What does an award-winning entrepreneur, a TEDx Speaker, a bacon-atarian (thats a
vegetarian who still eats bacon), a funky sock lover, a former rapper (who opened for
the Wu-Tang Clan – YES, really!) and a previously 332lb man (who has since lost over
130lbs despite his affinity for bacon) have in common?
They’re all the same guy.
Jason “JG” Goldberg is an international “Edutainer”, author of the #1 International Best-Seller Prison Break and creator of Playful Prosperity, and Competition-Proof Business Immersion.
He has been a featured expert on media outlets including ABC, CBS, and FOX as well as teaching on the Mindvalley and SoulPancake platforms and creating a business in partnership with NASA and the space shuttle program while earning his MBA.
Now JG focuses on blending his signature mix of simple and transformational wisdom, practical business mentorship, and belly-busting humor to help coaches, speakers, and online educators build “Competition-PROOF” businesses full of impact and influence (and have a ton of FUN in the process)!
As a sought-after international speaker and host, JG has shared the stage with some of the world’s greatest thought-leaders and innovators in human potential and performance including Jason Silva (Host of Nat Geo’s “Brain Games”), Dr. Sean Stephenson (never heard of him) ????, Don Miguel Ruiz (The Four Agreements), Vishen Lakhiani (CEO of Mindvalley), Steven Kotler (Stealing Fire), Marisa Peer (the UK’s psychotherapist to the stars) and so many others that he hopes will impress you if these other ones don’t! 😉
Jason will be part of the upcoming Lucrative Speaker summit. Click the link to grab your free ticket today!
Mindie: I can’t even start this without laughing, oh my God.
Jason: It’s fine. Start it laughing, I love that.
Mindie: We’re going to. Welcome everybody to The Lucrative Society podcast. I am already cracking up because my guest today is a dear friend of mine, an awesome coach, a fantastic speaker, and he does a lot of awesome other stuff too so I’ll have him tell you guys about that, but welcome to the show, Jason Goldberg.
Jason: Now that I’m here, it’s going to become the ludicrous society because this is going to be completely– I’m sorry, I’m ruining the entire brand in the first five seconds of our interview. I hope that’s okay Mindie.
Mindie: I’m all good with that because I know you and if I expected anything other than that, I would not have invited you to this program.
Jason: Good call, very good call.
Mindie: So, J. G., my buddy, you and I have had a lot of conversations over the years about money.
Jason: Yes.
Mindie: And this show essentially came from my challenges, my experiences, my sometimes really hard growth through the evolution of figuring out money, wealth, that whole scene and I know you have so much to say about this so I’m super excited to get into it, but because I know you really well, our listener may not. Could you give them a little bit of your evolution as an entrepreneur and specifically probably as it relates to money?
Jason: Yeah, absolutely. Well, the money conversation is always super interesting to me because I always like to say that on my family crest, the Goldberg family crest, it was like, “I’m scared of money, money always leaves”. It was on the family crest, that was the mantra for The Goldbergs and so I totally get that. I’ve had money challenges my whole life, and it was more my relationship to money more than anything else. I was raised by a single mother; I’m an only child. She worked her butt off, she still works to this day, she’s in her 70s. She did become a life coach a couple of years ago, which is freaking amazing, but just all that stuff with money stuff. So, I saw very early on that in my mom’s struggles with money to take care of me and to do all these things completely on her own. I mean, my grandparents were around to babysit and stuff and so was my uncle when she would work at nights. But what I knew right away, and you’ll see this with people in all kinds of struggling situations, you see people who their parent is an alcoholic and so they either say, “My parent was an alcoholic; now I’m an alcoholic”, or “My parent’s an alcoholic; I’m never touching alcohol ever” and it was the same thing here. It was like, “My mom had money issues, so I’m never going to be that way. If I have to kill myself working to make sure I never struggle in that way, I will do that”, and so I became very achievement-oriented, like “I’m going to crush it.” Way before Gary Vee was crushing it, I was all about crushing it. I didn’t say those words, but I was all about achievement.
