Building Resilience: Rising Up From The Worst With Sam Bakhtiar

 

Building resilience is key to enabling success, no matter what path you take in life. In this episode, Adam talks with Sam Bakhtiar is a multi-millionaire, champion bodybuilder, author, doctor, CEO of multiple worldwide brands and Founder of The Camp Transformation Center. In Sam’s words, without resilience, you would be unable to take a hit, causing you to crumble in the face of adversity and give up. Sam shares what resilience means to him as well as how to build it so that when the worst comes, as it does in life, you’re able to rise back up. Don’t miss this engaging and empowering conversation between Sam and Adam.

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Building Resilience: Rising Up From The Worst With Sam Bakhtiar

I’m feeling blessed as I sit here, lucky to be clearheaded, feeling at peace. It’s a lot going on in the world. A ton of shit happening in many ways. I didn’t think that it could get any more heady or dizzying with our politics. That’s in the US and everywhere. There are tons of changes. There are lots of disruption and with this Coronavirus thing. The last time that I have felt that the world was off-kilter in the way that it feels like it is in the moment is a different time that some of you may be old enough to remember this well. Some of you may be not. We had a family meeting. Our kids were young at the time that 9/11 occurred.

Those few weeks, those few months after 9/11, the world was off balance. People were in fear and in many different ways. It didn’t feel stable. That’s what the world feels like at this moment. To me when the shit hits the fan, that’s when I get the calmest. It’s like my heart rate cuts in half. It’s important that in times like this that we are able to harness our energy, be clearheaded, and be calm. That’s more the time for breathing, meditation and looking out at the landscape of things in anticipation of opportunity and anticipation of growth. That’s the time for that more than anything else.

I’ve got a great guest on the show who we share a philosophy there. It’s my suspicion that’s the case, who is also an entrepreneur like myself. I’m going to give you a little bit more background on him and then ask him some questions about that. We’ll dive in and see where things lead us. There’s a lot going on, a lot to talk about. Dr. Sam Bakhtiar is a refugee who turned divorcee on the verge of bankruptcy. A lot going on at a certain point in his life, as we all do. Turn that around to become a multimillionaire, a champion bodybuilder, author, doctor, CEO of multiple worldwide brands. As the Founder of The Camp Transformation Center with 110 locations and the 1% ER Movement, Sam inspires adults and young people to discover their 1% potential and excel in the five F’s: Faith, Family, Fitness, Finance and Fun. If you can’t have fun, it’s not worth doing anything. Sam, it’s a pleasure to have you on the show. Welcome.

Thank you for having me. I appreciate that.

What’s not written in the part of that bio that you would love for people to know about you?

I’m the king of failure. Failure is a prerequisite to success. The more you fail, the more resilient you become, the more you’ll learn, if you do learn from them. The reason I’m here and I’m experiencing somewhat of a success is because I fell over and over because I wasn’t afraid to try. I’m never afraid to try. I eat dirt. I get back up. I’ll try again. Eat dirt. I have an eight-month-old, so he’s going to start walking. He’s going to fall 1,000 times before he starts walking. He’s going to take a little step and fall. No kid ever said, “I don’t want to walk. This is it. I’m going to lay down.” Somehow as adults, every time we fail or if we fail, we’re going to give up. We want to be like, “This sucks.” I blame all the circumstances and everybody else, coronavirus, the economy and whatever else you want to call it. We never want to take personal responsibilities. We are here because all of a sudden, the decisions we made here in life so far.

Failure is a prerequisite to success. Share on X

It’s interesting you used the analogy of the kids when they’re little. I love that one personally because having four kids of our own and having seen them go through that stage of crawling to standing to knock shit over all over the house and having to childproof the house. They eat dirt again and again and yet you said it that the kid doesn’t think, “I’ll never walk.” There’s another piece of that which is the parents, the worst of the parents. We’ve got some parents that maybe should’ve gotten a license before they had a kid. Even those people never look at their kid and say, “That kid will never walk.” They crawl. They stand. They fall down. They’re going to walk. You have that faith. That’s one of your apps is faith. Faith that they will walk. If it takes eating dirt to use your words 100 times, 500 times. At some point that kid’s going to walk. Why is it any different when that little kid turns 30 years old or turns 40 or 50?

