Jesse Elder on Building Thriving Businesses By Following Your Passion – EP 116

Interview with Jesse Elder

Jesse Elder on Building Thriving Businesses By Following Your Passion

Featured on This Episode: Jesse Elder

✅ What he does: Jesse Elder is a speaker, mentor, entrepreneur, and performance coach. He’s devoted his life to sharing his principles of self-mastery with people worldwide. Through his Mind Vitamin videos, online courses, events, and private coaching, Jesse helps thousands of others create their own success and fulfilment, reclaim their personal freedom, and master their reality.

💬 Words of wisdom: “Within that space of clarity, ideas are born. Clarity creates speed.” – Jesse Elder

 🔎 Where to find Jesse Elder: Facebook | Instagram | LinkedIn

Key Takeaways with Jesse Elder

• Most of our definitions of success are inherited. Make up your own.
• Why a creative life is more fulfilling than a competitive one.
• Why your self-worth should never be defined by what’s in your bank account.
• How our thoughts create our reality and results in life.
• Why martial arts and fighting are a pathway to presence and discipline.
• Most people go through life thinking about how to help themselves. To taste true success and fulfillment, create value for others.
• Having the courage to leave a successful business to follow your purpose.
• You can buy material possessions, but you can’t buy back time.
• The importance of having a trusted tribe with which you can share your successes and vulnerabilities.

Jesse Elder on Make Time for the Things That Light You Up

Jesse Elder Tweetables

“I found that as long as I stay doing the thing that inspires me, that lights me up the most, that this really is a universe of infinite supply.” - Jesse Elder Click To Tweet “When somebody is not living a life that contains elements of adventure or intrigue or personal interest, the default is a very fearful, very fragile, seemingly safe, but actually miserable existence.” - Jesse Elder Click To Tweet

Resources

• Jesse Elder Website
• Follow Jesse Elder on Facebook | Instagram | LinkedIn

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Read the Full Transcript with Jesse Elder

Justin Donald: Well, Jesse, it’s so great to have you on the show. You’re one of my favorite people to have conversations with. And so, what better than this opportunity where we get to hang and talk and you know what? A bunch of people gets to listen in on it.

 

Jesse Elder: Justin, I’ve been looking forward to this, man. It’s like, we’ve been friends for a long time. And of course, I’ve known you’ve had the podcast. And I think every time we get together, one of us is like, damn, we should have recorded that. Like, that was really good.

 

Justin Donald: Yeah, totally. I leave our conversations, our meetups just with this desire to know more, to learn, looking bigger picture, thinking about things, or considering things, maybe I haven’t. Your life is fascinating. So, one of the things for me that I appreciate is that you and I have taken such different paths, and so, I love getting a perspective from you on another way to do cool stuff. So, I appreciate that. And I can’t wait to share some of the cool experiences, stories, lessons learned, successes, success habits, all the cool stuff that we generally get into.

 

Jesse Elder: Quite the setup, Justin.

 

Justin Donald: Yeah, yeah. I mean, no pressure here, Jesse, but now, I feel like you got to deliver.

 

Jesse Elder: I will 100% deliver, and if not totally satisfied, I will give them all of their money back that they’re paying for this conversation.

 

Justin Donald: So generous. So generous. Well, wonderful. Well, why don’t we dig in by– I always love taking a walk through kind of people’s lives. Who made it? What made you the way that you are? You’ve got this cool life where you built a massive business, you built a very successful practice, but you have always been willing to walk away at any time. You’ve had some different online businesses, but you’re the type of person that it’s very refreshing because you’re like, hey, money doesn’t really mean anything to me. It’s simply a means to transfer value.

 

And you live that at the highest of levels and you want to live for today. And so, you’re willing to hang up the cleats at any point in time where you feel like it may be disrupting your lifestyle or what you truly want out of life. So, yeah, how did you get to this point? I mean, you’ve been successful but with a different set of rules than most people have.

 

Jesse Elder: Well, I appreciate that, Justin. And I think it starts with, we all have definitions of success. And most of the definitions that we adopt and that we absorb are sort of inherited. And there are things that really don’t need explanation. They’re pretty self-evident. If you’re not feeling healthy and you don’t have a body that can move and do the things you want to do, well, then you probably don’t have that in your success definition.

