2014 has been tumultuous year for a lot of people including myself. There are so many problems in the world here and abroad that it can be hard to simply focus on the task(s) at hand. It is easy to get caught up in unproductive actions when you have idle time and no new prospects on the horizon. Low productivity and a lack of results can become a habit-forming sickness if you let it.
After life throws a couple proverbial kicks in the balls or as I like to say “shit sandwiches” at you, it can kill your confidence. In fact, you may have long streak of bad luck, or a shitty set of circumstances that has led you to the point of disparity. These “tests” are simply life experience that will allow you to build character, and although I would never wish bad things upon my fellow-man, shit happens and that’s life, so you are going to have to deal with it whether you like it or not.
So what to you do?
There are many ways to deal with shitty life circumstances, but really when you get right down two it, most people’s lives boil down to either of these scenarios:
1) Not enough money, too much time.
2) To much time, not enough money.
In my 30 years here on planet earth, I have seen and experienced a lot of people, places and things. Very little actually shocks or surprises me these days and that’s a good thing because I am not looking to be shocked or surprised. Instead, these days I’m looking for security, successful relationships and a long and vibrant life. When I have wound up in one or more of these scenarios over the years I would spin out really quick.
The best years I had making money were the years my personal relationships suffered the most, mainly because work came before everything else, and if there was work to be done, you weren’t important. This is no way to live unless you want to be a fat, bald, divorced rich guy who dates 22-year-olds in his late 40’s.
My worst years financially were the years that I grew the most as a human being. I found compassion and empathy for people who struggle that I never understood until I went through it. I made my best friends in life during those hard time and I believe it is due to the fact that when you have no material things to offer someone, then all you have to give is your friendship, loyalty and honor . To me those ideals are so much more important than money when it comes to who I associate with, and more importantly who I trust. It took me losing almost everything at 23 years old to realize it.
Finding the balance is always the hardest thing to do. I am a strict believer that those with the ability to reason (Homo Sapiens) have the hardest time living in a natural state. I’ll give you an example why:
Birds migrate to move from areas of low or decreasing resources to areas of high or increasing resources. The two primary resources being sought are food and nesting locations. If one of the birds had the ability to reason, he would negotiate renting a warm barn in the winter and find a way to store enough supplies to last him and his family the winter saving him and his family the burdensome task of flying several thousands of miles twice a year. The Birds brain does not allow for reasoning of this kind, in fact the bird couldn’t really even explain why it migrates, it just knows, as if nature set it up that way. If birds simply stopped migrating they would surely die by way of extreme weather and shortage of food.
You see, the ability to reason is a gift and a curse. If used properly and efficiently, a human can go on to live an extraordinary life but unfortunately this is not the case for most of us, and if you don’t believe me, take a stroll down your Facebook news feed and bask in sea of useless time wasting shit that gets posted on a daily basis. I know this because I have found myself getting sucked in to some stupid video and then next thing I know I lost an hour of my day looking at clip after clip of useless things that do not benefit my life in one way shape or form.
If the world was in perfect balance, there would no wars, no poor people, no suffering. On the flip side of that, If there were perfect balance you would not be allotted the opportunity to choose what type of life you want to live. In a basic sense, human nature as we know it is constant tug-o-war between what we really are, who we think we are, and what we want to become. Personally I find the most serenity in being comfortable and grateful for who I am now, and what I have now while always striving to better myself, and my situation. You can’t change the past, and you cannot tell the future so hope for the best but always plan for a worst case scenario situation.
The truth is that any person possess the ability to spend their time being and doing productive things in life regardless of any one or multiple situations. You do not need to be rich to be happy, you need to understand what kind of life you want and then live it, that’s the key.
So if you are currently in a situation like I wrote about above, I have put together a little matrix that may help you understand how to find balance and make some sense out of what I am trying to convey.
As you can see from my highly complex academic chart, if you work too much and spend a lot of time doing shit you don’t like doing, then you are going to be unhappy. If you strive for a good to great balance between work and play, then you are going to be a much happier person. The perfect balance does not exist, so stop being a perfectionist and strive for something obtainable. Come on, it’s not f%*&^& rocket science!
