If Everyone Is Thinking The Same Way, No One Is Thinking With Mike Martin

Welcome back to the Lisbon lifestyle. I’m your host, Igor Kheifets and today I’m hosting my good friend Mike Martin, a self-made millionaire, an online entrepreneur, a software creator, and the author of the up and coming book that’s called, in a world full of sheep. Fuck you I’m an entrepreneur. Oh, and by the way, we will say the word fuck a lot in this episode. So if you’ve got a problem without saying the word fuck a lot, then you should probably not listen to it moving forward, and skip to the next one or the previous one in the podcast. But today, this is what this episode is all about. Because Mike is really, really, really concerned about what kind of people our society is bringing up these days, and he calls them sheep. And that’s going to be the main idea for today’s episode. We’re going to discuss the outrageousness of how society is developing. Where are we going as a society? And what can we do about it on an individual level, especially if we are entrepreneurial minded? So, Mike, welcome to the list building lifestyle. Yes, thank you very much. Cheers for the intro. So give us for those who don’t know, and for those who are looking forward to the release of your book, or maybe those who don’t know yet, give us a quick breakdown of why you wrote in a world full of sheep. Fuck you. I’m an entrepreneur, by the way, great title. Really, really great title for this cover?

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Yep. Well, the title was meant to catch the right people. I mean, I’ve been doing this for 15 years now. Started out as a general tradesman out on the road breaking into houses and cars as a locksmith, and over the years realized I couldn’t make any money because I didn’t know Google ads. So I learned that and I learned SEO, and so on and so forth. And I spent the last 15 years going from knowing absolutely nothing all the way to the point where now, if we don’t do mid seven figures a month, we’re kind of depressed, like, whoa, whoa, what’s going wrong? Diverse situation. And I feel like it’s, I feel like the problem is with society in general, I feel like, I feel like everything from religion, right, the way up to politics is kind of designed as a control mechanism to teach people to follow and do as the toll whether they use your own personal

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fears of where you’re gonna go and sit in the big, big room upstairs, or whether it’s a case of if you don’t follow suit like this to say, he’s gonna look at you, and you’re gonna have a bad status. And what they do is they’re trying to develop a world of sheep, a world of people who follow all the rules, are tall, finish school, get a nine to five job, and literally just help society in general. So push everything they do pushes along and help society, but it doesn’t really help them as an individual.

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And I believe that if people, if I’d have had this book, 25 years ago,

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I’d have made millions a hell of a lot quicker. Because all of the rules I’ve learned over the last 15 to 20 years of making mistakes and making mistakes and losing money and ruining things I’ve been put into this book so that people who, let’s say, when you leave education, I would imagine that the majority of people who leave education, they’re left in an entrepreneurial position. Yeah. So they’re in a position where it’s like, right, what the fuck am I going to do next? Yeah, everybody’s like, at that point, where, what am I going to do next, when we’re going to go with this, with this life, what we’re going to do, and I think what happens is, most of us try our own thing, try our own thing. And I’ll say it from a man’s perspective, because obviously, I’m a guy, and then all of a sudden, you get to 2530, you get somebody pregnant, and it’s like, shitting me to grow up. Now he needs to be a parent. So all of a sudden, it’s like, right, my entrepreneurial dreams are gone. I’m never gonna make it, I’m not going to get there. And instead, now I’m gonna go and get a job and make somebody else rich and work for somebody else. And kind of follow the sheep’s path. Because there is nothing designed to teach people to be an entrepreneur, step by step by step, like starting right away from a mindset. And getting all the way to when you start to make 40-5060 grand a month, how to actually simplify the setup of your business, and then enable you to step away well, it scales and grows without you. And I think that’s, that’s really, really needed. Because most of the people I grew up with were very, very entrepreneurial. We lived on really poor council estates. Nobody had money, so everybody had to be entrepreneurial. And if he wasn’t you, football, you had absolutely nothing. And the whole point of the book is to really help people who are in that situation, be able to pick it up, start in the first chapter, go through and step by step, go through the book whilst they’re building their own lives in a way that’s going to benefit them not benefit. Everybody else. Yeah. And it’s interesting on the timing for this book, because as we stepped out of COVID, the world is going through a recession right now everyone’s you know, rising interest rates and the stock market

