The 10X Factor with Chris Record!

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To see our full income disclosure, please visit our website at www.empowernetwork.com forward slash income dot php. Welcome to another edition of the Empower Hour. Today is Monday night, December 30th, 2013. Getting ready to wrap up an awesome year. I'm very excited to be your presenter tonight.

My name is Chris Record, and I'm going to be talking a lot about Empower Network tonight, as well as setting some goals in 2014, and really getting excited about a strategy called 10X, how to 10X your life. And if you're not sure what 10X is, that's 10 times, how to take everything and how to do whatever you did in 2013 and do it 10 times bigger in 2014, to be 10 times more abundant, not only in your business, but also in your life. And so I am extremely, extremely excited. Now, I know we've got callers from all over the world, and we're not just a company here in the United States where I live, but in many countries all around the world. We have people in different time zones.

We have people listening in live from places where they're doing their best to stay up right now because it's so late, or they're just waking up in the morning and hearing this call. So first, I want to just go ahead and congratulate you for taking time out of your life to be on this call tonight, and I'm going to tell you why it's important. It's important because 2014 is right around the corner, and you're going to want to start the year off with a bang. And what I'm going to do is I'm going to do my best, to equip you with some of my techniques, some of my stories, some things that I'm doing to be able to really take my business and my life to the next level. And regardless of the obstacles that you're going through, regardless of the struggles that you're facing, regardless of the drama that's going on in your life, regardless of whether or not you even made a dollar in 2013, none of that matters.

Something that I love, every single year is a chance to start fresh, a chance to be able to turn the page, turn the next chapter of your life, and start fresh. So it doesn't matter. It doesn't matter. Nothing from 2013 matters. All that matters is what are you going to do in 2014.

And that's why I feel like it's an honor and a privilege for me to be here on this call tonight because it's a huge responsibility. And you know what? I want to transfer that responsibility to you because I believe that success is your responsibility. It is something that you absolutely must do for you and for your family and for your future and to be able to just get the most out of life, to be able to bring it to life. To bring the abundance out of life and bring it into your life, right?

Success is a responsibility. Success is something that you need to take control of. You know, money doesn't control you. You control money. Time doesn't control you.

You control time. And that's what's going to be different in 2014. So if you're excited and if you're ready to make massive, massive, massive changes in 2014, then let's talk about it. Let's talk about it for about an hour here, and then I want you to go and set some goals and just get as motivated as you possibly can, get inspired to finally create the change that you deserve. So once again, for those of you that don't know me, my name is Chris Record, and yes, it's Record.

A lot of people ask me, is that your real last name or is that more of an internet marketing name? No, that's my real last name, Record, like a record setter, like a record breaker, right, like a record player. That's my real last name, and it's one of those unique names. I've had fun with it over my life, but, you know, I don't have a record company yet. I guess that's going to be the next step, right, at some point try to get a record deal or a record company.

But, man, I'm having fun, and I want to tell you, here's how this call is going to go, okay? What we're going to do is we're going to start off. I'm going to start off and share with you a little bit about my story. I really want to get to know you. I want you to get to know me, and I want to share with you that I've been right where you are, right?

I've had so many ups and downs, and I'm going to share some of those with you, and then we're going to look at what I learned from those and how I was able to bounce back, how I was able to reframe everything, bounce back, and be able to get even 10 times bigger results the following year. So, again, it doesn't matter what happened to you in 2013 because I'm going to hopefully show you how to 10X your life and 10X your business in 2014. So we're going to do a little bit of story. After we do that, we're going to talk about some fundamental things that you can do right now, like some immediate action steps, because I want to make this one hour of your life as worth it to you as possible. Okay, I want you to come out of this.

I don't want it to just be in one ear, out the other. I want you to come out of here with an actionable plan that you can go out and create results, because why do we get on these calls? I mean, this is volunteer. When the presenters and speakers come out, why do we do this, right? It's because we want to see you succeed, right?

I want to see you succeed. I may not even know you, right? I have no financially vested interest at all, but I still want to see you succeed. Why? Because there's something that happens when you start to achieve success in your life, you know what's going to make you feel great?

When you can empower others to achieve success, and there's something about that feeling that will drive you. It will drive you like you've never been driven before, and that's why people such as myself volunteer to come out and share our hearts with you and share our stories with you, okay? So that's what we're going to do. And then we're going to wrap up the call with a call to action for you to actually go out and do something, right? There's no pitch.

There's nothing like that, just a call to action for you in your life where you got to step up, you got to get out there and actually do something about it. So many times I hear people talk. They talk about the things they want to do. They talk about, oh, I'd like to have this. I'd love to have that.

Oh, one day I'm going to do this. No. There's nothing more important than action, just physically rolling up your sleeves and getting to work and just going and doing it, just taking massive action to make it happen. So that's how I want to end. When we end this, that's the step.

Don't be someone that just sits on the sidelines and lets another year pass. Be someone who rolls up their sleeves and goes out and gets it done, okay? So with that being said, you know, real quick about me, I'm 35 years old. I live in Northern California. I'm married.

I've got two children, two boys. They're both still indicted. I've got one that just turned three years old and one that just turned one years old. So I've got a one-year-old and a three-year-old boy. Earlier this year, I'll tell a little bit more about that, but earlier this year we faced some struggles.

I'll actually come back to that in a minute, but this year has been a tough one for family and for everything else we have going on, but the one thing that's just been rock solid and the one thing that's just really been a good anchor for everything has been Empower Network. I just want to give props real quick to Empower Network. It's been a strong anchor for me, not only to provide income, great income for my family, but also to provide personal development. I mean, nonstop, continuous, ongoing training and surrounding myself with a community of like-minded entrepreneurs and internet marketers from around the world who are so abundant, who are so positive, who are not just happy and positive, but there's some next-level people here in this company. I mean, people that'll help you take your business and life to the next level when you get around them.

So that's what I do. I get on calls like this. I get around them as much as possible, okay? So I'm looking here at the notes. Looks like we got enough people to get started, and we're going to go ahead and just launch right into this, okay?

So for me, like I said, I'm 35 years old. Well, I've been in this game for a while, okay? Well over a decade, and that doesn't mean I've been massively successful that whole time. Let's back up there. There was a huge learning curve.

Let me quickly give you a timeline. It's pretty funny, actually. I got started in this industry back in 1998, okay? All the way back in 1998. All the way back in 1998.

And if I could paint the picture for you there, and many of you are going to relate to this probably, right? You all got into this industry, whether it be internet marketing, affiliate marketing, network marketing. You got in at some point, right? You were in an interesting situation. For me, I was actually bussing tables at a restaurant, you know, doing my minimum wage grind and just hoping for tips.

And I was bussing tables at a restaurant, and one of the waiters, I used to look up to the waiters at this restaurant because they made like twice as much as us. And I'd look up to this waiter, and one of them, you know, was kind of whispering around to a bunch of the young guys that worked there that there was this opportunity, okay? There was this way to make money. And all we had to do was drive to San Francisco, which was about an hour and a half away, and go listen to this presentation from this guy who was some mega millionaire. So me and my friends jumped in a car, and we drove out there.

We figured, you know, look, you know, we're struggling broke. What could possibly be the harm in listening to a multimillionaire teach us how to make money? Well, we go to this place, and sure enough, the guy looks. He talks the talk. He talks the talk.

And I found out later he actually was a multimillionaire, which is helpful. But he pitched us. He pitched us and a bunch of other people on a company. Now, I'm not going to say any company names during this. It's just that's all in the past.

But he pitched us on a company, and we joined, okay? I don't know what it cost. I can't even remember back then. It was probably a couple hundred bucks or something to join. And we all joined.

And that was me and my buddies, me and like two or three of my buddies. We're all bussing tables. Now we're these, you know, we're going to get rich. And we did everything wrong. You know, we told everybody.

We were going to get rich. We went out and just did everything wrong. I could go through the stories, but you all know that kind of crazy stuff that happens, right? That's what we did. We just went blabbing around.

We went to the local junior college, and none of us were even in college. We were all dropout. And so we went to the local junior college and figured, hey, this is a great way to just go get kids who want to make extra money. Okay, so we were doing that left and right. Now, we weren't making any money.

But here's the reason why I'm sharing this one specific story. Because there was a product. One of the products that company sold back in 1998 was a website builder. It was a product that let you actually build a website, kind of like the modern-day stuff that we have today with blogs. Back in 1998, they were selling this thing that was way ahead of the curve where you could actually have this dynamic website built for you in just a few minutes.

So I was fascinated by that. And when the opportunity wasn't working, I found myself just getting broke, I decided to turn to the product. And I said, maybe I can sell this. Maybe I can actually go out and sell this. So instead of trying to recruit kids at that junior college, I went to a couple of the adults that were there, taking marketing classes and stuff.

