[Transcript] - Steps to Getting Anything You Want Out of Life Health, Wealth, Love, & Happiness with Tai Lopez - Ben Greenfield Life

November 5, 2014

Podcast from: https://bengreenfieldfitness.com/podcast/lifestyle-podcasts/part-2-67-steps-getting-anything-want-life-health-wealth-love-happiness-tai-lopez/

[00:00] Introduction/Harry’s

[01:00] About Tai Lopez

[06:27] On Money & Happiness

[15:07] On the Amish

[21:09] Famous Figures on the Four Pillars

[33:47] Figuring Out Yourself

[35:36] Harry’s

[37:35] On Testing

[47:16] Ben's Book Challenge

[51:34] End of the Podcast

Ben: Today's show is brought to you by Harry's. Head over to harrys.com and use the promo code “Ben” to save five dollars off your first purchase of some pretty dang cool shaving equipment.

Hey folks, it’s Ben Greenfield, and welcome to part two of our very special podcast series with my mentor, Tai Lopez. Now if you haven't yet discovered Tai, I'd recommend that you'd go back and listen to the first podcast episode that we did with Tai, and it's really not the first ever podcast episode that we did with him, but it's the first series that I'm doing with Tai where you get to sit back and hear as Tai mentors me in my business and my life, and you get to basically be the fly in the wall as that happens.

So part one of this series, you can go listen to it at bengreenfieldfitness.com/tai1, and in that first podcast, Tai and I talked about things like how to stop multitasking, how to reprogram your genetics by doing things like reframing the way that you view the use of your phone by checking your e-mail less and by basically increasing productivity by embracing the chaos of getting less involved with things like e-mails and your phone. We talked about a lot of different books as well that I also had in the show notes of that episode. So again all of that is at bengreenfieldfitness.com/tai1 along with the link to Tai's online video series called “67 Steps to Getting Anything You Want Out of Life Health, Wealth, Love, & Happiness”. Today if you want resources for anything that Tai and I talk about, you can go to bengreenfieldfitness.com/tai2. That's T-A-I, Tai2, and you can get resources for what we talk about today, and you're about to hear it. We're going to talk about it today, so Tai, thanks for coming on once again.

Tai: Thanks for having me, I always like talking to you, Ben.

Ben: Yeah, and it was kind of funny 'cause last time, it was about a month ago or so when we did our first mentorship podcast, and you told me that I just needed to ditch my phone and get rid of it for a while and do what you called “embracing the chaos”. Get used to just not being connected, get used to not checking your e-mail frequently, and that night actually, I lost my phone. Just completely lost it. Totally serendipitous, but yeah. So I got forced from the frying pan right into the fire but ended up being really weird 'cause when I actually got my phone, it took about two days or so to get my phone back. It's like the world hadn't ended. There really wasn't that much that I had to do aside from be able to use all the free time I got by not having my phone around for a while, so it actually turned out to be a good thing, and the other thing that I've been doing quite a bit more of since we last talked is really getting into this concept of not feeling bad about just ignoring e-mails for long periods of time. With the caveat to that, that I have one folder that all of my important VIP client's e-mails get poured into, and I check that one folder but other than that, I can ignore everything else, and sometimes I'll do so for one to two days. And again, it turns out to be just fine, and nothing blows up.

Tai: Yeah, I wanted to ask you. How's it going since the last one? So you answered that, so feeling good about it, and life's all about experimentation, so every person ends up tweaking. Like Freud says in civilization, and it's this content when he talks about happiness. He gives nine factors that people use to try to find happiness, and he says at the end. It's an essay, he says, “Each of us has a different constitution, so you have to find your mix.” As you experiment, which sounds like you’re doing well, you end up going to equilibrium and at some point going okay, he's the happy medium that seems to work for the environment that I'm in now. So you feel like you're getting closer to that?

Ben: Yeah, I do, and it's nice 'cause it's just that much more time that I have to chill. My kids now are going to school. I home-schooled them up until this year, and now they're going to this little private school, and they get home from school now at three-fifty in the afternoon now, so it's just my goal now to just have nothing to do at three-fifty in the afternoon aside from just opening the door to my kids, and yesterday it was kind of fun. We went hunting for a couple of hours in the backyard, and we didn't actually find anything or shoot anything, but it was fun to just have that time to just walk around in the forest for two hours and be thinking about nothing but showing my kids how to explore and how to track game and just be in nature.

Tai: Awesome. Well that's awesome, man. So what else? What new things have popped in your head over the last thirty days?