People kept telling you, “You can’t do it.” You start paying attention to a lot of people’s thinking and opinion. A kid is not paying attention to anybody else’s opinion. A kid has one thing on his mind, “I want to get up and I want to walk because I want to get that toy over there. I will walk to that thing over here.” As an adult, we slowly lose focus on what we want and what everybody else is saying, what everybody else is doing, what everybody else’s telling us. That’s why that’s our biggest downfall versus when we were kids.

We could talk about one of those dark failure times for you. Maybe it’s helpful to do that to give a little context for it, if you can remember what your mindset was like. For example, I’ll tell you, I pivoted out of being a lawyer. I was a lawyer for several years. I’m successful. I have a couple of offices, more money than I’d ever dreamed I’d make. I made many times more than my parents made. I typically make more in a day, in a week, easily than my parents made in an entire year. I would do that all the time, but I was miserable. I had to get out of that because it’s destroying my insights. I move into something else, rise to the top of that particular thing, become successful in that arena. Business partners and I don’t see eye-to-eye. We have a falling out. They don’t believe in my vision any longer and I’m out. I have to pivot this time now, not because I decide when I’m going to get out, but because somebody else says you’ve got to get out.

I remember that time caught me more off guard than the first time when I was the miserable one and making the changes. This time, it was something that I didn’t necessarily see coming, could have, in hindsight it’s always easy to see the writing on the wall. We know that. I look back. I can see it, but I was caught off guard. I remember what I was doing, where my head was at and what I was more intentionally looking to focus on at that time, which helped me to get out of that and create what we’ve been doing ever since, which we loved. We’ve got a disruption with this virus thing, which we’ll get to, but take us back to that time. It could be you coming to a new country. It could be the ending of your marriage, but whatever was going on. If you can remember what it was like at that moment, what was happening for you? What was going on in your head? What was the worst thoughts you were entertaining at the time? In your bio it says, refugee turned divorcee on the verge of bankruptcy. I’m probably condensing that a bit.

I had many dark times in my life. I remember it all started when my dad left us when I was three. I never saw him again. Our country went to the war and we got bombed every night. We got to go under the stairs, in the basement every time we hear sirens. I came to America expecting I’m going to go to Beverly Hills because that’s what I saw on TV. We went to the worst neighborhood I’ve ever seen to this date. Where outside there were drug dealers, pimps, prostitutes and people were getting shot outside of my uncle’s store. Coming to America and my favorite sport I played all my life was soccer. They didn’t have a soccer team. I got cut from the basketball team. I got ridiculed. I got beat up. I got bullied. I got named called because I was the only minority in school.

I started going through chiropractic school in college because my mom said, “Become a doctor.” I am a doctor because of my mom. I started my first business and then the recession hit. Worst times when my ex-wife was pregnant with our first child and I had $314 in the bank account. I concentrated on trying to get the business back in. From 2008 to 2014, I was broke. I was trying to make ends meet. Finally, I started turning things around. I got served with divorce papers. Still to this day, as we talked about it, even though I got remarried, I’m still having issues to this day with my ex-wife in co-parenting and all that stuff. Because you see that the house, the mansions, all these kinds of stuff, that doesn’t mean that you don’t have adversity in life. In life, you either in a problem, headed towards a problem or left one. There’s always going to be something. I wholeheartedly believe that God puts adversity in front of you to test you to see if you’re worthy of his blessing.

 

I don’t think there’s anything that’s going on for any of us that we’re not capable of. I believe in a loving, kind universe. Sometimes kindness comes in funny ways because something that helps you to grow is a kind thing. It’s a beautiful thing. It doesn’t necessarily feel that way at the moment.

