#88: 12 Weeks To Live: How I Risked It All & Won

0:00Hello guys, it is Chris here and we're doing a little bit of a different style of podcast recording today. In fact, I've never done anything like this before and there's a reason for this. It's just going to be you and me. It's raw. It's real. I don't have notes. I basically want to go through three moments in my life that really changed the course of my life. And the reason I want to share this, I want to share it in a storytelling way. I want to share you the lessons that I learned and when the things really started to change in my life for me, because my life is dramatically different than what it used to be.

0:34In fact, it is day and night difference and it changed so quickly. But the reason I want to share these and the reason I want to record this podcast, I've been recording a lot. I wasn't planning on doing this, but I feel very called to share this message, share this lessons to be able to inspire at least one person. Now, who is the person I'm trying to inspire? I'm trying to inspire this person that's listening to this right now that has not yet taken the leap on their goals, has not yet embarked on that unknown, scary journey that they know they want to do, but they're just too scared to take the leap.

1:14My goal for this episode is to inspire at least one person to chase their dreams, because let me tell you, it will change your life. And in fact, I'd even go to say, what is the point of living if you're not going to chase your dreams? We're put on this earth not to be stagnant. We're not put here to be doing nothing in our life. We're here to be in motion. We're here to do things in service of others. And I think if you've got this thought in your mind of wanting change, but you've not yet changed, hopefully my story here, and when I share some key pivotal moments in my life, this can inspire you to take the leap yourself.

1:54Because what you'll see is there's a common denominator in my whole journey. And the common denominator is taking steps in the dark. There's no clarity with whatever I'm doing. It's literally figuring it out on the way. It's building the plane on the way down. My journey has been a constant state of, I don't know how to do this, but I'm going to try and figure it out. And then I try and figure it out, no matter if no one believes in me, because guess what? They don't. Especially in a place like Australia, they don't believe in you. You've got to believe in you more than anyone else, because the reality is, is no one actually cares.

2:32Until you seem to make some level of success, then they go, okay, yeah, he's doing well, but no one's going to support you until that moment. So what I want to do is I want to share three key pivotal moments in my life, and I want to talk about divine timing and I want to talk about how things just fall into place. You know, one of my favorite quotes, if you're a regular listener of the podcast, you would hear me say this, but one of my favorite quotes is by Steve Jobs. And he says, you can't connect the dots looking forward. You can only connect the dots looking backwards. You don't know where you're going to be in the next 12, 24, 36 months.

3:08But when you get there, you can look back and know exactly how you got there. And what's great about this is whenever you're in a decision-making process and you don't know what to do, choose the thing that you feel like is right in the moment and disregard any of the other options. Because the reality is, is any single decision that you make is going to shape you into the person that you're going to become. For good or for bad, it's going to make you who you are. So when you make a decision, don't think about any of the other options. Just do it and lean in and dive in and just figure it out.

3:42Find out what's on the other side. And the first moment I want to share with you is when I was 17 years old. I was lost. I was the captain of the footy team. I won the jock award at school and I was the cool kid, but I didn't know what I was doing. I had no idea. And, you know, the options back then in the state school that I went to was either you go to university and study something or you become a tradie, a plumber, a carpenter, a builder. They were the options. You know, business wasn't even a concept in anyone's mind. They were just like, yeah, like this is what you do. And so if I said that I wasn't going to go to university, the option was, well, you can become a tradie then.

4:33What are you going to do? Become a tradie? And I didn't want to do either. And so when you don't want to do the only options that you're there, of course you're going to be lost because you don't want to do anything that's on offer. You know, my mom, you should be listening to this. My mom, like, would send me a job offer in the mines as a electrician. And like in Australia, we work to the mines. We do this ridiculous thing where you fly in, fly out. So you leave your family for two weeks. You then work your ass off for two weeks, not seeing anyone being completely isolated. And then you come back and you have two weeks off and then you go again and leave your family.

