From Rock Bottom To Recurring Income: What Actually Changed
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Gene Wolf spent three years in affiliate marketing making just enough to cover his own membership fee, recruiting close to 200 people into Global Domains International for a single dollar a head, before he gave himself a 72-hour ultimatum to figure it out or quit. What changed his income from near zero to three thousand dollars a month within weeks wasn’t a new tool or a new funnel. It was a single realization: he was in the wrong industry entirely.
A childhood spent surviving, then basketball as a second home
David Wood introduced Gene Wolf as a longtime friend from the industry, someone he had watched online since around 2008 and 2009, back when Wood himself was building out MLSP and early YouTube presence. Gene used the conversation to lay out where he came from. He identifies as indigenous, the son of a full Native American mother and an Indonesian-French father. His mother spent seven years in Canada’s residential school system, a network of Christian and Catholic institutions that operated from roughly 1890 to the 1990s and were designed, in his words, to “wash the Indian” out of indigenous children. She was raped and beaten there, and the trauma she carried out of it shaped Gene’s entire childhood.
He grew up on what he called the Canadian version of Skid Row in Vancouver, watching his mother struggle with addiction. At thirteen he pulled a needle out of her arm and called an ambulance to revive her. There were stretches, some as young as five or six, when he was left alone for three or four days at a time with only a loaf of bread, peanut butter, and oatmeal in the fridge. His mother died when he was eighteen.
Basketball became the stability his home life never offered. He went on to become, by his account, one of the greatest Canadian basketball players of all time, leading his college and his league in scoring, and at twenty-two or twenty-three he was invited to a division-one camp where he was named the top player among roughly 140 to 150 fourth-year graduates, several of them NBA-bound. Scouts from the Lakers, Grizzlies, and Utah all talked to him. Without anyone to guide him, he decided to finish school instead, a decision he now regards as a wasted opportunity. “I never really learned jack shit from school,” he said. “I only went to school to play basketball, pretty much.”
Three years earning nothing, then a 72-hour deadline
After a period of street life that ended in a year of federal prison time in the United States, Gene described the experience as one of the best things that ever happened to him. Stripped of control over his own body and movement, he read forty or fifty books on spirituality, Buddhism, Christianity, and the Nation of Islam while inside, and came out with what he called a blueprint: the same discipline and consistency that had made him a legendary basketball player could be applied to anything.
The day he got out, he told himself there were two billion people connected to the internet and he had to be able to make a dollar from one of them. He answered a Craigslist ad that turned out to be for Global Domains International, thinking it was a job. What followed was three years of almost no income, capped by a moment where he sat down and gave himself seventy-two hours to solve the problem or walk away and get a nine-to-five job.
What he found in that window was that he had been focused on the make-money-online industry when he actually needed to be in what he called the people-helping industry.
That little tiny change, going from a desperate man who wants to make money online to transitioning to helping people, I started to realize that when I solve people’s problems, I always have an opportunity to make money.
A month after that shift, he was making three thousand dollars a month. The insight let him stop promoting a single program and start streamlining a funnel of tools people needed to succeed, which led him into Kimball Roundy’s SpiderWeb Marketing System and Tissa Godfredsen’s Acme People Search.
Black hat traffic and a plain white sales page
Gene credited Tissa’s system with converting extraordinarily well, describing a simple sales page topped with a photo of Tissa’s house that walked visitors through multiple income streams without him ever having to talk to a prospect directly. During the same period he was deep into black hat tactics, hunting down 0 pay-per-click coupons on Yahoo for ten or twenty dollars and finding ways to reuse them repeatedly, which multiplied the traffic he could buy. He was also inflating YouTube views to rank videos on the front page, pulling in 100 to 200 leads a day through Kimball Roundy’s system.
The success came at a cost. He hit what he called rock bottom, burned out from the grind of self-employment and depressed after knee surgeries at seventeen and again at thirty-one ended his basketball career and left him listening to people who told him he was washed up. He drank heavily for a period, snapping in and out of business activity between binges. What eventually pulled him out was a seminar called Choices, where facilitators gave him the nickname “the dream killer” for his pattern of sabotaging his own opportunities out of fear of what success would actually feel like.
The blueprint is percentages, frequency, and losing the ego
Asked directly what the blueprint actually is, Gene described it in the language of basketball statistics. A player he called “broken Gene” might hit three of ten shots; as frequency and practice increase, that becomes six or seven of ten. Business, he argued, works the same way: raise your percentages on the right activities and the volume follows. He pointed to his own basketball comeback at thirty-six, when he built the winningest team across three British Columbia cities and collected fifty or sixty trophies in four years, as proof the same discipline that built his first career could rebuild a second one.
The other piece of the blueprint, he said, is surrounding yourself with people as good as you or better, which forces your own frequency upward, and treating failure strictly as data rather than identity. He described himself as a computer accumulating data, where turnovers and missed shots are simply information to adjust from, not evidence of who you are. Self-sabotage, in his framing, has to be identified in your daily habits before it can be removed, and the ego is what convinces people their bad habits are acceptable to keep. “If you haven’t hit rock bottom,” he said, “then you don’t know what success is, because in order to feel what real success is, you have to feel what the bottom feels like.”
Written up from the original recording. The full transcript is below.
