REAL AF with Andy Frisella - The Upside of Rock Bottom, with Andy Frisella - MFCEO255

Episode Date: August 17, 2018

Have you ever hit rock bottom? Are you hitting rock bottom now? I get it. I've been there...in business & in life. Sometimes it's been my fault. Sometimes it hasn't. Well, listen...I can't explain this, but I've experienced it & I can tell you it's true: there's something really good about hitting rock bottom. In this episode, I give you three reasons why & urge you to wake up, rise up again, & dominate.

I can stack them hundreds to the roof. I ain't stopping till they stack to the moon. Without me, my family wouldn't have food. Anybody go against me, gotta lose. What is up, guys? You're listening to the MFCEO Project. I'm Andy. I'm your host, and I am the motherfucking CEO. Today, we've got Friday Fire going for you. Before I get into that, as you know, if you've been listening, we have a review contest going on. We've got about three weeks left in that. All you have to do to enter is to go on iTunes, leave us a review, and we're going to pick a few people to fly in, spend a day working with you guys, coaching you guys, working through your issues, whatever they might be, helping you figure out what you need to do. We're going to go out to a really nice dinner. I'm going to put you up at the Four Seasons here in St. Louis, which is one of the nicest hotels that I've ever stayed at.

And we're going to have a good time. So to enter that contest, you just got to go on iTunes. You got to leave reviews. All right, that's that. So today, before I get into everything that I want to talk about, I want to remind you guys, first off, thank you guys so much for all the support that you've offered this movement, because that's what this is. This is a movement. We started this podcast with the mission of really helping people define what it really takes to be successful, not just in business, but in all areas of their life. Because as an employer of many, many, many, many, many young people, it was easy for me to see that they weren't being taught the proper things or told the proper things or coached the proper way to show them what it really takes. Right now, we're inundated with

information and that can be a great thing, but in certain cases, it can be a bad thing because everybody's out there trying to grab your attention. All right. And the truth of the matter is, is that most people don't deserve your attention. All right. I just saw a great quote on Instagram this morning and it said uh never take constructive criticism from someone who's never constructed anything and that is just so accurate in today's world we have so many people out there that are trying to build something but don't have the experience to back it up and they come across and they have good intentions i'm sure but they there's pumping out

regurgitating information to people that they've heard somewhere else and haven't truly experienced. And for that reason, we have an entire generation of people that are misinformed about what it takes to actually succeed. And we're here to help them. So I just want to say thank you guys for helping us spread that movement. We get emails every day of people whose lives are changed. And that's not just from the messages that we put out on this. That's a result of you guys sharing the information. So, you know, I try to keep this as short as possible, but make sure that you remember that when you're spreading this information, you're doing something good

that is going to help other people in their lives. And I get so many emails saying that, and you guys don't get to see them all, but if you saw them, I promise you, you'd feel good about sharing what we're talking about here. On the other hand, guys, and this is what I'm going to talk about today. I do get different kinds of emails. Okay. And some of these DMS that I get aren't like that. All right. And they're, they're more like this. I'm just going to read you one that we got. It says, Andy, I just can't go on anymore. I'm working hard on my business and nothing is working out. In fact, it seems like in spite of my effort, everything has just fallen apart. Like the business isn't struggling, it's dead. Or I get an email like this. These are two different

emails. I've just started listening to your podcast and I realized that I'm everything you say a person shouldn't be. I'm lying in my bed right now. It's two o'clock in the morning. For the last five years, I've been making the wrong decision after wrong decision. And now I'm reaping what I've sown. My life is a train wreck and I've really hit rock bottom. And I want to address that. Okay, guys, if that's you and that's how you feel and that's how you're feeling about your life, you need to really listen to what I'm going to talk about today because I've been

there. I've been there in business. I've been there in my life. Okay. And don't think for a minute that there wasn't a time when Chris and I looked around at our empty store and looked around at our, our, our bank account and said, fuck man, this, this is never going to work. Okay. You know, it seems like we get a little traction, but you know, ultimately we couldn't see the big vision. And we felt like it seems like we get a little traction, but, you know, ultimately we couldn't see the big vision. And we felt like it, like we were just like these people who wrote these emails, we were dead in the water, you know, and you guys got to remember, you know, I've been through other shit

too. Like the year after I got stabbed in the face and my face was so fucked up, nobody would look at me or talk to me. You know, I thought my life was over. And if I'm being totally honest, don't think for a minute that I've never done something shitty myself and had to face the consequences. You know, I felt super guilty too about things I've done. I said to myself, fuck man, you're stupid. Why did you do that? You're a piece of shit. And I've been really, really hard on myself. Just like some of these people are that we've talked about. You guys have to understand that what you're going through here is normal. I understand what you're saying because I've been through it, all right, in both my business

and in my life. I've hit rock bottom. And let me tell you guys something. I can't explain it, but I've experienced it. And I can tell you that it's true. There's something really, really, really good about hitting rock bottom. It can be good for your business and it is absolutely 100% good for you. Okay. And this is why there's something about the nature of the universe that a person can only go

down so far before one of two things happen. A, you die. In which case, that sucks, right? Because you're dead. But it is what it is. The game is over. And most of the time, the truth is that doesn't happen. Most of the time, it's B. It's the second thing that happens. And it goes like this. You start going the other direction. You can't fall any further down. So you start rising up again. And I think you start rising up again. And most of the time you start rising up again, stronger because when you hit rock bottom, three things happen to you. All right. Number one, you have a life-changing moment. All right. You, you say, Oh man, I get it. All right. This makes sense now. It's like, you know, you're asleep and you fell off

