Ryan Deiss

Since 1993, Alex has generated almost $400 million in sales and profits for his marketing students, clients, and strategic alliance partners on five continents. His colleagues acknowledge him as the Warren Buffet of the Internet because of his unique ability to make money for his partners, clients and students.

Clients and luminaries alike say that his training and principles cause greater return on investment and also point of inflection that creates legacy. His expertise has been showcased on ABC, NBC, and Fox television, National Achiever’s Congress, Speaker, and Billionaire Mentor Magazine.

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Mindie Kniss:  Hello and welcome back to another episode of The Lucrative Society. We are super excited today because if you haven’t heard this guy, I think you were just born yesterday.

Sean Stephenson:  Under a rock.

Mindie Kniss:  Under a rock. We are delighted to have our friend Alex Mandossian with us today. Alex, thank you for being with us.

Alex Mandossian:  Thank you. My mother was born under a rock. She still doesn’t know what I do.

Sean Stephenson:  [Laughing] Awesome. Alex, I’m curious if you could just share with our listener, what is your wealth evolution from like how you first started making money to where you are today and the journey of that experience.

Mindie Kniss:  I’m excited to hear this.

Alex Mandossian:  Well, it started March 9th, 1964 in Hollywood, California when I was born to George and Carol Mandossian, I suppose. About four years later, I found myself in an Armenian church cause I’m Armenian descent and they didn’t let me speak English in the house because you know, we’re Armenian. She wanted me and then my sister, about another year later, to speak Armenian fluently. And the only way to do that is to force speaking fluently, you know, in the house. And so it was frustrating. But I learned Armenian, I still can speak Armenian, which is nice cause you know when you go to an Armenian delicatessen and they swear you out, you know exactly what they’re saying. It pays off in Glendale, California anyway. But they, for some reason, thought that it would be cool for me to recite classical Armenian poetry.

Now I couldn’t think anything to be drier than or as boring as watching paint dry. But you know, I was four years old. So at the dinner table, at the breakfast table, they would just have me recite and remember stanzas as of these 10 and 15-minute poems in classical Armenian. And Armenian’s tough enough, but classical Armenian, I mean it was crazy, but somehow I learned it. So I would recite publicly at church and I was kind of like a mini Mozart on the stage because they couldn’t believe I could remember all that. There was one poem that was 22 minutes long and I learned every stanza. Heck, I practiced every day because otherwise, I couldn’t eat dinner or breakfast. So that was the ethical bribery. It’s very handy, especially when you’re hungry. And so as it turned out, and I had two very loving parents, I would be the favorite of these elderly women who were widows at church with blue hair.

And one side of my face was always pinker than the other, cause they’d come and pinch my cheek and I’d have like a throng of little old ladies about a hundred deep at church in the recital hall. And that happened week after week after week. And that was my first entrance to public speaking. And so at that moment, I knew that I wouldn’t be intimidated in front of a crowd because I mean who could be intimidated in front of 70-year-old blue-haired Armenian women in Pasadena, California? So that was really the beginning of where I got my start, where I felt very comfortable in public. Even though I’m an introvert and I gain my energy privately, when I’m on stage, I’m not like a Tony Robbins that goes into the crowd at the break and I feed off the crowd. I have to take a break and go in the green room, recharge and then come back out again.

But I never was shy. I can’t remember ever having stage fright. And so I think that’s where it began. So fast forward, in high school and college I was a professional athlete. I was a cyclist and that was my excuse not to work or make any money. Right? And my parents, I was very fortunate, they funded my high school and college. I went to UC Irvine in Southern California, got two degrees, one in economics, one in psychology. And then I figured out I was unemployable because I felt I knew more than my boss who would interview me. My interviews didn’t go very well. I was probably a little offensive, definitely arrogant. And so somehow I convinced my parents to give me my grandparents’ money that they had left me and that was going to be paid out over the next 10 years.