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It is in freefall and the whole, you know, crypto FTX thing and a lot of people losing money, including Tom Brady, who lost like 100 million. But I find the timing of this book interesting because I’ve always felt at least in the last, I’d say five years or so that we’ve shifted as a society, to a society that celebrates the entrepreneur, in a way the entrepreneurs are the new rock stars. The people who are celebrated in the media are not the Floyd’s of the world. It’s the Elon Musk’s of the world, people who develop interesting startup ideas and whatnot. So how do you feel about that in terms of like, your message? And obviously, your point of view that’s super clear from the book is that there’s not enough of this, there’s not enough education, there’s not enough tools, there’s not enough guidance, there’s not enough systems to help an average person to make the transition, do you still feel this way, in spite of the rise of the information marketing space in recent years, the rise of the average entrepreneurial, you know, drive, if you will, like a lot of people who work day jobs, they still do side hustles.

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But of course, they do it to a certain extent. It’s not like they go on to explode and build massive companies. So talk to us a little bit about that. Like, what’s your point of view about the whole Zeitgeist these days with regards to entrepreneurial journey? Right, if we take it right back, first of all, to what an entrepreneur is. So in my opinion, society has put the entrepreneur on a pedestal, right? And if you

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15 years ago, when I was first kicking off and trying to become successful, if I turned around and said to somebody, I’m an entrepreneur, that even like, what, are you a millionaire? And my answer would have been no, but I’m an entrepreneur, because I’m trying, I’m trying to drain. And I think what people think entrepreneurs are few and far between, there’s not a lot of us, there’s not many of us that we don’t exist. And I think the reason the successful entrepreneur has been put on a pedestal is because society doesn’t understand what an entrepreneur is. I think probably 60% of society are entrepreneurial, but they don’t get it. So instead of actually building something, and growing and becoming successful with it, let’s say five times out of 10. They’re in a position where 99 times 100 are, they’re failing, and they’re failing because they don’t understand the rules. So what happens is, we all try different things. We all have our own crazy little business ideas. And we all try to stand on our own two feet when we’re young, when we’ve got nothing to lose, until society beats us down into this thing. And because society now looks at an entrepreneur and says, right, well, if you’ve got a few million in the bank, you’ve got a business where everybody else does everything for you, you spend half your lifestyle on a beach with no entrepreneur in the world really does. And all of these are the things you’re an entrepreneur. But most of the entrepreneurs, most probably 85- 95% of the world’s entrepreneurs, are struggling their skin, they’ve got no money. And everybody knows them as traitors, like, Oh, you’ve got loads of trials, everybody’s heard that saying God loves a trial. And the thing is, those traders are the entrepreneurs of tomorrow, which is Sony, her data. It’s your auntie, your uncle, even your parents, they can be constantly trying and failing. There’s so many guys I know, who have always been trying all their lives to do this. And to do this, and to do this and constantly failing. And to get into the role all the years into the 40s. They started to drink heavily, they feel like a failure, they feel it. And it’s not because they’re not entrepreneurs, it’s not because they’re not trying. It’s because they don’t understand the same simple, easy step by step path that takes them from zero to eight 910. Whatever level they want to get it to. It’s not all about making loads and loads of money either. A lot of people that are entrepreneurs have focused completely on making money. In the last few years, my business, I get up every morning, spend my mornings when my children take one of the LD forms of school, I come into the office probably about 10 o’clock, I have my team do everything that needs to be done. And I leave it too and then I’m home when the kids get back from school. It’s not effective. It’s not. It’s not saying that because I don’t want to trade my time for money anymore. Although I do like to have something that gives me some sort of focus on things to do. So I come into the office for three or four hours a day, not because I have to and not because I won’t make money to do that. But because I feel like you need to be driven with something. Otherwise you sit at home on a PlayStation all day. And it’s a big fat couch with it that really has no drive. So I still don’t work the 15 1617 hour days like I did right at the beginning. But what I find is society doesn’t understand what an entrepreneur is. And because of that, people who are entrepreneurs are constantly failing. And these books are designed to help those people who are constantly failing or if you buy it for somebody who you know, that’s constantly failing. It will really help them

