21: Apply Leverage With Randy Gage

Randy Gage is a thought-provoking, rags to riches entrepreneur who has published 14 books in 25 different languages including the New York Times bestseller Risky is The New Safe. 

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Apply Leverage With Randy Gage

Our  guest is Randy Gage, that I have been following Randy for the last probably 15 years, early 2000 when I first was introduced to some of his work, the Prosperity Series, and I never thought that I was gonna have him come on my interview, but this is a very exciting moment. Randy is a thought-provoking, critical thinker. He also is a rags-to-riches entrepreneur, if I may say so, and he has published 14 books in 25 different languages. One of his books, Risky is the New Safe, was actually a New York Times bestseller, is a New York Times bestseller and he’s coming up with a new book, Radical Rebirth, that I already pre-ordered and can’t wait to actually receive it in the mail. So without further ado, welcome to the show, Randy.

Hey, great to be on with you. Is that album you’re holding, is that CDs or was that cassette tape?

That’s CDs at least. Yeah. It’s not quite, although I have, you know, I was straddling that age of cassette tapes to CDs and I no longer can use them, right? I now have to go to the MP3, but I saw on the website that these are still available in MP3 format.

Yeah, that album is at least 20 years than a bestseller for us. It’s kind of my overview principles on prosperity, I guess, would be the best way to describe it.

It was fascinating and it’s a little bit spiritual, probably more than I am kind of vied for. But I was very intrigued by this series and I dug into some of the other resources that you offered at the time. And anyway, it’s pretty interesting. So tell us a little bit about your background. I think it’s a fascinating background, your entrepreneur journey, how you got here and how you became an entrepreneur in the first place and how you built up your speaking and author business.

Well, I took a circuitous route to being an entrepreneur because I feel like I was born an entrepreneur because when I was 11, you know, I come from a poor family, single mother who raised three kids by herself, knocking on doors, selling Avon products, and I raked leaves, shoveled snow, babysat, delivered newspapers, just any kind of thing. And in a big way, I mean, I actually, as I was delivering the hometown paper and I knew people went to the drugstore on Sundays and they would buy the copy, the Sunday edition of the New York Times or the Washington Post.

And so I wrote those papers and said I’ve got a distribution company here. I was a paper boy but I wrote it on a letterhead that said Gage Distributors and said you know we distribute newspapers and I would like to be the agent here in Madison, Wisconsin. And they said, OK. And so I started doing Sunday delivery of my hometown paper and then the Washington Post, the Chicago Tribune and the New York Times. And I actually sold that company to a grown-up person for a few thousand dollars when I was…

When was that? How old were you?

I was probably 15 at that time. So I started that way, and then I was a teenage alcoholic, a teenage drug addict. I made a lot of really poor choices. I ended up in jail for armed robbery at 15 years old. And then, of course, had to make some new decisions in my life, right? And so I resolved to get out and play, work hard and play by the rules. And so I went back to working for people. And I had started as a dishwasher in a pancake house. And so I became a cook and then a manager, trainee and a assistant manager. And I just got in the world of being an employee. But it took me some time to realize, no, that’s not what I want to do. If I’m going to be in the restaurant business, then I need to find a way to own my own restaurant. I think I’m psychologically unemployable, so I found my way back to being an entrepreneur.

That’s awesome. So how old were you when you kind of made the jump or start to make the jump to get into entrepreneurship and building your own thing?

So that was my early 20s. And then I also got introduced to direct selling. With Amway was the first company that I ever heard about and I joined. I didn’t make any money with them, you know, but they seem to have done pretty well without me since they’re still doing about $8 billion a year. So they survived the loss of me as a contributor, I guess. But I saw that, you know, I was exposed to that. And then that again, that was again, an entrepreneurial business where I could be my own boss. So I’ve done that for many years now, ever since I was 20.

You also produced some programs about multi-level selling and marketing, right?

Yeah.

I recall that you had some talks on that as well that I heard.

