by Steve Wolf | Jul 30, 2013 | Giving Back, Lifestyle, Mental, Spiritual & Mental
The last couple of weeks have been rough for me. I’ve been working O.T. trying to salvage an organization, plan for the future while tackling some personal challenges I have been faced with. It’s funny how when you get so busy with your life you tend to forget where you came from and how bad you have had it in the past. Not to mention, other people. When I’m having a bad day, sometimes shit really happened, and there is nothing I can do about it, but for the most part, my bad day is attached to a serious lack of gratitude on my part.
I mean come on, if you have read my blog, you have seen some of the places I have been too, do humanitarian stuff for people who are really in a bad way. Most of my problems these day are very quality problems compared to most of the world. When I say quality, I mean that there has been a day in over 12 years where i have not had food, shelter and clean water to drink. More than 50% of the world currently doesn’t even have those basic needs met.
It’s one thing to say this, or know it, and it is a completely different act to actually believe it in the moment when you’re looking at your bank account wondering where you are going maker enough money to make your house payment or car payment for the month. I mean even if you lost your house, you would have a place to go. If you lost your car, you could borrow one from a friend or from your family. Have you ever really gone hungry??? Were the most over fed country in the world, trust me, Americans with over 2/3 of the population over weight are not going hungry.
The point is that unless someone is dying, going to jail, or in serious danger, the problem is really not all that bad, and most importantly it can be fixed. So how de we no spin out and remain grateful when we get like this??? Great question, here are some of the things I have done that have help me remain in a place of gratitude when I get lost and spun out.
- Volunteer at a homeless shelter
- Buy a homeless person lunch
- Tell people you encounter in your daily life that you appreciate them coming in to work!
- Prayer and meditation
- Random acts of kindness
- Call a couple of your friends and ask them how they are doing in their lives and tell them that you appreciate their friendship.
- Let people who work for you know how much you appreciate them (This could be your mail man, garbage man, house keeper etc). This is also great to do with your loved ones and significant others. DUH@>!<W?><@
Story of my own.
Yesterday, I was pissed off because work had been stressing me out, I have been looking for a new place to live and I am short on money for the month, then my tire goes flat and needs a patch. I have been down and out the last couple of weeks dealing with some medical issues and other work related fires I had been putting out. Feeling sorry for myself, I went and patched the tire and drove off to the gas station to put air in the tire. As I pull in to the air machine, I notice a man sleeping in his beat up old pick-up truck next to 2 dogs sleeping inside. I walked in to the gas station to break a dollar and walked back to the machine.
As I walked back to the air machine, I noticed my brand new BMW next to this old pick up which was stacked to the gills with what apparently seemed to be all of this mans belongings. As if he had been evicted from his house, or wife kicked him out or something. As I filled up my tire on my brand new car, I couldn’t help but have a sinking feeling about the situation. Here I was pissed off about piddiley little bull shit when this man had no place to go, and no work to do as it was 3 pm on a Monday afternoon.
No one wants to end up like this. It was a bad run of life situations for him and this is where he had ended up. Instead of judging him, I took a moment to get grateful for what I had, then I took $5 out of my wallet and hid it in his gas tank so when he went to put gas in his truck he would be pleasantly surprised and that good things can still happen no matter how bad life seems to get.
The $5 was for the life lesson he taught me, he earned, it wasn’t charity. Him simply being there for me to witness was enough to snap me out of my funk, and I feel lie I should have given him $10. Either way, I hope it helped and It made me feel good to help someone else in need. I believe if we all spent some time doing this that the world would be a much better place.
As a result of this, I have made it a goal of mine to do something good for humanity at least once a month. Something a little bigger and more impactful than a $5 donation to a passerby. I’m going to call it, my monthly random act of Kindness, and each month I will be blogging about the experience.
Join me if you feel inclined. I think you will be delighted with how it makes you feel.
Hope you enjoyed the blog, please subscribe and re-post if you enjoyed the content.
-Steve W
by Steve Wolf | Jul 3, 2013 | Business, Lifestyle
This is whats Tattooed on My Collar Bone. So I never forget 🙂
One of my favorite books of all time is “How to win friends and influence people” by Dale Carnegie. Today, I am going to break this down for you Steve Wolf style and add my own little Part to the series, we will call it Part 5) “How to crush the competition and kick ass at life!”
You could go out and read the entire book, but I promise you what you are about to read is way more fun then the book that was written in 1936. But when you are done reading the blog, if you still want to buy it, I’ll post an amazon link at the bottom.
Ok, now were we go, my little summary + Some!