 

Money is such an easy one because it’s measurable. You can see the impact of it in your life and you can feel the impact when it’s not flowing or when you’re not at peace with the amounts that are coming in or what those amounts are then doing. And so, there was self-evident, I think, sort of signposts for success.

 

But one of the things that so far, seems to be working pretty well is that I don’t live in competition with anybody. And in fact, I think competition while a very useful frame in a very useful concept is a little bit unnatural because there’s a very human tendency to humanize the natural world, where you see like the– remember those motivational success posters at the mall in the 90s, Successories?

 

Justin Donald: Oh, yeah.

 

Jesse Elder: We see this, we go in through the concrete and there’s some quote underneath about, be like the weed, don’t take no for an answer, all this kind of stuff. You’re like the fricking weed probably isn’t sitting there going like, all right. I got to just break through a little more concrete today. It just takes the path of least resistance. It’s just this way, no. That way, okay. And it just exists.

 

And so, there’s this very human tendency to humanize and romanticize and glorify or demonize various aspects of the natural world. Pretty sure the natural world isn’t doing that. And so, it always felt to me that competition outside of very specific situational circumstances, I mean, I was a fighter for years and that’s not the environment that you want a participation trophy, like you want to know unequivocally who’s the victor and who’s the loser. And that gives you feedback and that helps you to determine how do I need to adjust my training.

 

So, within very situational circumstances, competition is wonderful, but as a global approach towards living life, I’ve just observed that it’s messed up a lot more people than it’s actually helped because then you end up with all this sort of super compensation where someone, let’s say, a guy doesn’t feel really happiness in his relationship or he just doesn’t feel good about himself as a person because maybe he’s doing work that’s outside of his values, but he’s justifying it by just making a killing and reinvesting his money and getting these great returns.

 

And so, there is that little light of significance where he feels like, well, I may be failing in these other areas of my life, but I’m going to make it up on volume in this one. And then if I can just get enough success in this one area. And so, I think that’s very natural. There’s nothing wrong with it. But I made the conscious choice probably about 10 years ago that I was going to do everything in my power to live a creative life versus a competitive one.

 

And the way that that manifested is that I come off of selling a business, which was my passion until it wasn’t. And I found myself really starting life over again. In 2013, I sold this business. I was getting divorced. I didn’t have any real sense of my value in the world. And I don’t think I internalized it all the way. I didn’t make it mean anything about me as a human, but I was definitely in a huge period of uncertainty because I didn’t know, like, what can I do? And I didn’t really know how I was going to pay the bills and I just didn’t know a lot of stuff.

 

Jesse Elder: But what I did know is that every thought that we think has a certain set of probabilities attached to it. And what that means is that if you think a certain thought about a certain thing, you then get access to a similar thought and you can sort of ease your way. It’s a process that I call radiant thinking, where you can think of one thing long enough to actually have your feelings about that thing change. And if you do that around any subject that you’re feeling ill at ease with, you can find ease within the subject. You can find a sense of relief. You can feel maybe even some genuine motivation.

 

And so, I spent a lot of time in 2013 just kind of asking myself, okay, well, what is it that I’m here to do? Who am I here to be? What am I here to do? And what is that going to look like tactically? And what felt right for me at that time was to, one day, I very, fortunately, did have a couple of clients, so I was paying my bills and I wasn’t in full survival mode, but I had 300 friends on Facebook.

 

And one day, I had a call with one of my clients, and he was doing great. We’ve applied all these strategies. He’s making tons of money. He’s really happy. So, I’ve got job security, at least for those couple of weeks until his next payment is due. And I’m like, all right, this is working.

 

And so, I finish this call with this guy. And it was just one of those mornings where everything just felt right. I didn’t know what the future held, but I was cool with that. It felt more like a mystery rather than a horror movie, like I was scared of what was going to happen. I just know it was going to happen. I was okay with that.

 

So, I ended up making this video and put it on Facebook, and this is way before Facebook Live. So, I recorded on my phone, zero editing. I had a little music playing in the background and I popped this video up on Facebook, and over the next week or so, that video ended up getting more shares than I had friends. And it was wildly affirming. It’s good for my self-esteem, it’s good for my confidence. But more than anything, it sort of acted as a signpost because I could reverse engineer the process leading up to that video because I remember waking up that morning feeling a little bit unsettled and a little unsure, really looking forward to my client call. That was about it. I had nothing else that was planned.

