Category: Mindset

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One Bite at a Time

Hi, guys. Let me figure out how to switch this [i.e., the camera on my cell phone] around. Um, I’m looking for a— OK, hang on, so zoom . . . nope. How do I? Oh, this, right? There we go! Hi, everybody. Welcome to my Live video for today. I’m out and about, getting stuff done, and I didn’t want to miss the opportunity to talk to you guys briefly, though.

Earlier today, before I went out doing stuff, I was cleaning my house, and I’ve been so busy and gone so much, I’ve let my house — well, it’s an apartment, it’s not a house, sorry; I call it my “house” (it’s like, you know, “Home is where you put your hat”, but…).

So I was cleaning my place, and I have so much to do. I mean, it’s— it’s bad. It’s livable, it’s not like it’s, you know, really disgustingly dirty or anything, but I haven’t vacuumed for a while, and I need to clean my tub, and I need to move some things (put them in boxes, put them away), and reorganize some, and everything. I just looked at everything and almost got overwhelmed just thinking, “Oh, my gosh. I have *so* many things to do. How am I ever going to get this all done today?”

And then, I remembered a quote by Creighton Abrams. Now, if you don’t know who he is, he was a really skilled tank commander in World War II. They actually named the Abrams tank after him. And he said that— He’s the one who did the really famous quote that said (I’ll probably get it wrong, not verbatim, but basically he said), “You eat an elephant one bite at a time.”

Even monumental tasks can be managed if you tackle them a little at time.

Right? I thought about that, and cleaning my house (or, my apartment) is the same idea, but a bunch of things in life are that way. I, for instance, don’t want to stress about how much of my place still needs to be cleaned. I just do one room at a time or one chore at a time, and slowly but surely, after enough time passes, you’re going to accomplish what you’ve set out to accomplish, right?

[Hey, welcome to the live stream. I appreciate it.]

So, for example, if you think about buildings, great structures in history – the pyramids, for example – they didn’t just throw down a pyramid, right? They put one block at a time on the pyramid, and over time it eventually turned into this giant structure. If you think about the Chunnel (the tunnel that goes between England and France, under the English Channel), that was done (I don’t know exactly how) a little bit at a time, and eventually you end up with your task accomplished.

That happens with pretty much everything in life, I think. So it’s really easy- I come from a family where we kind of give pretty unrealistic expectations to ourselves sometimes. We have this tendency to think we can handle more than we can. But you can eat an elephant, regardless; you can eat an elephant if you do it one bite at a time. Likewise, you can do anything you set your mind to, but you have to do it a little bit at a time.

And part of that is being consistent. You have to do the same things over and over and over again. You have to work for sometimes years to get where you want to go. [You see this] if you look at a lot of the successful people.

A wealthy entrepreneur, Robert Kiyosaki
is also a sought-after speaker.

Robert Kiyosaki has a great story. If you’ve not read it, I highly recommend first Rich Dad, Poor Dad (it’s the beginning), and then read The Cash Flow Quadrant. In that book he talks about how he and his wife set out to start their own business. (This is the early 1980s or whatever.) And as he was-

[Hi, I’m just recording some Facebook Live and I just stopped for a second. I’ll be out of here in a minute. OK, thanks. (indecipherable) What’s that? (You’re not here for no one, then?) No,

no. No, I’m just- I didn’t want to drive while I’m doing it, right? (OK. I just had seen the lights on.) Yeah, sorry. I’ll turn the headlights off; maybe that’s less? (You’re totally fine, boss. That’s smart thinking.) OK, thanks. (Have a good night.) Yep, you too.]

Yeah, I kind of just had to stop so I wasn’t driving while I was doing this, right?
. . . So they were starting their own business, and they had a lot of ups and downs. They had a point where the business pretty much completely failed. But they didn’t give up, and they kept the same behaviors, the same effort over and over and over again, day after day, and eventually they became super rich. Like, he’s one of the most— well, he and his wife; they’re both brilliant business people, and they’re super successful today. But that wouldn’t have happened if they gave up because the task was so big.

