From Suffering to Success with G. Michael Hopf

0:01Light that spark fire nation. JLD here and welcome to Entrepreneurs on fire. The only daily show interviewing the world's top entrepreneurs seven days a week. Today, we'll be breaking down going from suffering to success. And to drop these vibe bombs, I have brought G. Michael Hoth into EO Fire Studios. G. Michael is a USA Today bestselling author of 40 books, including the New World Series, which sold over a million copies. He's a marine veteran and co-founder of Beyond the Fray Publishing. And today, we'll talk about suffering, Michael's definition of that, how tragedy can ruin the lives of many and how to deal with it, the importance of mindset and perspective, and oh, so much more.

0:43And a big thank you for sponsoring today's episode goes to Michael and our sponsors. Fire Nation, this is your year to get unstuck and to grow a successful business. Attend the world's highest rated business growth workshop taught personally by Clay Clark and now featuring football star Tim Tebow and President Trump's son, Eric Trump at thrivetimeshow.com slash EO Fire. Again, request life-changing tickets today at thrivetimeshow.com slash EO Fire. Michael, say what's up to Fire Nation and share something that you believe about becoming successful that most people disagree with. Hey, first. Hey, John.

1:19How you doing? Hi, Fire Nation. Thanks for having me back on. It's really great to sit and chat with you. It really is. Yeah, to answer that question about success. I think it's how people define failure. And I've reframed what failure is. And I think many people like, well, failure means it ends. Well, actually, failure is a teacher. I know people have heard that. But I've reframed it to where I think failure is an opportunity. It's an opportunity to really reassess the situation of where you're at. I don't, failure never stops you unless you choose for it to. Everything's a choice and failure can be painful too.

2:07Failure can really hit at someone's ego, at your identity. And this is where the importance of mindset and reframing is so critical to look at failure as a teacher, as an opportunity to do something better, to level yourself up. I love it because Because for me, failure is not the worst. Failing is the worst. The act of actually failing because you're still in that moment and it's still taking up your time, your energy. You're still failing. You're falling down that hole. Whereas failure, I mean, now it's over. Like, okay, now what do we learn from that? How can we educate ourselves? How can we pivot and adjust?

2:43And now it's a fresh start. It's a new page. Let's move forward with those learnings, with a new perspective, with a new understanding and with a new idea. So for me, failure is great. That's why I say, hey, I don't want to be failing, but I want to fail fast. I want to become a failure fast because I can learn from that, pivot, adjust, and then move forward. So we're talking today, Fire Nation, about something a little different. It's about going from suffering to success. And I want to start with your definition of suffering. Oh, that's a great question. One thing is everybody will suffer in their life.

3:18There's no one that is exempt. It's kind of like death and taxes, right? in that old saying from think Ben Franklin. But the concept of suffering is, and it's a relative term, right? But suffering is, it's part of a human condition. We all will suffer. Suffer is a time when something doesn't go your way or there's a loss of something that you expected or anticipated would be there for you and then it's not. And so then you have this, because you have a deep emotional connection to it, you then that loss is felt deeply and painfully and it can affect your every day it can affect how you your perspective on the world your goals can shift from suffering your whole life can you know depending on what you do with that so i you know suffering again is is just an emotional toll that is taken when something we experience is unexpected, like the loss of somebody in your life.

4:22Now, tragedy can ruin the life for a lot of people. When they hit tragedy, sometimes it ruins the rest of their life. Some people, though, are able to come out of tragedy maybe a little bit stronger, maybe a little bit wiser, still with that tragedy with them, of course, that will never quite leave, but they can still go forward in different ways, shapes, and forms. So how can someone adapt to life after dealing with a tragedy? I'm going to talk about mindset quite a bit. And I know most of your listeners and people have followed you for years, and I know you believe in the mindset. And it is, it really boils down to having a mindset.

5:05Again, we like to think that we're special and we are. I mean, we're each individuals have our own special purpose, our own special, you know, existence. And so when something occurs, when there's a tragedy, we tend to sometimes go, we go inward and we like to think that this tragedy, what I'm suffering, no one can understand. And the reality is many people can understand it. You're not really alone in that. Again, there's no escaping suffering in life. There's just not. And if you're a religious person or a spiritual person, what the great religions of the world have taught us, they never said you're going to be immune from suffering.