Ben: Well I got one thing that I want to talk to you about, and it might almost be more of a philosophical question, but one of the few TV shows that I watch is Shark Tank on Hulu. Actually I have this giant TV in my house. It's like this super fancy, 3-D TV. I've never actually used it. I don't know how to use it. It's not hooked up, I don't have TV reception. Anyways though, I do watch Hulu sometimes on my little thirteen-inch laptop screen, and I like to watch Shark Tank where these people come in and they pitch their business ideas and ask for venture capital, from a bunch of different sharks like Mark Cuban and some of these other folks, and one thing that I've been thinking about as I've watched that show… a lot of these folks are coming in, and many of them are very successful, right? They're pulling in up to several million dollars each month.

They seem happy, fulfilled, but they want to go from seven figures to eight figures or eight figures to nine figures, and what I've been thinking about when I watched that and also when I take part in some discussions and some of the entrepreneurial circles that I'm a member of is when do you say I'm good? When do you say I'm as big as I want to be, and maybe money and growth and going public and going from making the amount of money that allows you to have what you want in life versus the amount of money that is some big figure on paper. When do you say that you found that ideal balance, or when do you strike the ideal balance between making money and then just saying okay, I'm good, and sitting back and living life? One of the main things I've struggled with is one of the main reasons for making more money so that you can make a bigger difference in the world and where do you stop between making a bigger difference in the world and just being happy and living life and relaxing and walking around through kids in the forest? So that's a big philosophical question that I've been dealing with lately.

Tai: Well, whenever I bump into questions like that in my own brain, the way I start with it that frees me up, I think to find the answer for myself is knowing that there's no black and white. In 67 Steps, I call that the Medieval Mind that most of us have, unknowingly growing up around, and it's basically 1500s. If you said that the world was round, not flat or that the earth was not the center of the universe, you might be burned at the stake. Back then it was very black and white. It was like no, the Earth is the center of the universe is what we believe, and any contrary advice gets you burned as a heretic, and although that doesn't happen anymore per se, that methodology of thinking has still lingered into our brains even now in the twenty-first century.

So the first step that frees you up in giving you an answer is you go there and really isn't an answer. If you sit down on a dinner table and ask this, you're going to get people on both sides very adamant, like oh yay! And they're both going to be able to make compelling cases and the answer, I think, is Will Durant, the Pulitzer Prize winning historian when he takes about the great philosophers. He says everything is thesis on the left side. If you put it up to your left hand, it's like thesis. On the right side is antithesis. The anti-thesis, and you got to find the synthesis. That's in the middle, and it doesn't necessarily always mean literally in the middle. It's just saying the blimp.

So I was reading Bob Marley, a book on him. When he did, he died of cancer in his toe when it spread. He was a great musician, the reggae artist, and he was with his son, was holding his hand in the hospital room, and his last words to his son was money can't buy you life, and so at one level you have that way of seeing life. At the end of the day, money can't buy you life, so that's the thesis. That's the one side. The people that will argue that you must go beyond money, and you just have to live and enough is enough, but there's also the other side which is like Jeff Bezos says. We are here to get things done. One of the most innate human attributes that you'll see in even the smallest child. If you give him blocks, legos, if you lay legos on the ground to a very young child, two years old, they'll start to pull them together and build because that is your humanness. So on the other side, kind of like the Bible says if you're Christian or religious or Jewish, by the sweat of your brow, you will get things done. Your purpose is to get things done, and even if you're an Atheist, it's the same evolution. You see that drive in humans.

So I think at some place, whether someone's listening to this, and they're making a thousand dollars a month or a million dollars a month. The better way that I like to look at it is John Wooden, if you haven't read any John Wooden, he's the great UCLA basketball coach, the most winning coach in college basketball history in the US. He has a triangle, a pyramid of virtues and character traits that he would teach, and one of the most important ones is ambition. You have to have ambition. He considered that, but it had to be kept in check by the other character traits like teamwork, so on and so forth, so honestly and all those things, and he also said God only made only one Kareem Abdul-Jabar, the great basketball player. So I think to me, it's fine to be ambitious. One of the issues, I would say, as you come with this left hand side, right hand side and trying to find the balance for yourself, is that we're bombarded by the media with images, even if you don't watch TV, but just culture. With images of people who are different than us, but subconsciously, we feel we have to become them. John Wooden, like he said, God only made one Kareem Abdul-Jabar. He was seven-foot-two, graceful basketball player. You and I, Ben, we're not going to be Kareem.

