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Doug Bopst · YouTube

How To Break Free From Old Patterns and Transform Your Life

Patrick Bet-David on victim mentality, the three forces that shape high achievers, and why the moment you nearly quit is where the real credit lives.

Posted
3 months ago
Duration
Format
Interview
sincere
Views
125.8K
3.6K likes
Big Idea

The argument in one line.

Personal transformation is not driven by talent or circumstance but by the compounding effect of kept commitments, choosing the right environment, and refusing to hand your agency to the things that hurt you.

Who This Is For

Read if. Skip if.

READ IF YOU ARE…
  • You have been using a difficult past as an explanation for why your present is not working.
  • You are rebuilding credibility after bad choices and wondering how long it takes for people to trust you again.
  • You manage or mentor others and want a framework for identifying who is coachable versus who will drain your time.
  • You feel an intense internal drive to build something significant but have no past credential to justify the belief.
  • You are a parent who wants to raise resilient kids without following soft-parenting scripts from people who do not have children.
SKIP IF…
  • You are looking for tactical business frameworks -- this is entirely mindset and character.
  • You want data-backed behavioral science; this is personal anecdote and pattern recognition from decades of recruiting.
TL;DR

The full version, fast.

Playing the victim feels good because it removes accountability, but it is a trap that can cost decades. Bet-David argues three forces tend to produce high achievers: unconditional love from one person, an approval-withholder who cannot be satisfied, and choosing the right enemy. Most behavior change is caught rather than taught, meaning proximity to the right environment shapes you at a 90-to-10 ratio over formal instruction. The fastest path back to self-respect is stacking small kept commitments until your word means something to yourself first.

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Voices

Who's talking.

00:00guestPatrick Bet-David
00:00hostDoug Bopst
Chapters

Where the time goes.

00:00 – 02:10

01 · Optimism as a creation mechanism

Doug opens with PBD viral post. Boot camp story: a soldier gets a Dear John letter with no way to respond for six weeks.

02:11 – 05:38

02 · Personal responsibility over victim narrative

Doug shares his jail-to-fitness transformation and his cellmate confrontation. Bet-David adds the Terrence Howard/Cosby story as a business parallel.

05:39 – 09:08

03 · PBD early life: army, alcohol, the reading pivot

Bet-David recounts his real vices (alcohol and women), the reading habit that rewired his direction, and the disciplines that followed.

09:09 – 12:12

04 · The three forces behind high achievers

Unconditional love from one person, an approval-withholder who can never be satisfied, and choosing the right enemy. The wrong ally is your real enemy.

12:13 – 15:29

05 · Lock-on method and coachability signals

How Bet-David screened recruits: sports background as proxy for coachability. Jack Welch and Xerox as corporate coachability factories.

15:30 – 18:29

06 · Rebuilding trust: the born-again identity reset

The born-again executive framing. Six months of disbelief, one year of observation, two years before the old story stops. Employee picked up from prison who rebuilt completely.

18:30 – 21:30

07 · Future self, mortality, and gratitude

Watching his four-year-old daughter dance. His 83-year-old father declining health. Gratitude as the only rational anchor.

21:31 – 24:53

08 · Keeping your word as the foundation of credibility

Credibility is a credit score. Start with the smallest possible commitment. Bet-David implements health advice from every podcast guest.

24:54 – 26:44

09 · Language audit and environment change

Auditing weak words. Common futures over common pasts. Doug outgrowth of old friends after getting sober.

26:45 – 30:12

10 · The opinion list

List every person whose opinion you carry, then prune. Five to ten names maximum scoped by area. Bet-David married despite family opposition.

30:13 – 34:04

11 · Is transformation repeatable? DNA vs. caught vs. taught

Three categories: DNA (not duplicatable), taught (overrated), caught through proximity (the 90%).

34:05 – 37:38

12 · 90/10: catching beats teaching

The daughter who caught a phrase without being taught it. Shadowing as the underrated edge. VPs become presidents by being in the room.

37:39 – 42:11

13 · Raising tough kids in a soft society

Teaching kids to renegotiate a no. Raising voices and having hard debates is preparation. His son reading the Bible, Koran, Torah at 15.

42:12 – 45:20

14 · Handling bad days: emergency meetings and controllables

Emergency dinner with executives. Lay out frustrations. Focus on one clear direction. 10,000 clients in 64 countries.

45:21 – 49:10

15 · Fire in the belly with no credential to back it

1.8 GPA, no organized sports, almost re-enlisted for pension at 40. Boiling blood with no past achievement to justify it. Doubt is the story.

Atomic Insights

Lines worth screenshotting.

  • Playing the victim feels like relief, but it transfers your power to whatever you are blaming.
  • The three forces that shape high achievers: unconditional love from one person, an approval-withholder, and the right enemy.
  • A person who challenges and confronts you is an ally. A person who lets you coast with no accountability is your actual enemy.
  • You cannot duplicate IQ, EQ, or character, but you can catch work habits, formats, and systems through proximity.
  • 90% of what shapes high performers is caught from their environment; only 10% comes from direct instruction.
  • Keeping your word on small commitments is the fastest path to rebuilding self-respect and earning trust.
  • The born-again identity reset works, but the first six months nobody believes you, and that is the part you have to survive.
  • The list of people whose opinions you carry should max out at ten names. Most people carry 200 names too many.
  • Sports and military backgrounds signal coachability because those people have already been pushed, lost, and learned to function as a team.
  • You can have an intense fire in your belly with zero past evidence to justify it, and that gap is exactly where the story gets written.
  • Teach children to renegotiate when they hear no. Coming back creative is the foundation of sales, persistence, and adult life.
  • Shadowing someone for months beats years of formal instruction. VPs become presidents because they are in the room.
  • Weak words signal weak thinking. Auditing your language is an early-warning system for mindset drift.
  • Spend time with people who share your future, not your past. Common history is not a sufficient reason to keep a relationship.
  • The moment you were about to give up and did not -- that is where the credit lives.
Takeaway

Accountability is the operating system, not a feature

WHAT TO LEARN

The patterns that trap people are maintained by the same comfort that victim thinking provides, and dismantling them requires building a new credit score with yourself, one kept word at a time.