And I said, hey, you know, would you be interested in a website? And so anyways, I started talking about that. And what happened was I found that a few people said yes. And they're like, how much is it? Oh, it's a few hundred bucks.

Okay, so they paid me a few hundred dollars. And now suddenly, instead of building this business of recruiting people, I was selling websites. Back in 1998. Now, keep in mind, I had no idea how to design a website. I had no design skills.

I had no programming skills. I didn't know code. I didn't know none of that stuff. Google wasn't even around, I don't think. It was like AltaVista and these other search engines back then.

I knew nothing. But I was ambitious and motivated to make something happen. So I went to the junior college every single day because I didn't own a computer. I was too broke. I lived in a 250-square-foot studio, and it made minimum wage.

It's not even a livable wage. And I lived in a beach town where it's super expensive. So I had no money, so I would catch the bus. I had no car either. So I would catch the bus to the junior college and go work on the computers trying to learn how to build websites because these people were willing to pay me.

And I'm like, hey, I need extra money. So I do that for a few months. I don't really make much money, but I decide that at least I could sell something. I could sell stuff and make money. I could scale up from there.

Now, I'm in the middle of doing that. Now, check it out. Everything takes a turn. So keep in mind, plant this in your mind here. Here I was back in 1998 getting ready to go down this route of Internet stuff, but then I got derailed.

What happened the very next year in 1999, I was waiting for my friend downtown Santa Cruz at a coffee shop, and I watched a guy with a suit, a guy in a suit and tie walk by me. Now, keep in mind, I live in Santa Cruz, California, which is this hippie town, beach town, skater – I'm a skater surfer bum, right? There's at this point like a guy in a suit is crazy. No one has ever seen one of those before. Like, whoa, can you believe it?

This guy – so I automatically assumed he was a millionaire. I don't know if anybody can relate to that, but if this guy is wearing a suit and tie in Santa Cruz, this dude must be a millionaire. So what do I do? I jump on the phone. I call my buddy George, and I say, George, George, dude, I just saw a millionaire.

I just saw a millionaire. He's in town. He's at the coffee shop. So I go, George, you've got to get down here right now. You've got to get here fast.

And then George is my ambitious friend who buys all the late-night infomercial products, and he's at home licking envelopes and stamps, and he's joining every company. He's in like 15 deals. This is back when he was like 16 he started doing this. And by the way, to give you an age range, I think we're around 20, 21 years old or something around that time. We're pretty young.

And so George is like, man, a millionaire? And George is saying, don't let him out of your sight. Don't let this guy out of your sight. That's how ambitious we were. We just wanted to come up in the game.

Listen, when my parents got divorced at an early age, I chose to live with my mom primarily. She was on food stamps, and we lived in Section 8 housing. And instead of daily allowance, I would get a daily food stamp. And I'd find myself going down to the store and buying bags of chips and stuff and trying to get back change so that I could actually go save up for a Burger King or something like that. We were just broke.

Welfare is like that. So for me, I wanted to come up. I had drive inside of me that wanted to come up, but I didn't know how. I had dropped out of high school. I've never even to this day still never graduated high school.

So I had never done this stuff. I wasn't a huge druggie or anything. I think I drank a bunch back then, but I didn't have some crazy drug story. I just had – my friends were – the old friends I had were just not ambitious, and only a couple of my friends like George were. So when we – we were looking for opportunity.

We went out. We were seeking our opportunity hard. So what happened was this guy, going back to the coffee shop. I walk into the coffee shop. This guy is sitting there with his wife, and they're presenting this business opportunity to this kid who's like 18 years old, and they're sitting there at the booth.

So I go get a cup of coffee, and I kind of curl up close to them. I get as close as I can, and I'm just trying to sniff it out, trying to see, what is this on this flip chart they're flipping around? What on earth is this? I want in. I didn't even know what it was.

I just knew this guy was wearing a suit, so that's my meal ticket right there. I could do whatever he's doing, and one day I could be wearing suits and be rich, because I assumed that's how you get rich. You just wear suits, and then you get rich. So I'm listening to this whole entire story, and sure enough, then he says e-commerce. He says e-commerce is going to be the next big trend.

People are going to be buying and selling stuff online. Like Amazon and these other stores, he goes e-commerce, e-commerce. It's going to be a big trend. And I go, man, this is exactly what I've been looking for. So I go outside, and I go, okay, George, what do I do, man?

They're selling this e-commerce deal. We've got to get in this thing. So George says, don't let them out of your sight. So the guy comes outside to go smoke a cigarette, and I walk up to him, and I go, hey, I overheard you in there talking about some e-commerce business. I'm looking for an e-commerce business to start.

Is there any way that I could go in and listen to the rest of your presentation? Now really quickly, everybody for a second, could you put yourself in this dude's shoes? Can you imagine you're in your home-based business? You're probably struggling, and you're dressed up in a suit trying to show the plan, and then somebody comes up to you begging to get in your business. You're probably thinking that's pretty odd, right?

That's pretty cool. Well, that was me. I was like begging to get in this guy's business. So he brought me back in the coffee shop, sitting down next to this other kid, and the other kid was all skeptical with his arms closed. He was turned off.

He was like asking all these questions like, is this thing a pyramid, and what percentage of people make money, and all these things. And imagine me on the other side, my arms open. I'm like, hey, can we go back to that slide right there? So how much money can you make in this deal? And then it's like, well, if we did this many sales, how many people could join this thing?

And I'm sitting here completely opposite. So they shift away from this other guy to me for the majority of the presentation. And at the end, I'm like, I want to get in. Then they said it was like $200, and I was like, oh, okay, I'm going to have to get back to you on that one. But I didn't have the $200 or nothing.

But it took me like two weeks to raise $200 back then. That's how crazy broke I was. But they gave that kid, they said, hey, that other guy Chris is excited. He's going to get in this deal. If you get in before him, then we'll put you underneath him.

They even gave that kid that opportunity. That kid's like, no, I don't want to do that. So anyways, a couple weeks later, they actually loaned me the money to join. I couldn't believe it. They're like, look, we're sick and tired of you getting all excited about this and not joining.

We're just going to give you the money to join this deal, and you can pay us back. So they like paid for me to get in because I had like five or six people underneath me wanting to get in already, and I just didn't have any money. So listen, I'm telling you this because that's back in 1999. Now again, I'm not going to tell you that company, and no, I don't do that company. Again, it's not about that company.

It's about the journey. And it's about the journey, and it's about the lessons learned. It's about what we do with it. So I spent the next five years in that company. The first year, I was fresh out the gate, man.

I was hot. I was on a roll. I hit some ranks in that company. I was running with it. I was recruiting people, doing whatever.

I was going to do house meetings. They had this saying that was called show the plan, where you got to show the business plan to people, and they had this little flip chart. And they said, you got to show the plan at least 15 times per month to be successful. So they said 15 times per month, you got to show the plan. Well, I was like, well, hey, if that's what it takes to be successful, you got to do double that.

So I would show the plan 30 times a month. I would be like – if I was at like 25 people, and it was the end of the month, I would literally go out like crazy, and I would go like show the plan to anybody. If they were warmed up and breathing and had a pulse and a body temperature, I would just show them circles. That's how crazy I was back then. And I would just do it because I'm like, you know what?

I didn't go to school. This is my first real official commission-based thing. I'm going to do this. And my first year was good. I didn't really make a lot of money, but I had a lot of success other than money, like I built a team.

I was starting to speak at meetings and stuff. And that was cool. I was 21 years old. It felt great. But the next four years, I was pretty much just in the company.

And I had hit a plateau, and I didn't know how to reinvent myself. Now, if I knew what I knew now, I would love to go back there and do this over again in hindsight. But I just didn't know how to reinvent myself. So what I did was I found myself just going through the motions, but never really – pulling that passion out. So I was actually in that deal for five years.

Never really making much money, always just getting by. And instead of working a job the whole time, I was selling these websites. And I was just – if I ever needed a little bit of money, I would just go out. I would go door-to-door to businesses in downtown Santa Cruz, and I'd walk in. I'd ask to speak to the business owner, and I'd ask them if they want – I'd tell them I could design websites.

And my whole pitch was, you're going to get the college kid price, but you're going to get the results that a professional company would give you. So I'm going to give you the same value they're going to give you, but on a college-type budget. So I was charging $300 to $500 for a website when they were getting quotes from other companies for $5,000 or $10,000. So they were going with me. So that's how I'd make a couple thousand dollars a month to live.

Now, here's why all that's important. I'm not just telling you stories just to come out here and tell stories tonight. I'm going to bring this all together, and you're going to see why these stories are important. Because what happened in 2004 was a major breakthrough. I found myself in that MLM business I was in, I found myself just going to meetings and just showing up.

