Mark Bell's Power Project - Mark Bell's Saturday School EP. 7 - Who Are Your Mentors?

Episode Date: July 4, 2020

Welcome back students to Mark Bell's Saturday School. Today Mr. Smelly is going to lecture us about some of the people he looked up to and some of his mentors. Subscribe to the Podcast on on Platforms! ➢ https://lnk.to/PowerProjectPodcast Support the show by visiting our sponsors! ➢Piedmontese Beef: https://www.piedmontese.com/ Use Code "POWERPROJECT" at checkout for 25% off your order plus FREE 2-Day Shipping on orders of $99 ➢Icon Meals: http://iconmeals.com/ Use Code "POWERPROJECT" for 10% off ➢Sling Shot: https://markbellslingshot.com/ Enter Discount code, "POWERPROJECT" at checkout and receive 15% off all Sling Shots Follow Mark Bell's Power Project Podcast ➢ Insta: https://www.instagram.com/markbellspowerproject ➢ https://www.facebook.com/markbellspowerproject ➢ Twitter: https://twitter.com/mbpowerproject ➢ LinkedIn:https://www.linkedin.com/in/powerproject/ ➢ YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/markbellspowerproject ➢TikTok: http://bit.ly/pptiktok FOLLOW Mark Bell ➢ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/marksmellybell ➢ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/MarkBellSuperTraining ➢ Twitter: https://twitter.com/marksmellybell ➢ Snapchat: marksmellybell ➢Mark Bell's Daily Workouts, Nutrition and More: https://www.markbell.com/ Follow Nsima Inyang ➢ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/nsimainyang/ Podcast Produced by Andrew Zaragoza ➢ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/iamandrewz #PowerProject #Podcast #MarkBell

This is Mark Bell. Welcome to another edition of Saturday School. Today we're going to be talking about mentorship. So I'm just going to jump right in and dive right in on this. First of all, let me explain who some of my mentors are and also explain how I think mentors are important for your career, for your particular job. I'll start out by explaining why I think mentors are important and what they can do for you. I think that people have probably heard me talk about this often over the years. But if you walk with the lame, you will develop a limp. And what that means is that you can't really afford to have people that are going to slow you down. You can't afford to have people around you that are not going to help with your progression.

I think even more important than that, though, rather than focusing in on like, okay, who's negative around me? I think a better perspective is to focus in on who's positive around me. Who are people that are around me that I'd like to be more like? And maybe you don't have anybody around you at the moment. But, you know, most things come from, you're going to really pull a lot of inspiration from some of these people that might be around you that are just really good at a particular thing. They make money really well. It seems like they have a good family life. They're just a couple steps ahead of you.

They're more advanced. And I think that imitation is probably one of the best places to start when you're trying to be successful. Just imitate, just copy. Now, you don't want to steal ideas and concepts, but you do want to steal behaviors. You do want to steal habits, the habits of the rich, the wealthy, the successful, the habits of somebody that has a big bench press, somebody that has a huge squat, the habits of these people. These are things that you want to adopt, and these are things that you want to get close to. So it's super important because if you don't have that,

maybe you'll never think of that. Like if you don't see that firsthand, maybe you'll never know anything about it. And for me, you hear a lot of people saying, oh man, you got to cut ties with all the losers in your life. And you got to, i personally don't like that mentality i think that it's um i don't think that anybody's a loser i think everyone has really powerful capabilities it's just people are at different points in their life and again like rather than focusing and i i would hate i would hate for somebody to think that and also i'd hate somebody somebody to misinterpret what's going on. I'd hate for somebody to misinterpret and think just because somebody isn't making a lot of money that they're a loser. Or just because somebody doesn't have a job that they're a loser. Or just because someone's not in good shape that they're a loser.