Part 1) Fundamental Techniques in Handling People
1. Don’t criticize, complain, or come off being a whiney little B^%$* No one likes that
2. Give honest an honest and sincere appreciation to the person, and even if you think what they are talking about is total bullshit, try to find the best part of it and work with that.
3. Make the other person WANT to get to know you better. (Hint*** This is done by being interesting, if you are not interesting, get to doing some interesting stuff with your life so you have something to talk about. Just don’t be boring because no one want to hang out with boring people.)
Part 2) 6 Ways to make people like you
1. Genuinely be interested and give a shit about what people tell you!
2. Smile, and not in a weird creeper way
3. Remember the person’s name. Hint*** Say it to yourself 6 times and then bring it up 3 more times in the immediate conversation and you will never forget it. It works for me 99% of the time. For example “So Doug, that’s an interesting name, why did your folks name you that, was it after some one famous???”
4. Listen for god sakes!!!!! Let a person just talk about themselves, they will tell you everything that you need to know to get them to do what you want them to. If you give them long enough, they will tell you their dreams, goals, ambitions etc.
5. When the other person brings up what their interested in, find common ground and ask them questions about that. For Example “Oh you skydive? Me to!! How many jumps do you have and what got you in to the sport?
6. Make the other person feel important, and do it sincerely. This is the most important, if you master this, you can almost skip steps 1-5
Part 3) Win People to your way of thinking
1. Avoid argumentation at all costs. Probably helps if you don’t mention Religion, or Politics, Sex is ok sometimes given the right circumstances.
2. Respect others opinions and viewpoints even if they are absolutely ridiculous. Do you want to be right, or do you want to win?
3. When wrong, admit it quickly and apologize.
4. Get the other person to keep saying “yes” and them let them keep talking and thinking that the came to the conclusion or idea of the conversation themselves.
5. Put yourself in their shoes, and see the world as they do!
6. Throw down a challenge.
Part 4) Be a Leader: How to Change people without offending them or arousing resentment.
1. Begin with Praise and Humility all the time. Remember where you came from!
2. When calling attention to others mistakes, do it indirectly, and talk about your own mistakes that you have made before you go it to their shortcomings.
3. Ask questions instead of giving orders as to get buy-in from the person or people.
4. Always let the person save face and praise them for even the slightest improvement. DO NOT bullshit this either, they will know, do it genuinely or not at all.
5. Give the other person a solid reputation to live up to. Use encouragement and make all faults seem easy to correct.
6. Make the other person happy about doing the thing you suggest.
Part 5) — My Part — How to Crush the Competition and kick ass at life.
Quick note if I may… What I am about to share with you is from my own personal experience meaning that I have done these things myself and live by them. I would never tell you or suggest anything to you that I have not done time and again mastering the skill!
1. Study your competition / enemy.
2.Live as they do, model them
3. Find weakness’ and take notes
4. Plan the attack carefully and collectively and set aside any emotion, pain, or fear associated with the task at hand.
5. Execute
6. Fight till you die, and if you’re not willing to die for it,(or see it through to the end) it’s not important to you and should go back to playing video games because you’re not ready to play in the big boy’s game and you’ll get hurt or worse.
Note*** When you get to the point in your life where your own “self competition” in your head is greater than any real competition in the physical world, you are truly unstoppable. If you’re not there yet follow the steps above until you are.
Now on kicking ass at life, here is 10 awesome ways.
1.Never give up
2. Always finish what you start.
3. If you want to be the best, then you have to work harder than whom ever is the best currently. Meaning if the “best” trains 3 hours a day, I need to go 3 hours and 1 minute.
4. Never walk away from a situation feeling like you should have said or done something but were too afraid to speak up. The emotional pain lasts way longer than the physical pain that might ensue in a situation like that.
5. All you have is today. Fuck the past, it’s not who you are, and fuck the future because it hasn’t happened yet. BE HERE NOW, this is the ONLY day you have.
6. What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger. What almost kills you makes humble, and what kills you, kills you, so don’t get killed.
7. Sometimes in life you have to eat a shit sandwich, so if you do, eat it fast and have a good attitude about it.
8. 99.9% of the time you can be right or you can be happy. So choose wisely, and remember that 0.01% odds are really shitty!
9. Choose your battles very wisely.
10. Eat well everyday, Sleep at least 6 hours per night, have sex 2-4 times per week and tell your friends and your family that you love them and appreciate them at every chance you get
Now go out there and apply some of this information that you have learned. This shit works for me and I want it to work for you, in fact I want you to come up with better stuff so I can log on to your blog one day and read about how something I wrote motivated you to do something different and great, and then you took it a step further, innovated on something I wrote, did, or said and made it better. It’s 2013 ladies and gentlemen and the world is not going to slow down. It will only get faster, and the more you feel left behind, the worse off you are. So get up, dust yourself off, and get back in the fight because we have a revolution to start.
