4 Lessons From Losing $1 Million Dollars with Mike Zeller: An EOFire Classic from 2021

17 Nov 2024 · 45 min

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In short

Podcast Summary: Entrepreneurs on Fire - 4 Lessons From Losing $1 Million Dollars with Mike Zeller

Episode Overview In this classic episode from 2021, John Lee Dumas hosts Mike Zeller, a successful entrepreneur who has generated over $300 million in sales. Mike shares insights gained from his experience of losing over $1 million and discusses the importance of identity, personality assessments, and the lessons that come from crises.

Key Takeaways

  1. Crises Can Remake You
  2. Personal Growth: Crises present opportunities for transformation and growth.
  3. Historical Context: Historical events like the Black Plague led to cultural and societal reshaping.
  4. Self-Reflection: Personal crises can lead to shedding past failures and traumas.
  1. Identity Precedes Destiny
  2. Concept of Identity: Your self-identity affects your capacity for success.
  3. Lottery Winners: Many winners go bankrupt because their self-identity doesn’t match their new financial reality.
  4. High-Performers: Successful figures like Kobe Bryant and Beyonce adopt new identities to excel.
  1. Finding Your Zone of Genius
  2. Self-Assessment: Engaging in personality tests (e.g., Wealth Dynamics, Enneagram) can help identify your strengths.
  3. Four Key Areas:
  4. Unique talents
  5. Key relationships
  6. Defining life experiences
  7. Values and passions
  8. Practical Approach: Conduct deep inventories of personal experiences and relationships to better understand oneself.
  1. The Upper Limit Problem
  2. Invisible Ceilings: Everyone has upper limits regarding income, relationships, and health.
  3. Breaking Through: It’s crucial to challenge and break through these limits to achieve substantial growth and transformation.
  4. Real-Life Example: A client successfully shattered her income ceiling through focused effort and embracing her identity.

Discussion Highlights

The Importance of Team Dynamics

  • Strengths and Weaknesses: Recognizing personal strengths and hiring complementary skills is crucial for business success.
  • Delegation: Emphasizing high-value activities while delegating lower-level tasks can lead to greater productivity.

Practical Steps for Entrepreneurs

  • Reflective Practices: Take time for self-reflection in conducive environments to enhance creativity and strategy.
  • Commitment: Moving from interest to commitment in personal development is vital to making significant changes.

Personal and Professional Development

  • Clarity and Commitment: Achieving clarity about one’s goals leads to greater commitment and ultimately success.
  • Value Creation: Focusing on what uniquely contributes to a business or team can significantly impact overall success.

Conclusion Mike Zeller offers valuable insights into personal transformation through crises, the impact of identity on success, and the importance of understanding one’s strengths. By embracing these lessons, entrepreneurs can reshape their paths and achieve their ultimate potential.

Resources

  • Mike Zeller's Website: [Meet Mike](https://www.mikezeller.com/about)
  • Book: [Genius Within](https://geniuswithinbook.com)
  • Free Resource: Text "geniusu" to 474747 for more information.

Final Thoughts Reflect on your identity, embrace crises as opportunities for growth, and focus on creating a supportive team. By doing so, you can effectively navigate the challenges of entrepreneurship and reach new heights in your professional journey.

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Transcript

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0:04Light that spark fire nation JLD here and welcome to entrepreneurs on fire brought to you by the HubSpot Podcast Network, the audio destination for business professionals with great shows like Systems Saved Me. Today, we're pulling a classic episode from the archives, and we'll be breaking down four lessons from losing$1 million. To drop these value bombs, I have brought to Mike Zeller in the EO Fire Studios. Mike has done over$300 million in sales, studying under masters of the industry, such as Tony Robbins, Russell Brunson, and Jay Abraham. And today, Fire Nation, we'll be talking about how crises are there to remake you, do the personality tests, and find your zone of genius.

0:40I'm an eight on Enneagram, by the way. Your identity, procedure, destiny, Fire Nation, and oh, so much more. And a big thank you for sponsoring today's episode goes to Mike and our sponsors. DTC Pod, hosted by Ramon Berrios and Blaine Bolas, is brought to you by the HubSpot Podcast Network, the audio destination for business professionals. DTC Pod is a podcast about all things direct to consumer. Ramon and Blaine cover everything from starting, growing, and optimizing e-commerce stores in DTC brands. If you're interested in the stories behind your favorite consumer brands, this podcast is for you.

1:14One recent episode on how the best brands are built is a must listen. Listen to DTC Pod wherever you get your podcasts. Mike, we are back, brother. Say what's up to Fire Nation and share something that you believe about becoming successful that most people disagree with. JLD, great being here, Fire Nation, so excited. And the number one thing that I love to speak on is your identity precedes your destiny. So often we get obsessed with working hard, we get obsessed with a certain strategy or acquiring more customers or whatever it is. Well, I've seen over and over and over in the hundreds of entrepreneurs I've worked with that if they don't have the identity that supports the higher level achievement that they want to step into.

