Overcome Your Internal Barriers to Success

Overcome Your Internal Barriers to Success—with Naftali Mark Horowitz

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Naftali, thank you for joining me on the show.

It’s my pleasure. Thank you for having me.

I probably expect most of our readers heard your name in the past. Even if they attended an LTB, Let’s Talk Business event or not, but there are some that didn’t. I want to start with the following that since the first time I heard your name, I somehow felt that I could call you a friend and mentor at the same time, and I continue to see the progress that our people are making or following your accountant by our events and other events. We were fortunate enough to share a couple of stages together throughout the years. I figured that it’s about time that we bring you on the show and get into a deep dive in topics that are passionate to you, passionate to me, and ultimately will help a lot of people that are reading this blog for the future.

[bctt tweet=”Life is full of challenges. The concept is to figure out a way to constantly get around it.” username=””]

I’m going to dive right into it. I am going to get to questions about your book that you came out with. I mentioned to you off the phone that I’ve read the book for my curiosity. Ultimately, I want to be able to speak on a couple of those topics. Let me start with something that I have realized. For our readers, I want to go a little bit deeper into that conversation. I remember at one point I was a guest on somebody’s podcast and at the end, they asked me, “If there’s one thing that you feel that is happening in the marketplace in the business world and you could change it, what is it?” It’s a very open-ended type of question where you could usually go in many different directions.

I don’t even know why, but my answer was along the lines of, “I feel there is much talent of individual people, people that are human capital as we call it in the business world, that is going to waste because they’re sitting in a position or they’re locked in their box that, ‘I’m good at this and I’m not trying something else.’ They’re living a life not to the fullest potential. I think if something needs to change, we need to find a way how we could highlight that topic, so people could start realizing what they are capable of.” I know that this topic is important to you as well. So, I want to get your initial thoughts on it, and then share some of the information that you feel that we need to elaborate on this topic.

You hit the hot button of my life. The title of my book, which is explained in the introduction, is YOU Revealed. In my introduction, I explained that success in life is that there’s you, which is the you that gets up every morning, goes about his day, does what he does, flocks through life, goes on vacation every so often, and hopes that nothing terrible happens to derail whatever status life has for you. There’s a YOU inside of you, which is the full expression of self, which is you actualizing all your potential, all of your talents. That’s the YOU, the late in talents inside of each of us. This book was written to reveal, to reveal to you, and for you to reveal to the world and what YOU really are. People that under-earn in business often under-live in most areas of their life. They’re living mediocre lives, either because they don’t want to push harder or because they don’t believe more is possible for them. It’s such a shame because there’s much-untapped talent in the world. If you only buy my book to read my toothpaste story in the introduction, I have heard from many people, it is worth it just to hear the story of the toothpaste.

Please share it now.

My toothpaste story was that one day, I came home late at night. My wife was away for the summer and we have a four-story house. I sleep on the third floor and our basement has our storage room. There on the counter of my medicine or my vanity was a beat-up tube of toothpaste. I said, “I don’t want to go downstairs and get another tube.” I squeezed the tube and I pushed that enough came out. The next morning, I was in a rush to get off my day and I didn’t have time to go down and get any more toothpaste tubes, so I kept squeezing that tube. I came home that night and lo and behold, I forgot. There I am facing that same tube thinking, “There’s no way anymore toothpaste is coming out. I’m not going downstairs.” I squeezed again and I got more out.

I then stopped and said, “Let’s see how long I could do this. Let’s see how long I continue to get toothpaste out of the tube that yesterday I thought was empty.” I kept squeezing and squeezing. It turns out, I got a week’s worth of toothpaste. I stopped and realized that this is not a lesson about toothpaste. Toothpaste is $3.99 a tube. You can go out and buy one at a Walmart. This is the lesson about life. If there’s enough toothpaste in the landfills of America, without question inside of tubes that can serve the brushing needs of America for many decades, but lies there because nobody bothered to squeeze and push a little bit harder. Think about all the untapped potential that lies in the graveyards of America.

