Anthony on Meet the Peak Podcast
The Amplified Impact Podcast
August 31st, 2024
Excited to share my story on the Meet the Peak Podcast. In this episode, I dive into my journey from hitting rock bottom to building success as an entrepreneur, author, and real estate investor. I talk about how getting dumped by my fiancée became a turning point, pushing me to focus on internal discipline and personal growth. I also share my strategies for building wealth, managing stress, and what it really means to become a ‘whole life billionaire.’ This episode is packed with practical tips and insights to help you thrive.
TWEETABLE QUOTE:
“Good decisions compound slowly, while bad decisions compound quickly. It’s the small, consistent actions over time that build a life of immense value and impact.”
– Anthony Vicino
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Episode Transcript:
Show here with Jedi. This time, we’re taking you global across the planet from Thailand all the way to the USA. I’m here with my friend Anthony, who we met through elite coaching with Dan Martell. I’m very blessed to have him here. He’s a serial entrepreneur. He’s written not just one, but twelve books. He has an amazing YouTube channel. I would have highly recommend you guys checking him out there.
He has a podcast, and he also has a huge portfolio of real estate. So I can’t wait to dig deep into his story and to share his learnings in his journey of coming up. Anthony, welcome to the show, brother.
Sup, dude? I’m psyched to be here. Thanks for having me.
I’m pumped to have you, too, man. So, dude, take us back to how young Anthony was.
Like, young Anthony was a hot mess. Hot mess all the way up. I mean, define young. I just turned 40, right? And I would say all the way up until I was 30, I was a hot mess. I growing. I have severe adhd. And it was a real problem for me growing up. I was told that it was a problem that I had this inability to focus and to sit still.
And I bought into that narrative and I just kind of. I struggled. I struggled with that, the. That route that a lot of people say you have to take, which is you go get higher education, you go to college, get your degrees, and then you go and get a good job and all that stuff. And I just. I wasn’t cut out to thrive in that environment. And so I kind of bucked against what people were telling me to do, went off and did my own thing, but I didn’t have any of the skills to, like, actually harness the potential I had inside of myself and point it in a useful direction. So all throughout my twenties, I just kind of bounced around aimlessly and just wasted a ton of energy.
And it all came to points, you know, when I was 28 years old, where my life kind of fell apart as a result of the bad decisions I had been habitually making. So young Anthony, he was impulsive. He did not understand that the timeline upon which bad things will play out take a long time, but when they do come, you know, finally to fruition, it all happens at once. So, like, my lack of discipline wasn’t a problem until suddenly it was a really big problem. And suddenly I was having health issues, suddenly I was having relationship issues. And so I really had to learn that stuff the hard way. But, yeah, young Anthony, he thought he had it all figured out. And in reality.
He. He was clueless.
What does, uh, being or what was the struggle or what did the struggle look like as a young boy growing up in an environment where you were labeled with ADHD?
Well, it’s interesting because, you know, when people label you, especially as a child, you don’t realize that it’s a label. You don’t realize that it’s an identity that’s being thrust onto you and that you have a choice that you can either accept it or deny it. And you just say, oh, the people in my life, my parents, my teachers, the doctors, they say this thing about me. Therefore, that must be who I am. And we often. That voice that we have inside of our head, that critic, that critical voice that we have, isn’t our own voice. It’s our voice repeating the words that somebody else has spoken over us at some point in our life. But that’s not our internal voice.
And it took me many, many years to understand that. Oh, just because people have said this about me, said that this is a problem, that this is an issue that I am this way, it doesn’t mean I have to be that way. It doesn’t mean it’s true. I can change my belief that I have about myself, which will change how I think about myself. That’ll change how I act, and it will ultimately change my results. And when you’re young, you don’t realize you have the choice to change those things. And so you just. You accept what people are telling you about yourself.
For a young listener who is maybe in their twenties as well, who perhaps feel that same way, that they’ve been labeled as something, and deep inside their hearts, they know they’re much more. Walk us through kind of like the process that you took to kind of get yourself out of that, I guess, label or that wrong coat that you.
Put on yourself, it starts with clarity of vision. You got to understand, like, where it is that you want to go, who it is that you think you can be, and having the courage to, you know, have that greatness inside of yourself that you can feel, but then to manifest that, you actually have to have the courage to speak that out and say, this is who I could become. This is what I’m put. I’m capable of being and writing that down and saying, this is the vision I have for myself and for my life. This is where I want to go. Getting really clear on what that end destination is that you think you could arrive at and then starting to work towards that. But for most people, you know, it’s it’s more accepted to be our greatest, our own greatest critic than it is to be our own greatest cheerleader. Right? It’s not, okay.
People go, oh, you’re. You’re too high on your own supply. You’re too cocky if you’re your cheerleader, right? But you cannot manifest your greatness if you can’t first see it and have the courageous to speak it out and write it down. And most people are so terrified by that act on its own that they never get to the point where they take the actions which would lead them to that place. And so first thing is, you gotta get clear, where is it that you wanna go? Write it down. Who is it that you think you could become? You get to craft your identity in a very real way. And so write down, who is that ideal, best version of yourself? What would you like that person to be like? How would they engage with their friends or family? How would they make people feel? What skills would they have? What beliefs would they have about themselves? How would they wake up in the morning, write all that stuff down, get really clear on it, because you can’t hit the target. You can’t see, or at least if you do, it’s complete lock.
Right? We can increase our odds of success if we zero in on that target and see it so clearly in our minds that it practically becomes a reality. And now our actions are in alignment with what needs to happen to get us to that destination.