 

And I remembered the feeling of just dropping into this sort of just being present, not trying to change things, but really getting in the space of appreciation and appreciation for my life and appreciation for my freedom and appreciation for my health. And as I got into that space and then I rocked out this client call, I could feel those energies just sort of multiplying and it was a sort of causeless joy. Like, it wasn’t really because anything great was happening. It was just very cool. It’s just like a conscious choice to feel good for no good reason.

 

Jesse Elder: So, I ended up making this video. This thing starts getting all these views, and it was like all of a sudden, I had a little bit of traction and I thought, you know what? I actually have had a lot of experiences that maybe would be useful for people. So, I started making these videos and I started calling them the Mind Vitamin videos. And every time I made a video, I was making one to three videos a week. Every time I made a video, it was always the same process. An idea would hit me, it would feel worthy, like it should be born, and I’d stop whatever I was doing and I’d make the video and I’d post the video.

 

And there were some times when I would feel that, oh, I need to make a video today. And those are the times that it’s like all the juice and all the power just went away. And I was like, well, this sucks. And then I’m sitting down like, okay, well, maybe I should write out the perfect outline that’s going to help people. And I still don’t have anything to sell. I was just really aware that it was a binary experience, either that flow and that fire and that energy was there or it wasn’t.

 

And so, on the handful of times that I would start to make the video, not feeling that energy, I could just feel like words just were clunky in my mouth and I was all self-conscious and I was like, screw this, I’m not going to do it. And I would go do something else, like go for a bike ride, I’d go workout, I’d go hang with friends, I’d go read a book, go meditate, I go play some piano, and then the inspiration would hit again, I’d stop what I’m doing, make the video. And so, I developed this on-demand real-time relationship with what I just started calling Cosmic Google.

 

And I realized that you can make your intuition tactical. You can actually weaponize and make your intuition pragmatic, so you can turn that feeling of an idea into the unignorable actions and that it just took off and it started to have so much, like I wasn’t making the videos to accomplish something, I was making the videos because they just needed to be made. And then the audience starts growing and next thing you know, I’m like, I should probably make an offer and I ended up making an offer.

 

My first one absolutely sucked and it was terrible. We had three people out of 10 on a Google Hangout. Remember those? And my idea back then is it’s the Internet. And so, all I need is to get 100,000 people to pay me $9 a month. Perfect. How much more difficult can it be?

 

So, when I signed the three people up on a $9-a-month membership and then I realized is going to take me 140,000 years to ever make any money doing this, but I just kept staying in that pocket of inspiration. What is the thing that I love to do that is useful for others and that they really find valuable that I’m good at? And I just kept staying on that.

 

So, I ended up making all these videos, ended up starting to make courses, and have now done something like 44 or 45 different courses and have had the opportunity to work with some super awesome true A players in the fields of entrepreneurship and marketing and sales. And I coached Tony Robbins’ number one sales guy. He was texting me backstage when Tony did the big UPW live back in 2020.

 

And so, Eli’s texted me, he’s like, “Man, I’ve got all of our frameworks on my mind.” This turkey goes and does $12.6 million on stage for Tony. And he’s texting me backstage. He’s like, “I appreciate you, man.” And I’m kind of like the Forrest Gump of the Internet marketing world. I just always kind of seem to be in the right place at the right time and have gotten to work with some really cool people.

 

But I still, to this day, don’t identify myself as this guru or rock star or celebrity or whatever. I’m at peace with it and I understand how it works. But to me, the most important thing has always been, am I being myself? Am I being true to my vision, to my values? And if there’s any sort of static in my system, I will drop whatever and go back and find that space of clarity because, within that space of clarity, that’s where ideas are born. Clarity creates speed.

 

I’ve seen some pretty significant, quite dramatic rapid rises in people’s situations. And it’s always because they just got super, super clear. They got clear about their purpose. They got clear about their path, clear about their plan. What they were doing was no longer inherited or borrowed or copied from someone else. It was pure, authentic self-expression. And nature loves that because then you’re in tune with nature.

 

Justin Donald: I love it.

 

Jesse Elder: That was a mouthful.

 

Justin Donald: Well, now, that’s incredible. There’s so much I want to dissect here. And when you think about this, you’ll appreciate this comment because I know you’re all about authenticity. And in the podcasting space, there’s kind of like one or two scenarios. And I don’t know if a lot of my audience even knows this. My close friends probably know this.

