Welcome to passive real estate investing. I’m your host Marco Santarelli.
We have two guests today and one very special guest, a guy you probably have heard of, Mark Victor Hansen. He is a well-known author. He’s the guy who has sold over 500 million copies of the chicken soup for the soul book series. With everything going on today in the economy and with this coronavirus pandemic, a lot of people are maybe misguided, depressed, and feeling a little stir crazy. Today’s episode is about turning adversity into opportunity.
Maybe it should have come sooner, but they’re providing an absolutely free two-day online event that is going to be great. I just signed up for it. It’s an event they’re calling Your Finest Hour Summit. And I will let them explain to you why it is called that. But it’s essentially a one of a kind virtual summit that will show you how others are overcoming obstacles in today’s economy. And with all the negativity out there that you’re hearing from other people in the media, the event that they created is to show people that others are using this time to create success. So don’t look at it as negativity or adversity. Look at it as an opportunity or a way to just do more and be able to get further ahead. The world has changed and maybe forever and in ways that we don’t fully understand. So now more than ever, you need a way to create order out of the chaos and to collect your thoughts and be able to do more with you, your friends, your family, the resources you have, et cetera, et cetera.
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So it is not a long episode. Listen through to the end. We’re going to mention the event a couple of times and we will bring Mark Victor Hansen back on to talk about his new book here in a few weeks. So this won’t be the first or the last time that you hear him on this show. So with that, let’s get to the interview. All right, well it’s my pleasure to welcome two special guests. My first guest is Mark Victor Hansen. He’s an American inspirational and motivational speaker, trainer, and multiple times bestselling author. He is best known as the founder and co-creator of chicken soup for the soul, that great book series selling over 500 million copies. My other guest is Nikki Ballou. He is a number one international bestselling author, the founder of East circle Academy where he runs a yearlong educational program working with coaches and consultants and entrepreneurs, positioning them as authorities in their niche. Welcome guys. Thank you. Thank you for having us, Marco. Well, it’s a, it’s an honor and it’s my pleasure. And Mark, I just want you to know I love your books and I have many of them on my bookshelf here, so thank you for writing those.
My kids are very happy they have shoes because you Marco
Hey, I got to help somebody. Right? That’s it.
We’re glad that our book serve. As you know, when Jack and I wrote the chicken soup for the soul series, we thought the soul of America was in trouble. What we discovered is just some of the world’s in trouble and now now we’re doing a summit called your finest hour summit.com and we think the whole world’s in trouble having been a sort of incarcerated government imposed for the last eight weeks or more, and we’re going to do everything we can to get people going again. How’s that?
Well, that’s perfect because that’s exactly what I want to talk about today. You know, with all this negativity out there, we should be talking about how we can turn this adversity that we’re looking at into opportunity. And so I look at it two ways. We’ve got a psychological component to it and we have an economic component to it. And I’m going to let you guys do most of the talking, but let me kind of tee it up by saying that there’s a lot of people out there I think that are feeling stressed, anxious, maybe a little stir crazy and on an emotional rollercoaster. So what should we do? Should we be going on a news diet, a social media diet?
Absolutely. Well first of all, there are not two crises. There’s three. We’ve got the physical crisis, which has lots of little cures for it now, I mean even the presence taken one of them. So then you’ve got number two, you’ve got the fear crisis, which really cripples everyone cause it debilitates our soul. And I tried that once when I went bankrupt in 1974 and I promise you that’s not a good one. And you know, FDR speeches were written by Napoleon Hill. The guy wrote, think and grow rich. And each of you have nothing to fear but fear itself and frightened fear and make it disappear. And then the third crisis we have is a crisis of the economy and what each and every person out there has to do is decide how they’re going to re invigorate themselves. Reboot themselves. What you said Marco is correct.
