The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast – Life Switch: How to Experience the Power of Living On by Discovering Your Potential, Passion, and Purpose by Joel Steele

Episode Date: October 19, 2025

Life Switch: How to Experience the Power of Living On by Discovering Your Potential, Passion, and Purpose by Joel Steele Bookjoelsteele.com https://www.amazon.com/Life-Switch-Experience-Discovering-Potential If an extraordinary life were passing you by, wouldn’t you want to know about it? All before turning twenty-five, Joel Steele had flirted with jail, bankruptcy, and death. But from those depths, he emerged not just to survive but to thrive. Joel chose a new path to find the highest levels of personal and professional fulfillment. Along the way, he obtained a meaningful life and even an NBA championship ring. In Life Switch, Joel narrates his raw and inspiring journey with unflinching honesty, revealing his secrets and strategies to unlocking your full potential, recognizing your passion, and discovering your true purpose in life. He’ll show you how to overcome setbacks and failures, turning your challenges into opportunities. Life Switch is a blueprint for personal transformation. Joel delves deep into the pivotal moments that shaped his life, offering relatable advice and actionable steps that you can take to flip your switch on to gain powerful access to the life you want. Joel proves we’re all pre-wired for success, and everything we need is already within us. His story is entertaining and thought-provoking while promising to save you time, money, and misery. Life Switch will rewire your thoughts and ignite a spark within you. Are you ready to take the first step toward an extraordinary life? It’s time to experience the power of living ON! About the author For over twenty years, Joel Steele has been an accomplished financial expert and co-owner of a leading financial firm. However, he would rather be known for being the best husband, father, and person he can be. Joel is passionate about sharing his life lessons and experiences to help others avoid learning them the hard way. He has helped thousands of individuals build their wealth and health. He is an author and speaker sharing messages from his unusual and interesting life journey that are part inspiring and part entertaining. Joel is part of the ownership group of the Grand Rapids Gold, the G-League affiliate of the 2023 NBA Champion Denver Nuggets. He also has a passion for fitness and nutrition. Joel is a former certified personal trainer and created a small chain of healthy fast-food restaurants in the early 2000s.

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Today we have an amazing young man on the show with us today. His book is out. It's entitled Life Switch. How to Experience the Power of Living on by Discovering Your Potential, Passion, and Purpose by Joel Steele. It's available for, I believe, pre-order now. You can get October 21st, 20, 25. We're going to get into it with him and find out how you can switch your life too. I've seen some of you folks and you need to do some switching, some switching, no flipping, but switching.

Anyway, guys, Joel Steele for over 20 years has been an accomplished financial expert and co-owner of a leading financial firm. However, he'd rather be known for being the best husband, father, and person he could be. Joel is you got to win a word on that bio Joel I've been doing this for 16 years no one ever says that it's always like blah blah blah I'm a great business person good for you good for you I like that is more interest of being good a good human being no one leads that in a bio so good for you Joel is passionate about sharing his life lessons and experiences to help others avoid learning them the hard way he has helped thousands of individuals build their wealth and health.

He is an author and speaker sharing messages from his unusual and interesting life journey that are part motivational and part entertaining. Mine's my life journey is mostly just entertaining. A lot of people just laugh at it. Oh, look with that idiot. Anyway, Joel is part ownership group of the Grand Rapins Gold, a G-League affiliate of the 2023 NBA champion Denver Nuggets. He has a passion for fitness and nutrition.

He's a former certified personal trainer and created a small chain of healthy fast food restaurants in the early 2000s. He enjoys traveling and sports, philanthropy, and meeting interesting people. He currently lives in New Jersey with his wife. That's my horrible New Jersey accent. Kara and their two kids, Brandon and Kessley. Sorry, I'm having a stroke, I think, here, Joel. Welcome to the show. How are you, sir?

I'm great, Chris. Thank you so much. You really pointed out some good things. Number one, I need to cut down my bio. That was pretty long. It's a great bio. But like I say, most people always put the family stuff at the last of their bio. You know, I've run a few thousand.

And so they usually put it at the end. No one says at the beginning. I just try and be a good person. Yeah. Well, that's part of the difference. It's about being the best version of yourself and being happy. And that's what that's what it's about to me. I work on being the best, worst version of myself, but that's a different story.

Let's get into your book, Life Switch. Tell us about, oh, I need your dot-coms. Let's get those plugs in first. Yeah, the easiest one is just my website, bookjolsteel.com, just like it sounds, bookjolsteel.com. And the book is all over the place, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Walmart. You can easily Google Joel Steel Life Switch, and you'll find it. So easy to find. And it's a hard copy as well as an audio book that will be out on the 21st. And it's got three E's. There's a steel with an E at the end. So make sure you spell that right.

