700 – The right way to have a successful business: Tom talks Persistence In Business

Episode 700 – 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 everybody, it's Tom here with episode 700 of Screw the Commute Podcast. Can you believe it? 700 episodes. That puts me in the 700 club, right? I think that's some show or religious thing. I don't know what it. Today, we're going to talk about persistence in business because who gets 700 episodes? How many podcasts? I don't really know. I heard that the average podcast lasts eight episodes or seven episodes, so I've done 100 more times than the average. I'm a high achiever, right? So this is a little bit different from my normal fare of how to stuff. And this persistence and consistency is critically important because if you don't have persistence, all the cool techniques in the world that I teach you are not going to help you a bit. All right. And because we're going to a little bit later today, we're going to release a 70% off sale on a bundle of my best selling eBooks just to commemorate this. So watch for that in your email if you're not on my email. Make sure you grab a copy of our automate free book. I've been giving it away for a long time here. If you have a copy, you're probably on my email list. But anyway, you go to screwthecommute.com/automatefree and then you'll be on my email list. You'll get that free e-book that you will thank me for. If you use the stuff that's in that book and then you'll get notice later of the 70% off sale.

[00:02:02] All right. I hope you didn't miss episode 699. That was online summits. And my first ever is coming right up. You can sign up for it and you get two free books for that one to sign up now and you'll get a free ticket at Screwthecommute.com/summit2023. And I got to tell you, you know, don't miss that Episode 699, because you can have zero online presence and put on an online summit. I teamed up with another guy that ran all the technology and I just put together a group of speakers. You don't even have to speak yourself if you if you don't want. I mean, I'm doing five master classes, but you don't have to. You could just put this online summit, pick a topic, a cool title, get somebody to help you run it, and bam wham! You get thousands of email addresses and sales of the videos with no online presence to start. If you're already well known or have a good online presence, you can really ramp it up big time. So that was episode 699. Anytime you want to get to a back episode, you go to screwthecommute.com, slash, and then the episode number. That was 699. Today is what, 700? All right. Make sure you follow me on TikTok. tiktok.com/@digitalmultimillionaire. I've got some viral videos going there. One's got 560,000 views in the last week or so, and and another one's taken off. So there's probably 200 little short training videos there for you. Some funny ones, too.

[00:03:42] All right. Let's get to the main event here. Persistence in business and in life. 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 and consistency. People have had 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, or you can't call DoorDash, you know, or and and have them pick up something from Panera Bread for you, Right. You can't do that. You got to go get it. And I love this. Stories about Hell's Kitchen. It's also known as the Clinton area. It's a it's a neighborhood on the west side of midtown Manhattan in New York City. And. And until the 1970s, Hell's Kitchen was, you know, it was all poor and working class people. And it got its real gritty reputation in those days. And. And listen to some of these people that came out of Hell's Kitchen, Larry David of Seinfeld fame, Alicia Keys, Al Pacino, Sam Jackson. He was a security guard there. John Goodman, Robert Mitchum, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Jerry Orbach, Tony Orlando. Mario Puzo. Bruce Willis, Sylvester Stallone. I mean, you can just Google people from Hell's Kitchen Manhattan and you'll get a pretty much a who's who of celebrities and high achievers. Now, these people did not get trophies per participation.

[00:05:19] Let me tell you that 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 continued to struggle and fight it out, to stay on top. And you only see the upside and the winds. But every one of those people had way more losses than wins. They're tough upbringing and fighting it out every day in Hell's Kitchen gave them the tools they needed to persist towards their goals. And let me tell you, parents out there, you aren't doing your kids any favors by making life easy for them. In fact, to me, you're negligent in doing so. Then long after you're gone, many of your kids will still be in therapy wondering how life hit him in the face and knocked them down, even though you told them how special they were as kids. This trophy crap for participation makes me sick. I mean, it had to be invented. One of my new books I'm working on is called Highly Educated Idiots. I mean, they have no common sense. I mean, 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. That's common sense. That's the way the world is. Giving somebody a winner's trophy or trophy for just showing up. That's asinine. You can't get any more asinine than that.

[00:07:00] You're a freaking moron if you go along with this perverse and stupid idea. Now I thank my lucky stars. As a kid, I was taught from the time I could understand language that I could have anything I want in life if I was willing to work for it. And 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'd like to give you a few examples. Now I'll give you an abbreviated versions of my story. And the first one comes to mind is when I was in college and myself and several other guys were renting a house. So every time the landlord would come over to fix something or work on the house, I would say, Hey, Frank, I'll help you do that. But you teach me what you're doing, okay? And so he would. And at the end of this the year he came over, he said, Hey, Tom, I want to talk to you. And I'm thinking, Oh, what do we do? All right. He said, I have been renting. Apartments and houses to kids in this college town for 25 years, he said. Not once ever, ever did one of them offer to help me or want to learn what I was doing. You're the only one. He said, I want to retire and go down to Florida.