So, I’m somebody where I had my first real job at fifteen and a half, my first legal job, but at 12, I was working in baseball card stores, and getting discounts on buying packs of baseball cards, and then taking the ones out that had the most value according to the Beckett guide. There was a thing called the Beckett guide that would tell you how much each card was worth. Then I got this suitcase, Mindie from a garage sale for $3 and inside the suitcase, I put all the best cards and I would set up like a friggin’ drug dealer, pop open my suitcase and sell these cards one by one to the kids. And the parents loved it because the parents didn’t have to keep buying packs and packs of cards. They’d buy the one the kid actually wanted and they’d be happy. So from a very early age, I had the entrepreneurial gene and whether it was healthy or not, it was really to achieve and so I brought that into my corporate life. I was in technology for the better part of 15 years, the last half of that I did IT consulting, making well over six figures in my mid-20s, and just working my butt off constantly to never feel like I would have money scarcity issues. Then here’s the funny part, no matter how much money I had, I still had money scarcity issues, so it didn’t really matter the number in the bank. So yeah, that’s been my relationship to money my entire life.
Mindie: I really would love to have a photo of you with your baseball card suitcase.
Jason: I wonder if it exists. It’s just cameras were so hard back then, it would have been like a Polaroid or you’d have to get it developed. I don’t know if it exists.
Mindie: Ask your mom if she has that because I would love to see that. So let’s talk about what you’re doing now because you have tons of really, really cool things going on. So I’d love to hear a little bit about that.
Jason: Yeah, so as a part of that journey, and it was working on the money stuff, it was working on self-love stuff and it was working on mindset stuff, and it was all these things that I needed to work on because into my mid to late 20s, making the six-figure salary, having what looked like the perfect marriage and having the house and having the car and having all the things that I wanted, or thought I wanted or thought would make me happy, I was also 332 pounds, right? I was at the highest weight I’d ever been in my life and I’m six feet tall, but still, 332 pounds is pretty dangerous and I was really kind of dying a slow death. This morbid obesity, and all the stress and the anxiety and the depression, and even the suicidal thoughts into my mid to late 20s I wasn’t really living as much as I was kind of going through the motions. That’s when I kind of discovered personal growth really as kind of a last-ditch effort because I was so sad and I saw people who had been through stuff that was objectively worse than what I had been through and yet they seem to be okay and I’m like, “I’m a pretty smart guy. What do they know that I don’t?” And so I started reverse engineering and started finding personal growth.
So fast forward, left corporate in 2011, had a couple of other startups, one in the transportation space, one in the technology space in partnership with NASA – technology commercialization. And through that whole process of becoming an entrepreneur and shifting into that mindset, which is a totally different mindset than an employee mindset, I was having coaches, I was being coached, I was seeing all of these transformations for myself and that, in a completely selfish way, became “Wow, this is amazing. How do I get paid to help other people do the same thing and how do I get paid to have an excuse to keep learning this stuff for myself?” And that’s how I kind of fell into coaching, fell into speaking, fell into doing all the things that I’m doing now and so now I run training programs, coaching programs, I speak, I do all the things in order to hopefully help other people have some semblance of the same transformation I had.
Mindie: Love it. I think for you and I, this is the most obvious thing, but let’s define a little bit what you just said, the employee mindset versus the entrepreneur mindset. You and I both came from corporate and have done the entrepreneur thing, so we get both sides of that spectrum, but those that are employees specifically, that might want to eventually get out of that role and become an entrepreneur, can you talk a little bit about the difference in that mindset?
Jason: Yeah, and for the entrepreneurs who are listening, don’t think you’re allowed to tune out and go make a grilled cheese sandwich, because you could be a couple years or more into your business and still have an employee mindset.
Mindie: Good point.
Jason: So changing setting doesn’t change your set, right, just changing setting alone. So this is applicable for everybody. So this shows up in a lot of different ways. Number one, it shows up in this belief that there is a limit to how much you can be paid for the work that you do. When you’re in a corporate environment most of the time, unless you’re in a very high-level position – and even then it’s not necessarily even true – there are other people that can do your job and so there is a set limit, set by the corporation, based on profit and loss, based on a lot of different things as to how much compensation you can make. Now, of course, if you have commissions and other things like that, you have your base plus bonus, there are ways to increase that, but even still, there’s typically a limit. That mindset can be really challenging when we then try to price ourselves when we go out into the world as coaches or speakers because to say, “I’m going to get paid $10,000 for an hour of being on stage”, as amazing and glamorous as that sounds for people, 9 out of 10 people don’t believe they deserve that, because they would never get paid $10,000 for an hour of work at their corporate job. So that’s a huge one first and foremost to look at is that you are not being paid for the hour you are delivering time, you’re not trading your time for money here.
