Compassionate Capitalism With David Meltzer

PR 61 | Compassionate Capitalism

 

Things can change in a second, so why not in a day? All it takes is your perspective on gratitude. David Meltzer, CEO of Sports 1 Marketing and #1 best-selling author of Compassionate Capitalism, has seen miracles happen. He’s studied quantum physics with some of the best minds and firmly believes that the universe brings abundance – when we’re open for it and we are of service. David’s pivots proved that gratitude makes every setback a setup. “Gratitude makes my past unbelievable, my present better, and my future brighter.” David shares this and other learning from his triumphs and tribulations that allowed him to be the successful business person and humanitarian he is today.

David Meltzer is an entrepreneur, author, humanitarian, and current CEO of Sports 1 Marketing, a global marketing agency whose projects include The Super Bowl, The Master’s, Pro Football Hall of Fame, and the Unstoppable Foundation. David has been recognized as a Top Keynote Speaker by Forbes and Entrepreneur, and Variety Magazine’s “Sports Humanitarian of the Year” (2016). He is a two-time #1 best-selling author of Connected to Goodness (U.S.) and Compassionate Capitalism (International). More recently, David has been the Executive Producer, judge, and host of Entrepreneur Media’s original show, and the #1 Digital Business show with over 20.8 million views, Elevator Pitch (2017). He is also the host of the iTunes #5 business podcast, The Playbook, which features sports icons who are using their post-athletic careers to enter the world of entrepreneurship.

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Compassionate Capitalism With David Meltzer

I was just remarking to a buddy who you are going to get to meet in just a second. I’m in a pretty cheeky mood. Almost anything could come out of my mouth and I’m just as curious about that as you might be. You might not be curious at all but I certainly am. In any event, as always, I want to start in the most important place for me personally. I don’t want to beat other people up with my personal beliefs, but it is so consistently the case that when I returned to gratitude, no matter what’s going on, if I’m having a good day and we all know what that feels like, I use gratitude to settle me down. That exuberance is a wonderful thing to feel that great energy that the wind is at your back.

It’s a sunny day. Things are going well. Everybody loves you with your spouse. You’re getting along with your kids, you can do no wrong, and there’s a tendency in those feels and in those times, at least for me anyway, to get a little cocky or just be a little tuned out, to be a little less sensitive and to be a little less humble. In those moments when I take some deep conscious breaths, I feel grateful for that awareness so that I can settle back in and get back to a place of center and to a place of being level. We were actually making a joke about it right before we hit the record button, checking our levels and checking our audio levels and all that thing.

It’s so important in life that we feel level that for me, I’ll just say, I love the feeling of feeling level. Sometimes you might say that’s balance or harmony, the Yin and the Yang, the Tao, the Middle Way, really important. Gratitude is one of these tools. You could call it something magical or even miraculous. When we’re feeling great, it’s useful for me and when I’m not feeling great and when the wind is in my face and I can do no right and every conversation I have seems to be tougher than it needs to be, obviously gratitude is also hugely important to get me back to a place of center and levelness.

With that, I feel wonderful about the person I’m going to introduce you to who you get to spend some time with. You are going to love this guy. He is doing amazing things in the world. He’s just a real person. He is great in his impact. He is that great in his steadiness, his down-to-earthness. If that’s a word, we just made it up. It’s good. I’m going to read a little bit from his bio and then we’ll get right into it as we always do. David Meltzer is our guest on this show and he is an entrepreneur, author, humanitarian, and current CEO of Sports 1 Marketing, a global marketing agency whose projects include the Super Bowl, The Masters, Pro Football Hall of Fame, and near and dear to our hearts here, the Unstoppable Foundation. David has been recognized as a top keynote speaker by Forbes and Entrepreneur and Variety Magazine’s Sports Humanitarian of the Year recipient in 2016.

PR 61 | Compassionate Capitalism

Connected to Goodness: Manifest Everything You Desire in Business and Life

He is a two-time number one bestselling author of Connected to Goodness and Compassionate Capitalism. More recently, he’s been the executive producer, judge and host of Entrepreneur Media’s original show and the number one digital business show with over $20 million views, Elevator Pitch. He’s the host of top five business podcast on iTunes, The Playbook with entrepreneur and chairman of the Unstoppable Foundation. David is using his 50th birthday to support this effort by hosting 50 parties around the world with the global goal of raising more than a million dollars for education centers in Kenya. You can donate by texting 50for50 to 555888. On this show, I don’t typically do too much promotion but this is an amazing foundation and our foundation supports the Unstoppable Foundation. We were able to contribute enough money to build a school in Kenya, which was really a blessing for my wife and for myself. That was really wonderful. Without further ado, David, welcome to the show.