2:01Think of lottery winners. Why do lottery winners, 74 % of lottery winners end up bankrupt three years later? Wow. Because their identity didn't support their new reality. Same thing with NFL players, things like that. After they retire, three years later, most of them are bankrupt. Your identity has to support your destiny. So if you want to step into a higher level identity, you've got to rewire your identity. That's why guys like Kobe Bryant, he had Black Mamba. He had a different identity that helped him step into a championship mindset. Sasha Fierce with Beyonce. Primetime with Deion Sanders.

2:39Oh, I love Primetime. I know, right? I love Primetime. So you got to think about what's the identity of your higher level self, especially if you're leaving past, leaving behind shame or brokenness or mistakes. You got to think about what is and create that new level of identity. Well, I love that. and Fire Nation, we'll be talking a lot, like a lot about all of these things throughout this interview, because let's be honest, Mike's learned some lessons from losing a million dollars himself. And, you know, we've all learned some lessons so show over our careers. It just happens. And if you were really listening closely, you heard me mention the fact that Mike is not in EO Fire Studios right now.

3:22Mike is in HubSpot's podcast studios because we are sitting across the table from each other in Nashville, Tennessee, in this beautifully built podcast recording studio, courtesy of the HubSpot Podcast Network, which of course you know, Fire Nation, that we are a big part of. And we are here at Podcast Movement, which is I think the eighth podcast movement, which is crazy because I remember going to the first one, as well as every subsequent one. subsequent one. And a pretty cool announcement if you didn't catch this earlier because we have been talking about this a little bit, but Kate just dropped a pretty epic keynote.

4:03What'd you think about that, Mike? She was on fire. She rocked it. You're a lucky man. The opening keynote by Caitlin Erickson. She was amazing. It was a blast. So yeah, right now Mike and I are hanging out in Nashville at Podcast Movement in a podcast recording studio brought to us by the HubSpot Podcast Network. Fantastic company doing some great things. And back to the focus of the interview, which, you know, we all might have our sweet spots. I mean, I'm good at certain things. You're good at certain things. You, Fire Nation, you're listening right now. You're good at certain things. You're just naturally good at certain things.

4:38But talk about how playing out of position can cause us just as human beings to lose a lot of money. Yeah. So back in 2018, I had in 2017, I had 55 employees. We were doing about 30 million a year in my different ventures. And then, you know, I sold out of certain ventures and then certain things happened in 2018 where I ended up losing a huge chunk of money. And then over that time period, rough two year period, I lost about a million dollars, a little over a million dollars, actually. And what happened was, is that as you're growing in business, as you're expanding, what happens is sometimes you grow out of position and I'm really good at designing, conceptualizing, architecting a business concept, but I'm not so good at managing the operations.

5:25I couldn't find the right operation, operating partners or the right team members, the COO type deal. I made some mistakes on that. And then what happens is, is project management and leading the operations. I'm not so good at that. And eventually things started crumbling and they crumbled faster and then I had a partnership that splintered that was my main cash cow business and all of a sudden now I'm upside down. I have way more expenses than I have income coming in. I have all these problems, all these investors, you know, bills, things like that that were just stacking up and what happened is I went through this, you know, really a crisis and I also got married during that season too.

6:05So two months before we got married, my cash cow business disintegrates. actually at a at a click funnels event no so yeah and I had this my expenses were way up because I had two weddings planned a Florence Italy wedding a Nashville wedding and all these things are just snowballing and I traced back to four or five years before I was like you know what I ended up starting six businesses in like two years and I was like you know what I'm gonna the crap's gonna to hit the fan at some point. I'm going to hit my edge and hit my limit. And sure enough, that 2018 was when I was starting to hit my limit.

6:43But what happened is, is the crises are there to remake us. And I started realizing, hey, all the things that helped me get to where I was, a lot of the good things were I was playing in my zone of genius. My zone of genius is I'm one of the best in the world at galvanizing momentum and strategizing and developing a business concept, an idea but i'm i suck butt at managing the last 20 percent um so in my redesign and going forward in today fast forward to today i know i gotta i'm hyper intentional about designing and bringing on people that compliment me and i won't start a new venture a high level of venture without the right operating partners because of the painful mistakes of losing all that money and the suffering that i drug my my new wife through you guys still together yeah i mean she makes she makes it with you through those days i mean let's be honest she's probably a keeper yeah but what i want to kind of go back to fire nation is you know just like this thought philosophy that you know the person to grow a business from zero to a million or a million to 10 million or so on and so forth may not be the person to go from 10 million to 100 million or from 100 million to beyond like And you need to realize that you have some strengths and some weaknesses.