But here I was, I had this opportunity with websites that was paying the bills. And what had happened was, I think it was Google at that time. I can't recall completely. I'm pretty sure it was Google. Google had – I don't know how long they had been out since then, but around 2004, they really started hitting the scene.

Google came out. What had happened was all my clients, I had about 20, or 30, or 40, or 50, or whatever over those years, they were all wanting to get indexed in the search engine. They're going, hey, it's great to have a website, but no one is finding us. Chris, can you get us ranked? So now I'm at the college every day, because see, I still don't even have a computer.

So I'm at the college every day. And by the way, I wasn't even registered at the college. They just let anybody in the library. So I just would go in there and just work all day in there. It's pretty funny.

And then I was designing websites and stuff. So then I'd figure out how to get them ranked in Google. I just taught myself. I would just go look in the search engines, and I would just reverse market. I would just look at whatever anybody else was doing, and I'd reverse engineer it.

Like why are these sites getting ranked well? What do they have in common? What are the titles like? What are the things like? And I just basically just learned by reverse engineering what other people were doing, and just experimenting.

So I would experiment, experiment. As soon as I knew that I could do it, I'd put together a package, and I went back to my clients and sold it to them. And I said, here you go. For another $500, I'll get you indexed and all this stuff. So sure enough, I went and made another round of money.

Now I'm indexing all these sites. Well, in 2004 when Google came out, they launched this program called Google AdSense, which was basically, the summary of it was if you had a website, you could put Google ads on it. And every time someone clicked on those ads, Google would pay you a commission. Now there couldn't be any fraud. You couldn't fraudulently click them, or you could get your account shut down.

But you could do this. You could actually just put ads on your site for other companies, and the ads are relevant. Google is really good at this. And then you get paid every click. Now this is back in about 2003 or 2004 or something.

So I was like, hey, will you look at that? This thing actually works. So here I devised a plan. I went to all my clients, and I said, you know what? Here's what I'm going to do.

I'm not going to charge you. I'm going to help optimize your website. I'm going to get them optimized. I learned some new strategies. I'm going to get them in the search engine.

But instead of you paying me, it's free. Just let me put these ads on the side of your page. So there's no risk to you. Here's what the ads look like. They're clean.

They match your design. There's no risk to you. I'll do it for free for you. You already know me. And then I'll just – whatever it makes from these, I don't even know.

Hopefully it makes something. So that's basically what happened. Basically what happened in a nutshell was I went to all my clients, about 30 of them, whatever, 20 of them, I forget, and I put these ads on the side. Now when I put these ads on the side, what ended up happening was I didn't really check it for a couple days. It took me a couple days to check it.

When I logged back in, I did not believe my eyes. $3,000. This blew my mind. That's actually more than I made in most months. So $3,000 was like gangster money.

That's like roll around town buying your friend's dinner kind of money. That's me going – I could actually possibly even get a car. So I was going, hey, this is phenomenal. So here's what I did. I got nervous.

I thought to myself, hold on. Maybe this is fraudulent. So I shut everything down. I took off all the ads. And I went and I read all the terms of service.

I went and read everything to make sure it was real because this felt like cheating. It was so easy to make money. I made sure it was all real. And then what happened was I turned it back on all the sites because remember, that was only a few days. I turned it back on all the sites.

Lo and behold, $10,000. I mean just imagine I'm pinching myself because in terms of work, you just slap code on these sites and then boom, it was there. And I couldn't believe it. I felt like this can't even be real. I mean you know how people say you're pinching yourself?

I was literally pinching myself like thinking like this, like literally. Like this doesn't even feel real. I got my friend George and I said, man, is this real? Is this really happening? And he's sitting there floored by it because all we knew was hard work.

I mean at the time, my buddy George was a milkman. Waking up at 4 a.m. in the morning delivering all these milk crates to businesses, just driving the big milk truck. I mean he's hustling hard, and then trying to build his network marketing business at night. All we knew was hard work.

All we knew was the people who succeed are the people who work the hardest. We didn't understand smart work. We didn't really understand that concept yet. 10 times more than I was making from that business at the time per month. And it was residual and it was passive.

Now what I didn't understand is that I just had capitalized on a trend. I was at the right place at the right time at the right trend. I had no idea about all that. So I basically just like freaked out, and I went and I just did better. Now get this, it was a killer situation.

The better I could optimize those websites to get traffic, the more money I would make. Now I was incentivized, and the owners of those websites loved it, because if I'm driving them more traffic, they're getting more sales of their products too. So they loved it. I loved it. It was such a win-win situation.

I absolutely loved it. Now here's what happened. The very next month, and I kid you not. I mean I could just – I kid you. This is serious.

Holy crap. I'm sitting here. It's like I'm only probably 23 years old, or 24, 25. I don't even recall this point. And I had never seen money like that at all.

I got my buddy George, and I can only think of one thing to do. I said, George, all I want to do all day and night is sit behind this computer and do this, because the more I do here, it's printing out money. So I told him, I said, here's the problem. I'm right in the middle of doing this and learning this, and then I've got to go dress up in a suit, and I've got to go down to this business opportunity meeting. You know what I'm saying?

I've got to drive across town. I've got to go to this business meeting. I've got to go sit there and listen to the same presentation I've just heard 400 times. I've got to listen to the same people. I've got to go make my rounds, and then afterwards we've got to go have a meeting after the meeting.

I've got to go do that. I'm not even going to get home until past midnight. And that's like – I told him, I'm like, that's like six hours of lost time on this. And if I don't go, every single person in the world is going to call me and give me a hard time for not being there, because I'm supposed to be a leader. I go, I've got a dilemma, George.

And I go, here's the solution, man. I'm moving out of town. I said, screw it. I'm moving. I said, I've got to go just far enough away that it makes sense that I don't have to attend these meetings anymore.

I said, I've got this place like three hours away. It's like three hours – I'm talking about leaving my family, leaving everything. It's like three hours out of town. We've never been there. We don't know anything about it.

I go, George, I'm going to go out there. It's like three hours away, but I've got to do it. I've got to get far enough away. And I said, George, I want you to come out there with me. I want you to move out with me, man.

I'm like, I'll teach you this. Dude, I don't even – he goes, I don't even like have a computer. My computer takes 15 minutes to start up and to load up. It's a dinosaur. He's like, I don't even know how to type.

I go, don't worry, man. I'll teach you everything I know. Let's just share money or something. Let's just go. So me and George picked up everything we knew.

We banked on everything. We moved three hours away, quit the secure job, quit everything. And we even brought our girlfriends with us at the time who probably thought we were crazy. Like here's these guys, whatever. And then we got this tiny little apartment.

We all shared it. So 15 hours a day, if you can imagine this, it's me and George sitting in these little recliner chairs with laptops on our laps just sitting there just working, afraid to get up out of the computer because we had struck a gold mine. It's kind of like if you had a gold mine in your backyard, how hard would it be to go take a nap when you want to sit there and just be digging for more gold. That's how it felt. And then obviously that shifted.

Instead of working for clients, we decided why aren't we doing this for ourselves? Let's become affiliate marketers. So we became affiliate marketers. We started finding companies like Amazon and these other big companies, and the big affiliate companies. And we started building our own blogs, putting their products on them, and then putting AdSense on those.

So now it's like holy crap, this is an amazing industry. Now the reason I'm sharing this with you is that you would think that I was smart enough to realize that was a damn good business model. Things were great. You would think, oh my gosh, there's no way Chris is going to let this one fall apart. Well, unfortunately, I did.

And I'm embarrassed about this. What happened was I got the real estate bug. Now George got it first. George always had a passion for real estate. He wanted to get into real estate.

So here we were, it was 2005. It was like the top of the real estate market, but we didn't know that. We had friends in our hometown who, while we were busy showing the plan, and building websites, and doing this stuff, they were busy getting involved in real estate. And there was this one girl, she was only 21 years old, who had made over a million dollars that both of us knew. And we had more stories like that.

She was a real estate agent, and she was investing. And she was selling people investment properties. And everybody was making what we thought was guaranteed 10% appreciation. So here we were. Here we were with our hands on a goldmine business that was going up six figures.

It was great. It was awesome. It was work from home. It was chill. We were on the lake every other day jet skiing, and having fun, and on boats, and getting tan.

We were getting in shape. We were just having fun. Life was fun. We were partying a bunch because we didn't have much overhead, and we were making good money. But what I did was I made a crazy decision.

I had a friend who wanted to buy that business, and I sold him that business. And I think, I don't even remember the price, but I think I sold it to him for $10,000 or something. I can't remember at this point. It's been a while. It was like one of those weird deals where you talk about like 10 prices, and then at the end of the day, I don't even know if I ever even got money or not.

