About the guest Trevor Blake:
Trevor G Blake, a serial entrepreneur and New York times best- selling author, who over the last ten years has gone from starting his first business with just a few hundred dollars to creating and successfully selling and exiting three separate companies for over $300 million, all while never hiring a single employee and does this all working only 5 hours a day.
Trevor grew up extremely poor and made the shift from humble beginnings to now achieving great success with balance. He joins Passing The Torch to help listeners accomplish a balanced and successful life with financial independence
Trevor has been featured in major media outlets such as Business Insider, Forbes, The Wall Street Journal, CNN, Inc. & more. Trevor is also the author of Secrets to a Successful Startup: A Recession-Proof Guide to Starting, Surviving & Thriving in Your Own Venture & Three Simple Steps: A Map to Success in Business and Life.
Show Notes
Connect with Trevor Blake:
Trevor's Books:
Connect with Passing The Torch: Facebook and IG: @torchmartin
More Amazing Stories:
Episode 28: Purple Heart Recipient CMSgt Ben Seekell – Your Capacity is Limitless
Episode 31: Todd Henry – Choose To Be Brave
Episode 35: Brook Cupps – Shaping Leaders On and Off The Court
Episode 41: Lee Ellis – Freeing You From Bond That Make You Insecure
About the guest Trevor Blake:
Trevor G Blake, a serial entrepreneur and New York times best- selling author, who over the last ten years has gone from starting his first business with just a few hundred dollars to creating and successfully selling and exiting three separate companies for over $300 million, all while never hiring a single employee and does this all working only 5 hours a day.
Trevor grew up extremely poor and made the shift from humble beginnings to now achieving great success with balance. He joins Passing The Torch to help listeners accomplish a balanced and successful life with financial independence
Trevor has been featured in major media outlets such as Business Insider, Forbes, The Wall Street Journal, CNN, Inc. & more. Trevor is also the author of Secrets to a Successful Startup: A Recession-Proof Guide to Starting, Surviving & Thriving in Your Own Venture & Three Simple Steps: A Map to Success in Business and Life.
Show Notes
Connect with Trevor Blake:
Trevor's Books:
Connect with Passing The Torch: Facebook and IG: @torchmartin
More Amazing Stories:
Episode 28: Purple Heart Recipient CMSgt Ben Seekell – Your Capacity is Limitless
Episode 31: Todd Henry – Choose To Be Brave
Episode 35: Brook Cupps – Shaping Leaders On and Off The Court
Episode 41: Lee Ellis – Freeing You From Bond That Make You Insecure
Bio - Trevor G Blake, a serial entrepreneur and New York times best- selling author, who over the last ten years has gone from starting his first business with just a few hundred dollars to creating and successfully selling and exiting three separate companies for over $300 million, all while never hiring a single employee and does this all working only 5 hours a day.
Background - Trevor grew up extremely poor and made the shift from humble beginnings to now achieving great success with balance. He has been featured in major media outlets such as Business Insider, Forbes, The Wall Street Journal, CNN, Inc. & more. Trevor is also the author of Secrets to a Successful Startup: A Recession-Proof Guide to Starting, Surviving & Thriving in Your Own Venture & Three Simple Steps: A Map to Success in Business and Life.