01Optimism as a creation mechanism
  • Those who believe the future looks bright tend to create it -- optimism is not passive comfort, it is an active input to outcomes.
  • When circumstances are at their worst, the two-choice framework forces agency: accept the despair or start with what you still have.
02Personal responsibility over victim narrative
  • Blaming others feels like relief because it removes the weight of accountability, but it also removes your leverage over the situation.
  • The victim trap is most dangerous because it is socially reinforced -- people around you often agree, which extends the cycle.
03PBD early life: army, alcohol, the reading pivot
  • Reading is the cheapest way to install a new operating system. The books Bet-David names all share one theme: agency over outcome.
  • Replacing a vice requires filling the slot it occupied with something providing comparable intensity -- books, business, and faith each served that function.
04The three forces behind high achievers
  • One source of unconditional love creates a model of being worthy despite failure. Without it, approval-seeking becomes the only driver and it is unstable.
  • Choosing the right enemy means selecting a standard or competitor that draws out your highest performance, not one that drags you into resentment.
05Lock-on method and coachability signals
  • Sports background is a coachability proxy: the person has already been pushed by a coach, lost in public, learned to rely on teammates, and come back anyway.
  • The Jack Welch principle: if your resume shows you survived a high-standard environment, you carry that standard into the next one.
06Rebuilding trust: the born-again identity reset
  • A credible identity reset requires declaring the old version dead and then living the new version long enough for others to update their judgment -- roughly two years.
  • People who deserve a second chance still have to earn it through a track record. The declaration is just the starting point.
07Future self, mortality, and gratitude
  • Gratitude is most functional when it is concrete and specific, not abstract. A specific moment is a better anchor than a general sense of being lucky.
  • Mortality awareness clarifies what deserves your energy and what is borrowed anxiety from people not on your opinion list.
08Keeping your word as the foundation of credibility
  • Credibility is a credit score: every broken commitment lowers it, every kept one raises it. The score you have with yourself precedes the score you have with others.
  • The smallest possible kept commitment still moves the score. Start there before scaling.
09Language audit and environment change
  • Weak words signal and reinforce a mindset, and auditing them is an early-warning system before the mindset compounds.
  • Outgrowing old friendships is not betrayal -- it is alignment. People who share your past but not your future pull in the wrong direction.
10The opinion list
  • Most people carry the opinions of 50 to 200 people. That number generates constant second-guessing. Ten is the functional maximum.
  • Even the names on the list should be scoped: what your father thinks about your business is different from what he thinks about your marriage.
11Is transformation repeatable? DNA vs. caught vs. taught
  • DNA, IQ, EQ, and character are not transferable -- they belong to the individual.
  • What is transferable: systems, formats, schedules, negotiation patterns, and work habits. These are caught by proximity, not taught by instruction.
1290/10: catching beats teaching
  • Children do not learn values from lectures -- they catch them from watching how their parents behave under pressure, in negotiation, and in failure.
  • The implication for adults: who you spend time around shapes your behavior more than any course, book, or mentor session you deliberately schedule.
13Raising tough kids in a soft society
  • Teaching kids to renegotiate a no builds the skill set they need for sales, persistence, and navigating institutions that will not give them what they want on the first ask.
  • Having difficult debates with children is preparation, not damage -- coaches and employers will not use the soft register that over-protective parenting installs as the norm.
14Handling bad days: emergency meetings and controllables
  • The productive response to a bad stretch is talking to someone who can help process it toward action, not isolating with it.
  • Frustration at things you cannot control is energy without a lever. Reserve intensity for the things you made happen, because those are the ones you can change.
15Fire in the belly with no credential to back it
  • Having no past achievement to justify your ambition is not a disqualifier -- it means the only thing driving you is the belief itself, which is cleaner fuel.
  • Doubt is not the enemy of the transformation story. It is the story. The credit lives in the moment you were about to stop and did not.
Glossary

Terms worth knowing.

Lock-on method
A recruiting filter used before investing heavy mentorship time. Sports or military background signals coachability, loss experience, and team orientation.
Caught vs. taught
A framework distinguishing behavior absorbed through proximity and observation (caught, roughly 90%) from behavior via explicit instruction (taught, roughly 10%).
Born again identity
A reset decision where someone declares the old version of themselves dead and commits to new behaviors. Requires surviving roughly six months of disbelief before others update their judgment.
The opinion list
A personal exercise: write every name whose opinion you carry, then prune to five to ten names scoped by area. The rest is borrowed anxiety.
The right enemy
A person or force that draws out your highest performance through competition or confrontation. Choosing the wrong enemy -- driven by pettiness -- destroys rather than elevates.
Quotables

Lines you could clip.

00:29
“If you have that mindset, you are guaranteed to get the results that you are thinking.”
Clean standalone sentence, no setup needed→ TikTok hook↗ Tweet quote
10:19
“You wanna choose the person that is easy and you can be accepted around no matter what you do. That is your enemy, not the other person.”
Counterintuitive reframe on enemies vs. allies→ TikTok hook↗ Tweet quote
25:16
“Spend time with people who have common futures, not common pasts.”
Tight standalone aphorism→ newsletter pull-quote↗ Tweet quote
34:47
“90% is catching. 10% is teaching. It is not even close.”
Specific ratio, counterintuitive, no context needed→ TikTok hook↗ Tweet quote
48:45
“The credit goes to that moment that you were about to give up, you did not.”
Perfect closer, emotional, standalone→ IG reel cold open↗ Tweet quote
Topic Map

Where the conversation goes.

00:00 – 09:08denseOptimism and victim mentality
09:09 – 12:12denseThree forces framework
12:13 – 15:29steadyCoachability and recruiting
15:30 – 21:30denseIdentity reset and rebuilding trust
21:31 – 26:44denseCredibility through kept commitments
26:45 – 30:12denseOpinion management and relationships
30:13 – 37:38denseCaught vs. taught framework
37:39 – 42:11steadyParenting and resilience
42:12 – 45:20steadyManaging adversity and bad days
45:21 – 49:10denseIdentity and fire-in-the-belly
The Script