5:45They just said provided tools so you can navigate through it. Even when you look at, again, if you want to look at spiritually or religiously, even Jesus himself, when he was, you know, led into the wilderness, he suffered for 40 days and 40 nights. And he was able to overcome that suffering because he was, you know, God in human form. So suffering is something that we will all encounter in life. And it's sometimes it, you're given the time to watch it unfold kind of that slow motion train wreck, or it just comes upon you suddenly, you know, like with a sudden loss of somebody in your life or the sudden loss of a business or whatever happens.

6:24And then you're dealing with a tragedy, you're dealing with something. And it's, it's the mindset. I, I tend what, what's, I've been able to navigate through what I feel successfully. It's not as if I don't think about these times, but I reframe things quickly because I like to distill things down very basically. Because I think life is very simple in many ways. And outside of just accidents that occur, our lives can be happy and fulfilling if we just do the right things. And most of the times, the things that enter our lives, we've caused these problems, right? We, people make their lives more complicated than they need to be because I, but I just tend to believe now that life is very simple.

7:10And so when something I'm faced with something, I boil it down, distill it down to its very, very base elements. So for instance, like when I was talking about failure, when failure hits us, I tend to like, well, I, when I play long game too, I look at my life and I have all these goals and I believe truly in legacy and I want to accomplish many more things in my life than what I've already accomplished. And I know that I'm never going to get there if I allow this one thing to interfere with that. And I get to choose. No one else gets to choose. I get to choose how I process that information or that event and then navigate around it.

7:48And I get to choose whether I'm going to allow it to weaken me or make me stronger. So these things to me come down to a basic acceptance that I I choose my emotional state and I get to choose the ultimate outcome from something that's happened to me. You did mention mindset and I want to dive a little bit deeper in there. So the importance of mindset, what does that mean to you? Mindset is a core values and beliefs. Like I, I, I, I have always believed that I don't quit. And so that mindset has been instilled in me at a young age. Um, so, and then I, that's enabled me to accomplish so many things.

8:30I, I, I even, I've instilled that into my, my children as well is that we don't quit. Hops don't quit. And so it's kind of become part of their identity in some way. So it's like part of their mindset, their little mantra. And they're able to overcome a lot of things because they have that, they have that connection to family and, and our heritage and they, we don't quit. We just, we persevere. We move forward. but mindset can evolve too. And I, as over the years, you know, I've learned from many people, you're one of those people, you're an inspiration. And so I look, it's like, what makes this person tick?

9:06I look at successful people, how do they do things? So not necessarily, I've become a clone of somebody. I look at like, how are they able to do this? Or how are, how are they able to do that? And I have come to determine it's their thoughts, how they think. And that's a mindset. They, they don't, they're one, again, going back, they're not quitters, but they, they, they look at the world and then they process the information and then they able to, again, I'll probably overuse the word a lot, but reframe something. Like when I said I reframed failure, I don't look at it as feeling. I look at it as an opportunity.

9:49and then I'm actually happy about it. That sounds crazy to say. Like, okay, this is good. This is good. Jocko said that one time. I'm not sure if you're familiar with Jocko Wilnick, but whenever something happens, and you and I as military people can understand, you just look when something bad happens, you go, good. That's good. And that's a mindset because once you have that, once you've drilled it into your head as a belief, as a credo, it makes an individual almost unstoppable. And that requires discipline to do that. It requires practice. It's like you go to the gym or whatever you do and you hone your body.

10:29That's a part of you do that. You practice that enough. Your mindset changes and become, but it takes discipline. I can clearly remember when we were training to leave for Iraq when I I was in the army and I was a tank commander. And during training, things would go wrong. I honestly would say good. I'd be like, good, because guess what? This is training. And now I can learn how to adjust and to do what's right now when things go wrong, because things are gonna go wrong when I'm in war, when I'm in the theater of Iraq, and I'm gonna be better prepared as a result. And that's just a little bit of a shift in mindset.

11:05That's a little shift in perspective. We're gonna be talking about those things and more Fire Nation. when we get back from thanking our sponsors. You've got AI helping you write emails and name your dog. Shouldn't you be using AI to help you invest too? Seriously, I know investing can seem a bit overwhelming. I've been studying it since a young age and I still have questions 30 years later, but it's an incredibly important part of my overall long-term wealth strategy. Is it part of yours? Public.com is the investing platform for those who take it seriously. With Public, you can build a multi-asset portfolio of stocks, bonds, options, crypto, and more.

