The Three Awakenings of the Entrepreneur

This is the Momentum podcast.

As we continue to revisit the Evolutionary Hunter, the Entrepreneurial Personality Type, today we delve into the Three Awakenings of the Evolutionary Hunter. The Three Awakenings that let us know who we are. I'll give you just a bit of background on this. You know, in my life, I've studied hundreds, thousands of successful people. I'm obsessed with seeing what makes people successful. And in that study, I've seen clear patterns that successful people have and clear patterns that people like us have, awarenesses that people like us have. And in this episode, I want to take you through the Three Awakenings of the Evolutionary Hunter. The realizations we have that let us know who we are and how clearly this pattern repeats itself in the lives of successful people and how you can use these awakenings to your advantage and how you can stop them from creating any type of constraint in your life.

I'm Alex Charfen and this is the Momentum podcast. Made for empire builders, game changers, trailblazers, 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 our 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 endure 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.

For those of you who are new to my podcast, I'll give you a quick recap on the Evolutionary Hunter and how I discovered these Three Awakenings of people like us. I was a very different kid. I share that all the time. I was kind of the outcast party-of-one, and I obsessively studied successful people. And what I expected to see when I study successful people was anything but something like me. And what I found was this similarity to me and that successful people are different. That successful people don't look like everybody else. Successful people don't act like everybody else. But what I also saw was that in the lives of successful people, there were these clear Three Awakenings that each person had. And I'll go through them briefly. And then I want to give you a detail. The first one is the realization that you are different than the people around you. The second one is innate motivation. This feeling of meeting momentum, of needing to move forward without intrinsic or extrinsic motivation, without any other factors, just the need to move forward. And the third one is the call of contribution. That voice that we hear that tells us we need to give more, do more, be more, leave more behind, make more happen in this lifetime. Let's start with the awareness that we are different than the rest of the world.

Every great person in history that I have researched has had this awareness that they are different, that they are not like everybody else, that there are people out there like them, but it's not the majority of the population. And it's this awareness that we are different that actually makes us great. The things that make us different, regardless of what they are, are the things that actually make us extraordinary in this world. You know, and often I've had people ask me, But what about disabilities? What about disorders? What about issues? What about challenges? I feel like every one of those sensitivities creates an equal and opposite ability to do more. I'll share one of the ones that comes up for me all the time, my friend John Moreau. John is an extraordinary entrepreneur. He has a team of, I think, a couple dozen people now. He has a multimillion dollar business. He's the owner of Smart Blogger. He is one of the top bloggers in the entire world, maybe the top blogger in the entire world. And he trains people how to become content experts, how to be writing experts, how to go work for companies and create content marketing that transforms the companies. John is an extraordinary entrepreneur who writes written word that communicate so deeply and connect so deeply that his stuff often goes viral and is seen by hundreds of thousands, if not millions of people. What a lot of people don't know about John until they get to know him is that he can only move his face. He is completely confined to a wheelchair. He moves the wheelchair through, blowing in a straw. He uses a mouse by manipulating it with his tongue and his lips. He manages an entire team of people and he literally can't move. So not only does he manage a team for his company, he manages a team that keeps him alive. And I was talking to him one time about his condition, about the fact that he can only move his face about how different it makes him. And he brought up this really interesting thing. He said, “You know, Alex, it's interesting. I think I relate to people so deeply because I feel emotions differently than the rest of the world”. And I said, “What do you mean, John?” And he said, “You know, my body doesn't react. If I'm scared, my body doesn't react. If I'm, you know, in a place of anxiety, my body doesn't react. I don't have the same feelings as the rest of the world. So I've had to use empathy to understand how other people feel and understand how the normal human being reacts to this. And I think it's that empathy that let’s me can connect with people at such a deep level”. And I can remember sitting on John's back patio, he was in his chair, I was in a chair and he had wheeled out there and we were just… afternoon conversation. And I remember thinking how wonderfully profound that statement was. Here's a person that the average person would look at and say, ‘Oh, poor guy, he's confined to a wheelchair. He can't move anything. He can only move his face. What a tortured existence’. But unlike the absolute opposite perspective coming from John, was that this existence that he has actually has given him benefits, has given him positives that he can share with the rest of the world. And I think what happens to us when we find out we are different societies, reflection to us is so negative and so challenging. I know it was for me ever since I was a little kid, I was given labels. I was told I was hyperactive and had behavioral problems and I had trouble paying attention and I had issues in class and I had all of these reflections that were completely negative and challenging back to me. And as a result, I tried to sit still and pay attention and not daydream and not think of the things that really excited me and constrain myself and hold myself in place so much so that I have permanent damage to my feet from crossing them under a chair in school. And I remember doing this as a kid. I would hold my legs as tight as I possibly could until they went to sleep so that I could sit in school without moving around and causing issues. We actually fight against what makes us different. We try and cover up what makes us different. We try and obscure what makes us different in the world as we live in because it is such a challenge to us and we are challenged by what makes us different. The world around us challenges us. But when we realize as Entrepreneurial Personality Types that our differences are what makes us great, our differences are what forms our perspective, where we can actually make a massive impact and a massive change in the world. Because we are different, because we see things differently. Everything in our lives changes. And when you look at the people out there who have realized they have different perspectives and different opinions and different ways of seeing things, and they've gone out and shared those, those are the people we remember. And so as Evolutionary Hunters, we have suppressed these differences. We have suppressed these abilities that the differences create because it's such a challenging reflection for most of our lives, almost every one of us has suppressed and shut down and turned off. And I want to share with you today, understanding the differences, understanding what makes you different is exactly what's going to make it so that you can go out and change the world in the way you want to.