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figure out the next step in the ladder. And for them to take things further. Yeah, just be careful if you buy this book for someone else, make sure to preface with a good conversation. So they don’t think you think of them as sheep. That’s really important. Make sure you tell them that you want to give them this book, because you think of them as a lion, and not as a sheep. And this is the manual to become one. Now I want to take this conversation into a bit of a different direction. So you mentioned you’ve got kids, two kids, I’ve got a little girl who is four, nearly five and a little lot who’s 11. Nice. Well, I’m in a very similar position, I have a daughter, she’s 10 and just turned 10. And my son just turned four. And I went through this journey still going through the journey with my daughter, where,

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You know, since moving to Canada from Israel, I started looking into the education system. And I started looking into public schooling, homeschooling and private schooling. And we did a bit of private schooling first, then COVID hit. So we did a lot of at home schooling, which is the

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the era, if you will, that where I was the happiest when it came to her education. And now she’s back into a private Jewish school. And, you know, we’re doing some extra stuff, obviously, outside of school, too. So I’m putting her through some coding curriculum, she’s doing some coding, we’re doing a lot of performance. So she’s acting, singing, and dancing. She doesn’t really like sports for some reason. So there’s no sports activities happening. But there’s, you know, there’s a lot of that, and kind of watching through her development, I became extremely picky about where she gets to spend her time, in terms of both education as well as the people that surround her. And what’s interesting is that,

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even today, even in the world where entrepreneurship is very dominant in the day to day conversation in the media,

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The school system seems like it hasn’t really progressed since 1924, or something, because let’s take the technology aspect of it. So since about the 80s, up until today, in the last 40 years, the technological leap that we went through as humanity, a society is absolutely insane. And as we speak, just a couple of weeks ago, Chad GPT was released with which I’m sure you’ve played with already, and the AI is going to accelerate it even further. And yet, even in a really expensive private school, where, you know, my daughter goes, where they treat the school is a little bit like a startup, you know, they’ve got a 3d printer and smart boards that connect to a computer. And you know, lots of interesting things. They only spend about one hour a week on the computer, on learning, you know, some, you know, something that has to do with a computer. Now, this is a pretty advanced school, like I said, they do a lot of science stuff. They study on a Chromebook. So they use computers to study which is a huge development in my, you know, in my opinion, a huge development compared to what all the other schools are doing here. But even at that school, they’re way behind what’s going on. You know, for example, my daughter this morning, she was doing homework, and she’s supposed to write a report about this charity organization. And I taught her how to use Chad GPT to go and get the Chad GBT technology to go do the research for her. So it can actually give her all the points, etc. So she got to do her homework in like five minutes and loved it. And somebody would say, well, you’re teaching your daughter to take a shortcut to you. She’s not really becoming smarter or whatever. But what I’m saying is we’re so we’re at a point in our development as a society, we’re going on your own and investing three hours into researching a topic, and putting all the different pieces of information, and then coherently expressing it in the in the report is a skill of the previous century. So my question to you,

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How do you like it? What’s your point of view about the education system in general? Like, this is my point of view, I’m really unhappy about it. I really think they’re, they’re dropping the ball. And I really think they’re stuck in the Stone Age. You’ve got to look at it. Firstly, they probably have to look at it from a teacher’s perspective. Now, if a teacher knew what we know, they wouldn’t be a teacher. Because they hardly get paid any money. We probably make more every month than they make every year, if not every week. So it’s kind of a situation where if they knew what we know, they couldn’t so they can’t really teach it but I get what you’re saying about. I mean, we was a parents evening, a few months back and one