And it’s the same thing with everything. So those have kind of been my thoughts today. The way may not be easy, and the way may not be clear. You may not sometimes know the exact, the very next step to take, but you may know where your final destination is. If you’ve got that in mind, you can just keep one foot in front of the other, until you eventually get where you need to go. To geek out a little bit here, you can think of The Lord of the Rings. Frodo and Sam didn’t know how they were going to get to the volcano, where they were going to throw The One Ring and destroy Sauron, right? But they knew that they needed to head toward the volcano, and so even though they got lost a little bit sometimes, they kept marching forward.

So, I would encourage you all. This is kind of a shorter video today. Being out and about, of course, I haven’t really had a lot of time to prepare anything or be super polished, but I just wanted to let you guys know that I have faith in you guys, you guys will achieve your goals. Just keep working at it.

One of my mentors told me a very important phrase. He said, “Don’t focus on results, focus on behaviors”, because there are certain things people have to do to reach wherever it is that they’re going. And that will be different for every person, right? Maybe you’re trying to become a famous singer, and so maybe some part of your journey might be voice lessons — over and over and over and over and over again — and singing at concerts until you get really amazing.

A book will never write itself.

Maybe you’re an author and so you need to participate in things like National Novel-Writing Month (which I believe is in November), and just write every single day to get your novel banged out, and then after that you can edit it. You know, whatever it is. Maybe you want to become an amazing barber, so you go to salon school at first, and then you apprentice under a barber until you can get your own shop. Whatever your goal is, right? There’s a lot of stuff that happens in different ways, but there are certain steps to succeed in any pursuit.

Just find out what those steps are, talk to a mentor (somebody who’s been there, who knows what to do), and then follow what they’re doing. Why would you take advice from somebody who doesn’t have what you want? Right? If you want to become a famous singer, are you going to go talk to somebody who can’t carry a tune, or are you going to talk to somebody who has become famous themselves? So just focus on what steps you forward, one step at a time — one bite at a time — and eventually you’ll reach your goals.

Thanks for stopping by, everybody, and I will talk to you guys soon. My next Facebook Live should be Tuesday night at the same time as I started this one. I appreciate you guys for all your support, and for your patience as I found somewhere to park to do this, and I will talk to you guys soon. Bye-bye.

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Live on Purpose, not on Accident

Hey, everybody! I swear my time is off. I swear I push when it’s, like, 7:29pm, and then two minutes later it’s 7:31 and I’ve barely gotten into the video.

Anyway, welcome, welcome. I hope you guys have had a great day. You guys are awesome! I appreciate you all, and hopefully you guys get something out of this video. A lot of times these Facebook Lives that I’m going to do, I think, will be probably one of two things. They either are going to be something I’ve learned through experience, or through what I’ve read, or whatever; and a lot of times that means there’s been, kind of, some hardship, some difficulty that I’ve had to push through to learn the lessons. And then, of course, I’m just passing those on to you so you hopefully don’t have to repeat the stuff that I went through.

And then sometimes the Facebook Lives will be things that I am currently considering, things that I need to work on, that I probably would do well to mind my own advice, to take my own advice and use it, right? And, of course, not every Facebook Live video is going to be “A Lesson by Kevin” or something, but I’m just saying that in these kinds of videos, like today’s, there’s been something on my mind that I think has changed in my attitude, in my way of thinking recently.

A little “tweak” that happened that has really lit me up, gotten me on fire and excited about 2018 and getting after everything. Especially now is the time when people typically make New Year’s resolutions and so on. So I kind of wanted to share some of my thoughts about my approach to the coming year, and my attitude about the future based on the approach I’m going to be taking.

So, let me ask you a question. Picture in your mind, if you would, a scenario where you are about halfway up a mountainside. You’re standing there — you’ve got your backpack, your boots, you’ve sprayed so bugs don’t eat you, whatever — but you’ve made it (however that’s happened) to the middle of the mountain. Now, there’s the peak above you that you can see, way, way up there (it’s obviously going to take a bit, but you can get there). And then there is the bottom of the mountain, where, say, a bunch of other people are waiting, and they kind of look up at you and are waving, but they’re not really trying to climb the mountain or anything.

