10th Anniversary: 7 Lessons I’ve Learned in the Past 10 Years

0:07Welcome to today's episode of the Mindset Mentor podcast. I'm your host, Rob Dial. If you have not yet done so, hit that subscribe button so you never miss another podcast episode. And if you're out there and you love this podcast, especially on this episode, do me one big favor, just share it with one person that you know and love so we can impact more people's lives. Today, it is the 10-year anniversary of the Mindset Mentor Podcast, which is crazy to say. And I am going to take you through my seven biggest lessons of what I have learned about myself, what I have learned about life, what I have learned about business.

0:38throughout the past 10 years of growing this podcast episode. It's been 10 years, over 1 ,600 podcast episodes, over 400 million downloads, over 5 million followers on social media, over 2 billion video views on social media. And it's been a wild ride and none of it made sense in the beginning. But 10 years later, all of this makes sense. And I wanna share with you what I've learned, a decade of wins, a decade of failures and losses, and a decade of lessons as well. I don't know how long this episode's gonna be. I have the seven lessons and a couple bullet points for each one, but I just want to free flow and kind of talk to you about how this whole ride started and then how this whole ride has been the past 10 years.

1:18And I'll give you my key points. The first thing that I think one of the most important things that you can do and the thing that I've really, really learned from this podcast and this business that I've grown is to follow the whispers. I was at an event in December of 2014 and I had this little thought in the back of my head. I should start helping more people because you know in 2006 I started in a company where I was promoted quickly to a manager and the thing that I miss most about being a manager and training people you know I trained over 2 ,000 sales right by the time I was 24 and left that company in 2010 was I just really missed helping people I really missed helping them teaching about psychology neurology helping them in their daily life and I had this whisper in the back of my head December 2014, I should help people.

2:05And then about six months later, I was at Jason's Deli with my girlfriend at the time, my now wife. And I thought to myself, I should start a podcast. I've got all of the equipment. I'd moved out to Austin, Texas because I'm a musician and I wanted to be a musician is what I thought. And I had all of the recording equipment already. I had this microphone. I had the app on my computer, everything. I knew how to record. And I thought I should start a podcast. And through that, all of my fears came up because I am a introvert. Naturally, I don't like putting myself out there. I was afraid of judgment.

2:41I was afraid of failure. I was afraid of telling people my story of all of the shit that goes on inside of my head, all of my trauma that happened in my childhood from my father being an alcoholic and being an alcoholic who passed away when I was 15 years old from alcoholism. I never told anybody about that. And now millions of people know about it 10 years later. And I want you to understand when I say, listen to the whispers, there's a quote that says, your fears will scream at you. Your inspiration will whisper. And I can tell you that is 100 % true after starting this podcast is inspirations like this quiet voice that's in the back of your head that you've got to get quiet to listen to.

3:22And you've got to get still to listen to, and you've got to get off of your phone to listen to, but your fears will just scream and scream and scream at you. And if you're going to make an amazing life, you have to stop listening to your fears and you've got to start listening to your inspiration. Another part of all of this that I think is really important that I have learned through the podcast is that your mess is your message. You know, I was so afraid to share my message with people, but the more that I've done it, the more that I've seen that I've been accepted for my mess, that people have connected with me more because of my mess, because of my father and the traumas that I went through and the things that I still struggle with to this day.

4:01And it has been so cathartic for me to share what I thought what I would be judged for and to be not only accepted, but to also have people be like, hey, me too. And it's really helping me that you're talking about it. And it goes back to one of my favorite quotes, which I've said many times in the podcast before, which is the cave that you're afraid to enter holds your treasure that you seek. And so the first thing that I think really, really resonates with me when I think about going off and creating this podcast and then creating a business on the back end of it is that it doesn't make a whole lot of sense when you first think about it.

4:39You know, it doesn't make a whole lot of sense to, to like, it didn't make sense for me to quit my job in 2015, where I was making over$200 ,000 a year at 29 years old in order to do podcasting because there was no money to be made at podcasting. But something deep down inside of me was like, no, trust that this is the right way to go. And I kind of just jumped off the ledge and had faith that there was a safety net that was going to be there that I couldn't necessarily see. So that is number one, to make sure that you listen quietly and to follow your whispers. The second thing, which is really important, is that you should feel like an imposter throughout your life when you're doing something.

5:19You know, to be successful and to do something you've never done before, to be successful requires a level of delusion. Like you've got to trick yourself into believing that something that you've never done before in your entire life, and there is probably no proof in your entire life is possible. you actually need to like trick yourself to believing that thing is impossible and to be a little bit delusional, be a little bit bit naive. And so I remember feeling like an imposter before I started the podcast. And I thought to myself, like, I'm 29 years old. Who's going to listen to me? Why would somebody want to listen to a 29 year old?

