What Is Your What? with Steve Olsher
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What Is Your What? with Steve Olsher
Our guest is Steve Olsher who’s known as the world’s foremost reinvention expert. He’s famous for helping individuals and corporations become exceptionally clear on their what. That is the one thing they were created to do. His practical no-holds-barred approach to life and business compels his clients towards achieving massive profitability while cultivating a life of purpose, conviction and contribution. He’s a 25-year plus entrepreneur. He is the Chairman and Founder of Liquor.com, which is an online pioneer that launched on CompuServe’s Electronic Mall in 1993. He is the New York Times bestselling author of What Is Your WHAT: Discover The One Amazing Thing You Were Born To Do and also the author of Business Technology Book of The Year, Internet Prophets: The World’s Leading Experts Reveal How to Profit Online. Steve, welcome to the show.
I appreciate you having me.
I’m always interested to hear my guest’s story of origin. You can take us back as far in childhood, high school or college or wherever you want. Did you always know you wanted to be an entrepreneur? How did you come up with these concepts for figuring out our purpose? What was it that got you where you are now?
Here’s what I believe, and I believe that entrepreneurs are not made. I do believe that they are born. I think it’s either on your DNA or it’s not. For me, I’ve always been wired as an entrepreneur pretty much from the time I was old enough to pick up a rake to move leaves around or grab a shovel and shoveling sidewalks and driveways. It’s always going back to some of my rap roots trying to rub a couple of dimes together to make a quarter, trying to make $1 out of $0.15. I’ve always been naturally wired in that way of trying to figure out where the opportunity is and can I create a product, program or service to solve that problem. I ended up opening my own nightclub when I was nineteen. That was my first real entrepreneur endeavor. I’ve been DJ-ing in clubs for a number of years and built a decent following so I thought maybe there’s an opportunity here for me to have my own club but I was young. I couldn’t even legally drink.
It was interesting because I think that’s where my true entrepreneurial roots were born because I saw the opportunity. You create a club that would be a non-alcoholic club which would be in the middle of all these alcohol lane environments, in that same central district. Because we wouldn’t serve alcohol, we would be able to care for the teenagers, those eighteen and under for a number of hours. We could close down, clean up, reopen and then cater to those eighteen and over and stay open as long as we wanted because we weren’t serving booze. We won’t subject to those liquor laws. When you’re young, the bar closes at 1:30, it’s a little early. There are some folks who still want to stay and do their thing. That was the basic idea and I thought there was a good opportunity there to create a non-alcoholic club. That’s what I ended up doing. I ended up writing a plan, raising some money and open up the club when I was nineteen. That was my first real entrepreneurial endeavor. Right off, there were some of the other things since. I think it’s in the blood. We’re naturally-wired to excel in specific ways and it’s up to us to figure out what that is.
[bctt tweet=”Entrepreneurs are born not made. ” username=”John_Livesay”]
The irony to me is you’re young and starting a nightclub not serving liquor and then you somehow from that get to launch to be the Founder of Liquor.com. What was that journey?
My family has actually been in the liquor business for a couple of generations. My grandfather started Foremost Liquor Stores out at Chicago back in 1939. My mom went to work for him, my grandfather, in 1977. It was a family business. After the club thing ran its course, I was sitting there trying to figure out what to do and mom said, “Maybe you want to come and join the family business and see if there’s a way that you can help here.” I didn’t want to be involved with stores necessarily. I don’t want to be in the retail environment. This wasn’t my bag, but then this very small piece of the company which was called Foremost Liquor by Wire, which basically did the same for wine, champagne and spirits as FTD did for flowers. If you’re in LA and you want to send a bottle of wine to your friend in New York, you call our 1-800 what’s line way back in the day and we would take care of that delivery through a local retailer. I saw that piece was interesting. They were maybe doing a couple of thousand dollars a month so it was a very small piece.
I thought there was an interesting opportunity there so I said, “Let me dig in here to this,” and ended up launching a catalog in ‘91. In ‘93, when AOL, CompuServe, Prodigy and some of those hit the map, it’s like, “Let me see what we can do here in this online space. I think this is going to be pretty big.” We launched one of the first stores on CompuServe’s Electronic Mall in ‘93. All the while, we were called Liquor by Wire. In ‘95, we launched one of the internet’s first fully-functional eCommerce sites. In ‘98, we had an opportunity to pick up the domain Liquor.com. It was a monetary stretch. It was certainly a financial stretch to do it, but I thought I could really change the phase of the business and so we made that leap.
Have you ever had to raise money for this company?
What Is Your WHAT?: Discover The One Amazing Thing You Were Born To Do
Several times.
Talk about that first because everyone’s always interested in what you learned pitching-wise.
We actually have a couple of iterations on it. In ‘98, after we got the domain, that’s when things started to pick up on the online space in a pretty big way that was internet 1.0 if you will. It was crazy. If you remember ‘99, those years, nearly ideas on the napkin were being funded. It didn’t matter. If you had a decent idea, you wrote it down, you had somebody like, “Let me give you a check.” We were an anomaly in the space because we were profitable. We were doing millions of dollars in revenue at the time we started heading down that path of fundraising. We were already doing about $3.5 million in sales which in nowadays’ dollars, that’s in $28 billion or something like that. Using the terms of the day, all the heavy lifting was done. We just needed money for marketing. We really just needed money to let people know that we existed.
Any infrastructure was in place, we can handle the load that was a niche. ‘99 we went out and brought in someone to help us get to the Promise Land, raise initial friends and family around. Call it maybe a series A, but just a very low-price round to give us additional capital to be able to hire an official investment bank to take us public. That was the ultimate goal. Part of that capital that we raised, I think we raised about $500,000 in the first round and ended up raising about another $4 million in total before the S1 was filed and we were ready to go public. That was the roadshow, the whole nine with the S1, and trying to get investors to sign on once obviously to commit to participating in the IPO. Did the roadshow and we were slated to go public in March of 2000. That’s when everything imploded.
Did your investors still get a good ROI?
They got zero. They got nothing. Everything imploded. As a matter of fact, part of the money that we brought in, we brought in because Wall Street wanted to see more of these lettered saviors. The CEOs, the CMOs, the CTOs, the CFOs, the WTFs, all these people that you don’t really need. We bought into it hook, line and sinker so much that I actually signed away my management rights to the company. We were completely blinded by the dot com light. We found ourselves in March of 2000 being unable to go public and by August of 2000 I had walked away from everything. I had built the company for nine-plus years. I literally walked away from everything. My mom walked away in December. Grandpa had passed many years before that. She walked away in December and I put it out of sight, out of mind for years. Mind you, I had never signed away my rights to the domain, just to the company. I washed my hands off it and I was like, “I’m out of here. I didn’t get along with the CEO.” That story is for another day.
[bctt tweet=”You are the solution to someone else’s problem.” username=”John_Livesay”]
In 2006, I won’t go into too much detail here because I know we’ve got other ground to cover, but I was finally able to reclaim the domain and subsequently put it up for sale. I had a couple of very interesting offers. The highest offer was $4.25 million just for the domain. Needless to say, I accepted. The guy made the first few payments and then bailed on the rest. I kept the money and I kept the domain. In 2009, I ended up teaming up with some folks out of San Francisco who now run the business. I’m the chairman but they actually run it on the day-to-day. I’ve got no day-to-day with it at all and we’ve raised about $12 million to date or so in this current iteration.
What a fascinating story of it go away. It comes back because you had one piece that could allow you to rebirth it, which is one of the big storytelling genres I’m always talking about. It’s also the not giving up and now the people who have invested in this iteration must be happy.
Not yet. It’s interesting. It’s like, “Screw me once, fool me twice.” You would think I would win but no. When I brought in this team out of San Francisco, the deal was I would contribute the domain and they would build the business. Once again, I signed away my management rights to it because I just didn’t have an interest in building the business at that point. In hindsight it was dumb, but it is what it is. I love those guys to death. They’ve done great on a lot of different levels. We’ve got millions of people who subscribed to the newsletter. We’re number one or number two in any SEO search you can think of. We work with all the biggest brands in the world but revenue has been limited to ads and those brand-related relationships. Revenue has been suffering. They’ve been operating in the red for God knows how long. We ended up striking a deal with a pretty big conglomerate to put a big chunk of change in and it’s needed at this point because the thing is bleeding. We’ll see what happens. That will be an eCommerce initiative and we’ll see how things go.
Amazon lost money for quite a while too. It shows the importance in investors going, “I still see the big picture.” The fact that you have relationships, revenue, the search, something that all that equity is worth a lot. You now seem to be the kind of entrepreneur, Steve, that has the ability, some people call it their gut, some people have described it as having their pulse on the Zeitgeist. It’s a little bit ahead of everyone else of, “I see this could be an opportunity,” which you did with this. It starts off as a little thing. You have a gut instinct. You look at something and you go, “This is something that’s a seed of an idea.” You have a seed of an idea that you feel now is going to be your next big thing. Can you share with us a little bit about what that concept is and what you’re doing?
I take that as a compliment because what you’re saying is that I’m able to see to Wayne Gretzky saying, “I see where the puck is going.” That hasn’t worked to my benefit, to be honest, because I’ve actually been too early in most cases. If you look at Liquor.com as a whole, it’s a perfect example of just being too early. There are other things that I’ve done where it’s been too early. In this case, I hope the timing is spot on. I think the timing is spot on but long story short is the endeavor that I’m undertaking is called Latatud. For those of you who are familiar with Software as a Service, you pay a monthly fee, you get access to a particular software, membership-driven recurring revenue, etc. This is built around the same general principles except that it is housing as a service.