Read the full transcript (59 min talk, 8,830 words)
Oh, hey, everybody who is watching live and also who is watching the recording, I wanted to welcome you out tonight. I have a special guest that I'm gonna introduce you to who's been a friend of mine for a couple of years, but we've kind of known each other for a while. His name's Gene Wolf. If you haven't heard of Gene Wolf, you're gonna get a good introduction today because we're gonna get him to share his story. Gene is really just a, he's an affiliate marketing rock star, he really is. He gets results in everything that he does.
He's helped people build out big YouTube presences. He's done marketing. He's done marketing service for people. He's done affiliate marketing. He's built teams of network marketing. He really knows his stuff, right?
He's practical and he knows how to teach people how to get results. He's actually a motivational speaker as well. Speaks to kids in basketball camps. I mean, he's gonna share his own story. And right now he's doing a lot of things in e-commerce. And that's been kind of his transition more product-based models.
And so he's kind of focused there right now. So today what we're gonna do is we are gonna pick his brain a little bit, find out a little bit about his story and a little bit about what he does. And Gene, thank you so much for coming out here and sharing a little bit today. Yeah, brother. Yeah, I was really happy that you asked me because since I first came into the industry back in 2008, 2009, when I was part of Global Domains International, I started seeing, that's when I started seeing you online, right? That's like back when I was at, and you does like back in the MLSP when you guys were first launching.
Yeah, I was, I seen you all over YouTube and stuff too. Like you were into YouTube when I just started getting into YouTube around that same time. Yeah, it was like, it's nice to still to know you now, right? And to have these long conversations and stuff with you as well, right? Yeah, yeah. Well, yeah, I mean, you were there.
I mean, back in the days when I was having a hard time, you were somebody that was there and you talked to me and everything like that. And I really appreciated that. So, you know, tell us a little bit about you. I mean, like, talk about your background for people that don't know you, who are you and, you know. Well, I'm, so I'm indigenous. I identify, identify as in I'm indigenous, right?
My mother's full Native American and my father is Indonesian, French. And then he's got like German stuff, a bunch of other stuff at night. And so I grew up with my mother though. And my father was a part-time father. He did his best. My mother grew up in the very, harsh residential school system, right?
Have you heard of the residential school system? Residential school system. So what it is, is like back in the days from about 1890 to about 1990s, they used to take all the indigenous children from the reservations and stick them into Christian and Catholic residential schools, which were like imprisonment camps for kids, right? So they used to say it was for to colonize and kind of wash the Indian out of them, is what they used to say. Take the Indian out of them, right? And so, but in these camps and stuff, they were pretty much like enslavement camps for children, for indigenous children.
And my mother was part of that, right? And so that's where I came from. I came from that intergenerational trauma from my mother. And so she was in it for seven years and she was, you know, raped, beaten. They destroyed her, right? She eventually ran away to the city in Vancouver, BC.
And that's where she met my father. My father was an immigrant from Indonesia. And he was in Indonesia around World War II. His father was like a Indonesian millionaire at the time. But he defected from Indonesia during that time because they were trying to force him to, they confiscated all his like property, everything. So they fled Indonesia to Holland and went to Holland.
He stayed in Holland from the age of like, I think it was like 10 to 18, 19 years old or something, 20. And then he, my dad, then moved from Holland to Canada. And then eventually the whole family started moving to Canada. And then that's when my mom and my dad met down on, we have this street called Skid Row, which is basically like Los Angeles Skid Row, but it's a Canadian version, right? And so, yeah. And so my father was about- They call it Skid Row.
Like they call it Skid Row. Yeah, it's called Skid Row in Vancouver, BC. So you can look it up. It's really bad. That's probably one of the worst areas for drugs in like Canada, like close to North America too. It's like really bad.
So my father, he actually did time. My father went to jail for four years, five years for manslaughter, right? Because he killed a guy, he beat him to death. And so he had to do time. And that was before he met my mother. He got out, he was a bouncer, they met.
During that time, my mother's going through like a really hard time from the system because she has a lot of trauma from the system, right? The residential school system. And so that really destroyed her. And me and my brother, we experienced the trauma of my mother, which she went through. We were put into foster homes. I watched my mother drink all the time.
When I was like 13 years old, I had to pull the needle out of my mom's arm a few times, right? And call the ambulance to revive her. Like I've seen some really shitty shit. And it was really tough. So my identity at that time, I didn't know what my identity was. I didn't know I was indigenous.
I didn't know I was native. I didn't know my heritage. I didn't know my traditions. I'm an urbanized indigenous Native American, right? And so all my traditions, I'm part of the system of colonization where they wanted to wash the Indian, beat the Indian out of us. And they did.
And so I'm an urbanized Indian. I grew up in the city. And so I came from pretty much that stem of intergenerational trauma that was passed on from my mother and her beliefs and how to raise me. And so I was at home at times, sometimes five, six years old by myself for three, four days at a time, beating myself too. Loaf of bread, some oatmeal in a fridge. I learned how to make oatmeal at a very young age.
My mama would buy peanut butter, a loaf of bread and say there's oatmeal in a fridge and she'd come back three days later, right? And this is because she's like strung out on heroin, strung out on drugs and alcohol and stuff. And so that's me, that's how my life has always been. It's always been a survival. It's always been taking care of myself. For a very long time, as I said, because I never knew who I really was, for me it was just about surviving and getting my next meal most days.