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analogy
00:00You posted something a few weeks ago, and it said, half the battle in life is believing the future looks bright, especially when nothing around you suggests it will. The easiest thing to do is to blame others, assume bad intent, and expect the worst.
00:12Those who believe the future looks bright tend to create it. How can people, when they're in that moment, that darkness, where nothing seems fair, how can they find the light? What's the alternative?
00:23It's the first question. What other choice do I have? So I I got two choices in that moment.
00:27I can sit there and think
00:29nothing's gonna go right. Poor me. It's unfair.
00:32I cannot believe this happened. I cannot believe in and if you have that mindset, you're guaranteed to get the results that you're you're thinking. Things are not gonna work out for you.
00:40So what am I gonna do? I'm gonna sit there. I'm gonna be like, listen, at least I have this.
00:45At least I have that. At least I got this going on. We were in the army one time in boot camp, and me and this one guy, he just got a letter from his wife leaving him.
00:56And I will never forget, we're in the bunk. You know, we got sixty, seventy of us at this one floor. And I'm looking at him, African American guy, probably 25, 26 years old.
01:06He's crying. And I go up to him. I'm 18 years old.
01:09I said, are you good? He says, no, man. I'm not good.
01:11I said, what happened? Hands me the letter. His wife left him for another guy that he knew.
01:19They were friends. So imagine you're in a setting where you don't have access to call her for six more weeks because it's the second week of boot camp that we're in.
01:29There is no texting. There is no let me FaceTime her. There is no WhatsApp.
01:34This is 1997. I joined April. I eventually got into boots.
01:38This is like first week of May, second week of May. What do you do in a situation like that? Imagine you're running.
01:45What are you thinking about? We have imagination. What are you visualizing as a man that your wife is hooking up with him, and what is he doing to your wife?
01:53This is your wife. She just left you. And you have to stay focused, and you have to do push ups, and people are screaming in your face.
01:59What am I going to do about it? Super, super difficult for him.
02:03And I sat there and said, listen, man, can you walk? Yes. Can you talk?
02:05Yes. Can we do this? Yes.
02:07I said, look, man, let's just kind of start with that and get back at it. To me, the idea of optimism, you know, feeling that everything's gonna work itself out.
02:17I grew up in a very difficult environment where I didn't have a lot to look forward to. But to me, I look forward to one thing on the weekend.
02:26That song, it's NBA playoffs ninety.
02:34NBA basketball or NBC, Ahmad Rashad, the Lakers. I look forward to watching a game on Saturday.
02:42That was enthusiasm. No matter how bad Monday or Tuesday was. So that came back to here now growing and building a business.
02:48You always have to look forward to what's happened what's happened in the future, and that optimism will give you more chances in life. You know, I played the victim for a lot of my life, and I was in jail for for selling drugs,
02:59and my cellmate got me into fitness. And I remember he was asking about my story because he's like, you're gonna work out with me someday. I was in the middle of opiate detox.
03:06Horrible, horrible for weeks. And he's like, well, what happened to you? Like, what did you do?
03:11And I'm like, my parents got divorced, kids picked on me. He's like, no. Like, what did you do?
03:17And essentially, he was he said to me, he's like, quit being a his exact words. And I was like, what? He's like, you're blaming everybody else for your problems but yourself.
03:25And he's like, you have the choice to change. You have two choices. Be a man, look yourself in the mirror and say you got yourself here, or be a little go cry in the corner and say, well, listen, that conversation changed my life for because for years, I was blaming the boogeyman for everything.
03:39And it feels good because then it takes your power away. It, like, you don't have to be accountable anymore, but it's a trap that so many people fall into for years, if not decades. It's so true.
03:48It is so true. Just right now,
03:50I came from a the second sit down I'm doing with Terrence Howard, the actor, and this is the first time I've seen him say, you know, his first time he went on Cosby Show.
04:01They did his part, and Bill Cosby afterwards said, hey, man. That was a very good part. I think you could maybe be a regular here.
04:07And then he goes and tells all his friends, hey, guys. I wanna be on Cosby. I wanna be he's 19 years old.
04:11And then no episode with him in it. So he's furious.
04:17He comes back. He goes to the studio, walks in, sees Bill Cosby, says, hey, can I talk to you? He says, come into my office.
04:24He says, I noticed you didn't use my clip. I was in Cosby, you said I'm gonna do great. He says, yeah, not everything makes it in.
04:32He says, but you said I'm gonna be back on, you said we had something. Yeah, but my thoughts changed. He says, but you made this promise, and what about this?
04:41He says, yeah. And I changed my mind. So he says, from that moment when I left, I kept blaming him for everything.
04:49And then I realized, guess what? If you don't change your own way of doing things, you know, sometimes things are not gonna go your way. Sometimes you are doing the right things.
04:58Sometimes the other person just doesn't wanna give you that opportunity. Sometimes a client changes their minds. You'll close a big deal.
05:04You're about to get a $10,000 check, and you're all happy you're going to the bank, client calls and cancels. Now what do you do? You were already counting the bills, your car payment, your phone, your this, your that, and no.
05:14Now I changed my mind. These things are gonna happen. But if you think long term, and you're able to make it past the tornado, and you take personal responsibility,
05:25you have a fighting chance. And you have quite the transformation story as well. You were a partier.
05:30You were somebody that didn't take life too seriously. And I know when people party I'm a former drug addict, so I understand that those habits can be ingrained in you, and it can be hard to make change because you've been doing certain things for so long.
05:41Like, how did you go from living in that, you know, that Ford Focus store you tell off Yep. Dad's heart attacks to kind of really changing things? So if you ask my friends and you say, my friends from high school,
05:53or even my friends from army, was Patrick a guy that smoked weed? They would tell you, Patrick never smoked weed.
05:59I never smoked weed until I was 22 years old. I smoked weed with a girl and a friend.
06:07I probably smoke weed five times in my life. Then when I was at Bally's, I worked with a guy who worked with a cocaine guy, and I did two lines when I was 21, 22 years old at a club in 3rd Street in Santa Monica, and then I did half a pill of ecstasy.
06:25That is it for me with drugs, just so you know. So to the average person, they'll laugh at that and say, what, you haven't tried this? No.
06:30But everybody around me, my friends, they all were into it. My deal was alcohol and women. I drank a lot.
06:38I would finish a bottle of tequila in the army every week. Literally every week, I drank a bottle of tequila. So that was my thing.
06:44We'd go in Nashville, Tennessee, party, do all this other stuff. And then one day, you know, I I see the life I'm living, and I'm starting the benefit that I had is I got into reading books very early.
06:5821, 22 years old, when I got out of the army, I got into reading books. And I said, you know what? I'm gonna read these books.
07:03Rich Dad Poor Dad, How to Win Friends and Influence People, Think and Grow Rich, Laws of Success, Psycho Cybernetics. Anyways, I started feeding, you know, power versus force. I'm like, wait a minute.
07:13What the hell am I doing with my life? I shouldn't be doing any this stuff. And then came church, and then came changing disciplines, and then came me dating a girl that we're about to get married, and after being together for two and a half, three years, I told her the magical words, and I said, before we get married, I wanna do something.
07:30She says, what do you wanna do? I said, I wanna go one month without sex, you and I. She says, what?
07:35I said, I wanna go one month, no sex, you and I. She starts laughing. I said, no.
07:39I'm I'm dead serious because I love you, but I wanna be married to you. I want you to be my wife. Let's go see if we can do one month or not.
07:47First week, it's Friday night at a big expedition. We get back from the movies. It's 11:00 at night.
07:53We typically would sit out there in the parking lot, and we would have some fun. She said, what do you wanna do? So I gotta drop you off.
07:58She said, you really don't wanna do anything? I said, I wanna know. Let's see what we can talk about.
08:02We didn't have a lot to talk about. Don't get me wrong. We had a very good connection together.
08:06But long term, she wanted to go the Hollywood route, I wanted to go a complete different route. Long story short, that didn't work out. And, you know, she's happily married today, I have three beautiful kids, I'm happily married, I got four kids myself.
