The Easiest Thing to Have Success Is Stop Resisting

Rui Gabriel thanks his wife Melissa, and a friend named Kevin, for the introduction, then tells a room full of marketers something most of them don’t want to hear: none of this is supposed to be hard. Not the leads, not the sales, not the blog post you’ve been avoiding for three days. He’d spent years working sixteen-hour days and still couldn’t keep his own family together in one place. Two of his daughters had already had to move out of the country because he couldn’t afford to keep them there. So when he says the fix isn’t more effort, it carries some weight. What he’s about to describe instead is a single skill he calls letting go, and it turns out most people fight it harder than they fight for anything else.

What if the struggle you’re so proud of is the actual problem?

Rui’s argument starts with a distinction between allowing and receiving. Everybody wants the result. Almost nobody is willing to actually let it arrive. He points at a familiar type in the room, the one who says, I don’t have any results yet, but I will keep fighting. That sounds like commitment. Rui calls it backwards. Struggle turns into an identity after enough years of it, and once it does, easy success starts to feel like a threat to who you think you are. Some part of you decides that isn’t really you, because you’re the one who struggles, always have. So the moment things start to loosen up, you tighten your own grip again and call it discipline. That’s the whole mechanism behind the line he tells the room to write down.

The easiest thing to have success is stop resisting.

He’s not being cute. He means the specific habit of assuming your goals require some heroic, extraordinary version of yourself, when the actual mechanism is smaller and more boring than that. You don’t need a thousand leads a day. You don’t need three videos a day. What you need is an honest vision and a few small skills, shooting a video, writing a post, aimed at putting that vision in front of people consistently. Do it long enough, he says, and you will sell things. It will happen. It just won’t happen on the schedule your anxiety wants it to.

What actually happens every time you talk yourself out of doing the work?

Rui’s second image is blunter, and it’s worth keeping taped above your desk. The business, he says, is a tree. Every no is an axe swing.

• Skipping the blog post because you don’t feel like writing one today.
• Not sending the email that was already written.
• Deciding traffic can wait until tomorrow.
• Staying home from the event because you’re tired.

None of those single decisions knocks the tree down. A tree can absorb a lot of hits. But every no still lands, and if you keep swinging, even a big tree eventually falls. The people who weren’t in that room, Rui points out, aren’t missing because they lack potential. They said no to the challenge of showing up, the same small no they say every day at home, and they’ll call it a scheduling problem instead of what it actually is.

Why did a broke guy start blogging every day for nobody but himself?

Long before Rui joined Empower Network, he was already writing a blog post every day. Not to sell anything. Not even to build an audience. He needed the discipline of doing something daily to stay grounded, and he built it on a rule that sounds almost too simple: it has to be easy. If a habit is hard, he says, you’ll eventually stop doing it, so anything worth keeping for years has to get chunked down into pieces small enough to survive a bad day. A blog post doesn’t need to be literature. It just needs to exist. Keep that up long enough and the habit flips, from something you talk yourself into, to something you can’t skip without feeling like you forgot to brush your teeth.

Why does a man who’s finally making real money refuse to own a car?

Rui’s proof that any of this actually works isn’t a number. It’s a habit he’s kept from the years he had nothing. For a while he was involved in another network marketing company, showing up to meetings in what he calls a shitty old car, embarrassed every time he parked it next to everyone else’s. Today, by his own telling, that scoreboard has flipped completely. And he still doesn’t own a car.

“I don’t own one,” he says, and treats it like a joke he’s playing on himself on purpose. He borrows one from a daughter or his sister, usually as old as the one that used to embarrass him, and shows up to events unnoticed until he walks on stage to speak. Nobody clocks him as the guy doing well. That’s exactly the point. Money stopped being the thing he was chasing a long time ago, which is why he spends most of this session talking about family and a mission to Guinea instead of commissions.