 

So, in podcasting, you either are really prepared and you have every question outlined and you know what you’re going to ask the whole way through, or you’re not, but it’s not a lack of preparation. It’s actually the desire to just see where things go organically. And so, in a lot of my life, I’m pretty calculated, I’m pretty prepared, but in this world of podcasting, I just love to show up. I don’t have an agenda, I don’t have an outline. I literally just show up and I see where the conversation goes. And that way, I just think it’s more fun because it flows where it needs to flow.

 

And so, I love hearing your framework where that’s really what you embody as a whole. And I like that this show is going to really be rooted in this authentic, just flow type of state. Now, I am curious, though, if we can back up a little bit. You ran a business. I’m curious, what was the business? And then why did you sell it? At some point, it sounds like you lost the passion for what you were doing, or maybe you got more clarity as you just talked about the power of clarity of where you wanted to move. And it may have been in a different direction. I’d love to hear that as we then kind of move forward into this next stage of your life.

 

Jesse Elder: Yeah, I love it. And I want to give you kudos for recognizing those two frames on podcasting and content creation, in general. Most people are so controlling, and that’s where so much of that overpreparation comes from, but it seems like and it feels to me like you’ve embraced this sort of improv, anything can happen. And that’s one reason I always love hanging out with you because we never know what we’re going to talk about and we always talk about epic sh*t so I appreciate it.

 

Justin Donald: Totally. There’s never an agenda and it’s like, how did we ever get to talking about this topic? It is incredible.

 

Jesse Elder: Right, right. I love it. It’s inherently energizing. So, way, way, way, way back, growing up, I’m the oldest of five. I was homeschooled or completely self-schooled. So, I never had a classroom or curriculum or textbooks or anything like that. And so, I was always following my own interests and we didn’t have much financial resources. But there’s a lot of time. And I had a lot of time to myself, a lot of time to read and to explore and ride my bike and ride the bus.

 

And one of the things that I got into when I was a kid was martial arts, and I fell in love with it, like it was everything. And I was literally the Karate Kid. I had my uniform. And I was going to class two or three times a week. And actually, I remember when the first Karate Kid came out because we went and I handed out fliers at the movie parking lot.

 

And one week, we had eight of us in class, and the next week we had 40 of us in class. It was one of my earliest lessons in marketing. And I just fell in love with martial arts. I loved the physicality of it. I loved the fact that you’re only competing with yourself, but you’re enjoying the camaraderie of a team. So, it’s like you have all the positive aspects of the team, but you’ve got also all the positive aspects of operating in a completely merit-based system where it’s just you and you. And so, I loved it.

 

By the time I was 15, I’ve got my black belt and I was starting to help out and teach some of the classes. By the time I was 17, I told my parents,” This is what I want to do for the rest of my life.” And so, I was competing pretty heavily. This is when the first UFC was not even out yet. So, everybody was still very style loyal. It’s like we do taekwondo and we do Kenpo and jujitsu. What’s that?

 

And luckily, I had one of my mentors who had a very successful school, so he was going to California training with the Gracie’s. And he tells me, he says, “Watch out for this thing called the UFC. It’s going to be incredible.” And I’m like, “Oh, what’s that?” So, I ended up training jujitsu. And on the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king. So, I knew just enough more than anybody else, which turned me into a pretty good fighter. And I ended up competing. And all these were actually pretty awful, like fight club environments.

 

Literally, they would roll this sweaty wrestling mat out on the dance floor at this nightclub in San Antonio, and they would have all the drink specials up there and there would be a little clipboard to sign up to fight. And that was it. It was a laughable waiver. There is no safety equipment, no rules, no time limit, no weight limit, literally just two guys get in there and fight. And I realized…

 

Justin Donald: By the way, if you go back to the original UFC, it’s like 1, 2, 3, 4. You’ll see that there’s no weight limit and you got these little teeny guys going against the big massive guys. And with the right form, you see some of these little guys just destroying the much bigger people.

 

Jesse Elder: 100%. And that’s when I realized that these fights were happening at this nightclub where I was also a bouncer. I thought, man, I either have to do this or I have to stop teaching martial arts because I’ve been operating under this illusion that I’m teaching people to protect themselves, but I’ve actually never been in a fight. And once that was open in my mind, I couldn’t ignore it because I’m like, well, sh*t. I’m either a total fraud or I got to find out what I’m actually made of. So, I decided to fight.