Those are all like really powerful claims. And I would rather focus more in on the positive and focus in on like who around me is doing some crap that I want to do and who's doing it in a way that I would like to do it. Now, if you are a fan of sports, there's a lot of different ways you can do things. You have a mindset like a Tom Brady. Tom Brady seems very fiery. He seems like he's kind of a win-at-all-cost kind of guy. At the same time, I mean, he seems to have some good values and stuff as well, but there's some stuff, there's some things circulating around the New England Patriots about

deflating the football, and there's some things like that. It seems like it would be kind of hard there's some things like that. And it seems like it would be kind of hard to play under Tom Brady, just as it was tough to play with Michael Jordan. But when you look up to some of these people, you can kind of pick and choose who would I most want to be like? Do you want to be like a Kobe Bryant where Kobe Bryant was real standoffish to the media and every single day was about him perfecting his craft and that's all he seemed to care about or would you rather be like a Brett Favre who seemed like he was having a lot of fun during the whole process of of being successful so I mean I think you get

to pick and choose and like if it's people that are in your life which it's you're much better off mimicking people that you actually know and that you can actually get close to. Because when it comes to these celebrity athletes, as we've seen before, we have no idea what they do or how they do it. But what it does, the reason why it's important to find a mentor, the reason why it's important to seek them out is so that you have something that you can imitate. You have a blueprint. You're like, okay, I can kind of act like that. I can kind of do those things. And when I do those things, those things are going to help me get headed in the right direction. Once you get momentum heading in the right direction, then you can continue down that path and you can start to

develop your own ideas, your own concepts. And, you know, these things will then kind of become your own deal. And then you'll have somebody else who's trying to imitate some of the stuff that you're doing. For me, you know, when I started to kind of go on this quest of wanting to be more successful when it came to, say, like powerlifting. You know, at the age of around 23 or 24, I moved to Columbus, Ohio to train with Louie Simmons and to trade at Westside Barbell. That was a huge commitment. And that was a big deal for me to do that. But the concept there was, okay, I'm going to power lift. But I'm not just going to power lift.

I'm going to really learn power lifting. And I'm not just going to learn power lifting. I'm going to learn from the strongest gym that ever existed at that time. And I'm going to go right directly to that gym. I'm going to learn from those athletes. And I'm going to learn from the best strength coach in the world. Louie Simmons was a great mentor to me. He was kind of like an idol of mine as well.

He's an iconic figure in strength. And I was like, you know what? I'm just going to go and I'm just going to absorb and I'm going to learn stuff from him. And so with my wife, we made that sacrifice moving from California. My wife was able to work from home luckily. So it worked out really well for me. But if you want to be a bodybuilder, then hang around with bodybuilders.

You want to be a powerlifter, hang around with powerlifters. If you want to be successful in business, hang out with people that are successful in business. So hanging out with Louie Simmons, people don't realize this, but Louie Simmons is also very wealthy. He has inventions, much like myself. He's had these inventions for years and years and years. He has multiple United States patents. He has patents all over the world, and he is a genius. So I started

to kind of pattern some of my thoughts and some of my ideas and concepts around him. Now, my inventions are completely different from some of the stuff that he has, but it's still in the same space. It's still in the fitness realm. But as I got around people like Louie, I started to quickly recognize how it made me feel. And I think this is the most important thing of mentorship is that it really leveled me up. So I don't think it matters a lot in terms of like if the person makes a lot of money. I think what matters the most is that you feel like you leveled up every single time you hang out with this person. It just feels that way. And these are special people. They're not easy to find.

You know, it took me a long time to get to that point where I was able to, you know, get to meet like a Louie Simmons. But sometimes these people are right underneath your nose. Sometimes they're right in your own household. And another mentor of mine was my dad. My dad gave me a lot of great advice that helped over the years and trying to mimic myself after him. Watching what a great family person my dad was,

watching how my dad coached our little league baseball team, watching my dad's behavior as I got older and as I became like a teenager and I was into chicks. And I would like look at these women or these girls that would walk by us. My dad would never flinch. He would never look at them. He just, you know, he married my mother, and that's the only woman for him. And I'm not powerful enough to uphold to everything that he was able to do, but, you know, it just gave me ideas and concepts of what it means to be a man