Thank you. It was like coming home. You’re one of those people that every time I’m with I feel like I’m at home. It’s like a younger brother. For the first time I met you just Karma-wise, energy-wise, talking about being level, I’m like, “That’s my kind of guy.” I think we were brothers in a past life. Thanks for having me on.

Reading this bio, this is a life’s work all by itself and probably pretty exhausting on the best days. What’s not in this bio that you would love people to know about you?

Number one, the family size is not in there. I grew up with six kids and a single mom and my mom’s my hero, so I still have mommy issues. I start to get choked up. I just have to tell you she turned 75 and it was such an unbelievable event for me to remind me how lucky I am and grateful I am to have not only such an extraordinary mother but the siblings I have and the support and family that I’ve been given to help other people. It started with my mom who’s selfless. That’s not in the bio and it’s most important to me. On a business side, I did have a career in technology before all the other stuff and I was quite successful and as CEO of Samsung’s first phone division, ended up losing everything and that’s another significant thing in my bio. They don’t promote all the time, but it’s the best thing that ever happened to me is going dead broke.

We’re going to have to dig into that a little bit. You said this as part of that answer, the last question. I’ll follow it up by asking you, how important is gratitude to you?

It’s everything to me. Gratitude makes my past unbelievable, my present better, and my future brighter. It is perspective, and it makes every setback a setup. It makes every person brighter. It finds the light. I have studied quantum physics and metaphysics, not alone, but with some of the greatest minds on earth in TLC. I have had discussions about it. The only truth and biggest help that I can give myself and others is simply if you can say thank you before you go to bed, and if you can think or say thank you when you wake up, in 30 days and you can do it for 30 straight days, it will change your life more than any other thing. That’s how powerful gratitude is.

You mentioned we know each other and we met originally at TLC. That was one of those meetings like you go, “Yeah. I know this guy.”

TLC is the Transformational Leadership Council. It was created by Jack Canfield, that’s the group that made the movie The Secret a decade and a half ago. It has been a blessing to be nominated and invited into my mentors and my heroes that I watched on that movie when I was going through my needed moment of my life.

For us as well. We actually were really fortunate. We were in Hawaii, in Oahu for the meeting and we brought Chelsea. Our oldest daughter got to experience TLC. We hadn’t shared it with the kids before, it was amazing. A few months back we had Ken Honda on the show. You know Ken from TLC. Ken is from Japan and we were talking about money, money happiness and money harmony and all that. He said to me that one of the big influences in his life early on in his career was this Japanese billionaire guy that’s the Japanese Warren Buffet. This gentleman says thank you a thousand times a day. Of course, he doesn’t say, “Thank you.” He says, “Arigato,” a thousand times. I remember asking Ken, “I know the way some folks think. They’ll go, ‘He’s a billionaire for crying out loud. Of course, he says Arigato a thousand times a day.’” Is it that he says thank you because he’s a billionaire or he’s a billionaire because he says thank you a thousand times a day? I’ll leave it to the audience to make up your own mind. I know what I feel about it.

[Tweet “Gratitude makes my past unbelievable, my present better and my future brighter.”]

Why don’t we dig into any area of that history, because people love the pivot stories? I don’t know this for a fact and we haven’t actually surveyed our audience, so it’s reminding me this would be a good idea. Part of the reason people are so curious about other people’s pivots is that the word pivot has a connotation of something went wrong and something went bust. One of the most famous pivots that I sometimes share with people that people don’t know is that YouTube was originally a video dating site. There are thousands of these kinds of stories but they’re such a prolific company. They were a video dating site. They obviously pivoted their model and gave up the dating piece but kept the video and now we know how successful they are.

I look at pivoting as a word that means change it. It’s a word that means evolution. It’s a word that means innovation, and yet still people think pivoting means a mistake and they give it a negative spin on what it means to air and to air big, where the business goes bust or whatever it is. Maybe they were in real estate and they lost their real estate empire in 2008, and we know a lot of people like that. The idea here is that these pivots are so pivotal in our lives and for our forward progress. Hearing other people, the way they dug themselves out of the hole, out of the ditch, or found that that inspiration or that new way that they could frame the event in a way that empowered them to move forward, this is what really helps folks, to know that you’re not alone and to know that you’re not the only one who fucked up. David, share any part of that pivot story. Start anywhere you want.