 

Long story shorter, ended up winning nine fights, lost two, and the two that I lost were just really, really great learning experiences. One of them, I ended up in the hospital with a collapsed lung and concussion, but it turned out to be the beginning of a huge spiritual journey because of that. So, I’m really very appreciative to that guy for collapsing my lung and being not just my sparring partner in the match, but really like a metaphysical growth partner because I never would have gotten those lessons if not for him.

 

So, I’m doing all this fighting, all this teaching, all this competing. When I was 23, I opened my school, found out really quickly, nobody cares how much you love martial arts. Nobody cares how much you love teaching. Nobody cares about any of that. It’s what’s in it for me. And so, I got really, really fast, had to learn how to market and sell. And that’s where a lot of my early experiences in marketing and sales came from.

 

And then that was a beautiful ride. I ended up opening multiple schools, had amazing business partners. At our peak, we had a team of 53 people on payroll, and my job was just training and training and training and training. So, a lot of what I teach now, working with coaches and consultants, really comes from those early understandings of how to help a 17, 18-year-old high school kid change their thinking about money, change their orientation to value creation, and have them selling a $15,000 membership cash to a soccer mom who did not wake up this morning expecting to drop thousands of dollars on the next three years for her child’s martial arts. But that’s how good our team was. They were just these ethically trained sales ninjas because they got it. This is 100% about the students and about life skills, and we’re using martial arts as a vehicle for life skills.

 

And so, it was just such a great proving ground to do the thing that I’d loved since I was a kid, make way more money than I ever thought was possible in martial arts. And along the way, I just kept feeling, like, this is not it. This is not going to be my life. I don’t know what my life is going to be, but I know it’s not this long term. And that gave me both a lot of peacefulness because it kept me excited about the future because there was some uncertainty there. It was torturous at times because it prevented me from really committing and really going all in and this is what I want to do.

 

So, I always kind of felt a little bit alien. I never quite felt like I fit in totally to the martial arts world, but it was what it was. And in 2012, I began to realize that I was at the end of the journey. I had three business partners. One of them ended up buying the schools that I had and had ownership in. And that was that. I mean, it was actually a very simple process.

 

Justin Donald: And then from there, so that’s where you started posting these videos, creating this content. I mean, what a great backdrop for what you do today in the coaching space, already having done so much in the one-on-one coaching, training, all this different work, all these different skills. But you then went to creating this content, putting it out when you felt it, realizing when you don’t feel it and you’re just trying to force it, it’s not as good. But you pivoted to a different model and your model became– so, at one point in time, you had an online business, right? And then later on and maybe this was at the same time you had a one-on-one coaching practice where you were highly selective with who you worked with, I mean, it just had to be a right fit and you had very few people on the roster, but that kind of became one of your main things, right?

 

Jesse Elder: It was. And I’ve always enjoyed the harmony of one too many, doing a group online environment with smaller, much more tightly focused masterminds, and then just this incredibly alive, collaborative one-on-one relationship. And so, I’ve always enjoyed the harmony between those because there are advantages and distinctions to each one. And to this day, that’s always been my favorite thing.

 

So, I’ve got a couple of coaching communities that I’m leading. I have a handful of private clients. And then, dude, I have so much time. Like, it’s insane. I work four hours a week, and the money just keeps coming in. And you get paid for this sh*t. This is awesome. And then people are reporting back all these crazy wins and things just line up for them. So, I found that as long as I stay doing the thing that inspires me, that lights me up the most, that this really is a universe of infinite supply.

 

Justin Donald: And it really is when you look at it from that framework. So, people that operate from the framework of really pinching pennies and that money is finite, that often tends to be the reality. And for people that kind of operate from this framework of, well, more is going to come, generally more comes. And so, I love having you on the show because number one, you’ve been very successful in all the things you’ve done. So, whatever you’ve put energy into, you’ve been very successful. Number two, from the standpoint of financials, you’ve done very well financially to the point that you haven’t had to work. At times, you’ve stopped working or you scale it back so much that you’re really working on your schedule to your point of saying, hey, I work about four hours a week.