If there is some kind of method to get you moving, what direction is that

A river normally runs down a mountain, not up.

thing going to move you typically? So, in other words, let’s imagine there’s a river on the side of the mountain. It’s kind of winding around the mountain. Does that river take you up the mountain, or does that river take you down the mountain? It might take you along the side some, too, but ultimately

is it going to lead up or is it going to lead down?

If you have some kind of natural disaster (lets say there’s an earthquake, or there’s a flood or something), and all of the sudden a bunch of mud starts sliding, is that mud going to take you up to the top of the mountain, or is that mud going to take you toward the bottom?

Naturally, we follow the path of least resistance, right? So if we’re letting something else control where we go, it’s going to take us down. And if our objective is the peak, we’re not going to get there. That’s true for everything in life, not just for some random scenario where you’re, say, halfway up the mountain, but in all aspects of our lives.

Let me give you a couple of examples. Michael Jordan became — now people may disagree with me on this because I know not everybody is a Michael Jordan fan. But in my mind, Michael Jordan became one of the best (if not the best) basketball players ever. Why? Why did he reach such heights of success? Did he just trip on day and fall and go flying and land with the ball through the hoop? Or, did he work at it, and practice, and sacrifice to get to where he could jump really far and make his shots?

Rachel Ray learned to be a master chef.

Rachel Ray, a very well known chef (at least in America), has her own TV shows and stuff for cooking. Do you think one day she walked by a taco stand, smelled something nice, went over— Thanks! Thumbs up, guys. I appreciate the support. Did she just see something and

go, “Oh, that looks delicious!” and then go knock on a producer’s door and then get some TV show based on that? Or, did she see that, let it inspire her, and put in the work to become something great?

OK? It’s very important that we don’t just live on accident. We need to live on purpose. Now what do I mean by that? Well, let me give you an example of living on accident. I know a lot of people who will talk to me about what they want in life, and where they are, and how frustrated they are that they’re not in a different position. And I feel for them, and I say, “OK, well, let me know if I can help you out with that at all.” Right?

And then, when we talk about it, they decide, “Well, I’m going to need to do this.” You know, they set out goals: “I’m going to need to do the following things to get where I want to go.” Great, you’ve got a plan. But then when I talk to them, like, a week later, he’s talking to me about the latest show on Netflix that he caught up with, or he’s telling me about hanging out with friends at a bar or something.

OK, that’s fine. I mean, I’m not judging. You live your life how you want, right? But you have to ask yourself: Is doing that kind of thing moving you in the direction where you want to go? If I want to build a house, I have to put in the work. I have to build a foundation, then I have to lay up walls from there, and I have to plan things. Where’s the window? Where’s the door? I have to— Thanks, Zach, I appreciate it, man! I have to really work hard and plan well to get what I want, right?

There are a lot of things I’ve been thinking about that I’ve allowed, just myself (for example), in the past to get in the way. One of the biggest things (like I was just talking about) is distractions. It’s really, really easy to let other things come up and take priority.

So I need to, when I’m working on a goal, decide, “What is the most important thing right now? What is something I cannot do without?” And then, from there, work down in my list of priorities. So the things I decide I must do always come before anything else. And there might be an order of priorities in that, too. For example, my family is always more important than work, work is always more important than play.

What is your order of priorities? Do you follow it?

Now, I would obviously encourage you to take breaks, but in talking about these distractions, it’s easy to take a vacation and let that become a detour. OK? Take breaks, not detours. If you burn yourself out, of course, you’re not going to be good to anybody. You’ll lose motivation potentially, right? So breaks are important, but don’t let your break turn into a sabbatical. This is a big problem that a lot of people have.

Years ago, I was starting a business with some friends. There were three of us, and we were all excited about the idea of this business. It was going to be entertainment — not “entertainment” (haha), but entertainment like games and things like that. We would get these published, and then we would put them in stores, or have them sold online, and so on.

