Greg Anderson

I think I am finally ready to launch with you guys.

Greg Anderson

Awesome.

I really appreciate you putting me on the podcast today. It’s fun to be able to share this and hopefully reach somebody else that has a similar background or can relate especially when they lose hope a little bit. When there’s, “How do I get past whatever my disadvantage or whatever my issue is?” It’s one of the things that I love to speak about the most.

You mentioned it. I was in first grade when a teacher walked into my classroom while everybody else was reading and speaking. She grabbed me and said, “Greg, will you come with me?” I walked out of the classroom, walked down the long hall to the trailer outside where in reality, all the children that were handicapped including me and one of the person in class. I didn’t necessarily realize what that was but eventually, I found out after high school I was dyslexic. They just told me at that point in time that I was holding other kids back.

I’d spent pretty much 10-12 years hiding, trying to be charismatic, trying to pretend that there wasn’t anything else wrong with me. In my entire life being told that I was something that inside, I didn’t really feel like I was. I was just told, “You’re just slow.”

Getting out of high school when I went to my counselor she told me, “Greg, college doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s for everybody.” I was just going to be the construction worker, nothing wrong with that. That’s just not how I felt inside although I was told that that’s all I would pretty much ever do in life. It just didn’t feel like me at all.

I went through years of construction and work. I was feeling like that there was something else inside of me until I finally bought a program that was online or at this point of time, it was television. I was working for a company in Texas. Driving around and selling food court signs in Walmart’s, and I really hated my life.

I was divorced at 20. That was my first divorce. I had two kids, child support, couldn’t necessarily afford my car payments and I kept watching this one infomercial over and over again and it just happened to be Tony Robbin‘s.

Greg Anderson

He was the big guy with the big teeth like, “You can do this.” At that point in time, I’d never spent any money at all on the self-help or coach or anything. This was like 160 bucks, which was not easy for me to come up with. It’s kind of scrimp, scrape and put it together. It was a 30 day program and I studied that like my entire life depended on it. I know my sanity did because I just was unhappy like life was just not good.

When I got out of that, I really wondered, why did I learn so much? There was audio, video, reading, and this is the first time I started to question, was what somebody else told me true? Was I really that person or really, I just couldn’t learn? Or, was it that I just had to learn a different way? It sparked a couple of years of diving into it and figuring out I was dyslexic. Figuring out how to retrain my brain, how to think until I started just saying, and “You know what guys? I’m going to question everything you guys ever told me,” and that started this 20 year-long personal development career to bring me really where I am now.

Greg Anderson

Yeah, you need to be courageous to love your life. It was something where I really had no support, no family, ex, buying things, trying things, and trying new jobs. As you bounce around from job to job or try a program and pretty fast people label you as the get rich quick scheme person. Like you said, the 9-5, it paid my bills but it didn’t feel like it was me. I wasn’t creating inner value. I didn’t feel fulfilled.

So, as I kept trying things, there’s a lot of the people that it didn’t fit with them and that’s okay because they can live their life the way that wanted to. There’s a lot of a leeway trying to sway me to lead my life and the way they wanted to, not the way I wanted to.

That was probably the hardest part.

Greg Anderson

I’ll flash forward. So we ended school or ended that and I started this self-development career.

I went back to computer programing, all kinds of jobs and finding myself in the midst. Then, I built this philosophy in my head up until maybe 5 years ago. I was poor when we grew up. I was on food stamps and things like that so my mind was always built around money. So, my philosophy was two dimensional. If I had a lot of money and I had a hot life, I would be happy.

Greg Anderson

Yes, that’s really important to love your life.

So, when this ended, I still knew how to make money and I was divorced now for the second time questioning again everything. Was that true and what other components of life are there?

So, I connected with 3 or 4 other guys that were friends of mine in different areas of life as I grew on some charismatic and powerful people. We came together and said, “Look, we are self-employed men that have different problems. Let’s come together as a mastermind group and figure out what we’re missing,” and through that, it really boils down to 4 main areas of life for me.

1. That’s health and fitness.
2. That’s your spirituality, your meditation, your mental clarity.
3. That’s your family, the people that you love.
4. How do I always make sure I’m moving forward in there?

Greg Anderson

If I’m doing something and I have goals, and I’m fighting or I’m pushing for those 4 areas, always trying to make them better, always hitting them every day, that’s what creates a life that I love.