I grew up in you a steel land. I appreciate that for sure. We want to make sure people get over there. So give us a 30,000 overview, Joel, of what's inside your new book? Yeah, I wrote this book because I was passionate about the experiences I went through. And I felt like I was sort of hoarding it from myself. I felt that there was a lot more value that people could get out of all the stuff that I went through. When I say stuff, I don't mean just failure.

I mean fall on your face, wonder if you're ever going to be able to get up failure, you know, epic failure. And I just felt that there's got to be more to that than just me hitting a dead end and then going up in my next career. And so one day I just started typing and writing and ultimately I decided to make a book out of it and become an author. And I've been really enjoying the journey. I'm not an author by trade, but I have written articles, financial articles for years. And I did always enjoy connecting with an audience. But as you know, with your form of media here, it's really fun and cool and interesting when you can connect with so many more people outside your little local area. And so the book can and will be all over the world.

And I just am so excited and fired up that people can read it, listen to it, and have some takeaways and have it positively impact their lives. Now, you went through quite the journey with your life from the sounds of it. I'm just the short blurb on the book. Says, all before turning 25, Joel Steele had flirted with jail, bankruptcy, and death. We call that Fridays around here. Yeah, I had some challenging times. I was on the wrong track, and I was almost put in jail a couple times, get some community service hanging off the back of trash trucks.

I got in some business debt. I owed close to half a million dollars. I had to dig out of that hole. I've had a gun pulled on me four or five times. I lost count. But you get to the point where you realize you're rolling the dice. And if you want to be serious about your life and even just living in general, right? We talk about surviving and thriving.

I was teetering on even surviving. And ultimately, I said, this is not for me. I want to thrive. I want to live this life to the fullest. And the more I started to get out of life and realize I was in control of my own The more I realized my potential was a lot higher than I ever thought that it was. These are the things that led me to some of my additional activities, like becoming an author, like being part of two professional sports teams.

You can do all these things if you give yourself a chance and you get doubt out of your way. Let's make a picture of what your childhood was like. I mean, you know, a lot of people go through, you know, dark times and they go, oh, mine was the worst. What was it like? Because it sounds like maybe you lived, you kind of grew up in a scenario that put you into some of these things or maybe put you in these environments. Well, I had fun.

I had probably too much fun in my childhood. My mom wasn't around the whole lot, so I got to grow up pretty quick. And my advice, that's not truly advice, but hey, no one's listening, no one's listening, right? So I'll just tell you. But if you're ever going to get in trouble, do it before you're 18, before you're an adult and before you can get arrested. And that's what I did. And thank goodness, I got that.

Is that a plan? No, no. I got it out of the way and I learned that this is not me. I felt terrible doing things that got me in trouble that almost put me in jail. And that really turned me around. And I went from not caring about anything and almost anybody having fun to really wanting to genuinely help people. And that ultimately led me into creating a healthy fast food restaurant, ultimately getting into financial services and helping people with their money, with their retirement. problems. And so those negative things help get me to the positive parts of my life. And so I try to

explain to people, there's something positive to take from anything in your life, especially the negative stuff. In fact, some of the worst things can end up being the best things if you see them through. Yeah. It's interesting how our life's journey shapes us and our stories and stuff and the things we survive. Was there a clarity moment that you had in your youth where you were like, Hey, we're not doing this anymore. Yeah. One of them was one of these incidents where I had a gun pulled on me. The guy had a gun.

It was waving it in my face and the guy behind me in the car. And he said, which one should I put a hole in first? Just deadpan. And I really thought he was going to shoot one of us. And that was a real moment where it was a, hey, you can't do this. You can't be around these people. You can't be doing things like this. And so that was a moment, but I've had other moments, too, that were less life sensitive or pulse sensitive, I should say.

And, you know, just deciding to open up a business, a restaurant business out of passion, deciding to make a business decision to go into financial services because it was unlimited income. No salary. It was unlimited income based on unlimited effort. And I was willing to work as hard as possible to make that work. So different decision points, doing your best in the moment to choose. the column of who has you know which one has the most pros and you compare that to the cons and i think a lot of us need to make decisions based on pros versus cons not a perfect decision but the best decision boy uh having a gun pulled on you uh and who who i sure first that that definitely

give you a moment of clarity of course that sounds like my first seven divorces but uh anyway now was there a did family come into the picture yet for you when you got clarity you know some people, they get a wife and kids, kids on the way, and, you know, they go, oh, you know, I need to start a family and, you know, I need to grow up a little bit or maybe, you know, square things away. I paint us more of a picture of how you, you onboarded that. So, you know, maybe someone out there who's struggling can see that there's a mechanism there that can utilize it.

Yeah, sure. Well, I started off with a restaurant business, which is a terrible business to be in unless you absolutely love it. It's a 90% failure rate. 25 hours a day. Exactly. And I was in that seven days a week. My wife was conveniently working at a bank seven days a week, so that was fine.