Oh yeah, and I’ve done very well with that. I’ve made literally millions of dollars with my distributorships over the years. I love it because it was perfect for someone like me who was a high school dropout. So there were no big companies recruiting me and offering me a corner office and a company car and insurance, vacation benefits and all that. I was just a kid from the streets. I was able to become a multi-millionaire doing that. I still love that business to this day. I love the business to this day because it has one of my other really important criteria is for entrepreneurship, which is the ability to apply leverage. You’ve got, if you want to be successful as I believe an entrepreneur or an employee, you’re going to have your highest degrees of success if you can find a way to employ leverage in what you do.

Are you talking about financial leverage or you’re talking about all kinds of leverage?

All kind of leverage. I love financial leverage, like real estate. I like to be able to buy a million dollar condo with a few hundred thousand dollar down and leverage money. I like to leverage my time, like I did in all those years with direct selling. I like to find ways to generate money, even if it’s not leverage. Sometimes, like I wrote a blog about this recently that would be really good for everybody listening. If you go to my website, the title was Beat Your Burn Rate.

I believe either one, entrepreneurs or employees can become wealthy. But either case, you’ve still got to apply leverage. And it’s okay if you’re an employee and you’re trading hours for money, right? That’s the thing we’re trying to escape. Because if you trade hours for money, there’s a finite limit to how much wealth you can create because there’s a finite amount of productive hours you can spend in the day, right? But if you trade hours for money and then take that money and leverage it through investments, through real estate, through some other type of business, then it really gets sexy.

There's a finite limit to how much wealth you can create if you trade hours for money. But if you trade hours for money and then take that money and leverage it through investments, through real estate, through some other type of business. Click To Tweet

And if you could find a way to earn where you’re leveraging your time, leveraging your, you know, you mentioned I’m a speaker and an author. What am I doing there? I’m leveraging my knowledge. So I can write, my new book is out January 12th, right? I wrote it one time. It can sell millions of copies around the world and I don’t have to rewrite it every time. I can, you know, I can practice leverage with that. So I think that’s really a critical key is that I look for is, is there ways to apply leverage? Because then I’m going to get more exponential growth as opposed to just incremental growth.

Incremental growth that’s fascinating. So how do you become a speaker? when was this point when you realized that you can apply the leverage of speaking and Step beyond doing directly selling yourself and maybe selling through other media But but being bigger than just a distributor but being more of a thought leader.

I wish I could take credit for my brilliant strategy for doing that, but it was completely by accident. I was in direct selling. I was doing pretty good, but I noticed some of my people were struggling. I thought they need training on how to do this. So I created, and the first rank you could achieve was called supervisor in that company. So I said I’m gonna do a supervisor school. Once a month, we get together on a Saturday, I’d rent a hotel meeting room, get a whiteboard there in the front and I would explain, here’s how you become a supervisor.

And then other people started saying, hey, can we come to your training? We heard about that. I’m like, yeah, you know, give us five bucks to help cover the donuts in the meeting room and you can come. And then people started flying in from other cities, then people started to say, hey, can you, if we bought you a plane ticket and we sent you to Chicago, could you do a training for our group there? How much would it cost?

And so I totally fell into that, just backed into it because I realized, OK, if I could train my team, I could train other teams, teams from other companies. So that’s how it started. I had my first midlife crisis right on schedule when I turned 40, and I said, you know, I’m tired of doing these seminars. I’m gonna retire, and I’m gonna play softball and race my vipers and drink out of a coconut. And I had a very dear friend, a guy named Bill Gove, who was the first president of the National Speakers Association.

And he told me, you’ve got to be back on the platform. This is who you are. This is what you, you’re one of the greatest in the world at that. You’ve got to do it. And I thought, and that really did intrigue me because I was going crazy being retired. And then I thought, well, but I don’t want to do seminars on how do you get a prospect’s phone number. If I have to do that, I would stick a fork in my eye. And I thought, I’d rather do seminars about the important stuff, the principles of prosperity, which that was the stuff I was always trying to sneak in the back door when I was doing the marketing seminars, because I felt like the mindset and attitude and how you program yourself, your daily routines, things like that.