I can't remember ever even getting a cut because I didn't know anything about business. I didn't have a business plan. I didn't have a company set up. I didn't know anything. I just knew that me and George could go out there and we could make millions of dollars in real estate.

So I gave it all up. I gave the whole business up. I got out of it completely. And part of that was because the search engines were changing every year. There definitely was a lot of upkeep to stay on top of it.

So I had a little bit of justification. We got into real estate at the top of the market, and we didn't just go in. We went in big. I took my savings that I had, extra money, and I invested it all into opening up a loan office where I could get an override of every single loan. Life is good.

I was having these meetings, recruiting loan officers, telling them we're going to get rich. And then what happened was the mortgage market was just falling apart. We hit the tail end. Nothing was happening. Everything started going wrong.

I left it all. And what happened was that business, that mortgage office failed. We never even got it off the ground. We never even got the lease. Ran out of money.

And I'm embarrassed to admit that I hit rock bottom. I got to a point where I kept stretching that vision so much that I actually could no longer pay my bills. And I had no money coming in. We were on the brink of losing our apartment, my girlfriend and I, where we basically, we had like seven days to pay, or we were getting evicted. We had already lost all the other bills.

We couldn't afford to keep internet on. I was losing my cell phone bill. Everything. We were losing everything. Every single thing was going.

My bank account had negative money in it. It was negative by $200. My credit score was a 485. We had already borrowed money from friends and family, what little amount they were willing to loan us, for the mortgage business. So we had already told everybody we were doing that.

So as soon as we were kind of giving up on that, no one was going to give us a dime. And all we had was me and my girlfriend. I told her, I had to man up and tell her, you know what, I think we should move back to Santa Cruz and move back in with our parents, and just somehow get back on our feet. And it was probably the hardest period of my life. Now, to make matters worse, my final, this is surreal how life works and how true this story is.

My very last appointment ever was with the investor who was going to pay for the lease on the mortgage office, and it was my last chance to do a deal with him. And I had been meeting with him. He owned a furniture company. It was like the last chance I was meeting with him. In hopes that he would just do it.

Let's just do it. Let's take the gamble. Let's just make it happen, because I was on my last-ditch effort. And me and my wife had driven out there. I'm dressed as sharp as I can, and the guy just won't do it.

He says, you know what? He's like, I'm just not feeling it. I know I told you I was going to do it, but I'm not going to do it. And I had my head down. I walked out of there, and I realized it was all over.

I realized I didn't have the money to keep going, and nothing. It was all over. I put my head down and got in the car with my wife. She was driving. It was all over.

And it gets worse. We're driving. We're right down the road, about a few blocks from there. Vanessa, there's construction going on. Lanes are merging all together.

Vanessa pulls up to a stop sign and stops. And we get hit from behind by a tow truck. Now, it's not any tow truck. This tow truck was carrying two cars. It was a flatbed tow truck with two cars on it.

So when that thing hit us, the back of our car like exploded. The glass all exploded. The car folded up like an accordion. I was on the phone talking with my mom. And all I heard, I glanced over to my left, and my wife said something crazy.

I don't want to repeat it. And I looked over at her, and I could see the fear in her eyes because she looked in her rearview mirror and saw a tow truck that wasn't braking coming right up on us, and she thought we were going to die. And I looked over at her, and because my head was turned like that when the car hit us, it snapped my neck. It gave me whiplash. And I kind of blacked out.

I came back to, and I remember that the cops were there, and they had pulled me up on the side of the fence in the shade because it was like 100 degrees that day. And I was in the shade, and I was dehydrated. All I could think about was water. And they were calling the ambulance. And all the thoughts that came into my mind was that I didn't have insurance, I didn't have any money, and I didn't want to deal with more problems.

So I actually told the cops I declined the ambulance. I told them, no, I don't need the ambulance. I'm going to be fine. I just need water. The cops took me to a local fast food place, gave me some water, put us in there.

We got picked up from our friends, and I went and saw a chiropractor to start getting me adjusted. And little did I know that would actually come back to haunt me that later on we ended up losing the case, the accident case. We actually ended up losing. Somehow we got hit from behind and ended up losing. One of the reasons is because the construction zone had weird rules, and the other reason was because I turned away from the ambulance.

It was like proof that I wasn't even really that hurt, I guess, and all this different stuff. We had no money for a lawyer, so we had one on contingency. And the lawyer didn't even seem interested in helping us. And it's unfortunate the system works that way. But it's like, you know, we ended up not even getting any money.

So we lost our car and got no money. And just got enough money to replace the car because we had a loan on it. So now we got no car. We got whiplash. Now that we lose the case, so the chiropractor now wants me to pay out of pocket because insurance didn't cover it.

Our life is just freaking screwed up. And I don't know if anybody can relate to this. This was in 2006 for me. I hit rock bottom. I hit rock bottom about as hard as I could.

And I was going to move back in with my parents. But at that moment, right there, I said something powerful. And for those of you that are taking notes, I want you to write this down because this changed my life right here. I'm going to tell you what I did at that moment. Instead of saying, I can't, I said, how can I?

Instead of saying, I can't, I said, how can I? How can I? How can I? Those three words literally turned me around completely. Those three words shifted my entire life completely.

You see, up until that moment, I was telling myself, I can't go on any longer. I can't get any money. I can't get a job. I can't do this. I can't – I was all filled with I can't.

The opportunities that were presenting themselves didn't matter because I was in a negative, pessimistic mood, and I was all about I can't. You see, and I would justify it. Hey, I would love to. I can't. But the reason is I don't have any money, or I don't know how to do that, or I don't have the skills, or I don't have this.

I don't have that. I don't know if anybody now listening can relate. But have you ever been in a place where you realize you're talking about the things that you can't do instead of talking about the things that you can do? And what happened was what turned out to be the biggest curse in my life actually turned out to be the biggest blessing, the biggest blessing in my life. Because instead of investing a bunch of money into a mortgage office at the end of the top of the peak of the boom and everything, what happened then was crazy.

My buddy George – it comes full circle. My buddy George was driving down the road, and he saw a sign on the side of the road, a little roadside sign. And it said that there was a local real estate investor who was seeking an apprentice. And George calls this guy up. He's a local doctor who runs two chiropractic offices.

And at the same time, he was a successful real estate investor. But what was more appealing is he sold some real estate education. He said, hey, we're teaching people in a down market how to make money investing, and we sell this education, and we can get paid. And so George was like, man, George calls me up and says, Chris, I found it. Now keep in mind, I'm days away from getting evicted.

I got no money anyways. He goes, Chris, I found it. I had to come pick me up because I can't even drive. I'm in the back of the meeting. I go to this hotel room.

I can't even sit in the chair. I have to stand up in the back, and I have to do like these wall angels during the meeting. The dude thought I was crazy. I can't even barely focus because I'm in pain still because this is just literally, to put this in perspective, that's all the same day. I don't know if this makes sense to you.

I don't know if I explain it well. The day we got in the accident, the day that I turned down the ambulance, the day that they put me into the fast food chain, the day that my friend picked me up and took me back to the house, that day was the day that George invited us to go to that meeting. It was the same day. How crazy is that? That was the same day.

And instead of saying, I can't, and I had every reason in the world not to. I should have been in the hospital. I said, how can I? I got there. I heard the whole presentation.

It was a top-tier product. They were selling it for like $20,000. They were paying out half of that in commissions. And the only catch was you had to own it. It was a deal where you just had to buy it first.

And you could buy the lower product for $16,000 and buy the other part later. But $16,000 stood between me and a chance to change it. And instead of saying, I can't, I said, how can I? Instead of walking out those doors saying, look, I can't even afford to keep our car. I can't even afford my cell phone bill.

And you want me to try to come up with $16,000? I've never owned a car worth $16,000. I've never bought a house before. I've never bought nothing in my life for $16,000 before. And at the time when I'm beaten down, and I'm in my brokest, and I'm in my lowest rock-bottom point, and all my family and friends, no way they're going to loan me nothing.

I got a 485 credit score. I got a negative bank account. And you want me to come up with $16,000? You've got to be kidding me. That's what was going on in my head.

But you know what was going on in my heart? How can I? Because without this, what else do I have anyways? What are my other options anyways? Continue on?

Continue on the plan that wasn't working? Continue on that definition of insanity? So you know what? That was the one point in my life I can honestly say, you ever hear that expression, man up? And no offense to women.

I share this expression for the women, you know, women up. But in that expression, I'm a guy. To me, man up. That was the one time in my life I said, you know what? I'm going to freaking man up here.

I'm going to roll up my sleeves. I'm sick and tired of being in this situation. I'm not going to let this situation control me. I'm not going to let money control me. I'm destined for something great, and I'm going to pull it out of me.

