Tomato Sandwiches, Getting Rich and Being a Badass (with Tony Rush, June 2012)

All right, good deal. Hey, guys, once again, it's Andy Rush here. It's Monday. It's June the 18th, 2012. You're in the right place for our regular Monday night Empower call, and it's my privilege to be hosting the call tonight with you.

David Sharper, David Wood, may actually come crash the call in a few minutes. I actually don't know. I know they're scheming. They're working on some pretty amazing things tonight, so they may stick their head in the door here in just a few minutes, and if they do, they can certainly interrupt me. That'll be fine, but we've got a pretty powerful call lined up tonight.

It's a bit of a continuation of some of the things that you guys sort of talked about in Atlanta. And if you were not interested… If you're in Atlanta, then if you're brand new, I guess I'm going to start there. If you're brand new to Empower Network, welcome. We're glad you're here. And let me just let you know, if you're brand new, you are the most important person on the call tonight, and you'll probably pick out why that is.

I'll just leave that for you to kind of noodle out and figure out, but if you're brand new in Empower, you are absolutely the most important person on the line tonight, and we're glad you're here. So we started off the conversation. I'm just going to jump right in. We started the conversation in that email that you got about this particular call, and the example that we used in that call, in that email, was about the example of seeing somebody who's on the street, and somebody who's homeless maybe, can't afford to eat, doesn't have any money, whatever the case may be.

And we've all seen them, and the truth is that if we took each and every person on the line… And asked them, you know what, if we took all your cash, if we took all your credit cards, and if we put you on the street corner, would you have to stay there? That's the question, right? And some of you, by the way, we have some guests on the line who are not with Empower Network. You guys sort of snuck in the door, kind of peeking over the fence. Welcome to you.

We're glad you're here. You may not have seen that particular email, but this – let me – I'll probably jump in a little too quickly. Let me share this. This call is normally for members only, and we've invited some special guests. So those of you on the line who are not yet with Empower Network, we're glad you're here as well.

Feel free to grab your favorite beverage. Take some notes. What you're going to get on this call tonight will absolutely assist you in any area of your life, in any business that you're working. Certainly, we feel that it has special benefit to people who are in Empower Network because we have the ability to earn 100% commissions. And we've got tons of people who are brand new in Empower Network who are making money.

Literally thousands and thousands of dollars a month having never had any success anywhere else doing anything. So what you're going to get tonight we feel like is of certain value to people in Empower Network, but it's certainly applicable no matter what you're doing. So the email that I was mentioning, we laid out the example of you see someone on the side of the road and they don't have anything. And the question was, hey, if we took all your cash and we took your credit cards and we stuck you on the street corner, would you have to stay there? And the answer is no, we wouldn't have to stay there, right?

Everybody on the line would say, no, I don't need to stay there because I know some things. I know people. I've got some confidence. I've got a few skills. In other words, before the sun goes down, you will be somewhere in a bed, right?

No, you wouldn't stay there. As a matter of fact, if we put you in that situation, we wouldn't stay there five minutes. We wouldn't stand there for hours. We'd be making some moves. We'd be plotting some schemes, right?

We'd be figuring out how to get off the street and how to get back to the lifestyle that we're accustomed to. And we can all agree on that. Now, here's the funny part of the story, sort of the punchline, if you will. Have you ever considered that wealthy people look at average people the exact same way? Stop and get that for just a second because there's a big clue there for what it takes to actually move from, where you are to where you want to be, no matter what that is.

Okay? Wealthy people, just the way you would look at a homeless person on the side of the street and say, I could get out of that situation, wealthy people look at average people the same way. Okay? So, let's start. Let's say one of my heroes, Sir Richard Branson.

If we took Sir Richard Branson and we put him in a bad spot where poor Rich, he's only got a quarter million dollars a month coming in. That's all. Poor Richard Branson, having to start buying $3 million a year. If you put Richard in that spot, he'd say, oh, my God, what a bad spot I'm in. No worries, though.

I can get out of this in no time. Now, that's a little mind-boggling. The first time it happened to me, it was pretty mind-boggling. That anybody would look at something like, say, $3 million a year as being a spot that they want to get out of. And that's not good, bad, right, or wrong.

But what it is an indicator of how we have our financial thermostats set. And that's what we want to talk about tonight. We want to talk about this process of learning to think like a wealthy person. And I'm going to explain in just a moment why that's important. Okay?

But this is sort of a thought experiment that I've spent hours thinking about over the years because I love studying the differences and the similarities between wealthy people and average people. And I like studying the differences and similarities between, say, average people and broke people. And here's why. And I think this is probably the best way to set the table.

So if you've got a pencil and paper, I'm going to have a few things for you to jot down so that you'll have a record of it when we come out here in just a little bit. But here's the first thing, and this is probably the best way to set the table. Everyone is a born badass. Okay? And by the way, if you're new to Empower Network, that's a phrase that a couple of us use from time to time because there are some people who are just so incredible, so awesome, so inspiring.

You just can't use the normal complimentary words. They're just badasses. You just have to call them what they are. They're just badasses. And here's the truth.

Everybody on this line, every person on this line tonight is a born badass. We all are. Absolutely incredibly powerful people.