 

And number three is that you own your time, which I think truly is the greatest indicator or measurement tool of if someone is wealthy or if they are not wealthy. A lot of people wrongfully equate wealth to money, or if you’re rich, then you’re wealthy. And it goes far beyond that because I know a lot of rich people that are not wealthy, that do not own their time, that do not own their health, and they’re just one event away from a total catastrophe, whereas I know other people and I was joking with one of my really financially well-off friends, I mean, that’s making a killing, and he said about one of the guys on my mastermind, he said, gosh, he just seems to be able to do whatever he wants. And I’m like envious of it. And I know he doesn’t make as much as me, but I know he makes a lot and he makes all he needs to make and he can do whatever the heck he wants. And so, it’s great hearing the person that is– I mean, this person is one of the more highly successful financially people in my network, but having this desire to have what this other person has, which is way less money but way more time.

 

Jesse Elder: Yeah. You just open up so many good loops there, Justin. I’m with you on time being wealth. And I think the other side of that coin is attention because if someone allows their focus to be fractured, to be hijacked, then your time and your money is really not your own because then it’s going to where you’ve been sort of conditioned to think it should go. The happiest people that I know are those who have a peaceful relationship with money, time, and their own energy and there’s not a thing on their schedule that doesn’t light them up. And when I’m working with somebody one on one, that’s one of the first things that will do is an inventory of interest.

 

And so, we just look at everything that’s on their calendar, and it’s a yes or no. Like, yes, this thing lights me up. I love it. It energizes me. When I finish, I feel better about myself. I feel better about the world. Or it’s an absence of all of that, and if it’s anything other than that, then it’s a black hole. If it’s that, then it’s a battery. And we just start looking at their schedule through this lens of batteries and black holes. And it’s incredible the amount of storytelling and justification that we do to support doing things that we don’t like to do.

 

And most people, again, have had this experience through an educational environment where they were taught that you have to do something you don’t want to do to get something that you need, like study something is of no interest to you personally, but get a good grade. And then the justification behind that is, well, it teaches you to focus. I’m like, no, it teaches you to sever your empathy. It teaches you to hate yourself. It teaches you to listen to someone else’s archaic, kind of just prehistoric, and irrelevant thoughts about what you should do. It’s like, wow, but I get that that it does serve a lot of purposes for a lot of people.

 

So, from the people that I’ve had the opportunity to observe up close and personal, who are the happiest, the healthiest, and truly the wealthiest, they have the ability to create income at whatever level they need. And I’ve modeled this to a certain extent, certainly not at the level of probably many people that we both know and work with, but I’ve discovered that there is really no solid relationship between time and money. It is extremely flexible and it’s very malleable.

 

So, if I have an idea about something that I want, either something that I want to create or something that I want to purchase, invest in, go do as an experience, whatever, I know that the time between the idea and the income, that time is the least important factor. Most of it is a game of alignment. And money doesn’t have any energy by itself, but we project energy onto money.

 

If you took a $100 bill and you just left it in the frickin jungle, it’s not like a bunch of monkeys are going to come out, fight each other over this piece of paper. So, as human beings, we create energy around money. And one of the fastest things that helps people to make a lot more money a lot faster is when they sort of removed the bigness in their own mind. And as long as somebody says, well, I’m going to make a big amount, I’m going to get a huge return, I’m going to make a sizable investment, and we have all these kinesthetic descriptions of something that is actually nonphysical, big money, the big numbers, well, your brain hears the term big and immediately attaches a level of complexity to the size. And then you end up in overwhelm or you end up just kind of out of your own flow.

 

Jesse Elder: And so, one of the things that I teach people to do is to just change the way that they’re describing the money because if money has a consciousness, it’s not walking around going, I feel pretty big today. Everything’s relative. And so, it’s not the money that we’re really going for, it’s the feelings and the choices that we think that money is going to give us. And since that’s what you actually want, which are the feelings in the choices, we’ll again freaking go for the feeling first.

 

And most people think about what they want from outside of the feeling place of what they want. And so, they’re actually thinking without the thing, thinking from without. And what I teach people to do is to get inside the feeling of the thing and think from within. And so, when you have, let’s say, an amount of money that somebody has got in their mind, there’s a feeling associated to that money. And so, what we do is go through a series of exercises where they get really connected to the feeling of that money. And that’s literally just like a beacon to the universe. If you want to get all woo-woo with it, it’s like, this is what I want. There’s no resistance in me about receiving this. And the how will be revealed.

 

But this is my clear request to the kitchen. This is what I would like. And you place the order, and then literally forget about it. The seed has already been planted. Your subconscious mind is totally ruminating on how you’re going to bring it about and maybe some sort of architected serendipity, maybe some sort of synchronicities. You end up sitting next to somebody on a plane or you end up somebody– I mean, we do communicate through thought way more than science has caught up with.