7:58And so for me, I'm always like, number one, what business do I want to be running? But number two, how can I be building a team around me that's keeping this strong, my business strong of what I'm creating and what I'm building so that when I maybe do hit my upper limits, which we'll be getting into a lot later, I know that I can pass that baton up to somebody who should be in that position. And before we do move on, there was one phrase that I really wanted to circle back to and just have you repeat it. It was the crises galvanized. What was that exact phrase? Crises can remake you. And you look throughout history.

8:36That was it. Yeah. Even what we're going through with our pandemic right now, right? Our world order is being shaken a little bit. You know, people are moving to Puerto Rico, moving to Nashville, Texas, from California, et cetera. well let's go back 600 years ago renaissance what predated the renaissance dark ages the black plague oh 50 million people died over about a hundred year period zero that's a big number and reshuffled the world order so like crisis is remake culture remake you also on a micro level you individually so that forced me to remake myself and i had to shed you know like there was shame and traumas and I had to shed all of that and get the tail was tucked between my legs for about a year but I had to get the tail out between my legs and let me ask you something because this is important did you find this because this is what I found to be true is there of course is shame when there's failure etc etc but at the same time I feel like it's kind of one of those situations where like as human beings we're all scared about dancing on the dance floor because we think everybody's looking at us and guess what nobody's looking at you because everybody's concerned about how bad they look dancing and they think you're looking at them and judging them so it's just kind of like there's a there's like this kind of like string of phrases that i love which is like you know when you're like under 20 like you know you're so worried about what everybody's thinking about you when you're like you know 20 to 40 you're you're realizing that everybody's talking about you all the time but then like you're over 60 you're realizing that nobody's ever talking about you in the first place because nobody really cares it's not they don't care so much but it's just like they have their own worries They have their own stresses and struggles.

10:15And so that shame you felt for a year, other people might have been like for 24 hours and would have been thinking about you, but then they were off to other things. It's just so nothing is destructive to the point of finding you can't come back from. So you got to just be swinging that bat for the fences. Now, one thing that I preach very often is something called the zone of fire. And you preach how to find your zone of genius. So tomato, tomato, very similar things. I'm just going for a little branding here, but talk about how this zone of genius can help us attract and even more importantly, retain A players.

10:53Yeah, great question, JLD. So Socrates said, to know thyself is the beginning of all wisdom. D. Hawk, the founder of Visa, founder of Visa, he when he retired from Visa, he started researching leadership and what the most effective leaders in the world did. and he started writing for Harvard Business Review. And he found that the best leaders in the world spent more than 50 % of their energy leading themselves. So what that means is, you know, I went through this season of crisis and I started looking at clues, and clues in four key areas. Now, I've come to believe that if you accumulate all the clues you can in these four key areas, you will have the greatest accumulation of clues about who on earth you are, what on earth you're meant to do, and how to monetize your genius.

11:39Here are the four areas. First, your unique talents. Second, your key relationships. Third, your defining life experiences, those moments in life where something tragic or something amazing or something where your soul was stirred, those type things. Fourth, your values and passions. The challenge with most of the tests and most of the personality tests and all that is it's one clue or one set of clues. But if you take wealth dynamics test, which is one of my favorite personality tests for entrepreneurs. Take that test, couple that with the Colby index, couple that with the StrengthsFinder, couple that with the Disc Profile and the Myers-Briggs now or Enneagram.

12:17Now you've got all these clues from different angles. It's like a blind man. Blind man touches the hoof of an elephant. He doesn't know what it is. Touches the skin. Doesn't know what it is. Could be a rhino. Touches the tail. It could be any number of land animals. But then he touches all those pieces and he sees oh touches the trunk trunk even the trunk there's other animals with trunk-like structures aardbox yeah aardbox i didn't know that but jld i knew there was other animals but um so you get all these clues and then like i noticed for example i had this hotbed of relationships in two core areas e-commerce entrepreneurs very successful e-com guys and then best-selling authors i hadn't written a book at the time and I had like 20 to 30 like from New York Times to you know Wall Street Journal best-selling authors that I was buddies with I was like why do I why am I drawn to these people and then why why do other people bring me death right just I love being around this group and I am not super thrilled to be around this other group so you start seeing patterns and then you assemble them together and then you start finding out oh I'm lit up for example I'm lit up by sustainability, by idea generation, by human potential.