I felt like they’re really important for success. But I had to sneak them in the back door, I thought. But then when I decided to come back into business, I just said, you know what? I’m not going to sneak it in the back door anymore. If I’m going to be a professional speaker, I’m going to do it on the topic that lights me up, that I’m really passionate about. And that’s the principles of prosperity. So that’s what I did.

Yeah, that’s pretty awesome. So how did you stumble upon this principle?

When I had a really horrific business failure trying to start my own restaurant and had it seized by the tax authorities here and auctioned off for the debts that I didn’t, the taxes I couldn’t pay. on the floor and I had a friend who said, you should go to the Unity Church on Sundays and see some of their services and kind of help get your mind right. And there I discovered the book, a couple of books, Prosperity by Reverend Charles Fillmore and the Dynamic Laws of Prosperity by Reverend Catherine Ponder who. Yeah, I read that one.

And she kind of took the principles of Philmore and made them a little more up-to-date, simpler language, easier to kind of, I’ll say this in a derogatory way, just kind of dumbed it down in a way that more people like me would understand them without having to wade through Charles’ more intellectual approach. And that transformed everything for me.

And I just became fascinated with the principles of prosperity and really have devoted my life since that time for decades now to study in those principles and teaching how to apply them in the real world with what we face right now. You know, like it’s great to say, okay, here’s a principle of prosperity, but it’s another thing to say, OK, what do you do when you’re in the middle of a worldwide pandemic and social media is toxic and you’re in a quarantine and the economy is tanking?

So how does it work? Give us a couple of examples of how to apply prosperity in the pandemic year of 2020.

So if I look at my speaking business, I’m going to end up doing more this year than I did last year. And I’ve done and I have not been on an airplane since February. OK, I believe it was the second or third week in February. I had a seminar booked in Germany for about a thousand people. And we were, it was just, COVID was starting to be known. We didn’t know a lot about it or how it transmitted that stuff. And so, you know, I met with the people who were bringing me in and I, and they just so happened that they have, it’s a, one of those amazing vacuum cleaner. They sell those big vacuum cleaners that cost like $2,000, but they have a way to purify the air in there. You can reverse them, you can put disinfectant in them. And I’m like, you guys have like the perfect product for a pandemic.

COVID killer, yeah.

So let’s do this. Let’s get the thousand people in there, but let’s get 20 of your machines in there and reverse it and put the disinfectant. And we’re gonna do the rules. No hugging, no kissing, no handshakes. You know, keep social distance, you know, spread it out. And so we did it. So that was my last live program in person in 2020. But I found right away companies and groups that say, we need you to do it virtual. And so I – and really, if I look now, like I did like six talks this week.

One of them will be for probably 20,000 people will watch it online. It’s filmed and it’ll be broadcast, not live. One was live for maybe a thousand people. And then the other four or five I did were three people, five people, seven people, because they were company executive teams or board of directors or something. And they are hiring me to be a critical thinker. And they’re saying, okay, we have this pandemic, we’ve got supply chain issues, we have ingredients we get from Asia, borders are closed, we can’t import this, how do we, you know, and I’m just talking them through solutions.

So I had to adapt, right? And that’s a big part. So what do you do during a time like this? You’ve got to adapt. You know, you can’t say, well, I’m a professional speaker. I’m good on the platform. I want an audience and standing ovations and acclaim and, you know, travel money and flying first class. No, that isn’t what the market needs. The market says, we have problems, we need to know, can you help us solve the problems? And if so, how can you do it? And how can you do it if you can’t travel here? And if we can’t get 5,000 people in an arena for the annual convention, how can we do that? And so that’s our job, to look at not how we want to deliver our product or our service, but how can we help solve the problems of our clients?

So, actually what you’re talking about is kind of a leverage. So virtual is a big leverage on your time. You don’t have to travel. You couldn’t have done six talks if you had to travel all over the world, right? This week, plus you can still do your podcast and you can do your writings. If this happened to me this year, last year I drove 50,000 miles up and down the U.S. doing my in-person meetings with the leadership teams. And this year we went all virtual and I had the time to actually write a book this year. And I could not have done it without COVID. So that’s kind of a big leverage, time leverage. I mean, I still starve the personal interaction and I hope it’s going to come back soon. But, hey, I cannot complain because the time leverage was real.