And I took it all at once and my mother put a second on her home in Pasadena to buy a frozen yogurt franchise, which I knew nothing about. Even worse, it was a bakery. You know, baked goods are worse than frozen yogurt. I mean, they go stale a lot faster. So for about 18 months, my break-even was supposed to be $823. I think my best day was $150 and I had a lot of $60 days. And after 18 months, I was on the other side of the counter at age 25 newly graduated two degrees, very educated. I thought decently smart, definitely scholastically smart. And I was the favorite prey of all the advertising people selling me advertising on the back of the cash register, those receipts that come out and all the little coupons and stuff like that. And a small business administration auctioneer was auctioning off my equipment for a few cents on the dollar.

So it was at that moment where all the money had gone. I was $242,000 in debt. I had no business contacts. I didn’t tell my friends about it because I was showing off, Hey, look at this beautiful store. And then the store closed down. And then I was thinking the unthinkable and I didn’t speak the unspeakable, but I thought the unthinkable and you can fill in the blanks of what that is because I didn’t know what to do. My mother’s house was in foreclosure from the small business administration and my only choice was to go home and live with her cause I didn’t have any money to eat. I didn’t have a roof over my head. And I was about to live in a foreclosed house, written with the worthless emotions of guilt and shame and I didn’t want to see any family. They’d say, how could you do this to your grandparents?

I mean, the Armenians are really good at guilt. Like the Italians and the Jews, right? They’re professional guilt seekers. So I just felt like a pin cushion at that point and I didn’t want to have to do anything with family. And then somehow I stopped on the way back from Long Beach to my mom’s house. My car was filled with my stuff because I couldn’t afford to live in my apartment anymore. They kicked me out. I looked good. I mean, it wasn’t like I was going hungry yet, but I was about to, and I stopped at MacArthur Park, which is a park in Los Angeles, California, just outside of the city. And I stopped on a park bench, I’d love to say it was snowing. It was freezing cold. I had frostbite, but it was warm. It was summer and it was a comfortable sunny day.

It wasn’t even smoggy outside. It was a great day. And that day, I didn’t realize, I would learn everything I needed to learn about the marketing that I know today. But it was a lesson that would become my origin story for the rest of my life 10 years later. And so on the park bench, you want to know what I observed on the park bench?

Mindie Kniss:  I do.

Alex Mandossian:  So I saw, now, first of all, I’m depressed. I’m sitting there and I’m just wondering what am I going to do? I mean, there’s like no way out. My nostrils are below the water. I feel like there’s a 50-pound weight against my ankles just pulling me down. And even though it’s on paper, there’s a lot of things that are about to happen that I’m responsible for. And I feel horrible. I feel helpless that there’s nothing I can do.

I have no contacts. I have no network, I have nothing! And I was an isolationist too, which I still am a little bit, but I didn’t have a way out. None of my family is wealthy. No one has made over $150,000 in their life for a year. They’re all teachers. So they’ve all been salaried. My dad was an engineer, but also a teacher. So I was on the park bench and I see this heavy-set woman. She looked like she was in her 50s and back then they had these birdseed machines that, these days they put Jelly Bellies and hot tamales in them. You know, they have a little crank and you turn them. And this is 1989 so she put a nickel in there. She turned the crank and the birdseed fell into her hand.

So I’m kind of watching her, cause I got nothing to do. This is way before cell phones. You know, TV still had antennas back then. I think cable TV was just coming about. I think her intention is to feed the pigeons. And so she takes the birdseed and she’s showing the pigeons the birdseed and they say pigeons are stupid, but they’re really not. If they’re hungry and they want what’s in the hand, let’s call that the lead magnet or the bait or the ethical bribe. You know, she’s kind of walking towards them but gradually, not too fast, but gradually. And so as she’s walking towards them, their heads are bobbing back and forth and they’re walking away from her. So she turns around and she still shows the birdseed because that’s what they want. She knows what they want, she thinks, and she turns around, she walks away slowly and almost as if she was seducing them, they turn around, I mean, literally 50 pigeons and they’re walking on the pavement in the park and I’m watching this and she turns around again and she walks towards them and they don’t walk as fast anymore.