Tips and Tricks
Here is what you can do when you have To much money and not enough time.
INVEST and SAVE. How do you think the top 2% did it. The easiest way to make money and spend less time working is by making your money work for you, so when it’s rolling in, get it while you can, but then invest and save it for the times in life when there is little or no money coming in.
Plan time for loved ones even when it’s going to cost you! Don’t make the mistake of sacrificing opportunities to build memories with friends and family chasing the dollar. My mentor Mike W. told me on his death-bed “Steve, I’m not dying in this bed thinking of all the missed opportunities in life where I could have made more money, instead I’m lying here in utter gratitude that my life allowed me the opportunity to spend a lot of time with the ones I loved and my livelihood allowed for us to have enough money to be happy.” I’ve never heard it better put than that.
Try to Automate the system, meaning same or more income, less of you needing to be at your “job”. Read the “4 Hour Work Week” by Timothy Ferris, it will lay some insight in how to go about this.
Continue to look for opportunities that will allow you to get more of your time back with the same or more amount of income, trust me, it’s very possible!
Now, lets talk about what to do when you are in the opposite side of the situation: To much time, not enough money.
Survival Mode, this means that because of the lack of income, you cannot be stupid with money. You need to make it last but do it so but keeping the quality of your life intact as much as possible.
Use this as an opportunity to work on yourself, your mind, your body and spirit. Go to the GYM, go do some Yoga, go SURFING, don’t waste the time playing video games or staring at Facebook for 6 hours a day. If you have some time, go use it to your advantage, and go do some of the things that your job never allowed you to do!
Look for work, and don’t be prideful. If it got bad enough for me, I would go dig ditches, get unemployment, and what ever I needed to sustain the quality of life that I have even if it meant doing work that I feel is below me or take government subsidies until I’m back up on my feet.
DO NOT GO IN TO DEBT! Never ever ever ever ever put things on credit or take out loans with out a solid plan of getting out of that debt. If you have to live on credit to sustain your lifestyle, than you are living beyond your means and you need to cut the fat, don’t be prideful, you can buy that new car next year when you get that job and can pay cash.
Don’t get depressed. It’s not the end of the world, opportunities find their way to people who are looking for them. Even a broken clock is right twice a day, and I am sure that you are not a broken clock, so don’t let the bad times get you down, just embrace them, accept it and move on diligently.
Enjoy the rest of the Week.
Happy Thursday, The weekend is almost here!!!!!!!!!!!!!
When I was 17, my mentor Mike Watson asked me to write a list of all the things I wanted in my life. Here is what I wrote
-Get my own place.
-Get a car.
-Get a girlfriend
-Get a job and be able to support myself with out the help of my family.
By the time I was 18 years old, I had gotten these things. I had a little apartment in South Los Angeles, bought a 95 Acura Integra for $5,000 and met a pretty girl that I was with. I was working at Guitar Center in Lawndale CA as sales rep which was a step up from my last job working the burrito line at Chipotle. I went back to my mentor and told him that I had gotten everything that I wrote down on my list. He told me to go make another list, but this time dream bigger.
My next list looked something like this.
-Go to Jr. College.
-Move in to a bigger place.
-Make enough money to where I have some left after bills at the end of the month.
-Get a truck!
-Start a business
When I turned 20, again I finished these things. I enrolled at El Camino Jr. College paid for by a scholarship I won in a persuasive speech contest. I found a nice little house in Lomita CA I moved in with a couple of friends and started my first business, a clothing company called All Else Failed Ind. He told me to keep going, that I can have whatever I wanted as long as I put it down on paper and was willing to work for it. (So I did, but I went big on this one)
-Make 100k or more per year
-Transfer into a UC/CSU school to finish my undergraduate degree.
-Write a book
-Make an album (Im a musician)
-Buy a house
-Buy a nice Car
By age 23, I published my first book “The Rich Kid Syndrome.” I moved from Los Angeles to San Diego to buy my first home in Oceanside CA, and then transferred to CSU San Marcos after spending the summer of 2007 Studying abroad in Spain, Italy and France. This was also my first $100,000 year and I earned quite a bit more the following year with my little brokerage firm that started in Carlsbad. I was doing so well, I decided to buy and new BMW, and I bought it with Cash 🙂 I also finally completed my first full-length solo album entitled “The Midnight Songbook.”
