You End Up Where You're Heading: The Hidden Dangers of Living a Safe Life with Jimmy Rex: An EOFire Classic from 2020

0:01Boom! Shake the room, Fire Nation. JLD here and welcome to Entrepreneurs on Fire. brought to you by the HubSpot Podcast Network with great shows like Duct Tape Marketing. Today we're pulling a timeless EO Fire episode from the archives so the giveaway may not be active. And we'll be talking about how you end up where you're heading, the hidden dangers of living a safe life. To drop these value bombs, I brought to Jimmy Rex in the EO Fire Studios. Jimmy is an adventurer, entrepreneur, networker, and author of a book called You End Up Where You're Heading, The Hidden Dangers of Living a Safe Life.

0:32Fire Nation, today we'll be talking about how people choose to have a safe life because they feel comfortable with it, but you can expand your horizons and see a bigger world and how human brains are wired to sense what is comfortable and what is uncomfortable. Unfortunately, your brain does not know that society is safer now and so much more. And a big thank you for sponsoring today's episode goes to Jimmy and our sponsors. If you're looking for highly vetted US-based fractional virtual contractors, then check out Belay. Belay is exclusively offering Fire Nation their latest ebook, Delegate to Elevate for free.

1:03Learn how to reclaim your time and save 15 hours per week by mastering the powerful tool of delegation. Text FIRE, that's F-I-R-E, to 55123 to get started. Outbound Squad, hosted by Jason Bay, is brought to you by the HubSpot Podcast Network, the audio destination for business professionals. Tune in for convos with leading sales experts and top performing reps to help you land more meetings with your ideal clients. One of my faves, the monthly app with Jason and Ethan, where they share hacks, tips, and tricks. Listen to Outbound Squad wherever you get your podcasts. Jimmy, say what's up to Fire Nation and share something interesting about yourself that most people don't know.

1:46What's up, John? Well, one thing that's super interesting about myself and what's up, Fire Nation, is I actually have diplomat status in Mexico. And yeah, that's something that I also have an honorary doctorate degree from 11 universities in Mexico. So I guess that's pretty interesting. Now, does Mexico have non-extradition with the United States? Is that what you're getting to? No, it's nothing to do with that. Me and a couple of buddies worked with a group for a while called Operation Underground Railroad. We'd go undercover in Mexico and help rescue kids that were being sex trapped. And so they wanted to honor us.

2:20And so we got this diplomat. It only works when we go to the airports in Mexico, but we get to skip the lines and stuff like that. That's pretty cool. Yeah, I like to say I'm a big deal down there. Not so much up here. I'm not trying to push it though, but don't diplomats have non-extradition to the United States? I believe so. I've said before to some people, I'm like, look, if we ever need to take care of somebody, we just got to get them to Mexico. That's what I'm saying, right? That's good to know, man, because it's not that hard to cross that border. That Rio Grande is not a formidable obstacle, but love the Underground Railroad.

2:51I know Russell Brunson talks about that all the time. It's ClickFunnels and Funnel Hacking Live events, and he's doing a lot of great stuff with that. It's an amazing cause. So thank you for what you do there. And Fire Nation, as you know, we're going to be talking about the hidden dangers of living a safe life because Jimmy's written a great new book called You End Up Where You're Heading, The Hidden Dangers of Living That Safe Life. And let's just kick it right off, Jimmy, because what do you mean exactly when you say there are hidden dangers of living a safe life? I mean, don't we just want to minimize our risk?

3:24What's the deal with this? And that's what's kind of funny is in the past when, you know, civilizations were forming and everything else, the whole purpose was the explorers had all the danger. The people that went out and did those things, they left the settlers behind. The settlers' job was to build walls to, you know, around those places that were already mapped out to kind of help make it predictable, eliminate surprises, destroy diversity, build walls, forts, you know, till the fields, reproduce all those things. And that was the safe life was to be the settler. All the explorers, I mean, even the good ones that we know about, you know, Marco Polo and others, I mean, they ended up getting killed on their explorations.