None of them are flying away cause they’re not afraid. She’s already established some level of trust. Like, Hey, she’s not going to hurt them even though she’s a hundred times bigger. They still don’t come after her. And she turns around again. She shows the seeds and they go back and forth. I would say it took about 7 to 10 minutes and they did this dance and it was interesting. I could care less back then, but today when I’m thinking about it, that distance got less and less and less. And what I thought she wanted was to have one of them feed from the palm of her hand. So it looked uncomfortable. She got on one knee, she genuflected like we used to do at church. And for some reason, maybe some courageous pigeon came up and kind of pecked the beak from the palm of her hand.

And then as soon as that first one did it, probably was a teenager, you know, reckless… Another one came and then another one came, another one and pretty soon it seemed like there were 50 and then there were these other flocks coming in like, Hey guys, it’s okay. Come on over here. Food! She ran out of birdseed. So she goes, she cranks the birdseed thing again and it comes in her hand. She didn’t have to go through that dance that took 7 to 10 minutes. She went right to them. They were landing on her shoulders. In the Armenian tradition, if pigeons poop on your head, that’s good luck. They were pooping on her. You know, I’m going, wow, check it out. She’s lucky. Right? Cause that was the culture I was brought up. And so I was fascinated because she was now the pigeon lady, kind of like out of Mary Poppins, you know, feed the birds, tuppence a bag.

So she left and later on it was summertime. So there was this young kid, maybe he was six years old, he was there with his mom and he’d watched this lady do what I had watched her do. He saw the result, pigeons feeding from her hand, landing on her, getting all this love. Really, they not only opted in, but they had continuity now. They had bought a high ticket product. I mean, they were all over this. They had opted in, they were reading the auto-responders, they were reading her newsletter. I mean, boom, they’re all over her. I think you know where I’m going with this. And so the young kid asked for a nickel, mother gave the kid a nickel and then he didn’t know about the dance. He didn’t know about what it takes to create that relationship of getting to know them, liking and trusting them, getting to show that bait and be careful, especially in the beginning, which is the most fragile part of any relationship.

First impressions last forever. I don’t think you get second impressions. So I thought my life was over, but as I’m watching this, the young kid runs at the pigeons, same pigeons. But this human being was maybe a third of the size of the old lady so it wasn’t as intimidating, I would assume. But still bigger. And he runs at the pigeons, they fly away because they’re scared. And out of disgust, he just throws the birdseed at them and he kind of shrugs his shoulders. And he’s upset and he goes to his mom, he starts crying, you know, and I wanted to go to him and say, Hey man, here’s what you gotta do. I just watched this old lady do it. It took about 10 minutes, but it’s super cool. You can have this too. But they went away and he didn’t even notice the pigeons came down to the ground and they started pecking all the birdseed on the grass and on the path of the pavement.

And I realized, 10 years later, not then because I eventually went home, lived with my mom for three years. I’d love to tell you everything was great the next day, but it wasn’t. It was hell for three years. The house ended up not going into foreclosure. I got on my feet, we ended up paying off the loan and she still lives in that home today. And we go there and we hug sometimes thinking about it, cause I just remember when we burned the deed that was the lien on the house, we were just weeping and celebrating cause only the people who’ve been in debt know what that feels like to get out of that hole and that abyss. And so I realized later that if you push too strong too soon in the beginning, they’ll fly away from you. And these are your prospects, these are the candidates, these are potential members, whatever you call them in business, potential patients.

And if you’re too passive, they’re going to still want to go through that dance, the back and forth, the to and fro process. But if you go through that process and you can duplicate it and you go through the evolution, you don’t just go for the result that the kid wanted. Everyone wants that be the multimillionaire or the billionaire that they see. But no one knows that Steve Jobs not only got fired, but he had some horrific years. I know a little bit about his history. No one knows that Bill Gates slept under a desk for a year, just building Microsoft. They don’t see the evolution. They just see the result. And they go, man, I can get that and why am I not getting it? And there’s this suffering of kind of crawling through, I don’t know if you’ve seen the movie, but The Shawshank Redemption tunnel, 500 meters of sewage before you get out the other end and it’s horrible weather.