What Is Your What: No guy ever wants to hear anything that he’s associated with being associated with the little thing.
It’s a membership opportunity for people who live the laptop lifestyle or as they’re commonly known as digital nomads to be able to pay a set membership fee and have access to housing that we own. That’s the biggest difference between Airbnb and us or any of those types of people. Our company owns that housing and it gives these digital nomads the flexibility to move from location-to-location as often as every 30 days and they have the ability to have privacy. It’s not like one of those co-living type environments that you see for so many of those types of folks. One of the more unique elements of what we’re doing here is they build equity as if they’re a homeowner without the headaches of homeownership. It combines flexibility, equity and privacy in ways that frankly isn’t being done right now. We would actually own the real estate which gives us the opportunity to provide equity for not obviously dollar-for-dollar but it’s certainly a lot better than renting. That’s what it is.
There are two things I want the readers to take away here. One of the things investors look for is why you and then why now. In Steve’s case, he’s got this experience of launching a company with huge revenue and brand. He knows what to do. They’re putting their money on the jockey and if you’ve already been through some of the pain points, that lets them feel like you’re not going to give up and you’re going to figure out how to make something work. The second part is why now. In other words, if Uber tried to launch or even Airbnb which is a more relevant example, Uber without people having smartphones in urban areas, that wouldn’t work. Airbnb, if 2008 hadn’t happened with people being open to new ways of making money, the concept was so revolutionary. This is yet another example of why now. The growth of all the digital nomads is one thing and the only options they have now is we work, we sharing, co-living or Airbnb and there’s some downside.
If you can boil down to your pitch like you just did to three keywords: privacy, flexibility and equity, then that lets people lock in three key things that you’re offering, the solutions to the problems you’re solving. That is what allows people to go, “I get it. I can explain it. I don’t have to work so hard in 30 seconds to understand digital nomads are going to get a place to live that gives them privacy, flexibility and equity.” That’s your one-sentence pitch right there and so that is the secret sauce to then having people double click on each of those different topics and how it’s different than what’s out there. It’s great stuff.
I appreciate that and the piece that we didn’t talk about and the reason why I think this combines so much of my particular skill sets is that I actually have done real estate development for the better part of several years.
The why you is very strong there.
[bctt tweet=”We’re just naturally wired to excel in specific ways. It’s up to us to figure out what that is.” username=”John_Livesay”]
There have been big huge hits and there have been big huge misses and the learning experiences with both I think does make me uniquely qualified to be able to lead this charge. I often say that this is a real estate play disguised as a tech play. The reality is that real estate and tech is where I’ve cut my teeth for the better part of many years.
I want to get to your book, What Is Your WHAT? because my first question to you is there are a lot of people reading that have a dream of a book or have a book but you were able to get yours to be a New York Times bestseller. Can you tell us that story?
2013 is when What Is Your WHAT?: Discover The One Amazing Thing You Were Born To Do was released. I knew that it not only had the ability to help people in ways that Myers-Briggs and What Color Is Your Parachute? and StrengthsFinder and some of those types of modalities couldn’t. I also knew that from a personal branding standpoint, if I wanted to build this career and the expert space, which I started pursuing in 2010 when I had this wake-up moment. I realized that my life was focused on the money and it was great for me and those closest to me but really no one else, which of course was short-sighted because money is awesome and that is a whole discussion for another day. There’s that, we come to that come-to-Jesus moment and that’s what it was for me in 2010. All these real estate developments all we were good but it’s just money. What am I going to do to serve humanity? That’s when expert-type space came about. I knew that if I wanted to build a personal brand, that more of the Steve Olsher brand, there were some things that you need to be able to check some boxes on. Having major media, having a book hit the list, have a live event, all these things that go hand-in-hand with being seen as one of those top folks. It was always the plan.
What Is Your WHAT? was my third book but it was always my plan to put that one on one of the lists, ideally the New York Times list. Back in 2012, 2013, even a few years after, there was a company called ResultSource. ResultSource’s claim to fame was if you can put enough pre-orders together for your book, we will then place orders throughout the country so that it shows up on BookScan or whatever it’s called nowadays. It looks like all of these people are buying all of these books across the entire country at the same time. If you have a certain number of books that are sold in a finite period of time, that then gets you on the radar of the list. Back in those days, if you’ve got to 10,000 books, the odds were good that you would hit the New York Times list. It was 10,000 books in a week.
You get to 20,000, you probably hit the top five and if you could get to 30,000 or so, you’d probably be top one or top two. The plan was that I’m going to work with ResultSource. We’re going to blow this thing out of the water. We’re going to focus really hard on providing incentives for people to buy the book, to buy more than one book. You buy ten books, you get this. You buy twenty books, you get this. You buy 50 books, you get that. Let’s shoot for 13,000 as our goal because that’s the number that we had said, “If we can get to 13,000, we should have a pretty good shot at hitting the list.” When all was said and done, we ended up right around 13,800 in terms of the number of copies that were pre-sold. On release date, they were then distributed out through all these various points of entry to the book system there across the country and that’s how we ended up hitting the list.
What Is Your What: You can achieve your desired results if you focus on what it is that you’re doing.
It reminds me of the way movies are launched. A lot of money spent on marketing to get watching trailers so that opening weekend is a killer because if it’s not, then the movie will not be a hit. All the buzz that has to go on is very similar. That skill set alone is completely transferable to so many other things and I know you’re doing a lot of other kinds of launches as well. There’s a chapter in your book, What Is Your WHAT? that I want to get you to talk about, which is The Vortex of Invincibility. You certainly have that. What is it that we can all learn from your book and you to become more invincible when things knock us down?
The Vortex of Invincibility is built around the framework of the conscious competence learning stages model. Basically, we have these four stages of the conscious competence learning stages model. We have what’s known as unconscious incompetence where you literally don’t know what’s going on, you don’t know what you don’t know. We have the stage of what’s known as conscious incompetence where you become familiar with what it is, where you’re weak or where you need improvement, etc. Those two are obviously very important as you move through this process of getting to a state of invincibility because if you don’t know what you don’t know, you don’t know it. If you’re out of luck, you’ve got to figure it out. Getting to step two of turning the light switch on is huge in terms of your own personal growth, your business growth, whatever it is.
Step three is then all about achieving what they call conscious competence which means that you can achieve your desired results but you’ve got to focus on what it is that you’re doing. Maybe you’re learning a new language. You’re sitting there, you’re reading a book and it’s in Spanish. You have the ability to read Spanish but you have to think about what that sentence meant, every word, etc. Ultimately, the last stage of the conscious competence learning stages model is unconscious competence and an unconscious competence basically things come naturally to you as breathing. You don’t have to think about your process.
To get to that point of invincibility, even if you can just master one area of life or business, the world stands up and generously applauds and compensates those who have achieved unconscious competence in any area of life or business. It’s so hard to do. Few people will ever achieve that state of invincibility outside of things that come naturally to them like breathing, walking or talking. I’m not talking about 10,000 hours or anything of that nature. I’m talking about truly becoming a master of whatever that craft is that the world handsomely rewards those people for whatever that one thing is. The tag on the book, Discover The One Amazing Thing You Were Born To Do, that’s the interesting part about all of this is it doesn’t take more than one thing to have a monumental impact. Not only of course on your life and on the lives of those closest to you, but on the world at large.
I remember this process learning how to drive stick shift and it’s like, “I don’t know anything about this.” I didn’t have any energy on it like, “I don’t know how this works,” but once I started the stop, the jolting part of it, it’s such a great metaphor I think if you’ve ever tried to learn stick shift on the hills of San Francisco. Now I’m aware of how incompetent I am at this and sweat’s pouring down my face as I’m almost going back down the hill because I can’t get the car in gear.
[bctt tweet=”A single thing can have a monumental impact not only on your life and on the lives of those closest to you but on the world at large.” username=”John_Livesay”]
The first stage honestly is you didn’t even know there was a stick shift.
When I don’t know it, I don’t have any judgment on myself yet. I just go.
You just get a car, put it in drive and go.
Someone’s going to teach me how to drive stick. I haven’t a clue what it does or how it works or clutch or any of that. For me, the challenge that I’ve seen myself face and I think other people do too is when you get to this conscious incompetence stage, the negative self-talk really amps up. “You’re never going to learn this. You were stupid even to try to learn this.” That’s where the invincibility is probably at its most fragile. Once we get to the place where it’s like, “I have to concentrate. I can’t be listening to the radio or talking to anybody when I’m driving stick.” That’s fine and we know we’ve got it at least. We’re not going to crash or go down the hill. This part, you can use this for everything in your life, anything you’re trying something new, in your business, to getting a new client, whatever it is. This conscious incompetence stage, do you have any insights that you personally have said to yourself or any tips for people who don’t realize that you will get it but it might take a little longer than you think? Try to talk down or turn down the volume on all that negative self-talk?