And thank God I found athletics and sports, right? I found basketball. So basketball kind of really gave me a home, gave me a home away from the home that I was missing. It gave me, I didn't really have family there looking after me either. I had no family. I had no cousins, no aunties, no uncles.
It was just me and my brother. And my brother was really into gangs and stuff too, already at this time. So he never really took care of me either. I'm just a little Indian boy running around on the street, right? To give you an example of this too, I was hit by a car at five years old twice in the same spot, right? In the same spot, on the same street.
And you know, yeah. And then like two years later, I got hit by a car twice again in a different city, right? Where we moved to this other place called Rupert. And so, yeah, I've been, I felt a lot of trauma at a very young age, but I found basketball, right? And so basketball, as you can see, a lot of these trophies and stuff, were from 36 years old until now, I'm 42 years old. So in the last six years, I won all these trophies and shit.
And it was just from wanting to rebuild myself and prove myself again, right? So back in the day, I turned into this legendary basketball player. I was named one of the greatest Canadian basketball players of all time on the list. In college, I led Canada in scoring. I went to the United States. I led Washington in scoring.
I went to UNBC out in Prince George. I led my college, my league, Canada. I won like MVPs, all that stuff, right? And during this time, you know, I'm actually, you know, still going through a lot of shit. Addiction-wise too, because after my mother, after my mother died, my mother died when I was 18 years old, right? So I was kind of left on my own at that point.
And my father, he didn't really do shit. Even my mom died. I was helping take care of my father because my father was, I don't know, he was just kind of depressed on his own. Like he didn't, couldn't do anything, right? He was handicapped, bad knees, overweight, diabetic. Eventually he died from cancer, right?
But at 18 years old, my mother died. And that really kind of hit really hard for me, right? That's, even though I'm like this all-star basketball player coming out of high school, it really hit home because like I didn't really have another parent there to console me. I didn't have anybody there to help me. And so, but I understood, there's one thing I understood. I understood how to become great, right?
And I learned from the pain that I went through a lot of the pain and trauma that I went through, I started streaming that energy into my skillset, into developing my skills and evolving my talent, right? For basketball. And eventually I started affirming to myself, I started making affirmations to myself, I wanna be the greatest basketball player to ever play. So I started training like that. And I started putting in the effort and the work ethic and all that stuff. And I got to a point.
So I was actually recruited in the NBA when I was about 22, 23 years old. And yeah, I was recruited to go play with the Lakers, Grizzlies. I was recruited to go to this division one camp when I was 22 years old. And no, 20 was a 23, 23 years old. And I was the number one player in the camp. And these are all fourth year graduates in division one, right?
So these guys are all, a lot of them are going to the NBA. Now, when I went there, there was like 140, 45 players there. I was in a, they named me the number one player out of everybody, right? And I played in the All-Star game. I talked to the Lakers scout, the Grizzlies scout, Utah scout. And they wanted me to come play, right?
Now, I talked to the, when I talked to the Lakers scout, they wanted me to come out and they wanted me to put me into a couple of CBA exhibition games. And then they wanted me to come to their training camp as well. But one of the things that I did, because I didn't have guidance, I didn't have nobody there to help me, to tell me exactly what to do. I kind of just, you know, my mindset was like, I should finish school, right? That's what I was thinking. I should finish school.
And so I didn't know exactly what I wanted to do. And here, I didn't realize the massive opportunity I had. And that is lack of masculine energy around me. I didn't have that guidance from my father to sit there and tell me, listen, boy, you should, you need to go do this and this and this, right? For me, I kind of just thought maybe I should finish school. Maybe I should do this, right?
And at the end of the day, I realized school didn't really do shit for me, to be quite honest. It's great up. It didn't really do shit for me. You don't make any money from what you learned in school? No, nothing, nothing. Actually, like, yeah, literally nothing.
I've made no money from anything that I, I learned how to read a couple of books. Even then, I've always had the ability to read at a very young age, when I was like six or seven years old, I was already reading, right? But yeah, to be quite honest, I never really learned jack shit from school. I only went to school to play basketball, pretty much. But I did okay in school. I did okay.
I think I'm like, if I went back to school now, I could still get my degree. And I think I'm like 25, 30 credits short. So I'm about a year and a half away from the degree. Maybe two years. But I wouldn't do it. I wouldn't go back to school because it's a waste of fucking time.
I'll just be putting myself more in debt. And when I could actually use that fucking money, excuse my language, anybody's offended by me, that's how I talk. Yeah, that's how I talk. But what I've learned is like, I put so much money into school. If I had any real guidance during that time, if I had a David Wood or somebody around me during those times with that type of knowledge and stuff, I would have took all my fucking money that I put into school and I would have started a business for this, right? That's what I would have done.
But I didn't do that because I didn't, during this time, I grew up in the 90s, 2000s area. And we never, that was just the beginning, the infancy of the internet when it started just booming. People could still buy Google shares and they would have been gazillionaires now, right? Yeah, yeah. So it's an interesting background. You went to school, you got recruited to play in the Lakers.
You're like this, you know, basketball legend up in Canada. How does this lead to affiliate marketing? Like how did you get into the full affiliate internet marketing thing? So, okay, so as I said, I never really had guidance. You know, the streets were my guidance. My best friends were my family.