It’s raining, but you’re not in the stench and the crap of the sewage, right? So you’re happy to get out as the freshwater’s coming all over you. And I learned that from that lady. As you got to go through that dance, the beginning is the most fragile part. And once you establish that trust, and once people understand and believe you and it’s the right time, like the pigeons were hungry. If the pigeons were full, maybe they wouldn’t have been interested, but it has to be the right time. Then when you have all that going for you, they know you, like you, trust you. Those aren’t the only three. They understand what you have for them. They believe you, which is the hardest thing and then it’s the right time. If you have those six things in your favor, which are like locked doors that open up to the path to wealth and riches.

Then I realized that that’s what I got to do in my business. And so fast forward to 1995 and I was a BG digital marketer, which means Before Google and I started consulting for a company that’s not around as much anymore, but it was called 1ShoppingCart. And I helped the original owner sell it to a company called Web Pros. And I don’t know if they’re still around. I was one of the pioneers, or I would call myself “dinosaurs of digital marketing.” And as it turned out I always focused on speaking virtually or publicly on stage and teaching. And I would tell my students, man, I want you to be bigger than me. I want you to be wealthier. I want you to get more exposure. And nothing is more annoying than when it actually happens. And so most of my students back then have now become my teachers and I could name names and name drop, but I’m not going to, they’ll probably come up in this interview, but I learned everything I needed to learn in 10 minutes. I just didn’t realize it until about 10 years later.

Mindie Kniss:  Well I love that story Alex. I didn’t know about your background and mine is really, really similar in terms of being so far in debt and ending up having your car and that’s it. I was living out of my office for a time. So yeah, I hear you. And that is just awesome to hear about the story with your mom and you know, burning that lien that was on the house. That’s so great. So this podcast is really about looking at wealth and I love how you shared that you’ve had the ups and the downs because I think that’s true for all of us. But as you mentioned, people don’t often see that and happiness. So I want to kind of bridge that gap a little bit here. And first and foremost ask you what to you, what is the definition of wealth?

Alex Mandossian:  Wealth and happiness together for me is getting what I want and, more importantly, wanting what I have. And it’s that second part that alludes a lot of people. I had an acquaintance who was a billionaire who took his life because he lost $3 billion, but he still had a billion and a half left. But the humiliation of losing the 3 billion, which was over his net worth, but he was still worth a lot. I mean, you can do a lot with $10 million, right? Even a million. His point of view and his viewpoint of life and how he defined things. He didn’t want what he had. He got what he wanted, but he didn’t want what he had. And I think that’s why sometimes wealthy people will end up in recovery or there’ll be fallen victim or volunteer into addiction or just are not happy.

Like “is that all there is” response. And so I remember I was happy before I made my first million, which was in 2003 online. I was happy. One of the happiest days of my life, other than the births of my kids, was one day in the year 2000 when I made my first dollar online, I made $147. I had a course called Marketing with Postcards. And Ryan Deiss was a student and he took two consultations for me. And look at him now, right? And he tells that story sometimes. He’s the only guy that took both consultations that were in the sleeve jacket of the three-ring binder. Everyone else took one. Some people didn’t take any.

“You can always tell a success in advance by their actions.

And so when I made that first dollar, I realized that passion is overrated. I know passionate people who are unhappy. I know passionate people who are not very nice. I know passionate people who are borderline suicidal. They’re passionately thinking about taking their life, but it’s only the commitment that really matters. Passion doesn’t produce commitment in my belief. I think commitment produces passion. You need the wood first then you got the fire. So I was committed to make money online. I was passionate about it. But the moment I made it, I thought, man, there’s a lot of potential here. That’s like the first pigeon feeding from my hand. You know, there’s all these other people, and I don’t mean people to be pigeons, but that was the metaphor. I remember with the old woman, and it ended up becoming my origin story as a result. So wealth and happiness to me as coupled is getting what you want and then wanting what you have and be careful of that second one cause you’ve got to define it in advance.

Mindie Kniss:  Totally! And thank you because that truly is the intention of this whole conversation. We talk a lot about, we know people who have made tons of money but they’re miserable or people that are happy, but they’re broke. And we’re like, how do we do both? One of the ways that we love to talk about this is getting to know people’s curiosities. So we want to ask you, Alex, what are some of your top, maybe three to five, curiosities right now?