08:19But I made different decisions because I wanted to get the real meaning of life for me. I really wanted to find that what that potential for me look like. So I cut out video games early on in my after the army, I was not a video game guy.
08:32I cut out the party stuff. I cut out my obsession with women, and then I said, let's replace it with books, business, health, and faith, and see what it does.
08:43And then my life changed in ways I never imagined. The life I live today is still a movie to me.
08:50This isn't something, if you ask any one of my friends that I went to high school with, not one of them would say I was gonna end up being here right now. None of them. So it was some of those choices that I made where I cut out the bad habits, the bad things I had, and life changed for me.
09:04Choose Your Enemies Wisely. One of my favorite books I've ever listened to, by the way.
09:09And if people listen to that or read it, I highly recommend, they'll know that you didn't just go from point a to point b. There was a lot of zigzags in between, a lot of loss, a lot of heartache and stress and financial stuff. Like, do you believe in order to get from, like, the point a to point b that people see, like, you have to compound small wins and continue to go through adversity?
09:28I don't think you have a choice. I I really don't think you have a choice. I think the guys
09:32that are winning at the highest level, that thick skin comes from somewhere. Your your ability to go through difficult times comes from somewhere.
09:41You you'll see stories about comedians who won, and they're crushing it. And then in a podcast, when they get vulnerable, they'll talk about how difficult their upbringing is.
09:50Mhmm. Look how funny Theo Von is. You watch Theo Von, you're like, this guy is just ridiculously funny.
09:57He had a challenge in upbringing, a different kind of a weird one. Look at Kevin Hart, tough upbringing with his father. You you you look at all of these guys, you know, and then you see some of the guys that make it to the highest level and they win.
10:09And I realized a pattern that they had three things in common. The people that become the greatest at what they do, one, they had experienced unconditional love from one person.
10:20That's all, you know, typically it's their mom. One person had to offer you unconditional love. You keep screwing up, they still love you because it makes you say, how can the love exist?
10:30I've let this person down so many times. She still loves me. Thank you.
10:34Number two is someone that no matter what you do, you will never get approval. I got my college degree, but you weren't valedictorian. I made a $100,000, but you don't have a college degree.
10:46I just started my own business. We did 1,000,000 a year. Yeah.
10:48But you don't own a house. I just bought a big house. Yeah.
10:51But it's in a bad community. I just no matter what you do, that person's never gonna give you the approval. And then the last one is you choosing the right enemy.
11:00You choose the right enemy. It brings out the best in you. You choose the wrong enemy.
11:04It can bring out the worst in you. I've seen people choose the wrong enemy, and they destroy their lives. I've seen people, you know, choose the right enemy and they just sometimes people choose those that believe in them as their enemies.
11:14And sometimes people choose somebody that wants the best for them, but just because they challenge you and push you as an enemy, that person's not an enemy. That's an ally. You are not choosing the right enemy.
11:22That's somebody you wanna be close to. Just because they're always challenging you and pushing you, that's not an enemy to you. You're delusional.
11:29You wanna choose the person that's easy and you can be accepted around them no matter what you do. It's okay. Relax.
11:35Oh, it's okay. Eat this. Oh, it's okay.
11:36Don't do oh, it's okay sleeping. Oh, it's okay to do that. Yeah.
11:40But that's your enemy, not the other person. The person that's pushing you, challenging you, confronting you, directing you to say, hey, man, you complain too much.
11:50Hey, man, your language is weak. Why do you talk like that? Who talks like that?
11:54I just don't like him. You know, he's my enemy. No, that's your ally.
11:59So unconditional love, no matter what you do, won't get the approval. And last but not least, choosing the right enemy.
12:06You do that, you know, typically tends to produce a very strong, ambitious human being.
12:12You know, one of the things that I did was I thought about what would make me angry when I would work out. Like, after I got out of jail, that's what helped me get through.
12:20It was like the people who bullied me in childhood and stuff that happened to me. Then I found that that got me so far and I had to choose different enemies because I found myself just angry at the world because I was constantly thinking about the people who wronged me and I caught myself at times slipping back into the victim mindset.
12:37There's a lot of people that go through adversity as a as a as a kid, and they're trying to turn that pain into purpose. How can they make that leap from, like, using that as fuel to then moving it into the next direction?
12:48Listen. You got anything
12:51I can use to drive you at the beginning, I'm gonna do it. Anything. When I over the years, I've recruited and built a lot of different insurance agencies in America, I would use a method called the lock on method.
13:03I would look at a person and say, is this somebody for me to put 90% of my time into? And typically, the things I would look at before I put my time into that person is, has this person played sports before? Why?
13:15If you played high school football, high school basketball, high school baseball, travel soccer, and you played it in your teens for four years, here's what you generally experienced.
13:28You experienced your coach pushing you, challenging you. You experienced losing. You experienced injury.
13:36You experienced teamwork. You experienced what it was like when a guy blocked for you or you're about to lose the game bottom of the ninth inning, but that shortstop made the cash through to first.
13:46Without him, you were about to get the loss because of him. You're a hero. The pitcher, you're like, man, I'm it's good to have good people in your life if I didn't have that shortstop.
13:53So you realize you need people. I saw patterns of people that played sports three, four years with a tough coach. They were generally easier to work with and coach than somebody who never had that experience of playing sports.
14:06They were sensitive. A person that didn't play sports, they were typically sensitive if you gave them feedback. You know?
14:11They were typically someone that was soft. If you had a little bit of military background, drill sergeants kind of pushed you and got that stuff out of you.
14:18So to me, as I sit down and go through it, that's a choice the individual's gotta make. You know, it's truly a choice. You're headed towards a terrible life.
14:27You're gonna lose decades of your life, and you don't even know it. So make the better choice for yourself. But, know, I Mario Aguilar, one of my guys, bought me a gift, a Xerox management manual, sales manual from 1969.
14:46Why Xerox? If you look at which companies produced some of the best salespeople in the last sixty years, Xerox is always on the name that comes up.
14:54If you go right now, chat GBT, what Fortune 1,000 companies produced the best salespeople? Who has a reputation for that The last sixty years, you'll see Xerox will be in the top five list.
15:04So guess what? Why is that? Systematic, a guy at the top taught people follow-up, taught them how to confront, taught them how to do customer service, customer experience.
15:14If you look at management, Jack Welch. If you worked under Jack Welch, people wanted to recruit you because they knew, especially if you had worked under Jack Welch's if your resume said, report it direct to Jack Welch for seven years. Oh, you want this guy.
15:26You come here. We'll put you and give you a heavy position. Why?
15:30If you made it under a Jack Welch, that means you are a Jack Welch. That means you can handle the tough love. That means you can handle being pushed.
15:36That means you can handle the pressure. We want somebody like that. So to me, you know, the same way you look at a resume and somebody's had four jobs in four years, I'm like, I'm gonna be the fifth job.
15:44Why am I hiring you? You know, it's the same way you're going to be judged for the choices you make, whether you like it or not.
15:52And if you want the kind of credibility and respect when you walk into a room, sometimes that takes years to regain. But the reality of it is just like in the in in Christianity, nondenominations, they'll say this.
16:04There's there's such thing as, you know, I'm a born again Christian. You'll hear that phrase. There's a born again executive.
16:10There's a born again CEO. There's a born again founder. There's a born again father.
16:14There's a born again husband. Hey, from today on, that's it. The old guy's dead.
16:19Decision is cutting away. I'm gonna make a decision to cut away from the old me. New person is here.
16:24Every day I'm working on developing a new guy, I'm good. I know I've made mistakes, I'm gonna be making better choices moving forward. Then at first people don't believe you.
