869 – You won’t know until you try: Tom talks You Can Do It

Episode 869 – You Can Do It
[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 multi-millionaire Tom Antion.

[00:00:24] Hey everybody! It's Tom here with episode 869 of Screw the Commute podcast. Guess what? I'm going to quit all this internet crap. And start selling road cones. And road barrels too. Cones and barrels. That's going to be my new gig. I'm just kidding. But I'll tell you about why I said that. And this episode is going to. That's a little bit different than my norm. You know, I'm not the old style motivational speaker when I speak. I'm highly motivating because I concentrate on giving you actionable steps that you can actually use. But sometimes you need a kick in the pants. And that's what this one's this episode is going to be a little bit about that. And it's called You Can Do it. You can do way more than you ever thought you could do. And I'll just give you some examples in a minute. All right. Hope you didn't miss episode 868. That was YouTube money. How much money you can actually make on YouTube and all the different ways you can make money on YouTube. That was 868. Anytime you want to get to a back episode, you go to screwthecommute.com, slash, and then the episode number YouTube was 868. Today is 869. You can do it as long as you sell road cones. All right. Grab a copy of my automation e-book at screwthecommute.com/automatefree. It's how I'm able to do as many things as I do because of these automation tools that are free and cheap. And I outlined them in that book for you. And then, of course, I want you to check out GreatInternetMarketingTraining.com. It's the longest running, most unique, most successful ever in the field of internet and digital marketing. Mentor program that's my mentor program has been running. She's now 25 years, something like that.

[00:02:18] All right. So, let's talk about you can do it here. And first of all, I want to tell you about the road cones. So, I just completed a 5000 mile driving trip with my dog, Abby. You can call it travels with Abby if you're old enough to remember. Travels with Charley, right? So it's 5000 miles. Uh, 1800 of it was in an SUV, and the rest was in a a box van that I could barely fit in. I think I wore my shirt out with the steering wheel hitting my stomach as I'm trying to drive this thing. Actually, God got it. I mean, I'm going through Nebraska and Wyoming and it's late at night and it's raining and the wind is blowing you like crazy. And and I'm in this tiny little cab of this box truck, and I just start getting a Charley horse in my right leg, I think, oh, man, I gotta suck it up now and fight through this.

[00:03:23] I can't, there's nowhere to pull off. It's one lane traffic. That's because of the road cones. I'll tell you about that in a minute. And I had to fight through Charley horses and. Oh, man. So anyway, I made it 5000 miles round trip and, um, the road cones thing. All right, so here's the thing. I bet you I passed. In this 5000 mile trip. 30,000 or more. I mean, I'm just just guesstimating. 30,000 road cones. Another ten, 15,000 road barrels. You know, those things. Those orange things. And but here's the here's the thing that gets me. This must be run by the the Road Cone Mafia or something. Only twice in 5000 miles was anybody actually working. They would close one lane of the road off with road cones for 1015 miles. And there wasn't a machine in sight. There wasn't a person working. There wasn't any lights up. There wasn't nothing. So I would love to talk to the Transportation Department. One of those states. Say what? Why is this all this one lane stuff and all these road cones? And they might say, well, I can't really say because they'll break my knee. And this one semi truck hit one of the road cones while I was in front of me.

[00:04:51] One lane, bounced up, hits the mirror of my SUV. Luckily I bought the insurance, you know, because there's no way to chase this semi truck driver down. So. So anyway, that was my, uh, 5000 mile round trip to to pick up an antique. Off road machine. A very unique thing called a coot. You can look it up. Look up. Coot. Atv. And that's what I got. So anyway, that was my trip. But, uh, and part of today's, you know, episode is that people were telling me you can't do this by yourself. I'm not by myself. I got my dog with me, all right? Which was great, because the dog scares the hell out of people. It's a protection dog. And, uh, uh, and I'm left, you know, he's older, so he's retired. So I'm lifting him up and down in his truck, and I'm doing, you know, going all these truck stops and getting gas and oil and and, uh, fighting traffic and fighting GPS sending me out and bum off Egypt and the wrong places. And, I mean, and then some of these people I'm, I'm ranting because. I'm driving down this one section and they say right lane closed ahead. Okay. You see that all the time. Get over the left lane. It was the left lane that was closed. They put the wrong sign up.