5:13And then you come back and you just live in this cycle of fly in, fly out. I think it's horrible. Um, and, and yeah. And so she would like send me a job and I'm like, mom, respectfully, no, she'll be laughing at this right now. Um, I'm like, no, I don't want to become an electrician in the mines. And these were the only options. And so the reason I'm sharing this with you is there was a moment that changed everything for me. I was injured and I was in rehab in the AFL team, the Australian football team that I was playing in. And I was in rehab and I was recovering my hamstring. And there was a guy in the rehab as well named Sam and he had hurt his collarbone or something.

5:58and we got chatting. Now I was the cool kid and he was like the weirdo that asked all the questions. So we didn't really get along, but we were forced to spend time together because we were in rehab recovering. And so we started talking and he just told me that he had dropped out of school and he was a straight A student and he had dropped out of school. And I just went, why did you drop out of school? And he started sharing the things that he was learning and he was learning all of these things about entrepreneurship and his friends were making $10 ,000,$20 ,000 a month. And I was like, what did you just say?

6:35And instantly things switched for me. I was hooked. I was like, tell me more. I bought the book that he told me to read. I dove deep. We started hanging out every single day. I dropped all the things that I was doing, the video games and all of the cool kid stuff that I would do, the late nights. And I started going to the gym early in the morning. I would read and we would just hang out every day and talk business. And day and night, you asked from the start of grade 12 at school to when I finished, I was a day and night different person. My life completely transformed. Now, when you hear that, you might think that was smooth sailing, but it certainly wasn't the case.

7:12I started changing and my friends at school didn't like that. I went from being the cool kid to no one answering my calls, no one hanging out with me. And I was completely alone. Literally, I would rock up to school and they'd be like, hey, Mr. Businessman, and they'll take the piss out of me. And so it got extremely isolating. And for the first time then, I understood that when you try and break the mold, especially in a culture like Australia, people aren't going to support it. So you need to believe in yourself more than anyone else. And you need to rely on your self motivation as opposed to getting it from anywhere else.

7:52Because guess what? No one else will support you and you've got to be okay with that. And for me, I spent a year extremely isolated, extremely lonely, but it was also exciting. I was learning so much stuff. And then I moved away and I moved a day before the borders closed during COVID in 2020, I moved to a different city and Sam and I moved into a studio apartment together. We were sleeping in the same bed. We were basically a married couple minus the sex because it was all we could afford. Our bank accounts were merged. Anything we could pull together, we would just put into one bank account so we could pay rent and buy food.

8:33And we just were figuring it out. We had whiteboards all over the walls and we were hungry to learn. We were 17, 18 years old at the time. And looking back at it, it was quite crazy. Um, there was times we would just be drinking heaps in the studio apartment. We were in lockdown. We couldn't meet anyone. We were struggling. We got investors on board this company we were running and it was an absolute shit show. But when I look back at those moments, they were the most life changing. You see, in the moment then I didn't understand what we were doing. We thought, you know, 17, 18, we thought we were going to be multi, multi millionaires at 20.

9:14We thought it was going to be smooth sailing. and you know looking back at that time as i said at the start the steve jobs quote you can't connect the dots looking forward you can only count looking backwards now that i'm here i can look back at that time and go yeah that looks ridiculous in fact that was fucking crazy i was sharing a bed with my friend away from my family away from my friends alone in lockdown with bank accounts merged trying to figure out how to get by. Yeah, that was crazy, but they were the building blocks of who I am today. They were the very moments that made me mature so quickly so that then I could show up in rooms with people that are way older than me.

9:58I could hold my own with people that I shouldn't be able to hold my own with. And when I did that, things started to compound. And as I look back at my life, that was a very pivotal time. You know, we got 12 months down the line and we had raised$80 ,000 at an$800 ,000 valuation. We valued our company at$0.8 million. And all those friends that hated me, that stopped answering my calls, that stopped hanging out with me at school, guess who's on the call? they're calling me back saying they've dropped out of their university degrees they're a bit lost they're a bit stuck this was 12 months after school had finished and then for that point on I realized I want to help people bridge that gap from school to the real world and so I searched I went in search of trying to help other people bridge that gap and teach fundamental education now you might see my Instagram page now it's more Chris Griffin that's what the name is called.