You know what I did? I went home, and I'm a spiritual person. I prayed about it with my wife. We prayed about it a bunch. We actually even had like a little prayer circle for like a couple hours.

I had never even done nothing that intense, but that's just how intense I was with that in my life. Did a prayer circle that I would officially leave the mortgage business behind and abandon that, even though it's scary to do that, and take a chance on this new opportunity, even though I had no idea where the money had come from. So I started that very next morning holding for that new business before the money was even there to buy into it. I started placing ads. I started going on Craigslist.

I started going on MySpace because there was no Facebook back then. I was going on MySpace. I started putting out signs. I started putting out flyers. I started talking to everybody within three feet of me.

Who do you know that's looking to invest right now? Who do you know that wants to invest while the market's going down? Who wants to make money off that trend? You know, who wants to do this? Who wants to do that?

I was talking to everybody. I didn't even know how to do it myself, but I was saying, look, I know a guy who's got a meeting this Tuesday night. He's looking for people that want to invest. He's looking for people that want to get in the real estate game. You know, when everybody else is getting out, that's when these investors are getting in, and they're looking for more people.

And I did that every single day. As hard as it was, no one knew that I had just been in a car accident because I was too prideful to tell anybody. No one knew that I was broke because I was too prideful to tell anybody. But all I knew is that if I put in work right now, it's my only chance to change it. And as crazy as it sounds, there was a guy at the meeting who saw me.

I showed up to the meeting the very next week with over 20 guests locally, over 20. Very sharp, professional people, adults, kids, everybody, over 20 guests I showed up with the next week, and over 30 the next week. Within two weeks, I had over 50 people that had come to those meetings looking into this. And one of the guys there went to that doctor and said, hey, who's that young guy right there that's just crushing it? And the doctor said, dude, he's not even in yet.

He's not even in. And he's like, why is he not in? He doesn't have any money. He's just building all this right now just on faith. As crazy as it sounds, that random stranger that didn't know me from Joe told the doctor that he would loan me the money to get started.

And he knew, and the reason he loaned me is because he knew that I was a sure thing. And why was I a sure thing? Because you know what? I rolled up my sleeves, and I went to work, and I didn't care about the obstacles. I didn't care about anything.

I went to work despite my situation. When I went home at the end of the night, we were eating Top Ramen. We were literally living off of Top Ramen and pancakes, literally. When guests would come over, it was the most embarrassing thing ever because we had nothing to feed them. We told everybody we were on a diet, right?

It's like crazy. But he saw something in me that I was actually producing. Everybody else in the world goes and asks people, hey, I'm going out there and produce, and if I produce these results, I'll get the money. It'll come. And it came.

Maybe you call it divine intervention. Maybe you call that an answer to a prayer if you're spiritual. Or maybe you just call that the law of hard work is rewarded. Whatever it was, that's what happened. I got the money.

Now, someone believed in me enough to give me a chance, and it was beast mode. At that point, it was game time. It was beast mode time. So you know what? Commissions, right?

Just crushed it because somebody gave me a chance. And I took my life around, and I went boom, and I took it. I took that, and I ran with it, and I ran hard. I got it while the getting was good. When you have an opportunity in front of you, you've got to run with it.

You've got to get on it. You've got to make it happen. Whether it was despite you or not. Regardless of what your obstacles were. And I got on it, and I got on it hard.

So I went and I multiplied my business by five times in the same year that I had hit rock bottom and had my worst year ever. Those first six months were the worst year ever, but the second six months, I had made over a quarter million, and then by the end of the 12-month rolling timeframe there, it was half a million dollars in income. That right there is beast mode. And how did I do that? Simple.

In that situation of rock bottom, instead of saying, I can't, I said, how can I? And instead of waiting for something to happen, I took massive action to make it happen. And it was that year that I started saying, take massive action. Take massive action. Take as much as I possibly could.

I said it all the time. We made a mantra call back then in 2006, 2007. It was all we ever did. It was take massive action. I was working 15, 18-hour days.

Now, I was still working hard, but I didn't care because my family deserves success. My girlfriend deserves success. I needed to step up my business. I needed to step everything up. So what happened?

Why did I not ride off into the sunset in that? Well, a couple more years of that, that company kind of tanked. Not kind of tanked, tanked. 2009, the business collapsed. I was at that point living on the other side of the country.

I was living out by Washington, D.C., expanding the business out there. And it just kind of collapsed. So here I was going, man, I had lost my big income. I had lost the business. I had lost a lot of stuff.

And it was just collapsing all around me. What am I going to do? And you know what came to my mind? What came to my mind was internet marketing. Let's get back to my roots.

I remember how that was. So I basically decided to get back into internet marketing. I started just 2009, I started getting back into it. Started with blogging. Started looking at blogging.

Started Facebook. I was all up on Facebook. And just starting to get on Facebook and social media and blogging and just looking for what to do. But I said, I want to do it different. Instead of sitting around my house all day trying to make money as an affiliate, I want to do it different this time.

What do I want to do? And I told myself, you know what? I want to be part of a startup company. I want to be part of something where we can start something up and make it huge. So late 2009, got together with a bunch of guys.

We moved to Southern California. And we launched a startup company. It was a social media company. We launched it up. We started our own reality show.

We moved into a mansion. It was a fun time. We had cameras on us all the time. We were busy. We were hustling.

We were making money. I mean the company made several hundred thousand or whatever. But because there were so many people, it was never really a lot of money. And because we had a lot of overhead, it really wasn't a lot of money. But it was fun.

And then my main reason – it's hard to keep a company going when there's a lot of people involved. So it wasn't just like one person's company. It was just a lot of us, a social media crew. And one of the reasons I actually transitioned out of that was prior to moving down there when I was out on the East Coast, I had gotten my – not my girlfriend. I had gotten married in 2009 and then gotten my wife pregnant.

So we wanted to. We were trying. So we got pregnant. So we moved down to Southern California. We only temporarily did this until we could go kind of move out on our own and do our own thing.

And needless to say, it was a great experience, but I ended up kind of turning more into like a family guy. When I knew I had a kid coming, I kind of buckled down and decided, I'm going to do this a little bit more. I'm going to stay at home. I'll be around my family a little bit more and work from home. So I took another startup company where it was a publicly traded company.

They had stock and everything, and they offered me an opportunity to work for them. And they needed me to manage their websites and stuff like that. So I thought, this is the good life. So I settled in. In 2010 it was, I settled in, started working for this publicly traded company.

And I'm not going to say their name or anything, but I had stock. I had salary. It was good. I was basically in kid phase. Kid number two came or got pregnant with kid number two.

Things were all good. Now, this is what I want to summarize of all this. Things were all good, but when you least expect it, sometimes there's something amazing right around the corner. And in the summer – so I'm coasting for a couple of years. Just nice, under the radar, easy life, everything's simple.

But I'm wanting more, but I don't know what. And I don't have any time. I'm working 80 hours a week, so I don't really have any time to pursue anything else. But come summer of 2012, we get introduced to Empower Network, me and a couple of my buddies. And it's summer of 2012.

Now, we didn't think a whole lot of it because it was just a $25 blogging system. So we actually just thought this would be a great way to generate leads that we could sell other stuff to. But that's what got us looking at it. So in summer 2012, in June 1, 2012, I joined Empower Network. Joined with a couple of buddies, stuff like that.

I got a few of us going. And I decided I'm going to dedicate an hour a day to this. I can't work more than an hour a day. I can't sacrifice my three years of – my two years so far of hard work with my publicly traded company. But I could dedicate an hour a day, and the rest of my time has got to go to family.

So an hour a day. So an hour a day, I said, can I do something in an hour a day? So first month was – I don't have my exact – I'm going to basically say as a disclaimer, everybody's results are different here. You never know what you're going to do. I'm just telling you my story.

I don't know what your story is going to be. Now, that was mostly though because I worked at like a traditional business. I actually talked to people I already knew. So my first month out the gate was just like, hey, look. I told people I was getting involved.

I bought all the products. I told them to buy all the products. I forget, a few hundred bucks something. So I don't want to sugarcoat this for you. I mean I knew I didn't have much time.

I knew I didn't – I wasn't going to be able to learn the whole company. Heck, I couldn't even learn the compensation plan that fast. Didn't have time. But I knew basically the more people that bought into this program that I'd be able to make some money. And I believe that – I'm a believer of Internet marketing myself because I've had success in it, and I felt like I came full circle.

So $8,000 or so, from there it was just uphill. It just kept going. So the next month, next month, I forget the numbers. I don't have them in front of me. But it was something like – it was something around like $45,000 in my first 90 days or so.