Show Notes
Intro 00:00 – 01:30
Working five hours a day with zero employees
01:30 – 04:40 Trevor G Blake: Well, so the five hours a day is a deliberate thing to keep peak brain performance, but I developed that because I got burned out so quickly as an entrepreneur. Cause I had a fast track career, but you know, when I think about it now, looking back, I probably spent 75% of my time sitting in a meeting room talking about nonsense. And then when you go to work on your own, I'm starting from the computer thinking I must be doing it wrong because I seem to have finished my work already. And I'm sat waiting for an email to come through, I'm waiting for the phone to go, and twiddling my thumbs. And I realized there's something different, that being in business by yourself. So I did a lot of research, I'm a scientist by education, and so I like to know how and why things work. So I started to study what people who went before me had done. People like, so NASA requires its pilots only to work certain periods of time and all this kind of thing, peak brain performance. And so I realized that I could achieve, ten times more working on my own at home than I ever could in the corporate office. But I didn't want to get burned out. So what I found was that the brain can't concentrate for more than two hours. So I gave myself a two hour productive period in the office. And then I would leave completely for two hours because I also found out that the brain's in its most creative when it's tired. So I kind of split my day up into a productive period, relaxation period where all the magic happens, right? All those great ideas, like being in, you know, with all experience being in the shower, and you think, God, why have I not thought of this before? So I built those into my schedule. So the five hour work day is And people can download this. I put a free download for everybody on my website, www.trevorgblake.com during COVID, because so many people were moving from the corporate office to work from home without any instructions, without any guide. And you can get burned out, you can get really stressed. And so if you split your day up into productive work periods and then stop and then go for a walk, and then for two hours or whatever, then stop and then come back and do another two hour period, you'll find that you're 10 times more productive than you ever were in another setting. So that's the five hour work day aspect of it. The no employees pretty much the same reason that I spent most of my career holding the hands of employees and trying to make them happy instead of talking about customer satisfaction, which is more important than product enhancement stuff like that. So I decided to structure a company based with vendors and contractors instead of employees. I kind of did it because I didn't have a lot of money at the start and I couldn't really afford to hire a bunch of people, but it turned out to be a really profitable business. And so, you know, I've 76% net profits within two years and so I just kept doing that, I'm on my seventh company now and I've built them all the same way. But I call it a model of alliances or a hub. And I've built them all the same way. And what it does is it frees me up to concentrate on growth, because these people don't need supervising. They're experts of what they do. So I will hire a company to be my manufacturer, another company to be my distributor, another company to be regulatory, et cetera, et cetera, finance and all the rest of it. And so all I have to do is be like a conductor of an orchestra and just give a little guidance here and there and then focus on product and growth. It enables an entrepreneur like myself to remain single, like a soul entrepreneur and to grow fast. And we live in a world of get big fast. So it works well.
Thoughts on office mindset shifting after COVID
04:40 – 07:38 Trevor G Blake: It's interesting because when I started my first company, I'm a late bloomer really, so I started in 2003. And so, you know, since 2003 to now, it's a lot of companies in a short space of time. But I remember the cynicism of when I was trying to get investment, I remember all this, all the people said, well, you need to open an office and you need to hire these people, you know, you can't do it on your own. And then, you know, I did the first company on my own in a few years, I had a couple of hundred dollars when I started, I sold it for 105 million and about five years later or something. And then, and the same investors, you know, they were still shaking their head and saying, well, you got away with it was their attitude. You got lucky, it'll never happen again. And so I keep doing it, but I still keep meeting the same students, even though I keep repeating it and keep having these successes. The same people are saying, that's not possible. And I'm saying, but the world is like this now, we have technology now that makes it possible. When I first started, it was still dial up internet. It was harder. Now it's so easy, you know, you can start, you come up with a winning idea, you start a company, engage the world tomorrow just through your computer. Like, look, of course, what we're doing right now, this wasn't possible when I first started in 2003. It was unimaginable actually. And now this is every day occurence. So, you know, but still like me entrepreneurs who still they start with this indoctrination of I've got to hire, I only know this one side of the business, so I need to hire experts for all the other sides of the business. And that's, you know, you can get into trouble, you know, cash flow trouble quickly doing that. And I'm not saying that you should never hire anybody different businesses get to a certain growth point where it makes more sense to hire. But I've not come across a startup that needs to hire people straight away. And it's just about the entrepreneur having the self-confidence to educate themselves about the main issues and the main opportunities and all the different functions when you start. Because if you do it any other way, to me, you know, the sort of vision visual I have in my head when most entrepreneurs I meet start the company and start hiring straight away is, you know, if you bought a new house, you wouldn't hire a full time handy person to live in a spare bedroom in case something went wrong. But that's kind of what everybody's doing when they start the company. They hire all these people for two weeks. They're busy and the rest of the time they're just playing on the internet because there's nothing to do. Because in the early days of a company, you know, the volume of work and everything is really squirrely. So I, you know, I encourage entrepreneurs to think, to think differently at the beginning. Do you really need to hire a CFO? Do you really need to hire a head of software engineering and all this kind of stuff? You know, for a period of time, whatever that period is, you can get quite far without doing any of that and then what you get to do is keep that cash. And that cash is so important these days. So it's all about really cash flow management.