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The teacher said, you need to work really, really hard. So that when you get older, you’re good at qualifications, and you can get a good job. And in front of my son, I explained the yes to my son, and I went, no. And I said, Well, that’s, that’s true. I said, he needs to learn to work hard, off his own back, so that he can be successful when he grows up, he doesn’t necessarily need to go and get a job. And my missus was looking at me as if like, you can’t really say that, but I’m completely open about this. To anybody who will listen to it, look, you’re completely wrong, I don’t want my kid to grow up and work his ass off to get qualifications that he’s never going to use, and then become like you.

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Teacher, not you, because you’re always doing what I did. To become like the teacher or like, like the person’s stocking the shelves in Tesco, or the taxi driver, or the lorry driver, I want him to grow up and become

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a success in his own right, somebody who controls his own destiny and somebody who understands that the work ethic is the most important thing, because you’ve got to work hard. But not only do you need to work hard, you need to focus but you don’t need to folk, like a few years back when I first figured out how to dominate the internet online, okay, for my local businesses, a locksmith, I sat and literally for months built 10s of 1000s of pages, one after the other after the other after the other. And I kept building these pages. And eventually, I ended up with over 200 Guys on a national basis working from all the subcontractors, and we were doing about 150 grand a month. And I thought this was absolutely amazing. First of all, within two years, a fighter figured that strategy out. The first thing I would have done is gone and found some developers and said, right, this is what I want to do. And I needed to build this for me in the next six months, so that I can do what would have taken me a year in one day. And that’s exactly what I did years later. And now we turn that into software. And that software now has several 1000 monthly subscription buyers, who pay us every single month to use the software which I designed to build my business. So the shortcut side of things, I think, is brilliant. Because if you teach somebody, right, you’ve got to work hard. And you’ve got to focus where you’re going to focus the right way. So if there’s a shortcut that can be taken, then focus on the short call and cut that work. That work level in half, too many people want to trade time for money. And it’s completely wrong. If the more time you spend on making money, the less opportunities you’ve got to be able to grow in scale. And it’s all about automation. So like you just said with the

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with the data and the chat GPT it’s why would you do that I mean, I’ve got a thing called Word tune read that I use. So whenever somebody sends me something to read, I open the URL in that. And what it does is it pulls out all the key points. So it’ll basically pull out all the key points from the page that somebody sent me. And they’ll be able to read like five paragraphs for a 3000 word article, because it usually only has five to 10 key points that are important, and the rest is just gibberish. And it’s kind of the same thing. Anything that saves time, enables you to spend more time on doing something that’s going to make money. So as far as the skill system Yes, I think it’s set in the Stone Age’s. And I don’t see it changing anytime soon. Unless they turn around and say to people like me, or like you, I call the successful entrepreneurs that, okay.

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His is half a million dollars a year, that’s a teacher. And the government’s never going to agree to that so they’re never going to learn what it is we do.

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And I just can’t see how it’ll ever evolve into that. Because the people who know what we know, can potentially do 50 to 100 grand a month, doing very, very little. So why would you go do a job that’s super stressful, put a lot of kids that’s going to give you loads of earache and stress and then have to go Mark 50 different work teeth every single day doesn’t make sense to me. So I can’t see how it’s going to progress to that. But it has to eventually. So well, I don’t think it will ever be that way. I think for the most part schools will be built, there will actually be something like the concept of a school originating back in Prussia, which is what Germany used to be called or something. If my memory serves me, right. And they were build this, this model of a school was built to get soldiers to build a generation of soldiers. And so if you look at the way the school is, and the kind of qualities it cultivates in a child, on an individual level, and the way it teaches the child, you see how that is true, because I’ve got Army, I’ve got military experience. I served for many, many years in the Israeli Air Force. So I got to kind of taste the world of what you would call like a sheep world because as a soldier, you’re not allowed to think you’re not allowed to make decisions. You know, if somebody told you to stand right here, if you just take a step right or take a step left or jump, that’s like a violation, you know, so you have to literally stand there and