Yeah and I’m not going to sit here and say that negative self-talk isn’t helpful. There are things that you are not meant to do. I could sit here and I’m 5’8” on a good day and the reality is there used to be a time where I could touch the rim in basketball. If I can slap at the net, I’m doing pretty good. The bottom line being I never could dunk. I’m not going to dunk. For me to continually sit here and try to get to the stage of unconscious competence, dunking isn’t going to happen. It is a fine line of recognizing where reality intersects with dreams, hopes, wishes and what actually is possible. What I know to be true is that for me, if I’m banging my head up against the wall on a consistent basis, let’s use the analogy of trying to jam a square peg into a round hole.
What Is Your What: Once you understand what your core gift is, the question is then what is the primary vehicle that you’re going to use to share that gift?
There are times where you can continually do that and you will whittle that thing down and break it away and eventually you can jam it in, most of the time it just results in pain. When you find yourself in that state of conscious incompetence and you’re continually trying to jam that square peg into the round hole, it may be time to go outside of yourself and ask someone for feedback. That’s the beauty of having a mentor, coach, guidance or accountability partner. Go outside of your own head to say, “Am I an idiot here? Is this something that I should continue to press through?” I’ve been doing Brazilian jiu-jitsu for the better part of many years. For me, it’s still conscious incompetence. I have some conscious competence but I have yet to reach the stage of unconscious competence. I’m still in phase two and I’ve been doing the thing for many years.
You obviously like it so you keep doing it.
I do like it but I also know that with enough time, with enough practice and with enough consistency, I can achieve that level of unconscious competence with one move at a time. It won’t necessarily be the entire sport because it’s endless and there are a number of things that you can do and the number of things that happen. There are so many variables in it. You’ll never get to that stage. Even the grandmasters find themselves like, “I didn’t even know this was possible,” because the sport is always evolving but you can certainly move beyond that stage of conscious incompetence to at least achieve some conscious competence with it. It’s an interesting discussion because at some point though, you do have to cut the rope and say, “This is not something that I can do or I no longer want to do it.”
At the end of your book, let’s say you found your one thing, your what. Now what? Obviously, the one thing you talk about is helping people in corporations figure out what their one thing is that they were created to do. Once people have identified that, what do you recommend they do with it in the book and in life?
It probably requires to talk just briefly about the What is Your WHAT? framework so that people understand what we’re saying here. What I’m talking about what your what is, in author land they say that you write the book that you most need. For me, this has always been a struggle trying to figure out as a grown man what it is that I’m good at and should be doing with my life. I did the Myers-Briggs, What Color is Your Parachute? and all those. They all left with more questions than answers. There’s got to be a better way. There’s got to be an easier way to get to an answer in terms of how I can hit the ground running to make a meaningful impact on the world. What I realized in having taught a class called The Reinvention Workshop, this is something that I had started doing back in 2009 where I was helping people to reinvent their lives and just try to move powerfully forward. I started doing workshops that I call The Reinvention Workshop and kept teaching The Reinvention Workshop, I became clear that there are three important pieces of the puzzle. If you can solve these three pieces, everything else falls into place.
[bctt tweet=”Bend your time or invest your time to start pursuing your what.” username=”John_Livesay”]
It all begins with understanding what your core gift is. Your gift could be something like teaching, healing, communicating, enrolling, protecting or entertaining, something like that. We all have a core gift. John, your core gift is probably either communicating or teaching, I would think something like that, maybe but we could get into. Once you have an understanding of what your core gift is and if you look at the cover of What is Your WHAT? you’ll see that the only graphic element on there is the DNA strand. What I honestly believe is that what really has chosen you is not that what you chose is truly a part of who you are. You can spend a lifetime in denial about what it is but ultimately, it’s a part of who you are. Your gift I believe is in your DNA. It’s there. It’s static throughout your entire life.
The other two pieces are more organic. They can evolve over time based on new experiences or based on things that come out of you. Either things come into your life and it opens your mind to something new or something new comes out of you. The second piece is the vehicle. Once you understand what your core gift is, the question is then what the primary vehicle that you’re going to use to share that gift is? For example, your core gift could be let’s say healing. The primary vehicle that you use might be a massage or might be acupuncture or something of that nature. Core gift, primary vehicle.
The third piece of the puzzle and this is the What is Your WHAT? framework. When I talk about your what, it’s the combination of these three elements. The third element is the people and understanding the people that you are most compelled to serve. Let’s say hypothetically you’ve got a tripod and you’ve got all three pieces here. You’ve got your gift, your vehicle and your people. You’re going to have a stable place to sit, it’s going to work, whatever. If you take away any one piece, if you’re clear on the people that you’re most compelled to serve but you’re not clear on the vehicle that you’re going to use to serve them, obviously that doesn’t work. If you’re clear on what your gift is and you’re clear on what your vehicle is but you’re unclear on who the people are that you’re most compelled to serve, you’re just going to end up serving anyone. That’s going to be a tough thing to take to six, seven or eight figures depending on how far you want to go with it. You can run it six ways from Sunday and you’ll see how that all comes together.
I love this so much because figuring out what you’re good at or gifted at, figuring out how you’re going to deliver it and then this is the biggest mistake I see people make so many times is trying to be all things to all people. Who do you help? What problem do you solve? Why are you uniquely qualified to execute it? It’s all answered in these three structured. It’s great.
The question that I asked people then is, “Who are you most compelled to serve?” The God-honest truth is you found your what, now what? That can evolve over time but then you found your what, now what? The first thing you do is you get started and you don’t quit your day job. If you’ve got a day job that’s paying you money, don’t quit that day job. Think about it like a recipe mixture. I know what my what is but right now 100% of my income is derived from my what isn’t. 0% is derived from what I think it is. Use those hours in the day. You can either spend your time or you can invest your time. That’s all you can do. Use those off-hours meaning before work, after work, the weekends to start pursuing your what.
As soon as those dollars start coming in, then that recipe mixture starts to shift. 100% of your income becomes 99% of your income and now 1% is derived from your what. It starts to shift 70/30, 60/40, 50/50 whatever and it’s the point you’ll understand when it’s time to cut the rope. You’ll also understand once you get in motion, what are the things that you need to be doing to make this work for you in a way that not only reflects something that you love doing but it also reflects something that you’re really good at. It reflects something that people will pay you handsomely for.
I can apply this personally to my own speaking career. I discovered I loved speaking and was good at it but I realized I needed to have some training to make it even better. The vehicle of communicating, in my case helping salespeople who struggle, but pushing out a bunch of information learn to become storytellers. I was very clear in who I helped and then specific industries, not just all salespeople but tech people, executive recruiters, healthcare people, design people. I knew exactly who I could help in that niche and the vehicle was being hired as a keynote speaker but then I was like, “I need to get more talks to be from 10% of my income to 50% to 80%. How do I grow that and all the steps to do that?” I think that example for people who go, “You don’t start out being Brené Brown with the Netflix Special. First, she did a TEDx Talk. She was a researcher but she found that she was gifted at taking information and turning it into stories. Anyone can take a real look at that. Are there any last thoughts or pieces of advice you want to leave our audience with?
As you relay the What Is Your WHAT? conversation which we’re having here now is the end, I have to simply say that the bottom line is that you are the solution to someone else’s problem. There are people who are literally praying for you to show up in their life. The God-honest truth is I believe that you do not have to succumb to life as a starving artist simply because you are compelled to draw. Why shouldn’t you be paid extraordinarily well for what it is that comes naturally to you as what comes as naturally to those who make millions of dollars a year doing what comes naturally to them? For me, I’m wholeheartedly on the mindset that once you show up in these people’s lives, those people who are praying for you to show up. They can get up off of their knees and stop praying because they have now found you and found your solutions, that they should start paying. We embrace the notion that you are the solution to someone else’s problem and that people should pay you for your talents and pay you handsomely for any gifts that you bring to the table.
Steve, thanks so much for sharing your story, your incredible journey. This new Latatud is going to be a huge hit, I’m sure. Of course, all the insights on what makes this book a New York Times Bestseller.
You’re welcome.
Links Mentioned:
- Liquor.com
- What Is Your WHAT: Discover The One Amazing Thing You Were Born To Do
- Internet Prophets: The World’s Leading Experts Reveal How to Profit Online
- What Color Is Your Parachute?
- The Reinvention Workshop
- https://SteveOlsher.com/
- WhatIsYourWhat.com
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Life Lessons From The Oldest And Wisest with David Romanelli
Posted by John Livesay in podcast | 0 comments
Episode Summary
There’s always a pearl of wisdom to learn from the elders. This is something that most of us tend to discount, but not for David Romanelli. Best-selling author of Life Lessons from the Oldest and Wisest, David talks about combining meditation and storytelling as the key to finding joy in your life. Creator of an ongoing series of events called Drinks With Your Elders, he uncovers what’s inside his book as he shares the healing power of a great story, how to find more time, what cures loneliness, and how to screw, laugh, and celebrate at funerals – all of which he learned from interviewing elderly people. On the side, discover how David combines meditation and storytelling, the conditions we attach to our happiness, and the reality behind social comparison.
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Listen To The Episode Here
Life Lessons From The Oldest And Wisest with David Romanelli
Our guest is David Romanelli, who’s a best-selling author and international speaker. He’s your guide to bringing old wisdom and ancient healing practices to your modern life. David initiates connection and conversation between the old and the young. Our elders in their 80s, 90s and 100s fought in World War II, survived the Holocaust and marched for civil rights. He believes they are our most precious resource of wisdom and history. Most elders lack a voice in popular culture and live out their final years in isolation. He believes we can and have to do better. He’s created an ongoing series of events called Drinks with Your Elders, bringing the old together with the young. This inspired his third book, Life Lessons from the Oldest & Wisest, which shares elders’ advice on parenting, marriage, loyalty, the all-important resilience, and having a sense of humor through all the ups and downs. David, welcome to the show.