13:30That is a huge value and passion for me. But sustainability, I don't have an engineering background. I'm not going to go work for Tesla. I don't have like, but there are clues for human potential. As you start assembling all the clues, now you can step more clearly into your zone of genius. And when you have clarity, you can lead with more certainty, confidence, courage, and conviction. Wow. A lot of good C's Fire Nation. And before we move on, because we're going to be talking a little bit about personality tests. You did mention the Enneagram. If you had to guess, just had to guess knowing what you know about me.

14:08Are you kind of familiar with the Enneagram? I'm reasonably familiar. It's out of the six I mentioned is my least. But I'll take a guess. One to nine. What would you guess my number is? You're probably the adventure guy. What is it? Probably a three and a seven. Okay. I'm a three and a seven, a half and a half. So I am actually an eight, which is a challenger. Challenger. And when I came up with that one, I was like, that's so me. Because I just challenge status quo. You can tell me, John, this apple is red and you're holding a red apple. I'm going to find a way to challenge that. And it's just kind of my mentality.

14:45And I feel like that's kind of one reason where I've had both great successes and great failures in life is because I've always challenged the status quo. And in some cases, like with Entrepreneurs on Fire, going against what a normal podcast was supposed to be, quantity, quality, frequency, everything. Going against that because people are like, you can't do that. I'm like, oh, yes, I can. me? And that's one thing that I loved to kind of see with these personality tests, which is kind of what I wanted to use as a segue to how they can be very valuable if they're used correctly. And I think a lot of people just kind of read at the very surface level, but there's so much depth with personality tests and you mentioned a lot of them.

15:28So how can we as entrepreneurs and even just as human beings use these tests to better ourselves? and a great question what i love to do and what i coach a lot of my clients to do is take the test and pull out the clues pull out the elements that resonate with you both in your strengths and your weaknesses test them with others and then also if you're married or in a relationship share it with your significant other like i've i've led uh married couples actually through like a zone of genius date where they go and take all these tests and then they go on a date together and they share and they read each other's profiles and then they start laughing and they start they trade their their their expectations like lots of times are differences which are often clues of our strengths like i am super calm pragmatic logical my wife is a super feeler like uh but guess what her extreme feelings she gets riled up her emotions like she freaks out if our baby is crying too much and guess what i'm super calm sometimes she gets pissed that i'm too calm she's like why aren't you mad right now why aren't you sad why aren't you upset yeah like when we were dating she would stomp around the house trying to get me mad um and frustrated that she's gonna get me real mad and then and now i now she can get me mad i've unlocked that she has bound the triggers yeah but then when she's freaking out guess what i calm her down I'm like her gravity I center her and uh so now that's a strength then we have appreciation for each other and now it's like flirtation she's like babe I'm like um uh like I'll flirt with her about being super feeling and irrational her feelings feel like they're the absolute truth of the world and then she'll flirt with me around oh you're so logical and tactical blah blah and Do you have any videos of this flirting?

17:28I feel like I... I have voice memos. Okay. Literally recording her on voice memos. Maybe we'll insert that after our last sponsor, Fire Nation. So stick around. So what I really want to kind of just hammer home with everything that Mike's saying is that there's a right way and a wrong way to look at personality tests. And before we do move on, what would you just want to end this topic specifically with? You know, make the people that put themselves in extraordinarily right positions accomplish extraordinary things. And if you look throughout history, you look at, let's look at Edison. I just finished reading his biography.

18:07Big difference in his wealth and his, I guess, I mean, Tesla was an equal inventor, if not superior inventor. But he didn't have the right partnerships. He didn't always put himself in the right positions. He didn't fully appreciate other people's genius. Yeah, and he was an inventor more than like a businessman. And Edison was an insane inventor too. Like he would file like seven or eight patents in a week sometimes. You're like, how the heck do you come up with all this? But between the two of them, they were at least as equally skilled as inventors. But Edison did a better job of designing the team around him and appreciating other people's genius.

18:50and finding out like, hey, this person's a badass at this. I'm going to hire you for this. Or Richard Branson, he's a creator on the Wealth Dynamics like me. Guess what? He started like 470 businesses, but he has operating partners for every single woman and he knows where he's amazing, stays in his lane that he's amazing and finds people that are amazing at the lanes he's not. So this is a little off topic, but I just have to share it because it was kind of just like this pretty crazy moment for me. I was on the treadmill yesterday here in the gym and I'm listening to Tim Grover's new book, which is called Winning.

19:24Have you read that yet? I just ordered it yesterday and just listened to a podcast on Dax Shepard of him. Oh yeah. Nice. And I'm listening to it and they get to one part about that book where they say, what is success in one word? How would you define success? and they went through like what all the average people like that have not yet found success would use for the word success just kind of like happiness and joy and fun and all this stuff and for some reason for me the word that came to my mind this was just this came to my mind as I'm walking like looking out over the horizon was everything like success to me means everything It doesn't mean that I get everything.