All three of us were going to be presidents, like co-presidents* of the company. And each of us had a different responsibility. Well, as time went on, it became increasingly frustrating for me. Now, this is not to rag on those friends, but I’m just giving you, as an example, something that can happen. It was really easy to let those friends talk me into doing extra work and relieving them of some of their responsibilities. They would let things distract them, And as (as they would put it) “life happened”, they stopped doing their part. Pretty soon, I was looking up copyright laws, and finding out pricing to get games created at factories, and developing the website, and—[the list goes on].

I’m not going to keep going on. I’m not trying to talk about anything as far as what I did, except [to say] that it was the result of other areas falling behind. They let themselves get distracted. They had this really burning desire for this company, but when it came down to it, they weren’t willing to give up movies, or video games, or TV.

So, when you’re considering what your priorities are, don’t just say something that you think sounds good to other people. Really spend some time and think about what it is you want, and put those things that have to happen to get where you want to be as your top priorities. Otherwise, you’re never going to get there. There’s not enough time in a day to do everything that you would like to do plus everything that you feel you have to do. So, start with the have-tos, and then [go on to like-to-dos] if there’s time left over.

I would say it’s important to act with a purpose, rather than out of boredom. If you are building a business (let’s say you’re an entrepreneur, you’re building your business), if you get to a certain point where things kind of have to wait on some other component, are you planning and preparing for more work that will have to be done later on, or are you letting that give you an excuse to fall down the endless, bottomless hole of YouTube videos online? What are you spending your time doing? How important is getting where you want to be?

I would say just— These are a few little phrases I came up with, all kind of saying the same thing. Take breaks, not detours. Act with purpose, not to escape boredom. Fill time with progress, not with regrets. Don’t set goals, set priorities. And don’t start on your journey without preparing yourself for success. Have a very clear vision of where you want to be. I have several mentors who’ve taught me this: Have a very, very vivid representation of where you want to be.

Imagine yourself, if this is your goal — I’m not saying this is your goal, and this isn’t exactly my goal. It would be nice, but — imagine yourself, say, in a hammock, a super comfortable hammock, hanging between a couple of palm trees on the beach. It’s a little bit before twilight, it’s nice and cool (so it’s no longer hot). The moon is just starting to show itself in the sky, and the sun is thinking about quitting for the day, and you’re just there with a good book.

Rachel Ray learned to be a master chef.

If that’s what your vision is, what book are you reading? How cool is it? Do you need a sweater or not? How is the beach? Is it near a resort? Is it your own private beach? And a lot of these seem like silly details, but the more you can specify, “This is where I am; this is how I will be”, the more power it will have in driving you forward.

So, I’d love to hear you guys’ thoughts on that too. If you guys set goals for the new year, I’d encourage you to live with intention, rather than by accident. Have a purpose, have a goal, but each day when you get up and you’re going to start doing your stuff for the day, what needs to happen to get to your goal? Find those things that are absolute musts, and do those before anything else.

I promise you, if you will do that consistently — all of the mentors I’ve read, all these brilliant, brilliant, successful people in business and in finance say the same thing — if you will do that, if you will intentionally do things, and not just happen to slide down the mountain with the mudslide, you’ll guarantee yourself success. It will be a slow progression to get there, of course, but you will get there.

Thanks for joining me, everybody, today. I didn’t want to take too much of your time. Thanks for joining me: I appreciate your support. If you have comments, anything specific you’d like to say about this video or about anything related to this, let me know in the comments below. And I will see you guys in two days, where once again, [at the] same time (so starting fifteen minutes ago for those of you who just recently joined) on Saturday night I’ll be going live again. In the mean time, God bless you, I love you guys, I appreciate you, and I’ll talk to you next time. Peace.

*Editor’s note: We were actually going to be presidents, like a three-president group, each over a different part of the company.

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A Life of Abundance

Good evening, everybody!

So those of you who have followed me for a bit, or who have friended me on Facebook a while ago, have not yet seen me go live. I’ve obviously done some posts here and there, but I figure it’s time to connect with you guys, one on one. It’s a new year; turn over a new leaf, and let’s really get to know each other.