We would get together, have dinner at 10 o'clock at night, go to the gym at 11, and it all worked out. Later on, when I got into financial services, after a few years, we did have kids, and I always wanted to be able to be there for them. And I was able to balance that out. And the funny thing I found is the more I sort of unplugged from work when I was home and played with my kids, the more recharged I got to go back in and do a better job and have more success. And so it's important for people to realize that sometimes you're turning like a screwdriver and you're turning it in the right direction. You're making progress.

But you can overdo it and start to strip that screw. And it feels and looks the same, but you go from productive to counterproductive. So I found a really good balance of working at work and being home when I'm home. And it really helped both of those sides of my life, personal and professional, where I could have it all. And I realized that, that, hey, you can have it all. You don't have to choose career or family.

Do you think that maybe, you know, not having your mom around as much when you were young gave you that parental instinct to want to be there for your kids? Was that maybe a thing? Well, she was there for the more important events. But I mean, she would go, you know, away on a Friday night. And she'd say, hey, is it okay if I go to the beach? And I'd say, yes, please go.

But she would always be at the important events. And maybe that helped me want to do that. But ultimately with my kids and even my wife, I just enjoyed it. You know, I realized pretty early on that being around the kids, being at their baseball games for like six hours wasn't for them. It was for me. It was for me to see them in that state that goes quickly. So I just did that for us.

And there's so many things that kids won't remember, but I remember them. I remember them like they were yesterday. And those are now priceless memory. So the more I was there, the more I felt fulfilled and happy. And so I just kept doing it. Well, that doesn't sound like my first 15 divorces. Anyway, we changed the number every time. So it's a callback joke.

I keep explaining all week I've been explaining that's a callback joke. I don't know why people should be on the joke by now. So it sounds like you kind of establish a good work-life balance early on. And you like your family too. Most people don't. I heard that over COVID. Yeah, that's tough. Sometimes there's not much you can do about that,

but sometimes you do need to take a step back in order to take two steps forward. But you're right. My family, I love them. They make me feel super fulfilled and happy. But I'm also very serious about business. I'm super intense when it comes to that. But again, you have to find that balance

to not be doing both at the same time, not juggling machetes, sort of juggling bugs, if you will. So it works, but it requires effort. And it's not so much that it's hard, but it requires focus. It requires understanding what you're trying to do so you can tell if you're on track or not.

A lot of people don't have a clear picture or vision of what they're trying to do. So they don't know. Am I doing good? Did I have a good day? Am I successful? I don't know. Did you go to college? I did.

I went to a small school in South Jersey. I actually met my wife there. That was the most valuable thing I got out of college. But one thing I did. learn in college was, again, I started to learn that we can make things happen. We can sort of push buttons, pull levers, and we're in control. And we can't control everything, but a lot of people love to blame things and people in everything, circumstances. But I started to realize that if I want something to happen, it's up to me. It's on me. And if I really believe I can do it,

I started to do things in high school and college where I started to believe them myself. Because prior to that, I was average at best with everything. And that started to drive me nuts. I really had a complex for being average. And no matter what I did for a while, I couldn't be above average. I wasn't good at anything. And once I started to become good at something,

which was strength training, actually, and working on my physique, ultimately led to being a physical personal trainer, the healthy restaurant and all that. But that's what I really started to understand that you put in the work every day, be consistent. you will eventually see results and you'll see those seeds that you plant start to sprout. So it sounds like maybe you had some influence there from, you know, working out and taking care of yourself and building yourself and not only externally but internally, maybe.

Absolutely. Yeah. The more I built myself externally, you're right. I did build that confidence within. And even losing weight started to reveal abs. It also revealed something else deeper inside of me, which was that drive. And so I thought I had no talents and skills. What I realized was the things that I didn't think were anything special were ultimately multi-million dollar traits and characteristics, hard work, determination, conviction, consistency, all these things that you hear about. But I really have applied them in every facet of my life. And it's worked. It's created success in multiple industries by working hard, figuring out what needs to get done

and then just going out and doing it. Yeah. That's one of the most important things I never learned about the gym until later in my life. The discipline and the mental crudy it takes to show up every day and do the work. And really, you know, like a lot of people, they think that the gym is, you go there and you're either performing for other people or trying to outperform them or compete with them or whatever. And really, that's not what it is. You're competing with yourself. It is a battle of yourself with yourself to do, You know, the hard things. I mean, no one wants to sit around and lift 500 pounds. I mean, I don't know. After a while, you kind of get into it. But, you know, I mean, I'd rather be sitting at home watching TV, really.

But it's a discipline thing. And that's one of the things I found when I started going to the gym regularly in my later life was the discipline nature. And it really helps build character, I think. Yeah, I agree with that. And I do things. I torture myself quite a bit. You know, I go for runs on 100 degree days. And I think to myself, I don't like this.