Yeah, I mean, I had a day where I did a talk that was supposed, I had a talk in that had been planned to be in person in Oslo for like five or six thousand people that I did it streaming instead. And so as a result, we had about 20,000 people because they had distributors in many other countries that were not going to fly to Oslo for their convention. But when we put it out on live stream, they could watch it live. Right. So I did that the same day I did for a company in Mexico with about 8000 people on it.

And then I did a small one for I don’t even remember where where they were, but they were all on one Saturday. And if they weren’t virtual, it’s just what you said. There’s no way in the world I could have ever done that in person and had that kind of impact and that many people. But the you know, every challenge has its hidden opportunities. And COVID-19 and the pandemic are no different. It’s horrific. I hate I mean, I lost two close friends who have died of COVID. So I you know, that will never change. It’s horrific. But I can also recognize that, yes, but there are hidden benefits in those kind of challenges and obstacles we face.

That’s a good segue to what I wanted to ask you about. Your New York Times bestseller, Risk is the New Safe, which actually I just listened to a couple of months ago, is really bring this idea of being risk-seeking rather than risk-averse. Actually, being serious seeking is less risk than being risk-averse. And there’s a recent book from Steven Anderson, who was on the show a couple of weeks ago, who wrote a book about Amazon, The Bezos Letters, and he is talking about the same idea that actually avoiding risk is a route to mediocrity and you have to embrace the right kind of risk. Tell me a little bit about how you see this topic and what do you mean by risky is the new safe?

Yeah an accelerated speed of development in everything, but obviously particularly driven by technology and all the forms of technology, like take biotechnology, take medical technology. Here we are, we’re in December, and we’ve already had 300,000 people get a vaccine that we didn’t even know existed until the end of January of this last year. Right. So a vaccine. I mean, HIV, we discovered what, 40 years ago or something, and we still don’t have a vaccine. Right.

Yet we were able to turn around two and maybe three or four vaccines in less than a year. Why? Because of the advancements in technology and some planning ahead, realizing, okay, we’ve got to look at this process of how vaccines are developed. That’s actually a process that started in the administration of George W. Bush and has continued through the Obama administration. And we’re seeing the benefits now in the Trump administration. But that’s the, we’re seeing that everywhere, but particularly with technology.

So playing it safe is, you know, the premise of that book was it’s just the riskiest thing you could do, right? The booksellers played it safe. They said, come on, people are not going to buy books online. You know, they go to the bookstore. For heaven’s sake, that will never work, that Amazon thing. You know, the taxi drivers and the limo drivers said, come on, that Uber, Lyft stuff, that’s just crazy talk. The incumbents are always blinded by their arrogance, their ignorance, and the human propensity to want to not have to change our beliefs about anything. And that’s the safe way, is we don’t question our beliefs.

Playing it safe is the riskiest thing you could do. Click To Tweet

And what that book is about, my Mad Genius book, which was kind of the follow-up to that, and now the new book, Radical Rebirth, that comes out in January, is the next level of that, which is how do we question the premises? What are the premises we should question? And then how do we move forward from that? How do we, like the Risky book was really how to peek around the corner and know what trends are gonna happen. Because any futurist will tell you the future’s already here, it’s just not evenly distributed yet.

But when I wrote the Risky book, I was talking about Uber and Lyft and genome sequencing and cloning and I predicted Brexit, all kind of stuff. And when that book came out, people just thought I was crazy. And they’re like, what? How do you think this way? Are you crazy? Are you doing drugs? Are you belonging in a mental institution? How? It’s just cray cray what you’re saying. And yet now, I look back at that book, and I’m like, wow, this book really makes me look smart. But all that stuff was there.

It’s just knowing how to process it and knowing, okay, is this a cyclical trend or a linear trend? There are trends like the cost of broadband. We know the cost of broadband is going to keep going down. And at some point, the whole world will be on broadband. At some point, broadband will be free. It’ll be like air or water where we just say, it’s not even worth metering it, it’s just, you know, put it out there and you know.

