Security Unfiltered
Security Unfiltered
Transforming Your Mindset for Lasting Success: Personal Stories and Strategies
Is your mindset holding you back from achieving the success you desire? Discover how a simple shift in perspective can transform your life, as we share personal stories and actionable strategies to help you envision and reach your goals. Reflecting on my own journey, I recount how motivational videos in high school changed my thinking from "I can't afford that" to "How can I afford that?" This episode includes poignant anecdotes, such as navigating my sister's kidney disease and dealing with a broken air conditioning unit, to illustrate the power of maintaining a positive, proactive mindset in overcoming life's challenges.
Join us as we delve into the contrasting paths siblings can take despite growing up in the same household, highlighting how different mindsets shape our futures. We explore the importance of confronting uncomfortable situations to build resilience and a growth-oriented approach to life. Drawing inspiration from influential figures like Mark Cuban and Steve Jobs, we stress the significance of setting high standards early on. Additionally, hear how a friend's daughter's perspective on wealth achievement underscores the impact of early exposure to certain lifestyles. This episode encapsulates the essence of mindset, hard work, and strategic planning as the cornerstones of lasting success.
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Hello everyone, this is another Security Unfiltered Mentorship episode, so I apologize. You know, the last time that I posted one of these was the end of March apparently I thought it was April, but I guess not. But again, you know, I want to start actually posting these more regularly, but I want to be providing you content that makes sense, that works, that provides value, right? So the whole purpose of this podcast is to provide you value and, you know, kind of share what I've learned along the way, right? So I'll try and do a better job of posting these mentorship episodes more regularly, these mentorship episodes more regularly. But again, you know, I want to make sure that they're providing you some sort of value, rather than me just talking or trying to, you know, cobble some things together just to release an episode that doesn't really work with how my mind works.
Speaker 1:So today I actually want to talk about changing your mentality, right? So we talk about, you know, envisioning your future. What do you want your life to look like at the end of your life, while you're, you know, in your 20s, your 30s, your 40s, even, right? What do you want retirement to look like? Do you want it to look like someone that's able to travel the world, buy the sports car that they want. You know, do all those things right that they have wanted. Do you want that, or do you want something else right? We talk about also creating your goals based on that, and those are, all you know, fantastic things to do. But I think to an extent I have left out one key part, and you know, I'll be honest with you, it's not that I did it on purpose. You know, it's because this happened so long ago for me, probably 15 years ago almost at this point maybe it is 15, maybe a little bit more where my mentality kind of kind of shifted and this mentality really opened the door for me, you know when it came to the possibilities within my life, right. And so this episode is talking about that mentality, and you know how I got to it and what that looks like, how you can also get to it.
Speaker 1:So when I was in high school, I started to, I kind of stumbled upon these motivational videos, right, and from time to time still to this day I will watch different motivational videos or motivational, you know, compilations and whatnot, right? Just something that will charge me, right, supercharge me, get me pumped up, get me ready tackle whatever new challenge I have out there. I don't do it as often as I used to. You know when I first started it would be, you know, every single day minimum. Most days it would be for several hours, you know, just going through different videos, hearing these things, right, because what you hear, what you open your ears up to, what you open your mind up to, is going to impact you many different ways, many more different ways than you would even expect. And it's very important for you to monitor, manage, maintain what goes into your ears, what your eyes are looking at, what's coming out of your mouth, what goes into your ears, what your eyes are looking at, what's coming out of your mouth. This isn't like a positive thinking video or anything like that. That isn't what this is. So you know, if you're thinking that that's where I'm going, that's not where I'm going, right.
Speaker 1:So one of the things that I heard in those motivational videos that kind of cracked my mind open to an extent was poor people say I can't afford that, and rich people or wealthy people they say how can I afford that? And when I was growing up, all I heard was I can't afford that, we can't afford that that won't work right. I'll give you an example. You know, when my sister was younger, she, you know, got kidney disease. Many of my listeners know this, I've talked about it before. She got kidney disease. She dealt with it for several years until I was able to donate my kidney to her, which she's doing fantastic now.
Speaker 1:But during those years of struggle, you know it was one really hot summer and of course this happens during the hottest week of that summer where RAC unit just broke. It was a little bit older, sure, but it just broke, and my dad always had that mentality of I can't afford that. So when it broke, you know, my mom just asked him like hey, can you call someone to like at least see how much it's going to cost, right, I know that we probably can't fix it right now, but we can at least get the number and save for it and work towards it. And he refused to even make the call right Because he didn't want to be confronted with a number that he couldn't afford, you know, when he knew his family needed it. Essentially, at least, I think that that's what was going on. I don't know my dad very well, but that's what I think was going on with him. So my mom, eventually, you know, after maybe a day or two, she made the call to an AC guy. He came out by the end of the day and the whole importance of this AC unit is that, you know, when my sister had kidney disease or I guess technically she still has it, she just now has one of my kidneys, so it isn't like life threatening at this point, Right, but one of the things with it is that, you know, you really need to keep her in a controlled environment, you know.