You are doing as that old story with Picasso, where the woman walks up to Picasso in the restaurant and says, “Will you draw something for me?” and he grabs the napkin, draws in 30 seconds, gives it to her and says “It’ll be 20 grand.” She says, “That took you 30 seconds” and he goes, “No, it took me 30 years.” You’re being paid for everything you’ve been through and overcome and grown through and created to be able to be the person on that stage that can share that message and impact people in a way where the hour they’re in the room with you is the beginning of their transformation. The next ten, twenty years of their life could be impacted massively by what they heard in that hour. So $10,000 is a steal.
Mindie: Mic drop! I don’t need to ask you anything else.
Jason: Well, it was good to see you, Min.
Mindie: I will though. I would love to know your definition of wealth. What does wealth mean to you?
Jason: That’s a really good question. What’s my definition of wealth? You know what’s funny, I don’t think about wealth as much as I think about– And It’s probably two sides of the same coin, but just from a semantics standpoint, I always think of financial security, right. So financial security, for me, has been more what I’ve looked to attain than wealth, and maybe that’s a developmental thing and as you go through the thing, you shift over to wealth, or maybe it’s just semantics. So the reason I say that is because to me, and this is something that a coach of mine told me years ago that really resonated. Because of this employee mindset and because of the money scarcity issues I had, I always thought there was a number in the bank, that I would feel I am now financially secure and of course, you can read stories all over the place of people who have $10 million in the bank, and are completely terrified that it’s all going to disappear. Or when I was making $100,000 plus in my corporate job worrying, “Oh my god, if I lose this job, what if I don’t find another job where I make $100,000 plus a year?” But there’s no number and so the shift there became financial security or financial freedom, even if you will, is knowing that you know how to create money when you need to create money and to me, that’s true freedom because now I’m not tied to a number in the bank, I’m simply tied to my resourcefulness. Instead of being tied to my resources, I’m tied to my resourcefulness and that’s something I can control. So if you can get really good at understanding and knowing how to make money from your skills and gifts, then you have an innate sense of financial security or financial freedom, no matter what number is in the bank, at least in my experience,
Mindie: And I would add on to that that if you are doing it from your own skills and gifts, that it is highly integrated into your purpose as well, like it’s why you’re here, so I love that. What does financial security or financial freedom get you?
Jason: Yeah, it’s a really good question. It’s funny, I think what it gets me is – how can I say this? – recaptured energy, right? So I feel like when I’m not in a place of financial freedom or financial security – and realize that the way we’re talking about this right now, financial freedom, financial security is a place to come from not a place to get to. So for if we’re coming from financial security and from financial freedom, then I am not leaking my energy trying to manage a number in the bank that I think give me the safety and peace that I’m looking for. I can essentially cut out the middleman and be happy and peaceful now and that’s not an easy thing. It’s simple, right? I’m making this very simple and I don’t want people rolling their eyes saying, “Oh, yeah, sure it’s easy for him to say”. No, this is a practice, right? This is a practice to anchor into that but when you live in the direction of that, you don’t have to do it perfectly, you don’t have to do it 100% of the time when you are living in the direction of that insight or that understanding, there’s so much more ease in my life.
Mindie: I love that and thank you for not having leaky energy. You know me, I can’t stand [it]. I call those people oozy.
Jason: Yeah, that’s even better than leaky, oozy is visceral.
Mindie: They’re oozy, I used to say that all the time and I remember Sean being like, “What are you even talking about?” I’m like, “It’s like they’re leaking everywhere. It’s gross.”
Jason: I feel it. I’ve felt it from others and I absolutely feel it when it’s happening from me as well.
Mindie: Totally. I absolutely have been there also. So I love that you used two words in that last bit: happiness and peace. One of the things that I want to focus on in this show is that integration of wealth, however we ourselves define wealth, and the experience of happy because I don’t think that wealth is necessarily an experience but happy is, and I think that they play together well. For you personally, when are you happy? How do you know when you’re happy?
Jason: Yeah. I definitely – and again you know me, I want to be as real as possible. I don’t like the BS platitudes and whatever else.
Mindie: No, I’ll kick you off the show if you start.
Jason: I know you would and that’s why I know that I can say whatever I want here. To say that it doesn’t feel really good to get the proverbial chi ching in your account and that the dopamine hit doesn’t feel amazing would be an effing lie. People were like, “No, I just have money flowing to me and it just doesn’t affect me, It doesn’t make me happy at all. It’s neutral”. I’m not there, dude.