But again, I don't have my stats in front of me, so it's just ballparking. But it ended up being – it ended up being a pretty good income. It became a very lucrative opportunity here for me. Now what did I do? What I did was I basically said, here's what I'm going to do.

I'm going to work this thing an hour a day, but instead of working hard – I'm already going to work hard. So instead of just working hard, I'm going to work smart. What can I do? What income-producing activities can I focus on that are going to yield the best result? How can I set goals that are going to be realistic for me based on those numbers?

Right? This is kind of what I want to transition the remainder of this call on is just sharing with you that when I came into Empower Network, I had that background. I had already had some experience in the industry. I had already figured – I had already made money online before, but I had never built a list. Up until Empower Network, I had never built a list.

So the one thing that I regretted the most was I didn't have a big list at all. I had nobody to contact on an email list. All I had was Facebook friends and people in my cell phone, and then friends in real life. That's all I had, and it was pretty much the same level playing field as everybody else. The one difference is that I had been in the industry for a while.

I had been exposed to success before, but it kept going up and down and up and down. It was a rise and a fall, and a rise and a fall, and a rise and a fall, a rise. It's like it just was a roller coaster train. And I realized I need something that's more residual. I need something that's more steady.

I need something that's got the big ticket potential like the previous company, some top tier, some high tier products, but at the same time, lower monthly residual products that could produce income. And I want to promote a product that's actually good, something that I would actually use myself on a day-to-day basis. And I thought blogging. And there was limitations. A lot of them were very, very – limitations in terms of you had to have an advanced skill to be able to use them.

And let me put that in perspective. For years I had been trying to get my friends to do Internet marketing like me, but they couldn't do it because these other blogging systems and these other website systems were a little bit too complicated for them. When I would show them Empower Network, I had friends that were saying, dude, I could use this. This is easy. I could just go in there and I could use this really easy.

So it's weird. It's like the limitations that were on the blogging system were actually benefits. A lot of people go, oh, well, what about plug-ins and these fancy things? Well, those were actually the things that used to eat up all my time. But myself, I would go and I would install a blogging system, and I would go install plug-ins, and I would be redesigning.

I would spend hours upon hours upon hours tweaking things to make them just right. For what? None of those other sites ever made me any money. None of those other blog stuff ever made me money. The ones that I made the most money from were the ones that I fired up really fast and got them out there.

So listen, I'm going to tell you straight up. I'm somebody who comes from this background. I'm somebody who comes from the background of I used to sell hosting for other companies and I used to design websites. In terms of some of the biggest competitors out there, I don't want to say all the names on there, but the other big popular blogging systems out there, I've installed self-hosted versions of these blogging systems hundreds and hundreds of times. I've even been part of a company where we did thousands of installations.

I've seen all these other things. A lot of people go, oh, well, does your blogging system do this, do this, do that? Listen, I've seen all these other ones, and yet why was I gravitated to Empower? Because by restricting it and keeping it tight and keeping it as a blogging system that the average person can use, they've got something different than everybody else in the marketplace. And see, that's why they exploded.

That's why they have like 150,000 customers right now, 150,000 members using the system. It's because they exploded because of that. So that's the thing you've got to keep in mind. I'm somebody who was an expert in this. I shared my background with you.

And when I saw that, I thought this is even easier. I would much rather refer everybody to Empower Network. And $25 is a no-brainer because a lot of the competing products, and especially the free ones out there, don't even allow you to monetize on them. They have big, huge verbiage on their thing that says you can't even monetize on this. You can't even use this to make money.

So when I saw Empower, I was like, this is it. And not only does it – it just starts at the blog. Not only do you get the blogging system, but you get all this additional training and support and community with it, and weekly calls and all this kind of stuff. So I thought, well, there it is. Now you've got a training program along with the blogging program.

So now they are getting personal development, Internet marketing training. And I'm sitting there going, this is a dream come true. Everybody is going to want this. This is solid. And I knew because I had seen the industry before.

That's why I jumped on this thing. And even though I regret only having an hour a day, I still knew I could make something happen there as long as I was productive. As long as I spent my time filling the pipeline and getting people exposed to the presentation, that's all it was really going to take. Just every single day I was creating traffic, capturing leads, and converting sales. So by the way, if you are taking notes right now, when I say an income-producing activity, here is how I define an income-producing activity.

An income-producing activity is one of the three C's of marketing. It's an activity where you are A, creating traffic, or I say C, creating traffic, C, capturing leads, or C, converting sales. Create, capture, convert. If you are doing something right now to create traffic to your pages, to somewhere where they can – to your lead capture pages, or to your blog if it captures leads well, if it has a good call to action to capture leads. Basically, let's work that backwards.

Sales, it all starts with sales. You convert sales from your leads. Well, how do you capture leads? You capture leads from traffic. Well, how do you create traffic?

Well, that's the ultimate question. So that's where I started. You see, I put a system together and said, if I can get enough leads, I'm going to get sales. And if I can get enough traffic, I'm going to get leads. So I put together a lead capture page.

I used some of the companies' provided lead capture pages, and I just started driving traffic to them. And if I drove traffic to something else like a blog post, I made sure that it had a good call to action to go to that lead capture page. No matter what it was, I was driving people through a funnel. Create traffic, capture leads, convert sales. And so that's what I would do for an hour a day.

I'd maybe fire out an email to my newly formed list. Well, guess what? That's converting sales. I was trying to convert sales. Or maybe what I'd do is I'd write a blog post with a good call to action.

Well, that's what I was doing to capture leads. And then maybe what I would do is I'd promote that blog post. I'd go out, and I'd figure out ways to promote it. Well, that's what I'm doing to create traffic. Right?

So I just started focusing. And I'd use social media, and I'd use – I started with all three strategies. I had no clue about paid advertising because in my whole career, I had never messed with paid advertising. So for me, it was all about free advertising, doing as much as I could. And of course, I was all in.

I owned all the products because I'm a believer in being all in. I'm a believer in putting it all out there. I'm a believer in never saying, I can't, but always saying, how can I? And I would have gone all in even if I was flat, even if I was a negative bank account, 485 credit score, just got in a car accident, got whiplash, and I heard about Empower Network, and I had no money in my bank account. I would have still gone all in and bought all the products.

It's always my attitude. Right? And that's what I did before with the previous company. So just what I'm saying is all of my experience led me to a point, a pivotal point where I said, you know what? Let's rock and roll.

Game on. So while helping to build a publicly traded company as the Internet guy there, I also on the side an hour a day was building up Empower Network. Now, it's been about 18 months or so now, about a year and a half. I don't know my total income somewhere. It's over $400,000, like $425,000 or something.

And it's a pretty good income, pretty healthy income. Now, of course, that's gross income. That's not my take home. There's obviously expenses on any business. Any time you ever hear a figure from someone, they're not saying that to brag or boast.

Their only hope is to inspire you. I mean, think about it this way. If I threw out a number to you, and I said, I'm not going to brag or something. It's just hopefully just to inspire you, to show you it's possible. Here's a guy who hit rock bottom, picked himself up from the ashes, and went out there and made that happen.

I'm trying to share that with you, so you'll do it. So you'll do it. Now, let's talk real quick about this year and about these goals. What happened to me this year was crazy. The beginning of the year, we start off with a couple of family members dying.

First, a cousin, and then the hardest part was the patriarch of the family, my wife's father. He passed away very quickly and very fast. It took everybody by surprise. He was in good shape, young. Everything was going fine.

Then suddenly he got diagnosed with cancer. And then suddenly, very shortly after that, he passed away. And that was a very rough time. Because even though I could handle it pretty well, I don't really have as much of an issue with death. I know we all come and go.

But it's a totally different situation when I see my wife go through it. So for me, that was the difficult thing, was my wife was in a very depressed state during that time, and rightfully so. She was a father who she loved so much. And we were juggling the two kids at the time. We were constantly going back and forth to Santa Cruz a few hours away.

It was just a rough time to start the year. And it just started piling on from there. Shortly after that, my two-year-old son, just after his two-year birthday, started acting very different. Started kind of going backwards. Lost his speech.

Lost his eye contact. Lost any sort of communication skills. Lost everything. Started freaking me out. And it happened really fast.

And sure enough, he got fully diagnosed with autism. And so that was earlier this year. So we lost some family members, one in their 30s, and then the patriarch of the family. And then our son got fully diagnosed with autism, extreme autism, too. And it was very fast, and we knew we had to do something.

So that publicly traded company I put so much time and effort in, I had to kind of make a choice. They needed an executive. That was going to be there all the time and to be working that all the time. And I felt like at that point, I needed to take more time for my family. One thing led to another, and I ended up walking away from everything there.

From years of building up sweat equity in a company, I ended up walking all the way from it. Instead, being a full-time stay-at-home dad and focusing on my son and family. And we started getting into therapy. We got 40 hours a week of in-home therapy for my son. And just doing everything while the window of opportunity is open, while his mind is developing.

