Lessons - Overcoming Hardship and Reinvention | Eszylfie Taylor, Celebrity Financial Advisor

Welcome to Lessons episodes of Success Story, part of the HubSpot podcast network. These lessons episodes will be shorter conversations with past guests, valued members of the success story community, and myself. They'll be focused on teaching you actionable, insightful takeaways that you can use to upscale your personal and professional life. You make your money, recession hits, you're broke at that point, that's probably rock bottom in your life for the success that you've had. How do you turn your life around? You're building again, but you want to build a little bit differently, right? You don't want to build the exact same way because you weren't happy then, any? I think, and this is something that the people who are viewing some of you might relate to, I think that really talented people have a challenge in creating scalable business. And people who create not riches, but wealth, understand the value of scale, understand that a true business runs in spite of you, not because of you. And I have a particular talent, right, like, I'm not shy if you can't tell, right? I have a particular talent of being in front of people and moving people to action. But the challenge that occurs in that, as me working with a client on a one-on-one basis, is that I can only have so many meetings. I can only close so many deals, right? But if I manufactured cell phones, right, and sold a million cell phones every month, I'd be a billionaire, right? And no one even knows my name, right? Think about Jeff Bezos, right, you know, CEO or founder of Amazon. How many, when's the last time Jeff Bezos delivered a package, right? And so, in a while, and that's been the shift for me, and again, the journey I'm still in the midst of right now is, how do I shift and restructure my enterprises, the various businesses that I run that they run again in spite of me, not because of me? One of my biggest clients said it to me best, and this really resonated with me. He said, he said, you have created the perfect business when you show up to work and have nothing to do. Matter of fact, when you try to do something, you mess it up. He's like, then that's it, right? And so that's been etched to my head like the last ten years, and so there. So even for me, it's like, man, I'm such an integral part of all the things I do, and that's great, and I love it, and I'm a big part of it, but I have a scale issue. So things like, you know, things like my app, my body money app on the app store, things like my show and my body money. Allow me to cast a widening, being in front of millions, tens of millions of people, and then hopefully some fraction of them act. And that is how I'm trying to gain scale in this next chapter of my life by, you know, taking, taking, taking my places of public figure, taking my places of celebrity and monetizing that. But in a manner that I think is positive, right, that if I get, if I get a million people to go, man, I love your vision, I love what you're doing, I love the impact you're trying to have on the world. And I could pay three bucks a month for all this content that's, that's actionable for me to have to improve my life and help other people, sure, I'll do that, right, when I get a million people to pay me three bucks a month, there you go, no, I think that, that's a huge issue people have, right, because they have this like super high valuable skill and they figured out how to kill it in their career, but that scalability. And now what you figured out, like actually by solving a very real business problem, now you can actually solve the rest of your life, which is how do you devote time to your, to your better half, to your spouse, to your kids, to your parents, like, to your community, because you really can't do that if you're just great at working. Like it's, I was actually going to ask you this, like, how do you manage and balance all this stuff? I don't know if there's a secret to it. I think it's just you got to find a way to build a business that scales. Yeah. It, you know, I don't want to make light of what it took for me to get here. Um, it's, it's easy, you know, you know, from some vantage point to say, look, you, it's easy. Like, you got that house now, you got that garden. Oh, now you want to balance now. And, and so I, I will say like I had, and I still have to some degree that I call it the sickness. Right? You must be obsessed with success. You must be obsessed. You're not like anyone great, like a Michael Jordan or serena Williams or a tiger woods or whatever. They're like, it's all sick. They're not like regular. They're not like, well, you know, I'll practice a couple times a week and see what happens. Like, no, obsessed. I think that you have to have that to be great, academics, business, sports, music. You have to have that, right? So anyone who's listening who's not where they want their career, yep, you got to grind it out, right? No, make no mistake about it. What I would encourage people not