Mindie: Me neither.
Jason: Yeah, it feels really good for money to come in, I dig it, and it’s exactly that, a dopamine hit. It’s not sustainable, right? And even if it is sustainable, and the money’s coming in every day, the day that the money doesn’t come in, it’s all gone, right? So it’s still not sustainable.
Mindie: Well, then it’s like a crisis.
Jason: Exactly. It’s like you don’t drop two notches down, you drop all the way down, you go from the ceiling to the floor, and that happens really quickly. So for me, it’s actually an insight that I realized a couple of years ago. I remember I was actually in Estonia and I was listening to somebody talk about something on stage and like I typically do when I’m listening to people on stage, which I think is a good thing, is I’m hearing less what they’re saying to us, but more what I’m saying to myself about what they’re saying to us, and what I realized in that moment was that money feels like security, but impact feels like joy, right? Impact feels like happiness and so if I had a puppy kicking business, I don’t know what the hell that means…
Mindie: Where did that even come from? A puppy kicking business?
Jason: I don’t know. This is why I shouldn’t take tequila shots before I go on podcast episodes. So I thought I was microdosing [this on the side 15:20] but I didn’t realize I wasn’t microdosing. So if I had some business where I didn’t feel like I was making a positive impact, then the money would be very unfulfilling. It would be great because I would have whatever “security” whatever home, Maslow’s hierarchy of needs bottom stuff taken care of, but for me, if I don’t feel joy in what I’m doing, if I don’t feel impact in what I’m doing, then it’s not worth it. So for me, and you know this very well about me, is that my happy place, my joy place is in serving, it’s in performing, right? So it’s one of those things where it’s like, what would you do for the rest of your life, even if you weren’t getting paid? It’s some kind of teaching, some kind of performing, some kind of joy activation for people.
Mindie: Making people laugh.
Jason: That’s exactly it. I always say, for me, I want people to laugh in the room and think on the way home, right? If I can make them laugh in the room and think on the way home then I’ve done my job, right, and I think that’s not mine, that may be a movie from Chris Rock, which looks a lot like me. So you may get us confused.
Mindie: Yeah, I’m confused.
Jason: So that’s my thing, and you know this, I always say, I have a one-line business plan, and my one-line business plan is to leave everybody I meet with at least 5% more joy than I found them. If I can nail that, I’m good. I really feel like I’m good if I can nail that.
Mindie: Love it. Let’s talk about curiosity. I am so into curiosity and asking the question, “What are you curious about?” because I’m learning fascinating things. No, what did you say earlier, fan-fucking-tastic things.
Jason: Fucking-tastic things.
Mindie: Jason doesn’t believe in the word fantastic.
Jason: I’ve never heard of it before. I don’t know what it means.
Mindie: Had to add that other part in. So, with curiosity, give me like five to ten, just whatever comes up first, what are you curious about?
Jason: Oh man, god I’m curious about so many things.
Mindie: That’s why it’s so fun.
Jason: Yeah, it’s great, and here’s the thing too, is like some of my curiosities are not joyful things. Some of my curiosities are digging into shadow parts of myself and being like, “Where the hell did this come from and how do I rewrite this?” and all that. So, that’s part of my curiosities. So one of my curiosities is, right now as of the time of us doing this, is flow, the science of flow. I’ve really dived into that a lot. I’m a big fan of Steven Kotler and the work he does. He’s become a friend over the last few years and so I’m studying his stuff now and I’m really, really digging that because I feel like there’s a great intersection between lightening up and living a not so serious life that I talked about, and the scientific part of flow. I think those two things together are just huge so I’m really curious about that. I’ve also become really curious about, and it’s something I didn’t think I would really be as curious about, is about kind of the shadow work of attachment styles, right? So the whole attachment theory thing and neediness and enmeshment, and how you were raised and how it shapes your relationships now and noticing how some of the stuff from my past shapes the way I show up in personal or romantic or professional relationships. That’s something I’m really curious about right now and diving into it big time. So that’s been really cool as well. Let’s see, what else am I curious about? I’m curious about figuring out why I have such an aversion to cooking, while also really wanting to know how to cook. It’s a very strange thing. Do you get what I’m saying? Like, I want to want to cook.
Mindie: I’m not even there yet. I don’t really cook and I don’t really want to want to, just where I’m at personally.