11:01But for the first hundred videos, it was called Primed University. I created a company, well not a company, I created an Instagram page called Primed University and the goal was to prime kids for the real world, to get them from school to the real world. And this is what I was doing. And I would post shocking videos, horrible videos of me like with a white board with a ring light. My eyes were just lit up and I had long hair and acne. And all I wanted to do was help people keep going, even though all of their friends abandoned them. That was the drive. And it's still my biggest driver. The first book I ever want to write is titled You're Too Young.

11:43And it's beating the stigma that you're too young to do things. My whole life, I've just been trying to prove people wrong because they haven't believed in me because of my age. Oh, you're just 20, you'll figure it out. Like you've got a lot of life to live. They write you off because of your age. And I just don't think it's the truth because what I truly believe is that age is not tied to maturity or maturity is not tied to age because I want to, I seek to understand this. What I tried to realize was that, that it doesn't actually matter about the number of years that we've lived. It matters about the amount of experience that we've had.

12:21So how do we gain experience? Well, what we do is we bear responsibility. So maturity starts with bearing responsibility. The way it works is we decide we want to do something. We want to onboard responsibility. So we bear responsibility. Through the responsibility, we start doing things. The more we do a particular thing, the more experience we gain at that thing. So when we gain experience, at that thing, we become better at that thing. And then eventually what happens is we become competent at that thing, whether that's business, whether that's communication, whether that's relationships, whether that is getting in fit and healthy shape.

13:02We become competent at that particular thing by doing a lot of it, gaining experience at that thing. Through the competency, when we do it at a competent level for a long period of time, we then become mature at that thing. So when I understood that, I realized that no matter the age, I can gain maturity. I just need to do more shit. So then what I did was I was like, how can I just fast track maturity? Do more. Do more. If you're not doing enough, you just need to do more. If you want to become mature at something, just do more shit and you will become mature. And I know that sounds simple, but just think about this for a second.

13:42If you're not bearing any responsibility, how do you expect to be mature? If you're still living at home, how do you expect to become independent? If you never do anything, you're never going to become good at anything, and then you're never going to be mature. And then through the maturity is where you grow. This is the thing that I think it's really important to note is when I look back at all the common denominators in my life, they all stem from actually giving something a red hot crack. And you know why? Is because when you don't, you don't fail. And when you don't fail, you don't learn. And when you don't learn, you don't grow.

14:26I seek doubt growth. And if we fast forward a little bit, and I'll go to this next point in my life where things really started to change. and this next point in my life was a couple of years ago now and it was it was May 2023 so two years ago a bit over two years ago I was in love this girl man like shout out to you you're not going to be listening to this but this girl really changed my life she she's so amazing and when I met her I didn't believe people like that existed I was so in awe by her I was so I was in love with her to be frank and when we got together and we would hang out and you know we were like best friends and I truly didn't believe people like that existed.

15:26And I was in awe. And I think that was probably the first problem because I pedestaled her. I thought maybe she was too good for me. You know, she was one of the biggest models in Australia and she was gorgeous and she had so many different things. She was making way more money than me. And I was just this young guy that was working a sales job. And you ask her today, she doesn't see me as some young guy working a sales job. She saw my drivenness. She saw my potential. She saw where I was going. She knew I was going to do great things. And still to this day, God bless her, she believes in me. And there was very few people in my life that believed in me.

16:08And when I saw her and the way she looked at me and the way she respected me, I was in awe by that and I just really valued that and I loved her um and in March 2023 she broke up with me and we were supposed to be going to Bali together um and yeah she ended things with me and I was so broken I was in a job that I hated I was starting this software company and we were pouring all of our money into it. We had no money. I literally had negative money in my bank account. And I was working a job that I didn't like, and I was heartbroken. And at this point, I had nothing to lose. I was just extremely, extremely struggling.