I have recently, as I posted yesterday, come back from a humanitarian project in Puerto Peñasco, Mexico, and — oh, my gosh, so good! So good! I’ll try to summarize what we did without getting too in-depth, because I don’t want to tell you, like, the size of the block that we laid and stuff, right? That seems a little silly.

We started last week. On Tuesday I traveled from northern Utah down to Phoenix, Arizona, stayed overnight, and then got a rental car. I picked some people up at the airport and so on, and we headed down to Puerto Peñasco. We checked in, made sure we signed waivers and things saying, “We’re OK. We realize that there are certain risks when you’re on a construction site”, and stuff like that, of course.

And we hung out a little bit, too, that night. And it’s fun to get to know people and to spend time with them, obviously, but the real treat came the next day. We took the entirety of everybody who went on the trip and divided them into two groups, so Group 1 and Group 2. On Day 1 (so the first day after check-in), I was in Group 2. We went into Puerto Peñasco but didn’t go to the construction site; that’s what Group 1 did the first day. They did the foundations and the first half of the walls of four different houses.

My group instead hung a right, and we met in this building where we assembled these food packages. There was a basket, oh, probably about this big [hands gesture about 12″ diameter and 12″ deep] — let me center on the camera so you can see. [So a basket] about that big, maybe, in which we put things like—

I don’t know what you call it, a “cluster” of garlic? Whatever you call it: a

Preparing food packages for needy families.

“flower” of garlic? I don’t know what it’s called. The whole thing, that has several cloves in it, right? You have to peel it and stuff. So we put one of those in there, and a couple of onions about this big [hands gesture about 6″ in diameter] (so decently sized onions). We put some — I want to say cilantro, but I’m not totally positive. Anyway, we put some things like that in one basket, including a couple of things for cocoa.

And then, we had a big garbage bag, and in that we put larger items. So there was boxed milk, there was a bag of tortilla chips, and so on. These all got put in the larger bag, like a garbage bag. And then we went over and loaded those on the truck. After all that food was assembled, we went with the trucks and we drove over to the site where we were going to distribute the food.

Now, while we began assembling these food packages, a small percentage of us (I don’t know, eight to ten people roughly?) went first to where the food was going to be distributed and they handed out tickets. So anybody with a ticket qualified to get food items. So it was really exciting for them: a bunch of people came and lined up and so on. I might be misremembering now, but I think it was 25 tickets and then some extra food packages left over to be handed out as well, beyond the initial tickets.

So when we drove over with the trucks, anybody who had a ticket came up to us. We handed them the basket, and the garbage bag, and then they had a second garbage bag that had meat, like a haunch of ham, or a chicken, or something like that in it. And they took that home. My understanding is that was able to feed that family for about a month. They, I think, have refrigeration, these people that had the tickets, so they’re able to store the meat long term (like in a freezer).

That was the first day that we were actually doing service. The second day, we then went to the job site while Group 1 (that had been on the job site the day before) went and did what we did on Day 1. And we finished the last half of the

House walls being constructed.

walls. The way we did it — I can’t speak about foundations because I didn’t work on them that day — but after the foundations, the walls were basically cinder blocks with mortar, all kind of bricked up and around, and there was rebar also down in several places, as well as some piping, little holes for electrical outlets, and so on.

And then, after we had gotten the walls as high as they were going to go (and tried to make sure they were roughly straight), then we poured cement down inside to solidify the whole thing, so the walls actually became solid concrete walls, and not just hollow, like the cinder blocks would have had them be, right?

And then the third day, we spent about six or seven hours (maybe eight, but I think it was about seven hours) putting beams across and putting plywood across the beams. So basically, we did the roof. Now, the houses weren’t totally finished when we left, but they get finished by actual workers in Mexico in the mean time. Because we had a limited amount of time to work on them before we departed, we left that other work (stucco, electrical and plumbing, tar paper on the roofs and so on) for the workers in Mexico who were there after we took off. That allowed us to do, really, the grunt work, and they worked on the more fine-tuned, finishing part so the houses turned out very nice.