How much could have been from the people who stopped squeezing at one point and said, “This is all the toothpaste that’s going to ever come out of me. This is as ambitious as I’m going to get. This is as motivated am going to get. These are the skills that I have learned and I’m too old to learn anything new.” What a shame that bodies are lowered into the ground full of toothpaste. This is exactly what I go out and I show people. I show people that greatness is not about being born great and with remarkable talents that nobody else has. Greatness is taking the time to explore your inner self, your untapped potential and creating goals and plans, having the wherewithal and the resilience and the tenacity to squeeze it out of yourself so that you can express your fullest version of self, your true YOU.

I love the analogy of toothpaste because it’s something that will resonate with everybody that’s reading this because this is exactly how we operate. I have a similar analogy that happened with me. A lot of times when I speak to people, I ask people, “Raise your hand the highest possible.” They raise their hand and I say, “A little higher,” and everybody pushes themselves a little higher. The first time I also said the highest possible, we don’t give it our all. There’s a level of comfort that a person has, and I’m not going to raise it to the extreme because somebody asked me, it’s not comfortable. When we’re speaking about revealing your real YOU, and sometimes it’s getting out of your comfort zone, getting out of that current situation where you are, and saying, “Maybe I am capable.” Don’t let in the doubt that you have.

I want to get into a little bit more of the no-nonsense advice for people. The analogy is perfect. I think everybody resonates with it. Think for a moment, somebody that’s starting off, let’s say they’re 20 or 30, and they’re in the earlier years of their career, life, personal, business or whatever you call them. What is holding them back and how could a person say, “I want to get ahead of me, I want to do this right?”

There have been thousands of people that have sat across my desk and asked me, “How can I make my life better?” When I wrote my book, I try to think about the most prevalent mindsets or obstacles that I see in people being successful. I tackle them in the book. In no particular order, I’ll tell you what I think they are. Number one is that people don’t believe in themselves. They’ve bought into an inner voice of ‘others can and I can’t.’ That is the most detrimental poison to successful living. It saps you of motivation and your confidence. You don’t exert yourself if you didn’t believe that it was possible. You need more toothpaste and stop squeezing, there’s no question about it. Why exert yourself out of your comfort zone if nothing else is going to come out? The day you think it’s empty, you throw it in the garbage. Unfortunately, people don’t believe that there’s more to them. That’s number one.

[bctt tweet=”Every successful person climbed his way to success on the back of failure after failure after failure.” username=””]

Number two is people think that there are shortcuts, “I like your toothpaste analogy, but I’m going to figure out a different way to get by without having to squeeze the tube. Maybe other people have to observe themselves and work that hard. Let me see if perhaps there’s a way for me to do this differently. Maybe I will get around, I’ll find a shortcut. I’ll buy a hot stock or I’ll get lucky and win the lottery. Don’t ask me what it is.” They think that somehow there’s a special path for them that doesn’t require all that much exertion.

The third one is that they’re afraid of failure. They know they should try but they are afraid of trying and failing. They’re too lazy sometimes on the outside to try but it’s not laziness. Not like they want to sit home and do nothing all day, they’re not couch potatoes as we say in America. They’re just afraid of failure. Therefore, it expresses itself in an hour away of hesitation, procrastination, and an inability to make decisions and all of these things I talk about in the book. On the outside, people are looking at them and say, “What’s wrong with you? You have so much talent. You have so much potential. Why are you not pushing yourself? Why are you not taking risks? Why are you not making more of yourself?” They’ll say, “I just don’t feel like it. I’m not motivated.” What they’ll tell you is that they’re not motivated, which is true. But motivation is a symptom, it’s not a cause. What is the cause that will motivate you and what is causing you not to be motivated? Sometimes, it’s a fear of failure.