Speaker 1:So it has to have AC, it has to have heat. She can't be too hot or too cold. All of these different things, you know, really impact her significantly. Like you know, for a normal person, right, being in a hot home, it's uncomfortable. You probably won't sleep very well, but you'll get through it. You're not gonna to, you're not going to like it, you're not going to enjoy it, um, but for my sister it was truly, you know, a a tough situation where her doctors even said, hey, if you don't have it fixed within two days, we're going to admit her to the hospital, right, because they needed to ensure that that she was getting better, that she was OK, that her, her health was in a good condition.
Speaker 1:And so now let's rewind just a little bit, or fast forward, whatever. It is Right when my dad said that he can't afford it. Right? You know, in my mind at this point I was already listening to these motivational videos. It was a little bit less frequently in the beginning, but it it quickly picked up. He said I can't afford it. And my mom said, well, let's find out how much it is and then we'll, then we'll figure that out. So she called the person. He came at the end of his day he found out that it was a $15 part. It was literally a $15 part. The guy didn't even charge us for coming out and replacing the part, because he had the part in his truck.
Speaker 1:And that kind of cracked open my mind in some ways. Right, because I have caught myself. I have caught myself being nervous when I am confronted with an unknown, you know, bill amount that I have to pay. Right, a random bill, you know, can really set off my anxiety, right, if I'm not in the right state of mind, if I'm not, you know, kind of looking towards it or anything like that, you know, if I feel like I'm caught off balance by it, all these different things, right, and it doesn't happen that much today. Today I usually catch myself pretty early on and I stop that anxiety approach, that anxiety circle, you know, early on, before it continues on. You know that's what I'm saying.
Speaker 1:But that think that, right with that broken AC, really kind of opened my mind a little bit to this possibility. So when we talk about envisioning your future, envisioning your retirement, setting up goals, your mind should immediately go to well, what do I want my future to look like? And then the next question that you should ask yourself is how can I make this happen in my life? What can I control and what can I work on? What can I do to make this happen? Now, I'm going to tell you right now. And when you ask yourself hmm, how can I make this happen for myself? Right?
Speaker 1:There's always going to be kind of like that positive-negative pull within you, right, at least in the beginning of it, and you're going to hear that negative voice say but how Right, how are you actually going to make this happen? How are you actually going to get that 4,000 square foot home, that's 7,500 square foot home? How are you actually planning on paying for your kids' college, right? How do you even plan on paying for your own student, because that's a great hurdle for a lot of people, right? You get these student loans. You got a degree, you're potentially in a career that you didn't even get your degree in, you're making the minimum payment every single month and you have 20 years of those payments. If you don't miss a single payment, that's a lot, right? So in your mind, how am I going to take those 20 years and shrink it down into two, or shrink it down to five or 10 or even 15, right, how am I going to shrink that down? And if you don't have an answer right there? Right then, and there, when that negative voice says, but how?
Speaker 1:A lot of the times, people just stop right there. It stops right there for them and they say, yeah, you know, that's probably not what's going to happen in my life. Right, it's probably not what's going to happen for me. It happens for some other people, but it doesn't happen for me. If you train your mind well, enough, right, and I think that I did this with the motivational videos that I heard. Right, because I put it into my ears, put it into my brain enough times for enough hours right Over an extended period of time, that all that negativity, all that, you know that negative voice and whatnot, when it would, when it would happen like the positive side of my head would just knock it down right. It would knock it down right to size and my brain would focus more on the positive side. Now there's been times when I've been negative you know where I've been down in the dubs but I give myself a certain amount of time to feel that way, to identify with the emotions, to, you know, kind of just feel it overall and then I move on and then I move towards working to find a solution, right? So I think that that is very important, right, so I think that that is very important.
Speaker 1:Now I do have a very interesting example. You know, my brother and I have a younger brother. My brother and I we grew up in the same home, same two parents. He experienced pretty much the exact same stuff that I experienced experience. He never really got into the motivational videos or anything like that that would potentially change or alter your mindset in a in a positive way. He fed more into that, but how, where, you know, when it was an unknown, he didn't go and push through it and I do have my own theories on that, you know.
Speaker 1:I think that he was raised just a little bit differently because, you know, for me I was pushed constantly to do things. You feel uncomfortable out on the basketball court Well, guess what you got to go out there? Oh, you feel uncomfortable in the pool Well, guess what you got to learn how to swim, you know? And just constantly being pushed and then pushing myself. I think it was more of pushing myself, because I really do not like being pushed by other people. It's really frustrating for me. I don't really know why that is, but it is what it is, you know, and you know I would.