Advice to people desiring a balanced and successful life with financial independence
07:51 – 10:04 Trevor G Blake: That's what I'm messaging about and that's why I do what I do. I'm doing this thing right now. I meet so many entrepreneurs that work 16-hour days, but they're on their third marriage. And the kids hate them and the dogs don't recognize them. And that is no way to live. I was lucky until my wife died a year ago. I've been together 40 years, 40 amazing years. But the reason it stayed amazing was that I never let work interfere with my personal life or vice versa. So when you're a sole entrepreneur and you're working from home, you've got to have a separate office space, there's got to be ground rules that nobody can just come in and chat and have a coffee. You know, when you're at work, you're at work. I have separate devices for work and personal life so that they never cross over. And if you don't do that, of course, everybody falls for the same thing. You know, you're busy working, concentrating, and then you hear a ding or WhatsApp ding or something. You have to be really strong willed not to go and see what that is. And of course, it's likely to be a personal thing. Then you're distracted. You know, scientifically it shows it takes thirty five minutes to get back on track, you can't afford that. So when you're at work, you're at work and see have you work devices, which is what I'm on now. But when I go to play, I have a different device. You know, I don't have to do it. And I lock them in. So at night time, this door gets locked, and I'm not going to have that interfere. So it's simple little discipline tricks. I was a military guy, you know that we would disciplines a big part, yeah, of who we are. And it becomes part of our DNA on how to discipline myself to keep on track with everything and I think that I find that is a useful thing to pass over to You know entrepreneurs and would be entrepreneurs the importance of discipline for everything So you treat your downtime and your quiet time just as importantly and with the same dedication that you do with your work time And you but you aren't like you would know with time You know with your military experience You know you don't say okay. We'll take about an hour to do this You know Yeah It's an hour And you stop and then the next thing and you stop. And so that discipline is really important too.
Managing energy which in turn has directly impacted time management and production
10:20 – 13:03 Trevor G Blake Well, I think it's the reason for my business success is that I still, in my mind, I still think I'm 20 years old, right? But I still have a lot. I've got plenty of energy. I don't get burned out, but it's really important. But I take care of myself too, which helps. So my education is as a physicist, right? So I'm fascinated by energy. So most people would look at me and say, okay, he's a business guy, okay, so he's a business man. But when they get to know me, they'd say, oh, actually, he's a bit metaphysical because I'm really into energy and how to play with energy And when we understand that everything is made of energy and how we interact with this gives us the results that we have today. So if we understand energy, maybe if we interact with it in a little different way, we get different outcomes. When you understand that and you play with that, and I have a, that if you read three simple steps, I talk about this, how to play with energy differently and seek us to a successful startup. It's very different to what people expect in terms of starting up a company. We start internally, we start with our mind and our energy first before we even think of building an actual physical company.When you understand that and work with that, you realize the importance of the structure. You realize the importance of doing things in a certain way, speaking a certain way, thinking a certain way, reading certain material. You know, your life becomes quite disciplined in order to have that balance. So that you can, there's no point during the day where you think, I don't think I ever say to myself, oh, I feel tired. I don't think I've ever, I can't remember ever saying that because you're working with energy all the time. So you can feel when your energy is not at its best, you do something to boost that energy. And these are things that you don't normally hear entrepreneurs talk about, but I will meditate, okay, or I will do yoga. I even do shamanic dancing, you know, I do different things during the day in order to keep to get myself back to the level I want to be so that when I'm working, I'm really sharp. You know, I saw when I worked in the corporate office, I used to have a reputation for being a bit of a troubleshooter. So if people had a problem, they'd say, Well, maybe Trevor has an answer, they bring me into their meeting. And I would know nothing, I couldn't understandBut I was able to kind of focus on the key issues that they were missing because they just tired themselves out Meeting and talking and all of it and everyone thought those guys are genius, but it wasn't that at all It's just that I would I knew how to work on my energy so that so that I'm connected to You know I didn't get distracted by all this the silliness that goes around a meeting and I would I would be connected to the issue And I would say well I think that you know I think it should be blue whenever I say it's green and then they go wow Yeah, it should be blue that's genius, but it wasn't because I was a genius It was just because my energy level was higher than everyoneelse is because I knew how to, and you have to keep it high.