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not move your ass. So if you look at a school, the school is exactly like that. They want all the kids to sit down and listen, and not really ask questions. For the most part, the good teachers actually encouraged their children in the class to ask questions, then they taught them to memorize stuff. They don’t teach them to think, which is my biggest problem with schools. That is they really don’t teach them how to think. And the only school in my area where I felt that they’re actually encouraging kids to think critically, was this school where I ended up taking my daughter to because, you know, actually went on the school tour, a school tour, and I started, like, I went into like a class, and I started watching and seeing what’s going on. And you see the teachers having a dialogue with the kids. And he’s posing questions. And he’s asking questions, and they’re asking questions, there’s actual critical thinking, you know, I used to have a sign in my home office back in Israel, if everyone is thinking if everyone is thinking the same way, no one is thinking. But that’s exactly what happens in a traditional environment where, you know, you’re basically being told how to think you’re not being encouraged to solve problems. I think entrepreneurs, by their nature, are problem solvers. They’re really ambitious problem solvers. They’re not happy with the status quo, and most greed, entrepreneurial stories, usually trek back to a person who was unhappy about a status quo in a certain industry, in a certain way, right, just like you weren’t happy about something in your life that led you to starting a business. So the other thing that I really want to see happening more and more in our society, especially when it comes to children, is they really need to focus more on self-development principles than they do on math. And you know how to use a calculator to calculate a square root of whatever. Because kids come out of school, they have zero understanding how the real world works, and they have zero tools to deal with the, with the actual harshness of life. Because everyone is now a snowflake, they get offended about everything, oh, you’re making me work too hard. Oh, I showed up for work. Hi. And you can find me because that’s the violation of my rights. You know, all that nonsense. If I showed up to work high when I was, you know, washing dishes at Burger King, I would be kicked out and I didn’t want to be kicked out, I needed the money. So I learned how to be effective, how to show up on time and showed some discipline. Yes, I had to do some really difficult and dirty jobs. But they made me into a better man, and made me appreciate certain things about my life today. And especially, they made me appreciate systems, which is what entrepreneurs are good at something you also talk about, in your book, where entrepreneur, like you said, you’re not going to go and create 1000 pages with content, you’re going to figure out a way to create a system that spits out 10,000 pages of content without you having to do the actual work of creating the pages of content. And that’s a key difference in how someone like you, and someone who works a day job, thinks, and if anyone ever wonders about why the CEO of a big company gets paid 100 times more money than the average employee in that same company. This is because they can be critical thinkers, they can problem solve, and they can create systems that have a much larger impact than the effort of one employee in that company. If somebody’s been working at a factory, and been tightening the screw like that for the last 20 years. And they’re not more effective. I think that’s true today than they were 20 years ago, they should not be getting your race, and they don’t deserve a raise. But if they came up with a way to tighten that screw with one move, so they can tighten 20 more screws in the same hour, then that person should get a raise. And that’s the difference, in my opinion, how an entrepreneur thinks and non-entrepreneur things. Do you think that that can be learned? Because I do think that can be learned. And I think a lot of people, like you were saying earlier about the sheep mentality about schools, it’s a control mechanism. And when everything around you sells to control you to go in one specific direction. It’s human nature not to think and just to do as you are told, but I believe almost anybody can learn to become a much more efficient thinker, and can start looking at things from a bigger perspective.

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Rather than just thinking to themselves,

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this is how it’s done. Forget about it, there’s no point thinking about it. This is how it’s done. This is how they’ve always done it. I’m just gonna carry it. But there are people like that who are happy to do that. And I know a lot of people that are like that, where it’s like, I don’t care. I just want to get paid at the end of the week and get paid on a weekend.

