611 – Persistence pays off in many ways: Tom talks Persistence In Business

Episode 611 – Persistence In Business
[00:00:08] Welcome to Screw the Commute. The entrepreneurial podcast dedicated to getting you out of the car and into the money, with your host, lifelong entrepreneur and multimillionaire, Tom Antion.

[00:00:24] Hey everyone, it's Tom here with Episode 611 of Screw the Commute podcast. Today, we're going to talk about persistence in business and in life. I might as well throw that in there too, because it certainly helps you in your life if you're persistent. It's a little bit different from my normal fare of how to do stuff, but it's critically important because if you don't have persistence, all the cool techniques in the world that I can teach you about business and professional speaking and everything else that I teach won't help you succeed. So that's what today's episode is about. Now, I hope you didn't miss episode 610. That was featured snippets. That's if you want to get on the first page of Google in a legitimate way that costs nothing and puts you ahead of sites that are more substantial than yours. Well, that's what that episode was about, episode 610. And of course, when you want to get to a back episode, you put screwthecommute.com, slash, and then the episode number. That was 610 featured snippets. Now make sure you grab a copy of our automation e-book at screwthecommute.com/automatefree. It will really. I mean, you're going to thank me for it.

[00:01:42] There's no question about it, because if you use even a portion of the techniques, you will get your work done so much faster and you'll be able to spend more time making money, developing products and spending time with customers than fighting with your computer. So check that out. screwthecommute.com/automatefree. And while you're at it, pick up a copy of our podcast app at screwthecommute.com/app. And you can put us on your cell phone and tablet and take us with you on the road. All right. Let's talk about persistence and business and end in life. Well, I hate to tell you this, but I'm pretty darn sure many people in the world are losing. Or more accurately, never had this trait of persistence. I mean, people that have to fight for their basic necessities are forced to have this trait. Just think, if you lived in some remote part of Africa and you're hungry. You can't call DoorDash and have them pick up something for you from Panera Bread. You've got to go and keep going until you land bag something to eat. Now I want to talk about Hell's Kitchen. It's it's also known as Clinton. It's a neighborhood on the west side of midtown Manhattan in New York City. And according to Wikipedia, until the 1970s, Hell's Kitchen was a bastion of poor and working class people and had a very gritty reputation.

[00:03:21] I don't know exactly the definition of gritty, but I know it was a tough area. They wouldn't have called it Hell's Kitchen. But an inordinate amount of superstars, celebrities and high achievers came out of that area. Here's just a list of some of the ones I recognize, but I can. I'll have a link in the show notes of a big list of famous people. I didn't recognize some of them, but they're famous in their own right or in their own business or whatever. But you've got Larry David of Seinfeld fame. You've got Alicia Keys, Al Pacino, Samuel L. Jackson worked there as a security guard. It was a tough area. John Goodman, Robert Mitchum, Daniel Patrick Moynihan. Jerry Orbach. Tony Orlando. Mario Puzo. Bruce Willis. Everybody knows him and everybody knows Sylvester Stallone. So you just Google. People from Hell's Kitchen, Manhattan, and you'll get a who's who of celebrities and high achievers. Many you'll recognize that maybe I didn't recognize. Well, why is it why is it that so many high achievers came out of Hell's Kitchen? Well, I'll tell you, these people did not get trophies for participation. Right. They had to fight and claw their way to their wins that were few and far between. Until they made it. And then almost all of them continue to struggle and fight it out to stay on top.

[00:04:59] Now you only see the upsides and the winds, but every one of those people had way more losses than wins. Their tough upbringing. Fighting it out every day in Hell's Kitchen gave them the tools they needed to persist toward their goals. And let me tell you, parents out there, you are not doing your children any favors by making life easy for them. In fact, to me and you might not like to hear this, but I don't care. You're negligent if you make it too easy on your kids, because long after you're gone, many of your kids are still going to be in therapy, wondering how life hit them in the face and knock them down over and over again, even though you told them how special they were when they were kids. So this trophy crap for participation just makes me sick. And it was invented by highly educated idiots with no common sense. If you lose a baseball game, you get the message that you must try harder and practice harder if you want to win the next time. And if you lose the next time, you have to keep going and try even harder. And on and on. Given somebody a winner's trophy for just showing up is is asinine. You can't get any more asinine as that.

[00:06:25] You freaking morons. They go along with this? I mean, this is a perverse and a stupid idea. Nobody in my hometown that has common sense that the small town would do would go along with this stupid, idiotic crap that you're doing to kids. I thank my lucky stars. As a kid, I was taught from the time I could understand language that I could have anything I wanted in life if I was willing to work for it. Now, one of the best lessons I got from my dad and there were many was that when someone tells you you can't do something. It has nothing to do with you. It means they can't do it. And this principle has served me well over many years. And I want to give you a couple of examples. I'm going to give you the abbreviated versions of some of my stories, but. The first one that comes to mind is when I was in college and myself and several other guys were renting a house. So. The landlord. I still remember his name. I think he's still alive. Living in Florida as frank before. And he would come over to work on the house and I would say, Hey, Frank, I'll help you put those gutters up. But. But you teach me what you're doing. Och. So this was an old house. So this went on all semester with him coming over, working on stuff, and I helped him.

