Mind Science For Fun and Profit: Success, Mindset And Motivation With John Assaraf

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FTC John Assaraf | Mindset And Motivation

What fuels success for an entrepreneur? John Assaraf says the answer is simple: Mindset and Motivation, and he’s got the experience to prove it. Join Mitch Russo as he and John explore how commitment and goal setting make a difference in your path to success. John explores his experiences as a young man, finding a mentor and how these lessons changed his life. Be inspired and motivated by John’s story to find your own road.

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Mind Science For Fun and Profit: Success, Mindset And Motivation With John Assaraf

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We’re onto my guest and his incredible story. Known for his appearance in the secret in several of the movies, our guest is no stranger to the business. Having grown RE/MAX of Indiana as a startup to over $4 billion a year in sales and building five multimillion-dollar companies, he knows how to motivate people to be the best they can be. Those lessons and his wisdom came with dedicated research into how the mind works.

From there, he authored two best-selling books and launched the NeuroGym Program, which has been completed by thousands of students all over the world. He’s here to help us get better acquainted with how we think, overcome mindset issues and make rapid progress. Welcome, John Assaraf, to the show.

Mr. Russo, it’s so great to be with you. Thank you for having me.

It’s my pleasure, John. I love your story. Almost everybody I interview starts from almost nothing and a lot less than where they are. Give us some more detail. How did this all start for you?

A lot of very successful people overcame a lot of things. For me, I had a regular family. My father was a cab driver. Mom worked at a local department store, trying to live a good life, nothing too major. However, when I was six, my parents decided to move from Israel, where I was born and they were living, to Montreal, Canada.

When you're committed to something, you will upgrade your identity to match this new destiny, which means you'll upgrade your beliefs, your habits, your knowledge, your skills, and your daily behaviors and habits. Click To Tweet

I got thrown into grade one, not understanding the English language. Not only did they speak English in school but they also spoke French that I didn’t know either. The first two years of school were challenging for me. A lot of immigrants went to the school that I was going to. I fell behind in a classroom of 50, 60 kids with 1 teacher that couldn’t take care of teaching a child the alphabet let alone what you were taught in grade one, which is mostly fun and play.

I quickly got behind and started to bug all the other kids around it because I was bored out of my mind. By grade 5, I was 2 years behind. By grade seven, I failed English and Math. By grades 9 and 10, I was flunking. By grade 11, I decided I’m going to leave after. I thought I wasn’t smart enough. It boiled down to not getting the attention I needed in the early developmental years with this transition that my parents did for their children’s safety and getting a new chance in life.

The only area that I did well in when I was in school was gym class. I was considered a dumb jock. When I left high school, grade 7 at 17 years young, I was getting into a lot of trouble first in school and outside of school with the law. I was selling and doing drugs, drinking alcohol and doing illegal things at 13, 14, 15, 16, 17. I had been to detention centers and a lot out of trouble for myself and my family. That was my 6 to 17 years old, 11 years of challenges. I have a loving and caring family that didn’t know how to help me.

My brother and sister went through a very similar time because they moved as well. They went to school and had a hard time. By the time I was seventeen, I went to get a job in an electronics company called Philips Electronics. I was working in the shipping department. Boxes were coming in. I take them off the truck. I put package boxes for things that were sold and put them on the truck all day long, back and forth.

I hated it. I hated a menial job. I didn’t think I belonged there but what am I supposed to do? I need to make some money. I had to pay rent to live in my parents’ house at that time because I was working. They needed help. That lasted for about two years. One day out of the blue, my brother who I didn’t know well because he was off playing tennis around the world, he was a tennis pro, calls me up. He was off the tennis pro circuit. He moved to Toronto, Canada. We were in Montreal.

He said, “Bro, dad and mom tell me you’re getting into trouble. You’re doing things you shouldn’t be doing. Why don’t you come and see me in Toronto? There’s a man that I’d like you to meet.” I said, “Who’s this man?” My brother said, “I teach him tennis. He’s a philanthropist in town here. He’s a highly successful real estate developer and the owner of a real estate company. I asked him if he’d meet with you and he said, ‘Yeah. Why don’t you have your brother come in for lunch?'”