4:02But these settlers had kind of this safe life. And unfortunately, it's all kind of changed. Now, you know, with social and technological advances, we've wiped most of the dangers of the frontier. I mean, calories are cheap. Transportation's safe. It's fast. Plagues minus the coronavirus has pretty much been eradicated, you know. But modern day explorers, they're the ones that get to venture out with a high degree. They have a lot of uncertainty, but they kind of know they're going to return in one piece. You're not worried about having to sail the seas with unsmooth waters. You're not having to worry about people thinking that you're doing witchcraft or hearse and things like that.

4:39And so where the danger come in now is, you know, the reality is, is if you're the person that's sitting and settling and you're just kind of staying in your safe place, you're going to have a lot of harsh conditions coming out of that. You're going to have, you know, forms of addiction, obesity, burnout, heart disease, anxiety, depression. And for what? So you can, you know, maybe get a little bit bigger house. You can have a mediocre relationship, comfort. So for the whole idea of the book, the whole idea of the title and everything else is we think that living a safe life is kind of camping in and kind of building ourselves into this small world.

5:14But the real value, the real beauty of life is getting out and exploring what's out there. It is really interesting because when you think about it and you hear all those stories from the olden days, you hear that phrase over and over again that you can see who the pioneers are because they have the arrows in their back. You know, they're the people that went like, we're going west, like we're going to the Pacific. And like, you never heard from them again because they went out, you know, they went into Native American country or they just, you know, had exposure because of the rocky winters and all that different thing, all those different things.

5:47So, you know, it's really interesting to hear that things have flipped because, you know, most people, they choose what they perceive to be this quote unquote safe life. So beyond what you've already shared is you've already kind of shared a little overview of what that happens. Let's get into a couple of specifics on why we as human beings do this and why maybe we shouldn't. If you picture there's a map on a table and somebody's got their head over the map and they're looking at this map and they see that as their entire world and they think, okay, this is what I know. This is what I'm comfortable with.

6:19This is where I feel safe. But, and most people live their whole lives with that map zoomed in. But if somebody were to come up and go, hey, pull the map back, pull your head back. And you notice the map is a hundred times bigger than you ever thought. And this happened to me in my own life. You know, I was born to believe one thing. And I lived that way for over 30 years. And then all of a sudden, I had a couple of life experiences. I started traveling the world and I got to go to over, I've been over 68 countries now. And with my travels, every single time I went, there was so much reward. There was so much joy.

6:50There was so much beauty in these other worlds that existed. It was like, I got to see so many different parts of life and so many different cultures. And every time I went, I learned other things. And I started to realize that all these things I was uncomfortable with, once I got to know them, the discomfort went away and it actually became a much stronger love. So I'll give one example. I was in Egypt a couple of years ago and a good friend of mine had invited me to go with him and he's visiting his family in Egypt. And I always had this fear just being honest of Islamic people. And his family was there and they had this beautiful Islamic family, about 30 of them.

7:26And I was, when I first got there, I was so uncomfortable. And then all of a sudden, I saw the love and the way they took me in. His mom came up to me and she said, I've been worried about my son in the United States for 20 years. And having met one of his best friends, all my fear has gone away. I can see he has these beautiful friends. And it creates these atmospheres. It creates these experiences, these life experiences where you just truly get to step out of your old map and look at this new form of it. And it's so much more bigger and so much more beautiful. Now, I had very similar experiences.

7:56I mean, I grew up in a very small town in Maine. I went to Providence College in Rhode Island, which is, you know, in New England. So I spent basically the first 22 years of my life, you know, in this very tiny corner of the United States, let alone the world. And then, yes, I did go into the army. So for four years, I traveled a decent amount. But, you know, I mean, when you're in Iraq, you're not necessarily seeing the country like, you know, mostly behind the wires, except for these little forays were going out, you know, during my time in the army. But then I can remember so clearly is that while I was in law school and I made the decision to drop out I was like, you know what?