I always say this analogy that I love, if you’ve ever watched MMA or boxing, and sometimes when you see somebody get punched right in the face, they get punched and they shake it off, laugh and let the opponent know, “You hit me. That was a good one. You got me good on that one.” To me, the more you get punched, the more you’re used to it, the more you’re able to maneuver through adversity. In life, it’s the same thing as boxing. The first time a guy got punched straight in the face, he wasn’t laughing. I guarantee you that. The first 100 times he got punched in the face, he wasn’t laughing. I guarantee you that.

He got punched many times. He understood that being punched was a part of the game. If you’re playing this game called life, adversity is going to be part of the game. Embrace it, smile at it, look at it and say, “What am I going to learn about this? How I’m going to maneuver it? What’s the other blessing that’s going to be on the other side? Every time I’ve gone through huge adversity. Every single time when I thought my life was over, I became better at the end. Have I given up? Have I thrown the towel? I wouldn’t have gotten it there where I am.

In that genre, I grew up watching Muhammad Ali. Maybe a couple of years you’re a senior. I’m not old enough to remember when he wasn’t willing to fight in Vietnam. For religious reasons as well as other reasons, he said, “I’m a conscientious objector here.” That was tough. Death threats and every other thing were thrown his way. Missing time, missing a good part of the prime of his career coming back. Standing in that ring with the likes of Joe Frazier, George Foreman. In the ring, he would smile at guys who punched him square in the head. He could take a punch.

He also had that little move that he would do where he would aikido the punch. He called it the rope a dope. He’d get on the ropes. He’d move his head back and forth. Guys would be hitting him, but not quite hitting him. He was absorbing the blow. The guy was a genius. He was a genius in and out of the ring. There’s something to the fact that all of us have to do that. With Ali, you could call it a shame, but it’s also a part of life. The man ends up with Parkinson’s and this great big hulk of a guy, this champion and this guy who could speak like nobody’s business.

It’s consummate showman and he can’t communicate. It’s like his communication left him as well. There’s an element of all of us having to learn how to roll with the punches. I’m going to go with that analogy. That’s what we’re talking about here, Sam. You can’t take it on the face too much. Rocky maybe is an example of both because in the first movie, as far as I’m concerned, the only Rocky 1976, Rocky and Apollo Creed. The guy gets knocked down and knocked down every single time. He gets back up, smiles, shakes it off. He says “That’s good, but it’s not good enough. It’s not going to knock me out.” He wins our hearts, but he loses the fight in the end. I’m not certain that we want to have people leaning into the punch, but to be able to roll with those punches. You’ve got to be smart about it too.

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Nobody leans into a punch on purpose anyway. You always want to avoid punches, but you also understand it’s going to play the game. You are going to get hit. Floyd Mayweather, the best defensive fighter of all time. He got hit. You’re going to get hit and anybody else going to get hit. Nobody has gone through life not getting hit. I can guarantee you that. If there was someday, for whatever reason, some trust fund baby who gotten billions of dollars and all he did was eat pineapples by the swimming pool, I guarantee you, he’ll be the most depressed person in the world because what is life without adversity? What is life without overcoming? What is life without learning? What is lacking if you’re not planning life?

I feel like you’re describing resilience. How do you define resilience, Sam?

Resilience for me is somebody who is doesn’t let outside forces bother him. They have a goal. They’re willing to do whatever it takes to go through, to get to that goal. They don’t care about the past. All they care about was where they need to go and they’re willing to pay any price to get there. That to me is resilience.

What are you excited about these days? There are some opportunities out there and that might be part of your excitement, but what gets you jazzed up?

Honestly, it’s fatherhood. There are opportunities out there and I’m all about it. I will jump on those opportunities. Don’t get me wrong. My main focus is quality time with the family, spend time with them. That’s what my main focus is.