11:39You can also access industry-leading yields like the 4.1 % APY you can earn on your cash with no fees or minimums. But what sets Public apart? AI isn't just a feature. It's woven into the entire experience from portfolio insights to earnings call recaps. Public gives you smarter context at every touchpoint. Plus, you can earn up to$10 ,000 when you transfer your existing investment portfolio over to Public. Go to public.com slash fire to fund your account in five minutes or less. Paid for by public investing, full disclosures in podcast description. We live in a world of options, whether it's figuring out which TV series to dive into next or what to order for dinner at a restaurant with a 10-page menu.

12:21Having too many options can be overwhelming. The same applies if you're a business owner who's hiring. It can be overwhelming to have too many candidates to sort through, but you're in luck. ZipRecruiter now gives you the power to proactively find and connect with the best ones quickly. How? Through their innovative resume database. And right now you can try it for free at ziprecruiter.com slash fire. Instead of sorting through resumes manually, let ZipRecruiter's resume database do the work for you. With advanced filtering techniques, you'll quickly find the top candidates for your roles. Once you see the one you like, you can unlock their contact info instantly.

12:55Skip the candidate overload. Instead, streamline your hiring with ZipRecruiter. See why four out of five employers who post on ZipRecruiter get a quality candidate within the first day. Just go to this exclusive web address, ziprecruiter.com slash fire right now to try it for free. Again, that's ziprecruiter.com slash fire. ZipRecruiter, the smartest way to hire. So Michael, we're back and I want to talk about the strategies that someone can use to move forward from suffering to success. When we're dealing with something, so often we feel that we're the only people that have ever dealt with this before.

13:32And the fact is that we're not, uh, there's so many examples of people that have dealt with, uh, adversity and loss and tragedy and they've overcome it. They've ever, they overcame it. And so I'm like, okay, so what I do is one of my strategies is I go seek out that information. I seek out that individual. Maybe they're from history. Like I mentioned, Jesus suffering. You look at other people, even in a contemporary time where they've, they've overcome like okay so what are they doing what do they do so that's one thing i do i seek out you know people that have overcome similar things and then i i find out what they've done i also what's helped me over many many years and is meditation um just to be calm with myself to control my emotional state uh to control my thoughts because again thoughts are things 100 and i use meditation as a powerful tool.

14:27I meditate twice a day, once in the morning. And then once in the evening, as I'm drifting off, I want to have my mind as I go into that dream state, I want my, have my thoughts kind of grounded. And I think meditation is a powerful tool to calm the mind. And it takes like anything, like all these other things we've talked about. It takes practice. Some people say, I can't meditate. Well, if you just, just sit and be quiet, you're actually meditating and just keep practicing and practicing you you become better at it yeah one thing i'll recommend as well is there's actually this great uh 21 day deepak chopra challenge you can just find it it's for free on youtube and you just sit with it and don't overstress it like just kind of follow deepak and just as 21 days get into it put in those reps and it will become easier and easier and easier and i want to talk about perspective what's the importance of perspective when dealing with suffering and grief?

15:26If you're having a difficult time, you have to then examine yourself. And so I know when I was younger, when you're young and lots of energy, a lot of luck for guys, lots of testosterone going on, you know everything. And I've actually learned so much and been able to grow is when I've let go of that egocentric concept that I know everything. And just, and then, and then it's interesting, like a veil is lowered and information that's that I, and then I'm, I'm a seeker of information and I'm a seeker of something. Like if I'm wanting to deal with my suffering, I'm wanting to deal with grief in the past.

16:07I was like, well, so like I said, I sought out people. I sought that information. I was with myself, but I was able to get to those points when I let go of how I thought I needed to be or how I, or I'm trying to, I'm trying to phrase this correctly. Um, so often people think that they, they need to act a certain way. Like society has a blueprint for how you need to deal with suffering that you need to drink yourself or you, you see, you see, you see it so often in movies where someone's dealing with something, they go right to the bottle. And I'm like, okay, is it, are we being taught that? Is that a natural instinct to want to go to the bottle, to want to go to drugs?