These are very prevalent things. Young people tend to think that on the second one, “Maybe my father worked hard. Maybe other people worked hard, maybe that was the old generation and this generation maybe you don’t need to. I’m going to find some special way.” This is why if you go to Robinhood statistics and other online brokerage sites, which are causing so much market volume lately, you’ll find that the average investor is 20, 22, 23 because they will try to strike rich versus growing into their wealth.

On that note, I speak a lot to business owners as well. Sometimes I would hear a comment like, “I thought the hurdle is over and now, it’s a challenge again, or this or that.” I say, “Life is full of challenges. The concept is to figure out a way to constantly get around it.” Nobody is exempt from those things. You’ve got to get into the mindset of knowing that this is life. It’s not like when a challenge comes up, you’re from a part of the business world that’s not normal. Those people that have it easy, those are the people that don’t have a normal life because this is how businesses is done.

Let me try to dissect some of the words that you said and understand from a psychology perspective for a person reading this and asking, “Maybe I fall into this category or that category.” Let’s say about fear. Let’s take the one that you mentioned, a lot of people have that fear of failing. Fear is real. I could explain to you why you shouldn’t have that fear, ultimately a person says, “I have fear of heights.” You can’t say, “I have zero fear of heights. I would go up on a plane and parachute and jumped down.” You can’t tell that a person has that fear. What is it that we can say to this person that has fear of growth, fear of pushing themselves that will give that person the real ingredients to say, “I’m going to reveal myself and do the best I can?”

This is a long topic, and I thought a lot about fear of failure because of fear of failure, fear of rejection hamper growth more than almost anything else. I could tell you from experience the thing that works for me because I have a tremendous fear of failure and fear of rejection when I started the business, especially when I started in sales. I could not handle rejection and failure. It would literally physically be painful as if somebody is punching me in the gut. There are a few things that I did that work. Number one, I find that fear works very well with fighting fear. I’ll give you an example. You have a person who’s afraid of dark rooms, or he’s certainly afraid to enter a cave, and you stand in front of the cave and you say, “Go into the cave, you’ll be okay.” He says, “I’m not going into that cave. Are you crazy?” He starts palpitating. He can’t step into that cave. You then bring a hungry black pit bull and you walk towards him with the pit bull. He’s going to run into that cave quicker than you can blink your eye.

What I call that is fighting fear with fear because there’s always going to be a larger fear that will make your current fear, nothing. My teachers used to say, “You shouldn’t be afraid of that. You should be afraid of me.” That’s what happens when you replace fear with fear. There are good fears and bad fears, as I write in my book. Good fear is when the person fears leaving this world having fulfilled 25% of his destiny. Good fear is nothing gave you to pay your bills and being ejected from your house by the bank and the humiliation that your parents and your family would say. Good fear is looking back at life and saying, “I failed.” A person should be afraid of that. The bad fear is, “I’m not going to make the next cold call. I’m afraid that the person on the other phone is going to reject me.” If a person can internalize intellectually, emotionally that in giving in to that weaker fear of the person hanging up the phone you, you are hastening and almost every guaranteeing the much larger fear, which is ultimate failure, not being able to pay your bills, not being as successful as you intuitively know you will. And if you start to think about that each time you’re about to make up a phone call, you extinguished the smaller fear by introducing the largest fear. The largest fear is the healthiest fear.

God puts fear into humans. He instilled it in us for a reason, because there are things in life we should be afraid of. An ultimate failure is something we should be afraid of. The other thing is I’ve tried to see fears, or small fears, for what they are. I know this sounds crude, but I do talk to myself this way, “You’re being a baby.” At the end of the day, you’re being a child and it’s a little child in you that’s afraid of the other person saying, “Sorry, I’m not interested in what you’re selling.” It’s such a smallness of mind because everybody gets rejected and everybody fails. We all know that every successful person climbed his way to success on the back of failure after failure.