I don't want to do this. But what I do like, what I love are the results. And so when I go to the gym, I never think about what I'm doing. I think about why I'm doing it. And I do that with everything in my life. I always focus on the why and the results of what I want out of this. Like we open up, you know, we open up packages from Amazon what eight times a day. Not because we like to open up boxes because we want what's inside the box.

Oh, I thought I was married. it's it's the same thing in the gym it's the same thing in the office and anywhere else it's the results you're seeking it's like a you know you're cracking the shell open to get what's on the inside yeah there's too many marriage jokes chris in the show already knocking off too many callback to marriage jokes anyway maybe it's a theme so did was there anybody around that time that inspired you to be better like any life mentors or maybe books you read or people that you know, kind of gave you a spark? Yeah, it was, it was actually books. Books helped me a lot. And funny thing is, I was not a reader. You know, now I'm an author and I have these crazy

stocked bookshelves that you might hear them collapse in the background. But up until junior year in college, I read Garfield. I read like comic type books. I just had no interest. I didn't like reading because I didn't have the, I didn't have the why. It was what am I doing this for? What's the purpose. And I started to read books with purpose, trying to figure out what do I want to do with myself? Because I knew when I was going to graduate college, I was not going to work for someone else. I knew that I'd be a terrible employee. I've always marched to the beat of my own drum. So I was figuring out what kind of business can I open up. And so I started to read a lot of books, think and grow rich, the strangest secret, understanding, again, that we can control things.

And then I needed to get into, okay, great, I'm super fired up, but what the heck am I going to do with it. And that's when I started to click. I read, Pour Your Heart into it by Howard Schultz, who turned Starbucks into what it is. And then, of course, once I decided on a healthy fast food restaurant chain out of college, I started to read all the fast food Titan stories. And they all did it. They weren't famous before they did what they did. You know, Colonel Sanders wasn't anointed to be the KFC guy. He made it happen. And so my thought was, no one knows who I am, but I'm going to do that. really went into that thinking. I was going to create this national chain. And that's what got

me to the level that it got to, which was not massive success. But I did open up three stores at 24 years old in Philadelphia. So that alone was an amazing feat. Unfortunately, it didn't work out. But just opening the doors was incredibly challenging and difficult. Plus, you probably learned a lot. A lot of entrepreneurs go through really failures. And sometimes, you know, they get kind of some success, but they don't really do. But what they learn from those experiences is the real key, because businesses, I always say business is the same of everything. You know, it just depends on what the widget is, right, that you're selling, you know, whether it's a food or whether it's a computer or a phone, you know, but the business operation in and of itself, the leadership part

and everything else, I don't know, maybe I've been doing companies too long, but it's pretty rudiment, not rudimentary, maybe, maybe rudimentary is a word, but it's pretty, it's pretty much a given, you know, like, okay, you name it, you do this, you pay your taxes, you do this, you know, you're trying to innovate, you know, you're pretty much problem solving all day long, no matter what business it is, you know, you've always got new problems to solve, new technologies to solve. So you're pretty much just solving problems. And so once you kind of learn how you, you know, by failing and, and stuff like that, I think that's what really honed you. and you get that education.

Yeah, the education of that first business was terribly painful and expensive, but it was critical to find not just success, but a very high level of success when I got into the financial industry. My goal out of college was to make $100,000 around my third year. And to me, that just was the definition of success at that time. And when I owed almost half a million dollars and I had zero income, that was really tough. We were living on my wife's income. She was making like $30,000 and I'm trying to pay off my debt and pay our basic bills, apartment and food and things like that. But it really

got me, it turned me into a bad out of hell, essentially. And without that failure of that one business, there's no way I would have had the success I ultimately had in the business that I'm in now, 20 years later. I would have been so happy if I was making $100,000. And the reality is that'd be a small fraction of what I ultimately turned. it into because I had to, I had to make like $7,000 a month in my first year, my first month just to not go bankrupt because that's how close my toes were dangling to the fire. So if I make $7 or $8,000 a month, I'm barely paying the debt and surviving. And so I was supposed to pay that debt for 10 years until I was 35 and I got rid of it

only two years into my career. So again, it was terrible, but it was also necessary to get to where I'm. today. You know, that's a real talking point that you have there, the story of how you, you don't know that if you would have maybe gone as far. I don't want to put words in your mouth, so I'm just kind of rambling through what you said. But you maybe might not have gotten as much drive if you kind of succeeded early and lighting that fire underneath you, because a lot of entrepreneurs fail. And sometimes they fail and they quit. They go, I'm not going to do this. I'm going to go back to McDonald's or whatever.

and put my head down and, you know, beak out, you know, alive somewhere in failure. And you're going to be haunted by that for the rest of your life. And people like you push through and they find that, you know, that drive that can push them through. And so I think that's a great story. I really do. Yeah, I appreciate that. Thank you. I think anybody can find success if they keep pushing through.