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But there’s no there’s, it’s good for society that there’s people like that otherwise, because we need more of those people in society than we do entrepreneurs. And that’s probably why

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A school is going to remain like it is because they want to build people with a sheet mentality who will follow that and will have one leader that can tell them what to do. And then everybody’s just going to be like a herd and do it at all.

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But I believe anybody, even those that are not like that, naturally, can actually learn to be like that. Because if he taught it in school, we would have more entrepreneurs than we know what to do with. And I think that’s a real tragedy. First of all, I agree with you, I do believe that every single person on this planet can learn to think in a problem solving manner, I don’t think you can teach to think in the way that Steve Jobs thinks or Elon Musk thinks. I think you can model that a little bit. But I don’t think you can teach that but these guys are not problem solvers. Because the Musk’s and the jobs of the world, they don’t just solve a problem, they create a whole new capability. And that’s like something you can teach. You don’t meet people like that too often. But a, but a hardcore entrepreneur. And this is what I consider myself to be, right. I never really worked with you shoulder to shoulder to know just your level of entrepreneurial thinking. But my level is pretty much problem solving, I can solve a problem that’s right in front of me, I can’t create a new level of capability. So in other words, if I have a broken mp3 player, I can fix it, but I won’t create the iPod. That’s really not my not my forte if you know what I mean. So , problem solving is definitely a learnable skill. And I’m a great example to that somebody because I spent my whole life consciously in the army and I don’t know if you knew this about me, I actually went to religious school. When I moved from Ukraine to Israel. My parents sent me to a school called shovel, which was a religious school for immigrant children where the Israeli

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religious groups were trying to recruit newcomers and may turn them into religious people. So I used to pray twice a day. I would put on the T line which is the thing you put on your head and on your arm. So I was really, really into it. But then I went to an Israeli Air Force Academy.

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I studied there for like six years and then I enlisted in the Israeli Air Force. So I was like a very, I was this I was a sheep man. I was like, and I was happy to. I really liked the idea of fitting in. But then at some point, you read Kiyosaki, Rich Dad, Poor Dad, and then Cashflow Quadrant. And that changes everything because and this is the greatest thing I think, is school has to get Robert Kiyosaki his books, make it a part of the curriculum, and make them read the Rich Dad Poor Dad and the Cashflow Quadrant, because what you described the process of having have having built 1000s of pages, and then realizing Wait a second, this is not efficient. Let me go build a software that builds these pages for me, not only it’ll build the pages for me in my niche, but also have 3000 Other people pay me a monthly subscription fee for using my software, while I kick back and do nothing or at least go work on some other projects, which I know that’s what you do, don’t just, you know, kick back and scratch your balls all day, you know, you’re much more hard working than that. So, in Cashflow Quadrant is where this exact thing is described, the story of a guy who wanted to bring water to the village. And you know, he basically starts making rounds, goes to the river and comes back with buckets. And then when the demand grows, he gets his son to join him. And now they’re going together back and forth across the river, while some other guy is kind of like you. I’m pretty sure his name was Mike as well, even though it’s a made up story, but let’s call him Mike. So some other Mike, you know, he basically lives in that village, he looks at the guy who’s constantly bringing in the water. And he’s like, okay, and he spends the next year building a pipeline. He just builds this pipeline all the way to the river that, you know, gets the water automatically. So he then stands next to the tap and he opens the tap for people and collects the money or whatever. And so the irony of this story is not only does Mike make more money, but Mike doesn’t really work all that hard. And when the old man who’s still carrying the water using the buckets with sun, he can’t really carry that water fast enough. There’s simply I mean, it’s the human body, and its ability to withstand pain and effort, that’s competing against automation like a pipeline.

