important to in their, even in the work that they do, it's always important to remember that your job in life is not to solve everybody's problems. Your job in life, your mission is to solve the problems that you are uniquely suited to solve the best. That's where responsibility meets personal mission. There is something you are good at,

and you should be doing that one thing, just like the C-suite executive client who negotiated his way into that C-suite executive role, he knew his unique talent. And he strove, he sought, he aggressively took action to get himself there. Just like my client, who is now a successful crypto-millionaire, knew that that's where he wanted to be. He knew that's where his talent was. And he was willing to put all of his effort and time and money down,

even in the face of a cryptocurrency downturn. That is the goal. So two of my three clients had heard that lesson, seen and felt that lesson, and then took action on that lesson. My third client reached out, and I had a suspicion based on their recommendation to me, that they had wandered a little bit from the straight and narrow path that we had discussed during their freedom seminar. And what was really powerful to me is that as our call went on, 20, 30 minutes at most, that my third client realized that's exactly what they had started to do. They had started to let themselves wander off of their own original realization that they themselves and their business are not there to solve everyone's problems. They're just there to solve the problems they are most ideally suited to solve. So my point with all of this is that there is a new year coming.

Every year, the end of the year is a time when people start wondering, what should I do differently next year? What changes do I want to make? what New Year's resolutions should I put in motion? What do I want to be better at? How do I want to change? And my question is not whether or not you should take on a New Year's resolution. That's your decision.

If you want a New Year's resolution, go for it. There's a reason 80% of New Year's resolutions fail within the first two weeks. And I'm not here to give value or credence to what you want to do differently in the new year. But what I do want to do is I want to present you with an opportunity to think about the entire new year differently. Instead of thinking about what you can do differently, I want to ask you, what kind of person do you want to be in the new year? Because in the case of all three of my clients, they were trying to be something someone else wanted when the person who they were was awesome. The person who they were built to be was awesome and successful, powerful, powerful, aggressive, dominant, brilliant. but instead they had been fitting into a mold of what others expected or what others required

or what some company or what some job was asking them to be. And that was the crux of their struggle. They were not gambling. They were not betting on themselves. They were not showing themselves the self-respect they deserved to do and be what they knew they were in their core. So rather than think about what you can do. differently in the next year, I want to ask you, who do you want to be in the new year?

Do you want to be the person that others require you to be? Do you want to be the person that others ask you to be or expect you to be? Do you want to be the person who doesn't gamble on yourself, the person who's lacking the self-respect to take the risks that they need to have the success they deserve? Because that is where most of us find ourselves. That is what culture and what societal norms thrust upon you. Our society, Western society, Western culture is a culture of responsibility, obligations, expectations, assignments, obedience.

That is how we were raised from the time we were kids. That's why you went to college. That's why you accepted the job salary you accepted. It's why you work five days a week. It's why you work from nine to five. It's why you log on and log off. It's why you follow the rules and cross the street across. and stop at red lights, because that's our culture.

It's how we've been wired to exist and to succeed in a framed, structured, western culture. But the truth is that you can cross the street anywhere. The truth is, you only really have to stop at a red light if there's another car coming. And you'll get away with all of it unless somebody who's enforcing the law observes it and chooses to take action, which is why every one of you know what it feels like to speed too fast on a highway past a car that's a speed trap, and the speed trap doesn't chase you. You know what that feels like because somebody who's in the job of law enforcement observed you but didn't choose to take action. That is also the dirty, soft underbelly of the culture that we live in. Rules really

only apply to the people who follow the rules. So the world, the world. is built. Our world, our Western world, is built around people who are following the rules that others set in place for them. Like at work when you're told what your salary is, like in the workplace when you're told what your role is, like in business when people try to tell you that you have to serve everybody's needs, that the customer always comes first and the customer is always right. I'm here to tell you from my own business success, the customer very often doesn't know squat about their actual problem. Just like assets in the field don't know anything about what the real reason is that they choose to become spies. When you convince a Russian or a Chinese person or a

French person or a Brazilian person to become a traitor against their country, they're not doing it because they want to be a traitor. They're doing it because they're justifying it as something else, because there's something else that they want. There's something that compromises their decision-making and makes them think it's a good idea to become a traitor against their country. The same thing happens in your everyday life when you think that there's something else

that's worth becoming a traitor against your own self-value, your own self-respect. And that's why you accept jobs that pay less than your worth. And that's why you date people who don't respect you as individuals. And that's why you put up with crap from bosses and from neighbors and even from business partners who don't respect you. So in the next year, I want to encourage you to be the person you are. Be the person you want to be.

Make the changes that put you in line with your own strengths and your own values. Don't ask yourself what you want to do differently. Ask yourself who you want to be and then be that person. Be that person, no matter how many toes you have to say. step on no matter how many people question you, no matter how many friends you lose. Because on the other side of you being who you were born to be, doing what you do best, gambling on yourself, on the other side of that gamble is the life you've been looking for, is the success you have earned, is the best year you have yet to experience.

And that is everyday espionage. Happy New Year, everybody. Take care. Everyday espionage is dedicated to one thing, educating everyday people. I know that not everyone will listen, but those who listen will learn. If you learned something new today, click subscribe, review, and share the podcast with a friend. Find me on social media at Everyday Spy or on my website, Everydayspy.com. If you are up for a special challenge, visit Everydayspy.com forward slash operations,

and join me for an authentic spy training mission. And above all else, remember that knowledge is freedom.