12 Choices That Changed My Life
The Amplified Impact Podcast
September 4th, 2023
I want to dive deep into a pivotal moment in my life when I was 28 years old.
I was living in a van, everything seemed to be falling apart, but within a few years, things took a remarkable turn.
In this episode, I’ll share 12 simple yet profound choices I made that transformed my life from rock bottom to a path of purpose and success.
These choices are universal and can apply to anyone looking to make meaningful changes in their life.
From embracing accountability and leveling up my network to cultivating daily discipline and converting my weaknesses into strengths, these choices have been my guiding principles on this journey.
And again, these are not just actions but shifts in mindset that can elevate your life.
TWEETABLE QUOTE:
“To actually start making money, you have to find a way to disconnect your inputs from your outputs. And the way I think about this is that hustle is the motor opportunity is the vehicle.”- Anthony Vicino
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Episode Transcript:
Anthony Vicino:
When I was 28 years old. You guys know this part of my story. I was living in a van. Things were not going well for me. I was getting my ass kicked on the relationship front, on the financial front. But within four, three to four years I would say things had really turned around. You know, I had built my built and exited. My first business was getting into my second, had acquired some real estate and, and maybe most importantly beyond all the monetary success, I started to feel as though I was moving towards my greatness for once.
Anthony Vicino:
That I was actually waking up every morning with purpose and meaning in my day and that I wasn’t just wasting this thing, this gift of life that I’d been given. And that was if I was to point to anything as like a win or success in my life that would be it. Like forget all of the external trappings of success and whatever that might look like or how people define it. Truly waking up every day and liking who you are and knowing that you’re making a valuable contribution to the world and that you’re doing something productive with your life is one of the best feelings. And I wanted to share with you guys today twelve simple choices I made that really transformed my life from that place of dire necessity, of rock bottom living the van at 28 to some semblance of not having things figured out, but at least moving in a direction that I could be proud of. So here are just twelve simple choices that I started to make that changed my life. Number one was that I claimed accountability for everything. I believe that you can either be the victim or you can be the hero of your story.
Anthony Vicino:
But you cannot be both. You cannot be both the victim and the hero. We do not idolize the victims. We sympathize, we wish them well, but we do not idolize them. We do not memorialize them. And more importantly, I don’t think any of us want to be the victim in our story. And I know that depending on where you are in your life, maybe you’ve gone through some really harsh stuff that I can’t even relate to. Maybe you’re right to be the victim.
Anthony Vicino:
You maybe have been victimized. But you can turn that into your power. You can turn that into your strength. And that begins with a simple choice that you are not going to be defined by that victimization. That you are going to choose to rise above that, to allow that to become the thing that fuels you, to move you forward. That’s going to become part of your hero’s journey. Number two is I leveled up my network. I started getting into rooms where the people in there were so far above me that I had no choice but to raise my level.
Anthony Vicino:
I believe that regardless of where you are in life, what room or who you surround yourself with that every room reverts back to the mean. And what that means is if you are the smartest person in the room, then you are going to get pulled down to everybody else’s level. If you’re the dumbest person in the room, you’re going to get pulled up to all those other people’s level. And the same thing applies to monetary success, relationship success, health success. If you are the unfitdest person in the group of people that you hang out with, you will probably migrate towards the average of their fitness. That’s a good thing. If you are the fittest person in your group of unhealthy people, then you will probably be pulled down to that level eventually because it is too hard to fight against the reversion to the mean. And so choose your rooms very carefully.
Anthony Vicino:
And truthfully, I think this is the easiest way to level up your life is just to change the people that you surround yourself with so that they reflect the world that you’re trying to achieve. Number three is I cultivated daily discipline. Listen, I’ve said this so many times before it’s probably cliche at this point. I hate writing, but I love having written. I hate working out, but I love having worked out. I hate eating healthy, but I love how I feel about myself and more importantly, how I feel energy wise after having eaten healthy. You don’t have to love the process, do it anyway. Discipline is the thing that changed my life.
Anthony Vicino:
Freedom is chaos without discipline. And that took me a really long time to figure out. Number four I turned my weakness into a strength. See, I used to blame my ADHD for being the reason I was failing in life. It was just a really easy scapegoat to point to my biology, this thing that’s different about my brain, as the reason why I wasn’t successful. But things truly did not start changing for me until I turned it around, until I stopped looking on that side of the coin that said my ADHD was a weakness. And I instead flipped the coin and said, this is my strength, this is my superpower. I’m going to lean into it, into the aspects of my biology that are uniquely me, that give me an unfair advantage and I’m going to start playing the games where I know I can win.
Anthony Vicino:
And that changed everything. Number five, I started creating more and consuming less. And you’ve heard me say this before. Again, it’s very, very hard to get paid collecting dots, but it’s surprisingly easy to get paid for connecting them. In this instance, dots are information, right? Like I was the person who was always listening to podcasts, reading books and consuming information because it made me feel this pseudo productivity, like I was getting ready, I was learning, I was expanding my curiosity tank and I was filling it. But you can only fill that tank so full. And the important thing is what you do with all that information that you collect. If you’re just going to collect it for the sake of hoarding it, well, hoarders don’t get rich.