Thank you so much, John. It’s great to be here.
I’m always curious to know how did someone get into what they’re doing, your own story of origin. You can go back as far as childhood, high school and college. How did you get into this whole mindset of, “There’s some wisdom to be learned here from the elders?”
I was deep in the yoga world. Some friends and I opened the first chain of boutique yoga studios in the ’90s. We were deep in yoga, the wisdom of the yoga tradition and studying with the yoga gurus. My last surviving grandparent was in a senior living facility in Los Angeles. It was a nice senior living facility. I saw how depressed she was and how it felt like everybody in that senior living facility was put out to pasture, not connected or integrated into the surrounding community. It wasn’t right because here you have these 37-year-old yoga gurus spouting wisdom on Instagram and the 89-year-old Holocaust survivor in the old age who’s dying a lonely death. Something seems out of whack. I shifted from yoga into the wisdom of the elders. I’ve been embracing that for several years.
[bctt tweet=”Let the joy in.” username=”John_Livesay”]
Tell us a little bit about what caused you to want to write this book.
I was finding that older people were not even on people’s radar. Nobody considers that they might have the wisdom or the missing piece to their puzzle. They weren’t relevant to business and growing their business. What could they possibly have to learn from an old person? You can find it on the internet. I found that when you engage with them, the wisdom is so profound. It’s deeply healing and incredibly relevant to every part of your life. I was like, “I’ve got to spread this.” I figured a book was one of many ways to get this message out there.
Do you have a story from your book or your research on the book of some wisdom you learned from a senior person that people could apply for their business?
First of all, the greatest story was from my previous book called Happy Is the New Healthy, which is a lady I met. I was working with this charity in New York City that helps old people in need. Their oldest client was 111. They call that a supercentenarian. There are about seven billion people on the planet. There are only about 60 people we know about who are 110 or older. A part of that is genetics. The part of that is the attitude. When you get to be well over a hundred, chances are you’ve lost it. You’ve probably lost a child at that point. You’ve outlived your own children. There’s a lot of pain. It takes certain strength for somebody to turn the corner on 100, even 105 and keep going. A lot of people are cashing their chips and they’re done. To live to be that old, you have to be able to have a certain strength.
[bctt tweet=”Stories allow us to pass on wisdom.” username=”John_Livesay”]
This 111-year-old lady, I asked her like, “What are your tips on health and longevity? How are you managing to get to be this old?” Her three tips were sex, vodka and spicy food. She had this joie de vivre that I have found is common amongst the oldest and wisest. Through the pain and the madness of life, we all have to take a moment to push back from our computer and loosen our grip and let the joy in, let the magic in. Everybody in business is grinding so hard. There are so much stress and such an excess of stimulation and information. The entire days go by where we don’t remember a single thing that happened. Do you want to live like that? Push back, take a breath, loosen your grip. Live in this moment.
Many of us are either rehashing the past or worried about the future. There’s no joy there. It’s anxiety or fear happening for the most part. One of the chapters in your book is The Healing Power of a Great Story. Can you tell us about that?
My guru’s name is Dr. Carl Hammerschlag. He was a medical doctor on the Indian Reservation for many years. He thought he was this highly certified and educated doctor. He would go into the hospitals to work with the Native Americans. Healing for them was much than art. I asked him questions like, “You know how to give me medicines, but do you know how to dance?” At first, it didn’t register. You have to be in touch with the rhythm of life to be a healer. It’s not just about the mind and the medicines. It’s how do you touch the spirit. Dr. H has these sweat lodges, which I’ve gotten a bad rap on the news because people have had dangerous experiences.
When they’re done correctly in Native American tradition, the idea of a sweat lodge is to go into this hot teepee. It’s so hot that you have to stop thinking and breathe. It’s almost like you remove your head from your body and let your spirit breathe. He says that the thing that’s missing from our culture is that we have to be telling better stories. You can’t pass along wisdom and teach our children how to live a good life if we’re not telling them good stories. He said, “We have to be telling better stories.” Whenever I learn from Dr. H something about heartbreak, resilience and what it means to heal my own anxiety, he always wraps it in a story and in a ceremony. He doesn’t just give me the information. That’s missing from our culture.
Life Lessons: Through the pain and the madness of life, we all have to take a moment to push back from our computer, loosen our grip, and let the joy and the magic in.
Another chapter in this great book, Life Lessons from the Oldest & Wisest, is How to Find More Time. Everybody of every age is looking for that, except maybe if you’re a kid and you want to get older faster. Most of us are looking for ways to find more time. What’s the story there?
There was a lady who’s 93 years old. At the end of our conversation, I asked if she could send me a picture. She said she’d put it in the mail. I said, “That’ll take a week. Can you just email it to me?” She didn’t have an email. She had to write down my email address to give it to her granddaughter to send me the email of the picture. It took five minutes for me to spell out my email and for her to write it down. At first, I was so frustrated. Who has five minutes in their day to give your email? Who wouldn’t get frustrated? At a certain point, I started realizing, “This is ridiculous, that I don’t have five minutes in my day for this lady to have this conversation. What better am I going to do those five minutes?” I started laughing. We had this great moment. She said she was an old fart. I realized that she had this spirit of a much younger person. The joke was on me, not on her. It’s ridiculous that we’re so efficient with our time that you give up a minute or two in your day that you didn’t expect. That should be a chance to laugh and loosen your day.
One of the other chapters that stand out for me is A Cure for Loneliness. We might assume that people get lonely as they get older and isolated, but there’s a lot of research that a lot of entrepreneurs feel isolated and can feel lonely at the top. What cures for loneliness did you learn in interviewing these elderly people?
Everybody’s lonely. We spend ten hours a day looking at screens. Everything is on a screen. Everybody’s longing for human experiences. We call it the matrix. You get sucked into. You can look at screens all day. You can go from your tablet to your television, laptop, iPhone and to your desktop. There’s no shortage of screens. I found this lady in New York City, who was the guest at one of my intergenerational events. She lives in a high rise in New York City. She said people don’t even see her. Her neighbors don’t even see her. She feels invisible. She’s had horrible health problems. She was bankrupted by the medical system. She’s got a bleak existence.
[bctt tweet=”You have to be in touch with the rhythm of life to be a healer.” username=”John_Livesay”]
She came and she spoke. People in the audience were crying because everybody realizes that they would probably not have seen this lady. We walk right by her on the street. We’re looking at our phone. If you have an elderly neighbor, a lot of people would not take the time to engage with them or are too busy. You come together and it felt so good to hear her story, hear her pain and give her a chance to share. People are living lives of quiet desperation. That’s true for everybody. To come to an experience where you can sit in a circle and say, “Here’s what hurts,” and listen to one another is an incredible experience. It’s not something that can happen on technology.
That’s the secret. Don’t be looking in the wrong place for your answers to feel connected. You would think, “I’ll hop on social media and feel better.” Research has shown that the more time you spend on social media, the more likely you are to be depressed because you keep comparing yourself to the best moments in everyone else’s life and thinking, “I do not have that much fun.” You also talk about how to feel instantly successful. I’m curious to know how to do that.
This guy in the book said he was a 90. He didn’t make more than $27,000 his whole life, but he found the value in being engaged, purposeful in his work and passionate about living and his faith. He is a widower, but he goes to old age homes and plays country music. He has a little country music band. There are a lot of people who’d be like, “I didn’t make any money my whole life. It’s been hard. It’s been a grind. I worked my ass off. What do I have to show for it?” Here’s a guy who put his emphasis on the intangibles. He was working in the fields on the tractors in the blazing heat. He cranks the country music, loved, found a way to his heart first and love what he did. He has lived a great life. Your accomplishments in older age are not what you have to show for yourself, but who are showing up for you. The investments that you make in people, love and relationships.
Nobody wants to hold up their plaques or awards at a memorial service. In fact, you talk about how to screw, laugh and celebrate at funerals. Everyone fantasizes, “What will people say about me at my funeral?” What’s going on in that chapter?
Life Lessons: Laugh about your challenges; don’t take life so seriously.
There’s this lady Lorena who is in her 80s. She spoke at one of my intergenerational events in Dallas. She told a story. Her first husband died of ALS. It was brutal. She got married again and had this incredibly blissful life. Her second husband died of a heart attack. She’d been through so much pain and loss. She was at the funeral for her second husband. She tripped, fell over one of the grandkids and broke her femur bones. Everybody was listening to her story. People stopped drinking their wines. You could pierce the silence in the room, which is sadness. She had to get rod and screws inserted in her leg to heal the break. She says to everyone, “I got screwed by Rod and I did not like it.” It was so funny. It was such comic relief that this lady could come to the pain in her life and find some humor. If she can do it, then so can you and so can I. Find a way to loosen our grip and laugh about our challenges, not take life so seriously.
You are combining meditation and storytelling together. Can you explain how that works?