[00:06:15] Oh, another rant that I had was, um, ranting on plastic, uh, cup lid makers and how they don't do quality control because I'm, I'm in the middle of nowhere and I stopped and got coffee when I picked it up to drink it, it spilled all over me while I'm trying to drive this big honking truck and it's bouncing everywhere. I mean, the wind was bad through there, too. I mean, it would feel like his knocking. You feel like somebody bumped into me and I'm, you know, grabbing the steering wheel with dear for dear life. So it was a it was a fun trip. But the thing is, people said I couldn't do it. And at my age, as you know, you can't do that kind of trip. That's too much. Yeah, well, guess what? I could do it. All right, see, here's the thing, folks. You got to keep this in mind. And I'm going to give you a bunch of examples from my life. And then I'm going to challenge you to do something in your life. When people tell you you can't do something, it has nothing to do with you at all. It means they can't do it in their mind. They've limited themselves. They can't do it has nothing to do with you. Let me take you back to, um. Some of you know, my hotel story, where I owned five apartment buildings in a hotel before I graduated from college, starting with nothing. I wasn't any silver spoon kid, so.

[00:07:35] Anyway, I own these apartment buildings. That's another story. But anyway, they're telling me, uh, this this, um, landlord of mine owned a hotel, and he wanted to, uh, retire and go to Florida. So he came to me one day because I had been helping him work on the house and stuff over the years, and he said, nobody ever helped me do this. You're the only kid in 25 years that's ever offered to help, let alone try to learn how to put gutters up and everything. And so he said, I've got a hotel and I want to retire and go to Florida. I want you to take it over. And I'm like, what? Yeah. And, you know, I had these little apartments, but, you know, that was a big deal. But he says, you get a first mortgage somewhere. I'll hold back the second. You'll have no money down. And I went to 50 different places to do it. And they're all these little pissant mortgage people, you know, shooing me away. Oh, you're a little kid, you know? You know, you can't do this. You can't do this. And. And I wouldn't give up. And so it took me 50 tries to find the first mortgage. He held back the second mortgage. He taught me how to run the place. I only went one day a week to pick up the rent checks and to make any minor repairs, and I was making this is in the 70s. I was making $65,000 a year while I'm in college off of that one building, going once a week to take care of it.

[00:09:05] And then the city ended up buying it for a couple of hundred thousand. So I made like a half $1 million in the 70s doing something people told me I could not do. All these little pissant mortgage people sit in pencil pushers or telling me, you can't do that. You can't do that. You know? You know, we'll take our $30,000 a year salary and lower it over you. Well, you know, fuck you. You know, I did it. All right. So that was one thing. Then after I college, I decided I was going to buy this old biker bar and turn it into a big nightclub. Oh, you can't do that. No. You know, I might have. Maybe I should have listened to them on that because the bikers are trying to kill me when I cleaned the place up. But I ran it for a long time till the drinking age went up. Made a lot of money there. I did lose some money because the drinking age kind of wiped it out, but people told me I couldn't do it at all and I did it for six years straight. All right. So, uh, in other words, they couldn't do it. Then I thought, you know, I'll get into something nice for people who aren't hitting me with beer bottles. And so I thought up the practical joke company called Prank Masters.

[00:10:16] And people say, you can't do that. Who's going to pay for practical jokes? What's wrong with you? You know, and, uh, and so I said, I don't know, but we'll find out. People love candid cameras. So I made a live candid camera. This is long before punk was around. People tell me you're crazy. It's never going to work. Never going to work. You're wasting your time wasting your money. I moved to Washington, DC, opened prank masters. We custom designed practical jokes. I did 4000 of them in the time I was there. It got me started in my speaking career. It got me worldwide publicity. I was on radio and TV all over the world and people said, you can't do it. No, those little assholes couldn't do it. They are going to sit in a cubicle, get their paycheck and waste it on, uh, a bunch of worthless stuff keeping up with the Joneses. And then they're, you know, so no, they can't do it. I could do it because I busted my butt to do it. So that was a practical joke company. Then this retreat center I'm sitting in right this moment. Oh, you can't do that. You know, you're doing good on the internet, but, jeez, that's a couple of million dollar place. And I said, I'm going to get it for no money down. And they're like, there ain't no way. And again, I'm back to all these mortgage assholes that are telling me, you can't do that.