Like, you'll eventually get there. And it might be one failure and then another. And a lot of people, they just pull off, they do it in the stock market, right? They lose 20%. I don't want to lose the rest of my money or it's rainy or it's snowy. I'm going to not go out. I'm going to pull over. And that's all fine, obviously, you know, to be safe.

But in general, like you have to take risk. You have to forge ahead. And I just have always believed in myself, believed in the fact that I can make these things happen. And I talk about it in the book. I have these early experiences that I pretty early on believe that anything is, possible and I can do anything that that did get put on the back burner for for much of my life but once I created a streak of making good things happen I truly believed without any doubt that I could do any of these things I wanted to do so I had these accomplishments and achievements and they kept

getting higher higher then it slammed down when the business failed but I had this like my fire got extinguished but the pilot the pilot in me was still lit and that little bit of light is what got me to realize, hey, get your butt up and just put one foot in front of the other. And that crawl turned into a walk, which turned into a sprint. Yeah. I love that analogy. I've told people, because I've been through those cathartic moments in my life where I've been beaten down to the mat, even after success, you know, 2008 crisis, our biggest jewel in our crown of companies was a mortgage company for 20 years. Not a good thing to have when the mortgage crisis comes in 2008. COVID took a lot of money out of the accounts because we did a lot of

lot of events. We would go to CES show and different events and interview CEOs and and it was crushing just to watch building a business for five years doing that just disappear with COVID, you know, everything was closing. It was just one, every week there would be a new event that would close that we would normally go make lots of money and and it was wrecking. And, you know, I've often said that you can beat me down to the mat of a boxing ring and as long as I can move a finger, man, I'm going to come back. So you better finish me off. And sometimes, like you said, it's just eating that elephant one butt at a time.

I remember when we lost everything in 2008, I was scrambling to make anything work. And I was starting all sorts of little projects and businesses and trying to make anything fly. And if you remember back then, everything came to just a dead standstill. And my friend, I started so much, so many different businesses were trying so different things. My friend said to me, he goes, he goes, you know, if it came out on, out on the news that you had become an international arms trader, uh, and they'd caught you or something because you're trying to survive this, uh, crisis, I wouldn't be surprised because

you've tried everything. And that's, that's sometimes the will it takes is to, is to, like you say, trying to eat, I was just trying to crawl the hole one bite at a time and, and, you know, that's one of my favorite sayings, eat the elephant, one bite at a time. And, and, you know, that's one of my favorite saying, eat the elephant one bite at a time. If it seems outreate, humongous and too much, just start chewing and forking, I guess. Yeah, 100%. You just keep going. You cling to that hope.

And I talk about it real briefly in the book. I mention it here because it's one of the most fascinating things I've ever read. There was a Harvard study in, I think, 1957. They put these rats in a pool, and they wanted to see how long the rats would swim before they started to basically give up and sink. And the rats lasted about 15 minutes. They took the rats out with nets, dried them off for about five minutes, and then they put them back in. And they said, how long do you think the rats swam for?

And my first reaction was, well, they probably just gave up, thinking, oh, my gosh, I'm back in the water. Back in the water again. They ended up going from 15 minutes the first time to 60 hours, the second time. Because they had been saved, and so they clung to hope that it might happen again. Wow. wow that's just made my hair stand up on end that's moving that really is moving wow that's you know and it's it's it's all about that endurance you know life is so long i think people i don't know

it's hard to understand when you're young because just everything's fresh and new i remember sitting around all day going what am i going to do with this whole day and now i wake up and then i'm crawling to ben and going what the hell happened is there a record of this but uh it's just that constant battle and but you know that's what the fight's about that's the journey and then the stories you get from it the you know i mean now you've got a book with these memoir of survivor of survivor stories you can help others that's why we do the shows is to give people is to give people you know hope let them know they're not alone let them know there's other people out in the marketplace that have their issues they can take and fix for them and uh yeah it's just

It's just a way to share that wealth and have other people know that they can do better. Yeah, 100%. And you talked about the three P's in the title of the book. I trade investment, stocks, and bonds. I talk about the market. And it gets to be a bit redundant, right? A bit monotonous going over the same thing day in and day out. And I'll be a little tired.

My battery is kind of wearing down. And then I put off my computer to the side for a second. And I start working on my passion. I start working on my book and the speaking engagements and the podcast. podcasts and all these other things. And I just, all of a sudden, it's almost like you can see the, the battery on your phone going from 50% just ticking up, ticking up, ticking up. Because when there's, when there's passion in your life, it doesn't matter if you're tired or you were bored or worn out. You just get excited.