That's who helped take care of me, right? But they didn't know any better either. A lot of these guys didn't know any better either. So they did their best. A lot of them, they said, they said, Gene, you shouldn't be doing this with us. They always said that.
Like a lot of my friends were actually, even though they're knuckleheads, gangsters and stuff, they always said, Gene, do you really think you should be around this? And me, I'm always like, I'm always down, right? I'm like, yeah, it's all good, don't worry about it. I'm down, let's go. And we did some really crazy stuff, right? I won't get into too detail, but it gets crazy, right?
Guns and shit like that. But eventually that led me to going to jail, right? So I did time in the States. I did a year time federally in the States. And that led me to rediscovering myself. And I'll tell you something, when you're deprived of your freedoms of movement, your freedoms of body, you have to find out who you really are, right?
You have no control over your body once you go to prison. They control your body. They tell you what to do. They tell you when to sleep. They tell you when to eat. If you don't do it, they'll add more time, right?
And for them, when I went out, I realized that I'm just a share. I'm a market share to them because prisons are independently owned, right? Yeah. And so for them to keep me in jail, it's like $1,500 to $2,000 a day. And so that's what they're getting paid to keep me in jail, right? Is that what it costs for a prisoner?
Those guys are like banking for nothing. They put you in like a little, like, you know, a cement room. I mean, that's crazy. And so when I was working in jail, I was getting paid like a buck 40 an hour, dude. Right? Crazy.
Yeah, so they're making about $15,000, $2,000 a day off me and I'm getting paid about a dollar an hour and I'm having to work. I'm making like $6 a day for eight hours of work, you know? But yeah, so I went to jail and, you know, I had to rediscover myself. How sweet for that, dude. So, but like, jail was one of the greatest things that ever happened to me. Yeah.
Because I became so disciplined. I became a monster in there. Like literally, I read almost 40, 50 books on spirituality, Buddhism. I dug into Christianity. I started reading about the nation of Islam. I started digging, I started digging more deeper into Buddhism.
And I started understanding the art of letting go, of detaching myself to certain things, right? I started realizing that I'm not my body, you know? And I started realizing that this body that we have is just a form of attachment. It's a form of illusion that we have. And I started learning about these things and it opened up the possibilities in my head. I started realizing I achieved massive greatness, legendary status in my city and also in Canada through basketball, and I'm a Native American.
And it's not easy for us to do that, you know? Where it is, you know, being Caucasian, you have the upper hand. Your opportunity is a lot easier because it's handed to you. Whereas when I come into an urban setting, I have to work 10 times harder than everybody else for everybody else to notice me, right? Because that's just the nature of the hierarchy in society, right? Some opportunities are greater for others and unfortunately it's based on race.
I hate to be that person, but I experienced it, right? Is what I'm saying, I'm speaking of experience. So in jail, I started realizing something that I went from this kid who has nothing to achieving legendary greatness in basketball and I had a blueprint for how to do it. And I started realizing that this blueprint that I have can be applied to anything, right? And it literally came down to consistency, hard work, increasing output and input and not giving up. And I started realizing a lot of my mistakes that I used to make were not mistakes at all.
They were their lessons, their learning lessons, right? It's information. So a lot of the times we, as human beings, we become these people who get down on ourselves because we fail, we get, we start to mentally break down and doubting our abilities, but we don't, but when you start to realize you're not your body, that this is just a learning vehicle, you start to realize that everything is information. Everything is information and it's important that you understand that you are destined to go through adversity, but adversity is just a harder way to learn. And once you start gaining this knowledge for things, you can achieve pretty much anything you want. Now, what it comes down to is just getting off your fucking lazy ass and applying yourself.
And that's the hardest part. It really is hard. I'm not joking. Some days I don't wanna do shit because I'm fucking, because of life, right? Some days I don't wanna do shit, but then I realize, you know, like you have the blueprint if you just apply yourself. And you can apply yourself to pretty much anything, right?
So coming out of jail, before I got out of jail, this is like the last two months of doing my time, I thought to myself, I just, it just popped in my head. There's two billion people connected to the internet. I gotta be able to make $1 from them, right? $1, that's it. And so when I got out of jail, the first thing I did was I went to Craigslist. I went to Craigslist and I saw an ad for Global Do Things International.
It's hilarious, it's really hilarious. And it was an ad that said, I can't remember the guy's name, but the ad was like, you know, very, you know, worded to like make me think it's like a job. So I replied to the ad, I thought it was a job. And then the guy, you know, it went from being a kind of, kind of sounding like a job to just affiliate marketing that we're marketing MLM. And that was my first, I didn't know what the hell, I understand, I've never promoted anything online. The closest thing I've gotten to online was going to yahoo.com, go to Yahoo chat and play Yahoo pool.
That was it, that was pretty much it, right? And so I replied to the, I replied to it. And that's when I started really rediscovering myself in the industry for three years, I made no money, yeah. I made enough money to pay for my membership every month. I was making, I think the closest I got in the three years was about 300 bucks a month, which is still pretty damn good. I was, I recruited almost like 100, 200 people into global domains.
And, you know. You recruited 200 people to make 300 bucks a month? Well, you're only getting paid $1, right? Right? So, but that kind of led me into understanding my worth, my value as my time, I started, in order for me to start valuing myself a little bit more, I had to make $1 per recruit, right? You begin to realize like, I put so much energy into this.