Alex Mandossian:  Well, I’m curious why people are mean to each other. You know, like what’s the hidden agenda behind doing that? Because at the end of your life and two people love each other and they’re mean, right? You know, if they have two days to live, they probably would call each other and say, I’m sorry. Why would you hold onto that for so many years? So I’m always curious about that. Not that I’ve never done that. I mean, I probably owe a lot of apologies to a lot of people. But that’s a curiosity to me because I want to overcome that sooner. And so I’m curious about what is it about some people they have the reconciliation gene and others just don’t, and then half the time I blame it on their parents and I forgive them.

Sean Stephenson:  Alex, we have this four-part question I’m going to walk you through. We ask all of our guests, kind of like a blueprint to figure up how you became who you are and have what you have. It’s an acronym and it’s HERB. And I’m going to walk you through each of them. The first one is habits. What are some of the habits you have, both personally and professionally that you feel really make your life amazing?

Alex Mandossian:  Oh, I’m so glad you asked that because I do have habits. I believe discipline is overrated. Discipline is what you need to start a habit, but once you got one, it’s like breathing, right? For me, some people disagree with me. I’ve had a habit for over 20 years and I’ve done it every single day, six days a week. I take a day off, a BS day. I call it a Business Sabbath. So I just take the whole day off. Usually, it’s a Sunday. When I wake up, I get up and I brush my teeth and I get conscious and then I have an hourglass so I disconnect, especially today when everyone’s connected and it’s 30 minutes and I do one of two things for 30 minutes. This is my morning habit. First thing, before email, before anything, I do this before I do anything, even workout. I read for 30 minutes and I’m reading a book that’s relevant to what I’m wanting to learn that year. Not that day, not that week, not that month. But the habit is if I immerse myself in a year, I’m really going to learn that subject matter, which is I think a big mistake a lot of my students make. They just chase bright, shiny objects with their learning. So I read, and I probably read more than half an hour, but I at least get a half an hour of reading done. So I know how many pages I’m reading per week, and then if I don’t feel like reading that day, which I’ll end up reading in the afternoon anyway, I write and what I write is kind of interesting.

It’s a technique I learned from one of my mentors. He was a student of mine actually, he bought Marketing with Postcards. It’s a copywriter that a lot of people don’t know, but probably both of you know him, Gary Bencivenga. And what he taught me is write, and Gary Halbert taught this too, rewrite the best copy you can get your hands on, and rewrite it with a pencil. So for the last month, no one can see the video, but I’m showing as proof to Mindie and Sean that these are the ads I’ve written out. I write them with an instrument that a lot of millennials don’t even know exist. It’s called a pencil and a pencil has an eraser on it. So if you make mistakes, you can erase it. You don’t have to cross it out. And so I write for 30 minutes.

It’s definitely not the entire ad, but I start thinking like the copywriter, I start feeling like the copywriter and I start acting like the copywriter, cause those same synaptic connections in my brain. And then in my mind, which I think there’s a heart component, I start thinking that way. It makes me a better speaker, a better persuader, an influencer, and definitely a better writer. So I do one of those two things every morning and it’s never been an issue with that habit. So that’s one habit for sure. Another habit I’ve done for at least five times a week is to workout. And so I workout for 50 minutes a day. I set a countdown timer and I don’t even think about it. You know, I suit up. I have all my clothes ready to go, so I’m not thinking about it.

I just put ’em on, I go up, I work out, I come back down and I feel like I’ve written and read and I’ve worked out. So I’ve gotten the mind, body, even a spiritual experience. I’ll meditate for five minutes. I’m not a one-hour meditator. I use Muse these days, which I got as a result of going to Genius Network. It’s awesome. I recommend it. And if I hear a lot of birds and, if you use Muse™ you know what it is, then I know it’s going to be a great day. So I try to get the four levels of consciousness in habit, which is mental, emotional, physical and spiritual before the day begins. I usually can do it within an hour and a half. And so I think that’s the most important habit I’ve ever had because if you own your morning as your own before all the other things that are coming at you are going to sway you or test you or ruin you in some cases cause you get triggered, or allow you to succeed. If you can at least own the first couple hours of your day and you can set it up that way, then you have a trajectory for success. So I think that habit of the morning routine has kept my life so that my children have enjoyed the best schools and I’ve enjoyed a great life.