I like to tell stories about the elders that I speak with. They are a great resource for great stories and life lessons. I lead these guided meditations and have these meditation programs. Meditation is something that we silo, that separates us from life so that we can find our peace, quiet, go off in a corner and listen to a guided meditation. I found that meditation is better in my experience when it integrates everything that’s going on in life, instead of separates from everything going on in my life. I lead these meditation programs. I share stories from the elders and stories about what’s going on in the pop culture. Every moment offers us an opportunity to meditate. Every moment throughout our today, stuck in traffic, screaming kids, running into someone that stole your fiancé. Every moment if we can resist and push back against it, life becomes exhausting or we can embrace, find the lessons and move deeply into the emotional experience of life moment by moment. I try to make my meditations integrating, everything that’s going on around us and within us so it feels more whole.
You have gotten some interest from Netflix on what you’re doing, and possibly turning that into a show. How did that come about? How are you pitching what you’re doing?
[bctt tweet=”Everything is on a screen and everybody’s longing for human experiences. ” username=”John_Livesay”]
The work I’m doing with the elders is interesting because 10,000 people are turning 65 every single day. We’re segregated by age. I don’t think businesses are recognizing how important it is that we learn to engage the aging population. There was this article I saw in Fast Company Magazine. The headline was, “It’s time to pay attention to the $15 trillion business of growing old.” It said it’s the most significant demographic shift in recent history. America has always been about being sexy, young and glamorous. We’re getting older. There’re going to be more old people than young people. It’s going to be much more about being seasoned and wise as much as it is about youthful and glamorous. I’m coming up with different ideas on how you can show the relevance of the elder population. How you can take them out of social isolation and bring them back into the mix. That’s an idea that I’m working on.
Congratulations on that. Tell us a little bit about the keynote talks you’ve given. Who hires you to give them?
I’ve been giving a lot of talks. My second book was called Happy Is the New Healthy. It shares the message of joie de vivre and the ways that we can loosen our grip. My new book, Life Lessons from the Oldest & Wisest takes the joie de vivre and the message of happiness. It also talks in depth about how it’s hard to see the future and the future trends if we’re not rooted in the past. It’s important for companies to be able to honor and share everything that they’ve learned from their past. The mistakes that they’ve made. When you talk to somebody who’s 80, 90, 100 years old, they weigh in on their regrets and the things that they didn’t do right, that’s almost as meaningful as the things that they did do right.
You don’t have to make the same mistakes over and over through every generation. We can learn from people. For instance, this one guy told me his wife passed away from Alzheimer’s. He was married to her for many years. He sat by her bedside and held her hand as she lay dying. He relived with her all the moments that he enjoyed in their life. He was grieving. He was sad. Hearing him tell a story was like a wake-up call because we all take our partner for granted. You wake up next to the same person every day and the same stories, issues and challenges. One day, we’re going to have to say goodbye or they’re going to have to say goodbye to us. There comes the point where you wake up and wish that you appreciated them more than we do, especially in the prime of our life when we can go places, travel and we’re not old yet.
Life Lessons: There comes the point where you wake up and wish that you appreciated your loved ones more than you do, especially in the prime of your life.
It’s important for people to hear that message. You don’t want to look back and wish that you were more grateful for somebody you love deeply. It’s not a pleasant regret to have. That’s why it’s important to recognize and listen to the regrets that people have, and for companies to realize, “These are the mistakes that we’ve made. Let’s honor these mistakes and grow from these mistakes.” When you have a lot of history, you’ve been around for a while and you’re able to share from that place of vulnerability that speaks highly to our ability to nurture great relationships.
You talk about people being so focused in the future that, “As soon as I fall in love, as soon as I have this much money, as soon as my career takes off, whatever it is, then I’ll be happy,” as opposed to, “I can’t possibly be happy now because I don’t have everything I need in order to be happy.” You have a lot to say on that.
There are all these conditions that we attach to our happiness. I had a great trip to Alaska with a friend. We were in rural Alaska. We had to get a taxi to take us back to our car. It was such an awesome trip. My friend said, “I bet you this taxi driver has a message for us.” Sure enough, we got in the car and the taxi driver tells us he just left hospice and his father passed away. We said, “I’m so sorry to hear that.” He said, “Don’t be sorry. I got to spend every day with my dad for the last six months of his life.” We caught up on so much. We did so many deep, rich conversations. He said, “What was I thinking? Why did I wait for the last six months in my dad’s life to get this close to him? What was I waiting for?” When he says goodbye, he always tells people, “Enjoy your journey.”
That was so true. We’re always waiting for something in order for us to allow ourselves to be happy. Most old people that I meet, they’re not like that in 111 years old. There are a lot of old people who are worried. There are a lot of old people who are resentful. Those conditions follow them into old age. If you’re a little bit worried when you’re 42, you’ll be a lot more worried when you’re 52. You’ll be really worried when you’re 82. If you’re a little bit resentful when you’re 37, you’ll be quite resentful when you’re 47 and resentful when you’re 67. There comes a point where you have to make a decision to set yourself loose from these conditions that we place upon our lives and free ourselves. There’s something you can do to be happy. I talk about in my books, especially in my speeches, the simple things that you can do right this second to turn up the volume on your level of joy, presence and quality of life.
[bctt tweet=”There comes a point where you have to make a decision to set yourself loose from the conditions we place upon our lives and free ourselves.” username=”John_Livesay”]
That is what meditation is all about, being in the moment, letting go of everything else, being comfortable with the silence, and not comparing yourself to other people is a key path for being happy. Whatever the journey is, you’re in it, as opposed to being so frustrated, especially in the entrepreneur world or business in general, “We have to hit this milestone.” There’s always another milestone to hit. Nobody ever gets to be in the joy and celebrate what they’ve accomplished. What you’re doing is so important to everyone of all ages, but also to remind us of the importance of spending time with people who aren’t going to be here forever.
I appreciate you saying that.
Is there any last thought you want to leave us with, David?
One more story about what you said about comparing ourselves. I interviewed this lady, Linda Jones, an elder. She’s in her 80s. Her dad was this iconic Chuck Jones, who created the Looney Tunes, Bugs Bunny, etc. Linda told a great story. When she was young, she felt bad that she wasn’t living up to her dad’s legend. She wasn’t as successful as she thought her father was. She felt bad about herself. We’ve all been there in some way. She wrote her dad a letter. Back then, people wrote letters. They didn’t type. They didn’t email. She said, “Dad, I want to share with you that I feel lousy about myself. You’re so successful and I’m not. I’m in the dumps.” Her dad wrote back. He said, “Linda, get off my mountain. You have your mountain to climb. I have mine.” She said it snapped her in a place. She recognized that she does have a lot to be proud of. Her dad wasn’t looking to her to compare and to hold up to his height. She has her own life to live.
[bctt tweet=”You got to be proud of the mountain that you’re climbing and the life that you’re living.” username=”John_Livesay”]
How can you avoid looking through social media and feeling bad about all the likes this guy gets? 100,000 downloads that my friend said she posted about her podcast or the place that this couple is traveling. It inherently makes you feel bad. At a certain point, the whole thing with social media, it’s not sustainable. Nobody feels good using social media and something’s not in the long run is going to give there. You’ve got to be proud of the mountain that you’re climbing and the life that you’re living. I saw this great quote that I want to end with. It’s a quote by Lao Tzu. He says, “Because one believes in oneself, one does not try to convince others. Because one is content with oneself, one does not need others’ approval. Because one accepts oneself, the whole world accepts her.”
I can’t thank you enough for being a guest on the show. If people want to find out more about you, what’s the best website?
David, thanks so much for being with us and sharing your joy and wisdom.
Thank you so much, John.
Links Mentioned:
- David Romanelli
- Drinks with Your Elders
- Life Lessons from the Oldest & Wisest
- Happy Is the New Healthy
- Dr. Carl Hammerschlag
- It’s time to pay attention to the $15 trillion business of growing old – article on Fast Company Magazine
- http://DavidRomanelli.com
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John Livesay, The Pitch Whisperer
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Entertainment Secrets For Entrepreneurs with Jennifer Lier
Posted by John Livesay in podcast | 0 comments
Episode Summary
The key to success is confidence and pursuing your goal in life no matter what it takes. Jennifer Lier, the President of the country’s premier motivational keynote speaker booking agency, National Keynote Speakers, shares her life story from being a shy girl to blooming into a pageant queen and a successful entertainer. Through her experiences in the entertainment industry, Jennifer teaches invaluable entertainment secrets for entrepreneurs, showing us how to present ourselves in a way that entertains and draws people. As a performer, artist, and musician, she shares what creating a great website and pitching things efficiently can do for you. Jennifer also recounts how she got into keynote speaking and shares some tips on how to become one.
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Listen To The Episode Here
Entertainment Secrets For Entrepreneurs with Jennifer Lier
Our guest is Jennifer Lier. She has an illustrious 25-year career in the entertainment industry. She’s a highly sought-after vocalist. I personally heard her sing, it’s amazing. She’s a headline entertainer, model emcee, on-camera host and was one of the most requested Marilyn Monroe impersonators in the country, which is quite a story in and of itself because her hair is black. At the age of nineteen, she lost over 100 pounds and also conquered her fear of speaking and singing in front of people. Back in November of 1990, Jennifer realized her childhood dream and debuted on the world’s most famous stages of Vegas as a singer in a popular dance band. She went on to win the coveted title of Miss Nevada 1995 and received a talent award at the Miss America Pageant. She continued on to headline over twenty shows around the world including Legends in Concert, the world-famous Follies Bergere.