and what it means to be somebody that's in a committed relationship. So I found tremendous value in having mentors over the years. I was very fortunate to have good parents. So both of those, you know, both my parents helped kind of mold me and shape me. In addition to that, I've had a lot of other mentors, a lot of other friends in the community. Let me just kind of finish off with the Westside Barbell thought, just so that's kind of a more complete thought. Getting around those athletes and seeing what it took to be a powerlifter

was also really crucial. So, again, getting around these people that are really high level in terms of what they can execute, whether it be business or skateboarding or video game playing or whatever the thing is that you're after that you're trying to be better at, photography, videography, anything, it's important to understand what does it all entail? What does it look like? What does it look like to be a videographer? What does it look like to film for TV? What does it look like to write scripts? Like, what does it really look like?

Like, are these guys just kind of like going to a coffee shop like twice a week and writing out a script? Or are these guys like working their faces off and sometimes they're writing at one in the morning because that's when something hits them. Or sometimes they're writing at, you know, in the middle of the day and they're making these sacrifices.

It's important to see those sacrifices, those things up close. And when i saw all the stuff that it took to be a great power lifter none of it scared me away from power lifting it actually encouraged me to to go into it further but that is a really important step because if it did scare me away like as a young kid i tried boxing and as i got closer and closer and as I understood what it took to be a boxer, the amount of running, the amount of conditioning, I was like, nope, that's not for me. And then I switched gears and started moving into something else. So those are really important factors. In addition to that, try to always seek out the best. You want to do martial arts, you want to do, you know, boxing, you want to become a great runner. Like there's somebody in your

community right now that's a great runner that you could easily get a great runner like there's somebody in your community right now that's a great runner that you could you could easily get a hold of you can i mean we have one degree of separation nowadays with the internet you can dm people if you don't get anything from one person you can dm another person i mean you can really be on a relentless pursuit you know i rubbed elbows with with as many different people as I could. Charles Poliquin being another one, like it didn't matter to me. I was going to figure it out. I was super nervous.

I was very scared. I was very intimidated. I remember paying for a phone call with Charles Poliquin probably about 20-some-odd years ago and barely being able to form any words. You know, now you guys hear me talking all the time and you see all the stuff that I do, but this is not a natural part of my personality. I only communicate because it assists with the business and it helped kind of put me on the map, so to speak, in terms of strength and conditioning and some of these other things.

But all of that was through watching how Louie Simmons did it. Like Louie Simmons couldn't do it without being able to speak. He made videos. So I made videos. I made videos on how to power lift. He had instructional content. I got around a lot of people. I coached a lot of people. I did a lot of the same things he did. And I really just tried to mimic a lot of that. And I was terrified. I was terrified to do all of it. It's really important that everybody understands that you probably are not going to want to do it. You probably will be scared. But having those mentors to imitate leads you to believe you're like, oh shit, like that's the way,

that's the route to go. To like a lesser degree, you know, like I have a lot of other people in my life that I wouldn't really consider them like real mentors. Not like they've been there for everything type of thing, but they're people that I get great power from. They're empowering people. Kelly Sturette is one of those people. Like I remember Kelly Sturette and I, we used to talk, I don't know how much he wants me to share this, but he and I literally would talk about making a million dollars because we were both starting to do well in business and we're like, how cool would it be to make a million dollars? We figured out the number and it's like

2,700 something bucks. I can't remember the exact number. You can do the math. You make 2,700 bucks a day and you make a million dollars if I'm remembering the number correctly. And I was like, whoa, like that is an insane, that is a crazy amount of money. But because he and I were talking about it and because we were like, you know, lining ourselves up for that with the type of businesses that we had, we were like, you know what? Like, it sounds wild to do it, but I think we can do it. And like every time we got around each other, that wasn't like a thing that we were like talking about that particular goal all the time. We were just talking about how to provide better service for people.