I take the train two weeks later and my brother picked me up. We went from the train station to lunch. I met this man by the name of Alan Brown. He was cordial, nice, well-dressed and looked successful. He asked me, “Why are you doing the things that you’re doing?” I’m like, “I don’t know. I want to make some money and move out of my parents’ house.” He said, “What are your goals and dreams?” I said, “I’d like to buy my car, move out of my parents’ house and make more than $1.65,” which is how much I was making working in the shipping department.

FTC John Assaraf | Mindset And Motivation
Mindset And Motivation: Let’s not hide behind our words. Let’s not hide by suppressing emotions or being embarrassed by our results. Let’s start with, “Where am I really?” That is called being truthful about your true north.

 

He said, “That’s all great. What are some of your bigger goals and dreams?” I said, “What do you mean?” He says, “Where do you want to live? What car do you want to drive? What home do you want to have? How much money do you want to make?” I said, “I don’t know.” He said, “Do me a favor.” He reached into his briefcase, pulled out this document and handed it to me. When I looked at it, it was the 1980 Goal Setting Guide.

This was March of 1980. I was nineteen. I opened up this document and the first question was, “At what age do you want to retire?” What? My father’s still working like a dog from 5:00 in the morning until 7:00 at night. I said, “Mr. Brown, what am I supposed to put there?” He says, “Pick a number.” I said, “Okay, 45.” I wrote down 45. I want to retire at age 45. I didn’t know when people retired.

The second question was, “Upon retirement, how much net worth do you want to have?” I looked at Mr. Brass, “Excuse me, sir. What does net worth mean?” He told me. I said, “$3 million.” It might as well have been $3 billion. Nobody in our family knew what millions were. The third question was, “What car do you want?” The fourth question was, “Where do you want to live?” The fifth question was, “What house do you want to have?” The sixth question was, “What lifestyle do you want to have?”

It had twelve questions. I wrote down stuff that came out of my head. I gave Mr. Brown the document. He looks at it and goes, “These are some good goals.” I wrote, “I want to have a Mercedes-Benz. I want to live in a four-bedroom house. I want to retire my parents. I want to travel the world. I want to have an Italian wardrobe.” I wrote all this stuff. I used to see on a TV show called Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous with Robin Leach. I wrote this stuff out of my imagination and what I remember from that TV show. He says, “This is a good vision and place to start. I’m going to ask you a question. The answer to this question will determine whether you achieve every one of these things you wrote on the 1980 Goal Setting Guide.”

Mitch, I’m thinking in the back of my head, “Are you kidding me? One question’s going to determine whether I would have all these things?” That was the statement in my head. He leans in and says, “Are you interested in achieving all of these things? Are you committed to achieving them?” I said, “Am I interested? Am I committed?” I said, “Mr. Brown, what’s the difference?”

He said, “Son, when you’re interested, you’ll do what’s easy and convenient. When you’re interested, you’ll allow your present or past to dictate what you do. You’ll allow your stories, reasons, excuses and beliefs to dictate all of what you do or don’t do but when you’re committed, you will upgrade your identity to match this new destiny, which means you’ll upgrade your beliefs, habits, knowledge, skills and daily behaviors.” I was like, “That’s deep.” I don’t know why but I said to him, “In that case, I’m committed.” He reached out his hand and said, “In that case, I will be your mentor.” I go, “Awesome. What’s a mentor?” That’s how green, young and ignorant I was. He proceeded to tell me what that was.

Two weeks later, I moved from Montreal to Toronto. I enrolled in the real estate class that I went to for five weeks, 9:00 to 5:00. I passed my real estate test. On June 20th, 1980, I got my real estate certificate that I was a licensed real estate agent. It was May 5th, 1980 when I started the course and June 20th, 1980 when I finished the course. I remember those specific dates so well because it’s the first test I had studied and passed without cheating in 2 or 3 years.

If we really want to be on top of our game, we must start with radical honesty. Click To Tweet

I felt so proud for the first time in my school life that maybe I’m not stupid and this dumb kid that everybody said I was. Maybe I needed the right environment and structure to see what I’m capable of achieving. He started to teach me how to upgrade my skills to be a real estate agent, which means I needed to learn how to market and sell. I was on commission only with zero salary. “You eat what you kill,” he told me. Over the next 18 months, I made $180,000 for me, which means he made $180,000 because I was on a 50/50 split. Every dollar that I made, he got half and I got half. That was the beginning of something. He helped me understand how to get my 1st, 3rd, 10th, 20th and 50th clients. It’s all duplicable.