I’m actually going to start young and quickly to go to it. When I grew up, I had five siblings that were extraordinary there. I always call them parent wet dreams. They love to study, highly academic, and intellectual. They all ended up in the Ivy Leagues with full scholarships, Harvard and Columbia. I had one personal goal as a little boy. My Dad left when I was very young. He left when I was five years old and I grew up really happy. Two-bedroom apartment, five boys, one girl, and a single mom who’s a teacher, and we didn’t have much. Sometimes we didn’t have food, but the only time there was any awareness of unhappiness in my home was when I’d catch my mom crying because the car broke down or the dishwasher didn’t work or she couldn’t afford me to go to a camp and she was worried about how she was going to pay for college with all these bright children. I took on this energy that all I want to do is be rich, but not for myself. It wasn’t like I needed a big house. I didn’t have those dreams at all. I wanted to buy my mom a house and I wanted to buy my mom a car. Literally that’s how simple it was from the time I was five years old.

I went through my pivots of, “I wanted to be a professional football player,” and I went to college on a scholarship to play football, then Christian Okoye ran me over and I said, “I better be a doctor.” Then I went to visit my brother in residency and met him in a hospital and said, “I hate hospitals.” He said, “You’ve got to be more interested than interesting.” I’m like, “What do you mean hospital? I want to be a sports doctor or a pediatrician.” He goes, “No, you’re an idiot,” so I went to law school like every other nice Jewish boy. I go to law school, I’m going to be an oil and gas litigator. I go to Tulane, best maritime law schools, civil and common law. I’m going to be rich because when I graduate law school from Tulane and I studied really hard, top of my class, I had two job offers. One, to be an oil and gas litigator, guaranteed to be rich. The other was the sell legal research online. There was a brand-new thing in DOS called Westlaw.

I went to my mom, my hero, my mentor, and I said, “Mom, what should I do? Should I be this oil and gas litigator or should I sell on the internet?” She looked at me without blinking and said, “Dave, you need to be a real lawyer because this Internet thing is a fad.” The reason I tell this story to that point is because it was the first time in my life I realized one thing. Nobody loves me still today as much as my mom. 75 years old and she’ll lie in front of a bus for me. I get choked up just saying it again but at that point I decided that just because someone loves you doesn’t mean they give you good advice. What happens if we take the advice from people who love us but don’t know what the heck they’re talking about? We end up resenting them.

If I didn’t take that internet job, I would’ve resented my mom because I don’t like being a lawyer. She made me take the bar, she thought the Internet’s bad, I took the bar, passed the bar, but within nine months Adam, I was a millionaire. Westlaw was big. We ended up selling to Thomson Reuters three years later for $3.4 billion in 1995. Over a billion dollars was a lot of money. I was the youngest executive at Thomson Reuters.

My first year out of law school, I was newly minted in 1995. I remember when the guys were saying to me, “You’ve got to get Westlaw.”

I call it legal crack. It was a great monopoly. I built an economic career, I paid off my law loans, bought my mom a house and a car, and I started an economic career. I took the ESQ off my business card, branded myself a technology guy, built my career in the Silicon Valley until I was CEO of Samsung’s first phone division. Multimillionaire in my early thirties and married my childhood dream girl. I don’t say sweetheart, because we didn’t date until I made a lot of money, but I asked her to go steady with me at sixth grade camp and she said no. I ended up at that time, that’s where the pivot happened. I was flying to India and I had 150 developers in a place in Calcutta. I had to add onto my own software company. I had left a Samsung and they kicked me out because we got so big and I was unqualified for the position anymore. I always say if you’re going to get fired, get paid a lot of money when they ask you to leave.

PR 61 | Compassionate Capitalism

Compassionate Capitalism: What happens if we take the advice from people who love us but don’t know what the heck they’re talking about? We end up resenting them.

That’s the best way to exit is a soft landing from a boot in the rear end.

My pivot happened. I’m flying out there, multimillionaire, and I had been surrounding myself with the wrong people in the wrong ideas. I had the huge home in Rancho Santa Fe, a Ferrari, a Porsche, a live-in nanny, three young daughters and this gorgeous, beautiful wife. This doctor was flying next to me and she looked at me and she said, “Are you okay?” It hit me, like my arrogant asshole self, rolled my eyes back going, “Of course I’m okay. Do you know who I am?” Literally, that’s in my idiotic mind. I said, “I’m okay,” and she said, “You’re so full of light but you’re blocking it.” I really rolled my eyes at her I’m like, “This would be a long flight.” I’m like, “What do you mean I’m blocking my light?” She goes, “Do you meditate?” I’m like, “No, I don’t meditate. I don’t have time to meditate. Meditation will do nothing but a waste of time for me.