So when we see Kareem in the media, we can very easily become dissatisfied with our life no matter how hard we try to be ambitious 'cause we can't be him. So John Wooden said you're in a competition with yourself, and so that's to me, the middle ground where you go. What's the natural aptitude that I have, and one of the things in the 67 Steps, the most important one for those listening who may be in it is the one where I talk on eulerian business destiny. So it's a concept of you have to find out what you, what the max you can hit with the given circumstance, and then you go for broke for that while at the same time, maintaining the four pillars. So that's kind of a litmus test for me too. If you start violating some of the four pillars: health, wealth, love and happiness, some of the other three I should say, health, love and happiness, just to get wealth? You can do that for a short stretch, but if it starts becoming prolonged, then I think you have to check yourself. As the hip-hop saying goes, you know you got to check yourself before you wreck yourself. For a week or something, you're working really hard, staying up late to get something launched for business, but if that week turns into a month, turns into a year and you start degrading your health, then it's a little bit like Bob Marley said. Money can't buy you life, you can’t sacrifice health for that.

Ben: When you lived, for example, with the Amish, they obviously live a relatively simple life, but I think from what I've heard you say in the past, they actually do pretty well for themselves financially while still living this simple life, and they're obviously not lazy, and I know that they're very productive people. Did you find that they were motivated by money and growing their inner prize and growing their legacy or whatever, or did they seem to be motivated by other things? Was it just like a built in work ethic where you get out of bed and it's just like I'm going to work 'cause work feels good, or was that based off of wanting to make more money and to build up the bank account?

Tai: Well, so that's an interesting question. With the Amish, you have a common nation of very German work ethic. You know my grandma's from Berlin, I'm a half-German. I was just actually in Germany last month. I met a guy in at the Bercher Halfway Meeting who turned out to be one of the wealthiest men in Europe. I didn't know real humble guys, they'd all come and talk to my company, and I’ll fly you there. Germany, I flew there last month and turns out this guy, I didn't realize in Wikipedia. He's this huge mogul in Europe, and his five hundred employees has me speak to all of his executives, and I was like, “wow, this guy is humble.” So humble I didn't even realize who he was, but at the same time, I said when did you start your business? He owns some of these publishing companies in Europe and he said twelve, and he was German. I mean, this guy was probably sixty-five or seventy and have that German work ethic on time.

So the Amish retain that, and at the same time, they're deeply religious, Christian, and so they strongly believe in that in the Old Testament, man will live by the sweat of his brow, and some of the New Testament stuff talks about these things, and so they are not money motivated per se. The way I look at it, I think this applies to the Amish and non-Amish. I'm trademarking this personality typing system. I teach business guys how to close sales and get more customers. So it's called Pase, P-A-S-E. So Practical Action Social & Emotional, and each of us have a component, but usually have one dominant. So practical people are generally much more motivated by money, so that's a P. A people, action, they're motivated by the newness of doing new things and entrepreneur ventures by activity. Social people are motivated by interactions, not because they want an outcome. They just like interacting with other people. Then E, emotional people, are often driven by feelings and so on.

So within even the Amish, you'll see the P, practical people. Without coming out and saying it, they are probably more motivated by monetary gain, and yeah, there's lot's of millionaires. The thing about the Amish that's nice, that's very interesting an applicable to you and I in the modern world is basically nobody really ever sacrifices the other things to get money. That's very looked down upon as a society. If you're a young boy and you're too money hungry, no girl's going to want to marry you, and that's one of the best motivation. If you look at how society motivates males, it's primarily about what women want. If you are made fun of or shunned in terms of no one wants to marry you, you won't do that activity anymore.

So they don't sacrifice their social life, they don't sacrifice their spirituality to get money because they'll be kept in check by social norms. So in the modern world, you and I, because we life in this non-homogeneous society where it's just do whatever you want. You could easily get out of line, and nobody's going to stop you. If you right now were just like forget it, I don't care. My kids come home, I'm going to put them in daycare, and they don't see me. I see them at nine ‘o clock and I'm doing e-mails. So if that was then what you wanted to do, no one societally. You'll be able to find a group of society that encourages that activity.

So that's what makes modern life much harder in that, no matter how crazy your life becomes, no matter how dysfunctional it becomes. You'll find some segment of society that will back you whereas with the Amish, it's not. If you start getting pure money hungry and screwing people over in business deals and sacrificing not coming to church for them is a big thing, you would pretty much have so much social pressure on you that you come snap back to reality.