5:56I don't have enough life experience. You know, and I thought to myself, like, why would somebody listen to me if Tony Robbins exists? And so for six months, you know, actually, I guess eight months at this point, I didn't even start the podcast. I just let it go. And I didn't just end up doing it. And then one day I was like, I've got to do it. I can't not try it out. And so you should feel like an imposter at some point in time. But the way I want you to reframe it is the way that Mel Robbins reframed it when I had her on my podcast. She said, stop calling yourself a imposter and start calling yourself a beginner.

6:29And the reason why is because when you call yourself a beginner, I think you just give yourself more grace to the fact that you should screw up. You should fall on your face over and over and over again. And that's what a beginner does. And it goes back to one of my favorite quotes, which is, you will never be a graceful master if you're not willing to be a foolish beginner. And so everything that I've done from creating podcast episodes to putting content online and creating stuff for Instagram and YouTube and TikTok and Facebook, I had to screw up so many things to try and try and actually figure out what was the thing that worked.

7:02And so you'll never be a graceful master master if you're not willing to be a foolish beginner. And for me, I had to be a beginner at one point. And that is what helps me get better is just not stopping. So that's the second thing is you will feel like an imposter and that's OK. The third thing is that you will feel a lot of fear, a lot of fear. Me, I felt a lot of fear many times in growing my business and also growing this podcast. Fear will always pop up when you are getting out of your comfort zone. For me, I was terrified. I was terrified to push upload and to put out my first podcast episode back in August of 2015.

7:38I was terrified to talk about my message. I was terrified to talk about, you know, when my grandparents passed away and I did an episode and started bawling in the middle of the episode and put it out anyways. I was terrified when I started creating content that put my face out there because back in the day, it used to just be audio. So I was terrified to start putting my face out there on Facebook and then Instagram and TikTok. And I was terrified when I first started in a few months after I started the podcast and tried to start growing my business, I wanted to go back and work for somebody else.

8:11And I was full of so much fear, so much fear. And I believe that if you're listening and if you're paying attention, the universe, God, life, whatever you believe in will speak to you. If you're quiet and you listen, like if you're listening for messages and I was terrified and I was so afraid and I was thinking to myself, I'm just going to go back. I'm going to cancel this whole thing. I'm going to go back and work for somebody else. And I went back to my sister's house back in Florida. I was back there for Thanksgiving in November of 2015. And she came out to me and she goes, Hey, have you seen this box of dad's stuff?

8:45And she brought out a box of my dad's stuff. And it was like a shirt of his, it was glasses of his, his watch and a bunch of other random stuff, but it was a bunch of also a bunch of letters. So my dad, when I was younger, was in and out of jail, uh, many times for DUIs and having too many DUIs and drunk in public and all of those types of things. And he was in jail for a while at one point in time. And he wrote letters to my sister and I, and I was reading through all of these letters and I read a letter of those written to my sister on her 21st birth, I'm sorry, on her 19th birthday, which would have been 1999.

9:18And I'm reading this letter in 2015. So 16 years later, and the message is really nice for her birthday. And in the end, there's this line, it's the very last line. And it says, I hope you live your life with courage, love, and laughter. And next to courage was an asterisk. and on the bottom of the page, there's another asterisk and it said, courage is not the absence of fear. Courage is the ability to move forward in spite of it. And I had this weird moment like, holy shit. This is like the universe speaking to me like, this is the universe coming through my dad in a letter to my sister for me to find it this moment because I am so terrified that I want to go back and cancel my dreams and go back and work for somebody else.

10:09And I'm supposed to do this right now because it says courage, love, and laughter. Asterix, look down at the bottom. Asterix right there says courage is not the absence of fear, but is the ability to move forward in spite of it. And I was like, 10-4. I've got to just burn my ships. I've got to do this. I've got to follow the great philosopher Marshall Mathers, also known as MNN. And the quote that he says is success is my only motherfucking option. Failure is not. I was like, that's what I have to start doing. And so what's the, what's the way to commit fully to something. And at that point in time, I had zero tattoos and I went and got, if you guys are watching on video, uh, it says I got my dad's actual handwriting tattooed on my left arm.

10:51And it says, live your life with courage, love, and laughter blown up on my arm. And I was like, I have to commit. How do I commit? I'm I committed. And then from that moment forward, things started to fall into place. And so I learned whenever I felt fear, what I really needed was courage not to give up. Whenever I feel fear, I need courage not to give up. And so you should feel fear anytime you do something you've never done before, but just don't give up. And that was lesson number three. Lesson number four is if it feels right, you have to do it. And it felt right is the key point of starting this podcast.