Why am I getting paid so fucking less? Right? Right? And so, but I almost quit, you know, three years into the industry, I almost quit. Like I almost gave up. I was like, I can't afford this, right?
The amount of energy and time I'm putting into it, I can't afford to not make money. And so, I sat down for about two or three days and I gave myself an ultimatum. I said, if I don't figure it out in the next 72 hours, I quit. I'm gonna cut my losses and I'm gonna go get a fucking nine to five job, right? And so, I sat down and I started to do my part in my homework. I started to dig into YouTube.
I started to look from a psychological point of view. I started to dig into people and try to figure out what am I doing wrong, right? Right. And eventually I came to the conclusion that I was in the wrong industry. See, I was so focused on the make money online industry and I wasn't in that industry at all. I came after 72 hours, I realized I was in the people helping industry.
And that little tiny change, going from a desperate man who wants to make money online to transitioning to helping people, I started to realize that when I solve people's problems, I always have an opportunity to make money. Or when I become a solution expert that opens up the entire, it broadens everything. It allows me to go into branch off into everything, right? And so, yeah, like a month later, I was making $3,000 a month, right? Just like that. Just like that.
And it was so crazy because what happened was once that clicked in my head, I started realizing I didn't have to just promote global domains. I can promote people helping tools and earn commissions multiple by streamlining a funnel, right? A funnel of tools that people need to succeed, right? And so that led me to two systems, the SpiderWeb marking system with Kimball Roundy and Tissa Godfartani's Acme People Search. Oh, you were working with Tissa. Oh, I did really well with Tissa too.
Like his system converted like crazy, dude. And during that time too, I was really big into Black Hat marketing. So I was into Black Hat marketing as well. And I started finding pay-per-click coupons. So I started realizing how to leverage PPC with Yahoo. And I was finding these $300 pay-per-click coupons and I was getting them for so cheap, like 10, 20 bucks.
And I found a way how to keep using them over and over and over and over. So while I was getting all this pay-per-click traffic, I was utilizing a Black Hat method to keep being able to use the coupons over and over. And it blew my income up, right? Blew my income up. And Tissa's system converted like crazy. He had this plain white sales page with his big ass house in the top.
And it goes through all the sales. People would sign up to all the income streams, just like that, so easy. I didn't have to talk to anybody. I just had to send. Yeah, yeah, Tissa knows. I had a good, Tissa, we were cool, right?
He really, he was one of the people who really made me see multiple streams of income. And then also I got into the SpiderWeb marketing system, right? And that's when I really started understanding direct sales with Kimball Roundy. Now, when I got into the SpiderWeb marketing system, I was doing a lot of leads on YouTube. This is when I really started pushing into YouTube. And because I'm a black hat marketer, I learned how to inflate my views and rank my videos really high on the top page, right?
And so I was generating 100, 200 leads a day. And I was getting a lot of signups because of that. And yeah, I did really well with Kimball Roundy. Eventually he shut down SpiderWeb marketing system, but I was very grateful to learn a lot from Kimball. We had a bit of a run out because he didn't pay me my commissions at one point. But for the most part, I learned a lot though, right?
Like he helped me understand sales funds. And sales, it was like literally the first sales funnel that I ever experienced promoting multiple streams of income without having to talk to people, letting video sales letters close all my sales for me, right? And so that was like 2009, 2010, right? Yeah. Yeah, I mean, I don't remember this because that was like SpiderWeb marketing. That's like around the time that I got started, that thing was going.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. So yeah, and then I started doing really well. I hit rock bottom though. Right. I started getting depressed. I started because I was always working and grinding.
People like they think, you know, it's all flowers and rainbows and sunshine when you're an entrepreneur and work for yourself, like they don't realize like you have to fucking work harder than everybody else to sustain a self-employed business. It's not like going to a nine to five where you get paid for going to work. You have to work harder than those people because if you don't, your income, you don't have no income, right? You have no income at all. And so I started hitting rock bottom because I started getting burnt out and depressed from all the work I was putting into it. And I started drinking.
I started drinking a lot, drinking alcohol. And that was kind of my crutch. Alcohol, drinking beers once in a while, here and there. Eventually that led me to really like hitting rock bottom. I hit rock bottom pretty hard. But even when I was at rock bottom, I was still marketing.
I was still like, I would snap out of it for like a week. I go make some money and then I start partying again. And then I started partying again. But I would always just a little bit, give a little bit into my business to keep my business going. And I always did. But since 2008, I've been self-employed.
I've always been self-employed since then. Yeah. But I hit rock bottom. And so eventually that led me to rediscovering myself again, learning how to reinvent myself. What I discovered was the main reason why I became depressed. I was burnt out, yes.
But it was because I couldn't play basketball anymore. Because I had knee surgery on both my knees. So I had knee surgery on my right knee when I was 17. And then I had knee surgery on my left knee when I was 31. And that's really about my doctor's thought. He's like, hey, your career is done.
And everybody that used to cheer for me and say, oh, you're amazing basketball, brother, they're all talking to, right? He's washed up, he doesn't play basketball anymore. And so I started listening to all this. I started listening to the rumors, listening to people talking. And I shouldn't have been listening to them. I should have been listening to my heart to get my ass in gear and work my ass off.