20:11It means that it takes everything to achieve success. So then they started going through what people who have actually achieved real success uses their words, which was like, these are some of the actual words, like dirty, just painful, just uninhibited. And a lot of words like that is what successful people have used because they realized to get to their level of success, it wasn't pretty and just happy and joyous. but it was the other side of that coin in some ways. It was just giving it all. And then my favorite part of it was, and this is a little humble brag, but you know, this is my show, is that they ended with Kobe because you brought Kobe out.

20:51And he said, because he worked directly with Kobe. And he said, Kobe's word, everything. And I was like, oh my God, how did I come up with the exact same word as Kobe? So when you were like, I'm a creator, so it was Richard Branson. I'm like, well, Kobe and I have the exact same single word for success. So, la-ti-da and Fire Nation, stick around because when we get back from thanking our sponsors, more value bombs come in your way. Marketers have never been spread so thin. Trust me, I feel it too. Between creating content, launching campaigns, generating leads, nurturing your prospects, and more, you barely have a second to breathe, let alone do your best marketing.

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22:01making your life easier, getting your results faster, and better connecting you to all your data all in one place. Stop spreading yourself thin and start making major moves with HubSpot. Visit HubSpot.com slash marketers to learn more. All right, Mike, we are back and I want to get back to zones of genius because this is one of your areas of expertise. So how can we architect our business around our zones of genius? Great question. So first dive into, I really believe you got to do some self-reflection and look at the clues that are littered around your life. The problem is they've been all around us, but we haven't put them on the table to see, to interpret, to apply, to assemble together.

22:47Look at the connectedness. So I love doing the personality tests those are paramount you got to do those but then you take a deep inventory i've actually got a worksheet in a process you guys can get the uh six steps to finding your genius where i have my genius within book uh that you guys can get as well but um if you go through the worksheet you'll see that there's six steps uh around finding your genius and you go through the personality tests you do a deep inventory of relationships a deep inventory of your key life experiences just and when you're doing these sorts of life defining reflection moments you want to put yourself in a thoughtful reflective mood not like have the tv on in the background not be texting and instagramming at the same time you're going to get in a soul reflecting moment so you put your phone in airplane mode you get your favorite glass of wine or your favorite coffee and you look out onto the ocean if you're in Puerto Rico.

23:46Puerto Rico. You know, you get yourself in an inspiring environment. Go to your favorite coffee house or your favorite place to think and reflect. Because, you know, Napoleon Hill said, titled in his book, Think and Grow Rich, not work hard and grow rich, not grind and grow rich, not hustle and grow rich, is think and grow rich. That's where the magic happens, guys. so but again doing those reflection through all those core areas key life experiences key relationships values and passions what do you stand for what do you stand against what what do you light what lights you up and then your unique talents you will find clues and you will see patterns and you will things will pop to the surface you'll be like wow that's how i'm supposed to use that story in my life that i didn't really know what was the purpose of that experience or that mistake or whatever.

24:37They can grow rich. I love that you brought that up because, man, it is just becoming so true to me over the years that it takes hard work to get to where you want to be, of course. But it's not hard work and get rich because you can be working unbelievably hard your entire life and you will not get rich. And again, rich, I'm not just talking about dollars and cents. I'm talking about a rich life, a life that has the freedom, that has the activities, that has the joy, the space that you want, whatever that might be. And that's not a dollar amount for everybody. That's all the things that I just mentioned.

25:11So that's one thing that I've been giving myself over the past couple of years. And it happened overnight. Like I just worked hard for a number of years and honestly in a lot of wrong areas, which wasted time, but that just was me through my learning process. And I was able to get to where I'm at now where I'm really taking time to just think and space and saying no and just saying, you know, that next great thing for me is not going to come from just working harder. It's going to come from a working smarter. So having very great systems and processes, but be giving myself space, giving myself time, giving myself energy and mental bandwidth and all of this.

25:50So think about that fire nation as we move on to high value activities. Like this is something that I really pride myself on now. It's like, I only do high level activities at this point. And And I have a great team around me that does the quote unquote lower level activities or lower value activities. You know, just like the more repetitive tasks that I had just a better use of serving my time elsewhere. So how can we find our$10 ,000 per hour activities and really be able to just focus and hone in on those? Great question. When I went to Ethiopia and Uganda years ago with some good friends, we were on a mission trip.