Jason: Fair, it’s super fair. What else? What else am I curious about? This is such a good question. Nobody’s ever asked me this before. Let’s see. Okay, here’s one and it’s going to sound weird, but it’s true. I’m curious about how many breakfast burritos I can eat. All right, let me clarify that. Not at one time, I’m not going for like glutton stuff, but I want to try every breakfast burrito in the state of California to find the best. I am obsessed with anything that is a delivery mechanism for other food, right? So burritos, it’s a delivery mechanism for other food. Dumplings, a delivery mechanism for other foods. I am obsessed with foods that are delivery mechanisms for other foods. So I’m curious about any food that fits into that category. You asked Mindie, you asked.
Mindie: I know. This is perfect. So we’re talking like restaurants, right? Like you’re going to go try all those different breakfast burritos?
Jason: Yes. Okay, come on. Do you think I’m going to make a breakfast Burrito? No, come on.
Mindie: They have like microwavable breakfast burritos.
Jason: That’s a good point. That’s actually a good point. The problem with those is that they always have that one spot in the middle that’s ice cold and I have this weird thing with, I don’t know what it is, I don’t know if I even had it– I’d have to ask my mom if I had it as a kid. I have a weird thing with textures with food. Do you have that at all? Do you ever have a texture thing with food?
Mindie: I mean, unless it’s like sand. Yeah, that’d be a problem for me.
Jason: Yes, a sand burrito. Yeah, sand burrito definitely would not…
Mindie: I mean, let’s say you’re eating a cracker and it’s super dry, that would be problematic. Otherwise, no, I don’t think I have a texture issue with food.
Jason: I have major texture issues with foods. So like if there’s like a little bit too much cheese on the pizza and the pizza has gotten cold enough where the cheese is kind of like coagulated?
Mindie: Yeah.
Jason: I can’t bite into that pizza because it grosses me out.
Mindie: Wow.
Jason: Yeah, I need therapy. That’s it.
Mindie: I mean. All I can say is when you first started down the breakfast burrito topic, I had written down 332 pounds because, to me, I was like, “Wow, that would be more than three of me.”
Jason: That’s true.
Mindie: More than three Mindies which, you know, you can’t wrap your mind around that so that was my concern with the breakfast burritos.
Jason: Yes, it’s a valid concern.
Mindie: But if you’re going to different restaurants and stuff, that’s different, I’m all for that.
Jason: Different restaurants and maybe I don’t eat the whole burrito either. Maybe I just get the taste of it, or maybe I get somebody else to eat the burrito and I just smell their breath.
Mindie: Those that can’t see us right now, I’m just shaking my head because I have nothing, nothing to say to that.
Jason: Yeah. That’s some of the stuff I’m curious about. I’m always curious about tech as well, I just love technology. And another thing too, a friend of mine came out with a documentary and it was all about Deep Brain Stimulation, like having diodes implanted in your brain and she did an amazing documentary called I Am Human and it covered three different people – one who had Parkinson’s, one who was paralyzed from the neck down and one who was blind, who developed adult blindness – and using these different technologies to reverse those things. When I watched that documentary, I’m like, “Wow, I need to dig more into that as well.” So anything that’s like future tech kind of stuff, I just think it’s so freakin’ cool.
Mindie: Nice, I love that. So I’m going to walk you through a framework called HERB, H-E-R-B.
Jason: Love it.
Mindie: The “H” stands for habits. What are some of the habits that you have that help you be who you want to be?
Jason: Yeah, so I am a pretty routine-driven person and I like my routine. I am very orderly. I actually had somebody asked me this yesterday. So, I typically wake up at the same time, so it’s usually between 5:30 and 6 typically. I’ll wake up usually pretty naturally, I have an alarm to make sure, but I don’t usually need it. I wake up and the first thing I do is if there are any dishes in the sink, I wash them, I make my bed, I just tidy up. If there’s anything to be tidied, I tidy it up because, for me, I can’t have the oozing of my energy, trying to manage all this like crazy stuff around me. That’s something I do every single morning, including the weekends. I will also typically read or meditate in the morning, which is obviously pretty standard and one thing I just added into the mix that you’ll probably love is I got the HeartMath ear monitor, Bluetooth thing so I can be in coherence and check my heart rate variability and everything. And I have a very funny story about that, by the way, that I think you’ll love but I’ve started putting that into my routine as well now, which has been really cool just in the last couple of weeks.