17:00And so I quit the job. I booked a trip to Thailand a solo sabbatical I booked it on a credit card I had a$15 ,000 credit card and no money and I booked this trip to Thailand on a credit card and went there for eight days by myself heartbroken no money I went there hired a moped drank a bunch of coconuts was chilling by the beach explored had a bunch of massages and a lot of reflecting a lot of writing a lot of thinking about what I was going to do. Now, some would call that crazy. I would too. And it was crazy. I don't recommend going to Thailand on credit. I just had this absurd confidence and I had nothing to lose.

17:49I was like, what do I have to lose here? And so the reason I'm sharing this point with you is because this is where things really started to change. I came back from Thailand eight days later. I had spent$3 ,000. So I had$12 ,000 left on the credit card. My expenses living in Bondi was$1 ,000 a week. I had 12 weeks to live. 12 weeks to figure something out because I was not getting a job again. I was done. I was done from working. I was heartbroken, but I had this fire in me that things were about to change. I get back and at the end of May, a mentor sent me a challenge to post a video every single day of June.

18:32And I said, scrap that, I'm going to post two. I rebranded from Primed University to more Chris Griffin. I started posting two videos every single day. And by the end of June, I had over a hundred thousand followers on all platforms. My whole life had changed. I went from having nothing, a failing business and no money and I was heartbroken to having a hundred thousand followers on all platforms and this is when I when I thought to myself I thought I wonder if that girl didn't break up with me if I'd be here the answer was no I wouldn't be there I wouldn't have had the drive to take that leap if she didn't break up with me.

19:20Her breaking up with me was the most life-changing thing that ever happened because it forced me to put my back against the wall, leave the comfort, escape from the comfort, and actually give things a red-hot crack. I had all these goals and dreams and things I wanted to achieve, but I was too damn comfortable. And then that made me take that leap. And so I did. But here's the problem. I gained 100 ,000 followers, but I couldn't make any money. I didn't understand the money part of the social media. I had all this praise, people saying I saved their life, but I couldn't even make a penny. And I remember going through this journey and a week would go by and I would have another thousand left on that credit card.

20:09Another week would go by and I had another$1 ,000 left on that credit card and I kept dropping down and to the point where the credit card went to$0. I had nothing. And then another week went by and I still made no money. Another week went by and I hadn't paid rent. And there's a conviction notice and I was about to get kicked out of my house. And I had no money. And I vividly remember, shout out to you, Susan. I walk into the real estate agent to the principal, who was an old lady named Susan. And I sold myself to her to give me an extra two weeks so I didn't get kicked out of this home. And I sold her to the fact that I had all this money coming in, showed her my followers and I was like, I'm a big deal.

21:10and I had all this money coming in. It was just the payments were taking ages and I promised that I'll pay her the money if she just gave me two more weeks. And she gave me two more weeks.

21:27I go back home and I was like, oh my gosh, I just bought myself two weeks. I've got no money. I'm selling things around the house to get a little bit of cash. so I could pay for my food, and I have no money. Two weeks goes by, I still made no money. I couldn't make it. I couldn't crack the code. I was still going viral. I was gaining tens of thousands of followers, but I couldn't make any money. 300 ,000 followers, 400 ,000 followers, no money. Two weeks goes by, I walk back into Susan, and I sell her on two more weeks. I say, I need two more weeks. This money's still not coming in. I've already done the deals.

22:13The money's already been made. It just hasn't hit the bank yet. Please give me two more weeks and then I'll pay you the money. We get two more weeks. And then during that two weeks, I launched some coaching and I did some one-on-one coaching, made some money, and then things started to change. I paid my rent and I got by and then my head was out of water. And I share this story and I don't share this story very much. In fact, I don't even know if I've shared this to this extent. But here I was, four months later, I was at a level of micro fame. People knew me. I'd get stopped on the street every single day.