Speaker 1:I went down a path where I looked at, you know, the wealthy people in the world, people that I felt were wealthy. You know Mark Cuban and Steve Jobs, bill Gates. Some of these people, or at least the majority of these people not saying that the couple that I just named are coming from this background, but there's a lot of them that come from nothing. So, in my mind, if they came from nothing and now they're there, then what's stopping me from coming from nothing and ending up somewhere over there? And I couldn't really find a good reason why that wouldn't be possible for me. If I put in the work, if I put in the time, if I really work towards mastering a craft, why can't that work for me? And I couldn't find a reason for why it couldn't, and so I just kept going right.
Speaker 1:And my brother, on the other hand, like I said, he fed into that negative voice, he fed into that negativity, and so he would look at the exact same situation and he would say to himself but that's not for me, right, that's not for me. I am not going to be part of that 1%. And you know, when I purchased my house I've talked about this before, I don't mean it to be in a bragging way or anything like that the house that I currently live in, the house that my kids are being raised in, is three to four, maybe even more times, the size of the house that I grew up in with my brother. When he came and saw the house, you know, he said that he was jealous, right? He said that he wanted what I had and he wished that he could have it. You know, my first, my first response was well, you can have it, you just have to put in the work and for him it just never gets farther than that Because he's never retrained his mind to think a different way, to force himself to be uncomfortable, to go into an area where he doesn't know and try and succeed.
Speaker 1:You know, as an older brother, I obviously want the best for my younger brother. I want to see him succeed. I want to see him, you know, have a great family and everything like that. But you know, after after years of therapy and counseling or whatnot, like I can't, I can't control those things. But you know, to fast forward to, pretty recently I was over at a friend's house and his house makes my house look tiny.
Speaker 1:Okay, that's the, that's the level of of wealth and success that he is at, and his daughter about nine or 10 years old and she is so used to that lifestyle that she literally doesn't know anything else. She doesn't understand why people have smaller houses, she doesn't understand how that's like feasible or anything like that. She doesn't get it. And she said you know that, that she wants a house like this, right, and my friend immediately said well, how are you going to make that happen? Do you know what it takes? Well, how are you going to make that happen? Do you know what it takes? And she immediately went into her plan of how she was going to make it happen. Right now she's nine, you know she's nine. Of course, you know she can't see that far ahead or anything like that, but she is envisioning herself in a house at that caliber, house at that caliber, and so now the drive and determination is going to get her to a place where she can actually afford it, where she can make that a reality, where maybe she can excel it or exceed it.
Speaker 1:I mean, um, which is, which is very it's interesting, it's a totally different way from where I grew up, right, where I kind of stumbled upon those videos that kind of cracked open my mind, right, and I heard that you know, I can't afford that versus how I can, how I can afford it or how can I afford that, right, I heard that in a motivational video, years before I picked up Robert Kiyosaki's book, where he talked about that and where that mentality you know, actually came from and where he started his journey from, and that's actually how he started his journey. And it's really fascinating to me, right, because all that she knows is that standard of living is that standard of life. She doesn't know anything else right, she understands she needs to put in work for it. She sees her parents working for it, and so she's already kind of calibrating and planning and thinking how do I achieve this?
Speaker 1:What's the steps that I need to take? I need to graduate grade school. I need to go to a good high school. I need to do good in high school. I need to go to a good college. I need to get a degree. Maybe I get an advanced degree, right, a master's degree, and get into a field that makes X amount of money. You're not going to know all those things when you're nine. Well, you know what you will know. You'll know probably the first two steps you know, and then you hit those two steps and then the next one or two steps become within vision for you, within sight, and you can say, okay, I need to do this, I need to do this. You keep going like that. You only fail when you stop moving. You only fail when you stop moving forward, and I think that this is something that I had to learn.
Speaker 1:So when I was in high school, you know, the first two years I did track and cross country. I was not fast at all, I was not. I also would get really bored on long runs and I would stop, not because I was tired but, honestly, just because I was bored. I was bored from running, and once I get it into my head of wait, why am I out here running all these miles again? You know why don't I just stop? And I convinced myself to stop. You know it was, it was a very interesting time.
Speaker 1:But running back then for me was very different than me running right now, me running right now. I had to kind of recalibrate right when, where I was. Because back in high school I could say my goal is a certain time in the mile, or my goal is a certain time in the half mile, or whatever it might be. Now I don't run for time, um, because I'm not in that one, I'm not in that physical shape anymore, right, um, but I am also 100 pounds heavier than I was when I was in high school. I'm not saying that I'm not not fit or you know anything like that, but I have, you know, definitely gone up in size since then. So it's not fair for me to still have those same standards. So I had to change the standards.