So I’ll do that and then my energy is its highest in the mornings, right? And so I’ve really been trying to feel into it, especially studying that the science of flow is to really follow my energy. And I think this is a big thing for people who try to force themselves to do work at certain times a day, not realizing that it’s not about time management, it’s about energy management. And so my routine definitely includes me doing the things that require me to be at my best, especially if they’re not with other people. If you’re in a coaching call, there’s an energetic exchange and so your energy kind of comes up to meet the person but if I’m writing copy or creating a training or doing something like that, that’s just me, I need to be top physical and mental form. So I got to do that first thing in the morning and then I actually like to do my workouts kind of midday. So I like to get the work in and then use the workout as kind of a break to let my brain recover from whatever work I did in the morning before I go into my second half of the day. I also typically do intermittent fasting, usually five days a week, so I’ll have bulletproof coffee in the morning, and then I won’t eat until about 1 pm. Then at night, I do the blue blockers from about 7:00, 7:30 pm onward, and I actually was able to get ones that clip onto my glasses. For those of you who can’t see us right now, I have glasses and I was always like, “Well, it’s not fair, I can’t see without my glasses and I don’t want to put a pair of glasses over my glasses.” I’m a geek, but I’m not that big of a geek. So I got clip-ons, which I guess is really geeky.
Mindie: I don’t know that that’s much matter.
Jason: Didn’t really help much and then I’m asleep by usually 10-10:30. So I like to keep that routine, I like to clock in as it were. I like to be dressed as if I was going to an office, I like to sit at my desk, I don’t do work from the bed, I like to keep as much structure as possible. The one thing I will say that I took from my employee days and my employee mindset is the power of clocking in and so that’s really something that I think has been helpful for me is clocking in and also what I call sacred calendaring. If it’s not on my calendar, it doesn’t exist and so everything goes on my calendar no matter what it is.
Mindie: Yeah, I always appreciated that about you, even meetings with yourself are on your calendar, which I think is awesome. So from the “H” to the “E” in HERB, “E” stands for environment and you talked a little bit about that, just like with the clutter and the cleaning of your stuff, but what do you allow in or not allow in to your environment and this could be your home, your car, wherever your space that you reside.
Jason: Yep. I try to allow as little as possible into my space. This is an ongoing challenge with my mother, who continues to send me stuff and I say, “Ma, I don’t want stuff” and then she sends me something anyway, she goes, “Oh, but this is just a little thing”. I said, “Ma, if it takes up space anywhere in my house, I don’t want it.” So now I’ve gotten even more clear. If I can’t consume it to where it disappears when I’m done with it, I don’t want it. And for me, I don’t have a real want for a lot of physical things. I would much rather have my space clear and clean and not have a lot of clutter. So I’m one of those people that like when you’re moving or doing like spring cleaning and you have 17 trash bags of stuff that you donate, oh my god, it’s lightweight, orgasmic. It’s not full-blown. It’s like you know how they say a sneeze is like one-eighth of an orgasm.
Mindie: I’ve never heard that.
Jason: Yeah, that’s probably not true, but it’s like three-eighths of an orgasm for me to get rid of a bunch of stuff. So yeah, minimal like my car. If you look at my car, it’s a little dirty right now, I need to get it washed but it’s dirty as in like actual dirt. It’s not dirty as in there’s a bunch of papers and crap inside the car. I like my space clean because for me, and you can tell, obviously I talk fast, I move fast, all that stuff and I get judged for that all the time and I’m okay with it, is that everything already moves so fast between my ears, I want to make sure there’s again no oozing, no leaking, no decision fatigue, trying to figure out “Oh, man, I got to manage that or I got to find a place for that or does that thing still work there?” I just don’t want to deal with that. So as minimal as possible.
Mindie: Yeah, I’m with you. Alex Sharpen calls that noise, like decreasing the noise in your space, and it goes to what you were saying about it’s like that internal craziness if the external is like that. So moving on to the “R”, and this you’re going to have a good time with. The “R” is resources and that can be books, programs, mentors, whatever and I know you could probably list 8000 but if you had to bring it down to a few, ones that just really have made a huge impact for you and that you would recommend to our listeners.
Jason: Yeah, absolutely. So, top three, like this is one of those things where if I had to just pick three people, and I could only read their stuff for the rest of my life kind of stuff, it would definitely be Steve Chandler. His work has just changed my life in so many ways. So Steve Chandler is number one. Byron Katie, number two, just such a hardcore crush on her in all senses of that word.
Mindie: I still don’t understand.