As my 24th birthday passed, it seemed as if I could do anything. It was like every single year, I would just write a new list of things down that I wanted, and then I would get them. I felt unstoppable, and invincible. Then the year 2008 came and everything changed.
It only took about 6 months after the economy crashed to lose just about everything that I had worked for. Aside from the fact that I had lost all steams of income, I ended up being 160K in debt to boot.
Just when I thought it couldn’t get any worse, I broke up with the girlfriend of 2 years, my dad went to prison, my mentor Mike (pictured above) died from cancer, my best friend screwed me over and I was conned out of my last $10,000 by a person posing as a roommate of mine who stole my identity and flew the coop. That’s what I call a bad year. I was so beaten down by all the loss in and around my life that it was hard to get back up and keep going. In fact some days it was down right direly depressing and some very bad thoughts entered my mind.
I realized that even though I had some major setbacks, and life threw me a couple of shit sandwiches, I had 2 choices. 1)Quit and kill yourself 2) Eat the shit sandwiches and make a list of things you want (as it has always seem to work before). So after a long day of gathering my thoughts and some meditation at the beach, here is the list that I made.
-Finish college
-Publish my second book
-Find a new industry to work in
-Surround myself with better people.
-Climb out of the hole (meaning get out of debt)
So, I picked up the pieces of my life and got back to work. I was 24, in serious debt, couldn’t find a job that would pay me nearly anything I was making in the mortgage game and all my “friends” or at least the people who I thought were my friends seemed to disappear with the money, the girlfriend and the stuff. I literally just had to hit the reset button on my life and start over.
I got in to Multi-level marketing, first with a company called Mona-Vie and then eventually in a company called RevvNRG. I always thought MLM was a scam but saw a lot of people making money in it. I figured if some barley high-school educated bozo’s from the Utah could make a couple million bucks on the Network Marketing game, how hard could it be? So I jumped in with both feet.
It took me about 18 months before I saw my first $10,000 month. As it turns out, you really can make some money in MLM. The next 3 years of my life seemed as if I was getting back in to my groove. I was traveling around the country, building a huge organization, making great money again and speaking on stages around the world telling stories of success and rising back up once life had knocked me down. I graduated college, published my next book “The Young Entrepreneurs Guide to Life.”
I felt relieved in a lot of ways. I felt as if I had a handle on things, life threw me some curve balls but I learned how to bend and fold in the situations and survive. As I was nearing 28 Years old, I began to reach my peak again. Now that I had the money game on point it was time for me to start living again, for me, this meant lifestyle.
What do I mean by lifestyle? Well to me “life” encapsulates all the things a human being has to do to live. Meaning we need to eat sleep, make a living, have friends etc. “Style” is a manner of doing something, so when you put those two together what you have is how a human being goes about living. I’ve come to understand that living life can be done many ways. Some people live very safe, they like a 9-5 job with benefits and 2 weeks vacation. Some people don’t even get that choice, they feel stuck in their life due to circumstances. Example: The man who worked as a mechanic his whole life because that’s what his father did and grandfather father did before him or the idea that the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree. Well, thats all bullshit at least to me it was.
So I picked up a few new hobbies, and got back in to someones that I had neglected due my crazy ass work schedule. Here is what it looked like.
So I finished, college, published my new book, completely changed the people I surrounded myself with and found myself 5 years in to a promising industry that was allowing my to travel the world, live my dreams and crawl out of the black hole that I had lived in. I wish i could end the story here, because then it would be a happy ending, but there was one more twist that was going to happen to me before I hit the age of 30. But I at least got my dream trip of traveling around South East Asia and Surfing in Bali twice before shit hit the fan again. (see below)
And then I got back to America. in fact it was Early May of 2013 when I arrived home from Bali for the second time that year to find out the master distributor of the Network Marketing company I was involved in was trying to do an end-run on the distributor base and secretly move them in to another company all together. When I caught him in the middle of it, I blew the whistle (get that full story here).