It sounds like you’ve been hard at work on this aspect of your life, brother. Like, how. How long did it take you from day one of understanding this concept until it led you to become who you are today?
It’s an ongoing process. Right? It’s. What’s really interesting is that we continually ascend to new levels in the game. But at each level, there’s a new ceiling that we don’t see. It says Orson Scott Carden, one of my favorite science fiction writers. He said, we question all of our beliefs except for those we truly believe and those we never think to question at all. And so at each level of the game, we have to rewire our minds to be able to ascend to that next level. And we have to be able to say, all the things that got me here will not get me there.
But because we’ve had so much success, success with the thing that got us here, we cling to it. I know this. It’s familiar. I’m good at it. And so it’s very unlikely that we’re going to drop it. But if you want to continue growing and expanding, you have to continually be shedding the skin of who you were and keep stepping every day into this new version of yourself. So it’s not like this process that just happens once and you’re done. It’s an everyday, continual evolution of saying, I am not who I was and I am not yet who I could be.
I am who I am, and I get to make that decision right now in this moment about who am I going to be, how am I going to show up in this moment. And it’s, I think when you look at it as a process, not an outcome, then you wake up every day realizing, okay, I got to go to work and do the most important work, which is chiseling away at creating the version of myself that I want to be and having the confidence that you can do that. Like, a lot of people don’t believe that they can do that, right? Like, if you don’t believe that you can change your identity and become like that greatest version of yourself, then again, it’s not your voice that’s telling you that. It’s some external voice that’s been implanted in you at some point in your life as a critical teacher, a coach, a parent, maybe a loved one. That meant well. They wanted to keep you safe. They wanted to keep you in a place of survival. But if you’re listening to this podcast, you’re not interested in just surviving.
You want to thrive, not survive. And to thrive, you have to step out of the comfort zone, because surviving is very easy. You could just sit on the couch, you can have your w two job, you can eat your hyper caloric food, you can watch your netflix, and you will survive. But that’s not a life of, you know, thrival, as we’ll call it.
No, I think just now you touched on a lot of interesting points. I think you talked about how we ascend to new levels, and at each level we’ve got to redefine a new belief that we might have held onto as true when we were coming out to that level. But in order to break up, we’ve got to break that belief and create new ones and perhaps find new ones that could be true for the next phase of who we could become. And you also mentioned about thriving versus surviving. So just to break it down further, how does one who is feeling stuck, who feels like they’re just surviving because they’re like, perhaps, you know, in a kind of like a standard 95, they’re bored out of their guts, but they don’t know where to go. They see all these opportunities all around. They see these richest influencers. They’ve got these youtubers, and then they’ve got these friends who’s in crypto doing this and that.
It’s like, there’s so much noise, right? What’s your advice to us to just really hone in? Like, what would you do?
You have to control what you can control. And I’m a big fan of making investments that compound over an entire lifetime. And when it comes to you as an individual, the skills, the things, the investments that are going to compound for you over your lifetime are your mindset, your health, your relationships, and your skills. That’s pretty much it. And so what are you doing right now if you don’t have momentum in your life, if you don’t have a sense of progress? And the thing is, it doesn’t matter where you are in life. You could be externally very successful to everybody else in the world. But if you do not have an internal sense of progress, you will feel miserable. Humans thrive on progress, right? And it doesn’t even matter where you are on the mountain.
As long as you are moving up the mountain, the person at the top of the mountain, they’re gonna. They can only stay up there for so long before they get the itch to go do something else, right. And so focus on those investments. They’re gonna pay compounding dividends over the course of your life. Again, that’s your mindset, how you think about the world, your beliefs, those things that will tint your reality. Number two is your physical health, this vehicle that’s carrying you through life. And in a very real way, the mindset and the health, those are the two gateway drugs that unlock everything else that you want. Because when you can discipline and you can take control and ownership of your body and say, I’m going to get in good shape, I’m going to be abundant with my energy, that has a downstream effect in everything else that you do.
But those are the things that you can control your mindset and your health. Now, you cannot control your relationships, but you can control how you show up for those relationships. And, you know, you’ve heard your network is your net worth. I don’t love that concept because it makes it so transactional. But there is a truth here, that your ability to go far and high in life is predicated on your relationships. How well you work with and through other people will define where you actually make it in life and whether or not it was actually worth going in the first place. Right? Like, your relationships, the people that you have around you. Like, you could be climbing the most miserable mountain in the world.
But if you have your crew of best friends, people that have your back, that you love and support the whole way through, it’s like, we can do this and it’s fun.
So true.
The last thing then is your skills. And this is probably for a lot of the people listening to this. If you’re in your twenties or your thirties, like I, the truth is I had no marketable skills. My skill sets in my twenties, it was not conducive for getting me ahead in life. And I sat down with a mentor and he looked at me and he go, and I was like, what do I do? My life had fallen apart. I was living in a van, $80,000 in debt. I had nothing to my name. And he looks at me and I was like, I don’t know what the problem is.
I’m smart. I have the ability to do stuff, but I’m just not getting ahead. And he looked at me and he goes, dude, you have no valuable skills. And I was like, what? And he’s like, yeah, you have no valuable skills. I was like, okay, what are valuable skills? And he broke it down in this framework. He goes, you have foundational skills and you have tactical skills. Tactical skills are what you do to go make money. So that’s like learning to copyright, that’s learning digital design, that’s learning sales and marketing or product design, right? Those are the tactical things that you have to go do in exchange for that skill.