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If you really think about it, it’s not a fair fight. So not only you’re becoming more efficient, you’re becoming richer, you’re solving a problem for other people. And you don’t need to work all that hard. So you basically get to have your cake and eat it too. And you know, and it’s just the way entrepreneurs truly get rich exactly what you’ve done. So look, we can talk about non business. What you’ve just said there let me just bring mentioned salty right. So you brought something about the story. Right? So like I was saying to you earlier critical thinking right and how to think big and how to

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To become entrepreneurial, can be learned by anybody. Right. But you know, the hardest skill, and the pipeline was exact, like, he was like it was the perfect story for it. Right? A lot of people can learn to think big, right? And you’ll understand this from I know, I know, tons of entrepreneurs like this, and you’ll know loads, but they’re no good at thinking long term. Right? So they want to jump onto these different promotions into these different setups, and they’re thinking to themselves, right, boom, I can make 25 grand this week off this. Whereas I’d think to myself, right, I can make five grand off this week. And then I’m gonna make five grand next month and five grand next month and five grand next month. And I’m going to build something long term, right? And with that pipeline, what you’ve seen there, he didn’t just think big, he didn’t just think outside the box. But he was thinking about the hardest thing for any entrepreneur to learn, is to not just think big, but to think long term. And still now, and I talk, I was talking to 150 different entrepreneurs every single month, right, and probably 95%, if not more, are still short term thinkers. Even though they think big, they make lots of money, they make millions every single year. But next year, they’re still gonna have to work because like you said earlier about systems, they’re not thinking long term, they’re not looking at this and saying, If I create this, it’s still gonna generate me money in 510 1520 years’ time. And I’m gonna build it once this deal works towards that 997, and things like that, that. And that story was brilliant. As soon as you said, it was like, you’ve just hit the nail on the head of what the most difficult thing for an entrepreneur to learn. And I think the time you learn it, is when it gets to the point where you’ve got a few million sitting in the bank, you’ve bought your house, you paid it off, you’ve paid for your cars, your kids schools, and tuitions, and college and all that. But when it’s like, right, I no longer need money, then you start thinking long term naturally. But if you can learn to think long term like Jeff Bezos did, right at the beginning, you can get to the point where you’re making 10 times more money than you can ever imagine. And working 10% of what you ever thought,

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You know, I really think it’s impossible for most people to do, and I’ll share my own experience about that.

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It took me maybe I started thinking long term, maybe five years ago, man. But before, it was never like that it was going from one winner to another, it was hoping to hit one jackpot today, and then another one tomorrow. And everything was like I said short term thinking. And looking back now I realize why that happens. That happens. Because usually great entrepreneurs start out because it’s true for you. It’s true. For me, it’s true for most people, we know, almost no great entrepreneurs start out really, really rich. And that whoever believes that idea, by the way, is just misled, and horribly, horribly misled. Most people get into entrepreneurship, not because they’re trying to change the world, it’s because they really want to make some real money. And not to have to have a boss, who is usually not as intelligent as they are, and not good people. But you know, regardless, you get into entrepreneurship, or starting your own business, for reasons that are primarily monetary, and with it. With this comes another fear, the fear of being without money, again, the fear of poverty. And that fear is so dominant, that fear is so prevalent, that fear is so gripping that even after you’ve made your first million, you still can’t really believe it. You’re like still going for the next winner, trying to ride the next campaign, build the next winning software, and get the next promotion going. Because again, I don’t know if this is true for you, man. But for me, it’s so true. Because there’s this wolf.