8:32It's really time for me to get out and really spread these wings and really zoom my map out And that's when I went to india for the first time and I did a four-month backpacking trip through india Through nepal and it brought this whole new perspective And i'll tell you when it came back it set the foundation Of me eventually launching entrepreneurs on fire a couple of years later, which of course has now been rocking for eight years So Fire Nation, if you get just trapped in that small map, like you're going to have small expectations, you're going to have small opportunities, you're going to have small sights of what can actually happen to you in this world.

9:08When you zoom that map out, suddenly a lot more things become possible. It's not always going to come from the areas and directions you think, but that's the point of zooming that map out. Now, Jimmy, in your book, you talk about the hero's journey. journey where exactly do most people get stuck on this part of their journey for example most people it's not that they're not explorers most people they're just human right um when an untraveled path shows up fear and discomfort uh make appearances to stop you in your tracks and so it's you kind of got this one-two punch of survival that you know has worked for thousands of years um our brains are literally wired to look for what is going wrong or what's uncomfortable because that's how it kept us alive.

9:51But our brain, unfortunately, doesn't know that we've evolved into a much safer society in so many ways. And so it's always looking like that's why, you know, negative news catches the attention so much quicker than positive news. That's why most people tend to focus on what's going wrong in their life and not right. You know, every guru or every motivational speaker will talk about gratitude because it's the only way you can retrain your brain to look for what's going right as opposed to what's going wrong because it naturally wants to see what's going wrong. And so, I mean, you know, just thinking about something unpleasant can induce physiological feelings of pain inside of us.

10:26It's like why you say, you know, you die a million or die a hundred deaths or die a thousand deaths or whatever, is because anytime you feel that pain of what you think could happen to you, you actually, your body experiences it as if it actually happened. And so, I don't know. So for me, that chapter, you know, that facing the frontier, and a lot of times what happens, unfortunately, is our family and friends want us to be safe as well. They don't know that when they're trying to keep us safe, they're actually kind of screwing us over because they're going to tell you to do the safe thing. They're going to tell you to do the thing that makes them feel safe towards you and everything else.

10:56And so you see that all the time. You hear people, everybody that's accomplished something, you know, the biggest naysayers are usually the ones closest to them. And that's why it's so much harder to actually break out of that frontier and go and explore your own path. Fire Nation, the key words I just want to go back to is exploring your own path. This is your world. And I'm telling you, over and over again, I've heard from so many of my past guests and from books that I've read of people that are looking back over their journeys, the regrets that they have, the ones that lets other people influence their path.

11:32So it wasn't their own path. It was their mother who wanted to just brag to all of her friends that her son was in law school or that her daughter was in med school or that, you know, the brother or the grandmothers or the family or the friend, whatever it was, it was them pushing their map, their path on other individuals that leads to nothing but regret. Draw your own map, draw your own path, make that happen. And if you think Jimmy is even close to being done dropping value bombs, you have to wait until we get back from thinking our sponsors. No one accomplishes anything great alone, but perhaps you've experienced this too.

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12:41It can help you find highly qualified virtual assistants, bookkeepers, even social media managers. And to help you get started, Belay is exclusively offering Fire Nation their latest ebook, Delegate to Elevate, for free. Learn how to reclaim your time and save 15 hours per week by mastering the powerful tool of delegation. Text FIRE, that's F-I-R-E, to 55123 to get started. Tech is great. It can help us grow and scale our businesses in so many ways, but it can also be clunky, time-consuming to manage, and expensive. That's why I'm excited to introduce you to HubSpot CRM, the best platform to speed up your sales and scale your business without blowing your budget.

13:22HubSpot's all-in-one CRM helps you automate tedious tasks, keep track of all your deals in one place, and make sure your whole team has access to the same data. No need to worry about the management and cost of a massive tech stack. HubSpot gives you everything you need all in one place. Plus, with fast activation, HubSpot makes it easy for the entire team to get up to speed, saving you precious time. And best of all, you can try before you buy. No commitment, no hidden fees, not even a credit card is needed to sign up. Get started for free at hubspot.com. That's hubspot.com. So, Jim, you are back, and I have literally been pounding the drum for years now, for people to invest in mentors.