Life lesson learned during time in the Royal Navy outside of discipline and structure that has helped
13:00 – 16:37 Trevor G Blake Well, I think self-confidence really, that I think I probably got a bit arrogant when I was in the Royal Navy, a bit cocky. But the reason being that. The reason being I joined as a kid, you know, like a 17 year old kid from poverty. And then I joined with all these rich, you know, dad's rich kids type of people. I joined the officer academy. And then I suddenly realized, hang on a sec, I'm as good as they are. And I didn't expect to be. I expected them to be like nine foot tall and super intelligent. And I realized that we're all the same and we're all making it up at the same time. And that really boosted my confidence. And when I've come into business by myself, I've realized that you're capable of it all. And so when I worked in the corporate office, I used to think, you know, at the executive level, there must be, it must be like a secret school or something, where somebody goes to learn to be CEO. Okay. That's what I was thinking. I used to be really intimidated by the, by like the managing director or the vice president. And then I got in a fast track career and within a few years, I'm vice president of commercial development. And I kind of caught myself and stepped back and thought, how did that happen? And then I realized and I look around and everyone's making up as they go along. Nobody knows anything. They're all figuring it out figuring it out and trying to get away with it. And that boosted my self-confidence. So the self-confidence I got in the military was so important to me because I wasn't afraid of trying things and taking things on. And then in the corporate career, I realized that most people are just faking it. And I'm as good, I'm a, I can BS as much as anybody. So I could get, I could have a corporate career, right? Just being a good BSer. And then when I started my own company, I realized, well, there's nothing in being an entrepreneur that I can't figure out. And I really learned that I'm meeting a bunches of biographies of people and a little light came on one day and I realized, hang on a sec, all these brilliant people from way back for like Madame C.J. Walker, who's one of my heroines, if you like, I wish I could meet her, but obviously, you know, she's from the 1800s, all the way to like Richard Branson. I realized that not one of them set out to be a successful entrepreneur, not one of them went to a school that said, okay, now I'm an entrepreneur. They all set about fixing something. So they would see something that they thought wasn't right. They would try to find as, you know, solution for it, realized that the solution doesn't exist, so they fixed it themselves. Like, no point of Richard Branson say, I'd like to, you know, run an airline. He wanted to get to see his girlfriend on a Caribbean island and his flight got canceled. So he chartered the plane and then sold seats on the plane to pay for it. Genius, really. But he just figured it out. He just fixed it. And so I realized that with being an entrepreneur and my self-confidence that I think I got from the military and elsewhere, the self-confidence was, if I see a problem, even though I'm totally unqualified for this, I can figure out a way to fix it me an entrepreneur by default. And that's what I try to get people to, you know, young entrepreneurs and would be entrepreneurs to think about. Think about entrepreneurship in a different way. It's not about what you're good at. And it's not about what you think you love to do. It's about fixing stuff. It's finding problems and fixing it or finding something that doesn't exist and creating it. And you'll figure out how to do that. It just somebody has to start and everyone else will come around. And you'll, you know, everyone, you'll be surrounded by brilliant people who make you really don't know what you're doing, but you have the confidence to try it. That for me is what entrepreneurship is all about.
Importance for people to define their rich
17:23 – 22:33 Trevor G Blake: A lot of people don't like talking about money because they think it's crass, but money is just energy. So the whole of the universe is made of energy, just showing itself up in different forms. And so you convert labor into payment, then converts it into a money form, which you then convert into something else. It's just conversion of energy. And you have to get used to talking about it because in business, one day you're talking about $200 and then a year later you're talking about $200 million. I mean, that's how quickly things move these days. So you have to get comfortable with it. Otherwise it will pass you by. You know, you mentioned goals a few times. You say, I don't really believe in goals and I've never really had goals or followed goals. I mean, my thing is intentions, which are completely different. So goals are a little bit like stepping stones across a pond. Okay, you know where you're going and you know it's, and people talk about them being, you know, believable to be achievable and all this kind of nonsense. I've never followed any of that, but I understand why people do that. But if you want to go from starting to, let's use a real life recent example like mirror.com, which is the big mirror fitness thing. I mean, there's a wonderful entrepreneur. She came up with the idea, I think around Christmas Eve. She sold it less than two years later for 500 million. That's the opportunity that exists today with technology and everything like that. She didn't start off saying, how do I get from here across this pond by the stepping stones? If she set goals, she never would have made it. What she did was she set an intention. And she had the intention that this would be taken up by a major store in the United States and that they would, you know, they'd buy her out, which they did for 500 million, Lula Lamont bought her out, who was one of the original investors in it. You know, that's an intention, going from zero to 500 million. A goal is going from where I am now to 2 million today. That's not rich. The official definition of being a multi-millionaire today is to have 30 million, 30 million in, you know, rapidly liquid assets. Yeah, yeah. So I mean, I mean, when I was growing up, nobody knew a millionaire. No one could conceive what a millionaire would be like, you know, that we imagine it'd be a man in a fur coat with a hat and a cigar, you know, because a million was so much. But today, there's 500 million millionaires today. It's not that much. And so, are talking about, you know, that they talk about billions, like when I was going up, we used to