But I was so depressed. I was allowing people to tell me who I am, right? To tell me what I can do. And which led me to hitting rock bottom, really rock bottom. I eventually got myself up. I went to this seminar called Choices.
And Choices was a seminar that teaches people how to start removing the tapes, the things that are stuck to us, not just from our parents, but that we gain through life, right? To identify the tapes that hinder us from achieving greatness or rediscovering ourselves, right? And so they called, what they called me, I had a nickname. And everybody gets a nickname at this seminar, right? My nickname was the dream killer because I was always killing my own dreams, right? That's what they said.
I was always, I had the opportunity to achieve greatness, like at another level. But I was so scared of success. I was so scared to go to a place to, I don't know, right? Like, it's scary sometimes when you get to it. Like, you know what I mean, because you were there. You were at the very top and financially and everything.
And it's scary sometimes because it's a different type of feeling that you have inside you. And that's a feeling that's really scared me because I grew up, my parents both had issues, right? I never had no guidance. So I didn't know what to expect. And I think that's why I sabotaged my own dreams a lot. And yeah, so, but that led me to, you know, going through the seminar, I realized that, man, I was great.
Like, I was legendary. Remember when I said, I know the blueprint. I have the blueprint. And it started clicking in me. You know, I did it. I hit the top before.
I can hit the top again, right? And so, this led me on my sobriety, my sobriety journey. And I decided to quit everything, alcohol, drugs, partying, recommit myself to my health, recommit myself to being an amazing father, recommit myself to being present in the now and not, my past doesn't, my past isn't who I am, right? It's just part of the wisdom I had to go through in order to gain this certain wisdom, right? And so, yeah, I understood I had the blueprint. I just had to apply the blueprint to what I need to do, right?
Work ethic, getting off your ass and doing something about it, right? So like, don't get me wrong, like we all go through depression. We all go through mental illness, but it doesn't mean you have to accept it. It doesn't mean you have to say, that's who I am. That's not who you are. Who you are is who you choose to be right now, right?
If you wanna choose to be something, you could choose to be it and then you just apply yourself to it. That's it, you know, application, you know? And so, I started training. I started doing all the things that I did before to become great and legendary at basketball. I said the one thing that I wanted to do was I wanted to be great again at basketball, right? And eventually I did.
Like those old, those trophies came at 36 years old. I won all these, we're talking like 17, 18, 14. I mean, there's like maybe 50 or 60 trophies there that I got from basketball in five years. In four or five, no, four years. In four years time, I got that, right? And my business too.
My business, I started joining different direct sales. I did like 50K and easy one up. I started joining all these different affiliate and I was just fucking killing it and everything because I kept applying the blueprint. I just kept applying the blueprint, right? And rinse and repeat, rinse and repeat. And like quite literally, it made me understand something that even meeting people like you, that I've known about you for a very long time, right?
You achieved, what, 200 million, you said, right? Yeah, yeah. Could you fathom even achieving that as a normal person with the mindset of a normal, regular person? You couldn't, right? No, there's something like that would never even cross the normal person's mind. Yeah, it doesn't process.
They come back, they get a check, they deposit it. Yeah, it doesn't process in your head. Like, I'm gonna make $200 million, right? And it doesn't process. The regular person doesn't think like that. But the thing is, it's possible.
It is possible, but you have to have the right mindset. You have to remove all the self-sabotaging things that we do to ourselves. Everything is, anything is possible if you just put in the work and you do the right things. I mean, clearly there's a blueprint, but if you do enough with the right things, eventually you're gonna get the right results, right? Eventually. Yeah.
Hopefully, hopefully. Well, definitely. Well, we've talked about, you've mentioned something a bunch of times, okay? And this is what you've said. I have the blueprint. I realized I have the blueprint.
So what's the blueprint? I mean, how do you be a champion? So, okay, so everything that I've done up to this point has been about acceptance. That my failures don't, that's not who I am. My failures is information. I'm a computer.
I'm accumulating data. And when I get enough data, it's a numbers game in basketball, right? If you shoot enough jumpers, you're gonna get enough data and you're gonna realize how good of a player you are based on your percentages. In order for me to achieve a certain aspect and raise in my game, I had to raise a certain level of percentage in every area. Turnovers, right? You know what a turnover is like.
I'm playing, I'm playing, then I pass it to the other team. That's a turnover, right? If I shoot the ball 10 times at broken gene, broken gene, when I say broken gene, this is when I'm all broken down and everything. I'm hitting three out of 10, 10 shots. But as Gene starts raising his frequency, he starts hitting six and seven out of 10 shots, right? And when I start, when I, everything's a numbers game when it comes to even analytics and business.
It's always numbers. And so the blueprint of all your numbers is raising your frequency and your percentage levels to a certain level that's going to produce X amount of volume for your business or for whatever you're trying to achieve. The blueprint has always been about, I have to do A, B, C, D, and all these, do these certain things to achieve a certain level, to achieve a certain result, right? If I do these things, I'm going to achieve this result. If I, if I get up and I, one of the things, so one of the things I learned from you a long time ago, and I learned from a couple of other people was daily action plan, right? Having daily action plan.
Those things really, if you just stay consistent with your daily action plan of activities, not just any activities, money-making activities. For me, when it came to basketball, it was activities that raised my skill set and my percentage is high, right? If I hit a certain amount of percentage in a game, I'm always going to win, right? And so eventually, like my team, I created my own basketball team in my city. I'm, my team, the team that I created is the most winningest team in British Columbia across three cities, right? Vancouver, Burnaby, and Surrey.