16:30They think you're full of shit. They're like, whatever. You're gonna go back to drugs.
16:34You're gonna go back to drinking. You're gonna go back to not taking care of your money. You're gonna go back to gambling.
16:38I get it why you don't trust me. It's a fair judgment that I deserve because I've been doing this for eighteen years. I get it.
16:44But wait for me six months. Six months later, oh, wow. Interesting.
16:48Is he gonna break again? One year later, wow. He's changed.
16:52Two years later, three years later, everybody forgot. And it's just an old story. I had a guy with me that's been working with me for twenty years.
17:00He had such a massive alcohol issue. Six years ago, I'm picking him up from prison. And it's 03:30 in the morning, I'm pulling up in my blue Rolls Royce in Oak Cliff, Texas, which is the worst part of Texas, Dallas.
17:13Terrible. The prison's there. I go, and everybody thinks I'm a lawyer.
17:16He gets in the car, we're driving back to his house, I'm dropping him off, thirty minute drive, saying, you're not saying anything. I said, I have nothing to tell you. You typically have a lot to tell me.
17:24I said, I have nothing to tell you. Pat, you have to talk to me. He's crying in the car.
17:27You have to tell me something. I said, have to tell you nothing. No.
17:30No. I'm I said, moving forward, you're not reporting to me. You're probably gonna get fired.
17:34You're out of the circle. You're not gonna work with me directly. They're probably gonna fire you unless if you commit to something with them.
17:40I'm no longer I said, you're not grateful for your life. I said, you're not grateful for what God's given you, and I can't do anything about it. You lack perspective.
17:47We come back. He says, give me one last chance. Every night, you need to go to AA meeting.
17:53Every night for a year, he goes to AA meetings. The guy that sat down with him was my previous CFO. He has a tough conversation with him.
18:02He accepts. He went from about to kill himself with his story to now he works with us. He does very well.
18:10He makes a million dollar of your income, beautiful wife, beautiful kids, beautiful family. But by the way, we forgot any of the stuff that he did seven years ago, because he proved to us that he's truly changed.
18:21Does that make sense? So the judgment that we were giving him, he removed it.
18:26And that's kinda how life works. He recreated his reputation.
18:30And everybody can do that based on their choices, but it's not easy. It's very, very hard to do. And I've heard you talk about, like, McConaughey's famous quote where it's like, your hero should be your future self.
18:39Do you think it takes something like that to create this future identity of yourself? This thing is so fun. This life it I mean, sometimes you're, like, going through such a season, and sometimes you're going through such an amazing season.
18:50And then sometimes you're sitting there with a person and having a great conversation. And, you know, this morning, I wanna watch my daughter. She was four years old doing a a show at our school, and she was part of the tiny dancer at the church.
19:02She she was dancing. I'm standing right there just looking at her, and I can't wait for her to see me and say, daddy's here. You're safe.
19:09And then I walk to the side, and she spots me. She runs up, just throws herself at me, lifts her legs up. I'm hugging her.
19:16We're sitting there having a good moment together. My son is over here. We're laughing.
19:19My other daughter's there. We're laughing at how she's moving, how she's dancing. My wife is sitting over here.
19:25And no one exists around me at this time. Life is amazing.
19:30But my dad is 83. My biggest fear at six years old was possibly losing this guy. His time is coming up.
19:36He's 83 years old. He walks different. You know, he he his body is very different.
19:41It's frail. It's not the same as it was, but we still have good conversations together. I'm 47.
19:46I'm not 37. I'm not 27. Body's different at 47 than it was at 37 than it was at 27.
19:51You know? You and I are five days apart, you're all you're an October 13 baby. I'm an October 18 baby, but things change.
19:57But it's also like, that's cool. You know, you sit there, you realize how amazing we got this one chance here, and it's not always gonna be great.
20:06It's not. But if you don't look at this and say, man, let me go enjoy this thing called life and get some experiences and, you know, do something that it can make an impact, so when one day I'm no longer here, yeah, they'll eventually forget about you, because that's kind of life moves on.
20:22We're all coming here, and then you move on. But at least some impact is left. At least you build something you're proud of.
20:30People look back and say, that's my dad. That's my mom. You have to think about your mortality and what kind of an impact you want to make.
20:37So to me, if you don't see the bigger picture of how lucky we are to have a shot at building a good life, even though after we screwed up, you like gratitude, you like perspective, but just take a step back and realize we are some of the luckiest people alive.
20:51Even if you've got nothing, you still have more than a lot of people that are billions of people don't have a lot of things that you have, trust me. But that gratitude, it's hard to do when life is tough.
21:02It's not easy. You gotta still find a way to do it. No.
21:05When you have nothing going for you, that's like the only thing you can really lean on, right, is gratitude's been great for, like, your legs and your arms and your And
21:12I think that people, have a hard time because they want to think positively, they want to be confident, but yet their bank account has nothing in it.
21:20They don't have a relationship. They're out of shape, so they have no real metric to look at. Like, my life is going in the right direction.
21:27How can people get past that? Starts with you. Make a change.
21:31You know, start keeping your word. Increase your credit score. You know, the same way we have a credit score when you buy a house or you buy a car, it's because you don't keep your word of making that car payment.
21:42So your credit score score drops. You did not make that mortgage payment on time. Your credit score drops.
21:49Everybody is judged on how well of a job you do keeping your word. If you're a project manager, does it get done on time? If you're a general contractor, do you build a house on time?
22:00If you're a kid going to school, do you go to school on time? If you're a father or mother picking up the kids, do you pick them up on on time? If you're a CEO running a Fortune 500 company that's a publicly traded company, do you deliver on your estimates that you had?
22:14You know, what you were gonna be doing? If you're president, you deliver on the policies that you said everything is about keeping your word, and it starts off with the smallest thing.
22:24I'm gonna walk I'm gonna go and walk outside twenty minutes. Okay. Great.
22:27Did you keep your word? I did. Great.
22:28Do that one month straight. Your respect goes up. You know, I'd like one of the things I had every time I had one of these health people on the podcast, I change something big about my health.
22:36I had Paul Saladino on about a year ago. Last time I had Celsius, I used to drink two or three Celsius a day. Haven't had a Celsius drink since that day.
22:44K? Then I had Gary Breck on change with him, what he said.
22:50Then I had Doctor. Rhonda Patrick on two weeks ago. I've been fasting every day.
22:56I moved up my dinner. Typically, I have dinner around seven, 07:30. Now I have dinner at 04:45.
23:01I don't have dinner late. Unless if I'm going out with somebody and entertaining, and maybe I'll have some oysters, something like that. But I try to bring my dinner to 04:45.
23:08I don't eat anything in the morning, including piece of gum, including honey in my tea, including any water that may have sugar in it. No.
23:15It's just regular water, regular tea. No. And guess what?
23:18I feel better. I feel hungry. I feel like I'm in a hunt at this.
23:22So to us, hey, you keep your word when you're making small little commitments, you start seeing respect goes up. You know what?
23:29When I say something, things happen. When I say what I'm gonna be doing, everybody builds a reputation. Some people have a reputation for being tough.
23:37Some people have a reputation for being good at making money. Some people have a reputation for being fun. Some people have a reputation for being a womanizer.
23:45Some people have a reputation for being good with the way they write, or text, or call, or speak, or podcast. I wanted to build a reputation that when Patrick says he's gonna do something, he's gonna do it. Because both your enemies, your friends, your family, your allies, benefit from it.
24:01If your enemies know when you say, here's what we're gonna be doing, they're like, oh, I definitely don't wanna hear it from him. There's a benefit of building a reputation. When you say you're gonna do something, you do it.
24:11So being consistent and not being a victim are two common themes we talked about. And keep your word. And keep your word.
24:16Yeah. What other, like, big life decisions do you think are important for people? Cut out the drugs.