I challenge anyone to apply these principles for the next 7 days. Record a 1-3 minute video of how utilizing these steps helped you, and I will feature you on my blog and I will give you a $25 -$100!
Here are the submission Requirements:
1. Upload the Video to You and link it to This blog post. (http://aefwolf.wpengine.com/?p=679)
2. Include my name and your name in your video and what steps you utilized in a specific situation to help you
3. Send me an email with the link to your Youtube video. email to [email protected] (Make sure to also send me your Pay pal email SO I CAN PAY YOU!)
4. I will pay you $25-$100 based on the creativity, story, and hits on your youtube. Any video that has over 300 hits before July 10th 2013 will automatically get the $100
5. I will pay out unlimited money for all good content. There will be no limit to submissions. So keep em coming.
I’d tell you good luck, but I don’t believe in luck, so go do it and get PAID SON!
If your interested in training on these things and joining forces with me on the application of these steps in your daily life as well please contact me through my blog and lets see what we can do together.
If you want more in-depth information like this, stay tuned for the podcast that will be starting in a couple of weeks or go check out my latest book “The Young Entrepreneurs Guide to Life” which can be found in the “Store” section of my website.
Thanks for taking the time to read this and I am looking forward to hearing your stories!!!!
Sincerely,
and if your still interested in reading HTWF&IP Here is the Book Link if your still interested
Click on Image to Buy Book
by Steve Wolf | Jun 12, 2013 | Business, Lifestyle, Mental
The supreme quality for leadership is unquestionably integrity. Without it, no real success is possible, no matter whether it is on a section gang, a football field, in an army, or in an office.
–Dwight D. Eisenhower
These past couples of weeks have led up to a defining moment in my young adult life. Shortly upon my return to the U.S. after my trip to Bali I walked in to a shit storm. Unlike most working professionals, the industry I have worked in for the past 6 years of my life has a way of creeping in to ones personal life. The line between professional and personal life gets very blurry because in the Multi-Level-Marketing industry, it is a relationship business, and at the end of the day, people have gotten in to business with me because they respected me, and they trusted me not just in business, but also in a personal way because they saw how I lived my life.
This is me last week 🙂
It’s sad how in desperate times, people who are the closest to you can hurt you the most. Not because that was their intention, but because when a person gets scared, they tend to do what is in the best interest for themselves and their family. In this past week, I watched the top guy (master distributor) in our company, someone who was a close friend and mentor of mine completely screw our mutual owner of our company and engage in the most below the belt tactics to get a group of distributors to follow him in to a different company.
The weekend leading up to this, I was in Las Vegas attending MFest with my buddy Cody. I had gotten news that a couple of groups in my organization had left to go to other companies. I had a feeling something bad was brewing and felt that I should get my ass to Salt Lake City to get to the bottom of it.
In my industry, when people start leaving, it’s because they have lost faith and feel that they cannot achieve their dream with our company. As a leader, when faced with this I have to ask myself some very hard questions, this is usually how they go:
- Was my distributor unwilling to take the necessary steps for him/herself to be successful?
- Did I fail as an “up-line” or leader because I didn’t support them accordingly?
- Did they leave because the company’s inability to offer value to this individual?
- Is our culture broken or not a culture that evokes growth and retention?
The distributors that I lost were not people who sucked, in fact they were very good friends of mine and some of the top people in my sales organization. Their departure sent me a clear message that they were done and fell in to one of the categories listed above. They explained that I didn’t fail them, but the company and the culture did, and although that made me feel a little better, I still lost them.
In the weeks leading up to my trip to Salt Lake City I was waiting to hear back from our master distributor on a possible investment in to out company. He told me that there were some promising people who were looking at investing in to our company. Sick of waiting, and having been told all kinds of things before that didn’t end up happening I decided to give him a deadline to come through on some of the promises that he was making.
The Deadline was on the Friday that I was on the way up to Vegas and the day after I suffered the loss of those two groups from my sales organization. After speaking with the Master Distributor, I felt as if he was bull-shitting me again, and buying time, something he is a master at. I took it upon myself to drive out to Utah and get to the bottom of it because I felt that I was just never going to get a straight answer over the phone. When I got there, I discovered that there were in fact NO investors and quickly realized that our master distributor and my friend and mentor Bryan was planning a strategic hostile takeover of the RevvNRG distributor base.