11:30It felt right to me. It made no sense when you look at it on paper, but it felt right to me. And teaching people and learning about psychology and neurology and early childhood development and coaching people was what I was most passionate about. It's what I started doing when I was 20 years old back in 2006. And when you discover what you're passionate about, you have to follow what you're passionate about. You must do it. And if you don't, your passion after you find it, if you don't follow it, will destroy you because it's going to be in the back of your head. You're going to be thinking about it all the time.

12:03And I heard a friend say this like five years ago. Once you discover your passion, if you don't follow your passion, your passion will destroy you. And then I ended up finding out a few years later that it's that's very similar to a quote that's in the Bible that says, if you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you. If you do not bring forth what is within you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you. And I was like, whoa, okay. These are all kind of making sense. And so when I followed my intuition and followed my gut feeling, I just trusted that it'd all work out.

12:37And I trusted that I would make some money doing it. And I thought to myself, I heard a quote one time that said, money is a byproduct of the value that you give the world. And so I said, okay, all I need to do is try to give as much value as I possibly can. And I trust that life will take care of me. and all I wanted to do was figure out a way to make$60 ,000 a year. That was it. How can I make $60 ,000 a year? If I can do that, I can pay my mortgage. I can probably pay my bills and maybe I can get like one or two cheap vacations a year, which is all I really want. I want to be able to travel.

13:09I want to be free and I wanted to do something that I love. And I never made a dollar online. Never. But I was like, I need to figure out how to grow a business and how to grow a following and how to create a business online. And it took a few years to really start to figure it all out, you know, to figure out how to create a great podcast and how to find my voice. I'd say it took me probably 600 podcast episodes to find my voice. It took me a long time to figure out how to grow a following online. And, you know, now you look at it 10 years later and it's like, yeah, the podcast done 400 million downloads.

13:43Now I have had, you know, over 5 million followers across all platforms. I've trained over 3 ,000 coaches on how to grow their coaching businesses online. I've created quite a few millionaires that are coaches from actually teaching them how to do that. All I did was I said, this feels right, and if it feels right, I'm gonna follow it. And so that is number four, the fourth lesson that I've learned. The fifth lesson that I've learned is that you have to outwork everybody. Success requires a lot of work. Like success in anything, in your finances, in your relationships, in everything, requires a lot of work.

14:18And when you do something that you love, it does not actually feel like work. Cliches are cliches because they're usually true. And the whole phrase of like, when you find something you love, you'll never work a day of your life, I believe is 100 % true. You know, when you find something that you love, it doesn't feel like work. And when it doesn't feel like work and you enjoy doing it, you will naturally outwork everybody who is struggling to force themselves to do something that they don't love. And so for me, like, I just love what I do. if I have to do a two hour live from 6 to 8 p.m. I will 100 % have more energy after I'm done with two hours of talking straight than I did before I started.

14:59How's that possible? How do I have, how do I use so much energy over the course of two hours, but then I get done and I have more energy? Well, because naturally it just flows through you. And it goes back to a podcast episode I did a few weeks ago that went to this quote that I found that really just hits home with this whole thing, which is anytime you create an illusion that is not in harmony with the laws of the universe, you must provide the energy to maintain that illusion. But if you find something and you do something that is in harmony with the laws of the universe, okay, aka what you're supposed to be doing in this world, the universe will provide that energy for you.

15:32So when I was forcing myself at 20, 21, 22 years old to work 110 hours a week and I burnt myself out, it's because it's not what I was supposed to be doing. I had to come up with that energy. The universe didn't give me any. It was just sitting on the sideline being like, hey, I'll wait till you're done here. But when I found something that I love, there's so much flow and energy that comes from it that I just become obsessed with it naturally because I love it. I ended up outworking many people. And so that's really the thing that I found that's a really big key as well, which is if you want to be successful, you need to outwork everybody.

16:05If you want to outwork everybody easily, find something that you love to do. So that's number five. The sixth thing that I have found is that you need to constantly be evolving yourself. It's scary to climb into the unknown because you have big dreams and you're looking at those big dreams and you're going, I don't think I can handle it. And the answer is just the truth of it is right now you cannot handle it. Like right now you're not good enough to fulfill your dreams and you shouldn't be because if you would have already been good enough to fulfill those dreams, you would have already fulfilled those dreams.

16:39But over time, you will evolve yourself. So like if I think to myself, and if I were to bring Rob from 2015 and plant him right here to live my life in 2025, Rob would have probably imploded in 2015, bringing him to 2025 because he needed 10 years of learning and growing and becoming better. I was a couple of weeks ago, I was at my active release therapist and she was, you know, working on my body and my neck and shoulders and stuff like that. She listens to the podcast. She's awesome. And she had said something. She's like, how do you do it? And I was like, how do I do what? She's like, it's crazy.