Ben: Interesting.

Tai: That's what I say, for you, for everybody, for me, you have to find a group of people that will be able to tap you on the shoulder, if you like. “Hey man, this isn't you, snap back, and get back to it.” But if you don't have that, the human are ambitious by DNA, man. We're ruthless by DNA, and like Will Durant says, “you and I are here on an evolutionary basis because our parents were a good blend and your grandparents and great, great grandparents were the blend of Altruism, caring about others, and ruthlessness, caring about themselves.” I'd still think you have to strike that balance.

Ben: So if you could think of people, examples of people that you know of, well known people who you think strike that good balance, if I wanted to go watch what they were doing, maybe read their biography. If they have a biography, read their blog, whatever. People who you think strike a good balance between doing well for themselves from an income standpoint like making enough money, telling liberally comfortably but also to maybe give money to charity, to help other people out, that type of thing, but who also seem to be living life to the fullest, right? By not just making money, but also going on adventures and exploring and having time for their family and enjoying things in life that go above and beyond, just the ultimate goal of making more money. Are there any people that come into mind for you as folks who you would say strike that ideal balance?

Tai: Well my first mentor, Joel Salatin, I would say he's about as king of pulling off the good life that I've ever met.

Ben: Has he ever written a book about his story? Like I know he's got a practical how-to-make-chicken-coops or whatever, but does he actually have his story written anywhere?

Tai: So he has ten books he's done, some of them are philosophy, some of them are like you said, how-to. I'm not sure if there's one just on his life. What I did do recently, so I launched this new series called Millionaire Mentor Interviews. It's obviously a business oriented one, but it's about mentors that I've had and people that are friends and advisers, and the first one I did. Well I just released this, launched this month, and the first thing I did was had to do a sit down. Joel Salatin was out of my house, he was doing the Joe Rogen podcast, and then he went up to Berkeley with Michael Pollan, “The Omnivore's Dilemma” author, and so Joel was here to stop in my house and I recorded two and a half hours. So I'm his first person he ever mentored, his first apprentice besides his own son who was twelve when I went there, but I was eighteen, and so that is probably a good glimpse into Joel. That interview.

Ben: Where do you find that?

Tai: So people are on my tailopez.com on the lit. Yeah, I'll give you a link, that's probably the best way 'cause it was just on pre-release now. It's called the Millionaire Mentor Interview series. I'm not sure where it is. Yeah, I'll send you the link, it's really cool. So Joel is the epitome, so let's just take the four pillars. So health, Joe not only is a very healthy guy. I mean he's getting older now, but Joel is one strong dude. I will tell you this, a man you would not want to wrestle with, Joel is one of the strongest guys I've ever been around. Just pure strength, farmer since he was…

Ben: Farm boy strong.

Tai: Yeah, funny. So Daniel, his son, is also super strong, and one of my brothers was an MMA fighter, a professional fighter and came to visit on Joel Salatin's farm. Somehow he decided to wrestle Daniel, and Daniel was five years younger, and I remember Daniel picked him up, and my brother's not small. Picked him up like a toy and tossed him, and my brother was like, “uh oh, this guy's strong, Tai.” He was like sixteen and picked up a hundred and eighty pound man and just tossed him.

So Joel definitely has health, and in addition to his own physical health, he's in the health space in terms of him and now a nation really pioneered grass-fed at that movement, even though now you have the Joe Robinsons and the Sally Fallons and all that, but the guys that were pushing it back in the seventies, that was Joel Salatin and our nation. So not only is he healthy himself, but he is in that space and spreading health around the world.

Wealth, Joe is a multimillionaire now, but that was never his aspiration. It just came. It's kind of like the Amish, but he definitely has wealth. Love, you know he married his high school sweetheart. They got married while they were in college. I think he only dated. That was the only woman, they both only dated each other, so he has love there. Joel always told me a good sign, a good test of how well you've done as a parent is whether your kids want to stick around once they get older 'cause a lot of kids just leave, right? That means they don't have much effect. Now not that's the ultimate test, but for Joel, his son has stayed on and pretty much now runs the businesses and lives as a house, basically on the farm about a half mile from Joel, and his daughter, Rachel, still in their life and now Joel has grandkids. He told me, you know one of my dreams was always to have my farm and my business and my family and kids and my grandkids running around my feet, and that for sure if you want to be happy, it's like saying nature laughs last. If you try to break that rule of the human brain, one of the great purposes for humans is to have great grandchildren. Whether you're religious or an Atheist, you would both agree on that.