You can’t get those days back. I’d said this to you also a little bit ago that our kids have left the nest. My wife and I, we are empty nesters. I’m supposed to feel guilty. I feel like this is a wonderful time to see our little chicks fly on their own. I gathered our crew together for a family meeting to talk about this coronavirus because it’s got a lot of people in fear. We’ve got two in college that are out, two that are in. The entire UC system has moved to online classes now. You’ve got kids living on campus who are now not attending classes on campus. They were attending them through their computer. That’s a big change. I asked you before but I want to get you on now to talk about this. What do you make of what we see with the response to the virus? I don’t mean the CDC response, the response of everyday people to it.

 

These days, everybody is influenced by social media. A walking example is what everybody else is doing. That’s why I created my 1% brand. It’s all about seeing what the masses are doing. Doing the opposite and doing your own thing. Not being a sheep and being a lion, making your own decision and making your own paths. Warren Buffet said that, “If you want to be successful, look at what the masses are doing, do the opposite.” It’s true. It’s never been truer than that. It’s a great day, a great time to be aware, to be able to think clearly. Do your own research. Come to your own conclusion. If somebody came and told me, “Don’t do an interview with Adam, that guy is a jerk.” I’m not going to take that. What I’m going to do is I want to do my own research. I’m going to come to my own conclusion about who Adam is and what he does and all that stuff. Most people are jumping ships, especially with a spread off social media and everything that is happening. Everybody is all in a panic. There is no toilet paper. There’s no water.

People are buying a hand sanitizer for $100.

We went to get diapers for my seven-month-old. We had to go to three different Targets to find diapers. The toilet paper companies are happy. That’s how millions are made and millions are lost, but you have to be able to understand, look at it and see how to react. If you look at the back of Lysol for many years, it says coronavirus on it. Coronavirus has been around forever. This might be a little stronger thing, but the people who are going to pass away from Coronavirus are people who their immune systems are compromised. It’s the older people who aren’t going to die from the Influenza virus.

The flu virus kills more people than Coronavirus has ever done ten times more. Nobody talks about obesity and how much obesity kills in America. Yet, we come up with a new flavor of Doritos, a new flavor of Cheese Whips and all that kind of stuff. This time is a good time to be awake, the time to make your own decision and not follow the masses and the media as this is making everybody panic. There are no channels out there. No news out there that says, “We’ll tell you what’s all the good thing that’s happening.” There’s no good news because nobody would watch it.

I want to invite people to repeat the words that Sam said, which is it’s a good day to be awake. It’s a good time to be awake. If there’s only one thing you take out of this discussion, that would be it for me. It’s a good time to be awake, to be aware, to see what’s going on. It’s rare that you get to see the herd all in one direction. If you watch a herd or you watch a documentary where you see fish swimming in schools under the water. It’s rare that you can see many people going in the same direction globally.

Sometimes you see it in your own market, it’s where you live. We’re seeing a global heard moving in a certain direction. You see it in the stock market. You see it in other places. This is a great time to be a contrarian. That concept of 1%, be that 1% that decides, “I’m going to swim upstream and look and see. What do I notice? What can I be aware of? What opportunities are out there?” Sam, tell us a little bit about The Camp Transformation Center and what was the inspiration for starting that business? Where’s that now?

If you're not taking care of your fitness and your health, everything else will fall apart. Share on X

Everything that I’ve done that was a success, it all started because it was a failure first. It wasn’t like this genius idea I came with. It was out of desperation. I started my personal training business on February 15th of 2000. I started doing good by my standards, which is low. I come from a low-income area called Sharon, Pennsylvania where you made $2,000 a month, you are doing good. When I started my business, I started making $10,000, $15,000, $20,000 a month. I thought I was Bill Gates. I was making more money in a month than a lot of people were making a whole year back home.

I didn’t know anything about investing or making money correctly and saving up on anything like that. I bought a house, cars. A lot of people do when they don’t know how to manage money and delay gratification. In 2008, the recession hit, nobody could afford personal one-on-one training. My business started tanking. I didn’t know what to do. I had to come up with creative ideas to be able to retain my clients because nobody could afford $600 or $800 a month bill no more. I came up after three years of failing at many different programs.