 

And so, you get an idea about somebody and you reach out to them and they’re like, oh, my God, I literally was just thinking about you. Or someone else thinks about you and says, hey, you should really talk to so-and-so. And that’s the sort of lubrication of human affairs that being in this space of non-resistance, thinking about what you want purely without any static, without any contradictory thinking. That’s why clarity creates speed because there’s just no resistance in someone about these things that they want.

 

And what screws a lot of people up is playing this zero-sum game. Even if they don’t believe in a zero-sum game financially, they still believe in it within the larger context of their life. And so, they end up like, well, I’m going to really crush it in the money part, and then hopefully, I can retire early, and then I’ll do what I really want to do. I’m like, do you hear what you’re saying? You’re basically saying, I’m going to practice sucking at life until this imaginary day in which all of a sudden, I’m going to be really good at being myself. In what world does that make sense?

 

All you’re going to be really good at is sucking at being yourself, and then you’re going to have a lot of money to suck at being yourself with, which is great because then you can just go spend it on a whole bunch of other things that will just remind you that you aren’t being who and what you’re born to be. So, my thinking is, why don’t you just have it all? Why don’t you just be the person you want to be? Let other people have their own experience of you. Do no harm, take no sh*t, be super productive in a way that’s aligned with your values, and let the frickin sheckles and tacos just roll in and just accept that as being as natural as sunlight falling on the universe. And then with all the rest of the time that you have, do epic sh*t, do things that light you up with the people that you like to spend time with. That’s wealth, and I don’t know that I’ll ever be convinced, otherwise.

 

Justin Donald: Yeah, that resonates so much with me because that’s the message that I try to communicate as effectively as I can, which is own your time. You buy your time back and whatever means you need to do that. And some people can do it a lot cheaper than others, but buy your time back. For me, it’s helping people create cash flow to cover their cost of living. So, you buy your time back.

 

Once you’ve bought your time back, then you can intentionally place it where you want to go and you can place it in the areas of life that light you up the most with the people that light you up the most, having experiences that really light you up. And what’s really fun is helping people that you want to spend time with, experience the things that they’ll never get to experience on their own because those will be lasting memories for those people, but also for you. That is to me the trifecta where you just have it all and it’s working and that’s outside of the mindset of the zero-sum game. That is a very abundant game.

 

We’re all getting something by being together and doing cool things together, but it’s hard because most people are in a routine or they’re in a rut or they’re conditioned to think that leaving the safety of their job or what they know today is risky and dangerous and the reward is not going to outweigh the risk. So, how do we help people? How do we help nudge them? I feel like our job is to constantly be nudging people into this new adventure, this new way of thinking, little small tweaks to the mindset, just shifting and shaping people’s mindset. And then eventually, with these small little changes, there becomes a big change. But how do we help people see what we’re talking about? And then even when they see it, it is so hard for some people to take action because they’re so rooted and conditioned into all these societal norms, all these things that they’ve been doing for years, all these things that in their mind keep them safe.

 

Jesse Elder: I could not agree with you more, Justin. I think that is our function as not just entrepreneurs, but teachers and messengers. And I believe this with every cell in my body that we are the message and the way that each of us choose to live our life is a message. And the thing that made such a difference in my life early on is just being around people who were doing the things that I wanted to do. And when I was spending time around the martial arts champions and these actual real-life badasses, well, I became more of a badass. I became more able to protect myself, more able to fight. And that just sort of became my normal. But then I also recognize that they’re mostly broke, they’re working jobs that they hate, but they’re physical specimens. And I was like, okay, well, I’m going to shutter my mind.

 

And so, only when I go to train with these guys, all I’m going to focus on is training. And I need to get some other mentors, I need to get some other role models. And so, then I ended up connecting with people who were phenomenal relative to where I was in terms of marketing and sales. But I could also feel their blind spots around physical health, for example. And I was like, okay, so keep this part from these guys about the fighting and keep this part from these guys about the money. Okay, cool.

 

So, I’ve just been on this treasure hunt my entire life of selectively sifting. And the more that I test this, the more that I find that it proves useful is I think trusting one’s self is a skill and there’s no amount of information in the world that’s going to make up for a lack of self-trust. And when somebody is not living a life that contains elements of adventure or intrigue or personal interest, if they’re not doing that, then the default is you live a very fearful, very fragile, seemingly safe, but actually miserable existence.