Now, the second awakening of the Entrepreneurial Personality Type is when we realize that we have this thing called innate motivation, when we realize that we are one of those people that lives for momentum, that lives to be moving, that lives to be creating, making things happen, moving things around, changing the world around us, improving the world around us, looking for opportunities. We are literally momentum based beings. You know, I define the Entrepreneurial Personality Type as physiologically sensitive, momentum based beings that are highly reactive to constraint. And I use Evolutionary Hunter and Entrepreneurial Personality Type interchangeably. To me, it's the same thing. And if you think of this Evolutionary Hunter, this personality type that I believe we actually have this reality of who we are, wouldn't it make sense that the percentage of the population of human beings that gets up every day and goes out and kills things to keep the human tribe alive, to make sure that the tribe has food, to make sure that we move forward, that we survive, that we exist as a species, would also have this epigenetic chemical, physiological, cognitive programing that cause us to be innately motivated. We don't need external or internal motivation. It's just there. And this is another thing that we fight. This is another thing that we actually try and turn off and suppress, because in most situations we have this innate motivation to go in a direction, to do something, to change things, to tell people what to do, to show people there's a better way, to show people there's a better solution. But for most of our lives, when we share those solutions, the reflection back to us is not a positive one. You know, we see the solution before anybody else even sees that there's a problem. And that innate motivation that that drive to do, that drive to move forward is something that we turn off and shut down. Like, I literally used to make my legs go to sleep so I wouldn't be moving. And we are so different than the rest of the world in that we have this incredible drive, this incredible motivation that keeps us going forward, that keeps us overcoming the coming, that keeps us going through obstacles in our way. And the rest of the world really isn't like that. Now, here's the challenge. When we suppress any motivation, all of that energy, that move forward, that go forward, that change the world, energy becomes suppressed and it gets bottled up inside of us. And you can see it. It becomes anxiety, becomes frustration, it becomes energy that doesn't have a place to go. And it can be incredibly challenging. It can slow us down. It can have us doubting ourselves. It can have us doubting the world around us. But when we channel that innate motivation, when we know where we want to go, when we understand what we're doing next, it is a force that can literally change the world and has changed the world over and over again throughout history, where people like you and I take this innate motivation and put it in a direction and get it into momentum and go out and make the world a better place. So if you relate to this concept of innate motivation, then just know it's one of the most powerful forces in the world an individual, Entrepreneurial Personality Type, an Evolutionary Hunter that is on fire to change the world, that is excited about what they're doing, that knows that they're on mission, is one of the most powerful forces we have in the world and there has ever been.