So, that’s what it’s about, is you’ve got to, you know, one of the things I do for my business every year, like I’m in December now, right, and this is my reflective time of year, I love the week between Christmas and New Year’s, that’s when I do my deep thinking about the next year. And one of the questions I always propose myself is, okay, how would I put myself out of business? How would I disrupt my business model if I wanted to take over Randy Gage’s market share? How would I do it? And that’s the thing that nobody’s willing to do. They’re afraid to do. But your competitors are not afraid to do that. That’s exactly what they’re doing.

Okay, Under Armour is saying, how do we get more share of Nike’s business? Pepsi is saying, how do we get more share of Coca-Cola’s business, right? Every industry in the world, every profession in the world, every business in the world. So you’ve got to disrupt yourself. You’ve got to be the first one to think about that. And then, I’m always looking for, like my approach to business is, I look for, can I dominate the market? Meaning, I do the same work with my clients. They come to me, they have their product lines, their particular products or their business models, and I’m gonna say, okay, will you be, can you be the number one or the number two product in that space? And if you can’t be, let’s dump that product and get out of that business.

Checklist philosophy.

Yeah, Welch in GE was, and I think his book, he talked about being one or two in market sectors, right? Because the way I look at it is, okay, if I’m the number five guy in tennis shoes and Nike or whoever is number one, how do I take their business? I need the same marketing budget they do. And they’ve got billions of dollars and I’ve got tens of thousands of dollars. So I’m not going to be able to do that. So maybe sneakers isn’t a good market for me to be in. But if I can get in some other market and I can become the one or two player in the space, that’s the first thing I look for. Then the second thing I’m going to look for is, okay, how much of a moat can I create around that, right?

Barrier to entry.

Yeah, a barrier for, and sometimes you’ve got patents and IP and things that allow you a head start, and many times you don’t, you just have that first mover advantage, right? And you say, okay, do I have enough first mover advantage? Can I capture enough market share to become the 800 pound gorilla in the space and defend it, right? I have that motor, that defense around it. And then I’m looking for, can I 50X the business? Can I 100X the business? If it really takes off, could I 1000X the business?

Because if your market is just one particular product that only 5% of the population would ever want or need and use, you’re only gonna sell a fraction of that potential thing. You say, well, I really couldn’t thousand time that business. So is it really worth to be number one and number two and create a defensible moat in there if the profitability isn’t going to be there long haul? So I look at those big picture stuff first.

And then, of course, I look for the story because the storytelling is what drives the business, right? Is it a story? Is it water cooler conversation, right? Is it the thing on Monday morning or Tuesday morning? You know, on Tuesday morning people are having water cooler conversation about what happened on Monday night football the night before, right? Do you have a business? Do you have a product that can create that kind of thing?

Those are the businesses that you see that go on Shark Tank and the next day there’s water cooler conversation about it. Wow, did you see Shark Tank last night? This guy, he has this new invention for this thing that does this. Why didn’t I think of that? Or man, I had an idea like that 20 years ago and I never did anything with it. He got Mark Cuban to go in for $2 million for 20% of the company, right? Do you have that story? Can you be a category creator? So those are the kind of-

Is there a process to come up with that? So is it just an opportunistic thing, okay, I’m out there and I’m keeping my ears to the ground and keep my eyes open to find these kind of stories and try to see how I can get into it, or is there a process where you can create these stories and put yourself in a position where these stories are gonna happen to you or happen around you?

Well, the stories only work if the product works, right? So the product or service has to be viable, right? So how do we know if the product or service is viable? Well, I believe, you know, in my principles of prosperity would be, okay, how is prosperity created and I would say there’s only two and a half ways that Prosperity are created way number one is we solve problems way number two is we add value so solve problems and add value that’s how prosperity is created and then I’m going to say there’s a third criteria here, and that’s why I joke that it’s two and a half ways, which is to envision possibilities.