talk about millions. And so a billion is an intention. And if that sounds crazy for people who are listening to this, the average age of a first time self-made billionaire is still 63 years old. So, so it's, you know, it's still, it's, you know, a lot of people think over billionaires like 25 years old now, and you've got some kind of technology thing, it's not, it's still the same as it used to be. Financial independence is not in my opinion, like the summit of a mountain that you climb to and you get there and you go, Hey, I'm here, I've done it. Because the minute you do that, you stagnate the energy and it all leaves you. So financial independence is about getting to a point where the energy of money flows through your life at such a high rate that you live this life, life of the billionaire, if you like. So if you take, again, I'll take an example like Richard Branson, and Richard Branson doesn't have a Hogwarts vault where he sits on gold coins. He makes some money and then he says, okay, now where does this money energy go? And he starts something else. And then that grows sells and exits and he starts something else. And that's what I've done with my businesses. So my current business number four, I'm in negotiations to exit that now and negotiations will take probably a year to 18 months from this point on. It's a billion dollar exit. Now I don't get a billion dollars because I have investors. I'll make a lot of investors very happy smiling from ear to ear. But I'm also enjoying that process too. So when people look at me, they'll say, oh, look, that guy's a billionaire, but it isn't a thing. That guy lives the life of a billionaire because that kind of money is now flowing through his life. So a lot of people again young entrepreneurs don't get this and they say okay, I want to be rich and they think okay What's rich? Oh, it's it like a station on a railway track. It's two million or five million But that's not rich That's when you when that happens if you get to that point and then you put your arms around it and embrace it or stuff The cash in the mattress it loses all its energy It stagnates and it starts to leave you so you have to change your mentality Completely about money and energy so that you talk about I am financially independent which means that I'm living this life, but I'm making multi-million dollar decisions every day. And that's great fun, right? Yeah. And it's much better than thinking about goals. And then your mindset is about, OK, I've got to pay off my credit card this week. You have to really shift your mindset away from a sense of lack to a sense of flow. And three simple steps. My book, Three Simple Steps, tells you all everything you need to know about. I don't get any money for it. All my proceeds go to cancer research and development. So I'm quite happy to say, go get the book and it'll change your life.
Difference between setting intentions versus goals
22:44 – 26:24 Trevor G Blake: It's very important. It's very, very important because an intention is so huge from where you are right now that you'd be embarrassed to tell anybody else in case of laughter. Okay. Whereas goals, you'll talk about goals all day long. We do goals in business, you know, we'll forecast some budgets, which none of us ever meet. And, you know, that's a normal part of life intentions are this thing that's inside you that matches your motivation and who you are that takes you from where you are to where you really wanted to be when you were five years old. Yeah, whatever it may be. And then when you think like that, your stomach starts to churn it with this kind of excitement, this sense of awe. Yeah, the energy, the butterflies. Yeah, absolutely. And you get it and you wake up fully excited. When I wake up every morning, with intentions, you have to eat, there's a sequence to them as a formula. Everyone now knows where to go to get that formula at www.trevorgblake.com. call it the five Ps, but you have to understand that it's kind of a science behind it. They're scientifically based, okay, it's not new age, feel good thinking, and it's not positive thinking, which is nonsense. There's no such thing as positive thinking because the thoughts are formed in 500 milliseconds. You don't have time to get in front of them. But what you can have is positive reactions. So you can have a thought about your credit card debt, and you go, oh, God, what a mess, how do they get into it? Catch yourself doing that, change it around, and start to think and imagine and you buy a bottle of champagne with cash and have all your friends around to celebrate, you no longer have any debt. That's how an attention differs from the goal. With an intention, there's no time involved. So you imagine what life is like, a day in the life of me, once my intention is achieved, how does that feel? And when you do that and you feel it now, you speed up the process of getting it, it comes to you. And it's a beautiful process, it works all the time my course transformation up to his neck in debt. We talked about it. I talked about changing his mindset. He just did his first deal for 250 million two years later. And all he did was change his mindset, just change the way he was thinking and go away from goal setting and trying to get out of a situation that you don't want and then focusing on what you want. But this massive thing that he wouldn't dare tell anybody. And not only did he achieve his intention in terms of the number, but he wanted to achieve it in another country. So he actually achieved it in the country of his I get these things, all these emails all the time, but it's good to talk about it because it's one thing for me to say it because people will say, yeah, it's easy for you to talk about because you've done it. But I've only done it because I learned of these things when I was little, when I was young. I used to hide out in the town library because I was getting bullied. And I would wait till the bullies got tired and went home for dinner. And so I just read books. And so I read biography after biography after biography. And then I realized that this is what these great people do from all of them, from Madam C.J. Walker, it all of them. This is what they did. They thought this way. And I figured out as a young kid that if it worked for them, who am I to say wouldn't work for me? So I just copied. I just did the same thing. And that's all. And that's what three simple steps are. The three simple steps are these three attitudes and way of behavior that the people who went before me all did in that did naturally. And I've just copied what they did and a life of tremendous adventure and fun as a result of that.