And that's where I was saying about potential. Like you can do so much more, take advantage of each day more. But if you don't have passion, you're not excited about each day. And there's not something that specifically you want to do or accomplish. accomplish, then you're right. It does go by quickly. And it's one day to the next. And is it Monday? Is it Tuesday? They're all kind of seemingly the same. But you want to extract some value at it of each day. And you can only really do that by defining what it is that is of value that is of interest to you that makes you feel alive and excited. Yeah. We were talking about this earlier today with the show and with a gentleman. And he was talking about having that work life balance and health balance. And he believes in a lot of holistic. sick stuff and eating well and living well and exercising. And it sounds like you kind of discovered that too. You know, one of my mistakes was I fell into treating myself very poorly when I started

my companies. I was like, yeah, I'll go to the gym later, ate poorly, put on a lot of weight, lots of vodka. For a long time, vodka was just a fuel. At night, I could, you know, I'd want to crash, but, you know, there's still work that's got to be done. So you slam back a couple shots. and, hey, you're relaxed and good to go for a few more hours and rock and roll. But then after a while, it catches up to you.

And that was one of the big mistakes I made. I didn't have a good work-life balance. And it sounds like you, you know, did the gym and health stuff and also made sure that you had that great frame in mind. Yeah, and I also like to stay within striking distance of what I consider my best shape. I feel that the more shape I'm in, the more I can control things outside of my body. And sometimes I see people and they're telling me all these things that they're going to do and manage and handle. And I look at them and I say, you can barely handle yourself, it looks like. And so how are you going to be able to handle and manage this?

So I respect people that take care of their bodies, not because they're in shape, but because they show those characteristics, the discipline, the hard work, the fact that they can sacrifice and do the workouts we talked about. And maybe they don't want to do it. But, you know, COVID really taught me that working out was not so much a choice. It was more of a medicine, if you will. I was so stressed out during COVID because as a financial advisor, you know, we're all told to stay home and basically watch TV. And so if you remember, I'm sure you do, on one side of the TV was the stock market going down and red. On the other side, it was the amount of people dying. And it was the worst, it was like the worst thing ever.

And it was the hardest part of my career for sure. So I worked out just to make sure that I don't have a massive heart attack. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, you got to take care of yourself in these moments, especially the cathartic moments. You got to take care of your health. And that was also something I'm probably going to stake on. And I'll share this because people should know not to maybe, don't do it, Chris says.

But, you know, there was a time, there were times when the alcohol got pretty bad. I was never an alcoholic, per se, that I couldn't quit. But I abused it and I abused myself with it. And during some of my darkest moments, I did that. And thankfully, around COVID, I quit. But, you know, it had an impact on how I responded to those issues. And so I like how you have a better focus on health because, you know, what's good internally is good externally. And, you know, if you're messed up in the head or messed up with your body, you're not feeling healthy, your brain's not going to be in the right place to succeed, really.

Yeah. And it's so important to be in the right place. Even if you, let's say, wanted to be in good shape or if you wanted to drink less, as long as you start by identifying that situation that you want to either get towards or get away from, that's really helpful. Just that alone. It's okay, I'm probably overdoing. I need to cut back.

It's a great start, right? You don't have to pick a date, but you just, you're aware of it. Then you go from there. But, again, it all comes down to getting to know yourself, what makes you happy, what makes you unhappy with yourself. And if you're continuing to do things that are making you unhappy, you're going to be an unhappy person and if you're okay with that fine but but who would want to be okay with that so again everything in life that has a payoff requires some kind of sacrifice discipline and a hard

work i mean everything what no i'm just kidding i you meet you know people you probably have people come up and say that to you they go oh it's so amazing you did the success you did yada yada uh it must be so easy for you and you're just like are you kidding i i'm missing like half body organs they had to sell to get here. No, I'm just kidding. But the, you know, it's amazing to me how many times I've heard myself say to someone that kind of was dismissive or like, well, that must be an easy for you or you were born with, I don't know, maybe some gifts or maybe you were born with luck or maybe rich parents or something. And I'm like, no, any, have you been here long in life? Anything life worth having takes work. Otherwise, it wouldn't have any value.

Love. Love is valuable because it's rare, you know. Ask my first 10 marriages. The same thing with success and anything worth having in this life. The reason it has that high value that everyone wants is because it's rare and it's hard to get. It's, you know, you've just become an author. And congratulations, by the way. And, you know, it's funny how, you know, like I always joke about how people come up to me And they'll be like, yeah, you got a book there, eh?

And I'm like, yeah. And they're like, yeah, you seem like you're really smart now that you have a book. And I'm like, where were you the last 50 years? I was going through all that shit I wrote about. But, you know, it's hard to write a book. You realize how hard it is when you write a book. And so it kind of puts you in this echelon where after you get your book published, people come up to you and they go, ooh, you're kind of, you've got to have a glowing specialness about you.