While his brain is developing, we just started pouring it all on and pouring everything on it. And I was stressed, you know? I mean, how would you feel after three years of 80 hours a week for a company to kind of walk away from it and not have any sort of big huge payoff or anything? And then now, I don't have that set foundation income. And now I'm basically full-time living off of my internet marketing income and spending all this time stressed because of all the crazy stuff that's happening in our family and just trying to balance it all.

And at that time, I'm supposed to be leading a team of people. I'm supposed to be a leader. All right? That was this year. I'm just finishing.

That's all this year. Right? It's just life is going to deal you some crazy situations. And here's how I chose to look at it. I call this reframing.

When life throws crazy things at you, it's all about your perception. It's all about how you reframe what's thrown at you. Instead of being thrown an autistic child, I looked at it like a blessing. You know, I chose. You can choose to look at things however you want.

I chose to say, you know what? I feel like it's a blessing that I'm being entrusted with this situation, to parent this child, to be able to give this child this extra attention, to be able to put money into extra services that insurance doesn't cover, to be able to put in this extra help and this extra time to be able to help the development here, and to be able to give this person, this child a good home, you know, not just for this year, but potentially for their whole life. And I just feel like it was a real honor that I was chosen to be able to father this child, and, you know, I actually got inspired by it and thought, wow, that God would think so highly of me and favor me so much that I would be in this situation. And even if you're not a spiritual person, that's all right. Even if you're not a spiritual person, it's like, hey, that's just called reframing.

You could reframe it whatever you want. You could reframe it with the law of attraction, or you could reframe it with the law of skepticism, you know, you know, however you want, you could reframe it. But, you know what, look, I don't want to be hit with a bunch of, please don't contact me and tell me what to do. Don't tell me anything about my autistic child. I have so many people reaching out to me with all this alternative stuff and everything.

Believe me, we've got to – we are happy, and we have a plan that we are working on that we're sticking with, and that's – we're happy with it, and it's working, and we're grateful. So we don't really – it's not something that we want to get into a bunch of conversations with people about. We're just – we're moving forward with what's happy for us in our life, okay? And that was dealt to us in the beginning of the year. And admittedly, it knocked me off track a little bit.

Some of you that know me, I kind of was very public about business and everything, and then kind of just drifted and kind of got in there. But you know what? I needed to turn up the heat, okay? I needed to turn up the heat. I found myself dipping in income.

I found myself making less and less money. I'm going to get real with you guys right here. I went from having big months, like $50,000 months in Empower, and just crushing things to suddenly dipping down to $30,000 to $20,000 to just, you know, $15,000. And it's like – and I sat there, and you could all say, Chris, man, everybody needs a break. You know, you had your family stuff.

There's many, many justifications. But listen, I found myself going, look, I want to spend the time, but I also want to be abundant in life, okay? I got a book. I picked up a book, okay? I don't know if I'm allowed to promote the name of the book, so for the case, I won't.

But I picked up a book, and it calls about – it talks about a principle called 10X, where you can multiply everything by 10 times. And it talks about how salespeople, in general, go through a cycle where they'll do really, really well, and then they'll kind of rest on their laurels, and then they'll kind of fade off, and they'll kind of start drifting. And then when they drift down, they'll blame it on the company, or they'll blame it on their leads, or they'll blame it on something else, or they'll just think, oh, it's time to move on to something new because this doesn't work anymore. When really, ups and downs are a normal part of business, a normal part of sales cycle, a normal part of that. Now, it could be fixed, okay?

Ups and downs are common to a lot of people, but it could be fixed. And this book talks about this. See, here I was starting to think, oh, maybe, you know, here I was drifting off into my own family, not spending enough time on my business, not really doing any new marketing, and I found myself having negative self-talk, saying things like, oh, well, maybe Empower's not selling as good as it was before. It's laughable because here Empower was, you know, just reached 150,000 total members. It's like just growing by landslides.

People are coming in making massive amounts of money, and here I was having negative self-talk going, well, you know, our company's down in general, so maybe that's just what it is. It's so weird how we do that. We seek to blame others for our situation instead of accepting personal responsibility. I read this book, and I realized I've got to accept personal responsibility here. You know, the only problem with anything is me.

I'm not putting in the right amount of effort, the right calculated effort to get the results that I deserve, okay? And that's when it's like you've got to get to that point where you realize there's got to be a turnaround to be able to turn things around, to be able to heat things up, to be able to produce, right? And sometimes you lose a little bit of passion along the way. You know, I used to have a passion to get on leaderboards, and that was a passion for me, and then it kind of drifted away from that, right? So I started reading this book, started learning about the 10X principle, and here's what he says.

He says, what happens a lot of times is you're at point A, and you want to get to point B. So you find yourself saying, man, I'd like to double my income, right? I'd like to double my income, and I'd like to double my results. If I just got double, I would be so happy. Okay, well, what happens is, if you fall short of that goal, and you only get halfway there, what happens is you're just in the same place all over again.

So this book really talks about a principle of, instead of going and setting your goals to double, why not think outside of the box, and why not stretch, stretch yourself to set your goals 10X, 10 times bigger, 10 times bigger? Because if you fall short of a goal 10X, you're still more than double where you were before, right? You go bigger because the type of thinking that it would take to get you 10X bigger is the kind of thinking, the kind of stretching that is actually required to get twice as big. But if you just think twice as big, that's the kind of thinking to keep you where you are. You're probably already thinking – I mean, look, let's put it in reality.

You're probably right now, whoever is listening, I'm talking directly to you, right now you're probably already thinking at least twice as big as your current performance, right? You probably are. Like every single month you probably were intending to have made at least double, if not more, of what you made, right? I mean, it happens the other way where you end up making way more than you ever thought, but most times you intend to make more, and you end up falling short. So we're already – everybody is already thinking 2X and 3X.

That's a standard. The way your brain works is you're always thinking the next levels. You're always thinking a level up, a level up, right? So this guy is saying, the problem is that level of thinking is conducive to actually keeping you where you are, and you don't realize it. But if you go to 10X, if you start thinking 10X, take everything and multiply it.

Take everything in your life and 10X it, okay? Let's say you're married right now, okay? Figure out a way to 10X your marriage, you know? Figure out a way to add date nights in, add more date nights in. If you have small kids like me, you know how important it is to have some time just solo with your spouse.

Or think about ways that you could 10X your relationship in every way that you want it to be better, right? 10X your health, 10X your fitness, you know? So think about how you can 10X your business, 10X your finances, how you can 10X everything. If you want to read more books and you don't read enough, set a goal to read 10 times more, right? Whatever it is, 10X it.

So here we are, we're getting ready to launch 2014. Now you've got to 10X your goals. You've got to 10X everything. Instead of setting just basic goals, 10X them. And some of you, we've got to fight through this.

Some of you are going to think it's unrealistic. Well really, how is it any more realistic to get twice as far as you are right now? How is that any more realistic, right? Let's put perspectives out there. How realistic is that?

Do you think people really believe you? Think about it, to them it's just as unrealistic. So listen, I'm telling you right now, doubling your goals is really just as realistic as 10X-ing your goals. It's just as realistic in my opinion to go from $50,000 to $100,000 as it is to go from $50,000 to $500,000. You know what, let me put it in some more perspective.

When I was getting in the real estate game, I remember I think it was Donald Trump or some famous person was saying, you know what, I'm going to paraphrase it because I can't remember entirely. It was in a book. But I think it was Donald Trump saying, he says, you know what's difficult in real estate investing? You know what's difficult? It's going out and buying your own home.

Going out and buying a single-family residential home. He goes, man, that's difficult. You've got to have good credit. You've got to have money for a down payment. Just sitting around, what's a house?

$500,000, what's 20%? Like $100,000? I mean, what family has $100,000 sitting around? Right? You've got to have good credit to go buy a house, right?

This nice home, you know? So he's sitting there going like, you know, that's difficult. He goes, man, props to the people that do that. That's hard. He goes, I don't do that because that's harder.

He goes, you know what's easier than that? Buying an apartment complex. Buying an apartment complex, your own personal credit and your own down payment is not going to be good enough to buy it. So the bank is actually going to look at the performance of the apartment complex. They're going to look at how that business asset performs, and they're going to lend based on that.

So now it's no longer based on you. It's based on that. So he goes, that's like taking it off of yourself and putting it on the performance of a property makes it a lot easier. So he goes, for me, man, that's easier. Now, of course, I'm paraphrasing.

I might have butchered that. It might not have even been Donald Trump. I've read so many self-help books over the years. But the point being is that I had a paradigm shift back then that it's actually easier to buy an apartment complex than it is to buy a single-family residential home. You can have bad credit.