People will give you money. The problem with tactical skills is you can hire them out. You can build a team around you that does those things. And so they are valuable, but they are only valuable up to a certain point. And if you do not have the foundational skills and those tactical skills, you will only ever make it as an employee. So the foundational skills that you first need to develop are the things that are going to define your whole existence, not just your ability to make money. And he defined, he listed out a couple for me, which was discipline, focus and energy management. He goes, if you can’t discipline yourself to show up, if you can’t focus your mind to do the work in front of you, and if you can’t manage your energy throughout the day, then you need to go be an employee and get those tactical skills.
Have somebody else tell you where to be and what to do and when to do it. And you use your tactical skill and you can make a good salary. But if you want to get wealthy, you need to learn those skills and you need to learn to discipline yourself, to focus and to manage your energy.
And I think your mentor got it, like, almost spot on from. I mean, those three skills are, I think if you look at the top billionaires and top, top of the world, they all resonate on those three things as well.
You will not find a single successful person in any domain that does not have discipline, focus, or the ability to manage their energy. You won’t find any of them.
That’s so true. That’s so true. How. How did you get into a place where you could find a mentor? Like, how. How. How does one go about finding a mentor? I mean, you know, right now there’s so many people who might want. It’s like Anthony Jedi. Like, how do we get one?
Yeah. And it’s. It’s hard because we talk about, hey, if you want to get ahead in life, the best way to do that is get around people who are operating at that higher level. Their frequency will pull you up. But the problem is people who are operating on that higher level, they’re not necessarily interested in going back down to your level to help you up. Right. So there’s this disparity of, like, I want to be up there and I want to be around you, but how do I get that mentor to take the time and energy? So, a couple of things that I would think about, number one is that the best mentorships that I’ve ever had were not necessarily with people that I actually knew personally. So, Charlie Munger, I consider him a mentor.
Naval ravicant, I consider him a mentor. Benjamin Franklin, I consider him a mentor. And I’ve read everything they’ve ever written. I’ve listened to everything they’ve ever said. I’ve consumed everything. I’ve spent dozens of hours with each one of these mentors, which is more time than you would ever get to spend with me as, like, your one on one mentor. Right. I’m not going to spend 40 hours one on one time with you.
I might hop on a call every couple of weeks for maybe 30 minutes, give you some insight, maybe give you a little perspective. But I’ve spent more time with those mentors than I have ever spent with any physical mentor. So that’s the first thing, is just recognize you have access right now to the most brilliant humans that have ever existed. You just go read their biographies, go read what they’ve written, go read their interviews, go read what they’ve, their speeches, consume everything that they’ve put out. Then, number two is, to attract a mentor, you must first become a person that is attractive to a mentor. And what I mean by that is a lot of people, they want a mentor who will tell them what to do. The problem is, if you have to be told what to do, you don’t have any value to the world. You’re just a cog in the machine.
The people who get ahead are the people who figure out what needs to get done, and then they go do it. And so the key variable there is that they have a bias towards action. They go and execute, and it might not be perfect execution, but they’re going and they’re doing stuff. So then when I look down and I see a 22 year old kid who is out there grinding, he’s building his thing, he’s putting in the work, and I see that he’s taking all the lessons that he can get from all his other mentors and he’s applying. It makes me want to lean in as a. As a person that says, I want to help this guy because he will take the information that I give him, he will apply it. Because the number one thing, no mentor wants to work with a loser. They do not want to work with somebody who, I’m going to tell you what to do.
I’m going to give you the answers and then you do nothing with it. And so true. The most successful people that you want to be around, they’re not even going to take a chance that they’re wasting their time on you until they see that you’re putting in the work and you’re doing all the things. It’s the same thing. If you want to attract a good business partner or if you want to attract a good life partner, you have to first become somebody that is attractive to that partner. And that means doing the work outside of anybody giving you credit for it, doing it when nobody’s watching, like, you just do the work and the people you want to impress, they will eventually be impressed. That’s the secret.
Amen and amen to that, brother. That’s what I tell all the young boys and young girls that come and ask me how I got to meet my wife as well. That’s the story in and out itself. But, dude, you’re spot on, brother. As you were telling or explaining your part just now, I’m reminded of a few guys who reach out to me and say, hey, Jedi, I want to work with you. I really love to learn from you. And I’m like, sure, I could. I could use some help.
Here in this area. And I sent them this, and it’s okay, sure, I’ll get it done and I’ll send it to you tomorrow. And surprisingly, both of them ghosts. And I’m like.
This is, this is it. This is it in a nutshell. I had. I have this all the time. I get dozens of people reaching out all the time. Hey, will you mentor me? And typically what I’ll do is I’ll first, I’ll just give a glance at their profile and see what they’re doing up their life, but generally seems like they’re doing something interesting and they’re trying and they’re showing up. I’m like, okay, let’s see. And I will give them an assignment, will give them a vague assignment, and I’ll see what they’ll do with it.
And 90% of the time, people won’t come back. They just disappear because they don’t know how to take limited information and actually run with it. They don’t know how to go get the answers, and so they feel lost because they’re waiting to be told what to do or one of two other things happens. The second thing is they’re too slow. They take two weeks, and then they come back and they finally did this thing. And I was like, that should have if you were really serious. You got me to respond, and I leaned in and you, two weeks. Case in point, there’s this kid who he dmed me, and I looked at his profile, and it was one of those, one of those cringy profiles where they have the rented lamborghinis.