We won all the, all the leagues, all, and I became the most winginess player too in the past five years, right? And it was because of my percentages. I raised my percentage levels at certain things, and I practiced certain activities that allowed me to increase my percentages and made me a better player. Again, and then the next thing was surrounding yourself with people good as you or greater, right? And by doing that, you raise your frequency level because when you have people who are smarter than you, when you have people who are more athletic or gifted than you, you start to raise yourself to their level, right? Because if you don't, you're going to get left behind.
But their frequency level is a lot higher than you. So in basketball terms, that was about me pushing myself to get at their level physically. Even though I was like that before, I'm not like that anymore. No, I'm old now, right? But I realized that I have to raise myself, my frequency up. I have to raise my work ethic up.
I have to work harder than these guys because if I wanted to achieve what their achieved greatness again, I have to raise my level up to other great people, right? The same level. And that was what I did when I was younger. I played with a lot of different great basketball players and I always said, it wasn't a competition, but I'm going to be greater than you. And I've always raised my work ethic level. I did everything I had to do work ethic wise to get there, right?
And that's the blueprint. The blueprint is work ethic. The blueprint is surrounding yourself with people who are just as smart as you or greater, right? It's not settling for, it's not allowing our trauma and it's not allowing our past to dictate who we are now. Those are the things that we've just had to go through in order to be who we are now, right? And that's as much part of the blueprint as it is anything.
I think that's one of the most important things because we self-sabotage ourselves because we allow our past to dictate who we are today. Yeah, and I think that that is so common because we all go through phases at different times when we do that. How does somebody get out of self-sabotage from? Self-sabotage, I mean, you have to identify. Your volume just tanked, no worries. Move me now?
Yeah, I can hear you better. Yeah, the baby mama is trying to message me. Okay, yeah, but so the, what was I saying? What was I saying? Oh, you're talking about self-sabotage. Oh, self-sabotage.
So you gotta identify it. Yeah, you have to identify like your habits because your habits are the things that don't, it's not what you want, right? We all have bad habits and we always justify nurturing these bad habits because it's okay. But if you want to remove the self-sabotaging activities that you do, you have to identify these things. And when you identify these things, it's going to allow you to remove them. And that means removing it from your daily action plan, removing it from your daily activities, right?
Mine was alcohol. Mine was also surrounding myself with people who just don't, whoa, that was pretty big. Yeah, that was a pretty large bug flying around in here. I don't actually even know how it got in here because the windows are shut. Oh, just one second here, give me a second. Yeah, no worries.
Got a giant bug. This is a common thing in my videos, actually. Like I used to do like videos outside and a bug would like hit me in the face. There it goes, it just landed on my computer. So yeah, the ego will tell you in your head that it's okay to have these bad habits, to have these things that are not good for you, but you say it's okay, right? You always say it's okay.
And if you want to remove these barriers from your journey so you can achieve whatever you want to achieve, you have to lose your ego because the ego forces you in your mind to attach yourself to these things and not. That's all right, man, that's all right, man. Are you big? The girlfriend's a problem, you have to have. Okay, give me one second, let me, I think I, am I still on? Yeah, you're still on.
Anyways, while I'm waiting for him to come back on, I'm just gonna run that route. Am I back? Yeah, I'm here. Yeah, you're back, yeah. Yeah, you're here, can you hear me? Yo.
Hello, yeah. Can you hear me? Yes. Can you hear me, no? Wait, yeah, the mic's not, I can't hear you. Oh no, I can hear you just fine.
I can hear you fine. Hold on, let me send you a message on Facebook. Hold on, Gene Wolf, give me a second here. Yeah, I can't hear what you're saying. I hear you just fine. Yeah, hold on just one second here.
Yeah, my microphone is on. Can everybody else hear me? Can you hear me? Yeah, I can't really hear you, bro. Yeah. You can hear me just fine?
Okay, yeah, I can't hear you though. I can't hear you, I don't know why. Wait, let me see. Yeah. Can you say something now? Yeah, hello?
Okay, anyways, yeah. Send me a text though. What are we talking about again? Yeah, we're talking about, we are talking about breaking through your limiting beliefs. We're talking about breaking, yeah. So the limiting beliefs.
So reprogram, I think you're gonna understand this a lot too. You have to reprogram yourself. So a lot of that has to do with neural pathways. Neural pathways are things that we have created inside of our brains that we become addicted to certain things. We become addicted to certain actions. I had a lot of different neural pathways connected towards my upbringing too, as well.
And so those helped me create self-sabotaging limiting beliefs, right? And when I did that, when I identified those things, when I realized and I lost my ego, I realized I'm not perfect. I realized that I'm weak, just like everybody else as well. I'm human being. I accepted that I'm not a certain thing of greatness at certain points. Then I could identify these things and I started to choose to not do them anymore.
I realized that if I keep doing this, I'm gonna keep getting this result, right? I started realizing that if I keep fueling and nurturing these addictions, it didn't matter what it was, whatever addiction, but if you keep nurturing certain things in your life and fueling these addictions or these things, these limiting beliefs, you're gonna keep getting the result, right? That's what you're gonna get all the time. And there's literally, it's not gonna change. We can try to justify it every time and say, yeah, it's gonna change, but it's not gonna change. Things won't change unless you start removing those things from your life.