Taking back control of one’s individuality
26:40 – 31:54 Trevor G Blake: That is a brilliant question. And that is that is probably the golden question that I think to my colleague Martin. And it's something I'm passionate about. It's one of the reasons I do what I do. We all lose our sense of individuality very quickly in life. And it's not anyone's fault parents fault is not the school's fault, that's the world we live in. But because we don't know that we have control, because we don't know that we have the ability to rewire our neural networks, okay, we're not taught that at school, we're not taught that at home. And so we become a product of environment, we start to take on the same sort of opinions that our parents have or the same sort of values as the school says we have and stuff like that. And if you don't manage your own mentality, then you do become that product environment. And I call it you end up back in quicksand. So you end up in this really comfortable place where you're surrounded by people who are very similar to you and you all feel good together. But then one day you might wake up and you might say, oh my goodness, I'm 40 years old. What happened to my life? I love what your son is doing because as a kid I wanted to be an astronaut. It was the first, you know, man was going on the moon for the first time and I was blown away by all of that. And you very quickly lose all sight of that. To the extent that when I was at school, the careers counselor that we had, you know, she looked me up and down and assessed me and looked at my background. And so she said, you know, I think your best opportunity here is an apprentice manager in a chicken packing factory. That's how she saw me. That's what my life is going to be like. And I actually said to her, no, I'm not doing that. I'm going to be an officer in the Royal Navy. And she laughed. She laughed out loud at me because that's impossible for somebody from my background. But through the biographies, I learned that this is what everybody else had faced. The laughter of everyone around you, the lack of, and it wasn't always out of maliciousness. It wasn't because the, didn't like you oftentimes is because they loved you and didn't want you to make a fool of yourself Okay, they want to protect you. Yeah, you know, tone it down a bit tone it down a bit, you know be an accountant You know what you what do you mean? You want to be an actress on stage? You know no no one makes money to be an accountant that so we're surrounded by that So what you have to do is you have to then realize that's happening Realize that that's affecting your thoughts and that your thoughts are energy and they go out to the universe Energy can only be converted. It can't be destroyed or created and so it comes back as more of the same thing If you think, you know, if you have a sense of lack, if you think of debt, you're going to get more debt. If you think, I can't do it, you're not going to be able to do it. You're going to get more, you get stuck. And so once you know that and you start to react to the thoughts that you're having, and you think in a different way, and you start to imagine success, no one needs to know you're doing it. But you have a technique called a mini-mind movie where you imagine what your life is like in this magical place that you can get to. When you start to do that, it has a tremendous effect on the outcomes in your life. And you do, you start to get out of the quicksand. And then everybody around you looks at you says, hang on, who do you think you are? Come back, get back in a quick sense, who do you think you are putting your head above the crowd? And so it takes a little bit of work and a lot of discipline, but eventually you get away from that. And the elastic band of people pulling you back, that snaps and you're off and running. Like the chap I just mentioned before, all of his family said, what do you mean you're giving up your corporate job? You're on a six figure salary, he's got a spec expense account, he's got a company car, he's got everything he can possibly want. But he wanted to create something. He wanted to invent something and then everyone say no don't be you know It's crazy and everything even even when he started his own company For the first six months his previous boss who was glad to get rid of him tried to hire him back about five or six times And it would have been so easy for him just to sit because it was hard on the first six months It'd be so easy for him to have said you know I will go back because my family's given me a hard time My friends are laughing at me. It's not going well But he stuck with it and eventually if you stick with it And you keep using these tools and techniques weeks, you free yourself from all of that and he became his own person. And he said to me in an email, you know, he feels he's been reborn. Like this is who I was when I was born and I forgot, I forgot who I was. And I was, I was born to be creative and I'm being creative as an entrepreneur. So getting back your individuality. But there's things you have to do. You have to understand how anything works and you have to start to recognize your own thoughts and then change them and react to them and use your imagination because show and the brain can't tell the difference between what's real and what's imagined. So if you keep imagining something you want, you over a period of time, you stop living the life you don't want and those things you want start to appear in your life. It's a magical process. It's beautiful. So I think you hit the nail on the head talking about losing sense of identity really through life.