That mission is the clearest evidence of what he means. Working with his longtime friend Nuno, thirty five people from his team drove ten cars and an ambulance across the Sahara, through Morocco, Mauritania and Senegal, dropping off medical and school supplies with organizations already doing the work on the ground, while roughly two thousand people who never left home helped collect what went into those trucks. National television covered it. So did radio and print. Rui’s read on why it mattered isn’t about the coverage. It’s what happens inside a team once everyone is pointed at something bigger than their own commission check, the same shift he says has to happen inside a single person before the business itself gets easy.

The full session goes further than what’s above, including the night at dinner when Rui realized something in his own family had gone wrong, and the friend in Denver who showed him what’s actually possible in just a few hours of work a day. Watch it in full, free, when you Create your free account.

The full session transcript follows below.

Transcript

It's my pleasure to introduce Rui Gabriel. Rui! Thank you. No, no, no.

I don't need that. Bring it up! Okay. Okay, so, can you hear me right?

Can you hear me? No? No? I think, okay.

So, my name is Rui Gabriel. I was, I am really happy to be here, of course. And I want to thank you, to thank Melissa and Kevin for the introduction. And today, I'm going to share with you, of course, some of my story.

But mainly, I'm going to share with you how easy it is to be successful. Are you interested in hearing this? Yes! Okay.

So, that's what I thought. So, when I was invited to be here, I started to think about what could be more helpful for everybody. And I started to realize that really what we do, it's not at all difficult. Everything is very easy.

And today, I'm going to talk about this. And you can write this down. The easiest thing to have success is stop resisting. Stop resisting.

I'm all into this attraction law thing. Like, you've been heard here before. And I learned that one of the most difficult things for us is the allowing, not the receiving. It's very easy to struggle.

It's very easy to go after our goals. Like the, you know that mindset when people say, I don't have any results, but I will keep fighting. This is all wrong. It's all wrong.

Because after a while, this struggle becomes your identity. And when things start to come easy, as they should, you start resisting. This is not me. I'm not making 30,000 a month, because I'm the one struggling all the time, all my life.

So, you start immediately to put up resistance and not allowing good things to come. So, today I'm going to speak a little bit about this, because I think this is maybe one of the most important skills that we need to master, is the letting go. Allowing good things to happen. Are you with me?

Yes? So, sometimes people say, my biggest struggle is, for example, convert. Okay, convert. That's the easiest thing, you know?

It's really easy. You know why? Because when you have a purpose, and you do whatever you need to do, you don't need to do extraordinary things. You don't need to get 1,000 leads a day.

You don't need to put up, three videos a day. You can. And it's good. But you don't have to.

Because if you are true with your vision, if you have a vision, and then you learn some small skills on how to put out your vision, like shoot a video or write in a blog post, after a while, you will be selling stuff. It will happen. It will. And if you can do this massively, it's even easier.

And it's much more easy to do this massively in a bigger scale than in a smaller scale. Much more easy. So, this allowing things allowed me to go from, I don't know, extreme poverty, because I was never there. I saw that in Africa this year.

But I was never there. But I was struggling. And it allowed me to go from that place to a little more than half a million dollars in commissions. And this happened.

Okay. This is cool. This is cool. Money is good.

But I'm going to talk to you about other results, other than money. And these other results make everything else really easy, including the money, including the sales. Everything gets really easy. So, I'm going to tell you the strategy.

If somebody tells you something that you know that it's useful for you, you should always say yes. We are the yes men. Or yes women. Always.

It's much more easy to say yes than to say no. For example, you are here at this event. It's great. Because at some point you said yes to the challenge of coming to the event.

Other people are not here because they said no. And they knew that being here would be helpful for them. But they said no to that. That's not a problem to say no.

But, you know, the business is like a tree. Every time you say no to that, you go to something. Like, today I don't want to put up my blog post. I don't want to send an email.

I don't want to get traffic. I don't feel like going to the event. Like this. Each one of these no's represents, you know, when you use an axe in a tree.

You hit the tree with an axe. It doesn't take the tree down immediately. But after a while, if you keep on saying no, what's going to happen is that your tree will come down. Even if it's a big tree.