John, this is an inspiring story. We have more in common than I realized. I became addicted to hard narcotics in high school. I ultimately had to drop out and go for treatment. During that time, I was a laborer. I was hired to unpack a warehouse and put them into trucks. I had to get to another city to do it. I’m in this other city. It’s late at night. We finished unpacking the entire warehouse. The area where I was supposed to ride back in was full.

A man in a Cadillac is overseeing from the background, walks up to me and says, “Aren’t you going with these guys?” I said, “There’s no room in the truck.” He says, “Why don’t you ride with me?” I said, “Are you going to the same place?” He goes, “Yeah.” I said, “Thank you.” We get in the car and here I am, a laborer. This man is in a fine suit, driving a Cadillac, which back then you know what that meant to us kids.

I said to him, “Thank you very much for the ride.” We started chatting. I said, “Do you have any relation to this business?” He goes, “I’m the founder and the owner.” I said, “Is this the Hoover Vacuum Company?” He goes, “Yeah. I’m the president of the company. My family founded this many years ago.” At that moment, John, my only thought was, “I have maybe an hour to be with the man who runs this huge company which is a household name. I better ask him anything I could think of.”

We had the most fascinating conversation. It was similar to the one you had. “What do you want to do with your life? Where do you want to go?” Unfortunately, he didn’t volunteer to be my mentor, I would’ve liked that but he changed my mindset on the spot. I knew from that point forward that I could be something and not just a laborer. I love these stories. They make such an impact.

It’s funny you talk about the Cadillac because two years later, I ended up buying a Cadillac Sedan DeVille, silver with a gray interior, brand spanking new. When I went into the Cadillac dealership, they asked me, “Where is your father?” I started off selling real estate with a blue 1976 used Dodge Dart.

FTC John Assaraf | Mindset And Motivation
Mindset And Motivation: The motivational circuit in the brain is deactivated in an uncertain state, and the behavioral motor cortex in the brain is deactivated in an uncertain state as a safety precaution.

 

I grew up in a relatively affluent neighborhood. All of my 16 and 17-year-old friends had Mustangs, Trans-Ams and Porsches too. I had a 1980 Pontiac Tempest four-door that had almost one whole panel without a dent on it. I was very happy. One of the first things, as a young man, watching my friends with all their fancy cars, I vowed that one day I will be able to afford to buy a car like that for myself.

It’s these decisions that we make early in life that change everything. One of the things that I loved about taking your course NeuroGym is that it helped me reset my mindset. I’m hoping we can get a chance to chat a little bit more about that and how you discovered this process and maybe even how readers can get some insight into themselves from what you’re about to teach us. Where do we start?

If we want to be on top of our game, I always start with radical honesty. Radical honesty is, “Where am I?” Let’s start with that and not hide behind words by suppressing emotions or being embarrassed by our results. I call that being truthful about your true North of, “This is where I am.” I always like to start with something like that by also saying, “Let’s do that without any judgment, blame, shame, guilt or justification. Let’s agree that for whatever reason, I am here with these specific results that I’m getting in my life.” The next question is, “What do I want to achieve in every area of my life, in business, finances, health, wealth, relationship, career, whatever it is?” Let’s say that many of the people reading here are in business. Would you agree that whatever business you are in, how to grow it by 2, 5 or 10X, the how-to, already exists?

If we have a business, we want to grow it to $50,000 a year, 2×2 Rubik’s cube. We go to YouTube and figure out how to solve the 2×2 Rubik’s cube. What if we want to grow it to $150,000, $250,000 a year? We can go to YouTube and find instructions. What about $500,000 to $1 million? We can go to YouTube and find a process, a person or a coach who can help us. What if we want to do a $10 million Rubik’s cube or $100 million Rubik’s cube? Some people have done it. What if we want the $1 billion Rubik’s cube? What if we want to solve that? Is the blueprint, the how-to available if we are committed?