And a lot of it too sometimes is people. We surround ourselves with certain people who are very toxic for us, but we always justify that it's okay, right? We always justify that thing, you know? Great. Can you hear me or no? Can you hear me?
Okay, I'm, yeah, I still can't hear you, bro. You can't hear me. Yeah, yeah, okay. All right, hold on a second. They can hear me. Hold on, I'm gonna type you something.
So why don't you just give your… Wait, let me see if this is live, hang on. All right, let me see if this is live, hang on. Yeah, it's live. It's live, I can hear you. They can hear me, okay.
I can't hear you on my other phone. Let me see if this is live. You can hear me on the other phone. Am I echoing? A little bit, yeah. But what I can do is I can mute myself back out or something like that.
Yeah, hang on. Let me put my headphones on my other phone. This one's actually. Yeah, yeah, don't worry, man. Hey, there's always a solution to every problem, right? There's always a solution to every problem.
So, I mean, this is part of what we're talking about because we think that- Okay, I think that works. Yeah, can you hear me now? Good. Okay, we're good now. It's a little bit of a lag. A little bit of a lag, but it's okay.
Yeah, so I talk and then you hear me on Facebook and then you can respond. I think you hear it. Yeah, I think you can. Anyways, Gene, we're having communication issues. So we've been on here for about an hour. Why don't you just talk about whatever it is that you wanna share and we'll close that, you know?
Just say whatever you wanna say to people, encourage them, whatever you think is gonna impact people and we'll just call it a day. All right, okay. Yeah, I'm actually lagging. So like the audio on this is lagging, so. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay, so I'll just, so, you know, my limiting beliefs, they never end.
They always continue to grow, right? But it's always up to me because of my ability to identify certain things. I can catch things early and I can make different changes in my life all the time. And one of my limiting beliefs a lot of the times was I felt like being with global domains back in the day and this is from the beginning. I was so committed and dedicated to global domains. I thought it was like the unicorn.
I thought it was the unicorn, right? And I realized that my limiting beliefs was that was possibility. I didn't realize until later, when I started receiving success, I started staying optimistic and I started allowing other things to come in. And I started experiencing other things from other people, other knowledge, and I started opening my belief system up to other people. And when I started to open myself up, I began to learn more things from David Wood. I started to learn more things from Tissa Gavrtani.
I started to learn more things from Dagen Smith, like Matt Lloyd. I started to, when I started to realize that there's people out there who have mastered certain aspects of the industry, certain aspects of life, and they figured shit out, it allowed me to evolve myself. It allowed me to remove my ego. The ego is always going to get in the way of you succeeding. It's always gonna be there because we are egotistical beings. We feel like we're the center of the universe, right?
And if you want to continue, you might be struggling, but don't ever think that your struggle is who you are. The struggle is just information. It's just information so you can adjust your campaigns. It's just information. Your failures is just lessons so that you can adjust and do what you need to do so that you can start succeeding. A, B, C, and D, split testing, all those things to generate information so that you can get the winner.
Eventually, you're gonna get the winner. And that's what life is. That is pretty much what life is in a nutshell as well. If you split test certain things in your life, you're gonna fail, fail, fail, but you're gonna succeed eventually at one of them and you're gonna figure it out. And don't accept failure as that's it. I've been at rock bottom.
Dave's been at rock bottom. Many people have hit rock bottom. And rock bottom, if you haven't hit rock bottom, then you don't know what real success is, straight up. If you haven't hit rock bottom, then you don't know what success is because in order to feel what real success is, you have to feel what the bottom feels like, you know? And so, you know, embrace your failures. Embrace the hard work.
Just keep working hard, you know? And that's pretty much, yeah, in a nutshell, yeah. Awesome, man. Well, I mean, we've been on here for a while. We're having delay issues. And so, I would probably continue it on a little bit, but it's kind of hard to go back and forth.
So, I would love to have you out another time. I have enjoyed this tremendously, you know? You never know really what you're gonna get a treat for. You know, I thought this was actually a tremendous treat because this is the real stuff. You know, a lot of times people think that strategy is the real stuff. And we always need real strategy, right?
But the real stuff is, it is personal growth, right? Because personal growth is what drives all the strategy. Personal growth is what drives the success. Personal growth is what drives the creation of companies, the creation of offers, the creation of things that work because we have to make ourselves work before the world on the outside of us, it also works. And so, you know, I encourage everybody, you know, if you're on here to follow Gene Wolf, you know what I mean? You can look him up on Facebook.
And he's doing a lot of e-commerce now, so he doesn't really have a lot of traditional websites and stuff like that and the same. But, you know, follow him, check him out on Facebook, find him on YouTube, watch his YouTube videos. And I encourage you to listen to this three or four times because if you really get the message that he talks about in this video, I would say that this is more of the secrets than a lot of times what you're looking to be the secret, which is you're looking for a magical strategy that's gonna make things work for you, but really it's not the magical strategy. It's how can you make yourself magical, right? So Gene, thank you for coming on. I know that we are having a delay, so I'm just gonna end this.
I appreciate everybody. Feel free to reach out, share this, follow Gene. And Gene, thank you for coming out, brother.