Speaker 1:My standard became I will not stop until I hit this mile marker, right, until my watch says 13 miles or 10, whatever it is right. Until my watch says that distance, I'm not stopping. And so, for me, what not stopping means is that I'll run some and I'm going to walk some. Hopefully I run more than I walk, right, as anyone with common sense would probably, you know, say or think, right, hopefully I run more than I walk, right, as anyone with common sense would probably, you know, say or think, right, hopefully I run more than I walk. I probably will run more than I walk, but at the end of the day, I'm not a failure as long as I keep on going. And there's been many times when I'm out on a run for 15 plus miles, right, and I'm not a fast runner, remember, I am not fast.
Speaker 1:My biggest struggle is not getting bored in my mind, right, so that I keep going, and I'll be out there until 10 pm, 11 pm, and I started at, you know, 5 or 6 pm, right, and my wife is calling me saying where are you? Are you okay? You know it's a different kind of goal, it's a different kind of standard and you shouldn't be afraid to change your standards along the way. You're going to have to, right? When you are younger, you're going to be able to do things that you're able to do only then, only at that time. And when you get older, you have to do maybe those things differently, or maybe you can't do those things at all anymore. Right? I think that physical fitness and just physical well-being and health right, is something that must be maintained throughout your life If you're really going to have any sort of success on the health side of it. Right, like, you have to maintain it and work towards it every single day.
Speaker 1:And that takes me to, you know, my, my final example, I guess right, where I have a friend of mine who you know came from a very similar area to me, a very similar background, came from nothing, took out student loans to go to college, right, graduated college, and then after college he started a company and he didn't know what he was getting himself into. I've talked to him about this before, tried to pick his brain, get his mentality and all those sorts of things right, and this is someone that makes tens of millions of dollars every single year like clockwork. He literally expects it, and if it doesn't happen, he'd be pretty disappointed, he would be pretty down right. But that is, you know, a thousand X, 10,000 X where he came from. What he started with? Right, because he didn't start it with, you know, investor money or anything like that. He started it literally with his own money, figuring out how to provide a service to his customers, figuring out how to get customers, figuring out how to schedule them and, you know, accept the payments and everything else, right.
Speaker 1:But he had that mentality of, if it happened for them, maybe, maybe, just maybe it can happen for me, right. And if you have that same mentality, anything is possible, right. I don't want to sound cliche with it, right, I really don't. But if you have that mentality of, well, if it happened for them, then why can't it happen for me? Right? If it worked over there, why can't it work here? Right? If you have that mentality, you're already off to the start that you need to actually make it happen.
Speaker 1:And there's no shame in readjusting and redefining your goals and things like that, because maybe you start working towards a goal and you're like you know what, I want to enjoy this. Maybe that isn't my goal, right? Maybe I got that goal from someone else and I need to recalibrate and I need to refigure things out. That's okay, you know, you can absolutely do that. You can absolutely recalibrate, refigure things out. That's okay, you know you can absolutely do that. You can absolutely recalibrate, refigure things out.
Speaker 1:You know, when you're in your thirties, when you're in your forties, I mean shoot, there's probably people out there that are recalibrating when they're in their fifties and beyond. Even you know they're looking for that new challenge. They're looking for something that will push them right To grow, to learn to change. And as long as you don't stop that journey of looking to be pushed to look to change, to look to grow, as long as you don't stop that, you're already ahead of the majority of people out there. Because I'm going to tell you right now most people, when they hear you know a random number right, they're saying to themselves I can't afford that. Without even looking at their bank account. They're saying I can't afford that right Without even thinking about different potential opportunities that are coming in the future. They're saying I can't. I can't afford that right when you, you can be that difference maker.
Speaker 1:You can say, well, how can I afford that? How can I pay for my kid's college. What would I have to do to actually achieve that? If that's my goal, then what do I need to do to actually achieve it? What kind of house do I want?
Speaker 1:You know, my wife and I, right, when we were looking to build or buy a home, we drove around and we saw all the different kinds of houses, the different living standards in different neighborhoods, and we narrowed it down, you know, just by that, like, hey, I don't like these houses. You know, it doesn't line up with our goals and things like that. Right, these houses are smaller, these houses are too big, and dial it in like that, right, you have to see it, you have to envision it, and then from there you start working out well, what would it take, what would it actually take to make that work for me in my life, for my family, right? So with that, guys, that's all that I actually have for this episode. I hope you enjoy it. I hope that you got some value out of it. I promise I will try and post at least one more mentorship episode this month. How about that? Like trying to get back into the swing of posting multiple times a week? All right, guys, thanks for listening. I hope you guys have a great week.