I created a group training concept where we could have one trainer but as many as 20 to 30 clients and train them. We lower the cost for the clients so they don’t have to pay $800 or $600 a month no more. They pay $100 a month. They can afford that. What we did was also lower the cost for a company because with one-on-one training, every time we had a client, you had to have a trainer. When our revenue went up, our payroll chased it. The biggest thing we discovered because I come from an old school bodybuilding background. You have to have one trainer with one client. You’ve got to lift heavy weights, and all that stuff is the fact that after that, we get better results for our clients.

Clients stayed longer because they’re working out with their friends. It was a much better vibe than the one-on-one training because it became a therapy session after a while when you and the trainer kept talking, all it did was more talking, less lifting and that was stumbled by accident. That’s when we found the magic because we failed the recession out of desperation comes inspiration and creativity. When you’re doing good and this and that, you don’t want to be creative because you’re comfortable. Out of desperation is when you have to get creative and you have to try and make things work. That’s when genius ideas come up.

Necessity is the mother of invention. It’s old statements like that exist for a reason. The five Fs, this is a part of the philosophy that you share with kids: Faith, Family, Fitness, Finance and Fun. This is an important thing to you. I get that. You spent a lot of time working with kids. Is that a part of the model?

I’ll work with everyone, kids, adults and let them understand what game they are playing. A lot of people are playing the wrong game. They think they want money, but that’s not what everyone wants. They want freedom. They think they want more money, but they want more time with their kids. All of that’s available now, but you have to make sure you are aware of it. We’re going to go back to the same thing over and over. Awareness, most people are walking around not aware of what they’re eating, what they’re drinking, what they’re doing to their body, their finances. They’re walking around existing without honing in on the particulars.

 

When I sat down and be like, “What areas of life somebody needs to be to become fulfilled?” That’s the sixth F that I never talk about because at the end of the day, all of us want happiness and fulfillment. Everything that we do in life, we’re going towards happiness and fulfillment. Faith, I don’t care what religion you are. It’s none of my business. You have to understand that there’s a higher power and you’re here for a reason greater than for yourself for you to eat, shit, sleep and repeat. God has put you here for a reason. If you don’t believe in God, you have to believe in a higher power. That’s your business. You’re not going to get into religion for you, but there’s got to be a higher power that you believe in something greater than yourself.

Two, Family, we all want better relationships with people who brought us in this world. We’d be able to be around him. People that brought us in this world, our relatives, our family and some of them are not even our families. Someone can be friends that are closer than families. I have some friends that are a lot closer to some of my family members that basically are personal relationships. Family and our personal relationships are important. To this day, I don’t care if you own an online business. I don’t care if you have a brick and mortar business. I don’t care what business you are.

In this day and age, you will not survive without relationships. The relationship is going to be your biggest advantage over anyone. The third is Fitness. You’ve got to be able to be at your top state. You have to be able to function optimally for you to be able to bring the finances, be with your family and do everything else. If you’re not taking care of your fitness and your health, everything else is going to fall apart. Last but not least, you’ve got to have fun. You’ve got to stop and smell the roses. You have to be able to say, “What am I doing all this for? If it’s not fun, what are we going to do?”

This all filters back to me almost like a recipe for creating resilience. The thing about resilience is the time to create it is before you need it. When we were talking about resilience years ago, that would’ve been a better time to be working on your resilience than and when the Coronavirus has changed things for you, changed the landscape. The time is here and now is the moment where you get to be more aware. I would say be more aware of what it is that you’re doing to be the best you can be. Take care of yourself now so that not just that you can thrive again or survive what’s going on now. You’ve created a new trajectory for yourself, a new path. This is not the last adversity you’re going to face. In fact, this won’t be anything like what you might be in your worst moment of what-if thing, it will not turn out to be that anyway. Rest assured, there will be another something that challenges your comfort zone a month, a year, ten years from now, whenever it is. Sam, what’s one thing that you do on a ritual basis to produce greater resilience for yourself?