24:22If, you know, you can cut out the alcohol, you know, cut out any of that stuff that slows you down. Change some of the people around you that are negative and are crap magnets, including some family members. You know, change your language.
24:33I audit people on the words they use. I'm like, don't use weak words like I'm tired. Don't use weak words like, you know, I I'm just so tired.
24:41I'm just I'm like, oh my god. Stops. It's a turnoff when somebody talks like that.
24:44Right? I can be sitting next to somebody and I talk to them just by the way they speak. I catch weak words.
24:50And when you catch weak words, a person with weak words can't manage others. And if you do, you can't in a high standard environment.
24:56So you gotta protect the words that's coming out of your mouth. You know, sometimes you slip, you're like, well, why am I talking this way? No.
25:02No. Upgrade the words. Upgrade your environment.
25:06I can't go on on this for for hours and hours, but those would be some of the things I would share. That was one of the biggest shifts I made was changing the people I spent time with. I I say that you gotta spend time with people who have common futures and not common pasts.
25:18And that hit home with me because I was a guy who partied all Love that. Yeah. Common futures dot common past.
25:23Yep. Because as a kid, you know, I I partied a lot, did a lot of drugs, and that was like my my crew.
25:29Where are you from? You're From Maryland. Maryland.
25:31Yeah. So were born and raised in Baltimore. Yeah.
25:34Born and raised in the Baltimore area. Yep. And so that's all we did, and so that's what I was used to.
25:39And so it wasn't it was when I when I stopped doing drugs and I got into fitness, I would go hang out with my old friends and there was something different. Like, they would go and do drugs or drink a bunch or whatever.
25:48And I was like, why does this feel weird to me? Why does this feel like an awkward first date when I have nothing in common with these people?
25:55And I had to make that decision that's like, okay, they're in my past life. I need to cut these people out. They're not bad people.
26:01They're just not aligned with where I'm going in the future, and that is has really stuck with me in something that I've used to be successful. Good for you. Respect to you.
26:08It's not easy to do. It's very hard to do. But if you're able to do it,
26:12life changes. You know, sometimes for us I had I had one of my guys that I've mentored for over twenty years, no longer, but I used to mentor this guy a lot.
26:22He he's probably one of the 10 people in my life that have spent the most actual hours with me.
26:29It's in the thousands of hours that this person spent with me. One day, we're having a conversation. He says, you know what?
26:35I don't know why, but why is it so important to me what you think? I wanna get to a point that I could care less about what you think about me.
26:44I said, really? Yeah. I said, why do you think you care about what I think why do you think you care so much about what I think about you?
26:50I don't know, but I don't like it. I said, okay. Alright.
26:54I said, so what's wrong with that? Tell me what's wrong with that. And he starts kinda going through the whole thing.
27:00Alright. I said, see, if you make a list of people in your life that you rank them by, who on that list do you care about and what they think about you, and you rank them.
27:16Like, I care what my kids think about me, but in what areas. Not the fact I'm tough with them.
27:25I'm gonna stay tough with them. But I care about the fact that they're gonna go out there, when a kid offers them drugs, for them to sit there and say and the kids that are offering them drugs say they don't have a good relation with their dad.
27:37I want them to say, man, my dad's gonna be hurt by this if I do it. I love my dad. He loves me.
27:42I can't I'm good, guys. That I care about that. Right?
27:46If I go and I think about my dad, I wanna make my dad proud. So I care about that.
27:52But my dad didn't want me to leave the previous company, start my own insurance company because he was afraid. He was afraid I was gonna lose everything. I already had a great life.
28:00I was already traveling the world. He's like, what are you doing? What you're gonna give all this up to go start your own company?
28:04I am. Why? Because I don't like what this other company stands for because of three people.
28:09He says, so you're gonna leave? He says, yes. He's called my pastor.
28:11He called everybody. He says, Pat, you can't do it. I said, dad, I'm doing it.
28:16But I did it partly for him. I wanted to make him proud. But guess what?
28:21I care about what he has to think about me. And then all of a sudden, I noticed who's not on the list. And I said, why do I care so much?
28:29Oh, done. This guy, why would I care about what they think? It it became so simple when you make a list of saying, are the top 10 people that you care about what they think about you?
28:40This should be a short list. But that also doesn't mean everything you do. Not every decision.
28:46My I have relatives that were not happy about my me marrying my wife because my wife's white, and I'm Middle Eastern. And I grew up around Middle Eastern minus my time in the military. In the military, I was around everybody.
28:57But in, you know, high school, was around Armenians, Assyrians, Iranians. No.
29:02I married my wife. We got letters.
29:04She got letters saying, how could you marry somebody like Pat? Do you know about his temper and all this other stuff and how hard charging he is? He's you want something like that?
29:12And I got letters. Why would you marry a white girl? The the day before I got married, I'm getting letters about why are you getting married?
29:20Man, I'm good. My dad loved her. I love her.
29:23We have a good relationship. We've been married now for it'll be seventeen years in June. Do I think we're gonna be married together for forty years?
29:29I don't know. We take it one year at a time. Every I've been saying this since our wedding day.
29:34When I got married, I looked at everybody. I said, I don't know if we're gonna be married for twenty years. We're taking it one year at a time.
29:39We've been taking it one year at a time for the last sixteen and a half years. Right? Four healthy kids.
29:44We're happy. Life is good. We're growing.
29:47We're doing our thing. But to me, it's very important to make a list of the people opinions you carry.
29:54You have to be honest with yourself because some people are on that list that you shouldn't care what they think. And that list shouldn't be 50 names, 200 names. It should be a very tight list.
30:03Max, 10 names. Healthy, five names. For me, I have four kids.
30:07I have more family, so that got a little bit bigger, but around 10 names is where it needs to be. And then you'll walk better, you'll make decisions easier, you'll second guess yourself less, you'll take responsibility more, and like, no, I'm good.
30:20Here's what we're gonna be doing. Alright. Great.
30:21You'll lead better if you're able to do that. Do you think the path you took to change your life is repeatable for people who wanna who are feeling lost? For others to do.
30:29Absolutely. Yeah. You know, like, the other day, we're doing an exercise.
30:32It's a good question you just asked. And one of my the managers here, her name is Taylor. She's phenomenal at what she does.
30:40Me, her, Aaron, and Mario, we made a list. K? And they're asking me, Pat, I wanna be better at managing my guys.
30:47What do I do? I said, great. Before we talk about what you can do, she's talking about how can I become better at duplicating others to succeed?
30:55Right? Duplicating others. So what you're asking is, is it repeatable?
31:00Is it duplicatable? Can somebody else get the same kind of results?
31:04And here's what I said. I said people we recruit, what do we get that we don't do, that they bring to the table?
31:13What is not that you can't duplicate? And they're sitting there thinking, I don't understand the question.
31:18Okay. What do you bring to the table that I didn't help you get?
31:25My IQ? Yes. It's got nothing to do with me duplicating.
31:28Like, I can't duplicate IQ. My EQ? I can't duplicate EQ.
31:32EQ personality. I can't duplicate the personality. So you and I can't be like Theo Vaughan.
31:38That's his personality. Right. You and I can't be like Marcelo Hernandez, the comedian.
31:43We can't be like, you know, a Matthew McConaughey or Tom Cruise. That's the personality.
31:50You can't duplicate that. Then character, honesty, integrity, that your parents did that to you, and your choice, your faith, your decisions, that's not my responsibility.
32:01That's on you. Authentic, some people are fake. Some people are authentic.
32:05I can't. If you're authentic, that's you get the credit for that. Right?
32:09And we wrote a couple other things here. Then it was like the next part is on what to duplicate. One of them was nonverbal.
32:16The other one is verbal. Meaning, caught, taught.
32:21K? So what you bring to the table, personality, DNA, character, talent, IQ, EQ, we don't get credit for that.
32:30Right? Then what you can catch from working with me, the impact I make of teaching you.
32:36Hey, Johnny, here's what you need to do. Read this book. Follow the script.
32:41This is your schedule. Here's how many calls to make. Follow the structure.