Sean Stephenson:  So moving from habits to the E in HERB, which is environment, what are the things that you allow in and you do not allow into your personal and professional environments?

Alex Mandossian:  The most important thing for environment for me, and there’s so many different environments from physical, financial, relational… People. That environmental structure, my network I’m very protective of that. One of the most stunningly painful things is when I guess wrong. You know, the only thing worse than going in the wrong direction is going in the wrong direction enthusiastically. And so when I’ve chosen a friend or a colleague or a confidant, someone I entrusted and somehow there’s a betrayal of some kind, doesn’t have to be overly dramatic. Because they’re in my room, right? So I got to get them out of my room cause I’m the doorman. And there’s actually a book that I titled for a couple other colleagues called Who’s In My Room? Ivan Misner, the founder of Business Network International (BNI) has coauthored with two other colleagues of mine.

Getting them out is really difficult. So my relational environment is super, super important because I’m very responsive to what other people say and think when I trust them. If I don’t know them or they’re acquaintances, I could care less. But if I know them and what they say has meaning and if they say things that are hurtful, for whatever reason, I believe them. So I’ve gotta be really careful who I hang out with. So that’s one environment. Another environment is my physical environment that I’m in. Clutter is something I cannot live with. I have these 10 minute magic moments where I have another hourglass that’s 10 minutes. I flip it and I just clean the messes or I organize messes. If there are a hundred things, I put them in piles of 10. So now it’s a little bit less messy.

And then from those piles of 10, I may have five piles and then one and then it’s gone. So maybe after three 10 minute magic timeframes within a day or two, it’s gone. So I like a neat environment. I’m not one of those people. Some writers have books and papers everywhere. I like to tidy up after I’m done and for whatever reason, I can think more clearly because it has an impact on me. So that’s a biggie for me.

Mindie Kniss:  Alex, I think that my next gift from Sean is going to be a bunch of 10-minute hourglasses. [Laughing].

Sean Stephenson:  Yep. They’re going to be all around you.

Alex Mandossian:  Well you can get a little digital timer that says 10 minutes if you want for about 20 bucks from Amazon. It’s awesome. It even has 30 and 45 you know, it has all different ones.

Mindie Kniss:  I don’t want to declutter that much time.

Alex Mandossian:  Another environment that a lot of people don’t think about is my memetic environment, my thoughts. Like what’s my self talk? In NLP, and I know that you’ve done a lot of work in NLP, Sean, the one element… They talk about visual, auditory, kinesthetic, but very few people when they’re teaching early on, talk about auditory digital, which is self-talk. I can’t think of anything that has more impact than the little voice that’s like a shovel that hits the forehead that can either propel you or just hold you back forever.

Sean Stephenson:  So moving from the E of environments to the R, this is resources and they can be books, courses, programs… Whatever it is that you would recommend that people go through for their personal and professional development. What are some of the resources you would recommend?

Alex Mandossian:  I love that question because not everyone is a reader and not everyone is a listener. But a lot of people watch movies because of entertainment. So my number one recommendation is go to Biography.com or go to a channel that you can get online or maybe go to a Netflix channel or now there’s Amazon and find biographies of famous people and people who succeeded. And you’ll always find a story where they were in the pit and then they came out. Then they went back into the pit again. I mean, Abraham Lincoln had two nervous breakdowns. Walt Disney had three. The things that you don’t hear is that process that that old woman went through at MacArthur Park. You know, they’re more dramatic. And so I love watching that because somehow misery loves company. And if I’m isolating, this is what I used to do, I used to watch biographies as my primary source, cause I could just sit there.