And he would share stuff about his business. I would share stuff about my business. Neither one of us cared about whether someone was going to like steal something from somebody. There was, and there was no remorse. There was no like, oh man, like you're ahead this week and I'm going to get ahead of you. Like there was no like competitive side to it. It was just, it was just fun. And I think it has a lot to do with, you know, leveling up, getting around people that empower you. I think that he felt similar to the way that I felt because we felt like we were kind of like in it together. And so there was like it wasn't like one of these kind of like one sided relationships deals where, you know, I was getting more out of it than him or he was getting more out of it than me.

We felt like it was really mutual. He would explain a certain specific way on how to stand and how to brace yourself for a squat because he knows human mechanics. He knows how the body operates. And I knew how the body – I knew how you're supposed to stand for a squat because I squatted a lot. And I squatted often and I learned it that way. And so we came from different sides. But we ended up sharing a lot of the same principles. Back to my dad for a second.

You know, I share this often. I've said this a million times. I can't say it enough. My dad taught me at a young age, part of knowing who you are is knowing who you're not. And I think at some point I was, I can't remember where I, like how old I was, but there was a point where I recognized like, oh man, like I'm pretty good at powerlifting, but I'm not going to be an Ed Cohn. I think this was actually very, really early

on. I think this was my first go at powerlifting before I started to try to like mess around more with like playing football and stuff like that as I got older. And it was before the West Side Barbell stuff. I think I was like a teenager. But I recognized quickly because Ed Cohn made progress so fast. And he burst out of the scene so quickly and just dominated. And then once he dominated, he never looked back. He never lost.

And then once he dominated, he never looked back. He never lost. And I kind of had this realization of like, okay, you can be big and strong, but you're never going to be Ed Cohn. And I remember saying something like that to my dad. And my dad was like, well, part of knowing who you are is knowing who you're not. And he's like, you're just, you know, it's okay that you're not Ed Cohn. It doesn't really matter because you're going to find out who you are. And then later I shared that with Ed Cohn in an interview that I did for him with Power Magazine.

And Ed Cohn was like, he's like, you know what? He goes, you might not be me, but he's like, I'm sure you're going to go on to do like things bigger and better than me, you know, type thing. And I just, that was super empowering to kind of hear that from, you know, a guy like Ed Cohn. So having like mentors is really important. Having people that you look up to, my brothers and I, we always looked up to Ed Cohn. We, we love those big weights that he was hitting. You know, it just captured the imagination and helped us to, you know, set, set our goals really high. I think everyone, you know, I think, I think people need mentors. I shouldn't say everyone, cause I'm sure, you know, I think people need mentors. I shouldn't say everyone because I'm sure, you know, people have different circumstances and maybe not everyone technically needs one.

But I think that it's assistive. I think that it helps a lot to have a mentor. And again, whatever field that you're trying to go into, try to get around the best people. You know, it's going to be really really useful to you to have a sensei and i'm a big believer you know some people like man i don't have anybody like there's nobody around there's nobody um don't talk like that like that is a loser mentality i talked earlier about you know like being a loser but that kind of mentality will will have you believe that you can't win and that's the definition of a loser, but that kind of mentality will have you believe that you can't win. And that's the

definition of a loser to me, someone that just thinks that they're not capable of victory. And you are capable of victory. There's people around you. There's people at your local gym that can assist you. There's so many options. If you want to learn about bodybuilding, go to a bodybuilding show. You want to learn about powerlifting, sign up for a powerlifting meet. You want to learn how to run, sign up for a local 5K and go talk to runners. There's no excuses. There's no reason why you can't figure it out. In finishing up, I'll just say, you know, I'm really thankful that I've had opportunities to meet people like Louie Simmons.