the bed and smashed your face on the floor and you woke up and you came to your senses and your eyes are open super wide and you're not lying to yourself anymore. You're not making excuses and you realize what you did that led you to this place of quote unquote rock bottom. You know exactly what you need to do to climb out of the hole. And that leads to the second thing. Number two, you are now motivated to change. We've all known the egotistical entrepreneurs whose businesses are struggling. They won't take anybody's advice because they're convinced that what they're doing is perfect and they aren't doing anything wrong. But then things totally fall apart. They lose

their house, they lose their car, they lose their fancy lifestyle and their business completely tanks. And they're like, yeah, man, this sucks. This is horrible. I'm desperate. I need to listen to whoever I need to listen to now and take whatever help I can get. And we've all known people whose personal lives are a mess too, but there's still enough about their lives that they enjoy that make them feel comfortable. So they don't listen to anybody and they refuse to change, but then they hit rock bottom. People give up on them, even their friends. So they end up alone. They're sitting at the bar four o'clock on a Tuesday because they lost their fucking job. They lost their wife. They go live in a fucking crack house and they get sick and they almost die, right? They hit rock bottom and

experience it so horribly that they say enough, I'm done. I'll listen to people now and I'm motivated to make a change. Okay. That's the process. And if that's you, you may not feel it yet, but that rock bottom experience you're going through isn't just going to wake you up. It's going to turn you around and get you motivated and propelled to move in the right direction. And when you finally start rising up, number three is what the coolest thing is that happens here. And it's this, what you learn at the bottom is what's going to lead you not just a little way up, but all the way to the top. Because here's the thing, guys. Most people never allow themselves to hit rock bottom.

They never allow themselves to fall to the bottom. They never allow their lives to completely fall apart. And I'm not saying you should either, but most people don't because they're so happy being average that they never hit a rock bottom. They do what they're supposed to do. They live the way they're supposed to live, the They do what they're supposed to do. They live the way they're supposed to live, the way society says they're supposed to live. And they do, you know,

the normal shit that every other normal motherfucker does in world. And I honestly, I think that's worse than hitting rock bottom if we're being honest here. Okay. And the truth is I've talked about this before, but everything that's happened to me after I got stabbed in the face, you know how I hated myself, how I was embarrassed in my face, how I was worried nobody would want to be around me and I wouldn't have any friends and wouldn't be able to meet girls, how I worried for the rest of my life. Every social interaction that I would ever have would be fucking awkward. And guess what? It forced me to become okay with who I was as a person. It forced me to embrace my authenticity and be proud of who I was. It forced me to get my focus off myself and put it on serving other people. It forced me to learn how to punch through social anxiety and master interactions with people.

And guess what? I wouldn't fucking be talking to you right now if that hadn't happened. It's helped me with my branding. It's helped me with my sales. It's helped me master creating culture. Dude, I'm a multi, multi, multi-millionaire. I'm successful according to the status quo of success, okay? And I'm committed to scaling my success

and dominating everything I do because I know what it's like to hit rock bottom. So you guys have to understand it. I get it. I've been there. I've been there and it was my fault, just like it's your fucking fault right now. But there's an upside to hitting rock bottom. I was telling Vaughn about this topic when we were talking about the show and he said, yeah, dude, it's like the poet Longfellow said, defeat may be victory in disguise. The lowest ebb is the turn of the tide. Okay. And I was like, yeah, man, king of the nerds. Guess what? You're fucking right. But guess what? It is true. When you feel dead in the water, that's good. When you feel like you're at the bottom, that's good. It means the

next step is to wake the fuck up, rise the fuck up and dominate in everything that you do. You are not destined to stay at rock bottom. See, that's the myth that you believe. The myth that you believe is that rock bottom is your final place that you're going to be. And guess what it is for the people that I talked about in the A group when they fucking go so hard that they actually die. Can't come back from that. I don't have a solution for it. And if you do, you're going to be a rich motherfucker.

But guess what? Some people never make it back, but most people fucking do. And the reason most people fucking win so big when they come back from rock bottom, the reason that when you watch TV, you hear these stories of people who made something, lost it all, went to the bottom, and then came back up even stronger is because the journey of getting to the place like some of these individuals emailed in and how they're feeling. That journey is what creates the tools, the mindset, the skill, the determination, the perseverance, okay, to win the long battle of success. I don't know one successful person that has self-made that has had an easy life. Think about that. Not one,

not one truly self-made successful person that I have met and I met a lot has had an easy life. They all have a story and it's not like they went out and made up these stories after they made money. They're telling you exactly what the truth of what happened to them. And through the process of their struggles, they learned all these skills that are going to make you be successful. So if you're one of these people who's thinking like my friends who wrote me in here and they're saying, I'm everything that you say people shouldn't be. First of all, you need to be looking for the approval of yourself, not for the approval of me. My job is to help you, okay? But I understand where you're coming from and I understand what that feels like.

If you're one of those people right now, dude, that's the purpose of this podcast. The purpose of this podcast is to wake you the fuck up. It's to get you to examine yourself. It's to get you to look at yourself. And a lot of people hear what we talk about on this podcast and they think, oh, you're being a dick. You're being a jerk. No, I'm not. I just know what it takes to wake people the fuck up. So if you're one of these people, don't go too hard on yourself. Hang in there. Shit is going to get better, but you do absolutely have to make it better yourself. Outro Music