Finding support in the moments when you are emotionally feeling lonely
32:31 – 36:49 Trevor G Blake: It is a brilliant question Martin that it's a lonely path and I talk about this a lot but the path to success is not very well trodden it's surprising and what I found and this I so in my course transformation on the very first activity I kind of have a disclaimer type warning in that if you don't want change don't go any further because everything in your life willwhen you decide to take control of your own destiny, everything. So you will probably, in all likelihood, you'll end up living in a different place. In all likelihood, the circle of friends you have right now will completely change. And it's not that you have to kick them out. They will lose interest in you because you're no longer interested in the same stuff as they are. You're no longer satisfied sitting on the sofa watching a reality TV show. You want to read something stimulating. You want to read about an entrepreneur or an adventurer or a musician or an artist, you know, depending whatever you're into. And suddenly, other people look at youdifferently and I found that in my life. So first of all, my father started to look at me differently and the issue started at that point and then my friends didn't even know what to talk to me about anymore. So you know, because they were doing the same thing as they've always done sitting in the pub drinking. And I wanted adventure, I wanted something in my life. So there is a very lonely time, but then what happens is you find that you attract to yourself another group of people who will support you at this new level that you're at and then you decidethen they go away and another group of people come in. And if you're lucky enough as I was to have a constant through that. So I had my wife for all 40 years through that. We met when we were 19 years old. I was in the Navy, she was a nurse. You know, she was always my sort of, I was just happy to be with Lynn. I didn't need anybody else. So it's just the two of us, we were fine. She used to say the same thing. So we never felt lonely on that, but because I meet a lot of people who start this program later in life, so like they could be 40 or 50,guy who's 87 and just started his first company, ex-professor of economics at North Carolina University, just started his first company and he says he feels like a kid again. He feels like life has now been worthwhile. Can't understand why he didn't start 30 years ago. So you just do it. When these things happen, everything around you changes. And so if you're lucky to have somebody who can be with you through that, that's a bonus and a fantastic thing. But you have to be prepared for the fact that that might not be the case. And for a period of time,It's just you against the world. But it doesn't last long. Once the success starts to come your way, people who are used to success, they come into your life. And they don't come in like the old guys and the pub for me, they'd be complaining about the weather and complaining about this, complain about that, they don't have enough money, taxes, all the rest of it. Now this new group of people are coming in and saying, have you thought of doing this? They're a completely different mindset. Not complaining about anything, but looking at opportunities and looking for new ideas and sharing best practicesSo everything changes, but you have to be prepared for that. And a lot of people don't like change. So that's my kind of warning in my course transformation. If you're not ready for change, don't go any further. I'll give you your money back. Because everything will change. Your whole life is going to change. For most people, that's a good thing. For most people, they want that. They want to be financially independent. They want to have inspiring people around them. They want great relationships. Whereas their experience up until this point in time is probably the opposite of that surrounded by complainers, all that moves away. And a more enlightened sort of world comes to you. And it's a lot more fun, I can tell you that. And you have this kind of sense of eternal youth. The one word I won't allow people to use around me is retire. You can't use that word. There's no such thing. You know, you can keep going, next thing, next thing, next thing, it's just fantastic. It's so much fun.
Using one word, what is the secret to those in need of healing
37:33 – 44:13 Trevor G Blake It's just to seek joy instead of pain. I mean it really is a choice. It's absolute choice and you know people look at it and they will as humans we're very good at making things complicated and we really if something's really complicated we assign a value to it and if something's really simple we admit we ignore it and dismiss it. Everything that I'm talking about is the simplest thing in the world you just change the thing. That's it. That's it. That's it. That's it. Right. And so you seek out things that fill you with joy instead of things that give you pain. I mean, I'm not trying to sound judgmental here because, you know, going back to the previous question and conversation, if you're comfortable and you don't want change, that's fine. There's no judgment there. That's your decision. Make a decision and you'll be happy. Most of the misery in the world is caused by indecision. People saying, I want to, but I can't. I wish I could. I just don't think I can. And that causes real frustration in people's lives. So, you know, as long as you make a decision, and then if someone else says, well, actually I'd like to go on this adventure. And instead of saying, who does he think he is? But you say, okay, good for you, I support you. That's fine, you know, but what typically happens is the opposite, obviously, as we know. So for me, it's all about seeking things that make you joyful. And for a lot of people, that is not the life they have right now. And you do have to be grown up about it. You have to sit down and sit. And I have an exercise because you sit down and you really consider things and you figure out