And this is not an opinion, by the way. I don't mean this in some kind of motivational speaker kind of way, like, ooh, you too can climb Mount Everest. I don't mean that in some kind of public speaker kind of way or as an opinion. I mean it's a fact, and I can prove it. Matter of fact, I will prove it.

How about this? Jot this down. As proof of your badassness. Is that a word?

I just made that word up. All right. So here's proof. You have, everybody on the line, you have got a 100% success rate on some of the most difficult things that you'll ever have to do as a human being. I mean, you have crushed it.

And I'm not being facetious. I'm being totally serious. I know I'm being a little dramatic, but I'll give you an example. Like, when we were kids, kids have got it figured out, don't they? I'm a father.

I had a great day yesterday. I have three sons, ages 16, 14, and my little guy is turning six years old next week. And, you know, at every stage of their growth, I'm just amazed at how incredible kids are. Kids have it figured out, especially when they're little. Little kids really have it figured out because they don't know any boundaries, do they?

They don't have any limitations. If they see that rock and they want to go climb it, it just doesn't occur to them that they could fall and crack their skull. They're going for it, you know? They want to be a rock star. They want to be an astronaut.

They want to be president of the United States or whatever. But kids have, it's like there's a certain age under which these kids are absolutely unstoppable. And that's where we all started from. So let me give you a couple examples of things that, like, I mean, you crushed it.

So take walking. Walking is a big deal. And, again, I know it may seem like I'm being facetious tonight, but I'm really, really serious about this. You stop and think about walking, what walking actually is. That's not for wimps.

That's for courageous people. The idea of getting up on two feet, you know, when you've been crawling around on all fours, that's just pretty cool. And here's how it started, by the way. You saw a bunch of grownups walking around on, what are they doing?

How are they? They're walking around different than I am, and they get to go faster. And they're taller than me. So I think I'll get me some of that. And so what do we do?

We start pulling up, right? We start pulling up. And, man, check me. I'm standing up here. And then we start creeping around the edge of the couch and reaching for the piano bench.

And the whole time, if you really look at what walking actually is, it's like controlled falling. The guy who made the Segway, you guys see, you probably saw him in Atlanta. You know, the two-wheeler thing that you stand on, and it doesn't have any steering wheel. It just kind of goes the way you lean. The guy who invented that, I think his name was Dean Kamen or Kagan.

The guy, when he was describing what it is, he, in order to describe the Segway, he had to actually first describe what walking is. And I remember him saying, it's controlled falling, because what you're doing is you're shifting your weight forward just enough to start falling, and then you stick your foot out and catch yourself. But you never straighten up. Now you keep leaning forward. You keep your motion forward, and you're falling again.

And then you catch yourself with your other foot. And you did this when you were one? That's badass. That's awesome. And, yeah, we look around, and there's people that have all figured out how to do it.

I'm going to cover why that is in just a minute. But walking was a big deal. Okay? Eating with a spoon, my God, figure this one out. You're sitting at the table.

You see all these grown-ups sitting around, and they're all just shoveling food in their mouth. And here you are. You've got your Cheerios there, and you've got your little spoon. And you've got to figure out how to hold the spoon, you know, because the Cheerio, if you put it on the wrong side of the spoon, it falls off. So you've got to remember which way to hold it.

And then you've got to get that Cheerio up onto it. And then somehow you've got to get that from the bowl to your mouth without turning the spoon. But you've got to remember to open your mouth, too. We're talking, there's a lot of physics involved in that. That's my point.

Learning a language, the mere fact that you guys could dial in and you actually can hear me making sounds and you understand the words coming out of my mouth, if you can do that, you already, you absolutely have enough intelligence and enough skill and ability to crush this, to make it. You can make thousands and thousands of dollars a week and even per day. But the problem is, so, okay, so how does this happen? So we're just born these amazingly powerful people. And then how is it that we find ourselves at 25 or 35 or 45 or 55 or 65 trying to figure out which end is up, trying to figure out how to get from where we are to where we want to go?

How does that happen? How do we go from being such amazingly powerful people to being people that are frustrated or struggle? Now, I'm not talking about everyone on this line because there's a lot of people on this line that have gotten some things dialed in. You guys are absolutely going at 100 miles an hour after your goals. And that's such a thing to celebrate, to see you guys crushing it.

But there are some people on the line, maybe you've just gotten started in power or you've been beat up in this economy or beat up in this industry, and you're sort of standing here thinking, you know, 35 years old, I really thought I would accomplish more by now. And I think we've all been there. So what happened? How did we go from being these amazing superheroes at age five to being frustrated adults who are trying to figure out which end is up?

And the problem is this. At some point in our life, we simply forgot how powerful we were. And we started buying the thinking and the ideas of not badasses, but the lame asses. The people around us who, for whatever reason, they got their own emotional payoff by pulling people down.

And here's some of the language that we heard growing up that robbed us of our power. Stuff like, you, really, you? You think you're going to try out for the lead part in the school play? Who do you think you are? Some of us heard that, right?

Or you're going to go out with who on a date? You're going to ask who out? There's no way. You will never get a date with her.

She is way out of your league. Get your head out of the clouds. Get your feet on the ground. Oh, you'll never be able to afford that. You're wearing the same clothes you wore when you got out of school.

Here we are. I always started the new year, and you're wearing the same jeans. I can tell because they're too short on you. That was one that I heard growing up. You know.