I will use the example of Steve Jobs because I can’t even begin to imagine founding a company like Apple and getting kicked out of that company. You could imagine how he felt being kicked out of Apple. What did the man do? He picks himself up and builds a company called Pixar, sells it for $2 billion, and then gets grabbed or begged back to Apple and turns it into an empire. Every single successful person will tell you that they failed and they were rejected all the way up to the top. Intellectually, we all understand that and we’ve all read the books and read the anecdotes. Yet, the emotional side of us, the little child inside of us still says, “I’m going to fail.” The bigger you has to start facing the smaller you, saying, “Grow up.” I used to tell myself, “Grow up.” I wasn’t soft on myself. I didn’t placate myself. I used to say, “Grow up, you won’t die.” I used to have a sticker on my computer, and when I used to make phone calls, it said, “You won’t die.” It’s changing beliefs. It’s changing thoughts and it’s connecting to the severity of ultimate failure. It’s incredible how people will run away from the opportunity to succeed because they’re afraid of failure even though they know where they are running is failure.

This is great because I think for people reading this, you could very easily identify that failure. As you mentioned, a small failure from the bigger failure and figuring out, “Are you trading that failing in large because of that next step in life?” I want to turn to another part of this, which I know people struggle with. The other side of failure is risk-taking. Obviously, there’s calculated risk. There are people that are risk-takers and ultimately fail because they’ve done something that they don’t have the capacity to achieve. How does a human person identify how much out of their comfort zone they should go, which will make them a calculated risk versus doing something they’re not capable of doing?

It’s a great question that comes up every single day in my business life, which is somebody who has a certain sum of money, should they take risks or should they not take risks to grow that money further? Once you decide you should take risks, what is the definition of the calculated risk? What’s the definition of a non-calculated risk? I say that there are four quadrants of risk. Before we get the calculated and uncalculated, I always tell my clients, “There are people who must take risks, that risk is necessary or imposed upon them in life. And then there are those that may choose to take risks.”

Let’s use the analogy of a portfolio. If a person does not have enough money to retire, they must take risks. If they don’t grow their money, they will not have enough money. In the analogy of a workplace, if a person is in a job which is a dead-end job, and I get these phone calls every day and I ask a lot of probing questions. The first thing I’m trying to identify is, “Is this a necessary risk or a chosen risk?” Once it’s a necessary risk, which is that the person is not earning enough money or he’s earning enough money but he isn’t going to have enough money two years or three years from now unless somehow he miraculously wins the lottery, I know that I’m dealing with necessary risk. In our belief system, there’s something called faith. Faith doesn’t mean that a person jumps off of a building and says, “God will protect me and I won’t splatter on the ground.” You will splatter on the ground.

[bctt tweet=”If happiness means that you have more than your nest, you may never be happy no matter how much you have. ” username=””]

However, sometimes the person is facing a great danger but they have absolutely no choice. They must take the risk there. There they say, “This is what God is telling me I must do, and therefore, I do it because it is necessary. I have faith that it’s going to work out.” The first equation that must be solved, necessary versus unnecessary. Most people are afraid to take necessary risk. Life, bills, cost of living is necessitating this risk be taken. “You must change jobs or you’re going to fall of the cliff, you’re going to go bankrupt.” Therefore, it’s not any more question of whether you should take risk or not. It’s a question of how you should take risks.

Now that you’ve gotten over that equation, it solves 75% of the problem. We need to talk about taking a calculated risk versus an uncalculated risk. The problem with calculated risks, and where most people come and ask me to help them calculate risk is that they don’t know what the variables are to begin with. The most important variable I ask people is, “Tell me what you are good at. Tell me what your attributes are. Tell me what you think you can achieve.” Most people don’t have an idea. They haven’t taken a good inventory of themselves. They don’t understand who they are and what they bring to the table. That’s the first part of the calculated risk.