to lose sight of even in the midst of that journey is trying to maintain some level of balance or reset. I'm wired different than other people, right? Like, I get energy from others, right? So I can work a hundred hours a week, two hundred and fifty hours. But if I'm around people and getting energy and encouragement from other people, I'm good. And some people are like, listen, two days a week, I got a shut off, no cell phone, whoever, like, and to each his own. I used to, I used to look at someone like that as I was going in my career. I would look at them as weak. I would look at them like, oh, you don't get it. And what I realized later on is like, you know, who didn't get it? I didn't get it. I was at this conference one time. I'm a new, like, up and coming kid, hot shot, right, running my mouth. I hadn't done anything yet. I was running my mouth like, I'm the right boy, that's what I knew, right? And I'm telling people like, this is where I'm going, people like, man, this kid is something else, right? And this other lady sit next to me and she had a completely opposite. She had been in the business like 30 years. She was like, ah, she was like, here's what I do. I work for three months. And then I take a month off. And I travel by family and then I work for three months and I take a month off. And as she was talking to her story, I'm like, man, this lady is wrong with her. Do you realize if you didn't take a whole month off, how much better you could even be doing, right? Now I look at it like, wow, that's cool. If what gives her fulfillment is, I'm going to grind it out, but then I'm going to take this time to reset with my kids and my grandkids, then cool. That is what success looks like to her. And so what I realize is that my definition of success, my definition of making it, doesn't have to be yours or anyone else's, we're all on our own journey. But the key is you must identify what it is for you. If you aim at nothing, you'll hit it with amazing accuracy. So you can't, to your point earlier, you can't gauge yourself or say, hey, because Joe does this, this is why I got to do it, because Mary does, this is what I got to do. You want to be the best version of yourself, whatever that is, whether it's making a hundred grand a year, making a hundred grand a day, whatever that is, right? And then once you define what does that success look like to you, what does fulfillment look like to you, then boom, do the work. So then it's okay. So that's, I love this, dude. I love this. This is so important because when people listen to this, I don't want them. To just look at people that operate at an exceptionally high level and be like, oh, I'm a failure if I don't get there. But I do want people to know that this take a lot of work to get there. And sometimes to be honest, like the people that make it to the top, like, there's a little bit off. Like they're not like a hundred percent, there's not a hundred percent normal. Like they have to put an insane amount of work to get there, which is cool. But like I think the people at the top also have to realize that like, you can burn a lot of good parts of your life away if you just focus on that. And I think for the average person who wants to be truly happy, I think that just being the 0.01% 24, 7, 365 from when you're born till you die is not going to make you quote unquote happy at all, actually. And I think that people, you know, it's a cautionary tale. You look at the people that are the, you know, Deca millionaires and, and, and even up to the billionaires and, and the family is suffering and the multiple divorces and like, there's things that fall away. So figure out what you want. I think that's super, super important. How do you, because how do you figure out what you want? We, we come into this world with nothing and we'll leave with nothing, right? I'm not a person. Like what do we remember for in that, in that, in that window of time, in the midst? Um, you know, I, again, I'm not, I'm not a special person. I'm not better than anyone else and I'm just on my, on my grind. I think, I think if I had to, to say, what am I, I'm, I'm a grind or I'm a hustler. I've, I've, I've fallen down and gotten up and fallen down, gotten up. And that's what I said. I don't believe in winning and losing. I believe in winning and learning and taking these lessons that I've learned, taking these challenges that I've experienced and then saying, okay, how can I come back better and stronger as a result, you know, of these things? And so, um, there's just a great level of peace. There's a great level of, of, of serenity that I have in the unknown. And that is what used to freak me out. That's the thing with you. Fruits a lot of people. I was like, you don't know what tomorrow is going to bring. And I know that if I crush today, if I do everything I can today, tomorrow bring enough challenges and problems of its own, let me just focus on today, right? Tomorrow's, tomorrow's a mystery yesterday's history, right? But today is a gift. That's why they call it their present.