Even big. It will come down. With all these no's. So, every time you have a game plan.

You have an operations daily plan. You have something to do. And you know what to do. And I'm sure there is nothing difficult there.

You can't. Because we don't do anything difficult. Our job is the easiest thing I've ever seen. Everything is really easy.

But it's like Jim Rohn said. What's easy to do. It's also easy not to do. And if you get this discipline to say always, always, always say yes.

Something magical starts to happen. And like the easiest thing. Like blogging every day. I'm going to talk just a little about this.

Blogging every day. I started to blog every day before Empower Network. For one purpose. For personal development purpose.

Not to put out something related to this. No, no. For myself. Because I needed.

I knew that I needed the discipline. I needed to do something every day to keep me grounded. And it should be easy. It cannot be difficult.

Because if it's difficult after a while, you will stop doing it. If it's very difficult. You know? So, writing a blog post every day is very easy.

You don't have to put up with this incredible literature or whatever. Just share something every day. Who finds this is very easy to do? Not everybody.

So, I'm going to ask again. Because this is really easy. And the more you do it, the easier it becomes. After a while, it's like an addiction.

Right? Before you go to bed, to sleep at night. If you didn't post anything in your blog, what happened? Something is missing.

Right? You have to get up and do it. And this is the power of the repetition of simple things. Easy things.

Easy things. Not difficult stuff. When we have to do something difficult, we have to chunk it down until it's easy. In small pieces.

You know that. And then you do it every day. And you do whatever you have to do. Sorry.

So, doing these easy things, I came from that situation when I was with my family. And Melissa is right there. My wife Melissa. And today we are talking about revolution.

So, those three things inspired me so much that I decided to put a little aside my presentation today and go about this revolution thing. Realization. The second one is? Resolution.

And the third? Risk. So, these three things, Empower Network gave me the ability of creating an entire revolution in my family. That's really happened.

And the realization happened when I was in my… I was having dinner with my family. And two of my daughters, they had to immigrate because we couldn't afford to have them there. So, they were 18 and 20.

And that day I knew something was wrong. So, this realization came not just there, but there was a high point. Something went wrong for a long time. Because I didn't know what I'm here to…

I'm telling you. I thought that life was difficult. That I had to work as I did for 16 hours a day. And I hoped that like that I would provide for my family.

And I couldn't. So, I was living like this. And one day, my sponsor Steve Fortunatos was there. He called me.

And he told me that he had this crazy idea of making a thousand dollars in one day. Every day of the month. And I wasn't making that a month. But he told me he was very excited.

And he told me that we will build this thing with pass ups, you know, and high ticket products and stuff. And I should go and meet him at the beach. Because we live close to the beach. And I went there.

And Melissa and Susie were for a walk. And we sat there on the sand. And he talked to me about this thing that he wanted to build with 100% commissions and pass up sales and all this stuff. And I said, for me, anything that comes will be great.

Because I don't know what to do. So, he presented this idea and immediately, for me, it was like the most impossible thing you can imagine. Can you imagine? A thousand dollars a month and suddenly somebody tells you we are going to make a thousand dollars a day in three months time.

And I believed him. And because I believed him, we started to work on this thing. And that was a lot of fun. Because he bought this script.

He bought this crazy costume of fortune. And then after a while, he realized that everything that we wanted to do was already done. And it was called Empower Network. So, it was the best thing because instead of months and months and I don't know how many thousands of dollars invested, we had this thing already done for us for 1995.

So, can you imagine how long it took me to decide? It took me, I don't know, a second. So, I joined immediately. I bought the blog.

I couldn't buy the inner circle because I didn't have the money. So, I had to wait for a week until I got a hundred dollars, 75 euros to buy the inner circle. And that that time, this was two years ago. And what happened since then, up until now, it was a real revolution.

Not only for me, but for all our team. Everybody involved with us in any way. We did so much, so much things. It looks like two or three, it was three years ago.