I didn’t have to listen. I didn’t have to read. I’d just watch. And I’d go, Whoa, how this nation and the framers created it and all the adversity they went through. I look at some of the kings and kingdoms from the past and all the wars they had to endure. I mean, it’s incredible the number of wars we’ve had through history, 6,000 years. Incredible, incredible! And so just looking through that, there’s always the seed of gratitude of, man, I’m living in the most peaceful time throughout humanity. It’s the safest time. I’m not going outside with a machete cause I’m going to get eaten, you know? And yeah, of course, it’s dangerous and we’ve got to lock our doors and stuff like that, but not compared to history. So I love watching biographies and history type movies, not so much entertainment that gets me out of the rut.

The other one is I like to read and I like to read biographies of successful people and all they had to go through. So if you read Steve Jobs’ biography or you read PT Barnum’s biography, and you looked at all the adversity they had to go through, that’s the thing they have in common for their success. They had to go through the Shawshank Redemption tunnel, crawl through all that shit and muck before they got to the other side. I recommend watching movies because you’re already used to getting entertained if you like movies and watching biographies are super cool.

Sean Stephenson:  Awesome. And then the last of the acronym is B, and that is standing for Beliefs. What are some of the core beliefs that you feel have pulled you through dark times and also helped you rise to the top?

Alex Mandossian:  Well, one core belief is that…

“Sloppy success is better than perfect mediocrity.

So getting started and finishing the first iteration is important. Otherwise, we wouldn’t have any authors or books in the world. The most important thing about a book is to finish it as you probably know. Another belief is that passion doesn’t produce commitment. It’s commitment that produces passion. I mentioned that earlier. I believe that discipline is overrated. I think you need discipline just as like a rocket thruster to get it out of the atmosphere. So 75 miles, the gravitational pull of the earth. But if you go to the moon and back, man, that’s half a million miles. Two ways. You’re using 15% fuel, two there and then one back, once you get out of the 75-mile atmosphere. So all the discipline, all the gravity is in the very beginning and then once habit takes over, then you’re kind of flying through without much friction.

So I believe that discipline is just an intense thrust moving forward till you move away from the gravitational pull. You know, Dan Sullivan has that series Going Against Gravity. It’s just the beginning. That’s the toughest. It’s not going to last that long. I also believe that the only way to live with honor is to be the person I pretend to be. So Socrates kind of said that, to paraphrase, and he’s not quoted that often, but I write that on stage, every time I go on stage because I think hell on earth for me would be for someone to say I’m different offstage than I am on stage. Right? And so, the longer the mask is worn, the more the face grows to fit it. I don’t know who said that. I think George Orwell, I’m not sure, but I’m afraid that. So I want to be the person I pretend to be. And I think that’s been a really cool belief because I tell on myself early, even when I’m selling the audience, I’m telling them it’s coming and it ends up becoming more successful than most. And so that’s really worked well for me.

Mindie Kniss:  Alex, this has been awesome and I know that Sean and I have learned so much from you over the last decade or so and it’s been so fun to get to know you in real life, not just from your products or seeing you online. So I want to thank you so much for being with us today. If our listener would love to also learn from you, where is the best place to send them?

Alex Mandossian:  I made a decision in 2018 like what could be my legacy and rather than writing a book, I want to use my favorite medium, which is audio. And so my podcast is the best place to get 25 years of sales and marketing know-how and human potential training in 25 minute chunks week after week. And it’s free. There’s no opt-in. You can even get the notes which I pay for and it’s at AllSellingAside.com. The tagline is seeding through storytelling is the new seller.

Mindie Kniss:  Love it. That is perfect. So we absolutely recommend that you all check out his podcast, check out everything that he’s got online because it’s all fantastic. Alex, thank you again. We so appreciate you, your time, your wisdom, for sharing with our audience. We absolutely adore you and can’t wait to see you in life, real-time, again.

Alex Mandossian:  Can I say something before we go?

Mindie Kniss:  Of course.

Alex Mandossian:  I want to acknowledge both of you because I’ve kind of snuck up on you two in private moments and it’s easy to have a persona as a couple, and being in public, and being in front of a lot of powerful people. And both of you, at least to me, and as I get to know you both more and more, you both are the people you pretend to be so I really appreciate that about you both.

Sean Stephenson:  You’re welcome.

Mindie Kniss:  Thank you.

Sean Stephenson:  Love you, buddy.

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