He’s clearly a 21 year old kid, and he’s trying to flex. And as his social media marketing agency, and he reached out to me for advice, and I was like, he was asking me something different. He was asking me for different advice, and I was like, hey, actually, can I give you a piece of advice that I think will serve you even better? And I asked him that question. Took him five days just to respond. Five days to finally say, yeah, I would love some advice. I was like, dude, I’ve moved on. That’s five days ago. Like, you had me here.
And so, like, speed of response is massive. The other side of this is, if I give you directions, follow the directions to the t. So case in point, I had a kid the other day on Twitter. He reaches out and he’s like, I would like to write your newsletters for you. I was like, cool. Here’s a video that I recently did turn this into a newsletter that’s 1500 words long. Send it back to me. He sends it back the next day.
Great, awesome. 1300 words. He says, I didn’t think, I thought 1500 words. It was starting to get a little fluffy. And so I only did 1300. I was like, cool. I asked for 15. So you’ve disqualified yourself.
You didn’t follow the directions right. And it’s so, it’s crazy how getting ahead in life is seriously just a factor of showing up and doing what you say. If you just show up and do what you say, you’re going to get ahead of 100% of people, I guarantee it. It’s so simple, yet people don’t do it. It’s wild.
It’s like there’s this, like I’m trying to figure out if it’s the concept of fear that’s holding people back from following through of. It’s like they’re like self sabotaging themselves, right?
It’s like they have that opportunity and then they’re right there and it’s right in front of them and then they want to lean in. They have the hand from perhaps like a big brother or like a mentor, perhaps a friend or a business partner that they really want to work with. And he or she reaches out, the hand is like, hey, come on, you come on this journey with me. And then they just kind of like, nah, you know, I’m out. Is it fear, brother? I don’t know.
Oh, I don’t even know what it is. You know, for a long time, you could say maybe it’s fear of success, I think, right. I think the truth is that most people don’t know how to be consistent. It’s so simple. But I don’t think most people know how to be consistent from a place of internal drive. We know how to be consistent when we’re showing up for a w two or we’re being told to show up for school. We’re really good at answering the call of external authority and external accountability. But your life cannot change.
It cannot become the person that you dream of unless you can discipline yourself. I think with Socrates, he said, the truly free man is only free to his ability to discipline himself. He who cannot discipline himself will be destined to be disciplined by others. And this was a really important. Yeah, and this was a really important concept for me, totally, because. Because I lacked the ability to discipline myself when I was younger. And I also rebelled against external discipline. I rejected external accountability.
And case in point, I was floating through life. I wasn’t paying attention to what I was doing or how it really mattered. And a really good case in point is, like, my oral hygiene. I wasn’t brushing my teeth and flossing like I should have been when I was in my twenties. And it wasn’t a problem until eventually the universe said, okay, well, here’s the price you have to pay for that, which is you’re now going to lose a tooth. And I was like, oh, shit, that’s really embarrassing. Like, oh, suddenly, like, the universe is like, okay, you can’t discipline yourself and show up and do this. So now we are going to have to discipline you.
And for me, that was a light bulb moment where I was like, holy crap. Like, everything has a price, everything has a consequence. And if it’s not going to be me holding myself to a standard, something else will. And so I think for a lot of young kids, they’ve had their family and their teachers and everybody in their life telling them what to do and putting this external accountability on them. But until they can learn, hey, the accountability has to come from within. And if you don’t have that, if you can’t be consistent and follow through on what you say you’re going to do, then nothing that we tell you is going to work until then.
I read in one of your, I think it was a blog post that you mentioned about a kind of steps towards creating and establishing discipline and the act of overcoming procrastination. Can you talk us through that process that you create it?
Yeah. So discipline is such an important concept to me because it’s the one that I’ve like that and focus. Those are the two that I’ve struggled with the most. And I’m a big collector of frameworks of different ways of looking at situations. And for me, discipline, one of the most helpful frameworks was the idea of the plus one framework of decision making. And I got this from Abraham Maslow, who a lot of people are familiar with his concept of the hierarchy of needs, where you need to have your physiological needs, your shelter, your food, your clothing, you have to have that met before you can start worrying about questions of love and meaning and purpose and self actualization. So we kind of ascend that ladder. But he had another concept that he said, which really resonated with me.
He said that which we can be, we must be. And what he was saying there is that we all feel we have greatness within. Nobody feels as though they’re average. Nobody feels as though they were put on this planet just to be ordinary. And that makes sense because you are whoever’s listening to this right now, you are experiencing the entirety of the universe through your eyes, through your brain. You are the center point of the universe. It literally revolves around you in a very real way. And so you feel you’re special.
The problem is, when we don’t live in alignment with that, we feel it in our hearts and we go, we feel discontent and frustration and anxiety and sadness. And again, it goes back to that idea of progress. If we’re progressing towards our best self, then we feel good. If we’re not, then we don’t. And so Maslow says, that which we can be, we must be. And the framework he suggested that we use to realize our greatness is just to imagine you’re standing in a road, and in front of you, there’s all these signs that are spaced at equal distance that say, plus one, plus one, plus one. And behind you, the road continues onto the horizon. All those signs say, negative one.
Negative one. Negative one. Now, each one of those signs represents a single decision, just one decision that you could make in any given moment that’s either going to move you forward towards your greatness, or it’s going to move you backwards. Now, if you make the wrong decision in any given moment and it moves you backwards, the important thing to understand here is that you’re not just moving back one place, you’re actually moving back two places, because that decision could have moved you forward one. Right. And so bad decisions compound faster than good decisions. But what I love about this framework is it says, listen, yes, in life, some decisions are more important than others. Who you marry, who you partner with, like, what opportunities you pursue, sure.