I like to put myself in uncomfortable positions. I like to take the hard way. I like difficult. I don’t like easy. Easy is not fun for me. I like to take the stairs. I like to do things that I’m uncomfortable with. I started yoga. I’m a bodybuilder. I’m a short dude with the muscle mass that has zero flexibility. I’ll go in there and I’m humbled. I’m by far the worst in class. I like to put myself in stuff and things that I don’t like to do. That’s how you build resiliency. I would like to get myself out of a comfort zone. It’s weird now. Over the years, I’ve learned that when I’m uncomfortable, I’m happy. When I’m too comfortable, I’m not happy. I’m sitting home on the couch, sipping on wine and watching Netflix. I feel like I need to read a book. I need to go exercise and jog. I need to do something. For me, that’s not happiness. For me, discipline equals happiness. I learned that’s who I am. It’s weird.

You put your finger on it, Sam. It’s who is. There’s no recipe for all of us. Our recipe is the thing that we discover about ourselves through that awareness you’re speaking about.

Out of desperation comes inspiration and creativity. Share on X

I’m uncomfortable when I’m comfortable. It’s weird.

I feel the same way. I know what you’re talking about sitting around when things are good. I’m never keen to sit around for too long. I want to read a book. I want to get out and get to the gym, walk, swim, do something that puts me on my growth edge a bit. Maybe that’s one good takeaway from this is that wherever you’re at, we’re all at someplace at this moment. Be it on our growth edge in a more comfortable position. All roads will lead back to what works for you? What works for Sam isn’t going to work for you necessarily or what works for me. You’ve got to find your own path. That’s what that awareness is good for.

To be awake means you’re not going to follow somebody else’s path. You’re not comparing yourself to other people based on what you see on Instagram or some other social platform or what you hear from the media. This is about you make your own path. What else have you got at the end of the day anyway, Sam? We’re all going to get to the end of our days. It’s either did you live your life or you lived someone else’s. It’s a good place to end. Also, to remind everybody to create a ritual for yourself in the morning. Sam, I don’t know if you agree with this or not, but to me the beginning of the day is a powerful catalyst for what that day is going to look like.

I hold up my schedule on a nightly basis. For me, my day starts the night before. What I do is I don’t even have my schedule on my phone. I print it out because I don’t want to be on my phone getting distracted. I’ll print out exactly what I’m doing, what time I’m doing it, what needs to be done. I have it detailed out. If you want to be productive and want to get somewhere in life, you can’t get up and say, “What am I going to do? I wonder what I need to do.” You have to be intentional about your day. You have to be intentional about every minute that you spend. I’ve said this many times on many different podcasts, everyone agrees that time is much more precious than money.

We never see someone drive around the neighborhood throwing money out the window. We never do that. We keep money and we were more careful with money. We’re more careful with money than our time. We’re wasting time all the time. I see inefficiencies in people’s day all the time. We’re wasting time. If you are wasting time, it means that you might as well throw money out the window. That’s cheaper than you wasting time. It’s cheaper than you sitting, not doing anything and not having a plan. If you did not have a plan, what is going to be given to you one day you will not go into much.

It’s a day by design or a day by default. I turned my phone to grayscale. It was after watching a documentary about this thing and how this thing is addicting. Forget about us. We’re adults. We’ve got personal freedom. We make our personal choices. If I’m addicted, I’m addicted. That’s my issue. It started to strike me about not my kids, but now thinking about even our grandkids. The fact that there are kids that you sometimes see at the airport, I’ve seen this a couple of times where people have their kid in a little carrier like six months, a seven-month-old child with a little device sitting right in front of them. A little iPad, iPhone, Android or whatever it is with some app that the kid is looking at. It’s my personal experiment that turning into grayscale. I touch it about a third of the time. What you showed people, which is a piece of old school piece of paper, something as simple as planning your day is I want to use your words, my day starts the night before.