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And it’s chasing me. And now the wolf is here to take everything I’ve got. So every morning, I wake up, and I have a cup of Ziff, I’m poor. And that’s been the reality of the first seven, maybe nine years of my journey. It’s been subsiding in recent years. So it created the possibility and the mental bandwidth to think longer term. But I think in many ways, I still suffer from it. And I spoke about this on this podcast many times to this idea of, I’m not really rich, that I’m still poor in my mind. That’s what for you that’s what’s fueling the short term thinking. Yep, I totally agree. I mean, I think I was forced into long term thinking when I when I first I came back from London and I needed to start another business so I went and got a job at a call center and I started teaching myself to pick locks at my desk, right and once at once and everyone was like you fucking money not coming the Pope was at dinner and right now I’m learning a lot on the setup a locksmith company. So everyone’s like he’s fucking stupid. Right? So I’d sit there probably three months. I’d learn to pick different padlocks and different locks. Start picking locks at my desk at dinner time and

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Then, as soon as I thought, right, I can pick any walk. So I started advertising. And so I went. So I started advertising on Google ads. And the first job that came in, I said, right, I quit, right there was like, what are you doing? Because I’ve got a job, I’ve just quoted him for 40 quid, I’m gonna go and do it. I wasn’t getting paid that day, I will go in. So it turns out, we’ve set a lot of picks. And its door mechanism on a PVC door jamb. And I was like, I turn over that so I can pick the walk, you know, off this key. And I was like, shit. So I phone the guy at the suppliers, because I’ve sorted that out. And he talked me through exactly how to break into this

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into this house. Anyway, from there, I kind of fell in love with it. I was like, I need to now know how to break into everything and do everything. So I focused on it for next year. And I ended up with over 200 guys on a national basis taking work from there. And we were doing 150 grand a month, right. But the biggest problem with locksmithing is if you’ve ever locked yourself out, and it costs you a couple of 100 quid to get in, you never lock yourself out ever again. Right? So there’s no repeat business. So even though I’d do 150 grand in month one, month two, I was hitting zero. And then I’m looking at saying folk, I’ve got 30 or 40 grands worth of overheads that I have to make before. So I was always stressed. And I was always worried. And it was always. So as soon as I started to transition into software, instantly, I was like writing monthly subscriptions, you know, I’m gonna, it cost me 30 or 40k to build something. So then, as soon as that was done, I was like, right, the next step for me is I’m going to move into monthly subscriptions. And I’m going to build the business in the long term. So everybody that gets involved, he’s paying me every single month, because I’ve been so stressed for so many years, with everyone working itself out once and it’s like never gonna do it again. So you never get any repeat business. It was I didn’t want contracts because I didn’t want to boss

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contracts, but I wouldn’t like No that makes perfect sense. And again, once again, we see this thread of, you know, being unhappy with the status quo. So even after you broke through your, you know, your 100k in a single month, you know, you still need to be an entrepreneur, you’re looking at the status quo with this new set of eyes, and you’re like, Okay, now I don’t like this part about it. So I’m gonna go fix that. And you’re building a thriving software business with dozens and dozens of software products, and 1000s of people 10s of 1000s of people paying you a monthly fee, which means every time every morning when you wake up, before you even put on your slippers, you already had several $1,000 probably coming into your bank account overnight because of the rebuilds that are coming in. So it’s an amazing position to be in. And really, really big, big thumbs up big kudos, you know, high five for success, man. So, guys, hope you enjoyed this episode. If you like Mike, and what he talks about, and his vision, then I urge you to go ahead and get a copy of this book. In a world full of sheep. Fuck you. I’m an entrepreneur by Mike Martin, you can get it on Amazon. You can Google it, you can use the link in the description. If you’re listening on YouTube, you can use the link in the show notes. If you go to our website at listbuildinglifestyleshow.com. Or, if you want to get it directly from Mike himself, maybe there’s a website where they can go? fuckyoubooks.com Wow, what a great domain. What a great domain. Yeah. Nice. All right. So you heard the man, get the book. It’s really, really cool. Especially if you’re thinking about getting into entrepreneurship. You’re thinking about getting started as you’re in your own business, but you’re still not sure you know, what’s the first step, where to go or where to get started. And again, look up Mike Martin, online and on social media and get his book and I’ve had a true pleasure having a chat with you today. Thank you so much. And till next time we chat. Have a good one.