But when you’re. When you’re diligent with the small things, you can be entrusted with the big things. And so this framework, the beauty of it is just to say, hey, that choice that you need to make right now between, do I drink water or do I drink a soda, that’s just plus one. That decision that I make right now, do I call my girlfriend and tell her I love her or do I ignore her and just watch another YouTube video or whatever? Do I go for that walk or do I stay in my office? Each one of these decisions is just moving you forward, or it’s moving you backwards. And what I love about this is it makes discipline very simple. It makes it go, is this moving me forward or is it moving me backwards? Would brushing my teeth right now move me forward? Yeah, it would. Okay, I’m going to do that. Is drinking the water going to move me forward? Yeah.
Okay, I’m going to do that. And when you build up the muscle with the small things, it makes it so much easier to make the big decisions because you’ve already been priming those muscles.
Wow, that’s powerful, man. I’ve never thought about it that way. But now that you’ve framed it into a very clear picture, now I, I really love it, man. We gotta share this into thai, in a thai version. Freaking love it, man.
Love it, love it.
That’s awesome. Plus one. And what’s powerful about this principle is that just like what you mentioned, a minus one choice is actually not just a minus one because it’s actually a, it’s a negative two because that choice could have pushed you forward, but instead it put you behind instead of putting you one step ahead.
The most powerful concept I would hope to, like, share with somebody young who’s trying to figure out their life and get ahead is understand that every good thing that can happen to you in life, all good things, all good things, relationships, wealth, skills, health, all of them, they compound slowly. All bad things in your life, all bad things compound quickly. The food, the relationship, the toxic relationships, the not taking care of your health. Bad decisions compound faster than good decisions. And so you need to keep showing up consistently, making those good decisions, because it takes decades for them to manifest. And those bad decisions, they only take days.
That’s so true. That is powerful. I really hope that anyone who’s listening right now is gonna catch that and run with that because that’s so powerful. I think if just anyone picks that up, powerful man. Now, I do want to touch on your businesses as well, because you’ve built and sold and built and still running quite a few things and as well as a real estate portfolio. So you gotta feel us in, man. Like, what’s, what’s been going on, bro.
Yeah, well, it’s funny. Like, I, I was not a natural entrepreneur. I wasn’t the kid with a lemonade stand. I never, you know, plucked flowers from the neighbor’s yard and sold it back to them or anything like that. Like, and so, like, growing up, like, when you ask, like, who was young Anthony? Young Anthony was the first furthest thing from an entrepreneur that you could imagine. And I only found myself building businesses because I fell backwards into it. And I happened to meet a person who changed my life, like a mentor. I truly, sometimes you just are in the right place at the right time.
And serendipity strikes. And I met a guy. I was living in the back of my van. My fiance had, had dumped me and so I had nowhere to live but in the back of a van. And he came to me and he’s like, dude, you’re at rock bottom here. You have nothing else going on. So let’s try something. Let’s try building a business.
And it seemed like the craziest idea at the time. I had never thought about it. Like, it just never crossed my mind. But we decided to build a window washing company. And what I quickly learned was all the things I had been led to believe about my inability to focus. It wasn’t that I couldn’t focus. It was that I couldn’t focus on the things I wasn’t interested in. But suddenly, as I was building businesses, I was like, I love this because my work is being rewarded with the outputs.
My inputs match my outputs in a very linear way. And I’m like, this is very cool. I own this. I felt a lot of ownership, and I love that. And I discovered that I had a lot of skills that were uniquely situated to do well in business. And so we built that window washing company to seven figures. And then we sold it about a year and a half later. We went on, we built a gym, we built a manufacturing company that produces polyurethane rock climbing holds.
We have an import export hardware business. And all of these are kind of within particular niches of rock climbing because in a past life, I was a professional rock climber, so I know that industry really well. And so back in 20. So after my first successful business, I had a new problem, which was I had spent my entire life being broke and I didn’t know how to make money, so the business allowed me to make money. But then I had a new problem, which is okay, now what do I do with the money that I’ve made of? And so I was asking my man, yeah, yeah. Like, splurging and no, no, I’m. No, I’m not interested in that stuff. Like, I’ve never really cared about what the money can buy you from a physical, material sense.
I’ve always liked money as a scoreboard for myself, to be able to measure progress. And I’ve liked money as a means for having complete control and ownership over my life. I like having the ability to do what I want, when I want, and nobody can tell me where to be and do what. So that that’s been the value of money for me. And if anything, learning to spend money was hard because I had to rewire a lot of the programming that you have when you’re young and you’re poor. And you’re broken and you don’t know anything. So that’s been a lesson is like, learning how to actually spend money without feeling some of that shame. So that’s been a struggle.
But I didn’t. I didn’t. When I started making money, I didn’t go off the deep end and start buying stuff I was more interested in, like, how do I take this and go build the next thing?
And so it’s like, kind of like a scoreboard for you to.
Keep on compounding, adding on.
Bigger.
It was just cool. It’s just cool to see the number getting bigger.
You are very blessed, brother. I see a lot of my. A successful friends and, dude, like, sometimes I make this mistake as well once you get that bonus and. But now that I’m reflecting on, kind of, like, the language that I’ve been using as well is that when you are in alignment with the work that you do and you feel like you really enjoy the work that you put in, there’s no real need or real urge to try and spend it because you really value that work. Right?
And so it becomes something that you cherish more. But I found that when, when, when the means to get to. To acquire money comes from ways that might not have been so that that was filled with. Filled more with struggle than with joy. Or at least like a worthen, worthwhile journey. You. You kind of want to spin it out fast. Or at least that’s what I found in my own journey.
