Bulletproof Motivation

I’m Igor Kheifets, and this is the List Building Lifestyle, a podcast for anyone who wants to build a wildly profitable email list working from home. If you’d like to make six figures, travel the world and help people improve their lives in the process, then this podcast is for you. I also invite you to attend a free workshop at Igor.ac, where I’m teaching how I made $21,779.45 cents in affiliate commissions by sending just 481 clicks to my affiliate link in one day. I’m also explaining why I walked away from ClickBank and I don’t promote ClickBank offers anymore as well as the five things I look for in the perfect affiliate offer.

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Welcome back to another edition of the List Building Lifestyle with your host, Igor Kheifets. So these two guys are out in the Safari in the African jungle and they’re hunting for a lion. They got rifles and everything. They’ve been out there for a little while and all of a sudden one of them hears a noise behind. He turns around, he sees a lion charging at him. And so he just kind of instinctively starts running away from the lion. And so his friend obviously sees the same thing and he’s running with him. And they’re kind of running neck in neck. So his friend yells at this guy, he says, “Oh man, do you really think we can outrun a lion?” And the guy starting to run a little bit faster says, “I don’t need to outrun a lion, I just need to outrun you.”

So you see, this anecdote has some truth to it. My wife loves to say that, that every joke has a bit of joke in it. Because if you really think about it, how often do you find yourself losing motivation? So you can be watching YouTube videos and you’re reading inspirational books and maybe you’re even studying biographies. And if you’re not studying, by the way if you’re not studying biographies, you should be studying biographies. Because almost everything that you’re trying to achieve with your life today has probably already been done at one point or another. And the lessons that that person learned are probably somewhere in the book.

And just by looking at what other people have done with their life, you get to learn a lot. And so you can either read or if you’re not a great reader, you can listen on Audible or you can even watch some of that stuff on Netflix. There’s a ton of biographies on Netflix right now, highly, highly recommended. There’s some joke in every joke. And what this anecdote really tells us is that motivation, the most powerful form of motivation is not the kind of motivation that you charge like a battery with positive words, right?

You can’t really go on motivational phrases all your life unless you have like a constant supply feeding into your brain at all times and it’s tuning out everything else and you live in a vacuum. If you live in the real world, the environment you’re in will always be more powerful than the advice that’s coming into your ears from the headphones as you’re listening to YouTube videos and motivational audios. However, there is one form of motivation that while still keeps me going, to be honest with you.

And that’s the kind of motivation that this anecdote really describes. It’s the motivation from getting eaten alive. Now, I don’t know if you subscribe to the same school of thought, that’s really up to you. But I spent a long time in my life kind of doing lots of self-digging and discovering things about myself. Because at the end of the day all knowledge is self-knowledge. And the more you know yourself, the more you will know how to operate yourself and the more control you have over your thoughts, words and actions.

And this is something that’s very important to me, because the moment I control my thoughts and I control my words, I can then control my actions even under really stressful conditions. So I discovered a long time ago that one of the ways that I’m driven, one of the ways that I generate drive and passion for anything that I do, not just my work by the way, just for everything pretty much besides gym.

I can’t get myself into the gym yet. It’s been a few years and I’ve been playing with different techniques, but it’s really hard to get me dressed, in my car, driving to the gym, not happening. It’s still not happening, but I’m working on it so I’ll keep you posted on that. So what’s been really working well for me was to recognize that I’m being chased by a lion, and that I really have to shuffle my feet really fast or otherwise I get eaten.

Because to me running from a lion is really just a bad … It is just the best motivation that you could possibly have. Because at that point, if you’ve ever been in danger, if you ever had that fight or flight response like I had when I was growing up, you had to have that. You had to be on alert because my mom would send me to buy, would tell me to go buy cigarettes and I was like a kid. And that was back in the time when you could still be a kid and buy cigarettes. Thankfully we’re not in that time anymore.

Honestly, I mean, that’s really irresponsible of my mom, to be honest with you. But I mean, I’ve bought cigarettes and vodka and it was truly for my mom and for my dad and at the time for some reason, they would allow us to do that. So in order to get to the market or the kiosk where I would buy the cigarettes, I had to go through three other neighborhoods. So I had to leave my neighborhood where things were like, well decent, my mom would let me go and then play in the neighborhood knowing that I’ll be safe.

And so you had to go through three other neighborhoods. And when the other kids, when other neighborhood kids saw you, especially the bad kids, the bad apples, and they knew you weren’t from the neighborhood, they knew you were an outsider. You were getting beat up. So you had to really look around and make sure no one’s chasing you. And if someone was chasing you, you had to run fast enough to get out of their neighborhood and into another neighborhood. Because they wouldn’t run into the next neighborhood because they were now in danger of getting beat up if they did.

So I remember that feeling, I remember that feeling a lot. And also conversation at the dinner table was always about money not being there and what would happen. I remember my mom was watching the election and she was really afraid that the guy that they would elect that year is an anti-Semite. So there was always something happening, and there was always some kind of lion chasing us at one point or another. Even the fact that we left Ukraine at the time had to do with a fricking lion, because now that I remember, my dad made a really bad investment of about $10,000 that he borrowed from a local mobster that he was on good terms with. But he did borrow it from him and he had to pay him a percentage.

And so he invested that into a farm, owner of which bailed with the money. And so again, we were like 10k in debt. So when we were leaving Israel, we sold our car, the apartment that we owned, paid off the debt and we immigrated with 1,000 U.S. dollars in our pocket and 11 bags with all of our belongings, weighing about 60 kilograms each. So that was like an escape. That wasn’t really a move. That wasn’t an immigration looking for a better future. That was like a freaking run. We were running away and we were to never return. And to this day my parents never stepped a foot back in Ukraine. I never traveled back to Ukraine myself. So it was a breakout, right? It was a prison break rather than an immigration.