Her diverse talents led her to incredible opportunities and experiences performing with celebrity icons and being a spokesperson for some of the country’s most recognized companies. When she transitioned out of the entertainment field, she became a partner in Level 10 Speakers, which is a Las Vegas-based bureau delivering both speakers and entertainment to the Vegas market. While still a partner in Level 10 Speakers, she became the Director of Special Events and Director of Corporate Partnerships for Polaroid Museum, which is a hip meeting and event space where Jennifer built from nothing to consistent and profitable training events, weddings and special events. She is the President of National Keynote Speakers, the country’s premier and motivational keynote speaking and booking agency. She enjoys a wonderful life with her husband, Dan. They have two children and she still finds time to volunteer in her community. Jennifer, welcome to the show.
Thank you so much for having me, John. It’s wonderful to be here.
Entertainment Secrets For Entrepreneurs: If you really want something, you need to go after it and settle for nothing less.
I’m going to let you tell your story of origin. You can go back as far as you want. You can start at nineteen when you had this dramatic weight loss or you can go back further as to what caused it. Whatever you think would be a good place to start where we can flesh out some of those details I touched on.
It’s interesting how life turns out. Sometimes kids grow up and they have a great household, great parents, they’re supported and they want to go to school. They know exactly what they want to do. They want to be a doctor, a lawyer, a teacher or whatever. Even times that people are born lucky with a well laid out plan, sometimes we’re not and I wasn’t. I did know that I loved to sing. I didn’t have any guidance or understanding, I did think it was a pipe dream 100%. I was shy. By reading my bio, you’d never know it. By knowing me now, nobody would ever know, but I was painfully shy. To the point where in school if I had a question, I would not raise my hand because I was shy and embarrassed to bring attention to myself and have to speak out loud to ask the teacher a question. I suffered for it, I did through school and I didn’t have the courage to ask for help when I needed it. I didn’t join into things that I thought would not benefit me. I didn’t have that. I wasn’t born with that.
I spent a lot of time at home after school when I was growing up and I was young. I loved music. I would spend hours in my room singing to albums that my mom had. I was young, too young to buy my own stuff. I’m talking five, six, seven, singing to her albums of Barbara Streisand, The Eagles and all of these great artists in music. I would listen to them over and over again. I wanted to be able to hit those notes, have that phrasing and have the harmony skills of The Eagles and the musicality that they had. I grew up loving this music and wanting to master it. It was my happy place. I wasn’t good at school. I stopped. I was terrible. It didn’t compute with me. I liked some things, art was awesome, but everything else was painful for me to be able to do. The music brought me so much joy.
I had a few friends. I wasn’t a lot of friends’ type of person. I might have one or two. I would go out and do my thing, go outside and back then we were active. There were no video games so we were always outside doing stuff. We’d love to more play with the boys. I loved to bike and I loved to throw a ball around. I was that girl. I wasn’t girly, even though I wanted to be. I didn’t look it and I was always plump. I felt more boyish, unfortunately, even though I did try to be more girly. As time went on, I had no plan for my life. My parents weren’t that type that put you into every class, sports, nurtured you or cultured you into where they thought that your talents lie. They weren’t that.
I barely graduated high school, like the skin of my teeth. I didn’t know I was graduating until I went to. I missed the day because I used to ditch school all the time. I was never enticed. I hated school. I missed the day where they handed out your slip for graduation. I had to go to the counselor’s office and I’ll never forget there’s a stack of papers. The counselor was not there. They’re like, “Go in the office. There’s a stack of papers, you should be able to find it in the basket.” I was like, “Okay.” I’m looking through the stack of papers and mine was not there. I’m like, “I did not graduate.” Mine was the last paper in the stack and I thought I had died and gone to heaven. I was like, “Thank God.” As I’m looking at the papers, I’m thinking about what I’m going to tell my parents and everybody else that I hadn’t graduated. I’m like, “I have to do my senior year over or go get my GED.”
I got graduation barely. I think it’s because my teachers liked me and they gave me D’s instead of F’s. That’s how I got out of high school. I think there’s something to be said with that, building rapport, making sure that you have a great attitude. Even though I was shy, I was always nice and helpful. Because I didn’t know how to step out, I knew that if I could help, I would be able to be included. I’m saying that for a reason because that benefited me later on in life. These are a couple of skills that I was able to go, “That worked for me. Note to self. Put that in my filing cabinet.” I’m 100 pounds overweight as I graduated high school. I was home alone because we’re not an active family. We didn’t do stuff. My parents pulled home and watched TV. It was like the ‘70s, early ‘80s family. They didn’t go to the gym. They weren’t active. They didn’t put me in sports. We watched TV and ate and that’s what I did.
I was an eater though. I was an emotional child. I ate when I was sad, when I was happy, when I was bored, when I was angry. I didn’t know how to express it. It was difficult and I was lonely. I didn’t have active parents in my world. What happened was I watched TV and that was my dreamland. I ate while I did it. Needless to say, I ended up having a lot of weight challenges. When that happened and I graduated high school, I was not getting along with my parents. I was told to leave a week before graduation and they said, “As soon as that’s over, you need to get out,” and so I did. At eighteen years old, I had nowhere to go and I was scared to death. I had no ability to figure anything out for myself. At that point, I was like, “I don’t know what to do.”
As the moment I graduated, I called a girlfriend of mine and I asked her if I could sleep on the couch and she said, “Of course.” What I did was I went to her house for as long as I could, slept on her couch. That didn’t last and I slept on some other people’s couches and that didn’t totally last either. I had a car and I ended up sleeping in my car when I need to. At the same time, I’m looking for a job. That was my journey at that time was trying to figure out how to get a job. Through that time, a girlfriend of mine had said, “I know you love to sing.” She was a pageant girl, she was a girl who was small, little skinny blonde with blue eyes. She had that ability and she had people around her. She said, “I know you like to sing. I’m working with this woman. She’s a dance troupe coach. I think you should go and see her. You never know what will happen.” I was like, “All right.”
I meet this woman. She’s like, “Let me hear you sing.” I said, “Okay,” so I sang for her. She said, “What are you doing with that?” I said, “I have no idea. I’ve nowhere to live. I’m looking for a job. I’m trying to figure out how to get to college, even though I barely graduated high school.” She said, “You have unbelievable talent. If you lose this weight, you can do this for a living.” Mind you, I didn’t say that I lived in Las Vegas. My parents moved us from LA to Las Vegas when I was twelve, so I grew up here in the city. For her to say that to me, it was literally making all my dreams come true. I’m like, “What? Nobody ever told me that. I always thought it was a pipe dream.” All the years of singing for myself for hours when my parents were gone after school and pretending that I’m singing to thousands of people.
[bctt tweet=”Be likable and coachable. ” username=”John_Livesay”]
I’ll never forget, I was singing Linda Ronstadt. I was a freshman or sophomore. First of all, that was the mid-‘80s about that time. I’m thinking, “Why am I doing this? Nobody knows Linda Ronstadt now. That was several years ago. What am I doing?” Ironically, later on in my life, it came to pass. That’s the reason why I was doing it. Jumping back to where this woman was telling me to lose weight, she said, “Come live with me. You can clean my house for your rent and I will help you on this journey.” I said, “Okay, great.” They literally cleaned out a walk-in closet, put a single bed in there and I slept in there for a year. As I lived with her, she eventually fired me from cleaning her house because I was terrible at it. I did find a job and I was working at a men’s clothing store. My journey progressed and I lost the weight within a year. I was singing karaoke bars and sneaking in because I was only eighteen, nineteen.
Somebody said to me as they heard me sing at one of the karaoke bars in this contest because I would go and grab $100. I’d win a karaoke contest once a week. I’d cycle around Las Vegas to grab some extra money and $100 was a lot of money back then. They said, “You’re amazing. You should go and audition for this band that needs a singer.” I did. They hired me and they were the dance band that I was talking about. I’m nineteen years old. I lied about my age. I wanted it so bad, I was hungry for that. There’s a reason why I’m telling this story because I know people who are reading your blog, I would have done anything for that job. I would have done it for free. I had been doing it for so long, going up to that point to be able to cut my teeth and learn the craft. The guy saw that I was comfortable, that I was hungry, that I wanted it so bad. He hired me and he knew I was lying about my age. There, my journey began.
From there, I did that. It was the most popular dance band for several years. I was still trying to figure out my college situation. Somebody said, “You should try out for Miss Las Vegas going to Miss America.” Losing 100 pounds, I wasn’t in the best shape. I looked good but not exactly swimsuit. That was my next risk to go do, that I won this Las Vegas one, once in Miss America. I had an amazing, exciting time. I started performing in high-level production shows here in Las Vegas. I traveled the world singing and performing with other producers that had shows around the world. I did remarkable stuff. One side note, when I was 28, 29 years old, Legends in Concert came calling me, which is a popular show here in Las Vegas. They said, “We heard that you’re a great singer.” I had done a couple of little small shows with them as a singer/dancer, not in a starring role. They said, “We have a request for a Linda Ronstadt in one of our shows. Can you do it?” I said, “Yes, I can.” That’s something to be said about following your heart, doing what you know and not knowing where it’s going to lead you.
Moving forward, I was in entertainment for many years. I’ve done many amazing things, work with celebrities. I did television, did high-level productions, spokesperson work. What that did to me is it showed me what vision, dreams, hard work and tenacity. If you want something, you need to go after it and settle for nothing less. It’s about doing the things that you don’t want to do. Now that I see what a lot of speakers and people wanting something in their life that is older, we forget what we had when we were young, when we would do anything for that. Oftentimes, I have speakers in this realm that come to me and they want to build their speaking business. They say, “What do I need to do?” I’m like, “First of all, you need to speak more, speak whenever you can. Whether it’s free or not, you need to do it,” and a lot of people could do that. It’s interesting because I’m thinking, “That’s how you get good.”