Once you know that, then you could match your skillset with whatever is in front of you, “Am I matched or am I unmatched?” That’s process number one: know who you are, know what you’re good at, know what you’re capable of and then see if you match or don’t match. For example, somebody comes to me and says, “I must take a risk. I have to start a business. Everybody I know in businesses, they’re all becoming wealthy, starting businesses. I’ve got to start a business.” I go, “Do you think you can start a business?” “Of course, I can start a business.” “Tell me why you think you can start a business?” “Why not?” “Are you good at sales?” “I hate sales.” “You’re going to sell your products.” “I’ll hire somebody.” You haven’t gone into a dollar of revenue yet. “Do you have a rich uncle that I should know about? Are you organized?” “Not really, I’ll hire an office manager.” We already hired a salesman and an office manager and they don’t even have a business up and running.

What I’m realizing there is the person who has this illusion that he can run a business but he’s completely unmatched to the challenge in front of them. That’s a ridiculously uncalculated risk. Once you know what you are and what your skill sets are, I always encourage people to sit down and talk to somebody because it’s very hard making calculations on your own. That’s why people hire me to manage their money. If everyone knew how to calculate necessary risk in the marketplace, they wouldn’t need me and what I do. I always encourage people, when you have a good inventory of self, when you have a good understanding of what the risk is that you’re trying to take and what it’s going to entail, you sit down with somebody and you sort it all out. If that calculated necessary risk adds up and if you don’t go for it, it’s fear of failure or laziness and your unwillingness to leave the comfort zone that is keeping you from taking that risk.

I think understanding how you arrive at the destination is important. I remember one of the episodes I did with Gino Wickman, who is the Founder of EOS, an operating system for businesses. In one of his books, he speaks about understanding if you are an entrepreneur or not. We discussed that a lot of people use entrepreneurship as an excuse. “I could be reckless, I don’t have to do calculated risks. All I need to do is I’m an entrepreneur.” You see it with the newer, younger generation even more than before where a person says, “I’m entrepreneur, I’m going to open up a business and I’m going to invest. I’m going to take somebody’s money and put it into to somewhere in the business,” not knowing exactly what the calculation of that risk is. What is that business plan looking like? Some of those people don’t even have what it takes to be an entrepreneur.

You said a very important point that entrepreneur is not a speculator. They’re very different people. The word entrepreneurship is in lieu of using speculation. You are a speculator, you’re not an entrepreneur. An entrepreneur is a person that takes a calculated risk. It’s not somebody who goes out and recklessly takes people’s money, rolls the dice, and hopes things are going to work out.

We’re speaking about this topic and every reader that’s reading this episode has something to sit down and think about and see how they can improve themselves. Everybody has room to improve to reveal their fullest potential. I want to share with you a story I have, and I want to get your take on how you would respond to that incident. I remember a couple of months ago, I came out of my house and I met a young guy. I would say he was probably 25 years old, a father of two kids, has a job. I saw that he wasn’t in his best mood. I said, “What’s going on?” He says, “I don’t know. I’m somehow I’m not happy or not satisfied.” I don’t remember exactly the words he used.

After a few minutes, I said, “Let me ask you a question. Are you married?” “Yes.” “Do you have a job?” “Yes.” “You like the job?” “Yes.” “You have kids?” “Yes.” “Are they behaving good? Are they healthy?” He checked off yeses, every single box. I asked them right afterward, “Think for a moment, is there anything in your life that you’re not happy about?” He thinks for a moment and he says, “This guy and that guy, people that I am friends with from school, they have already done this, and they’ve done that.” Ultimately, that’s bringing him down. If you have this scenario, when a person is telling you this exact same thing, first of all, what would your response be? Could you shed some light on the difference between happiness and satisfaction and how a person could work on themselves and being better at it?

The reason why he’s unhappy is that his goal in life has been set in completely the wrong direction. In other words, he is focusing on the wrong things to decide whether or not he should or should not be happy. If happiness means that you have more than your neighbor, then no matter how much you have, you may never be happy. You can be the second richest person in the world and be extremely unhappy because you’ve set your goal as being the richest person in the world. You can think that’s ridiculous. But in his mind, “I don’t care what you think. I don’t care that I’m the second richest person in the world. I may as well be the third richest person in the world, I’ll just a little bit unhappier, but I’ll still be unhappy.” That’s ludicrous. The answer to him is that he needs to recalibrate his destination.