17:16You have, you have 45 employees. You have a podcast with over 400 million downloads. You're constantly creating video content online for 5 million followers. And you're a full-time dad. You help out around the house. Like, how do you do it? She's like, are you Superman? And I was like, I don't feel like it's out of my capacity, which is a weird thing. If I look at it, yeah, it seems like a lot, but it's only because I've grown myself to be able to handle it. And so it doesn't really feel as hard for me now because I had to evolve myself. But if you take Rob from 2015 and put him into here, he probably would implode.

17:48And so you have to evolve yourself to be able to create the reality that you want. And right now, you're not good enough to create the dreams that you want, that you see five, 10 years down the road. And so what do you need to do? You need to evolve yourself to make sure that those dreams can become a reality and you will eventually grow yourself into the type of person who can create everything that you actually want. So that's number six. And then number seven is everything makes sense in hindsight. My entire life looking back makes sense in hindsight to me. Like if I look at my life now at 2025, I go, oh my God, it makes so much sense why little Rob had to go through so much shit with his father and why he had to grow up so quickly.

18:32It was because he was literally learning human psychology, watching his father not overcome his demons. And he saw somebody that said, you know, this person did not overcome his demons and he didn't overcome them. And then he ended up obviously going to the grave because of it. And then that happened at 15. When I was 19, I found a company that was really big into personal development. And I realized, okay, if I get into personal development, I can help myself grow. Maybe I can overcome some of the traumas. And I became better and I became better. I became obsessed with personal development. And then my students who were, you know, I trained salespeople and everything started coming to me and asking me questions to help them with their life.

19:09And so I started coaching them and coaching them and coaching them at 20, 21, 22, 23, 24 years old. And so, you know, I'm only 39, but I've been doing it now for 19 years at this point. That all makes sense now. Oh my God, it makes so much sense. And then it makes sense that I had to go out after running my own business and start working for people to realize that I hate working for somebody else and I'm not built to do it. So then I had to start my own company. And then I had to leave my business, you know, my company I was working with where I was 29 making$200 ,000 a year and had to leave. It didn't make any sense to do that.

19:46Nobody made money in podcasting back then in 2015. It's different for like Tim Ferriss and Joe Rogan. Personal brands weren't really a thing. Podcasting wasn't really a thing. People didn't really listen to podcasts. But then it also made sense. Oh my God. But I do have the equipment to be able to do it because I moved to Austin to be a musician. So I had all the equipment. I didn't have to have to invest any money. And so it's like everything fell in place over and over and over and over and over again. in hindsight is 2020 because you look back and you're like, oh my God, this makes so much sense.

20:17But from 2015 to 2020, I made basically no money in podcasting, but I created hundreds and hundreds of episodes. And then what happened was in 2020, two things, I guess three things really happened that kind of created a perfect storm because from 2016 to 2020, four years, the podcast leveled off and stayed at the exact same amount of downloads almost for four years straight. just didn't grow, didn't go down, just stayed the same. And then three things happened. Number one, Apple Podcasts ended up, Apple put out an app for podcasts. Number two, Spotify came out with podcasts as well, which now made listening to podcasts really easy because before then it was pretty hard to listen to podcasts.

21:00So those two things happen. And then number three, COVID happened and people started listening to podcasts a whole lot more. And so in 2020, it went from, you know, to 2020, podcasts basically stayed exactly the same. And in 2020, within a few months, my podcast, the amount of downloads that I had that I was used to for four years, took a 70X, like it grew 70 times within a few months. And so it went from X amount of downloads, like one download to 70 downloads. And it exploded. But from 2015 to 2020, there was no way of making any money. And it just, if you look at it from 2015 to 2025, if you were looking forward, none of it would make any sense.

21:45But looking back from 2025 to 2015, to everything that I went through my entire career of coaching people, to everything that I went through my entire life and childhood, it's easy to see how all of it makes sense. And so that's the other thing that I'll say. And the last thing I'll leave you with is that everything makes sense in hindsight, but you just have to follow whatever it is that feels right for you. And so those are the seven things that I've learned. I want to tell everybody who's listening to this podcast in any sort of way, I love you all. Thank you for making my dreams come true like my wildest dreams.

22:18I never would have thought that my life could be as good as I possibly. It's a hundred thousand times better than I could have thought it would have been in 2015. And I tell my wife, I wake up every single day and I feel like I wake up in heaven because this is the best thing that's ever happened to me. And so I appreciate you all for listening and I'm going to leave you the same way I leave you pretty much every single podcast episode. Make it your mission, make somebody else's day better. I appreciate you and I hope that you have an amazing day.