 

And so, I think to help somebody is to really (a) just be ourselves because that’s the real message. But also, when we create experiences and invite other people along, I love that you said that, then they start to look at the way you’re living and they go beyond that, oh, he’s an author and he’s an investor and he’s got a mastermind. He’s got a podcast. They go beyond that, like, no, this dude is actually living life differently.

 

And I started offering a couple of years ago these apprentice experiences where somebody would just come and just stay with me for a couple of days. And these are content creators and coaches and consultants. And I would just tell them, I said, look, I’m not going to make you any promises. You’re going to get out of this whatever you’re prepared to get out of it, but I think you’re going to walk away with some very interesting distinctions.

 

And so, one guy comes and hangs out with me and he’s watching me make videos and teach. And then I did a webinar and we did $178,000 in sales. And he’s just watching this whole thing. He’s like, “You mean it? This is not an act.” I’m like, “What are you talking about?” He’s like, “I really thought that maybe the guy that I was watching on the videos in the courses was a different guy.” He said, “but you, you don’t give up about what people think, but you really care about people.” I was like, “I’m writing that down. That’s a fortune cookie, at least.”

 

And there just gets to be this realness to what you do. And if people listening to this, if who you are is someone that actually cares about other people, then you’re going to always find ways to create value for others. You’re going to always find ways to help people solve their problems, and you should be rewarded for that. Whether it’s a service or product or providing capital, you’re solving problems for people.

 

And we live in a universe that’s expanding and we’re a part of that universe. So, our lives should be expanding as well. And to summarize all that whole part. I think people just need to have more fun. They just don’t know what actual fun is. They’ve been taught that seeking pleasure and being on this sort of hedonistic treadmill is fun, but that’s not actual joyful, childlike fun. When you’re a child, you can play with a stick and a rock and that thing can keep you entertained for months. Most people never reconnect to that state of just pure, childlike joy.

 

Justin Donald: Yeah, I love that distinction, not just joy, childlike joy. And I do challenge everyone who’s listening, everyone who’s watching, are you doing that? What in your life brings you the greatest amount of joy that you would do for free, you would do for hours on end, you would do just period? And are you doing that with regularity?

 

For a lot of people, they’re not doing any of it. Some people are doing it but feel like they can only do so much of it because I’ve got to get back to work, I got to get back to the real life. And some people are living a life that is that. I remember telling people my goal, and obviously, I want to do– well, the thing that I do work hard are the things that are important to me. But I told people my whole life that I want to be like Peter Pan. I don’t want to grow up. I want to live in this amazing world because what I’ve seen from the people that grow up is that that world becomes less amazing.

 

And I know some people that you got the exceptions to the rule that still live that way, but I just want to have this childlike enthusiasm and this childlike curiosity and this childlike joy in all the things that I do. So, I love that distinction. I love that point.

 

And gosh, I feel like we could talk for another hour. But you know what? We’re out of time today. One thing I do want to find out, for anyone who’s interested in learning more about you, where can people find out about you? Where can they go to learn about the cool stuff that you’re up to, your courses, your coaching, everything that you do? Because I know a ton of people that have worked with you, people swear by your methodologies and your strategies and all the stuff that you do. So, tell us where we can find you.

 

Jesse Elder: Cool. Social media is always pretty accessible. It’s Facebook, Jesse Elder. Instagram is timepiercer, all one word. And for those, like you and I, who are operating in the wisdom economy or who want to, I just wrote a pretty interactive whitepaper, if they go to TheTruth.Coach, and I think the password is September, capital S, September still, we haven’t updated that, but it’s a really good exploration into what is it that you really want to create, what are the things that might be preventing you, how to avoid some of the minefields of all these sort of false solutions. And I lay out my entire framework for how I build my business and for how I help other coaches do the same. So, they can go to TheTruth.Coach and the password is September.

 

Justin Donald: Oh, I love it. This has been so fun, Jesse. Thank you for joining me today. What great conversation we always have. I can’t wait for the next one. And I just love wrapping up each episode by asking my listeners a simple question, what’s one step that you can take today towards financial freedom in living the life that you truly desire, one that’s on your terms, not a life by default, but rather a life by design? Thanks so much. And we’ll catch you next week.