And it's just that you did the work, you know? And a lot of people just won't do that commitment. Yeah. Yeah. And I've been in different careers, different industries, again, personal training, restaurateur, financial advisor, business owner, and then an author. And in every instance, I put myself from the top of that industry to the absolute bottom. And I talked about earlier, I'd like to torture myself.

Not because I like the torture, but I love the feeling of going from here to here. There's no better feeling in the world. better than any drug you would ever have and there's only one way to do it and it's hard work and putting in the time and the effort that's why i do it the payoff is amazing and i have days where i have days where if i'm not know let's say it's a sunday and i're not working i get to really sit back and it's almost like an out-of-body experience and look back on all that i've done and i actually thank myself for that and i share that not to toot my own horn but i share that because anyone listening you can do that too you can do things that you can be proud of yourself

for and thank yourself because look you're going to be here hopefully in six months in a year and five years and you play the biggest role in where that's going to be and if you want to be somewhere different you put in the work and the sacrifice and you make it happen you're going to look back and say wow i'm so glad i did that and again it feels absolutely amazing and you mentioned earlier chris that life goes quickly i think a lot of us view a lot of people view that we do have unlimited time so we can waste a day a week a month a year And I don't like that way of thinking because, you know, you never know, but it's not about the length. I'm sure you know, it's about the quality, the quality of life that you have.

And, you know, you just want to enjoy it as much as you can. And again, not to be repetitive, but it starts with stepping back and sort of designing what you want your life to look like and then starting to put each piece in place. So ultimately, it resembles what you envisioned it could be. designing a life. You know, I wrote about this last week. I have a, every Sunday I do what's called gratitude for gratefulness day. And every Sunday is gratitude for grateful. And it's a time where I spend there's no dating, there's no chicks, it's me. And usually I go Saturday and Sunday, sometimes I'll go shooting and I'll just take a day jaunt and go photography around the city or work with smalls or do different things. And it's a day that I kind of,

spend on me and being grateful for stuff. And I remember I wandered around, took some beautiful pictures this last Sunday, and I wrote about this on Facebook, and I thought about the kid, because I was in an environment where I grew up as a teenager, and I didn't know what the hell was going to become, and it's a miracle I became anything, but I, from the environment it grew open, but I sat and I thought about all the decisions that I'd make, you know, because I've read some of the stuff I was writing back then. I'm not sure. That kid might have been smarter than me now. And, and, you know, I was thinking of some of the moments because I don't know about you, but there's moments that I have

interactions with certain people and decisions that I made that if I put them off a week or if I put them off a month, if I, if I had to add that interaction, my life would be changed. And those, you can count them probably three to five on my hand, those moments. And they are so, pivotal that I have no idea and I and sometimes I've had nightmares where fretting over Jesus what would I have been if these moments had to happen and so making those decisions now if you're in that moment of youth or you know you mentioned colonel sanders he didn't become successful at 50 or 60 um a lot of you know Oprah was older there's a lot of people that you know they they hit success in normal life so it's never over until it's over folks and uh

But yeah, just looking at that, and I wrote this post on Facebook, and I was like, I was like, you know, I was thinking about that kid, man. And I wish you could go back and I could say, hey, man, you made it. You got through it. It's going to be okay. And that meant a lot to me. And I think recognizing that those moments are now in most people's life, if this is what they inspire to, if this is what they want, make those decisions now.

Because 30, 40 years from now, like you or I, you're going to look back and go, thank God that kid made the right choice at the time. Yeah, no, 100%. You're so right about that. And you can't control what's happened, but you can control what you do right now. And that's the idea. That's why I'm doing the book. That's why we're talking because people, I want them to know that you're in the driver's seat. Look around. You're in the driver's seat. And make those decisions now. Like I've often looked. back over all my years of being an entrepreneur and thought of those moments and I've just been like, geez, I started that company that week and what if I'd done, you know, because I'm a bad procrastinator too. I even procrastinate procrastinating. And so, you know, what if I put that off? And there's, I can probably tell you examples that I put off and then they never got done

because I fucked around and found out. Let's get into this. Let's talk about some of the offerings you have on your website if you want you do speaking and different things talk to us about what your offerings you have there and maybe how somebody people can utilize you that are in the audience for yeah sure sure well the book is is the platform right i talk about all the things that i've gone through it's an entertaining inspiring read and and i share things that i wish i knew when i was younger and walk through all the things i went through good and bad and again the idea is to have you go through your own life and try to find these moments that you've all had. I call them life switch moments where you, you know, you just have this like click, this spark of an event

where, wow, this is it. I have to do this or I have to stop doing that. And when you string together these life switch moments, it creates this power. And that's where you feel on, you know, on versus off. And you kind of, you light up and you can see clearly. And you feel energized. And so I I want people to try to get that from the book and the audio book, understand what I went through and what they can go through. And there's nothing that I went through that's like, hey, I had $100 million and I blew it, and then I did this. Or I started this company, sold it for 30 figures, and all these other crazy things that are just not possible. You know, I'm a normal guy, but I was determined to go from a very ordinary life to an extraordinary life, extraordinary by my own definition. and I achieve that.