I was faced with the fear of my own loss, thinking to myself if this is successful and I end up on the wrong side of it, I’ll be broke and the 5 years I spent building this business will have gone to waste. I also thought about all of the relationships and promises I had made to people over the past 5 years and how my character and integrity would be questioned. I realized very quickly that I had to make a decision and do it fast as time was not on my side. It’s times like these that can confuse a person what the “right” thing to do is. I mean, here I have my friend and mentor in one ear telling me that I should follow him using every single persuasive tactic in the book to get me to get behind him. I was conflicted because I had a feeling that our mutual owner had no idea what was happening. When I asked Bryan if he had gone to Scotty (Our owner) and told him what he was planning, Bryan tried to dodge the answer in his usual style answering with out a simple yes or no, but basically explained to me that he hadn’t in fact discussed any of this with Scotty in a very eloquent way.
I have been alive long enough to know that if I act without integrity, I may get away with it for a while, but eventually the lies and deceit will catch up to me. This is why I live so rigorously honest today. Doing the right thing, especially when no one is looking is a matter of life and death for me personally. When I got sober almost 13 years ago, I was a liar, cheat, and a thief. It took me years to get honest with myself and to make all of the amends to clear the wreckage of my past. Eventually, after year’s sobriety, hard work, dedication and rigorous honesty with my fellows, and myself, I achieved what few people in life ever do; I was even with the world. I had paid back all the money, made all of the apologies and lived my life in a way where I would work carefully at all my endeavors as to not create new wreckage, and when I did make mistakes, I would correct them immediately preventing those shortcomings from festering and eating away at my soul.
I watched many men fail to do the right thing ultimately leading them to drink again, wind up in jail or just live a miserable existence filled with guilt, anger, and shame. I vowed a long time ago to NEVER end up like this. My mentors were gleaming examples of the type of life you get to live by always acting with integrity.
They led by example and would always tell me that serenity won’t come from a pile of money but from the respect of your peers. Perry P would always say, “you can’t be one guy in one area, and another guy in another area, a scum bag is a scum bag even if the guy does some good things too.” Perry always made it black and white, he’d say “You either tell the truth or you don’t kid, there’s no in between.” My other mentor Mike W. used to tell me that by standing aside and doing nothing when I could bring someone or something to justice by telling the truth was just as bad as the guy lying about it to begin with.
The bottom line is that I was in a position where I had knowledge of something happening that if brought to the right people, the lies would be exposed and something potentially harmful and hurtful could be stopped. I called a couple close friends who were long time Multi Level Marketing guys and sought some council with close friends. Just as my mentors would have advised, told me go forward and expose the lies.
I broke the story to our owner Scotty and called my team to action to help me prepare a conference call the field explaining and trying to prime them for what was about to ensue.
I began to get attacked from all angles and the shit storm commenced. I began to see how much or how little influence I had on the group as a whole. Even with factual empirical evidence people still believed what they wanted too. It was as if I was telling them the sky was blue and they still didn’t believe me even though they could walk outside and see it with their own eyes.
As each day went by I kept finding out more and more bad stuff about my former mentor and master distributor Bryan. Turns out that he had quite a few back door deals, and that his current financial situation didn’t seem to add up to what he would have me believe. Allegedly, there were large sums of money MISSING, and outstanding debts from prior lawsuits that were being paid off. Money given to him as an investment that was meant for opening international markets for RevvNRG never made it to the intended recipient.
After watching this drama unfold I couldn’t help but feel relieved that I made the right decision, but I felt remorseful towards Bryan’s wife and kids who I had come to know over the years and probably had little to no knowledge of what was happening. I also began to feel really bad for all of the distributors that were caught in the middle of this and made a quick decision based out of fear because they felt they were going to lose something or not achieve their dreams without Bryan.
I spent the next week on the phone with our owner Scotty trying to come up with a solution that would save the company. A couple of days after the siege, Scotty and his wife sue were feeling the pressure and it was time to stand up and make some tough decisions.
Within days of the fallout, the sides were divided and the people left on our side quickly got to work on a solution. Within days we put our heads together and aligned ourselves with the right people coming to a solution that would not only fix the current situation, but in one fail swoop eliminate and take care of some future and past problems that we had as well.
The moral of the story was that truth, and doing the right eventually paid off as it always has. There is no such thing as a short cut, or luck, you make your own way, and if you do it dishonestly or burning bridges along the way, eventually there will be nowhere or no one left to work with or help you out in a time of need. The RevvNRG brand lives on and is about to be 10 times bigger and in 11 new countries 😉 hint hint!!