We need to do a hiatus, a diet on TV news. The average person in the world now is watching two and a half hours worth of news on their screen a day and it’s all negative. It’s all debilitating, it’s all depressing and despondent. And what they gotta do is come to a, some of their like ours, your finest dollar.com and listen to people that are positive, uplifting, buoyant and they understand it, you know? Yeah. 30 million Americans and 3 million Canadians, 3 million Canadians may not have a new job to go back their old job to go back to. So what we want to do is show them all the possibilities. You know, we’re bringing out 13 superstars in different fields. We’ll bring up the leader of all leaders, Dr. John Maxwell, we’re bringing out the business superstar, the mega mogul whose name is Jeff Hoffman. He created place line.com and you bid.
And right now he’s doing a billion kid, marched get every kid in the world to become an entrepreneur with his best friend, pit bull who is the number one singer in all of Latin America. And so got really exciting. And then we’ve got Freddie Ravel coming out in Freddie Ravel is formerly with earth, wind and fire and he’s performed with Carlos Santana and Madonna and Princeton. And he is going to get everybody to get their life back in tune and listening to the best music that makes her soul sweet and their soul soar. And we’re just, we want more for everybody out there than they may want for themselves. And we want to wake them up to their new opportunities because like we said, the adversity has got to turn back into opportunity. With that, I’ll pass it to Nikki, I think.
Awesome. Well thank you Mark. So Marco, I met Mark through um, a man by the name of Raymond Aaron, who is a, uh, you know, a legend on the Canadian side of the personal development industry. And, uh, Mark, uh, came on my podcast to talk about he and his wife’s new book. They were both on together. They were amazing. And then he came on again for this other program that he has called. You have a best seller in you, you know, cause he’s put 15, nine, number one New York times best sellers, 309 overall best sellers. So the greatest bestseller writer in history probably has a thing or two to say about that. And I thought my audience wanted to hear that. At the end of that I thought to myself, you know, he taught me about asks. So I said, okay, I’m going to go for it.
I’m going to ask Mark. I said, Hey Mark, would you like to do a virtual summit together where we can help uplift the people cause they’re scared and they’re stuck and you know, the government is not necessarily the answer and the media is crushing hope. Would you like to do that? And then I told him the story of a talk. I’d been delivering tons of corporate audiences here in Canada. People like Royal the page, you know, you being a fellow Canadian, you know who Royal appendage is? Sure. So I speak to their national team on zoom. So there’s hundreds of people on that. And the talk went something like this. It was like I had, first of all the people share their anxieties, their concerns, their fears just so they could hear each other and know they’re not in this alone and that we’re all in this together.
And then I basically had them look at this and go, look, you may not be able to control what’s happening but you can control how you react to. So number one, we talked about going on a news diet, like Mark said, get everybody to go from two and a half hours on the news media full of negativity to listening to positive podcasts and reading positive books like marks and like online and being on podcasts like mine. And then we said to them, look guys, this is a chance for you to go service above self. There’s other people that are hurting. They need you. They need to hear from you. You could serve these people. And I said, who needs to hear from you? And I told them a story about a good friend of mine who is actually one of the speakers of the event and this man had one of the people in his circle commit suicide.
And it wasn’t because he had covert but covert and it’s isolation meant that nobody could reach him to stop him. And this young man, his father in his early thirties with two children, took his own life. I was absolutely horrified and galvanized by that, which is why I started to do these talks. And then at the end of that talk, and this is what I shared with Mark that struck his soul, I said, look, you know what? This is like our version of world war two. Not that we’re fighting, not that we’re getting shot down or killed, but like we’re being called to fight an enemy and evil, just like the Royal Canadian air force and the King and the Royal air force. In 1940 we’re in Britain fighting the battle of Britain and Germany had Britain standing alone against it and its evil allies.
And they sent the fame Luftwaffe Hitler sent them to go bomb Britain into submission and the British air Marshall thought they were done because they said, Hey, for us to win this British boys need to shoot down German boys airplanes at a rate of four to one. And they said it can’t be done. But Winston Churchill, he was a force of nature that man believed. And he made his nation believe. He made the boys of the RAF belief and they, by golly, shot down four German planes for every British plane that got shot down and they won the battle of Britain. And because of that freedom lived and tyranny was defeated and tyranny, at least for the moment, dye and Churchill deliver that famous speech in the Hassett comments where he said if the British empire and its Commonwealth were the last thousand years, men would still say this was their finest hour.
So I said, Mark, I think we should call this your finest hour. And his eyes kind of lit up over zoom and he said, I love it, let’s do it. And then he did what he does best. He called every major top global icon thought leader that he could think of at some of the biggest things in business. And this man put those people together. And then I brought in a guy who’s the world’s best at virtual summits and I brought in another guy who’s incredible and heart-based selling and holding that space. And together we have created something. My friend, this is not like any other virtual summit out there. This is unique. This is powerful. This is about serving the people, showing this is about bringing people together. So we’re all in this together, we’re going toward victory and we are making, making a statement to the world that, Hey, we love you, we’re here for you. We got your back and we will not let you down. We’re going to help you win. And Mark Victor Hansen is the man that took that spark that I gave him and turned it into a roaring fire.
I love it. I love it. So we’re right on the cusp of this event, which is coming up on May 21st and 22nd so it’s a two day free live event and I’m going to encourage people who are listening to this to try to get to that site and register so they can absorb all the great content and information that’s coming out of it, which is going to be take what we’re talking about today to a whole other level. We’re going to plug that again here as we go. What you guys are talking about has a lot to do with mindset and mindset is such a big factor in all of this. And some people become literally paralyzed from the fear that they get from everything that is going on. We just have to learn how to push through and some people are collapsing and cocooning from fear. Well other people are doubling down and I chose literally to double down on the things that are working and what I’m doing. So
can you guys comment on what things people can do to help shift their mindset for the positive?
Marco, I love what you just said. They got to double down on the positivity. When I was bankrupt and upside down, fortuitously, I’d sold my way through college and I was given an audio tape that was an inspirational tape by the Dean of speakers Cavett Robert who trained Zig Ziglar and myself and a lot of us. But I never listened to it cause I was cocky, sophomoric, I knew too much. I was well educated. Anyhow, suddenly I listened to this tape called, you’re either the creature circumstance or the crater, and I thought I listened to 27 times. It changed my life. It changed my future. It brought me to new carotids and that’s what we gotta do is listen to the positive stuff. And if you can’t for some reason, come to this seminar, go on YouTube. Watch every one of the people that I got.
Come and watch Jeff Hoffman. I fond replaced my watch. Alex Jordan, the guy who created constant contact with 650 million people using it every day at run rule. We’ve got the top political commentator of our time, a lovely lady named Candice Owen, just amazing thinker, just knowing none better. Dr. John Maxwell, who’s also a ratio Alger award winner like I am and a great speaker. If you listen to him on YouTube or listen to his tapes or read this book, it’s going to give you what old big Ziglar called a checkup from the neck up. Because what you said, Marco, is it your mindset creates your money, set your mindset, create your future set, and your mindset will get you out of the doldrums that the media would have you compress and depress you with. And I want you to express, I want you to expand. I want you to transform.
I want you to see that you’re unique. I want you to see the not only is your thumb, your mind is you got the only mind like yours and we need it. We need you to contribute and there’s 8 billion of spend locked down and I want us to unlock and this seminar is going to do it. And we’ve never had a, I’m told in virtual world, nothing’s ever gone quite as fast as what Nicki and I decided to do. We decided to do this two weeks ago and it’s starting to rock and explode and expand. And we want to do that for every person listening and give you new opportunities, a new life, a new lifestyle, better than before. Because even the Bible says what you meant for my harm. God meant like good. The last chapter of Genesis on Joseph ma code code story. We’re going to take disadvantage and turn into opportunity and advantage, and that’s what we want for each and every one of the people.
Amen brother. Amen. That’s so well said. And you know what, people, right now they can take heart that there’s so many world leading thought leaders that are giving their time to this for free. This event’s free. I can tell you this, Marco, and I know that. You know what I’m saying is true. If this was a live event done at a beautiful resort with all these phenomenal speakers, this would be a high ticket item. It would be five thousand ten thousand even $20,000 or more for people to attend. But because of this enforced shutdown, we’re able to deliver it to people over zoom. And we decided we wanted to make it free to maximize the number of people that could take advantage of this. And it’s a beautiful thing that’s a once in a lifetime opportunity, my friend, and to be able to offer this to the people to be able to take advantage of it. So even folks right now that might be hurting a little bit because of what’s going on financially can take advantage of it. It’s something that I know speaking for myself, and I know I speak for Mark, we’re both very proud of.
We look forward to having you all there at [spp-timestamp time=”8:00″] AM on Pacific standard time. It starts on Thursday morning, your finance, our summit.com
yeah, I’m going to put the link in the show notes and on the site and stuff, so, but let me ask you a couple other quick questions here just so people can have a takeaway. There’s going to be, people are going to listen to this when it’s too late, you know, a day after the fact, but it would be good to give him a couple of good nuggets here. The last that I read is four and 10 people said that their lives have been disrupted as a result of this outbreak and more than 30% feel that related worries have had a negative impact on their mental health, which is a terrible thing, especially when you hear that, you know, calls into suicide lines have gone up dramatically and one of their biggest worries is family. So what do you suggest maybe you know, have a couple of suggestions along the lines of what people can do to maintain control over their happiness and health and relationships. Cause that’s a big thing for people today.
Okay, I’ll have the first shot at answering that and then give it to Nikki. But I say, first of all, you got to figure out what you personally want, right? You’ve been in lockdown and you know the great Socrates said, the examined life is not worth living here. Examine yourself, figuring out what it is you want in your heart of hearts. If you don’t know, sit with your spouse and say 50 times in a row, what do you want? And they’ll say, I want a car. What do you want a house. By the time you get to 50 you’ll find out what your core beliefs are and then number two is you got to put it in writing. And let me go back to number one. When crystal, my beloved wife and I were falling him up, we’re sitting at a restaurant in Costa Mesa, California called mothers, lovely old man of the cloth that sitting next to us and he said, you guys look like you’re so in love.
Do you mind if I tell you what? We’ll keep your life and love life and family together for over. I said, I get goosebumps telling you this. I said, of course you should. Well, I’ve had a Billy Graham ministries other than Mr. Graham. I run the family division. I said, great, what works? You said only one thing, prayer and it’s gotta be out loud prayer and every night for all the years my wife and I have been together and we’ve got five kids and six grandkids. We pray out loud together and my wife said, gosh, I’ve prayed and church have prayed everywhere we go. But I’ve never prayed out loud and I’ve never prayed a lot, a lot I wouldn’t have thought of doing it in front of my [inaudible] out loud for work. So that’s one of those little things, but you figured out what you want.
You got to put it in writing. Prayer really works. You’ve got to visualize it and see that your tomorrow’s going to be better than today. What do you want to sculpt yourself as in your most ideal Oak picturing. And then last but not least, you got to put together a team to get your dream and team together. Everyone accomplishes miracles and ladies and gentlemen, we’re going to go into a time of miracles. If you go to my website, Mark Victor hansen.com will give you a free book and it’s going to be called how to be up and down times. And what we’re teaching is there’s to be $50 trillion worth of business in the next decade from 2010 to 2020 and one of the companies I’m an advisor to, I’m going to do it as a cliche. It’s called UCI in Michigan. There’s been $300 million in 20 years figuring out how to take every molecule and every atom of garbage and turn it back into a resource. So we’re turning metal to metal, glass, glass, plastic, glass of water to water. It’s going to be 22 million people. So that means in candidates can be 2.2 million people. It’s going to be one of seven businesses that do 50 trillion, not billions go with the team. So we’re going into the greatest business times ever. But you’re going to have to reinvent yourself. Gonna have to retrain yourself, reboot yourself, remodel yourself, we excite yourself. And that’s what our seminars dedicated doing. Was that clear enough Markel
that was exceptional. And for the sake of clarity, when you talk about rebuilding yourself, I’m the type of guy that likes to read and listen to podcasts and audio books and just continually educate myself and I talk about that on the show. Quite often I recommend and suggest people continue to do those same things because your financial education can never be good enough and your personal development has to continually grow. So are you suggesting or recommending people do other things, or are we talking about the same thing? Just you know, be a constant student and continue learning.
Absolutely. You’ve gotta be a lifelong student. I’m addicted to reading of course, and the zone that I want you to read it. It’s not generic. I want you to read specific. It’s great to get a good academic education. I’ve got one of the most superior, I was with dr Buckminster fuller Reinstein story.
I love Bucky.
So I know that stuff. Really. Yeah, Bucky and all the, all the stuff like you to geodesic domes, buckyballs world game, all that stuff. But more importantly is what is the self-help action books, tapes, videos, and on YouTube? Are you watching, listening to, reading, absorbing, and changing your mind from good to phenomenally good. Because every one of us, Bucky would say, was born a genius that we get on unplugged going through life. So the point is, what I’m about is helping people plug back in. And my job is an inspirational or inspiration motivational speaker, as you said, in the first line, and turn people onto their own greatness because everyone’s got seeds of greatness and now is the time to pull them out. Not to depress them, but to express them and cause what you’ve impressed in your mind, you’re going to express in a screaming your space. And that’s why it’s so good, Marco, that you spent your time as a lifelong learner of soul fullbacks and books. And if I could give everybody one key, just read our new book called Ask. It’s a bookstore, but his whole Amazon, cause the bookstores are temporarily closed. So our new book Ask, we’ll give you the greatest advance whenever, because success comes from grew breasted realization of worthwhile goals and you get to your destiny. The only one way by asking.
No, that’s, that’s so well said. Mark and Marco, if I may, one of my mentors who’s actually going to be speaking at our event is a man named Mark Von Muser. Mark is someone who been working the highest levels of the personal development industry. He worked with the number one transformational leader in the world who’s, who’s had like tens of thousands of people at each and one one of his events. And Mark helped help that man take that success to a whole new level. And Mark has been a man who’s helped literally a couple thousand thought leaders, get to space where they’re seven-figure plus earners. And he says that every single one of us has a superhero in us and a supervillain. The supervillain is that part of us that doesn’t want us to take chances, that’s afraid, that shrinks back, it stays in its comfort zone.
And the superhero is that part of us that sees our greatness, that eels, the mission that we have that runs toward purpose and gets out of the comfort. Every one of us has a superhero and a supervillain within us. And it’s up to us who we allow to be. And I say, the first thing you should do is figure out if you’re listening to your superhero, your soup on a daily basis. And if you’re not listening to your stupid role, start listening to your superhero. That’s number one. Yet Mark’s book, ask Mark’s book, ask is responsible for this event. He came on my show, he told me about the principles and I’m a good student. You know, one of the things I get to do is I interviewed the smartest people in the world and I learned from him. And that way I kind of feel that Napoleon Hill, like he did back in the day when he, when he interviewed the smartest people in the world.
So I use the principles in that book to generate this event, which is a world-class global phenomenon. So ask is a very powerful book. And I’ll also say this, Mark and I have put together a special package for people. Let’s say the event is free, but there’s a special VIP package where we’re actually offering people on both nights after the event, an opportunity to be in a special private, more intimate room with some of the thought leaders from the event to come and have a chance to ask questions to engage in that fire and that. But on top of that, Mark’s got a free book that he’s offering as an ebook and I’ve got a free ebook that I’m offering specifically to show coaches six steps they can take coaches and consultants take their business to a new level. So that VIP is actually really important and powerful and you don’t have to take it, but if you want more than just to listen to us, if you actually want to have a couple of hours worth of conversations and be part of a more intimate group, that VIP is available and you can definitely take advantage of that in addition to signing up for three programs.
So as we wrap it up, guys, I’m going to ask you one question and coincidentally it’s going to come right out of your new book Mark asking, I’m going to actually have you back on the show so we can talk about this great new book that just came out two weeks ago. The one section that I really liked, Mark was the section about pivoting your destiny by asking. And you guys have mentioned the word ask multiple times here in the last 2025 minutes. And I’m a big believer of asking questions, asking questions is so, so critically important. In fact, I remember having a book many decades ago, I sound really old by saying that, but many decades ago called the Aladdin factor as in like rubbed the lamp and let the Aladdin genie come out. And it was all about asking questions and just being there to ask because you don’t get anything in life unless you ask for it. And so the chapter in your book is, is asking what your definition of happiness. And I think this ties into the subject or topic very well because a lot of people are not clear on what it is that is their definition of happiness. And so they don’t know when they’re actually there and when they should actually be happy. So my question to you guys is how can we define what happiness is for us? Or how do we go and find the definition of our own happiness?
Well, let me do it as a one paragraph story, right of the book. So the guy whose story is Greg Hague, 40 years ago, he hired me to come and speak to his real estate company. Then 40 years later I moved to Scottsdale, Arizona and he said, I got to have you back. I hear this story from him. He’d made a porch, he had two jet planes, four houses, motorcycle motorcycles around the world. He had boats, he had everything that any human being could possibly want, but he was unhappy. He goes to breakfast with one of his best friends and he says, I’m just not fulfilled anymore. And the guy says, well, what’s your definition of happiness? And he said, Oh, I don’t really have one. So what happened is a Greg and this guy keep talking. And the guy finally said, look, happiness comes from passionately on purpose about something that matters intimately to you.
That’s the essence of it. It’s not word for word. And what happens is what do you passionately on purpose? Well because if you were like, I’m really excited about doing this seminar. So we wake up in the middle of the night thinking about when I was Whitey mass, my wife and I found out, Holy cow, when you start asking yourself questions, your mind has revelations. It has illumination, it has intuition, it has stuff just breakthrough. So once you learn to ask bigger questions, like, how am I going to help a billion people during this next decade? Like dr Peter Diamandis says, your mind goes to work. Then you get out of the Goldens and you start doing exciting stuff and you wake up beating yourself in a chest feeling like Tarzan or charge out and you go into life with Gusto, zeal, excitement, and utter happiness.
That’s the power of thinking big.
Nobody thinks bigger than Mark Victor Hansen, man, his goals are so vast and I wanted to work with a thousand people for this event. And he says, yeah, that’s cool, but we need to do more than one event in which millions. And I’m like, my eyes popped out. Like, wow, this man is big. I love it. I love it.
Well, we’ve only got thousands and thousands of tending and we’ll probably have tens of thousands of attending before it happened. Just two days. That’s how fast this thing is.
That’s incredible. Well, let’s wrap it up. Anything else you guys want to share before we close it up here?
We just want to be very thankful to you, Marco, and all your listeners for being kind enough to listen to us and I hope it gives you what old Zig Ziglar used to call it, checkup, neck up. So you go
I love it. And I’ll say this as well, that Marco, first of all, a brother you on or a spy bringing us on your show. Thank you for, for making this happen or being willing to move with velocity in this happening. And the other thing I want to say to all of your dedicated followers, this man’s a good man and he’s doing great work. He’s helping the world be a better place by bringing on people like Mark Victor Hansen, like myself, who think differently and who want to bring love to the world. So you’re definitely doing the right thing by following Marco. Senator Raleigh,
you’re too kind, but thank you so much. So let’s wrap it up. That’s YourFinestHourSummit.com go there, sign up for free. It’s a two day event. Take advantage of it. It’s going to be one of the biggest events of the year. So guys, thanks for coming on. I appreciate your time.
Hey Mark, thanks for having us. Bye bye. Bye bye.
I again appreciate the two of them coming on the show with such short notice, but we will have Mark back on here in a few weeks to talk about his new book. So we’re going to wrap it up right here. This was just a quick episode to get out and I’m going to turn this around in 24 hours if you can believe that. So we are recording on a Tuesday. It will go live on Wednesday and the event is on Thursday. That’s it for today. If you haven’t already subscribed, hit that subscribe button. Help us spread the word. So share the show with other likeminded people. Thank you for listening and we will see you on our next episode.
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