In a mad rush to try to save what was left of the company, I began negotiations to broker a buyout from another MLM company. In fact that is where I was last year on my 29th birthday. Even though we were able to get a deal done, it ultimately fell apart because as it turns out the owner of the company I was staying loyal to was scarred and greedy.
Fortunately, being down the “put all your eggs in to one basket” road before, I had some back up plans this time around. I had learned how to trade the FOREX market (read that story here) for some time and I had a little Tech-Start-up called Roommatefax.comthat I had been working on for a little time. Although I though I would have at least another year of residual income to count on from my network marketing ventures, I didn’t so I had to execute that back-up plans a little faster and take some side consulting work to make ends meet till I got them off the ground.
That brings us to the present, and as I cross the threshold into my thirties, I took some time to reflect, and these are the questions that kept repeating to me in my head.
-Have I lived honestly and had the best intentions?
-Did I take all the risks necessary to pursue success no matter the cost and safety?
-Would those (dead or alive) who came before me and made sacrifices for me so I could get ahead in life be proud of the man I have become?
-Will I be able to look my child in the eyes one day and proudly tell him or her about the choices I have made?
-If I were to die tomorrow, did I accomplish everything I set out to do? and when some of those things failed, did I see them through till the end and learn something from the experience?
-Have I lived with Honor, Integrity and loyalty?
-Was I a good son, brother, friend and human being?
I can honestly and confidently answer yes to all these questions, and that makes me grateful. I always thought by 30 years old, I’d have a million dollars and today I’m 30 and I don’t have a million dollars, in fact, I’m far from it, but what I do have is something that money can’t buy. What I have is something a lot of rich men spent their entire life chasing but could never seem to find. It’s the thing that most people live their whole life trying to find but it eludes them. What is it? Love. I’m surrounded by it and all the things that happened to me in my life were for a reason, they were to keep me safe from people, places and things, and sometimes from myself. I had lots of guardian angels that came in the form of people and circumstances.
I did my best to put Love out in the world, to give it when I could and try to keep the faith that it was there even when I couldn’t see it. I found hope, even when good people died or went to jail. I make hard amends to people I disliked, and let go of hatred for those I could justifiably hold resentments against. I found out what kind of man I was when life got hard, and saw what I was capable of when surrounded by the right people and situations. I learned to have a thick skin, be fearless and most importantly, not take life to seriously.
So all that’s left to do is make a new list. The list will probably have some things like get married, have kids etc. For me, it’s an open book. A big blank canvas waiting to be filled with life, love and memories. Fortunately, I’ve got quite a bit of experience now and I believe my best years are ahead. My 20’s were the minor leagues, and now its time for the major’s and I can’t wait to start playing!
Thanks for all the love and support! See you at the top!
In the winter of 2013 while searching for business opportunities (like I always am) an idea came to. I wanted to start something new and since I had been out of the CEO seat for a couple of years, I really wanted to make a splash. I was looking for a BIG idea, and guess what, I found it!
J. Candace Covington
I was in my car driving on the freeway thinking very hard about new business ventures (I like to go out for a drive to think). Then it hit me, initially the idea I had was doing something like a dating website/app but specifically for the purpose of finding a roommate. BING, lightbulb. I immediately called some people I respect to get their opinion of my idea, one of those people was my friend and now business partner J. Candace Covington. She loved the idea and helped me vet it out more adding some innovation to the mix by adding the idea of combing background and credit checking to the profiling system giving us a complete one-stop-shop for a “rooommate-finding/vetting” system. It was gold, now the next step was to see if someone had created this before us.
Watch the Roommatefax promo video by clicking this Image now!