I’m not sure if you have that with your clients or not.
Totally. It goes back to the idea of progress and are we progressing? So I think it was. I can’t remember who. I think it was Earl Nightingale who said, success is defined as progress towards a worthy ideal. Progress or success is progress towards a worthy ideal. And if we’re progressing in the work that we’re doing and we feel like that has meaning and has helped people’s lives and it’s contributing and it’s making us feel creative and it makes us feel purpose driven, then the money is great. But, like, the work itself is the reward. And I think that’s really important to understand is that, like, the.
The work is the prize, and if you’re doing the right work, then you don’t. You’re not worried about what comes after it. And. And that’s hard, especially when you’re young, because you have to do a lot of work that you maybe don’t love, but you can attach love to it by understanding that the work that you’re putting in. What you’re really developing isn’t the work you’re doing for the business or for this boss that you have. It’s actually the work that you’re doing on yourself, the person that you’re becoming in the process. And that’s a gift that you get to give yourself for the rest of your life, is the gift of you. But now, when it comes to money, the thing is, the marginal utility of money rapidly decreases above a certain point.
And so what I mean by that is like, yeah, I live in a nice place, and I can drive a nice car. Cool, right? But for the most part, like, everything that I use on a day to day basis, the most frequently, my headphones, my phone, my computer. It’s the same computer that Jeff Bezos uses. It’s the same headphones that Mark Zuckerberg uses. And it’s the same that you probably listening to this are using as well. So, like, beyond, like, just eating a fancier cheeseburger. Like, cheeseburger is a cheeseburger at a certain point, right? And so, like, I don’t get too tied up in the material side now. There are things where it’s like, okay, that nice car, that watch.
Like, there are things that, like, there. There’s almost like an artistic expression or a purity of engineering. Sure. They’re like, that’s cool. But for me, I’ve never been so interested in things as much as I have been in events or memories. I like to travel. I like to go do epic things. And that, for me, is a much cooler way to spend the money than it is just to own a thing.
Because often what ends up happening is the things that we own end up owning us, because now we feel the need to take care of them and to maintain them. And, like, what happens if this thing gets scratched? And I’m like, I don’t. I don’t need. I don’t need all that mental energy.
That’s a lot of stress, man. Like, dude, I I was just talking to my wife that, you know, we. When. When we’ve got kids, you know, like, now our house used to be just the two of us, right? And now. And both of us have a lot of stuff because we like to dress up and whatnot. And she used to go to quite a lot of events and stuff like that. And then now our house is filled with our own shit and then her own stuff, and then our kids shit as well. So, man, I could use a nice move where we can really straighten down our stuff right now.
And. And you’re spot on, bro, because, um, a lot of people that I know that have quite a lot of cars and a lot of houses, like, right now, we’ve got a lot of land and real estate that we don’t even have time to take care of because we’re so busy in our day to day business. So up to a certain point, it’s just like what you said, it becomes a stress in life instead of a blessing.
And you. And what I would encourage anybody listening to this because you’re probably young and you maybe don’t have a lot of stuff yet, and you’re like, I would like that. That stuff. Just understand this. Like, it’s okay to want that stuff, and it’s okay to have that. Like, those fancy things. That’s totally fine. Just understand why it is you feel the need for it.
If it’s something that makes you happy, you enjoy the art, the engineering, you enjoy the thing. It brings you joy irregardless of what other people think of it, then go for it. But if you’re getting the thing because you want others to feel or think a way about, you, don’t do it because you’re playing. You’re trying to transfer the wealth game to the status game. The status game is very hierarchical. I wear this fancy watch because I want you to see this fancy watch and think, oh, he has a lot of money. You’re playing the status game. And the thing is, anything that you buy to signal status is the ultimate not status move.
If you have to signal your status to me with your watch or your car, if that’s why you do it, it’s actually a depowering position because I don’t care about that. And the people who you want to impress, they also don’t care about that. The only people you’re impressing with your status signal is the people who also want that thing, not the people who have it.
That’s so true, man. That is powerful. That’s a powerful lesson right there, guys. I hope you are listening very closely to this. Now, Anthony, what’s your definition of wealth? I think you touched on it lightly, but would love for you to expand on that.
Well, I mean, wealth, if we’re looking at it from a financial perspective, a very technical definition that I like to use is wealth is the ratio between what you make and what you spend. So, in a very tactical sense, if you make a million dollars a year, but you spend a million dollars a year, you are not wealthy. However, if you make $50,000 a year. And you only spend $10,000 a year. Then every year that you work and you save, you build up $40,000 of wealth, which is equal to four years of living expenses. Therefore, you’re making four years of wealth. That’s how I like to think about that. Okay, so that’s.
And it’s the way that a lot of young kids maybe haven’t thought about it before. So I would encourage you to consider wealth is the ratio between what you make and what you keep. The other side of this, though, is that financial wealth is just one metric. And I’m a big fan of the concept of becoming a whole life billionaire. And what I mean by that is a lot of people think of, like, billionaires. People have a billion dollars, they have it all figured out, they’re so successful. Cool. That’s just one metric.
But what does it look like to be a relationship billionaire? What does it look like to be a health billionaire? What’s it look like to be a time billionaire or a mindset billionaire or skills billionaire? That’s what I think about. I like those five metrics. And because the money, that’s just one metric. It’s one way. It’s an easy way to measure the scorecard. But really, at the end of the day, the ones that matter more, it’s your relationships, your mindset, your health, your skills. Because I’ll let you guys in on a little secret. You take all my money away, I’ll be okay.