Jason: No shame! Byron Katie, I just love to death and I know she’s married and I know there’s no chance for us and I know she’s in her 70s but I did run into her in the grocery store right by my house last year, and I may have slipped her my number and we may have had a rendezvous in Ohio together, or we may not have. I can neither confirm nor deny it, all I will tell you is that – and this is how absolutely true – she watched my Instagram stories yesterday. I’m just saying, I’m just being totally honest. I tagged her in something and it was probably her team but let me have this Mindie, okay, let me have this. So Byron Katie’s number two. Anything you want to say about that terrible thing that I just said?
Mindie: I actually just want to ask you if you knew that she had called my cell phone one time.
Jason: No, I didn’t know. What are you talking about? She just randomly drunk dialed you? What did she do
Mindie: No, I don’t even know how this happened because she wasn’t even trying to call me, she was trying to call Sean.
Jason: Yeah.
Mindie: And whoever she got our number from gave her my cell phone number. So I had answered the phone and she said, “Hello, this is Byron Katie” and I’m like “What!” She said, “I’m calling to speak with Sean is he available?” I’m like, “Sean, Byron Katie’s on the phone for you.”
Jason: That’s incredible. I had no idea about that. I bet I know who it was that gave it to her by the way.
Mindie: It was one of two people that you know that are in the Phoenix area.
Jason: Yes. Exactly, that’s who I was thinking.
Mindie: Yes, and so it was great. I had a 15-second conversation with her on my cell phone, which she called.
Jason: Did she mention me?
Mindie: She may have to Sean.
Jason: Okay. That’s unfortunate
Mindie: All right, let’s just say she did.
Jason: Alright, fine. I’m going to stay with that.
Mindie: Okay. So Steve Chandler, Byron Katie.
Jason: And the last one, who I have no crush on but I think his work is incredible, is a guy named Austin Kleon. I don’t know if you know, Austin Kleon. He wrote a book called Show Your Work. He wrote another book called Steal Like an Artist.
Mindie: Oh, yeah. I’ve seen that book.
Jason: Yeah, he’s great and if I’m allowed to have a fourth, and I just thought of this because of Austin Kleon, I would say Steven Pressfield. So yeah, The War of Art is always a book I go back to, so those would be my four.
Mindie: Love it. So from the “R” to the “B”, “B” stands for beliefs. What are some of your core belief world views that allow you to do the things you do, lead the life you lead, be who you are?
Jason: Yeah. I think the main one, the kind of top-level one that I think, the top-level or meta, whichever one you want to say, is that we don’t have to be serious to be successful, right?
Mindie: Obviously.
Jason: Yeah, obviously but it’s funny though, Mindie it’s so funny right? And again, you know this because you’ve seen me at highs and major lows, right? I think a lot of people see me and the way I show up and the playful and the joyful and all this stuff and they’re like, “Oh, well, that’s just easy for him, that’s just how he always is”. F No! That’s not true at all.
Mindie: I can confirm this, that is not accurate.
Jason: Yeah, it’s not, and that’s the reason I do this work is because I know it to be true and I need the reminders as much as my clients or my audience or my students or whatever do. So for me, one of these core beliefs of like, you don’t have to be serious to be successful, kind of maps back to an Alan Watts distinction, where he says, “The opposite of serious is sincere”, right? So I want to be sincere about my work, I want to be devoted, I want to pour my love and my creativity and my curiosity and my attention into whatever I’m doing but I don’t want to make it a serious, significant thing as much as possible, right? So that’s kind of like the core belief, and then there are a lot of other beliefs that go with that but when I forget that one, every other belief becomes a push to enact into my life.
Mindie: I love that. That’s awesome. Tell me this. If our listeners are like, “This guy’s a rock star. I want to learn more, see what he’s got going on”, where should they go?
Jason: Crescent Bay State Penitentiary. I’m in for three to five years– No, I’m kidding. So yeah, I hang out a lot on Facebook and Instagram and it’s easy to find me there. I am at thejasongoldberg. If you want to be pretentious, it’s The Jason Goldberg because Jason Goldberg was taken, and so I’m like, “What’s the most pretentious thing I can say? How about The Jason Goldberg?” So those are the places to find me. I share stuff all the time and I’m happy to continue the conversation there.