14:04I mean, finding my mentor was a huge, massive part of my journey and a big reason why I was successful. I mean, my mentor was key, fundamentally key in me having a successful launch of the podcast and first few months running an actual entrepreneurial business. Talk to us, share with Fire Nation how we can find our mentor. Yeah. And so this is one One of the most important parts of the entire explorer's journey, the hero's journey, is you have to find people to guide you on the path. So for me in my own life, for example, I've had seven or eight key mentors along the way. I'm a real estate guy is where my background came from.

14:41You know, even every single part of my life, I would search for these people that had been there before because they've been through the mountains. They've been down the valleys. They've been into the cave. They know how to go through these things. And so there's a couple of keys to find mentors is number one. I think one of the most important things, because I get asked this a lot, I'll have people, you know, send me messages on Instagram or something like, hey, I heard you speak about mentors and I want you to mentor me. And it's like, okay, well, there's a couple of keys to having a good mentor.

15:08Number one is you want to be very specific of what you're looking for in a mentor. You want to find somebody that you look up to, not just because of what they're doing or where they're at, but because of the struggles they've been through, their trials, how they overcame them. You also want to find somebody that has similar traits and qualities to yourself. figure out you know this is the key to the whole thing is i always say if you want to find a mentor you've got to figure out how to provide massive value for that person and everybody needs something in their life but people are busy and so a lot of these guys that are mentors so many people want to be mentors but what you don't want is you want to know that your time spent with that person that you're mentoring is going to be a value and so you want to see somebody that has enough desire that has enough heart that's going to go out of their way um to do the things you teach them in order to get that.

15:53So one of my mentors is a guy by the name of Paul Hutchinson. And when I first met this guy, he kind of tried to blow me off. I just, I met him. It was a networking group and this guy was just different than everyone else. And I just said, I don't know why, I don't know how, but I have to be, I have to know this guy. I want to be friends with this guy and I want to learn from this guy. And sure enough, he was the one that ultimately led me to Tim Ballard in that group to work with them for a while. And, um, but when I first met Paul, he tried to blow me off and I knew I had to provide value for him.

16:22And so when he first tried to pull me off, I just refused to go away. He ended up inviting me to this sponsored dinner that was like quite a bit of money and I did it. And then I brought my most amazing friends that I could find and then we created a fun atmosphere. And then all of a sudden he's like, all right, let's go to lunch. And then he explained, he said, well, here's a couple of things other people are doing. I did them all and I just kept going back and he came back later. We ended up becoming, he's one of my closest friends in the world now and he's mentored me for years. And I've literally met more people and had more experiences of life through this human than probably any other two, three people I've met in my life.

16:53And he said to me later, he said, Jimmy, the reason why I finally like, you basically got in and me and you became so close. He said, every single time I asked you to do something, you overdid it. You did it, whatever I asked. And then some extra, he goes, you have no idea how unique it is to just show up and do what you say you're going to do. He said, in my life, I'm so busy and I need people all the time for different things. And he goes, the value of having somebody that I can 100 % count on, that was the biggest difference for me. And I knew I wanted to be friends with you as well. And so anyway, that's just one example.

17:26But too often you see people, they want to be mentored, they want to do things, but they're trying to get from that person right away. And the mentor, the whole fun of being a mentor is to be able to share with that person and know that you're making a difference and knowing that they really appreciate it. So you just want to show appreciation to whoever that mentor is. And, you know, it's not sufficient. I mean, I'll have people that hit me up on Instagram. They go, dude, I want you to mentor me. They're not even following me yet. You know, you're like, dude, you're not actually putting any effort into doing this.

17:52And so it should be, you know, you want to pick those key people in your life because if you have the right mentor, it truly will change everything for you. I know in real estate, when I first got in, it did the same thing. I was lucky enough, you know, my second year in real estate, I was only 24 years old and I ended up selling 98 homes. And so I kind of got the opportunity to be on some stages and talk about a lot of things what I was doing. Well, I got taken under the wing of the three top real estate coaches in the entire industry, Mike Ferry, Tom Ferry, and a guy named Bill Pipes. And they personally coached me.