That is free choice. We each get to choose black or white, right or left up or down. That’s it. This is what we have. This is a free choice. This is why America is a great society because this is a free society. It’s a free market society. We have the freedom of speech and we have the freedom to bear arms. That doesn’t mean I own a gun but I have the choice to own a gun. People think that free will and free choice exists in the realm of action. That’s the most important free choice there is. It’s wrong. The most important three choices we make are the way we think it, what we choose to think and how we choose to think. This person simply has become a person who chooses to think one way. He doesn’t even realize that he chooses to think that way because it’s become habitual to him. Like you make a choice in the morning, how much coffee you drink, or how much sugar to pour in and it’s no longer a conscious choice, it’s an unconscious choice. Even though it’s an action, you take the spoon and you put it into the sugar, or you dump it into the coffee, whether it’s three spoons, two spoons, or zero, that stops being a conscious choice once the habit is formed.

You can decide one morning if you come home from the doctor and he says, “You must lose some weight,” you can stop and say, “I want to start choosing this differently. I used to think that I must drink my coffee this way. Now I will stop drinking my coffee this way, and I will learn how to make coffee without sugar.” It’s going to have to start with a choice, “I am going to suffer the taste of bitter coffee for several weeks so that I can lose weight.” The person can choose to think differently. I teach them how to do this in the book. You can choose how can we replace negative thoughts, such as, “My neighbor just got a new Lexus and mine is three years old” with “I have an amazing wife, I have amazing children.” There are many things that we can focus on and choose to think about that will fill us with happiness, fulfillment, and gratitude to God. There are always going to be something that we can think about that will show the deficiencies in our life. Nobody has a perfect life. If you had a perfect life, it would be the most imperfect life from anyone out there. This person must learn how to think.

This is amazing and I appreciate that because regardless of who you are and how you are with your life, and maybe the example that I use is to the extreme, but almost every one of us will find times in our life, in their day or whatever something happens, and they would question themselves. The concept of understanding that you are in charge of how to think or what to replace that with is important. There’s an article that I wrote and the subject was don’t be your worst enemy. Sometimes we find ourselves that we are our worst enemy. We paint a picture for ourselves way worse than it needs to be, or we limit our ability based on our belief system for ourselves. That’s the essence of your book and everything around that we discussed is understanding that you have that opportunity to push yourself as much as you can.

I want to speak about the book. It’s been out just for a few weeks and it’s been a best seller. I’ve read it myself. You are a professional business person, you’ve been in business for a lot of years, been successful in what you do. With the rise of giving back and the rise of seeing what the community needs, you have been doing a lot of seminars, lectures, and conversations including this one. You then decided to write a book. You know what writing a book means; there’s a lot of outreach or more people reaching out, asking you from favors to clarification, to ideas, to help. You calculated that. We discussed that before with calculated risk. Tell us a little bit about your mindset. Why are you doing what you’re doing and why do you feel that for your life and regardless of what your business profession is that you wanted to give this for the world?

In my book, I teach a very interesting concept. I’ve worked for some of the greatest Wall Street firms out there. Today, I’m part of JP Morgan. I’m proud to hand my business card and say, “I’m part of this great firm called JP Morgan.” I love the culture. We have a great CEO. What makes a great company, a great company? What you want to do is you want to read their mission statement. Why are they in business? What is their mission in this world? All great companies live and die by their mission statement. Our mission statement never says, “We are here to make money.” That’s obvious that our goal is to make money. That’s a big part of what we do. But what’s our higher calling in this world? A great company will have a higher calling. If you look at that mission statement, you would read things like, “Elevate the lives of others, enhance the life of communities, orchestrate business transactions.” While people love to hate Wall Street, then you wouldn’t have lights in your house, you wouldn’t be driving a car. You probably would get to work on a horse. The world lives and dies by the financial world.