16:49Or we've been taught that we've seen that enough. And I, I don't, I don't believe that. And I know one that's destructive behavior. That's, that's not, that's not the direction to go. Cause if you're actually trying to overcome something, you're trying to be better from it. You don't go to something that actually tears you down. um but as far as and so it's letting go of past belief systems that if you're not able to overcome you have to you have to seek out the information and one way is to is to let that wall down and allow other information to come in and then apply it for a period of time to see if it works and i've been able to use it effectively i want to know if someone can truly succeed after dealing with tragedy?

17:34100 % you can. So say you're dealing with loss. I think it's important to live in that feeling for a period of time. There's nothing wrong with grieving. You process that information and it's okay, but you can't live there forever. And then, so you're dealing with loss. You have to then go, okay, would the person that I've lost want me to feel this way forever? Of course they're not. they would never want that never would they want you to your whole life be be identified or framed by that no of course they wouldn't so you have to that's where perspective comes in you have to like okay i've agreed for a period of time and that's that's relative some people need longer than other people i'm like you i like to like to try to pivot as quickly as possible and i have this this saying and this might sound kind of, I hope people don't take this as like heartless, but I, you know, I just say life is for the living.

18:36And I have, you know, I lost a son, but I have, you know, two other beautiful girls. And so they need their dad too. And I can't sit in suffering and allow it to affect me because it affects them. And that's not fair to them. They didn't choose for that to happen. And so I have to, I had an understanding that I have responsibilities that I also have them and they're alive and they have me that I need to be that father to them. And so I need to process through my suffering and grief as quickly as possible to get on the other side of it. And it's also when it comes to loss, I've just taken this perspective too, that the person that we've lost wouldn't want us to suffer.

19:25But at the same time, they would want us to carry on. And if we're going to be better, we'll do it in their name as a memorial to them. What's the worst memorial to have somebody is that my life became a total shit show because of them. That's horrible, right? They wouldn't want that. They wouldn't want that their life is lost and now other lives are lost or people aren't able to live to their maximum potential because of they, they, they died before their time. So that's, I, I, that's where that goes back to perspective thing. I like, well, of course they wouldn't, they want me to thrive. They would want me to be better version than myself today.

20:06They would want me to provide. So in, in the absence and in the absence of, of my son, I've been able to look at my life and go, okay, what can I do to be a better father to the girls that are here? Not that life was horrible before, but can I even be better? Can I do better? Can I do something and create a legacy that honors them at the same time? So I think we have to grieve for a period of time, but then there comes a point like life is for the living and we have to get back to living. And if we're going to live, we should live to the fullest. And we do that in their name. Michael, you've dropped a lot of value throughout this entire episode.

20:53So thank you for that. And obviously, we'd love to hear from you. The one key takeaway that you really want our listeners to get from our conversation today, how we can connect with you, a call to action, and then we'll say goodbye. Everyone can just reach me. Just go to gmichaelhop.com and there they can reach out to me. And again, I know there are people that are listening to this and that they have, they've dealt with loss and their suffering. And I would just say that it's okay that I'm sorry, but you can thrive past those points. You can use it as a way to be a better human being and succeed.

21:41you can succeed after loss. You can succeed after suffering. You don't have to live in it. I would encourage them not to do that. Not to live in their suffering like this. Fire Nation, you're the average of the five people you spend the most time with. You've been hanging out with GMH and JLD today. So keep up the heat. And for links to everything we talked about, visit eofire.com. Just type Michael in the search bar and the show notes page will pop right up. And Michael, thank you for sharing your truth, your knowledge, your value with Fire Nation. For that, we salute you and we'll catch you on the flip side.

22:18Thank you, Jack. Hey, Fire Nation, a huge thank you to our sponsors and Michael for sponsoring today's episode. And Fire Nation, what can 4 ,000 of the world's most successful entrepreneurs teach you? How about how to achieve financial freedom and fulfillment? My first traditionally published book, The Common Path to Uncommon Success, is a revolutionary 17-step roadmap that will lead you to the lifestyle that you've been dreaming about. This book took me 10 years of accumulating the genius of the world's top entrepreneurs, and you can get it all in one place when you visit UncommonSuccessBook.com.

22:51I'll catch you there or on the flip side. Fire Nation, this is your year to get unstuck and to grow a successful business. Attend the world's highest rated business growth workshop taught personally by Clay Clark and now featuring football star Tim Tebow and President Trump's son, Eric Trump at Thrivetimeshow.com slash EO Fire. Again, request life-changing tickets today at Thrivetimeshow.com slash EO Fire.