As I finish writing this it is close to midnight and is technically my birthday. I’ll be turning 29 years old today, and even though I’m far from home and have been stressed out over the past couple of weeks, I’m going to sleep well tonight knowing that I have a clear conscious, a bright future and a hell of a lot of people who love and respect me. That’s a whole lot of things to be grateful for.
I am excited to see how the next couple of weeks unfold, my prediction, EPIC!!!!!!
For more information on the what’s happening in my MLM business, stay tuned to this blog and my Facebook page as I will be posting videos and blogging about the big news coming!!!!
by Steve Wolf | Jun 2, 2013 | Business, Giving Back, Lifestyle
In the great words of the late Perry P. (my friend, mentor and role model in the later part of my formative years) he told me: “Steve, In life, believe none of what you hear, and only half of what you see. ”
I have been in business for a long time now. In about two weeks I’ll be 29 years old. I haven’t work a “W-2” type job taking a paycheck since I was 18 years old. First it was my clothing company All Else Failed Ind., I built that company out of front room in my little dingy apartment in South Los Angeles. Everyone told me it was a stupid idea, my partner Justin ended up quitting 6 months in to it, but by the end of the first year, I was selling my clothes in 35 states and out in the UK.
When I was 20 years old, I got in to the financial services business breaking off and starting my firm in 2003, I built that little brokerage in to a company doing 10-15 million a month in transactions. During that time I published my first book about my life growing up which I have now sold thousands of copies of.
When the industry crashed in 2008, my life fell apart. My mentor died, I lost my business leaving me about $140k in debt, parents were struggling, broke up with a girlfriend of 2 years, my best friend at the time screwed me over and a con-artist posing as roommate stole my last $10,000 that I had.
I realized that when I lost all of the material stuff, and my status and prestige was taken from me when life humbled me, the only thing I really had left that mattered to me in my life was my honor, loyalty and integrity. I watched fair weather friends disappear when the money was gone. I lost people who I thought were my friends over money and women. I lost hope at times and was furious with god because I couldn’t understand why he would take such innocent people away from me.
When I finally came in to acceptance about the reality of my life, I began to question everything, the meaning of my life, who my friends were, who I thought I was or was supposed to be, and generally everything.
I made a commitment to myself that no matter what happened, no matter how bad it got, that I would never sell my integrity. My idea of success changed. Instead of wanting to get money to be rich, I started to pursue happiness, and serve the truth, defy the lies, and get willing to be in a place where I was willing to sacrifice anything including my life to stand up for what I believe in.
When I made this decision, life got simple. It was easy for me to determine what people were good for me, and what people I needed to cut of my life. In business, I found a company and built an organization in to the 1000’s to watch it fall apart by some unscrupulous people. Then I got in to another company, built it in to the 1000’s again to watch it fall apart one more time by some unscrupulous people. I have learned now more than ever that no matter what someone says to you, the only way you can really judge them is by their actions. I have been sold the world by people. People I’ve been in business with have promised me the world and were really nice to me up until the time I disagreed with them. Perry P. was right all along. I should have only judged by actions, trusted my gut an intuition, but that’s been hard to navigate when your young or new at something or trusting in the success of the edified people. Regardless of the inequalities that I have felt, and putting behind all of the times that I have been lied to, or stabbed in the back in my personal and professional life, no one can say I was dishonest. No one can say that I told lies or mislead people with malicious intent. Basically, through thick and thin and like Perry, and all my other mentors, I remained honorable.
I am at another one of those transitional times in my career. It’s exciting to me because I know things I didn’t know before and I am finally going to get a chance to prove myself. In order to see if you outgrew your Sensei or guru, you must challenge them, if you win, than your right, you became better, more enlightened, but if you lose, you’re a fool. So if your going to go at it alone, you must be ready to accept all of the consequences that come with it, and further more be ready to humble yourself if you did in fact bite off more than you can chew. In my case, I’m as ready as I’ll ever be in this moment and it’s time to start a new chapter. This is the only moment I have, my conscience is clear, my side of the street is clean and I’m ready to put a dent in the world!
Today, Im a free agent again. I am young, single, healthy, well-educated and street smart. I know more now than I ever have before in my life. To me, I have found true serenity in the way I live because I realize that despite all of the injustice in the world and all of the suffering, I choose to be a part of the solution. NO ONE GETS A WAY WITH ANYTHING, eventually the world has a way of correcting the imbalances.
I will be giving a really big update this week, so stay tuned to this blog, I’m going to change the world, and I’m taking as many people who want to go with me.