Because I think the envision possibilities one will ultimately lead to one of the first two. It’ll add value or it’ll solve problems or both. And the example of this would be the iPad, right? When Steve Jobs brought out the iPad, he was envisioning possibilities because nobody knew that they wanted or needed an iPad. There was no particular problem that that solved.

They only wanted it because it was cool and it came from Steve Jobs.

Yeah. But when it came out and they tried one or they saw it on his Apple show, they’re like, I’ve got to have one of those. And then they realize that, wow, this could add value. So somebody like me, who was flying to Nashville to do a speech that night, and I’m coming home tomorrow, I say, I could take the tablet instead of my laptop, because the laptop’s 2 and 1 1⁄2 pounds, and the tablet is one pound, and I can keep my carry-on lighter.

You can open it up on the plane and stuff like that.

Yeah, and now I’m playing softball and I’m shocked how many coaches have their lineup cards and their scorekeeping book, they’re doing it on an iPad or some other kind of tablet. So it created value, right? There wasn’t an inherent problem there, but problems to me are the easiest thing. So going back to your base question of this, I always look for, okay, what are the problems that I can solve? Because if you can solve someone’s problem, they will joyfully, gratefully, lovingly crawl naked over broken glass and throw money at you, right?

Because you’re making their problems go away. If you have an abscessed tooth on a Sunday morning, you’re not looking for discounts or coupons or early bird specials from a dentist. You’re looking for a dentist with emergency service who will meet you at their office and make your problem go away. And when they do and they finish and they say, okay, here’s the bill, it’s $1,800, you go into sticker shock, but you take out your credit card and you pay it because they made your problem go away, right?

So, when you’re looking at a market, the question I think every entrepreneur, the question you wanna ask when you consider any market, any particular client, let’s suppose you’re a consultant in the manufacturing space, or you’re a consultant in the construction industry, or you’re in the boating industry. Say, okay, who are the people who can write me a check? Who can buy my product or service? You know, who are these people, and what are the three things that keep them awake at night?

Because once you know what, and if you don’t know, it’s really easy to find out, right? You could just do some phone calls, do some interviews, chat up some people on LinkedIn. You could find out what are the three things keeping them awake at night. Well, that tells you what their problems are. And then you look at those three things, and if you can help any way with any one of those three things, they will throw money at you. Because we all want our problems to go away.

Nobody really wants money. If they wanted money, they would keep it. They want money so they can trade it for the stuff they really want. So as soon as they get their money, they buy a BMW or they buy a boat or they buy a Harley Davidson or they get a new house or they get concert tickets for the Taylor Swift concert or the BTS concert or the new album from Beyonce, they immediately trade their money for the things they want, right? So you can make their problems go away. They’re happy to give you their money.

That’s right. So let’s talk a little bit about your book, and let’s see if I can bring it up. The Radical Rebirth. So what is the Radical Rebirth about? How is it different from a genius and risk is a new safe. What is this thing? And I was really struck when you talk about the book on your website, you talk about your, I think it’s your fourth midlife crisis that you mentioned and you dissipate four or five more. So how, what triggered this book and what kind of rebirth is that and how does that work?

This book, Radical Rebirth, how to be reborn into a new you where you kill off the old you and in my case like when I was in that jail cell and Wanted to get out and I had to kill off the old version of me When I was an addict and a drunk I had to kill off that old version of me and I was in 11 negative dysfunctional relationships in a row, and the name changed and the face changed, but it was the same relationship.

Time after time I had to realize, okay, is there one person who’s always at the scene of the crime? And of course I didn’t like the answer to that question, but that was the question I needed to ask. So, and I realized a number of times in my life, I don’t like my life. I don’t like who I am. I want to shed that skin. I want to leave that life behind and I want to create a new one. And I believe that’s what the journey of life is about, where we are continually – not everybody believes this, right? Not everybody does this.

There are people that they’re 60 years old and they’re living exactly the same way they did at 20 years old and they work at the factory every day, you know, and Friday at four o’clock they sign out and they get a 12-pack of Budweiser and they binge Netflix all weekend and don’t think about their life of quiet desperation till Monday morning when they got to go back to work again. This book is not for those people.