Basically, I have everything I’ve ever dreamed of because I can do one thing. I can outwork you, and meditation’s in the way of that. I can outwork you and I’ve been successful outworking people my whole life. They’ve been smarter than me, stronger than me, faster than me. They’ve studied better than me, but I’m a mule. You can’t outwork me.” She goes, “It’s too bad because I could teach you through meditation to vibrate faster. I swear I’m looking at her like, “What does that have to do with anything?” This is where the shocker came in. She said, “Do you know that you can only be aware of that which vibrates equal to or less than you, meaning the earth vibrates the slowest, animals, plants, humans, sound, light, thought.” Then she said, “Do you know what vibrates the fastest?” I said, “No.” She said, “The truth.” When she said the truth, it went through me like a lightning bolt and she caught my attention. She said, “I do all that through meditation. I can teach you through beta healing, quantum healing, beta meditation to increase not only the vibration of your cells, but the vibration of your mind and even your soul. Awareness would be the greatest gift I could give you. Because it tells you whether to go left or right, whether you’re by yourself, whether you’re with the right people or not, all the things. Awareness is the most powerful thing.”

Then she said, “Would you like to come to a workshop?” I still to this day don’t know why I said yes. I got off that plane, called my wife, she actually googled a woman because she thought at that stage in my life, the arrogant asshole I was, she wanted to see if there’s a woman was a doctor, what she looked like, what the Dave Meltzer scam was. Quantum healing workshop on Beta meditation for four days I spent in India and raised my awareness, learned about meditation, started practicing it. Now here’s the hard part. I came home and I still was surrounded with what I was doing, the wrong people, the wrong ideas, the wrong values. I went on a slippery slope for two years while I was doing the right things and at the same time my wife approached me and basically said, “I’m not happy. You’re surrounding yourself in more of this. I know you’re going to the wrong places and doing the wrong things and you’re not paying attention.” It literally hit me like, “How could you not be happy? I’ve given you all of this.”

I had over $100,000,000 in real estate. I owned a golf course, a ski mountain, 33 homes alone in San Diego, around the country many more, and I made one really stupid mistake. I thought and always believed that if I had equity and properties that I could borrow against it. Because I was a moron, because I was putting the wrong causes and energy out there and surrounding myself with the wrong people, I got into lawsuits. I had my ego in the way I wanted to prove myself right. Went through all my liquidity, thinking I had all this equity. Not only was my equity shrinking, 2007, but the banks basically said, “Sorry, you can’t borrow against your equity. We’d rather take your property.” I ended up losing everything. I spent one day in bed depressed. That was it. My wife stayed with me, but I was already on the road. I sat there in bed.

I was so low that one day I literally got down to the point that just said, “If I can look up, I can get up.” That’s literally all I had because I lost everything. I wasn’t afraid I wasn’t going to make it back. I was afraid of facing my wife and my mom. I literally couldn’t look at them in shame right. That was what really kept me in bed that day. How was I going to sit in front of my mom and tell her that I could have given her half of all my wealth at one point and she never would have had to work again and I have been dumb, arrogant, and stupid? This pivot to me, I got out of bed the next day and I said, “My direct thought is only towards being of service.” I was 25 years old, a millionaire in nine months, I didn’t know anybody. I had law loans. I didn’t know anything about business, and I became a millionaire. How was it now that I was 38 years old that I wasn’t going to be able to make it all back faster?

What I did is I said, “I’m going to direct all my energy to being of service, creating a void for the universe to fill. That doesn’t mean sit around on my mom’s couch, walking the streets of Calcutta, giving everything away, but I was going to provide value in everything I did. I wasn’t going to take it. I was going to trust that if I provided value to you, Adam, to everyone I met, that they were going to give me what I wanted to manifest. That was the pivot in my life and I made more money faster and continue to help more people. Model and my business is make more money, help more people, and have more fun. It’s a very simple philosophy that creates abundance. The best thing that ever happened to me was losing everything and giving me a fresh start.

[Tweet “The best thing that ever happened to me was losing everything and giving me a fresh start.”]

It’s remarkable as I’m listening to you that the one day in bed was what it took for you. That would knock somebody out for years, forget the days, and it could have an easily so. Things can change in a second, so why not in a day? Which has more than one second and it.

All it takes is a touch of favor. It’s your perspective that gratitude that brings the favor on you. I have seen miracles happen. People, “I met this guy and this is what happened.” I know the universe brings and we have to be open for it. The only way to open up for the touches of favor is to be of service and create that void. Let the universe in.