Entertainment Secrets For Entrepreneurs: For businesses and speakers who are looking for something, look where you’re not thinking.
If you want this, you go and make it happen. If you don’t do those things and you don’t want it bad enough, you’re not going to do the things that you don’t want to do. Oftentimes, people are successful in their 40s, 50s and 60s. They’ve already risen to a certain level and they go, “What do you mean to do something for free? What do you mean start over? What do you mean to be at the kindergarten level?” A little twist at that point as far as where they are, but they’re not there in the speaking world because in the speaking world, they still have to start over. Oftentimes what happens, somebody who’s great at what they do or in their job or their careers, “We can speak to our group.” It goes well. They get a standing ovation. It feels amazing. They’re like, “I am a speaker and I want to do this,” and they come to me, “I’m ready.”
I’m like, “No, you’re not. There’s a skill. Make sure that you’re learning the skill, learning the craft.” This is a craft and there is time involved and investment. There’s money involved with investments. There’s work, promotional material involved with the investment. It’s the same thing in entertainment. It is similar, which is why I’m good in this business, both on the client side and the talent side. As a performer, artist, singer, musician, you need a great website, a great video, a great one sheet, a great everything that lists what you can do, social speaker. When you’re talking about people who are reading this that need to know how to pitch things, make sure that your stuff looks as good as what you’re pitching yourself and your fee is. If you’re a $10,000 speaker, make sure your materials look $10,000 worth.
That there’s consistency in the brand across the video production, it’s for sure all of that is what you’re saying. You don’t suddenly get to Carnegie Hall or performing at the Hollywood Bowl just because you’ve sung a couple of times. Yet some people think, “I should be able to be on this big stage without any experience.” You said something that I want to tap into because it’s near and dear to me as well. I rarely talk about this because it doesn’t usually come up. When I was ten years old, I remember my mom took me to buy clothes for school. They said, “Sorry, but you’re going to have to wear the husky size,” and I was devastated. I wasn’t a particularly athletic kid and I was doing a lot of emotional eating that you described as well. When I was bored it was, “You want to eat something? You didn’t get an A, let’s eat for that. You’re lonely after school, let’s eat comfort food.”
For me, I started swimming and then got on the swim team. That’s when the weight started to come off and I ended up becoming a lifeguard. That journey of husky pants, a chubby little ten-year-old boy to suddenly you’re wearing a Speedo like you’re wearing the swimsuits in the Miss America pageant. It’s a journey that unless you’ve been there, people don’t understand how challenging it is to let go of your image of yourself at ten years old, in your case at nineteen. I think that gives us a lot of empathy for people who maybe don’t fit in right away. It’s because you look a certain way now, doesn’t mean you’ve always felt like you fit in. I wanted to acknowledge your courage and thank you for sharing that vulnerable part of yourself. I think that’s how we all relate to each other. It invites people in to know that. This likeability factor you talked about, is that everything, whether it’s a teacher liking students or doctors liking your patients.
There’s something to be said about that. I knew I was deficient in certain ways. I’ve seen people who are highly-skilled and they’re amazing at everything and a little cocky. They don’t have the graciousness or the heart to go along with that. In every situation, maybe they know they’re skilled and they know how to do it in most situations, but if they’re anything less than either tired, hungry or whatever, they’re not as nice as they typically are or can be. I always knew that. I wasn’t great in everything. I was a little deficient. I was good in a lot of things. I wasn’t great at anything. I knew that I could make up for that in my heart, with my heart, my personality and be able to take that a long way and I did. I wasn’t the best singer in Las Vegas. I wasn’t the thinnest, which was a big thing. I didn’t have the best body. I wasn’t the best dancer, but I was solid and good at everything. On top of that, I had the best attitude and that was everything. People’s association with me is, “Jennifer’s the best. She’s willing to show up and do anything. She’s willing to come.” I was the fourth in everybody’s mind when somebody needed someone or something. It’s about being your best always, whatever that is for you.
I was up for a speaking engagement with a couple of other speakers they were looking at. The speaking girl came back to me and said, “They picked you because they like your energy.” People go, “What?” It’s not because of your video. It’s not because of your book. It’s not because of the testimonials. Likeability factor is synonymous, in my opinion, with, “They liked your energy. They want that energy in the room. They want to work with you.” Before and after the talk, all that stuff could never be underestimated. A lot of people unfortunately think, “If I have all this information about how great I am, that people will hire me and they miss the whole likability factor.”
It’s the intangible that sets you apart from everybody else. I’m working on figuring out a way to teach that to people. I’m working on dissecting that because people come to me like, “How can I be more like you?” I’m like, “Let me think about that.” I want to be able to teach that because I do think that gives an advantage to a lot of people in every single industry no matter what you’re doing. Obviously in sales when your clients love you, in leadership when your team loves you and to be able to understand that. It’s not about being everybody’s friend.
It’s about being able to have the hard, difficult conversations and do it with kindness and care. It truly is about caring about other people. I think that that’s the foundation of it, which is probably what happens with you too because I’ve watched you speak and you care about the attendees that you’re speaking to you. You want them to succeed. It’s not about you being up on stage delivering this and getting a fee. It’s about you giving your valuable content of, “This is what I experienced. I want you to be able to do this. I want you to take this back to your industry to do that.”
[bctt tweet=”What more can I be doing to grow my business? ” username=”John_Livesay”]
I wanted to add to that. You were kind enough to come to hear me speak and then you went the extra mile and this is where your likability factor goes off the chart is you said, “I have some feedback for you.” That goes back to what you were saying about how coachable are you no matter how old or successful you are in any career?
You are receptive.
I’m always looking for any little nuance I can do to improve. I can’t wait to implement what you gave me when I’m speaking on that engagement I just got for being like my energy. That coachability factor, I think for the readers the big takeaway is likability and coachability are what’s going to set you apart of why anybody wants to work with you.
Don’t be the one that thinks that they know everything.
No matter what you’ve done or whatever accolades you already have. I do want to ask you because I know there’s a great story here about your wonderful husband, Dan, who is also a speaker. I’d love to hear how you two met and then how that led to you running your own bureau, the National Keynote Speakers. How did that all transpire from you saying, “I have this expertise. I may not want to be working nights. If you’re speaking during the day, we’re never going to see each other.” Tell us a little bit about that story of the origin of becoming an entrepreneur and a founder of such a successful speaking bureau.
I met my husband on Southwest Airlines, so it’s the other love app, which is funny because I’ve flown as a performer. I flew for a living because I was always flying to events and shows. He was a speaker, so same for him. We were both flying back from Phoenix, so he was also a peak performance coach as well as a speaker. He was coaching Terry Porter, who was the head coach of the Phoenix Suns at that time. I was taking a master voice class in Phoenix. We were both on our way back to Vegas. I sat next to him on Southwest Airlines because you can sit anywhere. He always sat at the exit row, I always sat in the exit row. It was a no-brainer and then the plane was empty.
I went and sat on the aisle seat in the exit row and he was sitting in the window. There’s a long story there, but the short story is we met on the plane. I was interested. I wasn’t looking to date him. I wanted to hire him because I wanted to take my career to the next level. I was like, “Give me your card.” The funny thing was, and he tells a story because he’s like, “I wasn’t attracted to her.” I got on that flight and I looked like hell. I had no makeup on. I was exhausted. I didn’t feel good because something happened to my shirt so I bought this funky shirt in the Phoenix airport that had these horrible cactuses on there. I still even had the sticker that had M all the way down on the thing. It was just not my best day. My hair was all wacky and it was just not good.
I saw this guy and I was like, “I think I could fake a better impression.” I was headlining at the Rio Hotel and Casino at that time. I said, “Come see me there and let’s talk in between shows of like, ‘I need to redeem what I just did.’” Here I am in full makeup and costume and everything. He sees me perform and I knew I had him. He was like, “I see now what you are.” The short story is we became friends and we literally talked every day. He lived down the street, which we didn’t know. We went to the same gym he lived down the street. We were destined to meet somehow, some way. I think God was like, “If you guys can’t figure out the gym, I’m going to sit you next to each other on this airplane and go from there.” We started dating a few months later and got engaged a year later. We got married a year after that. A couple of years into it we got married. He was speaking, I was still performing. I learned about the business.
What was interesting is that I had already been doing corporate entertaining, meaning that for you speakers, a company comes to Vegas or an event city and they hire speakers for their conference and stuff. They also hire entertainment, so I would sing at their cocktail receptions or their galas or I would emcee. I already understood that world. I was like, “Who hires you? How do you get hired?” He told me about something called a speakers bureau. I got it and learned it. I worked with agencies and so it made sense to me. I understood what he was doing for promotion. He was great at his website, his social media when it was just starting then in 2008. I saw how he built his business and I saw how he ran his business. For a few years while I was still in entertainment in the corporate market, selling myself to entertainment companies and corporations that would come hire me through my website, I saw what he did and how he built his business. I also saw what bureaus did with him, where they lacked, where their holes were. I saw other speakers that we knew where their frustrations were, how they needed to build their business.