And so you get around. And then the other thing, too, there's a lot of well-intentioned. There's a lot of adults, not just, you know, snotty, bratty kids. But there's a lot of adults who seem to sort of, as good as their intentions might have been, they sort of push us down.

When we say, oh, dad, look over at that car next to, oh, man, look at that car. And you're sitting here driving your Brookmobile, right? And you look over there, and here's the Ferrari, or here's the Porsche, or whatever. And so you're the kid in the back seat. And your dad looks over and sees this nice car.

And he doesn't have a nice car. And he used to want a nice car. But now he doesn't have one. And so he'd say, well, you know, son, a lot of times people who drive those nice cars like that, they're not very happy.

And just like that, a little bit of that negative thinking plants a seed in our mind. You know. Or you get around people and hear a healthy dose of things like, oh, I can't afford that. $100,000 for a car. My goodness.

Don't they know there's starving children and orphans? Or, well, you know how it is, I'd love to do that, but money doesn't grow on trees. Or, well, I don't want to be greedy. I hear that one from prospects sometimes when I ask them how much money they want to make in a home business.

Well, you know, I don't want to be greedy. I just want enough to pay my bills. Really. That's a lame – by the way, it's a lame answer.

You'll figure out by the end of this call why it's a lame answer. Oh, I can't imagine why anybody would want to fly first class. And the list goes on and on and on. Oh, well, we may not have a lot of money, but at least we love God.

Or we may not have a lot of money, but at least we're honest people. The unspoken corollary there is that if you have a lot of money, you're probably not honest. Or if you have a lot of money, then you probably don't love God. So we get around this language. And here's the thing.

Why do people talk that way? And the answer is because somewhere down the line, they forgot how powerful they were. They bought into the thinking of the masses, the small thinking, right? And, guys, this is some of the most insidious language that we encounter. Now, here's why it's important tonight.

You're probably thinking, okay, I get it, Empower Network or whatever your goal is, okay? Here's the reason it's important. The degree to which we've bought into this language, this idea that there's not enough to go around, the degree to which we've bought into the idea that making money is hard is the degree to which that's what we're living. In other words, the degree to which we've bought in, that's why we are where we are in our lives right now.

See, when I thought making money was hard, guess what? Making money was hard. But when I realized that we live in an abundant world, and there's literally millions of people every single day who want to buy stuff, and all I had to do was get between them and what it was they wanted to buy, I started making lots of money very easily. Matter of fact, most of the people in my life right now who know me, this is what they know of me, is that I work from home. They never really – a lot of my friends and family, they never saw me when I actually did have to work hard for a living.

So they like to kind of joke and kid around that I sleep until 10 o'clock and I never do anything, and, oh, I just push some buttons on the internet and I've got all this money flying in the door. And, well, for one thing, it's not entirely untrue. I don't work hard. I do put some time in. And I'm going to come to the hard work part in just a minute.

But my point is when I figured out that I could make a lot more money with an ink pen than I could a shovel, things changed for me. And then I graduated from ink pen to internet. But my point here is that when I went through life believing that making money was difficult or that it required a high education – I'll give you an example. All I knew is that I wasn't a doctor or a lawyer.

So I was automatically shutting off all those possibilities for wealth for my life because I had this belief that, well, you can't make that much money unless you go to have a college degree or you've been to law school or medical school. And I didn't go to college. So for a long time, I let all this language and this weird self-talk and these limiting beliefs really keep me stuck. And it wasn't until I got into society, and it wasn't until I got into conversations like the one I'm having with you, that my eyes were opened, that we live in an amazingly abundant world where there's more than enough to go around for everybody.

On the contrary, the money that you make today means that's more money that you have to spend on something today. And we've got the cyclical nature of money and how – if I've got money to spend, you know what? There's more money I'm going to spend. And the more money I spend, the more money I'm putting out in the economy. It's a beautiful thing.

It really does come back around for everybody who chooses to play the game, who chooses to be part of that cycle, that process. So the good news is that – okay, well, the bad news for some of us is, okay, you aren't where you are in your life right now because of your best thinking. The good news is now you're affiliated with Empower Network. So in addition to us giving you the tools of how to make money, you get to be part of conversations like this one, and you get to be part of the community that understands some certain wealth principles that I'm going to cover with you. I just want to cover a handful of them with you tonight.

But part of the value – somebody asked me the other day, they said, well, how do I know that the Empower Network products are good until I buy them? And, yeah, it was an unfair question, but my point to her was, how much is it worth to be able to hang out with people that are making the kind of money you want to make? I'll give you a quick example about that because this is part of what Empower Network is about. It's not just what you get.

It's about who you – it's not just about getting a blogging system, although the blogging product is fantastic. I mean, that's cheap enough. And you get to make 100% commissions when you refer others. And then we've got these other products that are just huge, high value, nuts and bolts marketing stuff. And again, you get to make 100% commissions by referring others.

But a lot of times I think when we're talking about the value of Empower, we probably don't call as much attention to the community as we can. Let me give you a shortcut. Here's a shortcut to success. As a matter of fact, it's as simple as most. It's a powerful shortcut to success that I know of.

If you want to jot it down, it's one word. It's called modeling. Dave Sharp's mentioned it. Basically, it just means that you're going to find someone who's living the lifestyle that you want to live, and you do what they do.

As a matter of fact, Sharp and I were talking about this again in Atlanta last week. It's how he created success out of thin air. It's certainly how I created some success out of thin air. And we can go down the list. Every top earner that I've ever talked to.

Always says the same thing. The simplest way for them to get from where they were to where they wanted to go was just to start spending some time around the people who were living the kind of life that they wanted. And they started just doing what they were doing. And then more importantly, they learned why that person was doing what they were doing. But in the beginning, just getting around somebody who's living the life that you can live is a huge shortcut.

In fact, let me give you a quick story. Several years ago. Hang on a second. It's been several years ago. My wife and I were at an event, and we were in Puerto Rico at the El Conquistador Resort.

Beautiful resort. And the resort had this like a resort within the resort. It was the area that all of us stayed in. And there was a little part of the resort that was sort of blocked off like a little community. And the top earners in the company that I was in, that's where they were all staying, was in this – they had all their rooms in this little section called the casitas.

And anyway, one day after one of the sessions, my enroller in that company who was making quite a lot of money, he says to me and Jessica – my wife's name is Jessica. Many of you met her in Atlanta. He says to us, he says, hey, would you guys like to hang out at the pool with us this afternoon? And I said, yeah. I said, we'll just meet you down there around 2 o'clock.

He said, well, we've got our own pool, so let me give you directions on how to get through the gate and where to find us. And so anyway, we went to this other area, and it was amazing. I mean, the hotel rooms were like 1,200, 1,500 square feet. And they had private balconies, private this, private that. And I remember when we stayed there several years later.

We actually had a butler that just came in and unpacked all our suitcases and hung up all our clothes and gave us his cell phone number. And if you need anything at all while you're here, just call me directly. You call your butler. It was amazing. But years ago, the first time we were there, I was relatively new at making any significant money.

And here we were at this private pool with my enroller. Well, who walks in but the owners of the company and his wife and the other owner? And then all of a sudden, the whole executive council is in the pool, and it's like 20 of us in a private infinity pool. And here's Jessica and I in the pool, and we're getting all this really high-quality face time with people that we really had a lot of respect for. Like picture that you just went to a restaurant somewhere, and then David Wood and his wife and David Sharp and his girl walked in.

And you all just had this out of the blue, fall in your lap. It was an opportunity to just hang out with people who were making hundreds and hundreds of thousands of dollars. That's what it's like. Okay, that's the scenario I'm describing. Well, a funny thing happened.

We swam and kind of hung out for a little while and really made some great friends with these people. And we're heading back to our room to get changed for dinner. And I said something. I can take you to the exact spot in the hotel where I said this. We were turning the corner on the second floor of our hotel building, and I said to my wife, Isn't that cool that we got to spend some time with those people?

And my wife's really smart, and she really got kind of not just what I was saying, but the spirit of my mindset that had produced that comment. And she looked at me, and she said, Yeah, it was cool. But here's the thing. Until we start seeing ourselves as one of them, we'll never be one of them. I want you to get that for just a minute.

It's not about a certain amount of money, or it's not about somebody being better than somebody. Please don't think that's what I'm talking about. I'm not. But I am talking about a certain level of success and how my wife recognized that I evidently saw myself as being different from them. And as long as you see yourself as being different from the elite or the top earners or the leaders or whatever group you want to be in, whatever label you want to slap on that group in any company, if you see yourself as being different from that group, you're choosing out.

You're choosing to be a foreigner. Does that make sense? Can I feel one or two of you guys kind of nodding with me? Do you get that? Some of you guys got that this past week in Atlanta, didn't you?

You know, getting to hang out at the party with David Wood, sometimes with Aaron Rashkin or Jessica and Chris Daugherty or Jonathan Ross. I mean, I can go on and on. I've already made the mistake of starting to name names, and I'm going to leave a bunch of people out. But, I mean, it's cool.

You're at the hotel. You're walking around, and all of a sudden it's like, oh, my God, there's Tracy Walker. And you get like this 45-minute conversation just hanging out there or Debbie Turner or Brandon Toon comes walking up, and it's like, wow, this is amazing. And you got that shift, didn't you? These are just regular people.

These are not superheroes. They don't walk around in a cape and tights. These are just ordinary people who've chosen to live extraordinary lives, and it's a choice that anybody can make. And so that was the shift that happened for me years ago in Puerto Rico when I got it that until I start seeing myself as being part of that group, I will forever be standing out on the edge of the circle looking in, longing to be part of the group. So the invitation.

The invitation I want to make for you guys tonight, if you haven't made this decision, is choose in. Right now. This is not a process. This is a switch that you flip. This is not something that you have to noodle about and have to think about it and have to process it.

No, no, no, no, no. Right now. Choose in. Right now. Choose to be in.

Be elite. Choose to be someone in Empower Network who's bringing in 1,000, 2,000 hours a day. Because when you do that, you've done 90% of it. Most of what keeps people stuck or on the fringes is 90% of it's in their head.

Okay? And then here's the beautiful thing. When you come to calls like this one and you get to hang out with people like David Wood or David Sharp or any of the other leaders who host this call from time to time, you're choosing to be around someone who's living the life you want to live. Lots of freedom. Lots of money.

Lots of options. Lots of experience. Lots of travel. Beautiful clothes. Beautiful home.

Beautiful cars. The ability to give lots of money away. You know? So just being on this call every Monday night is an opportunity for you to start modeling. You know?

That's why I hang around with people like David Wood or David Sharp. That's why I'm at Empower. That's why I have dinner with badasses like Lawrence Tam or Chris Campbell or Chris and Jessica or Aki Wood or Raven or Scott Lopez or Jonathan Ross or any of all these other people at Empower Network who are living their lives – now write this down – they're living their lives on purpose. This is about living your life on purpose instead of just knee-jerking your way through life like a lot of people do. That's what we're about here at Empower.

Okay? So being around people like that, whether it's in Atlanta or whether it's on the phone tonight or whether it's at our retreat or whether it's in San Diego, get used to being around a feeling, a group of people and situations that just feel abundant. They feel prosperous. You want to stay in that feeling of abundance and prosperity. I love watching David Sharp drop $2,000 on a table because he just decided to pick up the tab for dinner one night.

I love the fact that the tab was $4,500. Why? Because there's enough to go around. And it was incredible. Great service, great restaurant.

It's a bunch of people in a room, and it's like what a great place to be celebrating the fact that anybody that chooses in can have this kind of lifestyle. So it's about choosing to live on purpose. So when you get it, when you really get it, thinking like a wealthy person, this is the first step to being a wealthy person. You start looking at your whole world a little differently.

How many people on the line, and this is a rhetorical question, how many of you have started looking at those tags a little differently? Yeah, big news about the new MacBook Pro with the retina display came out. I have a big announcement there. And some of you guys, for the first time in your entire life, looked at that and said, huh, all I would need is a couple of all-ins. You know?

Some of you looked at it and said, you know what? If I had a 15K formula and a Costa Rica, I could just create that out of thin air and just go buy a MacBook Pro out of money that I created out of thin air. You know? Or some of you ladies might have been at the mall last week or this week perhaps, went by, saw that nice purse hanging in the window at Louis Vuitton or Coach or Burberry, whatever, and said, you know what? It wouldn't take but about three or four inner circles, and I could pick that bad boy up.

Now, some of you were looking at the other person that's going to take a 15K formula, and that's okay too, right? But again, it's about looking at your world differently and starting to think like a wealthy person. Now, let me clarify something, too, because I don't want to lead anybody down the wrong path. Let me give you an example. I make a lot of money.

I'm happy to say that. I'm very proud of what we've accomplished. I feel very proud. I feel very grateful every day that the decisions and the actions I've taken have led me here.

But I'm not talking about you becoming somebody different. You know, I'm not talking about you eating caviar off a golden spoon or, you know, lighting your cigars with a $100 bill. I had lunch today at this shack. Literally, it's called the Barbecue Shack. It's our favorite barbecue place in Dothan.

And you know what I have? They have tomato sandwiches on the menu. Every summer, they have the best tomato sandwiches. And so, you know, I'm not talking about you becoming somebody different. Jessica and I, we didn't want anything fancy.

It's like, you know, we're not at the Barbecue Shack, just get some tomato sandwiches. But Jessica and I and Easton and Pate went up to the Barbecue Shack. I think our whole tab was probably like $15. I had two tomato sandwiches.

Jessica had one. Easton and Pate split a chicken finger basket. And we were out of there. We busted out of there for less than $20. I'm not talking about you suddenly becoming somebody who has to order Chateaubriand every time you go to a restaurant.

I mean, you can still eat a tomato sandwich like me if you want to. But the point is, you're doing it because you want to, not because you have to. You get that? You get the distinction there? So we're not talking about you becoming some hoity-toity person.

We're just talking about giving you choices, you know? Now, I do think that there's a minimum at which you should operate. Okay? And I'm not making fun because God knows I've been there, okay? But I'm just saying there is a minimum at which people need to be able to operate.

And everybody on this line, and you can take any number you want in this sentence, by the way. Call it $1,000. Call it $5,000. I mean, when you start really living your life according to some of these principles and providing huge value, which is what we're really talking about, about providing huge value to people and getting paid what you deserve, then, yeah, you'll be in a situation where you can walk through the mall and literally you don't see anything in the mall that you can't afford. That is an amazing feeling, to walk through any mall in the United States and say, you know what, there's actually nothing in this store for sale that I can't pay cash for right now.

You will not believe the sense of freedom that comes from that. And that's what you deserve. So it's not about money. It's about the freedom and the ability and the options that money brings you, the ability to do all kinds of amazing things for yourself, for your family, and for your community. Okay?

Now, Maxwell Maltz is a guy who wrote a book with a funny name. It's called Psycho-Cybernetics. He's the first person that I ever heard say a human being cannot consistently outperform his or her own self-image.

If you want to jot it down, I'll repeat it quickly. Maxwell Maltz, he said, a human being cannot consistently outperform his or her own self-image. Another quick story. This guy started to make a little bit of money in this industry. I was climbing the ladder.

So one day, Jessica and I went to the movie theater, can't remember what we saw, but we got out, and we just didn't feel like hurrying home, and my mom was keeping the kids at the time, and so we thought, let's go to the bookstore. And the moment that I explained that to Jessica, and it came out of my mouth, it's like a little voice in my ear said, Tony, how much money are you leaving on the table because of your small thinking? But the truth is, it's not that hard. And there is a point at which you have to change the game a little bit.

Sharp knows about this. He and I have had conversations about how that works at a corporate level, because sometimes what gets you to say 100,000 members, you have to change the game a little if you want to get from 100,000 members to say a quarter million members. And there are some points like that in the money game as well. So what gets you to a quarter million dollars a year, you may have to change the game slightly if you want to get to a million a year.

But it's not hard, and it's not something that you can't do. But the point is, the biggest hurdle for 90% of people is their head. Because in their mind, they've got their thermostat set for $50,000. That's why Maxwell Maltz's quote hit me with a ton of bricks. A human being cannot consistently outperform his or her own self-image.

You don't see yourself as being the kind of person who can pick up every dime that's offered. This is why this becoming wealthy thing starts on the inside. A lot of people want to know, well, Tony, what ads are you running? Where are you running your ads, Tony? Every top earner here gets the same questions.

And it's kind of funny sometimes, too, because I think it was Jim Tang over in the UK, and I were laughing about this. But people will say, like they'll kind of come up to you in Atlanta or at an event, and they'll sort of say, now, I know I'm all in. I've got the Costa Rica, and I've got the 15K formula, and I'm making some money. That's some amazing training. I've never gotten that training anywhere else.

But where are you really getting your good leads? And it's hard not to laugh. But there's always a tendency, isn't there, that humans have, that, like, somebody's not going to tell quite the whole story. Like there's some super secret gold dust that we don't give out. And here's the honest to God truth.

Everything I've done to achieve what I've done here, I've gotten out of the Costa Rica product and the 15K formula, period. Plus nothing, minus nothing. I think most of the top earners here would probably agree with that. You know? But here's the thing.

Everybody wants to know, like, what's your funnel? Or do you have a particular email series? Or which of the lead capture pages are you using? Do you use this one or that one?

And they're not bad questions. But here's the thing. There's a reason why, say, Tom and Bob can get started in the same company on the same day and get different results. And a lot of it comes from this whole thing of how you feel about money. How do you feel?

Some people are – I used to be scared of it because my thing was like, well, if I had a lot of money, I'd be scared of it. If I had a lot of money, I'd freak out about the taxes. I wouldn't know what to do about the taxes. I would freak out.

And I would self-sabotage myself from making a lot of money just so I didn't have to deal with filing a long-form 1040 or going and getting an LLC or something. And I don't want to confuse this tonight, but my point is, there's different reasons why people kind of don't allow themselves to receive all the money that they are entitled to. And most of that is just monkey chatter in our heads. So you've got to make sure that you're not letting that stop you.

You've got to make friends with money. You've got to make friends with the idea that you can be wealthy, that your family can be wealthy, that they make these luxury cars and homes for you, not just everybody but you. Okay? And here's the thing. If you don't want the money, give it away.

Fine. You know, some people are like, well, I don't like all this talk about money. Everybody's talking about money, money, money, money, money. Well, A, grow up. Okay?

Let's go ahead and get this out of the way, because I get a little tired sometimes of some pious – and this is me talking, by the way. This is Tony Rush. Let me put a disclaimer on this. This is Tony Rush's opinion, not necessarily that of Empower Network. Okay?

But I get a little tired sometimes of these self-righteous and pious people who act like money's not important. Anybody that tells you money's not important is broke. They don't have any, period. It doesn't even deserve any more commentary, but I will add a couple more things. The people who act like, well, I don't like all this talk about money.

I mean, I don't need a lot of money. I just want enough to pay my bills. Well, how are you ever going to be any good to anybody else if all you have is enough for you and yours? I mean, really, there's more people on the planet than just you.

If all you have is just enough to pay your bills, what good are you? How are you making an impact on the world? How are you making an impact on your community? How are you having an impact on children who don't have clean water? I participated in a project a few years ago where we dug a well, and it was in the Central African Republic.

It was absolutely amazing. These kids were having to walk into the jungle, like, three miles, get dirty water in an old Valvoline oil jug, and then carry it back to the village where they strained it through T-shirts. And the T-shirt got off the grit, but it didn't get out all the cryptosporidium and all this other nasty business that causes diarrhea, and people die of dehydration and dysentery and all these nasty things just because they didn't have clean water. Wouldn't that be a fun game to play? So spare us the self-righteousness, right?

If talking about money very blatantly offends you, then check up on that. I'm not going to tell you it's good, bad, right, or wrong, but I will tell you that if talking about getting rich makes you feel a little squirmy, then you probably have got some monkey chatter that you need to take care of. You probably do. And I did this one time as an experiment. I was in a hotel meeting.

I said, how many people here want to find out how to get rich? And like three people raised their hand. And about 17 minutes later, I said, so how many people again are here to find out how to become financially independent? And every hand in the room went up. So I decided, I'm going to just start talking about getting rich.

I like to use the word rich. Let's get rich. And why do I like the word rich? Because I don't want to start shocking people into thinking about money.

And I'm tired of goose-stepping around people who are offended by the word rich. If the word rich offends you, then you probably have some head stuff that you need to take care of. There's probably some monkey chatter. There's probably some limiting beliefs and some weird idea that these people that are wealthy and rich, they're probably not good, spiritual, nice, ethical, moral people. And I've got news for you.

There's some of the nicest, super nice, ethical, moral people that you could possibly be around because they've got money. They've got money to do things with. They're not trying to figure out how to rob Peter to pay Paul. They're not trying to figure out how to live indoors. You know?

So money makes you more of what you already are. So if you hang out with really good, moral, ethical people who love people and who are generous, and they just happen to have a lot of money, guess what? They're doing amazing things with that money, and you deserve to be one of them. Okay? So I'm winding down.

I'm coming in for a landing. But here's what I want to leave you with. So none of this is about any – by the way, and I say this disclaimer quite a lot when I'm talking about personal development because nothing I'm talking about – this is very practical stuff here, guys. This is nuts and bolts. This is stuff like your grandpa could have taught you if he had been wealthy.

Mine was not. But I'm not talking about anything that's got anything to do with any kind of new age voodoo or any kind of out there, you know. No, this is nuts and bolts stuff. And here's the recipe. Your self-image.

What you think you're worth. Write this down. Your self-image creates your beliefs, your thinking.

Your thinking creates your decisions. Your decisions create your actions, and your actions create your results. One more time. Your self-image creates your thinking. Your thinking creates your decisions.

Your decisions create your actions, and your actions create your results. It all starts with how you think, how you look at yourself, and whether or not you deserve to be wealthy. If you don't think you deserve to be wealthy, you'll think thoughts that aren't wealthy, and then you'll make decisions that keep you from being wealthy, and those decisions – there'll be decisions that just get a little bit of money coming in but not what you deserve, just a little bit. And so small thinking creates small actions, and of course small actions create usually no results, but at best small results. So here's the good news and the bad news.

You are where you are in your life right now because this is what you've chosen, okay? And the better news is that human beings are the only creatures on the planet who get to choose something different. When I got that, I was so happy to find out that me being broke had nothing to do with the economy or the Democrats or the Republicans or who was president, when I really got it that the reason I was struggling financially was because of my own decisions and my own thinking and my own actions and my own self-image. Man, I was thrilled, because I can do something about all that. I can't do anything about what's happening in Washington, I can't do anything about gas prices, but I can do something about my thinking. I can do something about my decisions. I can get around better people.

I can buy the right products. I can learn how to do what the wealthy people are doing, right? So this thing, poverty is like a virus. You've got to get inoculated, and that's what it means to be here in the Empower Network. We've got the vaccine here against poverty.

So I want to give you – I don't know how many I've jotted down here, just real quick. I'm not going to give you any comments, real quick. No, that's fine, I rarely am able to rattle things off quickly. Probably one or two of these I'll have to say at least a word or two about. Alright, but here they are.

Average people and wealthy people. Here's the difference in their thinking, and you want to pick which. The wealthy. Alright? Average people believe their lives are happening to them. Wealthy people believe they are happening to their lives. That was a big one for me. That was a really big one for me, when I got it that I'm the one that's basically creating my whole life based on how I think, what I've decided, what I've been doing, everything turned around for me. Average people let fear and past experience stop them. Wealthy people move forward in spite of fear. This is a big one, especially if you've been beat up. If you've been beat up in the industry, I had been in a bunch of different companies and never made any money. I nearly quit. I'm one of those who nearly gave up because I thought, I can't afford to fail again. Let me tell you something. It feels like normal survival thinking. That is some of the most deadly thinking.

It will shoot you down every time. It looks like responsible thinking when you say, well, you know, I've been in this four or five different things, I've never made any money, and yet this Empower Network thing looks really good, but I don't know, I'm just scared of failing again. See, that sounds like mature, grown-up, responsible thinking, but in actuality, all it is, it's like trying to drive your car while looking in the rear-view mirror. It's like you've put cardboard over the windshield and you've taped that up, and you're trying to drive a car forward by looking in the rear-view mirror. Damn sure you're going to crash every time. There is no way that you can do that consistently without crashing. You cannot move forward in life by looking at your past. You can let the past inform you, we can avoid getting in the same ditch, but the beautiful thing is that Empower Network is so different than anything else that any of us have ever done before. Absolutely nothing has ever existed like this.

100% commissions. You don't have to talk on the phone. I used to be the phone guy. You know, David Wood says it as well as anybody, none of us got into the home business industry to be telemarketers. And yet, if you're like me, you used to spend four or five hours a day calling people up. Hi, this is Tony Rush. I'm calling to ask you to request some information on my website. Do you have about four or five minutes to have a quick chat?

Over and over and over, and leaving God knows how many voicemails, and then callbacks, and when you do get them on the phone, they sound like they don't have a brain in their head, and you're trying to book them to the 9 o'clock presentation, and then of course, when you call them back at 9:30, they've been abducted by aliens. They don't even live there anymore. I mean, you know, you get on the phone, it's no hablo English. What, was it the wrong number? So there's enough to go around. Money is infinite. And here, you don't even need – you don't even need to be a superhero. You just need to be someone who can go get to a day, which is easy. It's really easy. Okay? I've got to hurry. Average people ask, how much does it cost?

That was my mantra. That's what I used to do all the time. Average people ask, how much does it cost? Wealthy people ask, how much can I make? You see this a lot in clothing stores, guys. Do this sometime. Next time you're out with your wife, and she's buying something nice and shiny because you just made a bunch of money in Empower Network, and you're sitting over there in the corner just kind of letting her, you know, do the thing – or ladies, whatever – pay attention to what people do when they walk into a store. And if you close your eyes for just a second, I'm going to describe it, and you can picture it. So we'll use a lady as an example. Lady walks into the store. She walks over to a rack of clothing, and she looks for her size first, right? She looks for her size. Okay, there we are, size 8 or whatever. And she pushes – here's what she does now, pay attention – she takes her left hand and puts it on the left side of the hanger. It's one of those circular racks, and she pushes it so she can get a good look at the front of the garment, right? It's a pretty natural movement. So she's got her hand, she's looking at it, she pushes it to look at the front of the garment. And while she's looking, the left hand drops down about 12 inches and starts fishing around, fingers going 90 miles an hour, the whole time she's looking at the front of this garment, and she's fiddling around. What's she looking for?

She's looking for the tag. And she looks up, pulls the tag up off the end of the sleeve, and – oh – she walks off from the rack. It's the damnedest thing you've ever seen. She does not buy what she wants. She buys what she has decided that she can afford, not understanding that if she understood a tenth of what I've explained on this call tonight, she could buy the whole store. Somebody owns the whole store. It could just as well be her. But she's moving through life thinking, I'm not going to buy what I want, I'm going to buy what I think I can afford, and never understanding how close she is to a concept that would totally allow her to buy anything that she chooses to buy. You afford what you choose to afford. Seriously. Okay. Same thing when it comes to looking at businesses. A lot of people look at a business and say, well, how much is it going to cost? I get that. It's a fair question. It's not a bad question. But you know what? I love when I'm talking to a prospect and they want to know how much they can make, because that's somebody who's wealth conscious. That's somebody who's already decided, how much money can I make in your company? Who's making some serious bank here? How much can I make?

That's always a good question. That's a good sign that you're talking to somebody that's got a few things figured out about wealth. Average people say, how much does it cost? Wealthy people say, how much can I make? Average people say, I can't do it. Wealthy people say, how can I do it? Big difference. Average people say, I can't do it. Wealthy people say, how can I get that done? Self-explanatory. Average people work hard for their money. This was me. I used to believe that you had to work hard for your money. And that largely comes from the fact that I grew up on a farm, and everybody in my family was hard workers, and hard work was always described as a virtue. Have you guys noticed that?

It's kind of part of our language here in America. Hey, do you know Bob? Yeah, I know Bob. What do you think of Bob? Oh, he's great, man. Super guy. Hard-working fella. Boom, right there it is. It's like you're listing what's right with Bob, and one of the first things you hear is that he's a hard worker. He's a hard worker. What is it?

You know, a lot of times when people say, well, you know, I heard a guy say one time, he said, well, my dad was a hard worker, which was really another way of saying – and this is his words, not mine – he is explaining to me, my dad was a hard worker, but that's really just another way of saying that he never really understood how money worked. Again, his words, not mine. I wouldn't say that about his father, but I do understand, I saw that in my own family. Where if you're having to really grind it out, it probably means that there's something you need to understand. Like somebody's flailing away trying to chop down a tree, like they just keep hammering away at the thing, and they're just flailing away at it, and they're working hard. And then all of a sudden, somebody comes by and says, when's the last time you sharpened that saw? And they're like, sharpen the saw? What are you talking about? You know, old story about the commercial fisherman that came off the boat at the end of the pier, and there's a rod and reel fisherman down there at the end of the pier. He's, you know, fishing. And the rod and reel guy and the commercial fisherman, they had a little conversation there. The commercial fisherman says, how's it going today? And he says, going pretty good. He says, how many do you catch in a given day? He said, oh, I don't know, 10 or 12, maybe. Kind of proud of himself, you know. He looked at the commercial fisherman. He says, how many do you catch in a given day?

He says, I don't know, over 3,000. And the rod and reel guy says, what kind of bait do you use? And the commercial fisherman says, bait? That was the joke. That was the end of it. Bait? What are you talking about? Bait? It's not a funny joke, not intended to be funny, but the illustration demonstrates that the rod and reel guy, he has a very different way of catching fish, doesn't he? Two people that if you asked them, what did you do today? I said, well, I mean, can you imagine what it's like for somebody to own it?

For somebody to go to Google and type in the name of your company and your website, your blog ranks higher than the company's own website? That's a lot of leverage. So like when you get it, when you look at the numbers and you realize that, okay, out of 100 customers, you know somewhere north of 40% are probably going to get the inner circle, and then a fairly significant portion of those people are going to get the Costa Rica. And I've got to be honest with you, I'm at the point now – and this again, I'll put the disclaimer out here, this is just Tony Rush talking, this is not necessarily Empower Network – I'm at the point where I'm starting to get to where I don't even view Costa Rica and 15K as separate products, because people who come in at the Costa Rica level, why would they not get the 15K? Most people that do one do the other. So now you're looking at a situation where you've got, you know, $25 commissions, $100 commissions, and then bam, you've got, you know, like the $1,500 Costa Rica and 15K formula sort of combined, two different transactions. But it's sort of rare to see someone come in at Costa Rica and not pick up that last $1,000 product. So again, this is leverage, right? Why grind it out?