I’m going to ask you this question and I don’t know how you’re going to answer this and I don’t typically go down this road, but I am curious. I want to know how much is spiritual practice, how much is prayer even, a part of what it is that helped you to turn that around? I sometimes dance around this topic or at least navigate the edges of it in a diplomatic way because we don’t want to offend people or feel like somehow this is like a cult or something, religious things or things that people think are religious. You and I both know quite well that the spiritual practice and being on a path is a big part of how it is we wake up every day and create from there, so I’m asking you.

I’ll use the word God even though you don’t. I would look up Connected to Goodness so you believe in what you want. First, I wake up every day 4:00 AM and I ask God to put ten people in front of me that I can help. That’s my first prayer every day, that God put ten people in front of me I can help. Because when you shift your paradigm of value and understand by being of service, it all comes. If you have true faith in the universe, true faith in the spirituality, that there is a mathematics of the universe and it’s not giving to get, because that’s not giving, that’s trading. When you give with the expectation of getting, that’s trading. I give unconditionally and I pray for it. Then I meditate for twenty minutes and it goes back to what we started the show with, was the reason I meditate for twenty minutes is I find my center. What I’ve learned is that once I know my center at the beginning of the day. Anytime I go off center, I don’t react, I go back to center.

The analogy that I was taught was those martial art experts that are surrounded by twelve guys and it seems as if how are they counteracting all of the twelve attacks all at once. That martial art guy will tell you, “I don’t react. What I do better than anyone is I go back to center quicker than anyone and that’s how I’m able to keep balancing and defend all the incoming things.” The analogy I use is the reason I meditate in the morning, it’s really good for the audience to hear this, is imagine a car on top of the hill in San Francisco. In the morning, you can hold it up with one finger. I can hold the car at the top of the hill with one finger. The minute I let the car start rolling, the more momentum it has, the more energy it takes to stop the car. In fact, most people go the whole day and they don’t get the car back to center where you can just have one finger on it. Then they wonder when they come home into their four kids and their beautiful wives and the rest of the family, why they feel run over, why they can’t stop the car. That’s the momentum of the universe.

For me, meditation for those twenty minutes and having these spiritual thoughts, I’m just an embodiment having a spiritual journey. I believe that the human body works in a really miraculous way that there’s 10,000 new inputs you get a day. You have a cellular structure that has a memory, and so I have to control in a positive direction the 10,000 new thoughts I have every day so that they change the 40,000 subconscious thoughts that create neuropathways in my mind. If I can change the 40,000 with the positive energy, I actually can change my DNA. Not only does my DNA carry energy that attracts at the highest vibration and the highest awareness, but it comes from generations past. I can break the effective habits of my dad who was a compulsive gambler, any diseases that may carry through my genetics and better than that is my DNA will carry to who? The next generations, and my energy will track exactly what I want without me thinking about it.

I will tell you this. The reason I’m a multimillionaire again is because I carry an energy of abundance, of giving, and being of service. I can go across the street, sit on that bus stop, and I’ll do more business than anyone in my office that’s now almost 100 people. I know that I will attract it to me. Someone will stop asking me a question, I will be able to ask or attract exactly what I want and I’ll get you their dog’s name or husbands, owner, dog walker, who’s the CEO of a company, and I’ll do a bigger deal than anyone in my office sitting on a bench. I know that. I know that because I practice a spirituality of pragmatic spirituality. I love David Corbin, who we both know, gave me a great line. He said, “Dave Meltzer, I’ve never met anyone that can trust the universe as well as you, but still tie up his gambles. You live in this high vibration, spiritual, crazy, theoretical world, but you’re really good at living at the pragmatic level of making a lot of money, helping a lot of people, and having fun. So many people that have spiritual needs, they’re so far in their own way for someone that’s so connected.” I lived that life. Trust the universe. Tie up your camels. Lock up your Ferrari. Whatever you want to do, trust the universe, lock up your Ferrari.

We had David on our show some time ago. I have to ask David to come back. I just saw him in Florida. What a good man. I want to come back to back to center. For a lot of people, it’s really important what you’re talking about, something that’s pragmatic in the spiritual realm. Returning to center quickly is how I would define resilience. There’s a study that we’ve made some reference to. It’s a Harvard Business Review study, and I’ll send you the link to this David, actually just thinking now you’re going to freaking love this. They looked at the highest performing athletes in the world, professional and Olympic athletes, to see what the top performers and the gold medalists had in common and what was the distinction between those folks and the people who were finishing second or third place. What they found was it was their ability to recover.

PR 61 | Compassionate Capitalism

Compassionate Capitalism: People not only want to hear no but they don’t listen to no either.