32:46Dude, okay, that's teaching. And then it's catching. Catching is if you spend the entire day with me today from morning till now, you'd walk away saying, holy This guy's schedule is back to back.
32:58It's way more than what I'm gonna say on this podcast. Every time somebody comes here to our property and they come and walk around, we have three different buildings. One of them we're about to sell, which was a bank we bought, and the podcast said it was in the vault.
33:09The other one is a building we bought that we turned into our cigar launcher, private member, which now we're turning into a restaurant, and then this 11 acre campus that we bought. Not a land, lease to be on the land.
33:18Right? When somebody comes in, you're like, oh my god. What do you guys do?
33:23What is this? This is really what yeah. Holy I didn't know you guys said this.
33:28We do. Then somebody will come and monitor and see how I work. And then they say, oh.
33:34And by the way, when somebody comes and watches how you work, they make one of two decisions. One of them is, oh my god. This is what it takes?
33:43I'm not doing it. Or it's gonna be, wow. I got the blueprint.
33:49Let's go. But one of those two decisions is gonna be made. So duplicate this.
33:53Can somebody repeat this? Number one, the stuff that's your DNA, personality, character, all this stuff, no. That's on you.
33:59I can't be like you. You can't be like me in that area. I can't be like you.
34:02You can't be like that in that area. Caught. If I watch you do a 100 episodes of podcast, I can see how you prepare for it.
34:09I can see that you have notes here that you wrote down. I can see the format that you follow to write the notes down. I can catch how you do this.
34:17Then I can catch how you prep. Let's just say I'm your driver or your right hand guy, I drove here with you, and I saw what videos you watched of me. Do you go to filters, most views?
34:26Do you watch those videos first? Do you go to Twitter to see my last 100 tweets? Do you go to Instagram to see what stories I put up to see what's the most freshest thing on my mind?
34:34I don't know, but there's a format. Look at how you started today's podcast. You got a tweet or a Facebook post that I put put up two weeks, so you started with that.
34:41That's a format. I can catch that from you. Right?
34:4590% is catching. 10% is teaching.
34:49It's not even close. Well, I think it goes back to your environment, who you spend time with. Right?
34:54Because I think You know what I'm saying when I'm saying 90% is catching and 10% is teaching? Like, somebody told me this quote twenty five years ago.
35:03There's more caught than taught in parenting. There's more caught than taught in parenting. My daughter was two years old.
35:11One day she comes. She's like, what the heck? I said, what'd you just say?
35:16What the heck? Brooklyn. I said, babe, what'd you where did you learn this from?
35:23And then my wife said, babe, you always say what the heck. She caught this phrase, what the heck.
35:29School calls me saying, hey, your son dropped a few bad words today. Really? Tell me which ones.
35:35Well, the s word and the f word. I said, will take responsibility for the s one, not the f one. The f one, learned the school, the s he learned from me.
35:42And the teacher's like, oh, wow. You're very straight up. I said, no.
35:45What do you want me to tell you? I said a lot around the kids, and I probably shouldn't. So that's me.
35:50He caught that from me. But I don't say f around them, so he picked it up from somebody else. Okay.
35:55Well, thanks for that. Well, father, can you please slow down? I said, well, think about it.
35:59You know? But I'm being honest with you. So to me, the replicating part is you is caught is taught.
36:07Taught is important, but oh my god, catching it is so critical.
36:12And it goes back to the way you carry yourself, right, in setting the example and being the model. And that's why they say in parenting, like, modeling behavior
36:20is, like, one of the most important things. Like, just kinda just how you just referenced that. It's very true.
36:24This is why for me, when I would do conference calls, my kids are watching me. If I'm in the car, they're around me, I want them to hear daddy negotiate. If I'm running a meeting, if the kids don't have any school and no practice and no sports, they're at the office here all day.
36:39They're running around. They're picking stuff up on what's going on. How do we run a media company?
36:44How do we run a consulting firm? What do we say in the boardroom? What's being negotiated?
36:48Why did dad handle that that way? Dad, why did you fire that person? Dad, why did you hire that person?
36:53Dad, why did we make that investment? Dad, what do you think? Well, I think we made a mistake lose that.
36:57We did lose money, and we made a mistake. But what could we have done differently, dad? What do you think we could have done differently?
37:02It's constant because shadowing is an edge. It's massive.
37:08If if if I can work around somebody and shadow them, and if I can do that three months, six months, twelve months, two years, are you kidding me? Are you kidding me?
37:19Why is it that the VPs end up becoming so many vice presidents become presidents? Because they shadow the president. You know, they're they're in the room.
37:28They're seeing, oh, that was a dynamic with China. But that was a dynamic got it.
37:33Let me store it here. I shadowed. I saw it.
37:36So very important.
37:39So you got boys. We're in like a men's mental health epidemic, I think, right now with suicides and addiction.
37:47Like, do you think that is, and what can men do differently
37:51to be to kind of not fall into some of these unfortunate traps? We're listening to what people are telling us on how to raise kids. It's a bunch of nonsense.
38:02And we're being told how to raise kids by people that don't have kids, or or that are extremely sensitive. Oh my god, don't raise your voice.
38:11Oh my god, don't argue. Oh my god, no. No means no.
38:14No. I'm gonna raise my voice, and we're gonna have some tough conversations.
38:20And why? Why? But why you do that?
38:22Because how do you think coaches talk to you? You think a coach is gonna say to you, honey, please try catching the ball next time.
38:31Catch the flipping ball. We've done this practice route a 100 times. Run the route.
38:37What are you doing? Right? So, oh, okay.
38:39That's the reality of life. What do you think it's like? You didn't hit your numbers three quarters in a row.
38:43You think the boss is gonna come in? It's okay, Johnny. We'll give you one more quarter.
38:47No. No. No.
38:47Hey. Next quarter, you don't hit your numbers. This is it.
38:50I'm telling you right now. There's nothing I can do about it. You're gonna get fired because you haven't hit your numbers.
38:55And, you know, you're not working the way you were before, and I don't feel the intensity, and you tell me where you wanna go from here. We'd love to keep you.
39:01We'd love to have you be with us for twenty years, but you're making it very hard for us to keep you right now. So I don't know. It's your choice is on you.
39:08Where do you wanna go with this? You have to confront. So to me, I love when we argue, because when you argue with your kids and you debate with your kids, you're teaching them what?
39:15You're teaching them debate. You're teaching them how to sell. You're teaching them how to negotiate.
39:20You're teaching them how to ask for something. All skill sets that's gonna help them advance in their lives. When when I say no, I don't say, don't ever ask me again.
39:31I say no. I said no. No.
39:34And then he comes back with a different creative. And I asked myself, how come he's not coming back asking for it? Come back and ask for it.
39:41Renegotiate. Why are you not coming back? The kids are almost confused.
39:45Like, well, you said no. Why are you giving up so early? Come back and renegotiate with your daddy.
39:49Give me a creative way of saying yes to you. Okay. Okay.
39:53I'll come back to you. Alright. What is it?
39:55What if we do this, this, this, and that? No. I'm not good with that.
39:57But if you do this, I would be open to this. You'd be open to that, I would. So what if we did that?
40:02Okay. Now we're talking the same language. If that's the case, I'm good.
40:05Or I could I'm teaching follow-up, because you gotta learn follow-up. Half the battle with life is following up.
40:12So you gotta follow-up with clients, you gotta follow-up with boss, you gotta follow-up when you're closing the house, you gotta follow-up with a deal that didn't go through, you got it's follow-up. And then, you know, the the the the fighting intensity side to be okay in the storm, because life, you're gonna be in storm.
40:27Now don't get me wrong. Some kids are born. We have four kids.
40:29One of them is very calm. One of them is very intense. One of them is very philosophical.
40:34One of them has just got a temper and competitive, psycho psycho competitive. So, yes, you manage them in a different way, but you still you still wanna raise your boys to be tough because, you know and and by the way, teach my kids about politics, I teach my kids about debate, my kids read books.
40:51You know, my oldest son is right now going through the Bible, the Koran, and the Torah. He's already read At The Strike. He's already read is it Dante's Inferno, I think it's called.