That means that if everybody who’s reading this is committed to doubling, quintupling or 10Xing, the how-to exists. That means that the how-to is not your biggest problem. It’s maybe a problem because you don’t know how to but that’s not the biggest problem. The question becomes, “What is in my way? If the roadmap, the blueprint of 5X, 3X or 10X of my business is there, what’s in my way?”

There are only four things that are going to be in our way. It’s not 100. Number one is my self-image, self-worth and identity. “Do I see myself as the owner of this or that business?” How do I see myself? Not the business that I’d like to be but how do I see myself now? Identity shapes destiny and so do your decision. First and foremost, is your self-image and self-worth in your way? Yes. No. Maybe. Let’s set that aside.

Number two is, “Do you have beliefs that are limiting you?” I don’t know how to solve it because I don’t have the knowledge or skill. That’s a belief that limits you because you haven’t committed to gaining the knowledge and the skill, which is one of the other pieces. “Do I have beliefs that are limiting me? I’m not good and smart enough. I’m too young. I’m too old. I’m just starting. I haven’t been doing this for long. I don’t have all the skills.” Those are beliefs that limit us.

The art of being a great salesperson isn't in what you do when there's somebody else in front of you. The first person you must sell is you. Click To Tweet

Number three is, “I don’t have the knowledge or skills to do it.” That’s a real one because when we lack specific knowledge or skill, we are in an uncertain state. An uncertain state means we’re not in a confident state. In the confidence state, we take action. In an uncertain state, we procrastinate and self-sabotage.

The motivational and behavioral motor cortex in the brain is deactivated in an uncertain state as a safety precaution. We might have one foot on the gas saying, “This is where I want to go,” but we’re going to have another foot on the brakes going, “What if I fail or disappoint myself? What if I’m embarrassed, ashamed, ridiculed or judged?”

That leads to the fourth thing which is fear. If I have a fear of failure that’s bigger than my resolve for success, it’s fear of failure wins. There are 50 different types of fear that hold people back. There are fear of failure, fear of being embarrassed, ashamed, ridiculed, judged, rejected, fear of succeeding and failing, fear of disappointing myself or other ones. There’s a whole host of fears that deactivate the very circuitry that we must activate to take action. Even though the how to achieve this is available, we may only feel comfortable focusing on this.

John, I want to share with you one story. When I started Timeslips Corporation, I was only 28 years old. I had never started a business before in my life but I was a master salesman. I knew how to sell. I had decided to become financially independent and start a company. Making that decision brought opportunities into my universe. It opened up my world to possibility.

When I found my partner and we decided to go into business together, you might say I was committed. When I quit my job and he did the same, this burned the boats. I felt every single thing you said but I didn’t care. I had both feet on the accelerator because I didn’t know how to drive any other way. It ripped me up at times but I got through it because I was that committed.

A lot of times when we’re younger, in our 20s, maybe even our 30s, we haven’t failed enough to know the pain and discomfort of the failure. We know whether it’s in sports, being on the debate team or being an entrepreneur, we will fail. The way you become a master salesman is not by not failing. It’s by failing forward and framing what you learned in a way that keeps you going forward.

Most people have never been taught the art of selling themselves first. The art of being a great salesperson isn’t what you do when there’s somebody else in front of you. The first person you must sell is you. One of the ways you have to do it is by learning framing techniques. You have to learn how to ask yourself better questions that empower and move you forward versus disempowering questions and the meanings that we give things that keep people stuck.

FTC John Assaraf | Mindset And Motivation
Mindset And Motivation: Every brain functionally works the same. Every brain functionally works like a car, every car functionally works the same, whether it’s electric or motor.

 

I discovered I could level up my skillset to match the level of success I wanted to achieve and also level up my mindset. My mindset wasn’t about a positive mental attitude. There are lots of people with positive mental attitudes that don’t do well. When I talk about mindset, I also talk about emotional regulation. Emotional regulation is dictated by what’s happening in your mind and your subconscious mind specifically.

When I can master or even manage my mindset and my emotions, self-talk, attitude, focus, awareness, plus I have the right skillset and action set or behaviors, I can create a predictable model for success. Mindset plus skillset plus action set equals predictable results. There are a lot of people that are busy every single day, 50, 60 hours a week, that don’t achieve great results.

When you take a look at what they are busy doing, half of the time, they’re busy doing the wrong things. The other 45% of the time, they’re busy doing the trivial things versus the critical few things. In business, there aren’t 800 things you need to do well. There are a few things that have done well consistently that has an exponential return on your results. Ignorance is one of the greatest issues for entrepreneurs. “I don’t know.” Even if they know then they don’t know how to create a habit out of what they know.

I go back to the comment you made about knowledge of information. It’s unlimited, all available, free and on the internet but it’s understanding how to deal with the emotion and thoughts that come up when you try. That is critical. That’s what stops more people than anything else. I don’t think not knowing is a worthwhile excuse anymore. It might have been when we were kids.

On every one of our mobile phones, we have the computational power that’s greater than all the technology we needed back in the late ‘60s to put a human on the moon and bring them back to earth. There’s more power there. We have access to this thing that didn’t even exist then called a search engine. It’s the greatest library in the world where you can find any answer about anything you need in nanoseconds.

As a behavioral neuroscience researcher, I’m fascinated by the human brain, this 3-pound mass that is an organism that’s growing, learning, developing and pruning all the time. Is it possible that this brain we have is worth over $100 billion? Maybe we’re not great operators. Maybe we haven’t learned how to use the brain that we each have.

Every brain functionally works the same. It’s the same as a car. Every car functionally works the same whether it’s electric or motor. When I say, “How well have you learned to focus your attention? How well is your awareness of neuro muscle developed? How well do you understand the nature of your beliefs, the empowering ones and disempowering ones, the constructive ones and destructive ones?

In business, there aren't 800 things you need to do well. There are a few things that, done well consistently, have an exponential return. Click To Tweet

How good are you at identifying disempowering or destructive habits, knowing how to turn them off and create empowering constructive habits?” If the answer is not very well then you’re not a good operator of your brain.

You’re fighting all the time. That’s why you need to learn to be a good operator of your brain.

It’s something that I started learning years ago. That was the beginning of my entry into this neuroscience, neuropsychology realm of understanding self first and saying, “I’m afraid of failing. How come? What will it mean if I fail? What meaning am I giving it if I fail? How do I fail, learn and move forward? How do I fail and make it about the thing that I did versus who I am as a man? If I fail, I’m not a failure.” That’s a frame. If I failed what I did or didn’t do, there’s the issue. Let me fix that. All of a sudden, I can rise above a failure.

“I don’t want to talk to those people. I don’t want a cold call. What if they’re mad? What if they’re having dinner? What if they hang up on me?” What does it mean if they do? It means that maybe you’ve interrupted them and they hung up on you. That’s all it means. It doesn’t mean you’re an idiot, you’re less than or any of the things you think it means.

All of these frames are things that we can learn to upgrade our paradigm of reality. Unfortunately, entrepreneurs haven’t learned how to sell, the art of being relentless and pursuing until they achieve the result, the art of setting goals and plans to achieve those goals, the requirements for marketing and sales, how to manage and the skills, yet they want the result. They get into business. They don’t achieve the results. They say, “I’m not a good entrepreneur.” Maybe you’re an unskilled entrepreneur but it’s a skill you can learn.

It started with the issue of self-doubt. Everything goes back to your self-image. When I fixed my self-image, it took a geographic location. I was known as a junkie throughout my neighborhood at the age of seventeen. I picked up, left and went to Boston. Nobody knew me there. All of a sudden, I had the chance to shape what my self-image was without any question like, “Aren’t you that guy from Brooklyn?”

The work that you’ve done and the lessons I learned in working with you have helped me rapidly move past things I would’ve never seen before in my way. I want to make that point. There are a lot of people reading this who are smart. They probably are somewhat evolved or maybe very evolved but it’s the awareness of what’s in your way that you have mastered.

FTC John Assaraf | Mindset And Motivation
Mindset And Motivation: This brain that we have is worth over a hundred billion dollars, but maybe we’re just not great operators.

 

Awareness is what can give us choice. It’s in that choice that we can get our freedom. Our identity, beliefs and habits are not fixed. If you think about this question for a moment, when any baby is born or was born, are they born with any beliefs? No. Are they born with any fears? No. Are they born any identity, self-esteem or spirit? No.

That means that I learned about all those things and the things that got reinforced. At a certain point in many of our lives, we believed with conviction that Santa Claus and the tooth fairy was real. We believed certain things because the environment and the people shaped our beliefs. We developed habits based on our environment and what we did or didn’t do. The question is, “What was happening in the developing brain that caused that?” Some patterns were introduced whether it was language patterns, belief patterns, value patterns or behavioral patterns.

Any pattern that got reinforced went from a conscious pattern to a subconscious pattern. Once it goes from conscious to subconscious, our brain doesn’t think about, “Is this a good or a bad pattern?” It operates that pattern. It’s automatic like software that somebody wrote for your computer. If the pattern is corrupt, you’re not going to get the results you want. If the software isn’t as strong in the coding, you’re not going to get the results you want and chances are that we break.

Anybody reading has become aware of something new, maybe from the standpoint of our unconscious thoughts limiting us in ways that we never thought possible. How do we change it?

Let me have a little fun with a story. It’s a story that everybody can participate in. I want you to imagine wherever you live. Imagine a tea shop or a coffee shop where you go and you’re having a coffee or tea. You’re sitting with a friend or a family member. Out of the corner of your eye, you see a very famous Hollywood celebrity that you happen to like.

They pull up this document that they’re holding in their hand. They look at you and this document. They talk to the person that they’re with and then they get up and start to come over to talk to you. You’re like, “Are they coming to me? It’s surreal.” Imagine they come to you and say, “Hi, I’m Steven Spielberg.” You’re like, “I know who you are.”

Steven says to you, “Ron Howard and I, who you see sitting over there, finished reviewing this script that one of our top writers did. When I looked at you, I thought there is a part in this script that you fit the picture of who I see playing this role. It’s only five minutes long.” Steven says to you, “Mitch, if I give you $1 million and I give you this script, would you play this role? We’ll give you a coach. We’ll show you how to do the research. We’ll help you. You just need to take this five-minute piece in this movie and we’ll give you $1 million.”

Awareness is what gives us choice. It's in that choice that we can get our freedom. Click To Tweet

Imagine you’re a little scared and you go, “I’ve never done any acting but sure, Steven. I’d love to do it.” Imagine you sign the contract to get the script. You get your first $500,000. There’s another $500,000 coming after you film. You’ve never seen the script before. What would you do to take this script that somebody else wrote and become the role?

I’m not sure where to begin. If it was a serious question to me, I would ask someone to help me and role play it directly so I could get practice.

You take a script you’ve never seen before. You read it. You role-play with somebody. Would you consider maybe having a camera film you to practice and see what you look like? You review the camera and then do it again. Would you maybe record the script and listen to it so that it became more familiar to you like a song?

Like my bar mitzvah.

I had my bar mitzvah too. I recorded my segment and listened to it over and over again so that when it was time to deliver my portion, I knew it off the top of my head. A Hollywood actor or actress practices their script. In practicing the script, they create permanent neural patterns in their brain. I could do that by reading, visualizing, role-playing, adding auditory stimulation, getting critique or hiring a coach. I’m going to be a clumsy fumbling beginner at first. I’m going to take that script.

Once I get past the clumsy beginner then I’m going to have a little bit more flow. When members of a band get together for the first time, they start jamming together. They’re like, “That doesn’t sound good.” Through practice, they get into concert, coherence and flow. Is it possible that with practice, I could get better and if I could get better, I might be able to get good so that I can look in front of a camera and deliver this five-minute thing that I had no idea about when I was sitting having coffee and I could deliver it like when George C. Scott was Patton?

We can choose a new identity and practice that identity, not just in front of a mirror, reading and listening to it but let me maybe pretend and do this role for ten minutes. Let me show up with more confidence and certainty than I normally do. Let me test asking somebody, “Would you like two of these? Is four better for you?” Let me test the role until the role becomes more comfortable.

FTC John Assaraf | Mindset And Motivation
Mindset And Motivation: Entrepreneurs haven’t learned how to sell. They haven’t learned the art of being relentless and pursuing until they achieve the result.

 

That’s how our identity, beliefs and habits got shaped. Why not do what I call this deliberate conscious evolution of myself? Instead of living with the beliefs, habits and self-image of my old environment that my parents, teachers and friends had their hand in making, why not learn that I own this $100 billion brain?