They looked at the top tennis players for example, and the ones that were the best in the world in between points, forget in between games, you talk about 30 seconds, 40 seconds in between a point, they could get their heart rate almost back to resting. Their recovery time was quicker and they looked across the board at all these athletes and it’s the same exact thing, and then they looked at why it was, what were the things they were doing, what were their rituals that help them to recover more quickly? They studied their mental, emotional, physical, and even spiritual rituals for recovery. We’ve given it a name. In Pivot, we talk about that being resilience, this bounce-back ability. You’re like that ball when you were a kid, remember the super ball? Nothing bounced back quicker and with greater energy than that super ball, that magic ball, that miracle ball if you will.

That’s a really big deal to put names to things so people can understand what we’re talking about here, because this is about bounce back, this is about resilience. When we talk about going further on the bounce than where you were before it, it has a lot to do with the energy that you’re bringing to it. You’re not going to sit on that park bench across the street from our office and go, “Woe is me. I can’t believe I’m sitting out here waiting for the bus.” You’re going, “I can’t wait to meet somebody that I can help. There’s somebody whose life is going to change and this is going to introduce me to somebody who’s going to help me to change that many more lives.” That is your let your full-on expectation for every interaction you have.

I’ve actually devised a strategic plan of meeting people in person, on the phone, email, and social media, dividing it by two aspects. Every person that I touch in those formats, what am I going to ask, what am I going to attract, and what am I going to give? How can I be of service? I do a lot of business coaching. People think I’m a miracle worker because I get them on this program of just trying for two weeks every day to do one asking and attract of phone, email, in person, and social media. Just one each. Little do they know that in one week, seven days, because I believe in consistency, it’s 28 asks and attracts. In two weeks, it’s 56 and all of a sudden they’re wondering why they accelerated the successes and expansion in their lives when it’s just a numbers game. You’ve created the energy, the 56.

No kidding. This is so interesting. Sometimes I’ll ask people, how often do you hear the word no? People don’t want to hear the word no. It’s because it means something to them. I don’t typically do this when I work with people over Zoom, although sometimes I do, it’s more often in person. Hold somebody’s hand, look them in the eye, and ask them, “What does no mean to you?” It’s rejection, it’s them hearing their fathers say no, it’s them hearing their mothers say no, it’s the rejection of somebody that you loved or a number of other things. It means unworthiness, it means lack of energy, esteem, it’s not deserved, so it has this all this charge to it. All this energy that relates back to childhood. As you and I both know, it’s a numbers game. Life is a numbers game.

It goes both ways. I want to point this out, is that people not only want to hear no, but they don’t listen to no either. This is very important to me. No, I’m serious. I coached a Morgan Stanley guy and he’s telling me, “This lady I’ve been working with for two years, first her dog ate her homework, next he was sick. I have a rule. I don’t trust what people say. I trust the universe, so if someone gives me an excuse of any kind and I don’t care if it’s a serious excuse, like, ‘Sorry, I got into a car accident and I’m not going to really make your appointment,’ but they give me three excuses at any time during this period, I’m done.” What I do is I say, “Unfortunately, I’ve been working with you, but I’m going to have to move onto a different opportunity. I only wish you the best of luck.” 50% of the people that I walked away with close right there. I take it away and it closes. I take away the resistance. The other were never going to do business with me anyway, and all I’ve done is save a shitload of time because I’m not afraid to get to know, and I recognize a no for what it is.

I’ll take a quick no. We’re getting into some fun things here with people who visit. I’ll take a quick no for a slow, slow, agonizing, maybe no. You know what that one’s like. This is not the equivalent of good foreplay. This is the worst. This is foreplay that leads no place.

There’s the biggest blue balls of your life.

It’s the biggest waste of time and energy mostly. This is really important, that we have something practical, the path for our personal growth, which to me is what a spiritual path is. When you are committed to your own personal growth, it’s a spiritual path. Call it what you want, but it’s the regeneration of your soul. When I gave up practicing law, it wasn’t because I hadn’t figured out the game of law. I had figured out the game of law better than most. Guys work at a firm to make a million bucks and have to deal with everything and a firm. I didn’t have to deal with a firm. I wrote my own ticket, but it was causing harm to my heart and my soul. Ultimately, pain won out. I didn’t have any intelligence about it. I would’ve kept doing it forever and ever if I had left it to my head to decide. My head told me, “You have a wife, four kids, two dogs, cat everything. You’re an idiot and you’re a fool to give this up.”

Here’s the thing too. I was watching this documentary on Netflix. I don’t know if you saw the Ram Dass documentary that I recommended. Beautiful. He says this and he obviously some years ago had a stroke. You can still understand him and his mind is still fertile and working. He said, “Make friends with change.” I will never forget that. I have determined that this is a mantra for me. It’s so important in the work that we’re doing and in the body of work that we want to be known for. It’s so simple. When you can turn something, here’s a very spiritual guy who many people even would call a guru and he simplifies it to something that is so magnificent, “Make friends with change.”