Yo, it’s Igor. If you’re loving the content, hop on over to listbuildinglifestyleshow.com for more free training and a free transcript of this episode. Oh and I’d really appreciate if you logged into iTunes and rated the show. It really helps. Thanks.

So, I learned over the years to think that way, to think in terms of what’s the lion that’s chasing me today. And even when I would try and set goals, and this is something that took me two years to figure out. So me and my coach would get on the phone and he would always ask me what’s my goal or where am I heading? Because the constant makes sense, right? So if you want Google maps to get you places, you first have to enter a destination, then it will find where you’re located right now. And then it will calculate the shortest route taking you to your destination.

Well, if you don’t have a destination or if your destination is fuzzy, then you’re kind of screwed, because you’re not going to get there. The GPS simply won’t be able to tell you how to get there. And I tried for two years, swear to God. Two years I tried to set goals and I would be able to set, I don’t know, maybe short to midterm goals. So anything from three to six month, I would probably be able to set as a goal, because I always had a problem to lean on. I would say, “Okay, this is the problem I’m experiencing in my life right now. I want that problem fixed. So that would be my goal.

So in order for me to set a goal, I first needed to have a problem in the first place to say, “Okay, that’s how I’m going to get to my ideal outcome.” But if I were to simply sit down and upon request from my coach to imagine how I would life to look like if I had no limitations. I would just get lost. I could sit there for two hours with a blank slate and not write a single word and not conceive a single idea about what I wanted about out of my life.

And I figured that I’m really just not, I can’t think this way. I can only think in terms of lions that are chasing me. And so in order for me to find out what’s the next goal, I have to ask myself, “What’s that lion?” Now there are two types of lions too, and again, this is my philosophy, so I never heard anyone talk about it. So again, take it as you want. It’s not scientific [inaudible] like that. This is pure my own modus operandi. Take it or leave it.

So there are two types of lions. One is an obvious lion that’s chasing me right now. It’s the kind of lion that’s in my face. It’s there, and no matter how long I’ve been trying to run away from him, I’m still running. I’m still running and I’m still running and it’s still chasing me. And so those lions tend to be things like fear of poverty, fear of dying, fear of losing relationships, or fear of loneliness. Like a bunch of universal stuff that’s always there on one level or another.

And of course the immediate problems you’re facing, right? So if I’m like moving from Israel to Canada, right? The lion that’s chasing me is making a good decision about my housing, about my location and et cetera. But there’s also lions that aren’t really obvious, but they’re necessary. So I set the right goals. So anytime I find myself having to set a longterm goal or have to make a decision of any kind longterm, before he can do it, I learned to create lions. To imagine lions in my mind and to future based myself into scenarios where lions are waiting for me in the future.

So these lions aren’t necessarily chasing me right now, but these lions are waiting for me at one point or another down the road. And just so it happens that I know that they’re there and I’m still going through that same road. I have to go through the road, but I know that on the intersection A, there’s going to be a lion. On intersection B, there’s going to be another, intersection C there’s going to be another.

And so I know, I’m aware and I think about them. And thinking about those lions then gives me enough strength, motivation and puts me in that fight or flight to get me moving forward. And that strategy for me works so much better than trying to watch motivational videos and listening to motivational speeches. And I mean again, no offense to people like Les Brown or Tony Robbins and others. I love them. I love listening to their stuff. In fact, I recently met Les Brown in person. And in person he’s just as impressive as he’s on tape, trust me. A really, really cool dude.

But the problem is the moment you’re out of that seminar or the moment you turn off or you take off the headphones, the moment you turn off the YouTube video. The moment you’re looking away and the moment you get back into your day-to-day grind, dealing with your problems, and being and that marinating in that same environment you’ve been in for years, that motivation melts. It melts away and it’s like it never even existed. So for me that wasn’t an effective way. I tried it for a few years, but it wasn’t an effective way for me to stay driven.

It didn’t make me jump out of bed in the morning and go record. Like for example, right now I’m recording this when my whole family is asleep and I literally jumped out of bed to do it. Why? Because I know that one of my lions is to miss the schedule, to somehow fall out of sync from the schedule, because at one point in time I did. So now that’s the lion. That’s a very vivid, clear cut, very dangerous lion in my mind that I am running away from. That I always have to make sure that I look over my shoulder and say, “Oh, he’s catching up with me. I better go record.” So that is how I operate. That is how I get anything done, from launching new products, to selecting a school for my daughter to eating healthier. Anything at all. It’s always a lion.

So what’s your lion? What are your lions? Do you have some? Well, go ahead and share with me by writing to me through the podcast website at listbuildinglifestyleshow.com. And thank you so much for tuning in for another episode of the List Building Lifestyle. And until next time, ciao. Have a good one.

Thank you for listening to the List Building Lifestyle. Get access to previous episodes, the transcription of today’s show, as well as other exclusive content at listbuildinglifestyleshow.com. Also, don’t forget to claim your free seat at the workshop I’m hosting this week where I show the two step system that made me the top affiliate for people like Matt Beswick, John Crestani, Richard Legg, Michael Cheney, and many, many others. In fact, on this workshop, I’m going to show you the exact approach I take whenever I promote an affiliate offer. The exact offers I promote, as well as how I was able to make over half a million dollars in commissions using my small list of just 18,000 people promoting a weird type of product that almost no one else promotes. All that is yours at Igor.ac. So go ahead, claim your seat right now and I’ll see you there.