if there were no impediments in life, not at all, people, money, circumstances, country, race, whatever, there's no impediments to me, what would I choose to be? What would I choose to do? That's usually very different than where they are. But you do have to do it. And then when you figure that out and you say, all right, do I want to do that or not, that's the big decision you have to make. So you have to make a commitment and it's like a covenant and once you've made the commitment one way or the other then there's no going back Earlier in the episode you talked about the proceeds and the money from the book it's cool Do you mind just kind of expanding on you talked about the cancer research? Do you mind just kind of going deeper into that? Yeah, I'll see there's two things That's one of the nice things about having money flow in your life as you can do all the things you used to dream of doing when you were a kid so my mother died of cancer when I was young and she had you know She had so much grace dealing with her. I learned everything I've learned in life, everything I've achieved is down to what I learned, watching and observing my mother and watching and observing my wife, two amazing feminine spirits that I hope one day I'll get like 10% of that in my life. And then I'll be the richest man in the universe. That's your risk right there, right? Yeah, exactly. If I could get 10% of their intuition, wow. Nothing could hold me back. So I was always fascinated with finding, so she handled her cancer with grace, Side effects from the treatments were awful. You know, just they just took a womanhood away, took her power away, and I watched her diminish over time, obviously, as a kid growing up. So I've always been fascinated by developing treatments for cancer that don't take away the quality of life. They don't debilitate the patient. So that's what I've been working on on the side for my whole life. And we're in clinical trials with one right now that can treat certain cancers without any side effects. That's an amazing thing. Everybody told me it's impossible. Everything they still do today, even though improving, it's not impossible is possible. So a lot of the money flow that comes in my life goes to achieve that on a non-profit basis. I want this to be available to anyone who has cancer. So those who can afford it, it's only like $30 and those who can't, they get it for free. Disrupting the pharmaceutical industry is how I kind of look at it. But I also have an animal sanctuary. So a lot of my proceeds from the transformation experience go to the animal sanctuary because I've always been a lover of animals. I grew up in the countryside, it's hard not to be. I have a small scruffy animal sanctuary up in Washington. And we take any scruffy animal with any number of legs. And we try to rehouse them and re-home them. And so what we do in that is there's a lot of seniors in the world who are afraid of having an animal because what happens if I die is how they're thinking. And I can't afford a vet bill and I can't afford the food. So we provide all of that. We provide the pet to the senior. We pay for the vet bills. We pay for the food. And we provide pet walkers and pet carriers stuff like that. So that the senior, the senior human and the senior animal gets to live out a life of love without having to worry about a thing. And so that's something I felt that that was a fix. I saw that as something I couldn't understand why that didn't exist. And so in the end, I've gone to fix it myself in a small way, hope I'm planning to expand in the next few years. It's beautiful. Everyone wins, you know, the animals win, the human wins. And, you know, I get to channel some of this money energy into a good cause. And I was doing a lot of research about you over the past couple of days. And that's something that actually did not come across about the animal sanctuary. So it's called, actually you could look it up online. If anyone loves animals like I do, it's called Fluffs. Cause my wife used to call all animals Fluffs. So it's called flufsink.com. Oh, perfect. Fluffsink.com. On that note. You can see our, we change it every week, you know, depending on who's the resident and who's, it's like a, it's an in and out sanctuary you're involved in a lot of different things and you have a lot of good things going on. If people want to learn more about you, what's the best place to find you? at TrevegyBlake.com is where it is the portal for everything. You can get the books there, you can get the courses there. But I put so much free stuff on there. There must be a thousand articles. I can't remember how many podcasts I've done over the last few years. But it's a place where I hope people go and get something and it changes your life. It changes your life. If all it does is change the way you're currently thinking to a way that is going to be better, your outcome to see your life, then everyone wins. So, trevorgblake.com, it's a beautiful website put together by a brilliant digital team called Living Brightside, who I met just a couple of years ago. And everything on there is authentic. So, every picture is somewhere where I grew up, every, including the house that I grew up, that's on there too. Every testimonial on there is somebody who spontaneously sent me, you know, like feedback, And I asked them, can I use this? And then they said, yes. And I said, but for it to be genuine, I need a picture. So people have genuinely said, I'm proud for you to use this because I want other people to get the same experience. It's a great place to hang out, trevorgblake.com
Billboard Message
44:10 - Trevor G Blake: It would be the same as the mission vision values of all seven companies that I've built, and that is make a positive difference in someone's life, have fun doing it and sharing all the rewards, material and otherwise they come naturally as a result of setting the energy inflow.
Books and People Mentioned:
Madam C.J. Walker
Richard Branson
Book: Three Simple Steps – A Map to Success in Business and Life
Connect with Trevor Blake: