#1652 - Don’t Let People Lessen Your Success This Way

Have you ever felt that your quiet diligence and dedication to growth have gone unnoticed in favor of those who seek the quick path to viral fame? In today’s episode, Kevin Palmieri and Alan Lazaros reveal the untold hours and persistent efforts that excellence in public speaking demands. We confront the deceptive lure of overnight sensations. They dig into the compound effect and dissect why a one-size-fits-all approach to advice, much like fad diets, might not work for your unique journey.

Links mentioned:
Next Level Nation - https://www.facebook.com/groups/459320958216700
Next Level Monthly Meet-up - https://www.nextleveluniverse.com/monthly-meetups/

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Digital Asset:
Blog Article #15 - How to Create and Sustain Long-Term Success - https://bit.ly/3vxcaco
How to Choose Your Top 5 Heroes! - Real Life Superheroes - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8GBpe9Ks5vA

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NLU is more than just a podcast; we have many more resources to help you achieve your goals and dreams.

For more information, please check out our website at the link below. 👇

Website 💻  http://www.nextleveluniverse.com

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Any of these communities or resources are FREE to join and consume
Next Level Nation - https://www.facebook.com/groups/459320958216700
Next Level 5 To Thrive (free course) - ​​https://bit.ly/3xffver
Next Level U Book Club - https://www.nextleveluniverse.com/next-level-book-club/
Next Level Monthly Meetup:  https://www.nextleveluniverse.com/monthly-meetups/

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We love connecting with you guys! Reach out on Instagram, Facebook, or via email.

Instagram 📷
Kevin: https://www.instagram.com/neverquitkid/
Alan: https://www.instagram.com/alazaros88/

Facebook ✍
Alan: https://www.facebook.com/alan.lazaros
Kevin: https://www.facebook.com/kevin.palmieri.90/

Email 💬
Kevin@nextleveluniverse.com
Alan@nextleveluniverse.com

LinkedIn ✍
Kevin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kevin-palmieri-5b7736160/
Alan: https://www.linkedin.com/in/alanlazarosllc/

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Show notes:
(1:59) The long hard yards
(6:39) Be good at what you do
(10:22) Consistency over time https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8GBpe9Ks5vA
(14:15) At NLU, we want you to win! So, we're giving tools and resources to ensure your success. Jo

🎙️ Hosted by Kevin Palmieri and Alan Lazaros

Next Level University is a top-ranked daily podcast for dream chasers and self-improvement lovers. With over 2,100 episodes, we help you level up in life, love, health, and wealth one day at a time. Subscribe for real, honest, no-fluff growth every single day.

Transcript

Kevin 0:00

Next Level Nation. Welcome back to another episode of Next Level University, where we help you level up your life, your love, your health and your wealth. We hope you enjoyed yesterday's episode, episode number 1651, the Two Types of Courage. Today for episode number 1652, don't let people lessen your success this way. I saw a post recently, alan, and it said I don't remember who it was by. It might have been by Adam Grant. I believe he's written some books that you like I think it was from Think again and Hidden Potential.

Alan 0:36

I actually just bought the hard copy of Hidden Potential.

Kevin 0:41

I believe it was him and I think it was a quote thing that said I no longer look up to people who went viral. I don't care about somebody who's having a really good year. I don't look up to people who are just crushing it right now. What I really look up to is the people who put in the long, hard yard to get to where they are today. It was a very good quote. I resonate with that. Let me share that. Alan and I were talking the other day. I said our buddy, our friend, evan Carmichael, dm'd me and he said oh, you guys are about to cross a thousand subscribers on YouTube. Awesome, strong work. I said yeah, thanks, man. How are you? What's going on? He messaged me and he said I got my mastermind coming up in Arizona this weekend and all this stuff.

Alan 1:23

I said hey, can I ask you a question? Yeah, eddie told me he's going to that because I enraided Eddie to Next Level Live and he's like I'm going to be in Arizona.

Kevin 1:29

Nice.

Alan 1:30

Yeah, I think he's speaking. Well, he lives in Arizona. Yes, that's true.

Kevin 1:34

He's also speaking in Arizona. Oh OK, I didn't know. I didn't know. He said speaking in.

Alan 1:38

Arizona and I asked him. He said yeah, it's the Evan Carmichael thing. So again, I don't know the details, I just know that he's going to be there.

Kevin 1:46

Well, I DM'd Evan and I said hey, alan and I are trying to do more speaking and we just, transparently, we haven't seemed to crack the code on how to get speeches. I mean, we've done some paid speeches and we've spoken in front of some pretty large audiences but nothing really seemed to work that well. Brandon was running it for a while and he was consistent as heck, and we had other people I don't remember who else did it before, but there was. We've had a lot of team members try and we just haven't been able to crack the code.

Kevin 2:17

And of course, I should have expected this from Evan, because this is Evan, this is who he is. He said, yeah, honestly, it's probably going to take like 100x, 100 times the effort you're putting in. He said it's way more outreach than anybody realizes. Like 100x of your effort, you'll probably get results. Okay, perfect. I think a lot of people would hear that and say he probably has a better answer. He's just not giving it to me when in reality I'm willing to bet that's probably what he did to get the results. I mean, evan Carmichael is one of the most, one of the most successful speakers in this industry.

Kevin 2:56

Yeah for sure. He's spoken with Tony Robbins and Brenna Bouchard everybody. He's been on all those stages. He is super, super successful and he is the YouTube guy in this space. He knows everybody. The reason I wanted to label this Don't let people lessen your success this way is because anybody who's saying I can teach you how to get x results easily is lessening all the effort that they put in because it definitely wasn't easy and all the effort that you've put in and it's almost like you're again. It's one of those. It's not a you problem, it's a problem. It's not a you issue, it's. It's an issue. It was challenging for them to and then eventually maybe they got to the place where they found a level of success and then things started working. But it doesn't mean it's gonna be that way for you. What works for us as podcasters is drastically different than than what's gonna work for somebody who just started. What's worked for someone who's brand new to fitness versus someone who's 17 or 18 years in, like I am, is completely different.

Alan 4:01

Mm-hmm.

Kevin 4:02

What works for my relationship with Taryn is gonna be drastically different than what works for someone who it's their first relationship and they've never had a relationship before, but the fundamentals stay the same.

Alan 4:14

Fair, the fundamentals and the principles stay the same, but. But the amount of results that you get Based on those fundamentals are based on the compound effect and momentum and the advice has to be filtered on that.

Kevin 4:29

Yeah, the advice has to be filtered where I could say, yeah, I'm gonna have, I'm gonna have a pizza tonight for dinner. I'm gonna have a pizza, I'm gonna have a whole pizza, a medium Domino's pizza, that's what I think for dinner, nice, and you might say, okay, well, I'm gonna do the same thing and I'll just work out like you do Things like 2000 for 2000 cows for this one.

Kevin 4:51

I'm gonna do the same thing and then I'll just work out and then it'll be fine, like I'll. I'll look like you, but right now I'm not. I'm not saying I'm in great shape, but I'm just just as an example. But I know my body very well. I know 2000 calories is less than I need. So I'm actually technically still gonna lose weight if I did that long enough. I know I'm gonna crush a workout tomorrow. I know I just have a lot of Certainties based on the experience that I have.

Alan 5:14

So what if someone who's brand-new did that because you've been working out for 16 years?

Kevin 5:18

The truth is, it depends if it's somebody who, let's say, it's somebody who right now is overweight, they could I mean, you could still eat that pizza and lose weight if it's less than you need.

Alan 5:29

As long as that's all you eat.

Kevin 5:31

Yeah, yeah, if it's less than your maintenance calories. I haven't eaten anything all day, so it here's where it gets wonky. It depends. I mean, there are some people out there that if you had a pizza every day and you only ate 2000 calories a day, you'd lose weight. Other people, you'd gain weight. So it depends, but that's why it's so. It's. It's challenging to give advice because you don't. Nobody wants your advice when you suck. They only want your advice when you're successful. But when you're successful it's easier to be successful.

Alan 5:59

Yeah, advice is a significant margin.

Kevin 6:01

Yeah, I couldn't give advice at the beginning of a podcast journey. At the beginning nobody wanted my advice because I wasn't successful, I know. But now I always try to think of it's not what would I do, it's what can you do based on where you are Draftically different.

Alan 6:18

Yeah, that's fine.

Kevin 6:18

What I would do is completely different because it's not the same. So I get fired up by this very clearly, because there's a lot of people that take pictures or videos of them in their jacuzzi with wine, saying I made $9 million this year and I can teach you how. Just comment something below. I'm telling you a lot of the $9 million they made that year was by people commenting below and then buying a course or something. So just be very careful.

Kevin 6:48

Just because you're trying really hard and you're not getting the results you want yet, it genuinely doesn't mean you're doing anything wrong. You could be 100% on the path, it just hasn't caught up yet. Last example, when I've been jeffin with my diet. I haven't really been on it that much, but when I start intentionally tracking my food with the intention of losing weight, the first week I usually gain two pounds. So I'll go from kind of just freestyling it, intuitively, eating, sticking to a same 178 to 182 pounds right around there, to saying, okay, I want to get to 170 pounds in 12 weeks. Let me do this. I cut my calories the first week I actually gain weight. The scale goes in the opposite direction. I want it to go down. It's going up. If somebody came to me and said I can teach you exactly how to get the results you want in whatever let's say a week, four weeks, eight weeks, whatever because I've done it for myself, that automatically makes me think that I'm doing it wrong, when I'm not doing it wrong.

Alan 7:59

It just hasn't been long enough yet. Yeah Well, how do you know when you're doing it wrong versus and this goes back to that framework wrong expectations, wrong approach, wrong time perspective?

Kevin 8:10

But it's hard because things take different. We've been doing this, so I think it's challenging because we've been doing this for seven years, but it's not seven years once. It's a day, and then a day and a day, and a day and a day, 365 days, and then seven of those 365 day cycles.

Alan 8:30

Well, not seven, because we weren't doing one episode every day back then. No, no, I don't mean just in business quite a bit, not podcasting necessarily I'd say every day has been business, yeah.

Kevin 8:40

So we've learned something. So it's like we're not taking something that we learned in year one and then changing it for year seven. We're taking something that we learned on day one and then use that for day two and day three and day four and day five. So it's not like I don't have a good answer for how do you know something's not working. You probably have a better answer than I do for that.

Alan 9:01

It's so hard to do this without doing the math and I've done this example with a financial calculator live on workshops and I can't do that here but it's really important to understand how much 1% improvement over time compounds. And even less than that. I'd rather not even do 1%, because 1% can be daunting. Are you going to lift 1% more weight every day? No, but you can do 1 tenth of 1%, which is 0.1%. So, brian Tracy, he has a formula. It's called the continuous improvement formula and you can look this up. Look up Brian Tracy spelt just like it sounds B-R-I-A-N. Space Tracy T-R-A-C-Y.

Alan 9:43

He's one of the OGs in the personal development space and he has something called the continuous improvement formula and he says if you improve by 1 tenth of 1% every weekday meaning only working days, monday through Friday you can take the weekends off and you do that for 10 years, you end up 1,000% better. You end up 10 times better. And so if you make I don't know $45,000 a year right now, if you really focused on your career and your craft and your skills and you got 0.1% better, you learned how to earn 0.1% more per day, weekday, and you did that for 10 years. Let's say you're 35 right now, like I am, and when you're 45, you will make 10 times more. But you can't miss, and that's the problem and that's why we do an episode a day at NLU, because we want to help you get 0.1% better, and that's why Kevin and I always talk about if any of the listeners want to see something.

Alan 10:44

I do this with my clients and it's always a huge breakthrough. I have a private YouTube video, my very first YouTube video, and I'll actually send it to the production team and they'll put it in the show notes. I have it unlisted on YouTube. It's my very first YouTube video that I ever did and it's back in 2016 or 2015 or 2017. I forget, I honestly think it's 2016.

Alan 11:11

The point is it's before the hyper conscious podcast. It's before conversations change lives. It's before next level university ever existed. It's my very first time creating a video that I actually published on YouTube. Now I've since marked it as unlisted. I got rid of the real life superheroes series, so it was a series that I was going to do. Please watch this, and the reason why is because I want you to watch this. You don't have to watch the whole thing, just watch the beginning and then come back and listen to this.

Alan 11:42

That was just consistency over time the 0.1% improvement over time. I was awful. I was reading my notes. I didn't talk into the camera. The audio quality was terrible. The lighting was brutal.

Alan 11:54

I was in a classroom in front of a white board. I said I'm. A thousand times I had ego, I was nervous and pretending I wasn't. It wasn't close, and if you took this version of me I think that was what seven years ago or eight years ago and if you took this version of me and competed in a speaking competition, it wouldn't even be close. It would be ridiculous. That version of me doesn't even belong on the same stage as this version.

Alan 12:22

I'm still the same person. I just got a little better each day. And that's the thing is. We get this advice and we think we're supposed to win overnight and it just derails our progress. It derails your progress. I've worked out every day for two years and I'm still semi out of shape. I'm in pretty good shape, but the point is you have to stick with it and I can feel the compound effect. I get to eat what I want and I'm playful with this, but half the reason I love exercising every day is I just don't have to diet. It's awesome. Now, when I say don't have to diet, that means I'm leaving opportunity on the table.

Kevin 13:00

As a matter of fact, I was talking to Kevin earlier about dieting, not joining yet in Domino's Half Price, yes, exactly Half Price, pizza day.

Alan 13:07

Pizza weekend or whatever, or hump day, but that's all I would say is stick with it. And this whole quick overnight success thing. I just finished a blog, blog number 15. I'll put the link to that in the show notes as well.

Alan 13:25

The whole thing is about this. It's about how, when I made six figures out of college, it looked like it was overnight, but it was actually a decade in the making and I broke it down. I broke down exactly all the things that had to happen previous to that in order for that to happen, and I went from $8 an hour painting in Maine for less than minimum wage to six figures in what looked like less than a year, probably from the outside looking at, when in reality it was actually in the making middle school, high school, college, academics, all that stuff, and so, and then even more after that, I went from $8 an hour painting in Maine to, within three years, making almost $200,000 a year. But it wasn't in three years. It started as a dream when I was a kid. I was 10 years old and I decided that I wanted to go to WPI and I started working toward that and I broke down exactly how that all happened.

Alan 14:29

And so this overnight success thing, this being on social media. I'm a multimillionaire, I promise you. I've met so many millionaires. I've interviewed them, I've hung out with them, I've gotten dinner with them. I can name a dozen millionaires that I've spent personal quality time with and I'm telling you right now, every one of them grinded their faces off.

Kevin 14:47

Well, here's another thing. You know how many money coaches I've done podcast breakthrough sessions with who can't afford coaching. But on social media they're like I can teach you how to become financially free. They can't teach you how Exactly. And again, I don't mean that in a negative way, trust me. I get fired up for this stuff because I wonder. I think a younger, more naive version of me might have fell for it. We are searching for easy. So when someone says I can show you how to do that easily, I think we wanna believe them. I think we. It's just human nature. It's human nature when you see a commercial for any fast food restaurant. It always looks better than the food actually is. It always is.

Kevin 15:34

It always looks better. I've never had an experience where it's different, ever, never, and you never will, cause if they showed you what the burgers looked like, you'd never go there. I went to Burger King.

Alan 15:45

You, me and I. Every now and then we'll go to the BK, the BK lounge, BK lounge and, oh God, the burgers. Yeah, looks like it got run over by a truck.

Kevin 15:55

It looks absolutely terrible. It was still delicious. Yeah, they're good, but they don't look good.

Alan 16:01

In the words of Kevin Paul Mary. He said I have never, ever seen a worse establishment with better food in my entire life than Burger King.

Kevin 16:09

Taco Bell's right up there. Taco Bell's up there.

Alan 16:12

BK. It's a brutal establishment, but the food is bomb. But just imagine that.

Kevin 16:17

Imagine whatever company you work for. Let's say, you work for a company and inside it is shambles and you know how the whole company runs.

Kevin 16:25

But when you hear somebody talking about it or you hear one of the higher ups talking about, it you're like, oh yeah, this place is amazing, the culture is awesome, and it's like meanwhile you're ripping your hair out because the place is terrible. I think that's just kind of. We're in this weird place I was thinking of this today where I could start a social media page tomorrow and I could just start doing videos of here's how I made a million dollars this week and I could just make shit up and nobody would ever know. You could never know, because you'd never see me in person.

Kevin 16:58

How many of you are watching or listening have ever met me in person? A minute amount less than one-tenth of 1%. We're just in this weird place where you just can't even I say this all the time too. I probably don't say it enough but filter what I say and filter what Alan says too, through your own experiences and figure out what lands and figure out what's ideal for you and what's aligned for you, because we've done a lot of work and we've studied a lot and we've worked on ourselves and coached a lot and had a lot of conversations and all that stuff, but we're still two dudes on the internet that you've never met before, most likely never will.

Alan 17:35

Let's come to the next level up.

Kevin 17:36

Well.

Alan 17:37

I have a sneaky goal, kev, and this is. I always say sneaky goal, but it's I do. I have this desire and maybe this is detrimental for us in business. It probably is Most likely we have a new team member named Nicole. Show it to Nicole. And my sneaky goal is to have NLU actually be better from the inside out than from the outside in.

Kevin 17:57

It's definitely more complicated from the inside out than the outside that I'm sure yeah. She's, and I would say it's better. Thank you.

Alan 18:05

Thank you.

Kevin 18:05

Well, I'm a part of it. I like to think I'm a pretty big part of it.

Alan 18:10

It's because that's my goal, like I, I I'm not even kidding I want. I want to be the opposite of that, and I think this is actually detrimental to our influence. It definitely is. It definitely is. I want to be better behind the scenes than I am in the front of the scenes. I want you to. If you were to ever actually get to know me behind the scenes, I actually want you to go. Holy crap, he's actually harder working than I thought. Holy crap, he's actually more intelligent than I thought. Holy crap, he actually treats Emilia with more respect than I thought. Holy crap, he's actually kinder than I thought. And that last one's tough for me sometimes because I can get frustrated with my goals. But I want to. I want our character. I want to be as good from the inside out as we are from the outside in. I do. I really, really want that, and the reason why is because of what you're talking about, kev, but it does take longer.

Kevin 19:00

I know it does take. There's there's things that we've decided that definitely are slowing us down, but that's the way we want to do it.

Alan 19:08

I had a really cool moment recently. I want to share this with our listeners. I reached out, I did a free session with one of our listeners. He has a podcast and I went on his show. I showed it to Alex. I did a free session and and we broke down the whole business model and I showed him everything. He was just trying to add as much value in 30 minutes as I possibly could and I was five minutes late, so I had to hammer. And so afterwards I sent him an email and it was a follow up email saying listen, it's pay as you go. I would love to coach you. I want to see you win. I love your show. I loved being a guest. You're awesome, let's rock and roll. And I, at the end of the email, I said here's a list of all my clients and here's a list of their emails. They have given me permission, almost all of them in advance.

Alan 19:51

They all gave. I haven't asked everyone. So the people that gave me permission in advance, I sent their emails and I said please reach out to these clients and ask what their experience is. Not my old clients, not my fake clients, none of that. These are the people I work with on a consistent basis right now. Reach out to them and ask them what their experience has been, because of course, I'm going to say my coaching is awesome. Of course my coaching, I think, is world class.

Alan 20:20

I work on it every single day. I'm up at night thinking about Jenna's goals, thinking about Christie's goals, thinking about these people's goals. I'm up at night going oh, I can't wait to tell Jenna that, or Bianca that, or Christie that I want to be the person in your corner, that you win a championship. Every fighter needs a good person in their corner, of course, and I want to be that for our listeners. And the point of that whole soliloquy is Nicole, new team member, when she she was in group coaching and she was on team breakthrough, group 13. And I had this moment with myself of I can't wait for her to come and see what the inside is like. I hope that she thinks it's even better than how it looked from the outside, and I did tell her it's going to be overwhelming as hell because from the inside, like you said, it's a lot more complicated.

Alan 21:06

It's very complicated On the outside it makes it look like we made the movie easily, but in the inside it's very challenging, high level winging it at times. For sure, Very often.

Kevin 21:17

Next level. Nugget, I want the same for you. That's why I'm so passionate about about this, because, unfortunately, what's working on social media is not going to work for most of us in real life. Social media is not. It's not based on what's valuable, it's based on what's trending and it's based on what captures attention and what's controversial. And what works on social media doesn't necessarily work in real life. It's fire. Imagine, imagine if Alan and I all we did on post on social media was me working behind the scenes in my dark office. Nobody's gonna follow that. Nobody wants to see that every day. But if Tara and I are going on vacation, we're going to Scotland and we're gonna be there for however long, and we're gonna drive all over the place and we're gonna do a bunch of cool stuff. That's gonna look awesome. But that's not how we built a business. That's not how, the way we got.

Alan 22:14

So how you paid for the vacation yeah right.

Kevin 22:16

The way we got the results is not what I'm showing and, again, we try to do it as authentic as possible, so I want to make that clear. But yeah, that's my next level, nugget. Just, you're working really hard and you're probably doing more right than you think. Yeah, there's probably some stuff you're doing that's not ideal and that's okay. But don't let somebody lessen the progress you've made by saying, well, I know how to do that. I made a million dollars. This Tell me what you did your first year. Don't tell me what you did right now, because it's different. What did you do your first year? How can you help me in my first year? Not 10 years into business, like you are, where you have a bunch of connections or whatever it is, or 10 years into your fitness journey how can you help me where I am today? That's a really good question. Nice, thank you.

Alan 23:03

You're welcome. We get fired up about that. I'm grateful.

Kevin 23:05

Yeah, I don't like when people get taken advantage of Same man you know what I mean Same brother. Can't stand it. Yeah, I I have. Honesty is so important to us 100%.

Alan 23:16

Thank you for being on this journey with us. 100%.

Kevin 23:20

If you have not yet joined our private Facebook group, next Level Nation, please do so, and if you are looking for somebody to help you strategize with your success, whatever that means health, wealth, life, love reach out to Alan. I feel like you talked about your coaching, so I think that's a good segue for anybody who's interested. It's way more affordable than you think. We don't have contracts. You don't have to sign up with us for a year. You can literally pay for a call, see how it goes and then say you know what? I actually Alan's somewhat valuable. He seems to kind of know some stuff. All right, I'll do another call and then you pay after that call happens. So it's easy. We're pretty easy to get along with. That's always the goal.

Alan 23:57

Helping you achieve your goals is my favorite thing in the world. I hope that you have me come into your corner and what we can accomplish together is going to be awesome. So it won't be overnight, it's not going to be quick fix successes, but we will change your life together and I love that.

Kevin 24:13

That's what I live for, so I hope you reach out Tomorrow for episode number 1,653. And this is assuming we survived the experience the top three lessons from next level, live 2024,. As of this recording, it hasn't happened yet so we could come in and say it was terrible and the worst thing ever. I don't think it will, but I don't think we will, but we'll see what happens. I love doing episodes like that because everybody in the audience is going to have a different experience than me and Alan's going to have a different experience than me, and our lessons will be different, but hopefully together they'll be super powerful. So that's our ultimate goal for that episode. As always, we love you, we appreciate you, grateful for each and every one of you, and at NLU we have fans, we have family. We will talk to you all tomorrow.

Alan 25:06

Keep increasing your effort if you want results. Next one issue.