This book is for the people who say, no, I want to leave that life behind. I believe there’s a higher, newer version of me. I want to recreate myself and get to model 2.0 or 3.0 or 8.0. That’s really what the book is about. I broke it down into six areas which I think are the most important to a prosperous life. And it’s not a business book, but every entrepreneur should read it. Because companies don’t evolve unless the people who own and run them evolve.

That’s right, they are a cap on the company.

Your company will never outgrow your self-development and personal growth. So it’s not a business book, but it should be required reading for every entrepreneur. It should be required reading in every business school. To me, it’s the culmination of all my life’s work, all my podcasts, all my blog posts, all my books, my seminars, my keynote speeches, like this is the bow that I tied it all together to say, okay, let’s look the six most important areas of our life where we create foundational beliefs.

How do we get negative or limiting beliefs in those areas, which we all do? How do we recognize then blow them up, replace them with empowering beliefs. And it’s not abstract or metaphysical really in any sense, it’s to me very scientific, like there’s a formula we can look at, what are you allowing to influence you? What beliefs are created? What happens after you create those beliefs? What are the behaviors you take? And when you take those behaviors, what are the results that you get?

So I just kind of in the book, I’m showing the reader how to reverse engineer the process. We look at, okay, here’s the outcome. Here’s the life I really want. Okay, I was a dentist because my dad was a dentist and my grandfather was a dentist and my great-grandfather was a dentist. So I became a dentist, but you know what? I don’t want to be a dentist. I want to be a dancer. Or I want to take a company public. Or I want to sing opera. Or I want to write. Or I want to open up a vinyl record store.

You know, whatever. It allows you to go backward in the process and say, okay, now look at what it is you really want to create. And then go back and say, okay, what’s the programming I need to change? What are the new beliefs? The new beliefs create a new vision. The new vision creates new behavior and new behavior creates new results. To me it’s science.

What about this word radical? What I have experienced, and maybe that ís just a limiting belief I have. I’m totally open to recognize that. But I always felt that entrepreneurism is risky and the way to manage the risk is to not take too many steps at once. But basically it’s more of an incremental approach. So how can I evolve from one business to another? They’re basically harvesting the first business and then using whatever I harvest. I’m no longer growing my business and I reinvest it in another business, which has a bigger potential.

So I don’t call this a radical rebirth, it’s more of an evolutionary rebirth. And I did this a couple of time when I went from banking to investment banking and investment banking from coaching and from coaching to what I do now, implementing business systems for companies. But it was really an evolution and if I kind of did a radical one then my family would have starved potentially. So how do you do the radical bit?

I love that you brought this up. That’s a great, great question, Steve. There could be another book. The other book would be called Incremental Rebirth, right? That’s the book I don’t want to write. Right. Okay, because that’s not the way I roll. I believe, you know, let me see how I can say this without giving away anything or throwing shade on anybody, but I’m in discussion for a new venture that I’m looking to launch, right? So it’d be like a $60 million valuation to start.

So it’s some some decent investment in there to launch it. Right. But I believe it’s a potential unicorn that this could be a multi, a multi-unicorn, a decacorn. I was talking about this with my accountant and he said, you know, this is a risky thing and if we do that, you know, there’s no guarantee with this so if we did it slower and we spaced it out over the course of two years and I was like, time out. Listen, you know, we’ve got a concept here that could be worth two billion dollars five to seven years from now.

But it’s only gonna happen if we go in and own the space and we move fast, we capture the market share, and we create the narrative. If you think your effing accountant who makes $200,000 a year is qualified to talk about this, then we have a problem. Because your accountant is not qualified to talk about this. Your accountant is qualified to show you how not to lose money. And, you know, when Elon Musk says, we need to be a multi-planetary species, so I’m going to start a rocket development program to take us to Mars, that is when he says I’m going to create a electronic car company.