So he has that pillar, the third pillar and then the fourth pillar, fulfillment, happiness working for a goal larger than yourself. Charlie Munger, the billionaire says, “the earned respect of your peers is one of the sweetest feelings of fulfillment you ever have”, and Joe has the respect. I mean, I've not met many people who have a more strong group of people interested in them, and he has. You know Joel's here in my house, I think he's almost sixty. He said, Tai, and you'll see it in his interview, I don't know how people sleep for all the opportunity in the world. So he's tap dancing to work, he's a religious guy, he's Christian.

So he has his faith, he has his family, he has his grandkids, he has a thriving business, he has the respect of his peers. He has real wealth, not just he's wealthy in that sense. You know he drives the same car, he told me he bought a car for the first time in his life. He probably bought a three thousand dollar car, or he probably drove a five thousand. So his mother, who's like ninety-five, lives on the farm there. At the end of the day, what else do you want? He pretty much pulled off the hat trick. That's the hat trick, all four, you know? And there are other people like that. Warren Buffet, but Warren Buffet, I think his love was a little more complicated, not that I can judge and say oh, he did right, but I think by his own admission, he had some real painful points, but Warren Buffet's on a lot of things, right?

His son is his right-hand man at Bercher Halfway, so he's done that, and he has to earn respect, and he certainly has wealth, and he's pretty healthy guy even though he doesn't eat that well, but he's doing something right. He owns ten percent of Coca Cola, so I think he drinks Coca Cola partly to show it off. You know he's not like Joel Salatin necessarily doing as good for the world in health, but he's pulling off. Richard Branson, I think.

Ben: You know, what's the best, Warren Buffet, to hear his life story? Is there a book, like a biography of Warren Buffet?

Tai: Stonewall. If you go on my booklist, and also there's another good book that I have on mine. If you go to tailopez.com/books, or you can put a link on your site to my books thing, I have one called “A Few Lessons for Investors and Managers” by Peter Bevelin, and its quotes of Warren Buffet. He's never written a book, and it is tremendous. Just ask yourself this test, will you ever need money? If the answer is yes, then you must read this book. It is one of the great books on wealth and money and how to make money, and it's sound, it's solid.

Ben: Which one is that?

Tai: It's called “A Few Lessons for Investors and Managers” by Peter Bevelin. It's basically a compilation of Warren Buffet's words on money because he mostly just does speeches and does newsletters, so it's tremendously powerful.

Ben: I'll find these books for those of you listening in, and get a link for you in the show notes. I actually read “Seeking Wisdom” and I own “Seeking Wisdom” by Peter Bevelin. Fantastic book, I didn't know he had any other books, but “Seeking Wisdom” is one of my favorite books. It's right in my bookshelf over here, and it's called “Seeking Wisdom: From Darwin to Munger” and I didn't know he had another book and it's called “A Few Lessons for Investors and Managers from Warren Buffet”?

Tai: Yeah. It's better than the wisdom one for me. It's more honed into finance, but one of the quick tips, the tests that I look for, okay, 'cause you're asking that question and there's celebrity. I think Richard Branson, some of these guys, I think the way to test, because you'll find people that are also unknown that are also passing these tests is the tap dance to work test. So you got to ask yourself, Ben, every morning when I wake up, is there an energy level there that's not artificial, it's not coming from a coffee even though there's nothing necessarily wrong with coffee, is not coming from delusion, it's not coming from just some false ambition goal that you've set in front of yourself, but it's a genuine tap dancing out of bed, and the interesting thing, and this is controversy that I'll say this.

I see this along a broad, a spectrum of people, even people that maybe you wouldn't want to be, maybe you don't look up to say Hugh Hefner. You know he's a very controversial person, certainly not a role model for a lot of people, but there's a twinkle in people's eye that I see in Joel Salatin, I see it into Warren Buffet's, and you see it even in people that I said maybe you would think wow, that guy doesn't, shouldn't have it. He's money hungry or he's going after shallow thing like Hugh Hefner. So I think I see it in some athletes and you don't see it in others, so I think it's something. That's why I said, that's why in the beginning I brought up Freud and about what he says that there's different constitutions per people, and that's why you're not in a competition with Michael Jordan or Warren Buffet or Joel Salatin. What you have to do is, what creates the twinkle in your eye, the tap dance effect for you?

