Buy Your Presence And Awareness

I'm Alex Charfen and this is the Momentum podcast. Made for empire builders, game changers, trail blazers, shot takers, record breakers, world makers, and creators of all kinds. Those among us who can't turn it off and don't know why anyone would want to. We challenge complacency, destroy apathy, and we are obsessed with creating momentum so we can roll over bureaucracy and make our greatest contribution. Sure, we pay attention to their rules, but only so that we can bend them, break them, then rewrite them around own will. We don't accept our destiny. We define it. We don't understand defeat because you only lose if you stop and we don't know how. While the rest of the world strives for average and clings desperately to the status quo, we are the minority, the few who are willing to hallucinate there could be a better future, and instead of just daydreaming of what could be, we enter the vulnerability and exposure it takes to make it real. We are the evolutionary hunters, clearly the most important people in the world, because entrepreneurs are the only source of consistent, positive human evolution, and we always will be.

Buy your presence and awareness. There comes a time for most entrepreneurs, most successful entrepreneurs, where we realize that our success comes from our ability to be present, our ability to be aware, our ability to focus. It's interesting. Bill Gates and Warren Buffett were once told to write down the reason for their success and then share it with each other, and both had written focus.

And one of the biggest challenges for people like us is achieving focus. I know it's hard for me, but when you learn how to start creating focus, when you learn how to start understanding yourself better ... I don't think there's any surprise why so many famous entrepreneurs have gone on spiritual journeys, have tried meditation, have learned different ways to become aware, have used illicit substances to expand their thoughts, their knowledge, or at least in an effort to do so they did that.

All of these things are done in an effort to expand presence and awareness, but I take a really pragmatic approach to making you a better entrepreneur. Because here's the challenge. You might not become a good meditator for the next six months to a year, so how do we, in a hurry, start making your world better right now?

Well, here's how I look at meditation. It is an incredible tool to lower the pressure and noise in your life, because if you're willing to sit down and put on a Muse headband ... you can go to charfen.com/muse and check it out ... put on a Muse headband. It's essentially an EEG machine. If you're willing to meditate three minutes a day for the next few months, you'll see a massive change in your life, a huge reduction in pressure and noise.

But here's something else that will absolutely radically reduce the pressure and noise in your life. You buying it away and here's how you do that as an entrepreneur. First, you pay off your debt, and then second, you start building net worth. Here's the challenge in the entrepreneurial world today, and man is it prevalent.

We have this new dynamic in the world called social media, and I'm on it, you're on it. I use it like crazy. I'm on Instagram, I'm on Facebook. My team uses it for YouTube. We do a ton on social media. But here's the challenge. So many people these days are now manufacturing their lives for social media. And entrepreneur after entrepreneur is going out and buying cars that they really shouldn't buy, and renting houses and eating food and going on vacations all to impress people on social media because they've somehow confused that their image is their success, and the reality is that that is all empty spending. I know somebody who buys really expensive cars who doesn't even drive them. He just has them literally as props.

And when you look at what really is going to make you more successful as an entrepreneur, is first buying down your debt. Stop spending money on your image and start getting serious about being a real entrepreneur and buy your debt down everywhere in the world until you have none, because you don't know what you're capable of. You don't know what level of creativity you can achieve. You have no idea what real perspective you have until you have no debt in the world, and it's incredibly difficult to explain the feeling to you until you've actually done it.

And anyone who's gotten debt-free will tell you the exact same thing. And it will allow you to buy your presence and awareness. Cadey and I give every person who we hire in our organization a copy of Total Money Makeover. And we want everyone to read it because we want them to put together their debt reduction plan. We have given out dozens of debt-free awards in our companies. Why? Because we know that if we help people become debt-free, they're going to be more present, more aware. They're going to do even more incredible things for us.

I can't tell you how many times I've heard the crazy strategy from an entrepreneur or a sales manager or someone saying, "Oh, I just hired a new kid and I'm going to have him buy a car so that he really needs the job." That just increases pressure and noise in their life. You want your people to be excited to accomplish, not under pressure to achieve. Those are two completely different things, and the first one works a heck of a lot better than the second.

You can take the revenue you make, and instead of spending it, instead of not understanding where it is, start tracking it and understanding exactly what's going on in your organization, and then instead of "reinvesting," start increasing your net worth. Once you've paid off your debt, build a backstop. Put some money in the bank. You don't know how capable you are as an entrepreneur until you show up with seven figures liquid in the bank.

I know because I've been there for most of my career, and when it was gone, I was shaken. When it was back, so was the feeling. And if you haven't done it, you can't know what it's like. Whenever I see somebody in the rented house with the exotic cars, I wonder will they ever know what it's like to have a million liquid in the bank.

Because for people like us, it is all about presence and awareness. It is all about us lowering the pressure and noise in our lives so that the attributes of the entrepreneur show through. Remember, there's 10 of them. The entrepreneurial personality type, the evolutionary hunter has high sensitivity and awareness. In today's world, that's that sensitivity that we understand what's going on. We see what's happening. We know the conversation being had before we came into the room. That's that high sensitivity. It's future focus.

If you were called a daydreamer, you're also a visionary. It's high processing capacity, the speed with which we process and the volume of data we process. It's how adaptable we are. It's why we're called chameleons. It's the intense focus on results or a single result like Edison. 10,000 tries to make a light bulb. It's bias for improvement, that thing in our minds that makes us improve everything around us.

And when we lower the pressure and noise, these attributes create intense positives in our lives, experimental or experiential learning. It drives us to do. But when we don't experiment or experience, when we have high pressure and noise in our lives, that's when we become skeptical. Our ability to perceive unique connections becomes clouded. Our drive for gained advantage becomes cut throat. Our innate motivation becomes hyperactivity or restlessness or insomnia or exhaustion and fatigue.

And so when we buy down the noise in our lives by literally forcing our businesses to make money and radically increasing our net worth and tracking it on a monthly basis and having the discussion with our spouses and saying this is what we're going to do to our net worth, Cadey and I know exactly where we want our net worth to be at the end of this year.

We have a very nice house and I have several cars that are nice, but they're not brand new and they're older. And my wife drives a nice car and we have a gorgeous pool in our house and we live in an incredible part of the world, but everything we have was paid for cash a long time ago. And we don't finance anything. And everything is debt-free.

And so don't let any of my image on social media or anywhere else drive you to try and buy the lifestyle we have until it's something that you can afford without having to go into debt and without having to raise the pressure and noise in your life, because until you are debt-free, you don't understand what the trade-off is for increasing debt in your life. And until you have money in the bank, you don't understand just how crucial it is to have a backstop and how much different you can show up. But when you do, you will see what you're truly capable of.

If you enjoyed this podcast, you probably enjoy following me on Instagram. You can go to instagram.com/alexcharfen or just type Alex Charfen on Instagram search. You'll find my account. Follow me and do me a favor. If you follow from the podcast, send me a direct message and let me know you're checking me out. I do a lot of Instagram stories with me, my kids and Cadey. We love to share a little bit of our lives with you and you might pick up some tips along the way.