Because I got all the other banks figured out. I have my relationships, I have my time, I have my skills, I have my mindset, I have my body, and I can get the money back. So that’s not even the most important one. So when I think about wealth, I think about who has those five banks the most full.
How does one work on each of them?
With intention. With intention. You sit down. You sit down and you plot it out just like we started the conversation coming full circle is that if you have an identity of who you could be, that great person, you need to speak it out, you need to put it down, you need to identify it, set the destination, and then we can work backwards and triangulate it. But for most people, they’ve never sat down and said, what does it look like for me to invest in my mindset today? What would that look like? Okay, well, maybe that’s a 15 minutes meditation. Maybe that’s a 15 minutes journal. I don’t know. But until you start, start to ask yourself, what would it look like to invest in this same with relationships.
A lot of people are just too passive in their relationships and they, they let their friend, like, when I reach out every now and then, you know how it is. Like, oh, I got this buddy from 15 years ago. We go way back, he’s my homie, and yet we get busy. I haven’t reached out to him. We haven’t talked in forever, and he would like to talk to me and I would love to talk with him, but nobody reaches out. And so both people just keep doing what they’re doing. And so one way of investing in your relationship bank is with intention and saying, okay, what am I going to do today to invest in a relationship that matters to me? How am I going to invest in my partner? How am I going to invest in my friend, my employees, whatever relationship it is? And maybe that’s a relationship with yourself. What am I going to do today to invest in the relationship that I have with myself? And maybe that’s saying, I’m going to go for a long walk.
And on that 30 minutes walk, I’m going to just list off all the things that I’m grateful for about myself. There’s a novel concept, right? Like, yeah, what would it look like to become your own biggest fan and be okay with that? But again, to invest into anything, it has to be done with intention. So just figure out every morning, what would it look like to invest a little bit into it? And it’s not about intensity. It’s not about, like, going and doing 10,000 push ups tomorrow, because you’re like, I’ve decided to invest in my health. A hundred push ups every day for the next 10,000 days is better than 10,000 pushups today, right? It’s consistency over intensity. So figure out, how can I show up every day, make another deposit, because again, good decisions take decades to compound, so you just got to keep showing up and making the deposits.
I love that. I love that. Now, since we touch on kind of like your journey in building a business as well, what are your, kind of like your main takeaways in being an entrepreneur? And do you think that everybody has the capacity to become a business owner if they choose to?
It’s really interesting. I think everybody could, but it’s more important to understand who you are and play the games in life that you’re uniquely suited for. So going back to my adhd for the longest time, I was told it was a weakness that I couldn’t focus, right. And is why I struggled in school and struggled in the corporate America or corporate w two route. And the reason for that was because I was playing the wrong games. And the really important thing to understand is that you cannot change the cards you’re dealt in this life, but you can change the games you play. And so just understand, you might not be the best entrepreneur in the world. You might not be cut out for that, but you might be the world’s best number five.
You might be set up to be the world’s best fifth employee at a big organization. You might have that in you. And what I’ve come to realize is that I’m actually not a very good number one. I’m not a good CEO. I am a damn good number two. So every business that I go into, I always have a business partner, and I am real good as a number. There’s nobody better as a number two. And I can do the number one, but I’m not the best at it.
Right. And so I understand the cards that I have, and I understand the game that I can win with them, and I only play those games I can win. I would encourage people listening to this isn’t to think that, like, you have to play the same game as me because your cards are different. And so you just need to evaluate and say, where, in what way can I play these cards? Where it maximizes my opportunity for success.
How long did it take you to figure out that you are more suited to be a number two than a number one?
Oh, that was easy. Yeah. So my first two businesses, I was lucky, and I had a partner, and he was the more senior partner. So it was, like, very natural. It was very natural. I was learning from him. And then my third business, I went into it by myself, and it was my one and only massive failure. And I learned very, and I learned very, very quickly.
I was like, oh, these things that my partner does, I hate them so much. I hate doing these things. Like, I’m a big fan of playing to your strengths and surrounding yourself with the people that have the strength, the your complementary strengths to your weaknesses. And I didn’t have that, and I didn’t have the awareness before that because it was just the world that I had known. I always had a partner who had those complementary skills. So when I did the business on my own, I realized, ah, this is why we were successful. Over here is his yin to my yang. So now whenever I do a business, I go into it and I say, who is that person that has these skills that will enable us to be successful? So I had to learn the hard way.
Makes sense makes sense. As with all of us, I think life lessons are probably the most valuable ones, for sure.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. And actually, what was funny in that one is, come to think of it, the problem wasn’t actually that I was the only person, because I actually had a business partner on that deal that that blew up. The problem was him and I had the same exact skill sets. We’re the same person, and so we didn’t have that complimentary. What is that thing that’s filling our void? Because we both got along, we had the same skills, and therefore, we had great conversations. We had great. Like, we just jived. Right.
And sometimes finding the person who complements your strengths, they’re a different person. They think very differently than you. And so there’s. There’s often this friction, like a good partnership with a good part, a business partner, there’s usually a friction, and that can turn people off because they think it needs to be easy all the time. And it’s like, no, actually, it’s the disparity in personalities that makes the magic.
I I’m totally with you on that one, because my mom and my dad, they built the business from scratch as well. And both of them are very complimentary. Like, my dad is very like, go, go, go. And then my mom, she’s like, she’s like, okay, go, and I’ll manage. Go, and I’ll manage, and I’ll get things done behind the scenes. So, yeah, that’s been kind of like their secret sauce, you know, like that duo now. Um, I. Since we’ve got a bit of time left, I really touch on how you got into real estate as well.
