Momentum Podcast: 1

Sharing My Origin Story

by Alex Charfen

Episode Description

This is the introduction to the Entrepreneurial Personality Type and how the content that has gotten the most exposure in my career has been a struggle to monetize, until now.  The content flowed through me after sitting down to write a book called Constructive Company.  When I reached the point in the proposal that was about the audience, 200 words turned into 25,000 and the Entrepreneurial Personality Type was born.  This is for the most misunderstood and brilliant among us.  If you are listening, you are most likely one of them although you may have felt isolated and like a party of one.  You are actually part of the most important club in history.  I can prove it to you.  

Full Audio Transcript

I'm in a Mastermind with Russell Brunson, and going through his content. If you haven't read it yet, you've got to pick up Expert Secrets. I don't know what I did with my copy, but the cover looks like this and you should definitely have a copy of this book. Oh it's right here. You should definitely have a copy of this book. Mine's all dog-eared, and picked through, and has a ton of notes in it. I've reached the point in Russell's content where he says I should share my origin story, and this has been really hard. In fact, it's been really difficult to figure out how to share the entrepreneurial personality type, how to apply this content to Russell's framework, because this isn't content that I ever set out to sell. It's not stuff that I ever set out to monetize. Russell says, "You can always tell who's gonna win or lose in business by those who love the marketing," well I love marketing this so much. For years, we put it in front of like 100,000 people, but we haven't figured out how to monetize it, and there's a reason.

This is about me, but I also think it's about you. As a kid, I struggled in school. I was so different than the other kids. I was so separated from what I thought success was, that I didn't even know there was a system there I could access for help. The only time I really did well was when I got along with a teacher, and that didn't happen very often. As a kid, I didn't know where to turn, so I started reading obsessively, and looking at what creates success. Maybe like you, I started sharing or started reading some self-help books. What happened was, by the time I got to the 10th book, the 10th book had almost completely negated the first, and they started arguing with each other. Instead, I just started obsessively studying successful people. I'll tell you, you look at 100 successful people and their stories look different, they look separate, they look unique, but you look at hundreds of successful people, you obsess over thousands of successful stories, you start seeing these clear patters of successful.

I read so much. That was my release when I was younger. That was my escape. That was my relief, was reading those stories of entrepreneurs. By the time I was in my early 20s, I knew a lot about business, and by reading about these people, what I realized was, I thought I was so separate from success because I was the behavioral disorder. I had a hard time in school. I didn't get along with a lot of people. I didn't understand the systems in the world, and you read about enough successful people and you see that they're just like that. The more I read about success, the more it looked like me, and it gave me some confidence. There was this place I found called business that meant the world to me, because as soon as I saw business and as soon as I understand how business worked, I felt like that was a place where I could actually be successful.

I started businesses my whole life, and when I was 21 years old, I had already had a few. I got into a very fortunate meeting and became a Fortune 500 consultant. I started working with Fuji digital cameras, SanDisk memory, Fuji media. My first three clients were groundbreaking, earth-shattering technologies that changed the entire world. In my 20s, I could help businesses grow. The guy that I worked with and I, Richard Thall, we put SanDisk product, the first flash memory, into stores. We helped plan-o-gram the digital camera revolution. We helped expand that market both nationally and internationally. It was amazing because by the time I was in my 20s, I had read enough to help almost any business grow, but here's the problem, sometimes the entrepreneurs in those businesses weren't ready for the growth. Sometimes the business wasn't ready for the growth.

Sometimes what would happen is, we'd get the big order from Walmart or from Radio Shack or from Home Shopping Network, we'd get the big international order, and then the next thing you know, a company would go out of business, and there were so many reasons, but here's my belief, when a business is ready to grow, and it doesn't, it's because the entrepreneur's just not ready. This question that had been my obsession my whole life, how do you make business grow, had been answered, and I could help people grow business, but the problem was, they were growing right out of business. I kept reading and studying and trying to understand better, what was it that makes people grow? This has been an obsession of mine for my whole life, and I think it's because I wanted to know how to grow myself.

Here's what I found, a few years ago, I sat down to write my life's work, a book called Constructive Company, a book about how to grow people and how to grow business, because when you do both, companies explode. I've proven that throughout my life. Katie and I put a company at number 21 on the Inc. 500 list, and we were voted best places to work every single year we had that company, because when a company's growing, people are growing and they love it. Then I got to the part of the book proposal for Constructive Company where you describe your market and I started describing entrepreneurs, and I couldn't stop. What was supposed to be a 200 word section of a book proposal quickly grew to over 20,000 words, and in describing entrepreneurs, in describing the successful people throughout history that I've obsessed about, in describing all the amazing people that write books like these, in trying to put a definition to entrepreneur, I realized, almost like an epiphany, like a lightning strike.

It was like a religious experience when I realized that all of these people throughout history that I've obsessed over, all of these people throughout history that I related so well to, we were all the same. We look different. We might accomplish things differently, but what binds us all together is our entrepreneurial personality type. When I discovered the entrepreneurial personality type, it was amazing, because it was like the Rosetta Stone to share with entrepreneurs, and show them how they think, and how they can create unlimited momentum, and how you can grow with your business regardless of how much momentum you build because that is always the goal.

The most important part of discovering the entrepreneurial personality type is that, my entire life growing up, I was different enough that I felt isolated, alone, like a party of one. When I sat down to define entrepreneur, I realized that everyone in history who I remember, everyone who matters to be remembered, everyone who has ever gotten up one morning and envisioned a better future and demanded it become real, is just like you and I. In trying to help people grow, the person I grew the most was myself. That's my origin story. Let me know what you think. Give me a comment below and let me know if you'd want to hear more. Thanks everyone.

Thanks for listening to episode one of the Entrepreneurial Personality Type podcast. As you could hear, I'm recording these live on Facebook. After about three days of staring at a microphone, trying to make these engaging, I realized if I just went live, they would be that much better, so not a lot of production, not a lot of intros and outros, just you, me, and the Entrepreneurial Personality Type. Do me a favor, before you listen to episode two, if you could subscribe to this podcast, I would appreciate it. We're trying to get as many subscribers as we can to push up our rankings, and find more entrepreneurial personality types, so that every one of us can understand, there's nothing wrong with you, and you are not alone.

Thank You For Listening!

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With gratitude,

Alex

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