22:57I now started making some money. but four months prior, I was heartbroken in a job that I hated with a credit card to live off. Four months is all it took to fully transform my life. And I know that there's people listening to this right now where they're so comfortable and they don't love what they're doing. They might say their job is good, but deep down, if you ask them, would you want to spend the rest of your life doing this? They would say no. I can hand on my heart say that I would want to do what I'm doing now for the rest of my life. It lights me up. It excites me. And I'm truly passionate about the things that I'm doing and the work that I'm doing.

23:34I'm on a podcast tour around the whole US, Canada, and the UK building 4K productions in places, interviewing names I never could have dreamt of meeting. And when I share this with you, I have so much passion and conviction in my voice because it hasn't always been the case. It was a pipe dream before. and not too long ago, a couple of years ago, until things really took off. And the reason they took off was because I bared responsibility. It's because I took a risk. It's because I lived life for me. And you'd think that after that time we launched the coaching, things would really start to change and my life was smooth sailing from there on, but it certainly wasn't the case.

24:15I stopped doing the coaching. It was draining me more than ever. I was trying to solve people's problems in the mindset space and it was really taxing me and it was making me struggle to show up for everyone else that I was doing online. And so, and just, excuse me, I'm just having some water while I'm drinking, my mouth's getting dry. And I met these people in Bondi and we clicked and I moved in with these two guys and we started posting fitness content and we started blowing up you know things were really starting to take off for us we were living together we were training we were looking really good with these three blonde haired jacked looking dudes in Bondi getting all the attention, but it wasn't filling me up.

25:11It wasn't me. I knew I wanted to do this podcasting thing, but I knew that in order to do this, I needed to take another leap. I needed to put my back against the wall again. I had to drop all the things that I was doing and go all in on this. So what did I do? I dropped it all again. I let the soul-led version of me lead the way and I took another massive risk. I left all of that opportunity behind, all the partnerships we were doing and picked up a microphone, rented a studio, again, didn't have much money at all, rented a studio and started a podcast. and it was tough. Again, when I started it, I was just another guy starting a podcast.

26:05No one believed in me, but I believed in me. I put in my Instagram bio, podcaster, before the first episode ever went out. And for some reason, I had this absurd confidence that things were going to work. Now, you might ask, okay, where did this confidence come from? Because as you're listening to this, you don't have the confidence and you want to know where I got it from. Where I got it from was from bearing enough responsibility and getting slammed on my face time and time again to the point where I wasn't phased about failing. Because if you're negative$22 ,000 in debt, you're not scared about going to zero.

26:40Because if you made it out of$22 ,000 negative, you can make it out of zero. So the answer to having more confidence is to go through more pain and overcome it. It's the proof that you are going to be okay. And when you have that proof, you're more willing to take the risks. And it's exactly what I did. And so dove right back into the deep end. And there's going to be a key moment that I'm going to share with you that is another turning point, another point where I've started all over again and put myself into the deep end. And we launched the show. First week, it got like 70 downloads. It had nothing.

27:20no one was listening. I just had to obsess over figuring it all out. But six months later, we hit the podcast charts. We stayed number two in the education platform for the whole country of Australia. We stayed there for like three or four months straight under Mel Robbins. And Mel Robbins isn't even an Australian podcast. We literally were crushing it. We were getting all these brand deals on. We started making all this money. You'd think that everything was set up, but it wasn't. It wasn't set up. I still was a bit stuck. I kept like chasing. I kept throwing myself into this deep end and going through challenge and spending all of my money on things just to try and grow.

28:07And I would spend money on travel and I would go, okay, we make 10 grand here. I would put it all back into the business. So I kept putting my back against the wall and I was extremely uncomfortable. And it was about a year ago now where things really just started to kind of come to life a bit more for me. I started to have a little bit more security and I started to make a little bit more money. But again, I was still really, really pushing to try and get by because I was investing all this money back into the business. I'm going to tell you one more key moment where things started to change.