I'll tell you, Ben. One of the new things that's been on my mind, I always pick a new topic. Once a week, I pick a new person to study. That's kind of a pattern with me, I'll get interested in Julius Cesar or Andre Agassi, whatever. Right now I'm back on Michael Jordan for the last week I've been doing. Before that, I was doing some World War I veteran guys, and then I also pick up a concept. I'm glad you're doing this, you got this concept of your rolling around in your head. What's going to make me, Ben, find that balance between overambitious and underambitious? And I think the thing, this new concept for me, not new, but what's really been moiling over my head is the concept of what Socrates and the great philosopher said back thousands of years ago. They talked about the Oracle of Delphi. It was a place you went to get wisdom, and the oracle started by saying know thyself, and I'm at a place right now where everything I'm focused on for myself and other people is how can you figure out yourself more?

I'm telling you if you can crack that nut, if you can get to the bottom of that one, you are light years ahead, and I think that's what attracted to me to some of the stuff you talk about in your book. It's like you have to figure out your body, and there's people's bodies that are completely different. This inheritance book that we talk about last time with Dr. Sharon Moalem, talking about DNA. Some people if they eat fruit, they're fructose intolerant, one piece of fruit would have them drop over dead. So when you give blanket things like, not you, but when the USDA says “oh, everybody should eat fruit.” What if a fructose intolerant person is reading it, they're dead. So what you have to do is find that health combination that works for you, and there's probably some universals like McDonald's food universally is bad for everybody, but there's nobody that's getting healthier eating McDonald's. So we can put that in the “universal truth” so to speak category, but then all the other stuff's up for grabs. Some people, and that's what Dr. Sharon Molem says that the day would come when some people are like do not drink coffee and some people are like drink five cups of Bulletproof coffee or whatever it is. And so when it comes to this ambition question, health, wealth, love and happiness, you got to find your one, and so I recommend, I don't know if you've done this, Ben, but there's a link you can put in your show notes to test at humanmetrics.com. There's an exact link, but if that Human Metrics for your Myers-Briggs where you get the letters like I'm an ENTP.

Ben: Yeah, I've done the Myers-Briggs.

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Tai: It's a tragedy of education that you and I haven't spent one hundred hours of our life doing personality tests while before we even hit eighteen. It's a tragedy, people lament the education system and a lot of it is lamentable, but I'm like imagine if you and I, when we had all the free time at our disposal, if we had sat down and taken every Myers-Briggs test, every Choleric, Sanguine, a Melancholy personality test. If we had taken career aptitude tests, what could be better than doubling down, investing in your own brain and understanding yourself and then moving forward? That's the problem with college, it's not college. There's nothing wrong with college, there's something wrong with anything where you spend four years and a hundred grand with no focus. If you know, “hey, I want to be a brain surgeon.” Well my advice is go to medical school because you're going to go to jail if you try to be a brain surgeon without that, and university works pretty well at putting out good brain surgeons, but if your focus is marketing, there's millions of marketing majors. I'm like well you may be better off doing some other stuff interning with OooWee or this, that or the other thing, and so again the question of university. The question that you brought up in the beginning about how ambitious should I be?

Well some people are machines, and you want them, some Leonardo Da Vincis. The advice for Leonardo Da Vinci that is best for him and society would not be “oh, you need to spend more time twiddling your thumbs and getting in touch with yourself.” No, you were built to create ideas and come up with innovations. Stephen Hawking, man, sure you need to spend time with your family, and he does, believe it or not. Stephen Hawking has kids and a wife, but Stephen Hawking is a man built to innovate and see things that you and I don't have the aptitude for. So that's what I said, you know yourself, as my third mentor, a guy named Mike from Ireland told me and said, “Tai, it's horses for courses.” Meaning you got to put the right race horse on the appropriate race course, so that's why I said the real answer for you, and I know I've gone long in naming all these things, but you're going to have to use the next month, maybe ‘til we talk, to just hone in more and more.

You're a very in touch with yourself, knowing yourself kind of person especially physically with all the training and things that you do there, but take it further. Take the sculpture and refine the sculpture even more down, and you start with knowing yourself more. Take some of those tests again. What's wrong? If somebody came to me and said okay, I've got fifty thousand good hours in my life, which is probably what you have in your prime, maybe more depending on how healthy you are.

Okay fifty thousand hours, if I would say we'll put a hundred of those into knowing your own strengths and weaknesses. That would sound reasonable. Out of fifty thousand, put a hundred into investigation of yourself before you proceed, but yeah. Myself, you, the world we live in, people haven't spent more. They go to their grave not having spent more than two or three hours taking tests, aptitude tests, personality tests, interacting with people who know how to read, it's a tragedy, man.