If I need to become a better entrepreneur who can build a $1 million business instead of a $50,000 business, let me start on the mindset, skillset and behaviors. In doing that, I am activating certain neural patterns. The neural patterns and the neurons that fire together will wire. The neurons that wire together in similar sequences over and over become more permanent patterns.

When those patterns start to take, what I see, think, feel and do changes. It doesn’t matter where you are. That’s your true North. What matters is choosing a new true North, marching confidently in the direction of that dream and becoming the person capable of achieving them. That is a deliberate conscious choice.

John, that is so powerful. If I were to unpack that a little bit and make it a little simplified, it would be something as simple as, first of all, making a decision. Decide whether or not you’re committed to the script and the task. Second of all, get good at it. Do whatever you need to do. Hire a coach. Use your phone or mirror, whatever it takes to get good at it. Third, fail as often as you can until you perfect your process. That’s what I heard.

What you heard is accurate. There is a part of our brain called the error detection mechanism. We learn by activating the air detection mechanism. Like a GPS, it detects when it’s off course. Our failures are the off-course signals. Fail and fix over and over.

John, this has been fascinating. Readers have gotten a lot from this conversation. What you’re teaching and the way you’re helping people are very valuable. We’re going to shift gears here. We’re going to find out a little bit more about you and the way we do that is by me asking you a couple of questions. Sometimes my guests call them silly questions. I like that. I don’t mind that they’re silly. Most importantly, it exposes or at least shows us a little bit about you that we didn’t know before. Here’s the first question. Who, in all space and time, would you like to have one hour to enjoy a walk in the park, a quick lunch or an intense conversation with?

That would be Albert Einstein.

It doesn't matter where you are right now, or what's your true north right now. What matters is we choose a new true north and we march confidently in the direction of that dream and that we become the person capable of achieving them. Click To Tweet

Why?

He was a little bit quirky and a genius who didn’t care what others thought of him. To be able to mentally go through the calculations he had to go through in his head, I want to understand his rituals, how he did what he did and how he framed certain things. When he was thinking about some of the things he was thinking about, it was so out of the realm of what most people thought about. I would like to have a dialogue with him. On the other end of the spectrum, I also want to be with Gandhi for his ability to respond versus react and have this unimaginable resolve to take on the British empire. I want to learn about his conviction and get out there into the quantum field of what might be happening.

It’s a person who has committed to something so directly and empowered that nothing can shake him from his mission. I’m not promising this but if I can arrange a little lunch for you and Albert, would that be okay?

Let’s do it and do the quantum field thing.

My next question is what is it that you’re doing or would like to do that truly has the potential to change the world?

Show up with so much love that everybody feels it.

You’re being very modest. You’ve done quite a bit of world-changing already with your appearance in the very powerful movies that you’ve appeared in and the messages that you have for others. You are already a world-changer. As the representative of earthlings here, we thank you. Thank you, John, for your time. I can’t let you go without you telling us a little bit about this incredible gift that you promised my readers. What is that?

There’s an eBook that we finished. It’s called 4 Steps to a Million-Dollar Business. I’ve taken some of the stuff that I teach my $100,000 a day clients. We’ve put some great stuff for small business owners. Whether you’re new, starting up or already in motion, if you want to get some of the ways that I think about growing businesses and I’ve helped over 15,000 businesses, we’ll give it to you for free.

Readers, if you’d be interested in getting this incredible gift, all you got to do is go to YourFirstThousandClients.com. At the very bottom of John’s show page, you will see a link to that gift. John, this has been so much fun. Thank you for taking your time. Your $100,000 a day type of time is very valuable. On behalf of everybody, this was a great lesson and teaching. I hope everybody takes what we talked about and goes to the next step. Thank you, John.

Thank you, Mitch.

 

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About John Assaraf

FTC John Assaraf | Mindset And Motivation

John has built 5 multimillion dollar companies, written 2 New York Times Bestselling books and featured in 8 movies, including the blockbuster hit “The Secret” and “Quest For Success” with Richard Branson and the Dalai Lama.

Today, he is founder and CEO of NeuroGym, a company dedicated to using the most advanced technologies and evidence based brain training methods to help individuals unleash their fullest potential and maximize their results.

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