You can have a 500 credit score, and you can get out there, and you can put together an apartment complex deal easier than probably just buying your own, buying a $200,000 house. It's crazy, right? But that's 10X thinking. See, a lot of people think something 10 times bigger is actually 10 times harder, but it's not. See, if you're going to go all out beast mode, all out massive action, you might as well get a bigger result.

And the author of this book, one of the things I like best is he said, you know, he said, look, I don't have any regrets in life. But you know one of my only big regrets? He said, over the last five years, I have absolutely crushed it. I have absolutely worked my butt off. And you know what my regret is?

I didn't think big enough. He goes, had I applied that same work ethic to a thinking 10 times bigger, I would have been far beyond where I am right now. He said, that's my regret, and that's why he wrote the book is because to take him to the next level, he's got a 10X. And that's somebody who's already a multimillionaire, right? So listen, what I'm trying to help you understand is that it's the same output.

Take your goals. Let me put it in perspective. Let me give you some clear-cut goals for those of you that like setting goals. Okay, what's your best month in your own business? Your own home-based business, not your job.

What's your best month in your home-based business? Let's start with Empower. Okay, for those of you that are in Empower Network, I want you to take a pen and paper, and I want to write it down. What's your best goal? What's your best month you've had?

What's your best month? Commission. Write it down on a piece of paper in front of you or online, wherever you are. Write it down. What's your best month?

Now, I want you to multiply that by 10 and write that number to the right of it. And then I want you to circle that number a few times. And then I want you to write 2014 that's going to be your new best month. In your business, 2014, okay? And I want you to go through an exercise.

I want you to believe it. I want you to work this week on every fiber in your body to actually believing that's possible. Actually physically believing. You've got to get to a point where you believe it. See, for some of you, that's a big number.

I mean, that's a huge jump, okay? I want you to believe that's possible. Now, that's one way to do it. Be transparent. Maybe that goal is not motivating enough for you.

You don't need a 10x a small goal. You need a 10x a big goal. So what I want the rest of you to do is this. Take the goal that you are planning on setting and be honest. What was your goal that you had thought in your mind, this is – I would be happy if I hit this year in 2014?

Or I would be happy if I was making this much per month? Maybe your number is $10,000. I think like 90% of people are really set on $10,000. So what I would encourage you to do is 10x that. And I want you to spend this week and I want you to believe it.

The very first thing that needs to happen is you need to get inspired to believe that you're worth it, to believe that you deserve it, to believe that it's your duty, that it's your responsibility, that it's in every fiber of your being you know that you're meant for something greater. You might as well spend the whole year busting your butt to make 100 grams in a month. You might as well. If you're going to spend the whole year busting your butt for anything, you might as well get the best result you can out of it. 10x.

10x your best month. 10x your best year. 10x the goal you were planning on setting before this call. 10x it. Work on believing it.

Work on believing it, truly believing it, and then build your action plan based on that. And I assure you, if you operate at the level of a goal 10x bigger, and you write down what it would take to do that, and I guarantee you, personally guarantee, this is not on behalf of Empower or anything, this is a personal guarantee, I guarantee you, you will go out there and you'll work harder. Now I can't guarantee you a result, but I guarantee you, you'll work harder than you would have worked. There's no guarantee of a result. Results are going to vary for everybody.

Results are going to be different, but I guarantee you, it will drive you to work harder. Try it. Set a goal. Set a goal 10x bigger. Write down an action plan that it would take to get that, and then do that action plan, and I guarantee you, it will get you to work harder than you even thought you could.

It's not about working more hours. You can work an hour a day. You see, I was working an hour a day. That's my goal. And I hit that.

Right? I look back and go, how silly was that? I set a goal. I mean, the fact that I hit the goal meant that it was not a big enough goal. See, a lot of you think that when you fall short of a goal that you're a failure.

No. You set big goals and it causes you to do more and more and more. Now listen, the last thing I've got to tell you is it's got to be action. You still have to take massive action. Without action, all this is meaningless talk and hype, and you're going to get excited but do nothing.

Look, it all comes down to action. What I'm saying is that if you set a goal to make 10 times what you were originally planning on making, and you actually set an action plan to get there, and you actually take massive action on that, then even if you fall short, that's still more action than you would have taken for a goal 10 times smaller. Or let me put it in this perspective. Let's say you have two goals. You have your normal goal for 2014, and then you have your 10X goal for 2014.

Let me put it this way. Your normal goal is 10 times smaller. How passionate are you going to get about pursuing a goal that's 10 times smaller? You don't want to pursue something 10 times smaller. Go after it.

Go get it. Go get hungry. Go get beast mode. Go do it because your family deserves it. Go do it because you're sick and tired of having money control your life.

You're sick and tired of driving the car that you have to drive, not the car you want to drive, living where you have to live, not where you want to live, not having enough space in your house, not having enough toys in your house, not having the latest technology to do the things you want, waiting to have to upgrade your phone until your thing's up, and waiting to do this or that, or not being able to have the right things for your kids, or not being able to take care of your parents, and watching your parents work when they're still in their 60s or 70s, and knowing that if you just made more money, you could take care of them, or knowing that you might have friends who have autistic children, or you might have friends, you might have single moms, knowing that you could go do things for them, knowing that you could make enough money where you have time that you could go give and volunteer, and go travel, and do goodwill, knowing that you have money that you can make donations with, knowing that if you 10X your life and your business this year, knowing that you would be a good person with that money, that God would entrust you with an enormous amount of responsibility to go out there and do goodwill with it, and knowing that you're worth it, and knowing that you're absolutely worth it, and at the end of the day, knowing, as scary as it might feel, as hard as the road ahead might be in terms of work, trust my butt, and make 2014 the biggest year ever. And I capitalize on the opportunities I have in front of me. And I stop blaming anybody. I stop thinking negative thoughts like, oh, maybe the industry is changing. Maybe the company is changing.

Maybe things are shifting. I stop thinking these negative thoughts, and instead think, how can I do 10X more? How can I model after the people in my company that are doing 10X more? How can I look on the leaderboards and look at those people and do 10X more? That right there will bring you to a whole new level in the game.

And that right there is how you, in my own words, man up. And sorry for being a little male testosterone there. When the women come out and speak, they can say how they want. But that's just how you step up. That's how you step up to the next level in the game.

So my call to action for you is to 10X all of your goals, 10X your faith, your family, your friends, your fitness, and your finances. 10X your faith, your family, your friends, your fitness, and your finances. When I say faith, I don't mean in a spiritual way. When I say faith, I mean belief. I mean your subconscious.

I mean what's going on in your self-talk inside of your mind. 10X that. 10X those negative thoughts that are telling you stuff. 10X all the negative stuff that's in there. 10X all that negative self-talk.

For some of you, that might be spiritual, but for most of us, that's just that negative self-talk. 10X that. Get that out of there. 10X the positive inside of you. 10X the belief inside of you.

10X the how can I. 10X your family. 10X your time. 10X your relationship with your spouse. If you're single, go 10X the quality of a person that you're looking for, and go be 10X the quality of the person they're looking for.

Become 10X. 10X yourself from where you are right now, and you'll start attracting the most amazing people in your life. 10X your friends. 10X everything. 10X your fitness, your health, what you eat, how you work out, how you feel.

10X that. And 10X your finances. 10X that money in your bank account. 10X the spending. 10X the investing.

10X the charitable donation. 10X your savings. 10X your reinvestment back into your business. When you 10X your faith, family, friends, fitness, and finances, that's how you 10X your life. So I was inspired today to give this talk with you.

I was inspired to share my story. I appreciate you for letting me be very transparent about my story, where I came from, about my family, about my child with autism, about my ups and downs. Even months when I didn't work would still make six figures. There's no reason to doubt what you have your hands on. You have your hands on greatness.

Responsibilities in your hands. The ball is passed to you now. Set your goals. Make big things happen. And I look forward to seeing your name on the company leaderboards.

So with that being said, it's been an absolute blast sharing with you tonight. I look forward to seeing you out there. This is Chris Record. Thanks for having me on Empower Hour Call, December 30th, 2013. See you in the new year.

Although you're listening to a private recording in a non-disclosure Empower Network customer training, the principles and strategies in this audio can be applied in any business. Although these techniques, philosophies, and strategies may have worked for others, no one can guarantee that they will work for you. We report real average earnings, updated daily, at empowernetwork.com forward slash income dot php. The purchase of this or any other audio is not required to earn money in our affiliate compensation plan, and you can decide to not continue to buy these forever, at any time. We hope, however, these ideas and strategies will assist you in building a profitable, long-term business.

Success takes hard work, determination, skill, and consistent effort. Please refer to our average earnings at empowernetwork.com forward slash income dot php.