Mindie: Awesome. Yeah, and I’ll link to all of that. You’re also going to be on the Lucrative Speaker Summit, which I am delighted. Basically, when I asked you to be a part of this, I said, “Look, you’re like the fan-favorite, from 10K speeches so please, please, please, can you be a part of this?” And of course, you were generous and said, “Yes, absolutely.” So could you give our listeners just a little hint about what you might talk about on that summit?
Jason: Yeah, I think just for the listeners who are curious about that conversation, I think it went more Like Mindie said, “Hey, Jason, will you?” and I said, “Yes”. And then you said the rest of the stuff. I don’t think there was a whole lot of like, “Here’s this thing and we think…”, no. It was like, “Come on Mindie, yeah, of course, that it’s a no brainer. Hell yes for me.” So I love what we’re going to be talking about in the summit because one of the things that I see happen all the time and Mindie I’m sure you’ve seen it, and we can all admit this has happened to us, myself included, is that we get a lot of amazing information, like world-class stuff. I’m not talking about the crap that some people peddle, like really world-class stuff, like all the stuff that you and Sean had done, just world-class stuff, amazing stuff, and then yet somehow it doesn’t get put into action, right? And the tough thing about this is that immediately, for a lot of us, that immediately brings up shame and it’s like, “Oh, well then I must not be cut out for this” or “God I’m such an ass, I’m self-sabotaging myself” and it’s just all this shame spiral and then you give up and then you never live your dream and then you never feel fulfilled and yada, yada, yada as the story goes.
So what I’m going to be talking about in the summit is essentially ways for you to take all of the other incredible information you’re going to get from all the other speakers and make sure you actually do something with it, right? So I want you to go from inaction to in-action, and going from being in a place of inaction and maybe fear and not really being sure this is something you can do. Or if you use words like self-sabotage, or fear of failure or fear of success, any of those things that come up, I want to give you really practical, usable tools, and kind of mindset shifts and hacks that you can use so that everything you learn from the summit will be exponentially easier for you to implement, and that you’ll get exponentially better results from it.
Mindie: I frickin’ can’t wait for that. It’s going to be amazing. For those of you that are interested in that, you’ll find all the information you need at thelucrativespeaker.com. My final question for you J.G. is this. If you would consider the listener on the other side of this conversation and maybe especially the listener who’s struggling right now, who’s feeling the scarcity, who’s feeling the challenges of life. If you would – since you’ve been practicing coherence – drop into that heart space and just say whatever is on your heart to that person, I think that would be really, really helpful.
Jason: One thing that I’ve learned over the years, Sean was a fucking amazing example of this, and teacher of this is the truly unbreakable nature of the human spirit. We forget, we’re always going to forget the God within, it’s a part of being human. I think it’s a fun cosmic joke that we forget that every once in awhile, and the fact that if we ever feel like gods, we can only feel like gods because we also know what it feels like to feel completely worthless and that that entire spectrum is totally okay to feel. It doesn’t matter what’s going on in the world, doesn’t matter what’s going on in politics, doesn’t matter what’s going on in your home, the permission to feel is probably the biggest piece of permission I can give you that you don’t actually need, and to be so gentle and compassionate with yourself as opposed to resisting and trying to fight and overcome your experience of life. The more that you can do that, again, totally my experience, lowercase t truth, the more energy I have to create in the world, to love in the world, to have a happier experience of life in the world, and I want that for all of you. I want you to realize there’s nothing you’ve been through that you haven’t gotten through because you’re listening to this podcast right now. So the only evidence you have is that you are a fucking badass and you are resilient. Literally, the only evidence you have in life is that that’s who you are. So if you have forgotten that for some reason, today I hope you now have a reminder of who you really are.
Mindie: That’s fantastic. I call that “Resilient AF.”
Jason: Hell yes! Resilient AF.
Mindie: We are resilient as fuck. You and I have been through so many different things and that leads me to just a point of gratitude for you and I’ve said this to you, but I want to say this publicly. I so appreciate your friendship and I’ve told you this before that, one of the things that delight me to no end is not just the funny times that we’ve had together or the laughter or the different experiences with our businesses, but that you and I had a friendship that yes, you were also friends with Sean, you were also friends with the two of us together but you and I had a friendship that was solid and has only continued to grow since then. So I adore you, you know that, and thank you so much for being on the show.
Jason: Absolutely the same, I love you, Mindie. Thank you for just being a part of my world. I’m so grateful for our friendship and for all the work that you continue to do in the world. You’re amazing.
Mindie: To the listener, you are also amazing, and I’m delighted that you spent this time here with us.
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