[bctt tweet=”It’s the intangible that sets you apart from everybody else.” username=”John_Livesay”]
I always kept that in the back of my brain because I wasn’t in shows anymore. I did stop doing shows. I want to be home at night with a family. We had two kids and I want to be home at night every night. Corporate work was easy. I only had to do it a couple of nights a week if I did and it wasn’t late usually, but I wanted to get out of entertaining because I was tired. It’s a lot of work and I thought I wanted to do something new. I wanted to do more. I had more to offer. While I was making that transition, the Polaroid Company came calling and they were opening a museum here in Las Vegas. They needed somebody to consult with them and so I helped them open their museum because they wanted to use it as an event space.
Once that was open, they needed somebody to run it and I was like, “I’ll do it.” I stopped entertaining. I went into the corporate world. I went into sales and marketing and building that business for them as corporate events, a place for meetings, weddings, cocktail receptions and such. I had a great time and loved it, but their partnership dissolved for their company around the country so I was losing my job. Dan said, “Stop pussyfooting around. You know this business. There is no bureau in Las Vegas, you need to open one.” I was scared because I really understood it, but I didn’t know it. I knew I had to learn all the speakers, all the clients, all the industries and all the topics too. I needed to understand, “People in technology or innovation, what do they speak on? What do you mean innovate what?” I saw I had to get well-versed in that and understand it.
Back in the day when I was doing a lot of entertaining, I used to do a lot of spokesperson work too. Companies would hire me in to learn their product and I would learn it in one day or two. I would become an expert in the product and be able to talk about that for a few days. That was my superpower. I think I was lucky in this business because I was able to learn the business quickly, learn the topics, understand it, get into the deep level and be able to talk about it and be able to sell that to clients. We opened Las Vegas Keynote Speakers, it started as, and it became successful in a heartbeat. We started opening around the country.
I had a presence in twelve other cities and it was phenomenal. I was like, “I need a national name,” and that’s when I came up with National Keynote Speakers to house everything that I had. It’s been wonderful ever since. It’s been growing steadily and in a place where people are having difficulty finding market share and getting new clients. I’ve had major bureaus come to me and say, “How do you get new business?” They’ve been in business for many years, so they have their clients that they’ve done great customer service with that they’ve kept. How do they get new stuff? I was like, “I’m not telling you,” but I said, “That was my ability to go in there. I’m looking in places you’re not looking because of my core background.” To people who are looking for business and looking for speakers, who are looking for something, look where you’re not thinking.
[bctt tweet=”Paint a picture of what is possible. ” username=”John_Livesay”]
Look in your own backyard. Are you in an event town, like a major city? Are you going to the Convention and Visitors Bureau and networking with them and saying, “How do you book? Who comes to you? Are you looking at any sales teams or any meeting planners? Are you networking in their networking groups? Are you reaching out to them? Are you giving value? Are you making your presence known?” There are all these different ways that I was able to build. I came from entertainment and I was used to that on the ground level, like boots on the ground world, rather than going, “I’m going to open my website and hope that everybody comes.” It’s different and so I was able to do that.
The concept that there wasn’t a bureau based in Vegas fascinates me because that’s where you heard me speak. There are many companies that are not based in Las Vegas and yet they bring all their people there because they have so many places that have conventions. I would think that there’s always every day a keynote speaker speaking in Vegas. It’s almost like Amazon going, “Let’s do books first and then we’ll do everything.” You went, “Let’s do Vegas, my backyard. I know it and now I’ve got that model down. I can do what Amazon did and scale that across the country.” I also want our audience to take away what you said, which is you asked yourself, “What is my superpower?” In your case, it was learning information quickly and becoming a subject matter expert. That’s what a good speaker has to do too.
When you’re brought in to a new client, you have to learn that industry, their niche, their competitive advantages. When you can speak to them, it’s customized and not seeing, talk to everybody. I’ll never forget when I spoke to a healthcare company and I got off the stage and somebody asked me, “How long have you worked in healthcare?” It’s all of that stuff and not everybody can do it. I think that if someone’s saying, “I don’t know what my superpower is or how do I find it? I’d love your opinion on this,” is your superpower sometimes is something that comes relatively easy to you. Because it comes easy to you, you assume everyone else can do with that too. People point out and go, “I can’t do that. How do you do that?” Look for those feedback comments. What are your thoughts on helping people find their superpower with those criteria?
Entertainment Secrets For Entrepreneurs: If you don’t give everything that you have with the excitement that you had as a child, you’re never going to go where you really want to go.
I think you’re 100% right. I love how you just dialed that down. Your superpower is something that comes easy. You think that everybody else can do it too and you realize, “No, they can’t.” I also think on top of that, being open, willing to learn and do something new. Getting out of your comfort zone and going, “I’m going to really see my creatives also.” This is how I start my day and every business interaction is, “How can I help? Not what can I give you?”
It’s that concept of coming from a place of service. Sometimes it can be something so simple like, “Would you mind buying my book and writing a review on Amazon?” It’s a little ask, some little thing sometimes, I’m looking for this kind of customer or here’s my ideal client, what tips do you have for my website or if you wouldn’t mind re-tweeting something I posted? It’s amazing. How can I help? Some people are hesitant to ask that because they feel like it’s too much of an imposition. I think if you realize that sometimes the help can just be, “I just need to call you when I’m having a bad day.”
There are two things: How can I get help? Also how can I help? How can I serve? My first underlying thing is how I can serve? This thing you were telling me that people want to learn how to pitch themselves better, their products, themselves. When you come from a place of how can I serve you that it opens your mind to a different place. It allows you to ask different questions, get the answers, and then you can speak into what they need. When you’re trying to figure out how can I pitch myself better? Ask what people need. Ask how you can serve. When you can talk about how you can serve somebody, it changes the conversation. It changes the copy on your material. It changes everything.
When you’re having the conversation with the client and you’re asking them more questions, because I’m on a call with a speaker a lot when they’re talking to a client. Sometimes it’s my first call with a particular speaker and they are talking way too much. I’m like, “Ask more questions.” They want to talk, people want to talk, they want to tell you about their problems and tell you about their company. Stop talking and listen. The valuable thing there is that they tell you what they’re looking for. When they tell you what they’re looking for or you can go, “Great.” You allow the client to talk and they really get into it in the beginning, but after a minute they get into it and they say, “John is having trouble here over in this capacity with this team because the team is really struggling with the production and the warehouses. Over here, we’re struggling with morale and this is happening.”
If you let the client talk and do their thing and then you come back at the end and go, “Great, it’s so wonderful to hear. Thank you for talking and telling me about what you’re looking for. What I do is I speak to the fact that a change in overcoming adversity and we’ll talk about attitude and building morale.” You can speak into what they were saying and whatever your topic is at that point, whether it’s innovation or motivation, you can quickly formulate your information and your topic into what they need. This is the disconnect that a lot of people have. I saw this with entertainment. I know what I can do. I know my whole background. I know every scope. I know the scope of every single thing that I can do. The person who is hiring me, meeting for the first time, has no idea. If I don’t speak, describe and give them the pictures and the image of what’s possible, they’re never going to know. If they tell me what they’re looking for and I can say, “I can do this and this for you to create that and to have that objective.” They’re going to go, “You’re the perfect fit.” All of a sudden, I’ve got that job.
Give a picture of what is possible. You’re such a great storyteller, Jennifer, even describing what you were wearing when you met your husband, Dan, with all the medium size M’s on that sticker, that such a visual. It’s memorable. It’s funny and that detail. When someone says, “We need a singer of Linda Ronstadt,” you tell the story of, “I used to sing her songs in my bedroom when I was this year-old, young.” You get two great examples of painting pictures, telling stories that pull people in. That’s the secret of becoming memorable, and as I like to say, irresistible. You are certainly irresistible. I can’t thank you enough for sharing your wisdom, your passion and your story with us. If people want to find you, they can go to NationalKeynoteSpeakers.com. Do you have any final thoughts or inspiration you want to leave us with?
[bctt tweet=”Follow your heart and do what you know without knowing where it leads you. ” username=”John_Livesay”]
I feel this, and I say this every single day. If there’s something that you want to do, go and do it and do whatever you can to get there. Don’t let anything hold you back. Definitely remember how you were as a kindergartener. You wanted to try everything. Go and try everything to be successful. Whatever you’re doing, if it’s speaking, if it’s a product that you’re launching or you’re being an entrepreneur or starting a business, go and do it. We can always start over. We can always decide to turn around and go somewhere else, but if you don’t give it everything that you have as a kid, as that excitement that we had as a child, you’re never going to go where you want to go.
Don’t give up. It’s always too soon to give up. Rudy Ruettiger is one of my favorites ever. His saying from the movie, Rudy, “It’s always too soon to give up,” and I agree. Always ask yourself, “What more can I be doing?” That’s my favorite question. What more could I be doing to build my business? Your mind is going to answer you and you might not like some of the answers. It’s going to give you the answers that you need. Sometimes it takes us looking at ourselves like that, and so keep moving forward. Be like that kid that wants to go and live a dream and do whatever you can to get there. You’re going to do it. It’s going to get you where you want to go.
It’s wonderful, inspiring and tactical at the same time. What a great question. What more can I be doing to grow my business? You have given us a lot to think about and you’ve certainly inspired all of us. Thanks again, Jennifer.
You’re welcome. Thanks for having me, John.
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- Go to the ‘Ratings and Reviews’ section
- Click on ‘Write a Review’