It looks like it was ten years ago. So many things happened. And these things, everything that went on, after I made a hundred thousand dollars, that was maybe six months later. But I was saying that I was seeing that I was getting there really fast.

So, I went to my friend, Nuno. Where are you, Nuno? Right there. I went to his office.

I knew that he was involved in the charity work. For a long time. And I went there and I said, I want to give a hundred thousand dollars a year for your charities. And he knows me for a long time.

We've been friends for, I don't know, 20 years. And he knew all my struggles. And he knew I never had any money. So, I started to work inside him.

Like a seed. What I really wanted was to, inside our team, everybody really loves to help other people. You know that. But sometimes you don't help more because you don't have the channels.

So, I wanted to create a channel to make it easy for other people to help others. So, I was talking to him. After a while, he joined. I was not, that was not with the intention for him to join.

But I'm glad you're here. I'm very glad you're here. And then he took up on himself to organize us as a team to do this thing, this charity work. And we've been, it's been a year and a half.

And we have done amazing things. Like last year, we organized a mission to Africa, to Guinea. We bought cars. Eleven cars.

Ten cars and an ambulance. And we went across the desert, the Sahara Desert, Morocco, Mauritania, Senegal, up until Guinea, driving them. And then we left the cars there in institutions that we know that are making a good job there. With medical supplies, school supplies, clothing, all this stuff that we managed to collect.

And this, Thank you. And we took 35 people there inside our team. Another, maybe, almost 2,000 people involved outside that were not engaged in the mission. But it was outside, like collecting donations and all that stuff.

So it created a really big thing inside our team, Empower Network team. And we went on national TV, went on the radio, and it was news on newspapers and magazines and all over the internet. And can you imagine what this made for our business? That was good.

That was good. Because everybody likes to be involved in something bigger than himself. Right? That's called sharing a vision.

So we did this last year. And right now, we are preparing the second mission to the same place, the same environment. Well, I won't talk to you about what happened during the 12 days driving across the desert. It was amazing.

All our team members that are here, they were on the mission. Melissa and Silvio and Cesarine and Miguel. Antonio Hornbeck is right there. And, of course, Nuno.

And Paula is right there. Yeah. So many. It was an adventure.

It was really, really, really cool. We still, today, we talk about this. So this thing united the team as nothing else could. And this was difficult to do.

It was the easiest thing. Because the same day, we had an event there in our team. And I announced that we created this group inside our team to social, to charity work. And in that same moment, Nuno presented this idea about going to Guinea and doing this thing.

And then we left the cars behind. Even our own clothes. Everything was left behind. And we came back in an airplane with our clothes in our bags.

So we did this. But this idea was presented before. Maybe three or four months before. And you couldn't imagine how many people were going insane.

They wanted to go and they wanted to participate. And this was really easy to do. Because when we moved to Guinea, when you live inside the community, sharing the same values, sharing the same ideas, the same purpose, anything that you do, suddenly is done, gets done in a huge dimension. For example, I don't know how many thousand people are here.

But if we decided everybody to buy one of these, who's got one? Who's got one? So if everybody decided to buy one of these things, in the merchandising thing, this is for charity, suddenly, there won't be enough. Because we have the power to put a lot of people behind an idea.

And what was difficult before, suddenly, it's not. It's very easy. And this goes the same thing about our personal businesses. It's exactly the same thing.

What I'm doing, I realize that most of the people, they don't have the skills yet to make this thing like internet marketing thing. They don't know what the autoresponder is. They don't know how to send an email. So the way they have to go through, it's really long.

Because they are so far away. And we decided, because of the way we have to see things, that those people will not be left behind. We will not make money from them, maybe in a year or two, because they are so far behind. We have people in my team for a year, they have not signed up one person.

An entire year. And you know what happened? They're still there. Because they get to participate in something that's really bigger than money.

And this brings a team together. It's really easy to have a team, you know, and to build something big. You need to go through hard times together. You know what hard times are?

Training. Training. Nothing more, nothing less. You know?