Ben: Yeah, that's really interesting. So the Myers-Briggs is the one that you recommend starting with? And then you're also developing this other one, this PASE Test?

Tai: Yes, I have that, and just keep going. Just google, and go beyond just personality tests. Do career tests, do love tests. You know that book “The Five Love Languages”. It’s kind of a cheesy sounding book, but that's another one. Now one thing that people get off, and this is back to the Medieval, black and white mind. They go “well, Tai, I don't believe in the Myers-Briggs.” Well first of all, who cares what people believe? What if I believe the world is flat, then make it flat. People are too in love with their beliefs, I'm like experiment, try, go out there. What's the downside? If you take the Myers-Briggs test or if you take the Five Love Languages test, if you take, there's a new one. It's called “Strengths Finder”. It's a lot of new scientists putting in.

You take those tests, who cares if you don't? If the results seem to be stupid, then just dump it out of your mind and move on to more. The end of the day though, and you show people with your body, take tests. You were going through with me, you mentor me in telling me the tests that I should take, whether it be lactose intolerance test, whether it be the saliva suave stuff or the stool sample, all those different parasite, all that stuff. That's more testing, and the more you know about yourself, the more clearly you move forward.

Ben: Yeah, and it's really interesting we get many people who are into self-quantification, and I was actually down there and you and Nick are in the woods at the Biohacking Conference, so it's all fresh in my mind, all the different apps and self-quantification wearables that we have available to us, yet I think the type of people that listen to my podcast at least I know, and a lot of them are these self-quantification, Biohacker types. I don't think a lot of them, and I know I'm not personally, are doing many of these tests to find out more about just themselves and their personality as much as their skin temp, heart rate variability, perspiration, etcetera, so that's interesting. You know I've taken the Myers-Briggs, but I haven't gotten too carried away or infatuated with personality test. So I think maybe, just based on your recommendation, I might go in and take it again just to refresh myself. I've got it hold up in my computer now anyway just so I can put the link in the show notes for folks. So Myers-Briggs and then for the PASE test that Tai's talking about if you're listening in, I'm sure that Tai can shoot me over the link to that, and I'll put it in there for you guys too.

Tai: And also don't forget, so try to do all four pillars. So for you and your teaching on health, you have your set of tests, so for wealth, you can do the Myer-Briggs. There’s also something called “Strengths Finder”. I'm not sure, I'll try to find the links, it's a book and a series of books by a lot of psychologists and some guys in MBA programs, some of the top guys, so look at that one because that's a test about your career and wealth, and there's also a component of Myer-Briggs that helps you with that. So Myer-Briggs is an overarching one, but take a specific one for your career aptitude because you may not have to quit your career, okay, but you might make a small adjustment based on the findings that you get.

Thirdly, when it comes to love, a good simple one is take that, read that book, and I'm not sure if it's an exact test, but read the one, “The Five Love Languages”. That one's great at showing you why a lot of people who are married or dating or not dating have issues because they're speaking… There's five love languages, I think I can't remember all of them, but there's gifts, time, acts of service, touch and words of affection. I think that's all five, so by finding out what you are and what the person you're dating is, you can move forward and perfect the sculpture. It's not a lottery, life is not a lottery ticket. Most people are waiting for the lottery, oh magically, I'll meet the love of my life.

Magically I'll come up with one business idea that makes me the next Mark Zuckerberg. Magically, I'll find one diet in seven days. I am in shape. No. All of that, and same with happiness, I'll just come to a place where all of life is good and I'm happy. It's all a bunch of bunk, it's the refinement of the sculpture. And then it's not one moment, it' not one lottery ticket that you scratch off and now I'm perfectly healthy. You've been doing this health thing for a decade plus and it’s the same thing. You do that with your career, and you get a sculpture, and then the last one on happiness, and that's where the Myer-Brigg one is pretty good, and there's some other ones where you can find that happiness kind of test. In the 67 Steps, I give you that book, Peter Drucker's book, “Managing Oneself”, a very short book and he talks about knowing yourself too and he has some tests in there. So what I'm basically saying, Ben, for you and anyone listening and definitely for myself, preaching to myself, continually take every test that you can bump into. Dr. David Buss, the famous evolutionary psychologist and my friend, he told me once he got his PhD in these type of tests, and he developed his own. He said he can tell in four minutes of sitting in a room with a couple if they're going to get divorced or not.