26:34I remember at the end, my friend Josh Axe and I, we were talking and we were like, hey, next time we go on a trip like this, we've got to use our gifts at a different level. We have more to offer than to play with orphans and to help build an orphanage. We can offer a lot more because we're both thinking entrepreneurially. fast forward seven or eight years later i have a socially minded car dealership where we had a goal to twofold first create the best car buying experience in nashville second every car we sell helps us give away another car to sing a mother's name i go to this church uh sunday morning they decide hey we're gonna go serve the homeless shelter the next door i'm like all right that's a good idea like putting us in acts of service we go over next door and we're serving the homeless people food lunch breakfast whatever hot dogs and hamburgers and guess what there was like 200 church members and 200 homeless and mostly i stood around the only meaningful thing i did that morning was i talked to a couple homeless guys homeless teenagers for like 15 minutes like nothing meaningful happened like ah good idea good intention wasted energy i was like i wasn't doing what i wasn't doing what i was desperately needed to do a few months go by and at another church and they offer they're like hey we have our big christmas extravaganza we need volunteers i'm like no way and heck i'm volunteering i hate just standing around being a warm body i have a lot more to offer than being a warm body i'm like that bores the heck out of me so but i write on i can do something and i write on the card i'll donate a car to a family new and so I get a call the next day and we donated a minivan like$10 ,000 minivan to this couple that or family that radically changed their life had four kids a single mom needed a new car like her car was breaking down trying to make ends meet change her life change her trajectory and that became a defining story in that Christmas extravaganza and that was something that only we could do because we had that philosophy we had that culture so when you're thinking about what's my ten thousand dollar an hour activity what is it in your business that only you can desperately do or only only you can do so if i think about my business as only i can build like i've got this abundant you challenge of rewriting your money mindset that i'm doing with a lot of other top thought leaders john assaraf's one of our speakers les brown fingers cross will be yeah um he'll be at least maybe on the next one if he's not this one we've got all these big level speakers only i can design the experience only i can design my no one else on my team can do that to strategize to create the brand to create the strategy that's where i'm one of the best it i'm really super strong on strategic thinking if i go to all my personality tests and all the other strengths and i already have deep relationships with a lot of these people so Natasha Grano she's a good friend of mine and partner she's got 5.2 million Instagram followers so she's my partner on it um I designed the whole experience she's the star and the you know she's a star persona so you figure out where can where do you provide disproportionate value that no one else can do and that's the ultimate question so like that's one of the best examples I can think of is hey no one else can design out this experience and get fingers crossed we'll have 50 000 leads that we'll get from it and three to five thousand people sign up this round and then when we do the christmas one we'll have 10 000 people paid registrants and that comes because i'm designing that part out and i'm delegating the rest it starts with thinking you know it kind of goes back to what we were talking about before is actually taking time sitting down and thinking about where do you best operate?

30:23Where can you best serve? And it's all great to be that quote unquote warm body and to fill a spot, to do something. But what if instead of being a warm body, you could just impact tens of then hundreds of then thousands of then tens of thousands of people with an idea or with a concept or with a process or with something else. I mean, think about the gifts that you gave to that family with that donation of the car that have just kept on giving. You didn't just one time hand them like a drumstick to eat some food. You gave them a vehicle that significantly impacted the next years of their lives in such a meaningful way that again, probably allowed them to then go out and impact other people that they otherwise would not have been able to because they would have been in total scramble mode because Fire Nation, when we're in total scramble mode, we can only see where's that next meal coming from?

31:16Where's that next glass of water coming from? Where are we going to sleep tonight that has shelter that we're not going to freeze to death or be overheated? And when you are able to check those blocks, then you can start thinking outside of your own survival tactics into thriving tactics. And that just makes this world such a better place, which I love that. So the last thing I want to talk about today is what we kind of teased a little bit earlier in the episode, which is the upper limit problem that so many entrepreneurs have. I mean, myself, even to this day, I mean, I think, I think everybody lives with an upper limit problem.

31:50I mean, there's some people, maybe like Elon Musk doesn't have an upper limit problem, maybe Richard Branson, but besides like those two people, it's like, we all have that. And you know, we need to solve that upper limit problem and have a better understanding of it. If we're going to hit our potential, talk to us about that. Yeah. So if you look, we all have invisible ceilings of identity. And this identity, oftentimes what happens is we step up. Sometimes it's an upper limit around income. We're about to break through to an income level, new income level. Sometimes it's relationship where, oh, you're used to dating bad dudes and now you're dating a good dude and now it doesn't feel right or whatever it may be.