41:00He's already read he's he's had five, six hundred books over. He watches Hillsdale College to get the history of the constitution, to get the history of politics. I'm shaping their mindset, so when they go into the real world, and let's see what you wanna do with it, you pick and choose.
41:13But you gotta work with them to be tough. I think it's a soft society because one, fathers are not that involved, they're not selling the right belief system, they're scared, they're walking on eggshells.
41:23Then by the way, if you see my kids, like today my 12 year old, I'm in the chapel watching a four year old daughter, he's sitting on my lap. Not because I asked him to sit on my lap. We have a relationship, we have a bond.
41:33I don't know what's gonna happen next five, ten, twenty years because they're gonna go through their own thing, they're gonna have different influences, some of the influences they get are not gonna like me, some of them are gonna be girlfriends, all your dad cares about is money, they're gonna date somebody that their parents are not fans of where I'm at because I'm loud with certain opinions that are.
41:50They're gonna go through this phase, and it's okay. It's okay as as they go through it, but as long as, you know, we're shaping them to be tough, respectful,
41:59long term, we have a fighting chance with them. You know, the show is called The Adversity Advantage, and and the reason is a couple things. One, to show that adversity has purpose in life.
42:08And two, it's like what not to do. Because I think a lot of people's problems are they're caused by what they do during adversity.
42:14They drink a bottle of wine every day. They have too much sex. They do all these things, spend a bunch of money.
42:19What do you do when you have a bad day? Like, do you have, like, a recipe, like, to to to kind of recalibrate yourself when you're having a bad day? Yeah.
42:26When I have a bad day, I'll come in, and the if you wanna know the immediate way to get rid of all of it for me is my kids being around me. And I know it's not something that's duplicatable or replicatable with everybody,
42:38but if I've got kids with me, I'm good. When I come home, I see them, pain goes away immediately. At least that's for me.
42:48But I, you know, I I don't I don't know if I like, last week, we had a couple days where I'm like, yeah, I'm not feeling good about what's going on.
42:56And then all of a sudden, I'm like, no, I can't keep going like this. I called an emergency meeting.
43:02I took my three executives. We went out to dinner. I said, guys, let me tell you what's on my mind, and I need your help with this.
43:08Here's what I'm thinking about. I laid out my concerns, what I'm frustrated with. And I said, I I I want us to have a clear road to a billion, to 10,000,000,000, to a 100,000,000,000.
43:20We don't have a clear road right now to a $100,000,000,000. We're having this conversation about valuation and what we wanna build.
43:25What we wanna build, we have a big vision. So, okay, if we drop everything we're doing and we only did one thing, what would it be?
43:35And they say to me, da da da. I said, okay. I said, so go a little bit more.
43:41How how much could this scale? Well, we did this, like right now we're getting a lot of companies that are coming to us because our consulting firm is booming, growing exponentially. We have 10,000 clients from 64 countries that we do engagements for, and they range from $50,000 to a $3,300,000 engagement.
43:56And some of the companies come in and they say, hey, can we give you some equity? Can we do half cash, half this? And the companies that have been with us for two or three years will entertain it because we know the operators.
44:06And so now we're getting to a point where people are coming up to us saying, hey, we'd like you to open up a fund, and we wanna give you half $1,000,000,000 to go, because we have so many companies that are coming to us. You make the investments, you take the risks, you manage it, and then for us, we'll bring the CEOs in, we'll help the CEOs become better CEOs, we'll deploy to them exactly the variable comp we have, the benefits program we have, how we do our calibration, how we do our marketing, how we do all here's how we do everything.
44:29This is all yours. Why? Because we own 50% of the company.
44:32Because we own 100% of the company. Because we own 25 of the company. So now we're deploying everything to you.
44:38And we sat there and said, what if we did this for twenty years? What does twenty years from now look like? And it was like, this is the range where we'll be in.
44:44I said, that's believable. Okay, great. So it's as soon as possible trying to talk to somebody to process the issue, what we can do to make that issue or the problem better.
44:58I wanna talk to somebody. What do you think about what happened? What could we have done differently?
45:01What about this, what about that? If we have a bad day because, I don't know, market dropped or tariffs got canceled by Supreme Court or Bitcoin is down 50% or interest rates went up, I can't control that kind of stuff.
45:15My frustration typically comes when we make bad mistakes or when we make certain things that's not moving. That's typically my
45:22format on what I do next. You control the controllables, which I think is all you can do when you're faced with hard times. I think so many people, they over index in the problem in itself and what they can't control instead of spending time on, like, the things that they actually have the control over.
45:37It's true. What would you say to the the Pat and the Ford Focus, knowing what you know now? You gotta go through it.
45:43You just gotta go through it. You know, part of life
45:47with faith is the reason why we respect people who win at the highest level is because, you know, the the people will ask, did you ever think that you were gonna do something big?
46:00Like, you know, even the song for a podcast song is, did you ever think you would make it? Right? I knew I was different.
46:11Like, I knew I was different. I knew, like, the the fire I had in my belly to wanna be somebody was so out of control high.
46:22It was so high, but then on the complete opposite side, I had no credibility to say I was capable of doing something big with my life. I didn't have anything to say, well, I was a high school quarterback.
46:35We took the, you know, team to the state championship. I never played organized sports. I'm six four, two fifty.
46:41I have never played organized sports. How is that possible? I never played organized sports.
46:46I don't have, you know, where I was in the army and I went to, you know, Delta Force, a special force. I don't have that.
46:52I didn't have a 4.5 GPA. I had a 1.8 GPA. I don't have a 1,600 s a t or fifteen eighty s a t.
46:59I don't have that. I I didn't have anything to look at to say so it was always a guessing game. Why do you think you're so special?
47:06Why do you think you're meant to do something big with your life? Why? So I'm like, I don't know, but I cannot get rid of this feeling in my belly.
47:15I can't. I feel like my blood is boiling all the time because I wanna go out there and do something big with my life. Almost gave up, almost went back into the army, ended twenty years, and that's all I was gonna do.
47:29Because I looked at the $34,000 pension plan I was gonna get when I was 40 years old. I almost did it.
47:35I almost went back into the army. So to me, it started off with that fire in the belly. And then I remember when I hit made $250,000, and I started getting very good at the business and insurance, that's when I was kinda like, I think I can do a 100,000,000.
47:55I think I can do it. Why? I don't know why.
47:58I just think I can. What makes me think you can do it? I don't think I'm gonna stop until I do because I trust my way of making decisions.
48:07And then that led to next step and next step and next step and next step. But even today, where I'm at today, my aspirational vision of where I wanna be in ten years, Still a little bit like, it's kinda crazy for you to think that you're capable of doing that.
48:22Who are you? Why don't I believe it? Yeah.
48:25But who are you? Well, look what I've built in the past. Okay.
48:28But this is a complete different industry. I get it. That part of the unknown and the faith and the doubt that whether you're gonna pull it off or not, that's the hell week.
48:37That's the excite that's why you get the credit from people to say, man, you made it. Man, you won. Man, you pulled it off.
48:43So I think I think a person's gotta go through the parts of the battle of the doubt, close to giving up, and that's all part of the test to tell the story later on to realize the credit goes to that moment that you were about to give up, you didn't. That's where the credit lies.
49:01I'm looking forward to seeing what unfolds for you in the future. Pat, thank you so much for coming on the podcast. Don, thank you.
49:06Love this convo. I really enjoyed it as well. Thanks for having me on.
49:08Appreciate Got it. Thank you.
The Hook

The bait, then the rug-pull.

Patrick Bet-David opens by quoting himself -- a post about optimism as a creation mechanism, not a comfort mechanism. The frame: the future is not something that happens to you, it is something your beliefs about it actively construct.

CTA Breakdown

How they asked for the click.

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