In the financial world, good financial firms have a mission statement. How many people have a mission statement for their life? What is my mission in this world? What am I here to accomplish? I teach people how to do that in the book, how to sit down and write a mission statement. I once to challenge a group of people to do this. Some of the results were remarkable.

To answer your question, I did write a mission statement and I’ve come to realize that every single person has a choice. That choice is, “Do I live for myself and my family?” which is just an extension of self, and that’s all it is. Taking care of your wife and kids is obvious. They’re extensions of you. There’s self-gratification, there’s self-enhancement. And then there are people who choose to live for others. Once you choose to live for others, everything else falls aside. Meaning, you don’t even think about what this will do to you. You really only fixate on what it will do for others and what it can do for others.

[bctt tweet=”Nobody has a perfect life. If you had a perfect life, it would be the most imperfect life from anyone.” username=””]

To answer your question: I knew that this would happen. I honestly did not envision it to happen to the degree that it has in the last weeks. Nonetheless, it is what it is. The number of phone calls and emails and people that need to speak with me, not so much about clarification, but because I’ve opened their eyes and their minds to a new possibility for their lives. I got them to shed light on the greater YOU that lies within. Now, they’re asking me to help them translate what they’ve learned in the book into a mission for them. I did it because this is something that’s eternal.

A person in Wall Street is something called leverage. You can invest the dollar that earns two or you can invest the dollar and borrow a dollar and earn four. Leverage powers a lot of Wall Street, and in life there is leverage. Employees are leverage. You, Meny, have so much time in your day, and all you could earn was dependent on your time by earning a salary, you have no leverage. When you hire employees, you train them and use them well, you’ve created leverage. When you lectured with thousands of people that it takes one hour, you turned one hour into a thousand hours. When you spend a year writing a book or six months writing a book, and it reaches 10,000, 20,000, 30,000 people, and those people leverage that information by bringing up their children better, and so on and so forth, you have immeasurable leverage.

There is no greater leverage than that which has the immortality aspect to it and can reach people while you’re sitting at home. When you want to help people, and I know you are one of those people, Meny, and so I know you’re going to resonate with it. Even if they get to the seminar and there are 1,000 people there, how much can I possibly teach in one hour? I just can’t. And I probably will never see this exact group again. I can hand them a book, give them 10,000 hours’ worth of material in 400 pages. How can I condense that much information in the amount of time that I’m going to get to spend with them and do that for thousands of people over and over? Books are incredible leverage in helping people. Where I used to be frustrated when I gave this person 30 minutes, now I say, “Please read this, come back to me after you have, and we can have a 30-minute conversation.” When he comes back, he’s a completely different person. I’ve advanced his situation so that I can now be helpful to him. That’s why I wrote a book.

I have the leverage at this point because I have the mic, I want to say thank you on behalf of these thousands of people that might not reach out to you and they are better because of the book. Thank you for that. Let’s close with the four rapid-fire questions. Number one, a book that changed your life?

Man’s Search for Meaning.

Number two, a piece of advice you got that you never forget?

Don’t ever talk bad about your competition.

Number three, anything you wish you could go back and do differently?

I wish I could have learned all things that I did five years earlier.

Number four, final question, what’s still on your bucket list to achieve?

[bctt tweet=”A great company will have a higher calling.” username=””]

I still want to study the much deeper parts of the Torah. I still want to explore many of the aspects of self, such as self-esteem in a much deeper way. As I’m drilling deeper into the conscious and subconscious itself, I keep finding that much deeper than I ever thought. There are many years of exploration and research ahead of me.

Naftali, thank you for joining us. I know your time is valuable. That is why in the name of our readers, we will forever be grateful for sharing some of your time with us.

It’s my pleasure. Anytime, Meny.