I can't get leads, I can't convert them. What is that? Training. Nothing else.

Because you need to go through that process to understand the dynamics, the emotions behind it, to understand the frustration. You need to understand all these things. Because in the near future you're going to have a team, and people will go through the exact same process. And you will be able to understand them, and more important, to challenge them in the right direction.

Not just understand them. Because you know, when you understand someone, that person will stay there. She loves the understanding because it's not challenging. So you understand, I need this, I need this, I need this.

So when people are like that, we need to understand them, right? But we need to challenge them a little. I understand that you need this. But what you need to do is that.

And after you've done it, you come back to me again. And next time she comes back to you and she says, I need that. Have you done that thing before? No?

So go back and do it. And when it's done, you come back to me. So after a while, we learn how to learn and we learn how to live normally, being challenged all the time. I like to call it be comfortable in the uncomfortable zone.

No? Like it's a way of living. No? If you don't have anything difficult to do, it's boring.

So you need to have something bigger, challenging, always putting you forward because otherwise, it's no interest. So we decided to build this thing that we decided to help the most people that we can. Our mission and my personal mission is to free as many people as I can as I was free from the life that I had. This is my personal mission.

But then I realized that some people I used to phrase this in this way. I will help people to free themselves. And this worked for me for a while. Because if they don't want to be free, there's nothing you can do.

Right? But this worked for me just for a while, not ever. Now I think in a different way. There are people that you can say that, you help them to free themselves, you give them the tools, the inspiration, the environment, but there are other people, and there are people too, and they are willing, and they have the power and the will to change their lives, but they are not able to help themselves.

Because they are so far away. Some of them, they don't have a house, or they don't have, I don't know, food for the children. So we need to set up this thing to help those too. And this thing, this is what we are trying to do.

And these two things together work like a charm. Because after a while, we get people in your team making money, the first $5,000 in one month, then $10,000, and they realize, because they went through this process, that the money is really nothing. Now I have team members, and we see all this a lot in multi-level marketing, about the cars and the houses, it's cool, it's good. But when I wasn't making any money, I was involved in a network marketing company for a while, and when I went to these meetings, my car was really old, you know, like a shitty car, and I was embarrassed.

And today I have money, I made a lot of money, and I don't have a car. Can you imagine this? I don't own one. Sometimes I need to go around, and ask for one of my daughters to lend me the car, or my sister, and they're all old cars, you know?

I love, this is just a crazy thing I have, I love to go to a meeting, and arrive in this shitty car, you know, really old, and nobody pays attention to me whatsoever. I go completely unnoticed, up until I go on stage and share my story. Oh, that guy, okay. And it's a good thing, I like to do this.

Because, because this is what we're doing here. What you have to do is believe. I'm going to share with you something. It's a song, and it's a symbol, that really changed my perspective of things, about believing.

And I'm going to do this right now. Okay, so pay really attention to the words, and, okay, probably something is going to happen inside you, as you listen to this song. Okay, please. And close your eyes.

Just feel the music. It's great. Your time. Guys, thank you very much for the opportunity to be here.

Thank you very much. This was awesome. Thank you. Thank you very much.

Thank you. Thank you. Stay up. Let's do that thing.

One, no, three, two, one, right? Three, two, one. No! Right.

Now, it's my honor and privilege to introduce the next speaker. After I knew that I was making this introduction, I was thinking for two seconds about what to say. It's really a good friend of mine. He probably was the first person to believe in me, before I did it myself.

Because right in the beginning, I was not making much money. And he invited me to go to his home, in Denver, Colorado. I live in Portugal. So, that was a challenge for me.

But I learned really early, always to say yes to everything that I know is good for me. So, I was there. And I was in his house for three or four days, watching him work. And I saw this man, making millions, working two hours a day.

And right there, I realized that I could do that. So, I started to believe that I could do that. And my income doubled and tripled those two months after that. So, I'm grateful, and I'm amazed, and I'm honored to be here today and be able to ask for the stage, Aaron Raschke!