In the past and whenever I’ve worked with people that have 2 or maybe 3. If they’re lucky of these areas, what happens is go to work and if money was our object, the family starts to slip. When the family slides down low enough and things get bad enough, all the momentum that you now made at work has to stop so that you can go back and fix your family.

So, you end up on this big slide of this tether toddler if you will. You’re going back from health and fitness, to body, to family, and never actually raising all of those up at one time.

When you raise all these four areas of life up at one time, that’s when you start finding your soul purpose. That’s when you find love, passion, and connection. 

You know that when you go to work, you still have an amazing family at home that you’re taking care of because you’re taking care of those things everyday.

It’s pretty much just a checklist of things that make possible to love your life.

Greg Anderson

As we graduate high school and getting into our early 20s and we have this version of success that we’ve typically adopted from what we’ve seen in culture and media and maybe those that we’ve looked up to. I think as we get smacked in the face by reality, as we go through relationships, and as we looked in at certain people and go, “Gosh, I don’t like that about you,” and looked at other people and go, “I really admire that person.” It really starts to form in shape what success really looks like and I don’t think that success is very relative.

The key to success is not very specific. I think that there are different channels of success but I think to have it all, if you will. This has been one of my aim on my journey of success is to have it all. Meaning to have strong relationship with my wife, my family, and my kids, to have a really have strong spiritual life that I’m a Christian guy but just to make sure that’s a priority in my life, which suggests that the key to success is a wide term. To make sure I have good reputation, and that I protect that and the day of the internet where the internet never forgets whatever you say can be construed and pushed against you. We got to be very careful to protect our names and our reputation. And then, my physical health, on top of that, my finances. Together, those kinds of things really make up my success and really help in defining the key to success.

You can tell it. I don’t talk about my business. My business is not something that I do and I think it’s fairly successful as a channel but for the most part, I don’t want to become the wealthiest guy that nobody likes. Mere being wealthy is not the key to success. I don’t want to become the guy that got too busy making a living that I forgot to make a life. There are all these puns that I can just keep going with in terms I don’t want to be the richest guy in the graveyard. That’s the life that I want to stay away from and I define the key to success on my own terms.

I might not be the wealthiest guy that you’ve ever meet but my hope is to become one of the most successful people you’ve ever meet.

Greg Anderson

This is certain things like in the new book that’s coming out soon, Creating the Life You Love. Hopefully, that’s the final title because I’ve been working on it for a while.

Greg Anderson

Whether it’s your family, a spouse, a parent, or somebody that’s estranged, an old friend. These are check off list of things that I’m doing on a consistent basis so that I know I can do it.

It’s funny in business where we track every dollar and cent, and any company that doesn’t know their profit and loss statements, their cash flow analysis, and their balance sheets, eventually go broke. However, when we come to our family we just assume that we’re doing what’s right. I assume that I had the right conversation with my spouse. I assume that I spent the time with the kids. I assume that I spent notes.

However, in reality once you start tracking, you’ll realize you’re doing things like 30%-60% at best instead of always tracking everything like creating that task list if you will, for life. Did I do this? Yes or no? That’s when the magic really starts to happen is when you can follow your progress. “Yes, I have been doing that.”

When you start feeling like things aren’t going your way, you go back to the list and you realize, “Wow. I’ve only been doing a quarter of the work. I need to get back to work again because this task and this checklist really work for me.”

Greg Anderson

It’s been a great for my life.

Greg Anderson

That’s very true.

Greg Anderson

You really need to learn love your life. The one thing is that life doesn’t have to be so dramatic, mundane, and unhappy even when you’re building and things are extremely hard. One of the best tools that I was ever taught was to ask the question, “How can I make sure that I’m having the most fun with this?” Or, “How can I make this task more fun?”

So you’re at the gym and you just don’t want to be there and it’s hard, and your mindset is falling and you’re just asking the question, “What can I do to make this more fun right now?” For me, that means throwing on a couple extra weights and doing a couple extra wraps, and I do that in business, at home, and everything that’s so hard. If we get into that mind-set, it’s so dramatic and we just don’t want to be there.

If you just ask one simpler question, a better question, it makes everything more enjoyable.

I love to do everything I do even the hard things.

Greg Anderson

Yes, absolutely.