[00:08:00] So at the end of the semester, the school year. He comes over and he says, Hey, Tom, I want to talk to you. And I'm thinking, oh, what do we do? You know, what did we do wrong? He said, I have been renting apartments in this town for 25 years to students. He said not once, not once ever. Has any of the kids offered to help them do any of the work, let alone want to learn anything about the work? He says, I own I want to retire and go to Florida and I own a hotel about 20 minutes here in a different town, Fairmont, West Virginia, because I went to Morgantown, West Virginia, to West, by God, Virginia University. Okay. He said, not once has anybody ever offered to help me. I own this hotel. I want to retire. I want you to have it. Then at the time, of course, I'm a high achiever. I had already owned a couple small triplexes and duplexes. And. He said, I'll hold the second mortgage. If you can come up with the first mortgage, you'll have a no money down deal. That's what that kind of meant. This was long before no money down was a thing. I'll teach you how to run it. And you can pay me off and pay all the mortgage off and and you'll have this, this new business.

[00:09:31] And so I said, wow, you know, so. Here's where persistence comes in. Well, first of all, there's another lesson here. Give before you get. I was helping him for free just to learn. And it really impressed this guy that that was already a multimillionaire real estate guy. So the persistence came in when I went to try to get the first mortgage. I kept getting shooed away, like I'm a little punk kid, just as if I went to one of those weekend seminars. And now I want to make no money down deals. And and they just treated me like garbage. They said, Oh, yeah, you got a couple of little houses, but this is a hotel. And just they just kept shooing me away, which kind of pissed me off and helped in my persistence because I'm going to show you little pencil pushing banker assholes. What the deal is. So. It took me 50 tries with different lending institutions to come up with the first mortgage, which I did. He held back the second mortgage. I went down. He taught me how to run the place. I went down once a week. There was a manager. I ended up making $65,000 a year just from that property while I'm in college. And. The city ended up buying it out for a couple of hundred thousand dollars afterwards.

[00:11:00] So I ended up making about a half a million dollars in the seventies on this property because I gave before I got and I was persistent. Now, with this entitled generation, they want everything and give nothing. Well, that's backwards. You're not going to impress people like me that got money. If you come with that attitude. So it doesn't take much for this generation to really step up above their their colleagues and their, you know, their whatever millennium or whatever darn thing they call each other now. But persistence is is not taught nowadays. It's like you should get everything for doing nothing, you know, that's just so stupid. I mean, it's like that's why my I'm working on a book called Highly Educated Idiots. That's true. I am collecting all these stories, but that's a story of persistence that really kicked off. I mean, I was doing okay with what I was doing and, you know, I was. Ended up buying a nightclub and all that. Well, yeah, that story is good, too. People are telling me, Oh, you can't put a nightclub out where you're doing it. And I said, Well. I didn't even say anything. I'm thinking you can't. That's what my dad taught me. They can't do it. I could do it. You can't do it. So I went out and did it. I started big nightclubs, second biggest nightclub in the state.

[00:12:25] So that's another story. At all, save for another day. And then this retreat center that I'm recording this in now, it's a multi-million dollar property. I was bragging to people, I'm going to get a no money down deal on this place. And all the mortgage brokers, everybody's telling me, you can't do that. You're crazy. There's no way that I do it. You darn sure I did. Now, then, I take it. No, I didn't take the no money down deal because the interest rate was a couple of points higher. So but I did land the no money down deal on this retreat center because I kept persistent. I kept going. I kept clawing and scratching to get where I was going to go. So, yes, I I'm not just preaching of ideas to you. I have lived this my entire life. Thank God I had a good dad that that taught me this skill. It is a skill you can learn this skill. I was ingrained with it since I'm a kid. But you can learn this and you might have to stretch it a little bit if you've been handed everything your whole life. But if it's not going well for you, maybe it's time for a change. Do something different to to change the course of your life and then pass it on to your kids.

[00:13:44] So anyway, that's my little rant on being persistent and in my rant against participation trophies and all that ridiculous, idiotic PhD bullshit. You know, that's not helping kids and that's why the country is in trouble, because some of these these people are taking over. They're getting old enough to get into power and ruining the country. So. So anyway, you don't have to let that happen to you and your family. So be persistent. And hey, if you want to be persistent, learn how to do Internet stuff. Well, I can't find anybody more persistent than me since I've been doing this, since the commercial Internet started in 1994 and persistently helping thousands of entrepreneurs along the way. So I'd love to help you. So check out my program at greatInternetMarketingTraining.com. And hey, if you have kids get them involved. I'll talk to them personally and and encourage them to be something better than than they might be had they not had this kind of training and encouragement from you and and and other people in their life, because the average person is not going to tell you this kind of stuff. The average person is just going through life entitled, and that's not going to help your kids or you. All right. That's my story and I'm sticking to it. We'll catch you on the next episode. See you later.