I don’t know if you saw, he just was on Twitter, Apple was announcing that they’re going to start an electronic car and they’d like to bring it out in 2024. And Elon saw that and said, that’s fascinating because they’re trying to use this battery, which I’m already developed two years ago, and then they’re trying to do this battery which is impossible physically and when my model 3 was really struggling I went to Apple to try to sell my company and what’s his name wouldn’t take the meeting with me right? Right? This is the reality. Elon rolls the dice right?

So I don’t think I don’t want my partners to mortgage their house, sell their retirement plan, sell their car, put everything into it, and perhaps go bankrupt. That’s not the kind of radical I’m talking about, right? And again, read that, everybody listening, read that. It’s part of a three-part series, but it begins with the blog post, Beat Your Burn Rate, right, because I’m talking about my philosophy of how you don’t have to risk everything. You should never have to start all over again, right?

So, but you should have a certain percentage of your wealth that you’re willing to take a big risk on. And in the case of the book, this is your life we’re talking about, all right? And we don’t have any guarantees in life. I told you, my two friends, they died of COVID, okay? One is an older guy with a lot of conditions, that’s no surprise. My other friend was a mid-30s policeman who I played softball with at the peak of physical health, and he’s dead. He was dead in two weeks from COVID, just like that, okay?

My brother-in-law, you know, two beautiful children with my sister, he got a brain tumor. He was dead before he was 35, right? So, life is so short, so unknown, and we don’t know how many. There’s no argument you could make for me about making an incremental change in your life if you’re not living your best life, if you’re not living prosperous, if you’re not healthy and happy with joyous relationships and a strong spiritual grounding and you’ve got the money thing out of the way.

You know, someone’s going to argue to me, well, I’m going to do an incremental… No, I’m not buying it. And again, I’m not telling them what to do. They’re going to do their life how they want. My book is not for people who are thinking that way. My book is for people who say, no, I want to reinvent myself. I kind of joke on the information page about the book that it needs a warning label.

Warning, if you read this book, you might change your religion, quit your job, join the circus, move to a lesbian commune, found a boy band, or all of the above, go to a mountaintop in India, join an ashram, become a monk, whatever. I don’t write my books for timid people. I write my books for people who believe life should be bold, daring, and imaginative, that we should relish the journey and not play safe, right? So Risky is the New Safe was kind of my grounding premise.

The warm-up.

Yeah, and now I’m really taking it to the ultimate culmination, which is, how do you become the highest possible version of yourself?

So that’s the individual version of it. So that’s fascinating, and I do encourage you to buy as it’s available on pre-order. I bought it yesterday. And so you said January 12th is the date of the release of Radical Rebirth?

Yes.

 Okay. So where can people actually buy it? What is the URL of your…

So right now, it’s by the time you guys are watching or listening to it it may be on Amazon it may not if not then go to randygage.com forward slash radical rebirth and then we’ll have links to all of that I’m trying to think actually I was going to say we we already I was going to say I was mixing up my country’s that because we just sold the Bulgarian rights, but I forgot you’re Hungarian. We haven’t sold the Hungarian rights yet, but yeah, we’ve got it coming in Bulgarian, French, Dutch, German, Farsi, a lot of languages already. So, it’s going to have a big splash around the world.

Well, I think I’ll read the English one that will come out first. And listen, it was fabulous to have you on the show. Really enjoyed it. And thanks for coming and sharing the gospel here on prosperity. And I’m gonna re-listen to this book as well during the holidays. Any other resources that people, I mean, your website, there’s a shop there. So people from that link that you just gave us, they can find the shop and they can find other resources that are already available, right? So they don’t have to wait.

Yeah, randygage.com will get you to everything I do. Best place to connect with me is Twitter. That’s really where I engage people the most. I’ve got a blog that I’m very active with at least a few times a week. And then I also have, like you, I’m a podcaster and I have the Power Prosperity Podcast and that’s on Apple, Spotify, iTunes, all the platforms.

 

Important Links:

• Pinnacle: Five Principles that Take Your Business to the Top of the Mountain
• Stevepreda.com
• Randy’s book: Risky is the New Safe
• Randy’s Twitter handle
• Randy’s website 
• Steve’s blog