Like, what led you to that route?
Well, I went, you know, after I had my first little bit of money come in, I went to the people who were ahead of me in life, and I asked them, like, okay, what do you do with your money? And everybody just kept telling me, invest it in a real estate and hold it for the next 30 years, and you’ll probably do okay. I was like, okay, okay. Yeah. I was like, sounds good.
That simple?
It was literally that simple. And so I went and started buying little residential buildings, like three units, four units. And I was doing that with my own money from about 2012 to about 2019. And then in 2019 is when I started going into larger commercial real estate, and we started raising money from outside investors to go acquire large apartment complexes. And that was mainly due to the fact that I had built a large enough portfolio at that time, and I was managing them in house with my own team. And so I had all this operational potential. I had the systems in place. I had the team in place.
And so it was kind of like, well, how do I maximize this machine that I’ve built over here? And the easy solution was, okay, we could blow it up by bringing in outside investor capital. We’ll go large with this thing and we’ll just manage it all in house. And so kind of fell into it all backwards. I don’t have, like, a deep passion or a love for real estate, but real estate is a fantastic store of wealth is an asset that appreciates if you buy it. Right. So cash flows in most countries. It has pretty good tax implications, and it’s steady, so it doesn’t whipsaw back and forth like stock markets do. And so those are things I like about it.
But again, depending on where your listeners are at in their life and even geographically, like, I’m not going to lie. Like, I’m really blessed to be in America where, like, real estate laws are very advantageous for us here. And it’s, it’s a little bit easier, I think, to get into real estate here than in a lot of other places. So you might not be able to play that game yet. But my one encouragement to people would just be to understand when you go into real estate, you have to ask yourself, is the goal to invest in real estate or is it to build a real estate investing business? And those are very different things to invest. For instance, investing in the stock market, you put your money in there and it starts getting you yields. Right? A lot of people will do with real estate is they’ll go and buy it themselves and then they’ll operate it themselves. And now they have a small business that they’re managing.
They thought it was going to be passive and easy and it’s going to make them all this money. And next thing they know, they’re having to deal with the residents and broken toilets and, like, all of these things. And, like, I didn’t sign up for this. I wanted to focus on my main business. I just want to put money over here. And that’s the big mistake I see a lot of people make. So just go into real estate eyes wide open about what it is you’re, you’re hoping to accomplish.
Wow, that’s some really great tips for people who want to get into real estate and perhaps some mindset shifts that you should be careful of as well as you’re going in now. What are you right now working on, Anthony? Like, what’s, what’s uh, what are you building towards in this phase?
Yeah, the big. The big thing is we. We started the media side of our business and back in 2015 and really started talking about entrepreneurship and personal development, because those, like, for me, entrepreneurship was the ultimate vehicle for realizing my potential. It wasn’t just about making money. It was about realizing my potential and about making a positive impact on the world. And so what we do now with our content, whether that’s on YouTube, Instagram, the newsletter, we have a community for entrepreneurs. It’s all about helping them maximize their return on life, because I believe that entrepreneurs ultimately are the people who make the most disproportionate positive impact on the world.
I love that.
And so if I can help them learn how to step into their greatness, whether that’s through the systems, the frameworks that will help them build their business, or just by developing the mindset and the beliefs that will help them get out of their own way, I’m all for that, because I think that’s the way that I can make the biggest positive impact on the world at this point.
I love it, man. It seems like most of the people that Dan has attracted into the group, like, oh, we all kind of share this similar goal of creating a positive dent on this world and creating a positive impact in a society that we live in. That’s really adult, man. Where can people. Find out more about yourself, brother.
Yeah, I’d say. I mean, I’m on all the social media platforms, like you said, the YouTube channel, we have a pretty good YouTube channel. We put a lot of time and effort into that. But if you want to connect with me personally, I would say go to Instagram. Go to the Anthony Vasino on Instagram. Come find me, DM me. We respond to all of our DM’s. We got hundreds of DM’s every day on all the different platforms, and our goal is to respond to every single one of them and actually engage with the community.
Put social back into social media. So come find me on instagram. Come follow the content if it helps you on your journey. Awesome. Reach out. I won’t mentor you, but I might. I might lean in and give you some ideas that will help you. So all I ask is that you lean back towards me.
I love it, brother. I love it. What has been your most peak moment in your life so far, Anthony? You could pick one instance.
Well, the peak. Here’s what’s really interesting is I would say my peak was actually my rock bottom. It was that moment when my fiance dumped me, and I had to go live in that van. And for, like, it was humiliating at the time, and it was embarrassed. I was so embarrassed, and I hated every minute of it. But when I look back at my life, that was like a second birth. It was the moment where I suddenly had to step out of the person that I was and become this new version. And more importantly, it put me on the path to climbing the right mountain for once.
And so I don’t think I’ll ever reach a peak, but I know I’m on the right mountain now. And it all started by getting to the base of the right mountain, which was that rock bottom.
Wow. What a powerful way to end. I love it. Brother Anthony, thank you so much for your time, brother.
Thanks, brother. I appreciate it.
It’s an honor to get to, I guess, call you as a friend and brother, thank you for doing what you do and sharing your journey, sharing your excellence and your mindsets and your beliefs to the world and being such a positive impact into the community that you’re able to touch. Thank you, brother.
I appreciate it. Thank you.
All right, Mandy.
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