My initial reaction was that someone would have had thought of this before because it was so simple and right in front of us. “Who wouldn’t use this?” I kept asking myself that over and over again. Knowing the pain we have all gone through living with a bad roommate(s) or renting a place to a bad tenant(s), I would have paid hundreds or thousands to avoid that painful process. So, we starting researching, and sure enough, no one had done it yet! That’s the crazy thing about a great idea, some descent ideas become great simply because no one has done it yet. Have you ever thought of an invention or business and then saw your idea on an infomercial years later? That’s happened to me before, and more than once too. If you are anything like me, you are a methodical person with a dash of crazy. You see, to run with an idea and try build a company around it is no easy feat. Although this is not my first rodeo when it comes to start-up’s the environment changes daily, especially if you’re in Tech. What I have learned over the years is that some can get lucky once, rarely do they get lucky twice, and you pull it off a third time, it’s not luck, it’s a learned skill and habitual.
Jim Hamerly Ph.D.
So, knowing we had a solid idea, and no one else was doing it, we ran with it. Filed all the paperwork, raised a little seed money, wrote a business plan and starting building a team. We needed advisors, a development team, an attorney, and most importantly, we were going to need some investors! The amount of work and sweat equity that go in to the beginning stages of a company are dizzying, and most people can’t imagine doing it because the name of the game is work for free and ask a lot of people for help your first year, and then maybe you will get a shot at the big time. Remember that 95% of small business fail, and you don’t even want to know the percentage rate for start-up ventures! I eventually brought Dr. Jim Hamerly the idea. Jim started the entrepreneurs track at the CSUSM (my Alma Matter) and helped “reform” the school of business there. He was the former VP of AOL Time Warner and former VP of Netscape (He has so many big accomplishments, I could write a blog about it 😉 )I met him while I was giving a lecture the CSUSM Entrepreneurs society 4 years ago. We quickly became friends and shared many of the same business philosophies. I would run ideas by him, but I had never seen him as excited as he was when I ran the Roommatefax.com idea by him. I immediately asked him to be our lead advisor to the company and he accepted.
Eric D. Morton
Armed with a small team and a little bit of capital, we picked up an attorney advisor Eric Morton. We realized quickly that if we were going to make this happen in a big way we would need to team up with a law firm that could advise us on any problems that could arise in the future. Although I have owned and operated several companies, we quickly learned that if one day we were to go public there were many things that needed to be taken into consideration and that it is best to tackle those things early on. Eric Morton has played an integral part in helping us set up the business properly and filing our trademarks and copyrights to protect the hard work that everyone has put forth to get this project going along with user agreements among other necessary documents.
Prakash Chegu
We had spent countless hours researching the market place and now we knew what we needed to have to make us stand out from rest. The next step proved to be the most difficult. Who was going to help make this dream a reality? We knew time was not on our side but it was extremely important that we picked the right development team to build the Roommatefax site and app. We began a checklist of things that we were looking for in a development team and began interviewing teams across the country. Some of the criteria most important to us included the development team believing in the idea (like it was their own), be in the United States, willing to work closely with us and have successfully launched websites and apps on all platforms. So after meeting with several firms, we were introduced to Prakash Chegu. Prakash was really excited about the project, and met all the criteria and best of all, he was local and really easy to work with. We did some wire frames, cut a couple checks, and the development of our dream commenced.
Shaun Briggs
Finally we were going to need some awesome design work for the company. My good friend Shaun Briggsanswered the call. I have known Shaun for over 6 years now and his design work is so good, that as a designer myself I feel like I stand in his shadow. I was always told by my mentor that you should look for people better than you, and then work with them. In a strange turn of events, it turned out that Shaun actually used to work with Prakash 10 years ago when he was running his brokerage firm in San Diego, that was fate, and in the start-up phase of a company, you need all the help and good luck you can get! Its been a year and a half since we started out on this mission and a lot of blood sweat and tears have gone into this project. And I knew this was going to be a lot of work putting all the pieces together. Although it is nice to know that we are on the home stretch of the development process, the real hard work is about to begin. So where are we at now? We are currently seeking investors while getting ready to close out our seed round of funding that will continue until about mid-late July. Then we plan on launching our beta versions of the site and app (on IOS and Android) by late summer. Currently we have a profile on crowdfunder.comwhere we can seek investors from friends, family, and supporters of us. We know we are in the toughest phase of the start-up process and are ready to take it on. So if you or anyone you know is interested in getting involved in our company as an advisor, investor or member of the team, please get in touch with us here.