Anthony Vicino:
It’s the people who use what they have and so make more time to create, less time to consume, because at the end of the day, you can’t consume your way to fulfillment. It can only be created. Number six, I started treating personal development as my full time job. And this is so damn important because I believe skills are the only investment that pay dividends regardless of economic conditions. And the beauty of skills is that they can never be taken away from you. And so you need to approach the world of skill building as though it’s your full time job. It is the most important thing that you could possibly do. Number seven is I built a business.
Anthony Vicino:
This is getting into the technical side of like, here’s what I did. To actually start making money, you have to find a way to disconnect your inputs from your outputs. And the way I think about this is that hustle is the motor opportunity is the vehicle. And it doesn’t do you any good if you put a really big motor on the back of a rowboat, right? Like that thing’s only going to go so fast, it might even sink, depending how big the motor is you put on there. On the other side, if you have a paddle and you’re on a super yacht, that’s not going to do you any good either, because you’re not even going to be able to reach the water, much less move the damn thing. So you got to pair the right hustle with the right opportunity. And this is why it’s very, very hard for w two employees to get rich. They’re simply in the wrong vehicle.
Anthony Vicino:
No matter how much hustle or how big their motor is, they’re just in the wrong vehicle. And until it took me a long time to figure that the business was the right vehicle for me, number eight was starting to invest in real estate. Once I had that money, I had to figure out what to do with it to keep it growing so that I didn’t have to work all the time. And they say that real estate has made more millionaires than any other investment vehicle in the world. And I don’t know if that’s true or not, but I can say with certainty that it’s made more dumb people rich than any other vehicle. And the reason for that is it’s a fairly simple model. There’s so many advantages, whether that’s the leverage, the appreciation, the cash flow. There’s so many reasons why real estate is a powerful investment vehicle that you don’t have to be brilliant to succeed.
Anthony Vicino:
Number nine is I studied the rules of money. Listen, the sooner you realize that money is a game, the sooner you learn the rules. And the sooner you learn the rules, the sooner you can start mastering the strategies. And the sooner that you master those, the sooner you win the game. It’s just that simple. But it took me a really long time, a lot of shame, a lot of guilt that I had around money or the taboo of talking about money. For me to even approach it as something that I could improve at or to accept the fact that I sucked at it, that was a harsh thing. For a long time I sucked at making money.
Anthony Vicino:
But I refused to acknowledge it because I just kept telling myself, why choose not to play the game? Well you have to play the game and it’s up to you to play it as well as you can. You can’t opt out of the money game. We all need it to pay rent, pay our food. You need to. And so if you’re going to play the game, play it to win. At least play it to play to the best of your ability. And it doesn’t mean that you have to become money focused and have that be the hub of everything that you do. That’s not the point.
Anthony Vicino:
Money is not an end in itself. It’s to buy back your time so that you can maximize your return on life. That’s the goal. Number ten is I started asking better question. And one of the best questions I ever started asking myself was simply, so what? Once you realize that other people’s perception of you or their hate or their booze, those things can’t actually stop you. Then you become something remarkably powerful, something terrifying to the trolls and all those well meaning loved ones who would hold you back for fear of you realizing your greatness and not wanting you to get hurt or for you to not leave them behind. You become untouchable. So the question, so what? I don’t care what you think.
Anthony Vicino:
I don’t care about your judgments. I’m going to pursue this thing that’s meaningful to me. So many of us are not afraid of failing. We’re afraid of being seen to fail. We don’t want others to see our failure. That’s what we’re afraid of, not the actual failure itself. And the sooner that you get over that, the sooner that you start taking the strides necessary to actually win the game of whatever it is that you’re playing. Number twelve or is it eleven? Number eleven.
Anthony Vicino:
Do more, think less. For me, a lack of knowledge has almost never been the thing that’s held me back in life. It’s been a lack of execution. Simple as that. Do more. Number twelve. Learn higher value skills. When I had to look in that mirror and realize that I wasn’t winning the money game, that I wasn’t achieving everything that I could in life, it started by looking in the mirror and accepting that I didn’t have much value to the world.
Anthony Vicino:
I was a rock climber, very good at climbing rocks and living in the dirt. But that didn’t transfer into any kind of meaningful value that could transform or improve the world in any kind of meaningful way. And if you’re paid in proportion to the magnitude of the problems that you solve, I just wasn’t solving very big problems. And so I started acquiring skills that would enable me to make a bigger impact. And so I think those were twelve. I think I had written down 13. No, I said twelve. Okay, so those were twelve choices.
Anthony Vicino:
I get lost in my notes here, guys. I’m sorry. Those are twelve choices is that I started to make and they had a transformational impact on my life. And hopefully they help you on your journey as well. So thank you. I appreciate you. Thank you for being here. As always, guys and gals, you guys rock.
Anthony Vicino:
I will catch you here tomorrow, but until then, stay hyper focused, my friend.
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