[00:11:35] It's impossible. There's no way you could come up with a no money down deal. Guess what came up with a no money down deal for this? You know, massive retreat center. And did I take it? No, because the interest rate was a couple points higher if I did it that way. So I put 5% down and did this and been running this now for 20, which is, uh, 24, 22 years. All right. So oh, excuse me, I forgot I couldn't do it, but here I sit doing it. Right. So the latest thing was to drive this truck across the country and back and haul this thing and, you know, so. So this was all about me. I'm just telling you, you can do more than you ever think you can do. And when people try to Pooh Pooh it now, it doesn't mean you don't listen to sound advice. And but when people just say, no, you can't do that. No, they're a bunch of assholes. They're just a bunch of low life nothings that are never going to do anything in the world. When you can do it, you can do more than you ever can think you can do. Um, so I want you to think, what are some of the things I want to do? And everybody in my life has nixed the idea. Now, I'm not trying to suggest if you have a family, that you quit your job and, you know, you know, go bankrupt because you don't know what you're doing, no, you've got to do it strategically and you have to get knowledge.

[00:13:06] That's what guys like me are for, to help you to get that knowledge. But you keep the money coming in and let it finance your new career. All right? You don't just quit cold turkey and do stupid things, but, um, you can do way more than you can. You think you can. And I'll tell you what. Quit wasting your time watching sports. And now I'm all for hobbies. I mean, I've lived my life without doing what I want to do, but, you know, and I made my big hit in in college, but, you know, with a football scholarship and work, you know, I was a top 20, um, school, um, starting guard for football team. Yeah. So, yeah, I'm, I'm, I like that. But guess what? None of these million dollar athletes that you watch on TV and scream at your TV and buy an extra large TV to watch, are ever going to send you a nickel? Never. All right. And the old saying is, is, uh, and we have two massive, no, two massive libraries and one smaller library here at the retreat center. The old saying is, um, let's see. Poor people have big screen TVs and rich people have big libraries. Okay, now I don't use it as much since everything's digital now, but the point is well taken. You know, you can waste enormous amounts of time on TV that you could be building a career for yourself where you're in charge.

[00:14:34] And if you don't like dealing with somebody. And that's where I've been for, you know, the last 30 some plus years is if I don't like you, I don't have to deal with you, or I can come after you in my anti-scam stuff, you know? But but it's that's such a great feeling to not have to deal with people that are assholes, you know? And there's just loads of assholes out there, right? And if you don't have to deal with them, your life is so much better, so much better. And you can make it for yourself by not listening to these assholes that never going to do anything good in their life or important in their life, are never going to get out of their little stupid cubicle and bouncing from job to job. That doesn't have to be you. You shouldn't even be listening to this podcast if you if that, if you want that to be you to just have that little piddly paycheck coming in where they take the taxes out and you're screwed, you don't get any tax benefits from being in business. I got episodes on that, you know? So I'm kind of ranting here a little bit because I want the best for you, but you've got to step up to the plate and learn what it takes to. And if you fail, we want you to fail fast. And and don't fail for lots of money.

[00:15:47] Fail for little bits of money and learn. And then you don't make that mistake the next time. And keep learning and keep getting better. Hey, when I started this internet business 30 years ago, when the commercial internet started 1994, you think everything went smooth? Hell no. I mean, I had no idea what I was doing. I could barely run the computer that well. But guess what? I kept after it. You fight, you fight, you learn, you get help. I had young people like the Ilya guy that's now sold $300 million, um, website that he developed. You know, I started him, but he helped me with his youth and and handling the computer stuff and teaching me all kinds of stuff while he was here, you know? So keep clawing and scratching and you can get where you're going. You can do way more than you ever dreamed you could. All right. So I'll probably get back to just how to stuff, but I wanted to hit you in the face with that and especially tell you about that road cone business. Right? I don't know, they'll probably break my knees if I got into it. It's got to be mafia controlled, because you don't put in 30, 40,000 road cones for no reason, right? Unless somebody's making money on it. All right. That's my story. I'm sticking to it. We'll catch you on the next episode. Go out and do something bigger than you ever thought. Catch you later.