And so I want people to do the same thing for themselves. So the book is out there. I hope people really enjoy it. And also I do speaking, which I really enjoy it because then I get to be there and bring the book to life and talk about additional stories and some of the outtakes and things that I don't get a chance to get into in the book because the book was originally 330 pages. I had to cut out basically a quarter of my life.

You got a second book. You got a second book. The publisher told me two things. He said, one, you've got to cut out about 75 pages. And I said, let me see you cut 25% of your life out. And the second part is he said, you're going to definitely do a second book. And I said, if you want to take a bet on that, I will bet you that I won't because this book was exhausting. I have no plans to do a second book.

But I love to talk about additional things that were on the scrap room floor. I speak. I speak at companies. I speak at workshops. I do different interactive type of motivational conversations. I speak at colleges. And ultimately, I would love someone to recognize that every college graduate should read this book. Because when you're 22 or 25 getting out of school, depending on how your journey goes,

you usually don't get out of the gate at a great start. And a lot of it is you're doing what you think you're supposed to do, which is the complete opposite of passion. You do what you're supposed to do what someone else tells you to do. So I just want people to either launch or relaunch. at some point in their lives and do it their way, do what they want to do and take control. So the speaking, listening to the book, that's all I'm doing right now. Also, in my spare time, I'm running my financial practice, which is definitely time-consuming.

So I'm making sure, as we talked earlier, I'm balancing, I'm juggling these things. And of course, I still want to be with my family and be at all these events. So there's a lot going on, but because I have so much passion for all of them, I don't get tired. I'm just happy to do all the things that I'm doing. Good gratitude, feeling blessed. Now, tell us about this. You're doing a million dollar giveaway or something of that nature. Tell us about what that is.

And I think there's an entry point on the website for it. Yeah, you're right. Yeah, on the website, there's a page called Campaign. And I'm personally giving away a million dollars if we can sell a million books. So some people have said, you're crazy. You're never going to do that. I say, how many books have you seen that say sold a million copies, sold 10,000? the reality is it's doable it's happened it'll happen again and it's possible so i'm trying to prove

to everybody some of the same messages in the book that not only can we all do these amazing things in our own lives but if we pull together we can do something unbelievable and i'm going to sit down and personally write out a million dollars it's going to be 10 checks the top 10 voted on charities we'll each get $100,000, totaling $1 million. But it's funny. You know, I'm pretty frugal, but I've never been so excited to write out big checks in my life. Well, this should be fun.

And people can go to the website. They can find out more about there. And, of course, buy the book. Order of the book. We're fine books of salt. Anything more we need to know, Joel, before we go out. No, just everything we talked about. But I'm having a great time talking to you.

And I just want people to take some of these messages from this conversation that whatever your life is today, if you're having a great time and living your best life, keep doing it. But if you think that there's a version of your life that could be better, you're probably right. And you want to start to figure out what that is and work on it today and tomorrow and the next day. So that's it. Pretty simple. I love it. I love the work life balance. That's like so important. We had the, it was the ex-CEOO of Alcoa and Siemens. He wrote a book that I'll give a plug out to it. Well, I'll just, I'll leave it at that. But he, he talked about that work life balance like you talking about, taking care of your health, taking care of your work,

not frying yourself out, finding your purpose. And so yeah, it's just, it's so important. I wish I would have paid more attention to it. So that's a do not do it, Chris. Voss did message. Do it, Joel did. These are the advertisements we do on the Chris Voss show. So, Joel, give us your dot com as we go out and final pitch out for people to pick up your book. Yep, bookjolsteel.com. That's my website. You can also just go to Amazon. I think everyone has Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Air Google, Joel Steele, Life Switch, and you can find me. But I hope you enjoyed the book. I hope you enjoyed our conversation today. I know I did. And Chris, I really

appreciate you having me on thank you and we've had a wonderful time having you on and what an inspiring story i hope people get involved with what you're doing by the book and uh and share the book with others remember someone remind me earlier today yeah christmas is coming up eh by like 10 or 15 20 books of everybody that comes on the show so you can you know pass them out and share the love pass it forward as it were that are just you know you Christmas gifts so uh it beats by i'm find him a toaster. Anyway, thank you very much, Jill, for me on the show. We really appreciate it.

Thanks, Chris. Thank you. And thanks for us for tuning in. Go to goodreads.com, Fortress, Chris Voss, for your family show and friends, relatives. Go to Facebook.com, Forchess Christchristch, Christvost. LinkedIn.com, Fortress, Chris Voss. Oh, the crazy place for the internet. And if you don't, I'll pull the car over and come back their kids.

Don't mean we do that. Be good to each other. Stay safe. We'll see you guys next time.