I'm really thankful that I have, you know, a great, I have great parents. But again, when it came to, you know, you can't choose your parents, but I chose, that was a choice that I made to go and see Louie Simmons. And it's something that helped change my life. Dave Tate, you know, I can't, I can't leave Dave Tate out of there. I need to explain that for a second. I know these Saturday schools are supposed to be shorter format, but sometimes, you know, we got to, sometimes we got to go in deep on some of this stuff. Having a mentor is a life-changing, life-altering thing that is massively important to your life,

massively important to your career. So, Louie Simmons was, you know, he was Westside Barbell and he explained a lot of what they did at Westside Barbell and stuff like that to me. But I didn't, at the time, I didn't believe I had the capacity to learn it because I was, you know, told this story from the time I was a kid that I was dumb and I bought that story. You know, told this story from the time I was a kid that I was dumb. And I bought that story. You know, I thought that that was true. I kind of became a loser because I didn't think I could win. So I had a difficult time learning stuff. And when Louie would talk about certain things they did at Westside Barbell, I'd actually be pretty confused. I would understand some of it. I was like, okay, they have a dynamic day. They got a speed day. They got a day where they go heavy. You know, I get some of it, but then I'd

get lost here and there. Louie talks really fast. Louie's a genius. And so he's speaking in a way that makes sense to him, but it doesn't, it turns out it doesn't make sense to some other people. Like when I communicate with other people, like, yeah, man, I'm not sure what he's talking about. And I was like, oh my God, I thought that was that was you know I thought I was the only one who had a problem absorbing this stuff I thought it was more simple but Dave Tate actually broke down all those barriers and Dave Tate was the one to explain the west side method in really really simple terms and he's the one that made me completely, completely obsessed with it. I got obsessed with it from that point on and just never stopped thinking about powerlifting ever again.

And that was in 1998, I think, that that happened. I went to – my wife actually paid for me to go to a Westside Barbell seminar in Columbus, Ohio that was taught by Dave Tate. And it was at the original Westside, not the original original Westside, but one of the original Westsides that had the window painted black, but it looked purple because the sun came through. And Dave Tate taught that class along with Louie, and then the next day it was just Dave Tate. Dave Tate communicated in his seminar about how he was a learning disabled kid.

He always thought he was dumb, and he was explaining all this stuff. I'm like, oh, my God. I'm like, this guy is my idol. I found my guy right here because I feel the exact same way as him. I was put in special classes, and I was just told I was slow. And you hear that enough enough and at some point you believe that's your truth. You believe that that is what you are. And once Dave started to explain the West Side Method and he explained it, he broke it down because he's coming from the same side of the tracks that I was coming from. And so when he broke it down, I totally understood it.

It was like Neo understanding the matrix. I mean, it like blew my mind. And then from, again, from that point on, my mind was completely obsessed with box squats, bands, chains, rate of force development, how to become more explosive, how to become stronger. And I studied every single nook and cranny of powerlifting that I possibly could. And everything spawned from there. Everything came from that. The slingshot, the compression cuffs, the hip circle, all the stuff that you see at markbellslingshot.com,

all that stuff that you see now, all came from that time period. It all came from, because I just became so obsessed with, I was like wrapping my knees. I was trying out bench shirts. I was trying out squat suits. And I was just fascinated by what the human body can do, what some of this equipment could do for you. And day and night, every single day, it didn't matter if I was in the shower, it didn't matter if I was taking a dump, it didn't matter what I was doing. I was thinking about powerlifting every single opportunity and every single chance that I had all the way to the point where anytime I'd get up off my toilet, I would do so explosively in a box squat fashion. Sorry for putting that into your head.

You can't unhear that and you can't unsee it probably, but that's the way all that went down. So that should give you guys an idea how important it is to have a mentor. It'll fire you up and it could help alter your life and change the trajectory of your life forever. Thank you for listening to Saturday School in the comments below. Let me know who's your mentor. Hopefully I've been able to assist you and mentor you.

Hopefully one day we can meet. You can come here to Super Training Gym. And the gym is free. We're open every Saturday and Sunday. We're still in the middle of this quarantine thing. So you'll have to hold off for a few more weeks. But I'd love to meet you. And let me know who some of your mentors are.

I would like to learn that. I'd like to know that. Strength is never a weakness. Weakness is never a strength. Catch y'all later.