18:22And the opportunity that that gave me, I honored that so much. Nobody worked harder and nobody was more grateful for that. And so by working with those amazing mentors, I was able to soak up 20 years of information in less than two. And that is kind of what exploded my entire career. One thing I've always said, Fire Nation, is your perfect mentor is somebody who is currently where you want to be. So think about those words. Your perfect mentor is somebody who's currently where you want to be. Now, what do I mean by that? Well, listen, so many people are saying, hey, oh, Richard Branson would be my perfect mentor.

18:56Like if he would just mentor me, life would be perfect. Well, do you want to run a record company or do you want to actually run an airline? If the answer is no, then believe me, Richard Branson is not the perfect mentor. If you want to launch a podcast, guess what? That dude is not going to be able to help you launch a podcast. He doesn't have the knowledge, the skills, the experience, and he shouldn't because if he ever wanted to launch a podcast, he would just turn a microphone on and he'd let his team do the rest of the stuff. And that's fine. That's cool. He's Richard Branson. You need to find somebody who is currently where you want to be.

19:23They're going to be able to guide you on that journey. Now let's call a spade, a spade, Jimmy. I mean, sometimes we take a wrong turn in life. How do we know if we're on the wrong path? One of my favorite questions is, you know, how do you know where you're at on the path or if you're on the wrong path completely? And I think it's a little bit trickier than people think because a lot of times you can be on the wrong path, but you kind of feel like you still have some things going on correctly. You can be happy and be on the wrong path. You can be successful in areas of your life and be on the wrong path.

19:56You can be in love and still be on the wrong path. What you got to do is kind of take a look of your entire life and just really try to feel if you're in alignment with your true self. And we, if we stop, and this is why it's so important to take time. We talk about, you know, meditation and exploration by yourself and really spending that time with yourself. We live in a world that's so busy now. That's one of the gifts of the coronavirus is that it gives us this opportunity to slow down and actually look at our lives and go, what are we doing that is truly in alignment? And where do I feel a little bit off?

20:25And it's the first time that I can ever remember. I know I'm a high achiever. And so for me, it's the first time in my life I can literally take time and do nothing to think about these things and not feel like I'm being left behind, not have any fear that I'm missing out on stuff. And so it's been a real gift for me. And even myself, this book's going to be coming out in a couple of months and I'm the one that wrote it. And I still was on the wrong path in a part of my life. I started doing a lot of real estate coaching and I realized I've never wanted to be a real estate coach. That's not something I desire to do.

20:55And I've got all these courses, I've done all these things. And I'm like, but it wasn't truly authentic to where I want to be. And it took this slowdown just the last couple of weeks for me to realize, oh my gosh, this is not fulfilling me. This is not, I just was really good at real estate. So I figured that was the most obvious thing to start coaching other people on. But I actually have all these other areas of life that light me up that I, the true stuff is like what my book is all about, like truly getting your inner path and, and, you know, going into the cave and doing these things. And, and so for me, I just had to drop it all.

21:26I told my marketing guy, I was like, hey, we're done with all the real estate coaching. He's like, what are you talking about? This is everything we've been pushing. I said, it doesn't matter because it's not my true path. But it takes that strength to really go, okay, even though I've got all this effort over here, if that's not authentically what I want to do. And so many people in their life, they feel stuck because they've put so much effort into something. We do this a lot with romantic relationships, right? It's very difficult to leave it because you've built so much up. You have all these memories, you have those experiences, But so many people realize they're in the wrong relationship, but yet they're like, this is the safe path.

22:00This is the safer place. It's truly not, but it feels like it is. You're really keeping yourself from a lot of passion, joy, and happiness that are waiting for you on the other side if you actually are willing to go down the scarier trail. So if I had to sum up what Jimmy just shared, Fire Nation, sometimes you have to give up the good to get to the great. Because listen, a lot of you are really good at things. You're comfortable. Jimmy was good at real estate. He sold 98 homes in his rookie year. I mean, he's been good at it for a long time. It's in his comfort zone. People look up and they respect him in that area.