I get up at 3:00 in the morning because I want to work out when my family is sleeping. I don’t want to come home from the office and take time away from the family and go to the gym. That’s not what I want. I’m crystal clear on what I want out of life and how I want to spend my time. My number one priority in life other than serving humanity and faith and all that is to spend as much time with my family. Number two is to provide for my family. Number three, stay healthy so I can do 1 and 2. Once you’re crystal clear on your mission, this is making becomes easy. You know exactly what you want to do and more importantly exactly what you’re not going to do.

They become non-negotiables. That’s why I do so at 3:00 in the morning when I get up. I don’t want to figure out what am I doing? What am I supposed to do? That’s not what I want to do. I already know the night before what I was supposed to do. I want to get up at 3:00 morning. What am I going to wear to the gym? My clothes are already set out. My plan is already set out. I’m getting dressed. I’m looking at my note planner. I’m reading my goals. I’m headed to the gym. I have what I call the perfect day formula routine for me to be able to be at a peak state.

When I keynote a corporate conference, I’ll ask the people, “What if every day that you went to work, every day you picked up your responsibilities as an executive, as a leader. What if every day somebody’s life depended on you being at your best? It’s an Olympic gold medal performance that’s required from you every day that you get into the office?” I was a lifeguard long ago. I worked at an active beach in New York. Hundreds of thousands of people on a Saturday or Sunday would gather on that beach. Thousands of people in the water. We had crazy rip currents. This was no Baywatch thing. We had our down days. We had our moments when the water was calm. It was like a lake and all that thing. Midweek was always fun. On those days, we rocked and rolled like nobody’s business. You couldn’t be distracted from your goal. You didn’t have the margin for error to be distracted or tired or hungover or any of that other bullshit because people’s lives depended on you being in that stand and at your best. That’s what you’re describing. It’s like, “What if you treated your business? What have you treated the things you say are important to you, degree of sanctity?” What would it look like for you?

I need to perform because somebody’s life depends on me. Who depends on me? My wife, my children. I got to be able to be that superpower. I got to be able to provide for them. I got to be able to lead the family. Their life depends on me. It doesn’t need to be a matter of life and death. If I don’t perform, their life goes down. I’m not going to be able to provide for them. I’m not going to be able to be a role model for them. That to me is as important somebody dying because that’s a slow death. If I’m not being able to be a leader in my house and be able to respect I do. I don’t want to be like, “My dad was a deadbeat. All he did was smoke weed and watch TV and he never provided for us.” Is that what I want my legacy, my children say about me or that’s what I think about? More than that, what example am I setting for my family and the next generation?

I know everybody who’s reading this can feel it and hopefully it’s a good moment for everybody to take a nice, collective, deep breath. Let’s be a bit more present in the moment, a little more awake and aware. Let’s go from there. No answers. I’m not going to pretend to give you something to do other than what maybe you’ve been inspired from this conversation to think a little bit about. Sam, it’s been a pleasure. I appreciate your presence.

Thank you for having me.

Wake up tomorrow. Have a plan for your day. I know my plan every day I put my feet on the floor is to thank God and to say these words out loud, “I love my life.” Ciao for now, everybody.

 

Important Links

•  The Camp Transformation Center
• www.SamBakhtiar.com

 

About Sam Bakhtiar

Refugee turned divorcee on the verge of bankruptcy…

To multi-millionaire, champion bodybuilder, author, doctor, and CEO of multiple worldwide brands. Dr. Sam Bakhtiar is an American success story with humble beginnings and a meteoric rise to wealth and influence.

As founder of The Camp Transformation Centers (110+ locations) and the 1%ER Movement, Sam inspires modern adults and youth to discover their 1% potential and excel in the 5 F’s – Faith, Family, Fitness, Finance, and Fun.