Jack Canfield said, “Be a baby with change.” I said, “Jack, what does that mean?” He says, “The only person that loves change is a baby. Yeah. Be a baby about change. When it comes, just be relieved that, “Thank goodness, a new diaper.” I love that. I’ve actually shifted my perspective. It’s very difficult, but if you get to a point where when things are challenging or changing that you can say, “Thank you,” before the actual unraveling or the set up comes. “I’m hurrying, I’m late for my son’s basketball practice.” I got all this on my mind and that red light comes and the old Dave Meltzer is like, “F-bomb.” I’m there, the energy and now I sit there and go, “Thank you.” This is just the way it’s supposed to be, whatever change that’s happening. Sure enough, every other light after that turns green for me or whatever’s supposed to happen. That perspective of when things get really challenging, I get so excited now and go, “Something really good’s happening. Something good, something bigger and better, because the universe is making me stronger and it’s getting me ready for some of the bigger and better.”

[Tweet “When you’re truly living in a world of more than enough, all of that comes to you.”]

I know there’s an open loop. I want to close that loop and then we’re going to ask you one final question as well. You used the word setup. So many people are upset on a regular basis. The reason why I used to wake up when I was a lawyer and put my feet on the floor and feel dread was because, and I just only recently had this real of it, I would always describe it as I was unfulfilled. I had plenty of money and all that, but success without fulfillment feels like failure, and that’s how it feels. There’s no amount of money that makes that better for those of you. Now I also realized that I was angry so often that what I was really dreading when I was waking up in the dark and getting out before the kids were up and Randi was up was that I was set up for another angry day. I was going to be upset that day and also set up.

The setup is what you’re talking about. It’s a setup for something to change. There’s a setup. It’s a messenger. There’s a message being delivered to you. The moment when you want to lean on the horn or get into the tunnel, give somebody the old three fingers number. What a great opportunity. As you said earlier, when you’re vibrating at a level of awareness. You see it, you feel it, and then you’re being guided by it. The book that we’re right now percolating and will be out soon as is this move from being guarded, living a guarded life, to living a guided life. That that is all about what you’re talking about, because for people to look at any two people and say, “What’s the difference between them?” This guy’s a billionaire, and this guy’s struggling and he has nothing and there’s no difference there. There was absolutely no difference. Don’t tell me about IQ. Don’t tell me about this one went to Harvard. This is nothing. It has nothing to do with that.

It’s three worlds. Some people live in the world of not enough. Some people live in just enough. Those billionaires and where I live is a world of more than enough. When you’re truly living in a world of more than enough, all of that comes to you. If that’s what you want, if that’s what you want for your more than enough, lots of money. There’s more than enough of it.

To close this one other loop, thank you for that. I really want to sit with that. That was beautiful. The way you tied that up.

We’re living in a world and more than enough.

This Harvard Business Review article about resilience was then took a look at those athletes and compare them to people in the business space. What they found was that folks like us are working more than ever. The audience, even just listening to a podcast, you might be feeling the stress of, “I should be doing something else,” or “I could be doing something else that might be more productive.” We all know why we listen to these things because to get one nugget, to get one thing that we can apply, could create so much that we can’t even predict. Most people are not making time for themselves and for their own self-care. The resilience we’re talking about, the bouncing back that the best athletes do is because they have rituals for recovery and they have rituals for resilience. I’m going to ask you the final question, David. What are some of the rituals or one ritual even that you apply that helps you to be in that zone?

For me, there are two rituals. Number one, I believe in the enjoyment of the consistent, everyday persistent without quit, positive pursuit of my potential. The ritual that comes into play is I always have three priorities. I give them a minimum amount of minutes a day. Let me give you some examples. One of them, you saw me at TLC. I’ve lost 40 pounds, gained 11 pounds of muscle, because I made my health for a minimum of an hour a day a priority. Even with my kids, I tell them, “I can’t go do that with you because I have made it commitment to be healthy so I’m going to be here a long time. I’m going to be productive for you. This is for you, but I’m not going to be with you and I’m leaving work because me not where I’m at healthy, we all are going to lose money.”