Thank you so much for all the love and support. We are looking forward to helping a lot of people with our idea, and truly believe it will make the world a better place! -Steve Wolf
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In about a month (June 13 to be exact) I am turning 30 years old. It seems that even though I have arrived at this point in my life with a nonchalant free-spirited attitude not giving any real weight, worry or concern to the age milestone, people around me seem to think that it is a huge life changing event. I never really understood the phenomena of people getting anxious each year they grow older. For me, I have always believed in the buddhist ideology that our body started dying the day we were born and more importantly that this (life) is all temporary. I also did most of my radical changing in the early parts of my 20’s. Meaning that from where I am sitting today, I have direction, purpose and drive and I am not nearly as impressionable as I was at 22.
Before I go off on a philosophical rant about my metaphysical beliefs in modern Tibetan Buddhism, lets just agree that it’s impossible to get younger, all we have is the body were given, and one day, like it or not, I am going to physically DIE! I cannot change these things no mater what I do, therefore for me to get upset that my body is getting older is about as crazy as crying because the sun keeps coming up every morning.
So why is turning 30 such a big f&^%ing deal. Well, depends on who you talk to me. For me, the only real mile stone that I set out to accomplish by 30 years old was that I would stay sober (as I have been since 16 years old) and that I would be a millionaire. Fortunately I am still sober after 13 years and counting, but I haven’t quite made my first million dollars yet, but I’ve done ok. Perhaps just because we’re 30, we fill its high time we get our shit together. All my friends seem to be getting married, having babies and doing the things “adults” do. There is nothing wrong with that. Some of my friends refuse to do this as for me, I have always been open to it. In fact I look forward to getting married and having kids of my own to indoctrinate in to mini me’s! For fun I took a list that I found on Buzzfeed.com entitled “30 signs you’re turning 30.” and added my own twist 🙂 Enjoy.
You get carded, and your first instinct is, “AWESOME, then your annoyed.
Instead of drunken party photos, your Facebook friends are all about the baby pics.…and marathon times.
Chicks you used to fantasize about got old, married, had kids and seem more like your mom did 5 years ago.
You have 10,000 business cards from old jobs that you have no idea what to do with.
You find celebs who are in their early thirties and think, “There’s still hope, or it’s time to switch careers.”
You’re getting increasingly scared to check your credit score.
You’re seriously thinking about getting a dog. No, having a baby. No, definitely getting a dog.
When you do drink beer, it’s not Spuds choice, it’s Imported or micro-brewed locally from organic hops.
You’d rather pay a little more for a “nice, clean” hotel room than cram into a hostel with 12 of your friends.
Everything cool is being marketed to people younger than you now.
You’ve definitely lost the enzyme that lets you digest Taco Bell.
There’s an increasing number of musical artists you haven’t even heard of.
You realize your parents were your age (or younger!) when they had you, and you start cutting them some major slack.
Teen slang words like “YOLO” makes you viscerally angry.
An 11-year-old has to show you how to do something on your smart phone.
When you watch teen movies/TV shows, you find yourself siding more with the parents than the kids.
I got in to Multi-level marketing, first with a company called Mona-Vie and then eventually in a company called RevvNRG. I always thought MLM was a scam but saw a lot of people making money in it. I figured if some barley high-school educated bozo’s from the Utah could make a couple million bucks on the Network Marketing game, how hard could it be? So I jumped in with both feet.
In about a month (June 13 to be exact) I am turning 30 years old. It seems that even though I have arrived at this point in my life with a nonchalant free-spirited attitude not giving any real weight, worry or concern to the age milestone, people around me seem to think that it is a huge life changing event. I never really understood the phenomena of people getting anxious each year they grow older. For me, I have always believed in the buddhist ideology that our body started dying the day we were born and more importantly that this (life) is all temporary. I also did most of my radical changing in the early parts of my 20’s. Meaning that from where I am sitting today, I have direction, purpose and drive and I am not nearly as impressionable as I was at 22.