32:33Or health wise, sometimes people have upper limits around health. And what happens is subconsciously, there's a story, there's a belief, there's a fear or a trauma that is trapped in our body that causes us to, hey, it's not safe, don't go there. And we don't recognize it because we're, us as human beings, what's different about us versus many other members of the animal kingdom, I read this in the book Healing Trauma, polar bear. Let's say you're a polar bear and you get shot by a tranquilizer gun. You're running, you're running, helicopter comes over, shoots you with tranquilizer gun you're knocked out helicopter carries you back to the base a few hours later scientists started wondering why do why when the tranquilizer wears off why is the polar bear still moving frantically it starts moving frantically they didn't understand it for years then they started playing the videos in slow-mo and the polar bear was still running it was releasing the trapped energy because it still thought it was being chased wow right that's fascinating so think about that all right now let's go to us as a human let's say you're six years old you experience a trauma you get pushed by bully at the playground or you're 14 and your dad goes bankrupt or and you have to move out of your house this trauma is trapped in your body because we don't naturally release a trauma polar bear releases the trauma by running all right and then it's released in the wild it forgets like you think of a nature shows my dad made us watch all these nature shows as a kid and you'd see a wildebeest it's running away from a lion lion catches it and it's about to kill it and then it gets this gets free and then it runs away and then five minutes later it's eating grass like you were about dead what are you doing you should be like breathing or whatever huddled in a corner just crying yeah why aren't you crying and you're eating grass all of a sudden well guess what us as human beings we don't we don't process that same way.

34:34We internalize things and we'll hold on to things for our whole life. And that's why it's so important to understand how your mind works. But this upper limit problem is you keep bouncing up. It's almost like a wave. You know, the whole universe is made up of waves. And you bounce up to this upper limit, you bounce back down, you bounce up, bounce back down until if you hit that ceiling with enough force, enough intensity that you can shatter that upper limit. And that's why like Kobe Bryant wouldn't have been an NBA champion without the black mom behind identity Michael Jordan you were listening to winning with Tim Grover he wasn't going to become an NBA champion and he had an upper limit the Detroit Pistons were his upper limit right and he shatters it because Tim Grover helps put on the muscle and the mindset and the mentality and the determination that he's going to shatter it and he had he kept losing the losing fed the strength and the force that would force him through that upper limit.

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35:33And then the beautiful thing, when you break through an upper limit, guess what? That old ceiling becomes your new floor. And now you're going to bounce down to that old ceiling. That's why once people meet or reach a whole new income paradigm, they usually don't go back down. And then now they might keep bouncing up and bouncing up until they get enough hunger and enough force to bust through that new ceiling. that's what usually happens over and over i've had clients that were in the same making 180 thousand dollars a year or 20 000 plus or minus for five six years until we shatter and force through that next level upper limit problem and that's an exciting revelation because think about that if you can just shatter through that and i love that visual of now your old ceiling becomes your new floor so that's why it's so worth shattering those upper limits fire nation and working so hard to do that.

36:26Because once you do, your old ceiling that you couldn't break through now becomes your new floor. Yeah. Can I share one more story? Yeah, do. All right. So one of my clients, she's an absolute rock star. And I worked with her last year. She was a hairstylist. Kristen Boss is her name. She's an absolute gem. Hairstylist up until March last year. Well, guess what? We worked on The Zone of Genius. She found out she's a star on Wealth Dynamics and all these other profiles. And she hit her. She went at it. She did everything I told her to do. And then some. Like if I told her to have 15 discovery calls with ideal clients, with her ideal 4 % client, she did 25.

37:07Right. She's absolutely locked in. And guess what? She shattered her income. She more than 10X her previous year's income. And this year, she's already, she's going to do multi-million dollars this year. She's already done multi-million dollars this year in the middle of the year. And what happened is she shattered her upper limit and stepped into a whole new identity by finding her zone of genius, by hitting it with enough force, by going after it. And now she embraces this identity as the star. She's a star in the social selling or network marketing. And she's one of the best teachers in the world at building your network marketing brain.

37:50And it's because she's done all that hard work on identity, zone of genius, hitting that upper limit with enough force. And then now she's at a whole different paradigm and a much bigger ceiling. And this works in a lot of ways in life, too. It's not always just even business. I mean, of course, we're giving these examples because this is entrepreneurs on fire. But I had the exact opposite type of thing happen to me in the health space in a good way. Because in weight, like I had a floor I could not get below. I was stuck at one mid-170s, couldn't get below the floor of 170. Worked at it, worked at it.

38:26I was just, my body was set there. My body was set at that weight range. And it took me going to North Health Center up in Santa Rosa, California, spending 17 days there doing a 10-day water-only fast. That's water-only. got down from 173 to 152 in 10 days it's intense broke that floor shattered that floor yeah and now like i i'm down like my body's reset and like now my new ceiling isn't even one set i can't even get there not that i want to i'm not trying to but i couldn't because my body's now happy in like the high 150s low 160s like that's my new set range that i've created for myself because I took extreme action, extreme measures in the health space, and I shattered those old stuck sets that I had in life.