So he says I could have helped them either not get married to start with or adjust their personality. So become a test hungry person, aptitude tests and health body tests. The more the merrier. Some of them will be not very valid for you, just cast them off and keep going, take in more. The concept is right.

Ben: Cool. Well folks if you're listening in, last time that Tai came on the show, he actually recommended several books, and I gave a challenge for those of you listening in to read each of the books that he talked about in that show, and it was “The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains”, “Inheritance: How Our Genes Change Our Lives” and “The ONE Thing: The Surprisingly Simple Truth Behind Extraordinary Results”, and I told you if you shot a photo of you holding all three of those books, hard copy formats in your hands and you sent that photo to me on Facebook or Twitter, I'd send you a signed copy of my book. I'll do the same just to drive those of you listening to action. I'll do the same this time around 'cause I signed a lot of books in the last podcast, but if you read “The Snowball: Warren Buffett and the Business of Life”, if you read “A Few Lessons for Investors and Managers From Warren Buffet” and if you read “The Five Love Languages” and we'll say that if you wanted to, you can even throw one of Joel Salatin's books in there as well.

Tai: And throw one of those “Strengths Finder” books, there's Strengths Finder 2.0.

Ben: Any one of those books, a book by Joel Salatin, “The Five Love Languages”, “Strengths Finder”, I'll put them all in the show notes to make this easy for you guys. Just go to bengreenfieldfitness.com/tai2. Anyways, upload a photo to my Facebook page or tweet me a photo of you holding each of those books and this'll just be a trust relationship between Tai and I and you guys listening in that you actually read the books, and you're not just holding them at the lobby of the library, then I'll send you a signed copy of “Beyond Training”. So do that, and also be sure to check out Tai's online video series, the “67 Steps to Getting Anything You Want Out of Life Health, Wealth, Love, & Happiness” and I'll put a link to that in the show note over at bengreenfieldfitness.com/tai2. Also that's T-A-I, the number two.

So you can also leave your comments below the show notes for this post. If you have your own thoughts about how to strike the ideal balance between overambitious and underambitious and how to know when you're actually making enough money and also focusing enough on life, love and happiness. So head over to the show notes if you want to get in on that discussion. So, Tai, any last words? Sounds like you're on death row, anything else you'd like to say for this podcast. [laughs]

Tai: [laughs] I would say the takeaway that I'm going to work on the next month, hopefully you and other people were… let's go. The next time we talk thirty days from now or whenever it is, let's have some insight. I'm going to have new insight on myself, things that I learned from aptitude tests, books, and things whether they'd be on health, wealth, love and happiness. Maybe let's focus on some since the question of the call today was about business ambition, let's maybe get some insight from that book “Strengths Finder” on our career. Are we a Stephen Hawking, are we a Bezos here to get massive things done or are we here to strike a nice balance where we're financially independent. I think we can get some insight just from some of this career testing aptitude, looking inward kind of thing.

Ben: Alright sweet, I'm adding that now to my task list for the next thirty days is that I'm ordering that book now off Amazon and I'll have that test done by the next time we talk and hopefully we'll have some more information for our listeners.

Tai: I think there's a 2.1 version, there's a newer one. Look for the “Strengths Finder”. I think both of them are good.

Ben: Okay, so whatever the newest “Strengths Finder” book is on Amazon.

Tai: Yeah.

Ben: Okay cool, I'll hunt it down and put a link for everybody listening in. Alright, well cool, thanks Tai.

Tai: Thank you, Ben. Always great talking to you, man.

Ben: Alright folks, this is Ben Greenfield and Tai Lopez signing out from bengreenfieldfitness.com/tai2. Thanks for listening.

Welcome to Part 2 of this special podcast series, in which you get to sit in and listen to Tai Lopez coach Ben Greenfield (and you!) using the strategies from Tai’s online video series “67 Steps to Getting Anything You Want Out of Life Health, Wealth, Love, & Happiness“.

You can listen to Part 1 here.

In this episode, Ben and Tai talk about how to know when you’re actually making enough money, and when you can stop focusing on income, start focusing more on life, love and happiness, and how to strike the ideal balance between being overambitious and underambitious.

Books and resources Tai and Ben discuss in this podcast:

Finding your strengths/personality tests:

If you’re an Entrepreneur or are thinking of becoming one, this book and psychology test is best fitted.
If you’re a leader or an active member in a team, this book and psychology test is best fitted.

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