[00:08:32] And I own a hotel in a town about 20 minutes from here, Fairmont, West Virginia. And I want you to have it. I want you to take it over. He says if you can come up with the first mortgage, I will hold back the second mortgage. Teach you how to run it, and then you can pay me off over time. And keep in mind, folks, this was that meant no money down. I didn't have to have any money to do this deal. So talk about persistence. It took me 50 tries, 50 lending institutions to that were all shooing me away like a little punk kid. Like, you're crazy. You can't take over a hotel. And so I'm thinking my dad saying, They're telling you you can't do it. No, that means those idiot bankers can't do it. So I kept going. I got the first mortgage he took the second mortgage, taught me how to run the place. I only had to go down once a week. There was a manager there. I picked up the the checks. And guess what? I made the small repairs that I had learned from both my dad and my landlord and didn't have to pay for those repairs. I was making $65,000 a year off this one property while I'm still in college. And then the city of Fairmont bought it out and for a couple of hundred thousand. So I ended up making about a half a million dollars on this project because I gave before I got.

[00:10:03] Now, this is foreign to kids nowadays. The young people, they're so entitled, they want everything handed to them on a silver platter. Another thing people tell you, you can't do something. I put a nightclub where there wasn't one. So they say, you can't put a nightclub there. Nobody's ever going to have that blah, blah, blah. I did it. I ran it for six years now. Yeah, something bad happened at the end, but I still did it when they told me I couldn't do it. The drinking age. At the end I was on my way to being a millionaire by the time I was 30, and the drinking age went from 18 to 21, wiped me out, lost everything, lost 400,000, got injured, no health insurance, and living in a vacant house that my buddy owned on a mattress. All right. Couldn't walk. All right, so this is where you got to suck it up. And your training of being persistent and never quitting. And nobody else can. I mean, nobody can tell you you can't do it. Kicked in. And so at the lowest point of my life, I'm sitting there and I was always a funny guy and teasing and joking with people. And I kept humor books around me. And like I said, I'm living off credit cards. I was a big shot in the whole state, and now I'm a nobody living on a mattress with a black and white TV, which those who listen and probably never even seen one, let alone heard or heard of one.

[00:11:34] So I'm keeping up beat by having humor books around me. And I got the idea. I'm watching Candid Camera on a black and white TV, and I got the idea for an entertainment company called Prank Masters. So when I could walk, I moved to Washington, D.C., started it, starved to death for six months. Remember persistence. And then I got a break. Washington Times did a feature article on me. Washington Post picked it up, then Associated Press picked it up. I was doing radio and TV all over the world. Thing went crazy and led to my speaking business, which led to my Internet career, you know, So I could have given up any place along the way, losing $400,000 after working seven days a week and having bikers to kill you. I could have quit, right? I could have quit. You know, in the first six months of trying to make it. And the high rent, you know, in Washington, D.C. could have quit, you know, So I could have quit in the first two years of trying to be an Internet sell on the Internet when it didn't make a nickel for the first two years and then four years later, I'm a multimillionaire. All right. I could have quit. So persistence is the key to all of this. You don't have to be perfect. You have to be persistent. They both start with P. You might not notice. So. Oh, another one. This retreat center I'm sitting in right now, 11,000 square feet, two and a quarter acres, pool, tennis court, workout room, theater, the whole bit.

[00:13:08] I said I was going to make a no money down deal on this. Everybody's telling me there's no way you can do that. Impossible. I said, okay, you watch. So I hit up all these mortgage brokers. They're making fun of me. They're saying, there's no way. Guess what? I got a no money down deal. Did I take it? No, it was a little bit higher interest rate. So I put a 5% deal to buy this multi million dollar property. So so again, when they tell you you can't do it, it means they can't do it. Don't let anybody stop you. So. So however you have to do it, learn persistence on your own for your own purposes or for darn sure if you're going to bring kids into this world, give them this skill and attitude as soon as they can understand language and you'll be giving them the best gift a parent can ever give. 700 episodes and still rolling. Still rolling. Hey, if you like to be in my summit, make sure you go to screwthecommute.com/summit2023. Hey, if you want me on your team teaching you this stuff, get in my mentor program. So the longest running, most successful, most unique ever in the field of internet and digital marketing at greatInternetmarketingtraining.com. All right. We'll catch you on episode 701. See you later.