The point of that was that, then, we give these houses . . . not “we”, but the charity (Families Helping Families is what it’s called) gives away the house to somebody that is qualified. So, somebody local (in Mexico) does a series of interviews, and they find people who have jobs and who are working, trying to make a better life for themselves. But, for whatever reason, they really haven’t had a hand up, so they’ve struggled to progress with where they are in life.

These numbers might be off a little bit, because I’m not remembering what we were told at the site, but I believe each family that’s going to receive a house will get a contract that says that, if they meet the terms of the contract, the house becomes theirs at the end of a year. The term’s — among other things, although there’s not a lot — but the main term is that they pay 1,000 pesos (MXN $1000) a month, which works out to about 50 American dollars a month (US $50).

A one-thousand-peso bank note from Mexico.

Now keep in mind that, because they’re in Mexico and it’s pesos in which they’re paying, it’s just the same as coming to an American family and saying a thousand dollars a month, right? A thousand pesos to someone in Mexico is the same as a thousand dollars to someone in the United States. So it’s not a small thing that they commit to do.

But, if they’re able to pay a thousand pesos over the course of a year, all twelve months, at the end of that year that land and that house become theirs permanently. And so, it’s a really awesome thing to be a part of, doing all the work (and you feel good working out, of course too — exercise is great). But then, when you finally see the family receive that house, and you see the mom and the kids with tears in their eyes, knowing that they have something to look forward to in the future, it really does something to you.

So that’s kind of what I wanted to talk about in today’s Facebook Live. I wanted to talk about what makes an abundant life, what makes your life more meaningful than it otherwise might be. Now this is an opinion, of course, but I find personally that my life means more when I’m not wrapped up in myself, but I’m thinking about other people.

Do I contribute to a charity? Do I help go build houses? Do I pass on lessons that I’ve learned? If I can know that what I’m doing is helping somebody else move forward — that it will allow them to improve their circumstance and to achieve their goals — that is the most fulfilling thing to me, I think, that I could ever be doing.

You might be able to tell that I’m a little bit, I don’t know. I got a cold on

Am I helping others improve their circumstances?

the way back or something, driving back from Mexico? I don’t know. I don’t know when that happened exactly, but anyway, despite the fact that I’m sniffly and I have a little bit of a cold, I really, really wanted to share with you guys how excited I was to do this, and how awesome it was to be able to participate. I feel just grateful and honored that I was able to be a part of this.

This has now become an annual thing for me. I’m going to do this every year, unless for some reason I try to register and registration is full, but otherwise this is going to be an annual thing for me. And if it ends up being full one year, I will just find something else to do that service-oriented at the same time.

Anyway, I wanted to share that with you today. It’s not too long: it looks like we’re approaching 12 minutes, so I’ll kind of cut it there. But I would like you, over the couple of coming days—

Let me backtrack slightly. This is going to become a new thing for me, obviously. I’m going to be regularly doing Facebook Lives. My plan is to do them every Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday evening at about this same time, so about 7:30pm, approximately. So if you guys would like to participate — if you want to watch live and put comments and stuff — then I would obviously be able to communicate with you live at that point.

But I’m going to be doing these Facebook Lives regularly, so between now and Thursday, anybody who watches this (even if you watched after the fact, while it’s on my Facebook page), I would just like you to think on your own about what you have currently, where you are in life, what you want, where you would like to be, and what kinds of service and help you can offer other people that can [also] help take you to a happier, more fulfilled you. And I’m not judging. Obviously I don’t expect someone to say, “My life was totally unfulfilling and now I finally have something to fulfill it”. But I would like you just, if you haven’t already to contemplate, “What are some acts of service I can do that will help improve others’ circumstances and other people’s lives?”

And if you would like to share those, if you’re so inclined, then leave comments on this video after it’s posted, or else comments next time when I follow up on that. I will talk to you guys soon. Thanks for your time! I’ll see you next time. Peace.