39:20So this works just like the 80-20 rule is everywhere. This type of thing, Fire Nation, is everywhere. So Mike, we've talked about a lot of awesome stuff today. What I want to do is give you the microphone, take us home, give us the one single biggest takeaway that you want to make sure that our listeners really get from everything that you shared here today. Any call to action or gift. I mean, I know you mentioned a book that you have and some other things. That's the time to share this now and then we'll say goodbye. All right. JLD, being in your presence and on your show has been an honor and always an oh yeah it is different though you know we spent a lot of clubhouse time together but now we're like in like a studio locked in i know it's like it's like yes but uh one of the coolest things that i've ever seen is if you can really or when let me reframe that when you really commit to working on that upper limit identity and rewiring your identity and i want to invite you to pursue that invite you to commit to that not just be interested but be committed when you're committed it's a must when if you really want to break through to that next level you got to be committed to working on that new id and and here are the steps to that new id figure out your zone of genius when you figure out your zone of genius chris and boss is an example and i got dozens and dozens of others where they found their zone of genius and they were able to step into it and Because you have, again, it's the five C's.

40:56If I have more clarity, I can lead my life with more courage. If I have more courage, guess what? I show up with more confidence. If I have more confidence, I'm showing up with greater conviction, which raises my level of commitment. So it all starts with clarity. That's the first domino to fall. And our mutual relationship, Tony Robbins. I was in Tony Robbins Mastermind for two years. You're one of his top promoters and affiliates. and you've had the pleasure of connecting with him in person many times. Yeah. He talks about how clarity precedes momentum. And I see that happen over and over. If you can get clarity on your zone of genius, or when you get clarity, guess what?

41:40Magical things will happen. I've had clients double their salaries by renegotiating because they could explain their genius better, their value that they provide to the world better. Or if you're an entrepreneur, you see, hey, this is where I really, I created a lot of value and this is where I suck. I need to find people to help me on the suck. And then it also helps you appreciate your team, appreciate your partner in life as well. So grab that. I got six steps to find your genius. That's completely free. And then the Genius Within book that comes out very, very soon, probably out by the time you guys listen.

42:16It's geniuswithinbook.com. I would love to have you guys pick that up. and also just tag me, reach out to me if I can support on finding your genius. I love to hear stories. I have people in Dubai that have gone through the process. Dubai? People all over the world, they've gone through the process now and it's been an honor seeing the identity shifts and the life shifts because your identity precedes your destiny. What a value bomb to end with because Fire Nation, you're the average of the five people you spend the most time with. You've been hanging out with MZ and JLD today. So keep up the heat.

42:53Head over to eofire.com. Just type Mike, M-I-K-E in the search bar. His show notes page will pop up with everything that we talked about here today. Best show notes in the biz. One more time. What's that URL, Mike, for people to go to get that book? It's geniuswithinbook.com. And you can also text geniusu, as in the letter U, to 474747. if you're in the North America quadrants and you will get a link to the book as well. Fire Nation, listen, act, have conviction, have courage, have clarity, have commitment and all of those awesome cities. And Mike, I want to thank you for sharing your truth, your knowledge, your value with Fire Nation today.

43:42For that, we salute you and we'll catch you on the flip side. Thank you, my friend. Honor being on the show. Hey, Fire Nation. Today's value bomb content was brought to you by Mike. And just a heads up, if you're like, John's recording a pretty cool podcast right now with Mike, well, you're right. And if you think that you might want to record a podcast of your very own, I have a completely free podcasting course for you. It's a really difficult website, so get ready for it. It's freepodcastcourse.com, freepodcastcourse.com. I will catch you there or I'll catch you on the flip side. DTC Pod, hosted by Ramon Berrios and Blaine Bolas, is brought to you by the HubSpot Podcast Network, the audio destination for business professionals.

44:29DTC Pod is a podcast about all things direct to consumer. Ramon and Blaine cover everything from starting, growing, and optimizing e-commerce stores and DTC brands. If you're interested in the stories behind your favorite consumer brands, this podcast is for you. One recent episode on how the best brands are built is a must listen. Listen to DTC Pod wherever you get your podcasts.

From the publisher

From the archive: This episode was originally recorded and published in 2021. Our interviews on Entrepreneurs On Fire are meant to be evergreen, and we do our best to confirm that all offers and URL's in these archive episodes are still relevant.

Mike Zeller has done over 300,000 Million dollars in sales studying under the masters of the industry such as Tony Robbins, Russel Brunson, and Jay Abraham. He has mentored over a hundred high-level entrepreneurs from 4 different continents.

Top 3 Value Bombs

1. Crises are there to remake you.

2. Do the personality tests and find your Zone of Genius.

3. Your identity precedes your destiny.

Check out Mike's website to learn more about him - Meet Mike

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