I’ve taken all the way to a little level where I had issues with my mom because I felt like she was reacting to the fact she wasn’t feeling like I loved her or appreciated her. She would ask for things and say things to me for me to prove my love and appreciation. I said I’m going to give her a minimum of a minute a day. The only thing in the objective is to make sure she knows every day, “Mom, I love you and I appreciate you.” Sometimes she’s complaining to me and I’m watching the clock and it gets to a minute. “There’s another line. I just wanted to call and tell you I love you so much and I appreciate you. Most importantly, I’m so happy and I know as a dad that if my son or daughter called me and told me how happy they were, that that would be the best gift of appreciation.” That’s all you want. I do that every day. My relationship with my mother has changed extraordinarily. That ritual of the consistent, persistent, and positive pursuit of my potential and have three of them every time, and then once they get in your subconscious, you go get a new one. There’s other stuff during the day.

PR 61 | Compassionate Capitalism

Compassionate Capitalism: Be kind to your future self and everything will turn out okay.

The other thing is, not to plug but I know it’s significantly changed my life, is I trace calligraphies. At home, I have a six-foot calligraphy for mastering Dr. Shaw that I trace for my family and declare my karma and to download from a higher source. I also trace calligraphy at the office, I have a six-foot calligraphy. We have a global sports marketing agency, world-renowned; Warren Moon’s my partner. I ran the most notable sports agency in the world and it’s so fun to see Jim Brown’s jersey, Troy Aikman’s jersey, Steve Young, and that a six-foot calligraphy and everybody going, “What’s that?” Those are the two rituals that I do personally that have significant change or pivot to my life.

That resonates with me. Thank you so much for being on the show. Any final thoughts?

I always give this final thought, “Be kind to your future self.” That’s a great awareness but be kind to your future self and everything will turn out okay.

I want to say thank you for your time and for you being here and sharing these pearls, beautiful things. I want to thank our audience. Thank you so much for sharing your energy with us and for giving us your time and hopefully this has been really valuable and if it has, we always love to get your feedback. Either going to AdamMarkel.com/podcast and then leaving your review or your comments is great. You can leave an iTunes review as well. We’re going to have a sweepstakes with our iTunes review a folks as well.

Our Facebook group is here for you as well to support you. This community is growing leaps and bounds, this Pivot community. Start My Pivot Community on Facebook. You can get there by going to PivotFB.com, a really simple shortcut to get to that spot. As always, I want to leave you with something I think is really important in that is a prayer. For me gratitude is a prayer. When I think of gratitude, that’s exactly how I think of it. The prayer I have is that tomorrow that you all, that David, you and your family and our audience, all of us, that we get to wake up tomorrow because of course there’s no guarantee of that. We’re awake now. Think about it. What are the odds? What were the odds that we would wake up when so many people didn’t? Tomorrow’s no different. When we take that first breath, when we realized as we’re waking, as our bodies are waking up, our minds are waking up, that we’re taking that first conscious breath, there will be people who will be taking their last breath. There are babies being born in that very moment taking their first breath of life.

It is a spiritual moment. It’s a holy sacred moment. It’s certainly something where in that moment, there’s something to be grateful for. It could be you’re waking up tomorrow to some challenge. It could be the day you’ve got to move out of a house that you wanted to stay in, it could be the day that you are going to sign divorce papers, it could be almost anything. It could be a really incredible day, a joyful day. You don’t know even what will unfold for the most part in that day, but we know one thing, you could start it off the right foot, as my grandmother would say. With the first thoughts that you plant in the garden of your mind, let them be gratitude. Let them be a prayer for gratitude. Three parts to this waking ritual, you wake up first, hope everybody’s going to agree, “Yes, I’ll do that tomorrow.” Secondly, that you find something to be grateful for. I hope you’ll say yes to that. Third, lastly that you say these words, if you’re willing from the, when your feet hit the floor, “I love my life. I love my life. I love my life.” I hope and look forward to seeing all of you very, very soon. Thank you again and ciao for now.

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About David Meltzer

PR 61 | Compassionate CapitalismDavid Meltzer is an entrepreneur, author, humanitarian, and current CEO of Sports 1 Marketing, a global marketing agency whose projects include The Super Bowl, The Master’s, Pro Football Hall of Fame, and the Unstoppable Foundation. David has been recognized as A Top Keynote Speaker by Forbes and Entrepreneur And Variety Magazine’s “Sports Humanitarian of the Year” (2016). He is a two-time #1 best-selling author of Connected To Goodness (U.S.) and Compassionate Capitalism (International). More recently, David has been the Executive Producer, judge, and host of Entrepreneur Media’s original show, and the #1 Digital Business show with over 20.8 million views, Elevator Pitch (2017). He is also the host of the iTunes #5 business podcast on , The Playbook.

As Chairman of the Unstoppable Foundation, David is using his 50th birthday to support this effort by hosting 50 parties around the world with the goal of raising $1 million for education centers in Kenya. Donate today by texting “50for50” to 555-888.