And that brings me to the third awakening of the Evolutionary Hunter. It's the realization that we are hearing what I call the call of contribution. The call of contribution starts out as a whisper. It's a voice in our heads that says, ‘you can do more, you can be more, you can leave more behind, you can make this world a better place’. Then it becomes a drone. Then it becomes a little louder. Then it becomes, for some of us, the only thing you hear. This need, this drive to make the world a better place. You know, for me personally, I know I even felt that drive, that need to make the world a better place when the world around me was reflecting negatively to me. When the world around me was attacking me, I still wanted to help people. Even when I was bullied or made fun of or made to be the outsider, I still wanted people to do better. And I think that's just how we're wired as Evolutionary Hunters. And to me, it makes perfect sense. It makes perfect sense that we understand we're different. It makes perfect sense that we have this innate motivation to keep the human tribe alive. And it makes perfect sense that we have this embedded need for contribution to help the human tribe. Because we as hunters who have gone out and made kills and done what they need to do to keep the human drive alive, turn around and help the hunters behind them, and we leave behind shortcuts and help and information and our work to help the world around us. In fact, so often in the research that I did on successful people, you see people whose lives started out kind of shaky, like maybe not in the best way, maybe in a challenging way. You know, Henry Ford is an interesting example.

Henry Ford created the assembly line and the automobile and, you know, did incredible things. His name still survives today. It's on millions of cars around the world. But in his early life, he was actually a racist and anti-Semitic and handed out pamphlets about blacks and Jews and negative information about human beings. And over the course of time in his life, as he grew, as he made a greater contribution, as his company grew, as the automobile grew, he went from being a person who only wanted to help some people and really didn't like others to a person who wanted to democratize the automobile for everyone to help everyone in the world. Of course, that helped his business, but it also changed who he was and changed how he looked at the world. And when you look today, the Ford Foundation set up by Henry Ford is one of the biggest charitable organizations out there that funds all kinds of things for everyone. And that switch from being biased against certain people to wanting to contribute to everyone, it's interesting how often you see that in the lives of wildly successful people. This call of contribution tends to take over. And when you drive around cities and you look at buildings and you see the names of people on those buildings, yes, sometimes it was a memorial, but most of the time it's because it was an entrepreneur. And just like you and me who wrote a check, who funded something, who wanted to help the world, who wanted to leave information behind, who wanted their name to be remembered as someone who contributed to the human race. It's interesting how this presents itself so often in the lives of successful people. And so here's how you can use this reawakening for yourself if you've had them, if you've known you're different, if you have that innate motivation and you feel that call of contribution, the first thing we need to do is understand ourselves better so we understand our differences and what truly makes us great.

In my book, The Entrepreneurial Personality Type, I outline the ten attributes of the Evolutionary Hunter and how each one of them is a massive positive that's almost like a superpower, but it also can hold us back dramatically. You can download that book for free right now at FreeEPTBook.com. Free as in Entrepreneurial Personality Type dot com. And read those ten attributes so that you understand which ones you have, so that you understand how you can maximize your life, maximize your contribution, and go out and make the change you want to see in the world. When it comes to innate motivation, we have to understand that we have it. And when we plan and we focus and we know where we want to go and we're clear on our destination, this innate motivation is a superpower that will get us through anything. Literally anything. I've seen it over and over again in the histories that I've read of entrepreneurs, in the stories that I've read, the articles I've read, but I've also seen it firsthand, watching incredible entrepreneurs who don't have what it takes, don't have the resources, don't have the experience, have too much experience, are too old, too young, whatever it is, they are not the person that should be doing it, but the innate motivation gets them through the challenge so that they can go out and do exactly what they want to do in the world and make a massive contribution. And then the last one, the call of contribution. When we understand that what we really want to do is contribute to the people around us and make the world a better place, they've actually become easier for us. And I want to make something very clear. I am a capitalist, I am a passionate capitalist. I believe in capitalism. I think it's the best system in the world. Capitalism is the system that allows for the exchange of value between human beings. And I think that is one of the most human things we can do. That is one of the best things that we can do is to create value for other people around us and that contribution that we make to the people around us. When, you know, what I believe fully is that capital flows to the greatest contribution. Money is energy. And if you're making a ton of money, that means you are creating a positive energy in the world and people are giving you that energy in exchange. So the more we make, the more we contribute. And I just want to make it very clear that I don't want you to just go out and start a charity or just help people. I want you to go build a business that changes the world and makes a massive contribution and changes things for the better because that's what we're all programmed, that's what we're all hardwired, that's what we're all epigenetically here to do is to make the world a better place. If we are doing that, we will have the wealth and the impact and the income that we want because we are making a massive contribution.

Now, all three of these awakenings are one guidepost telling us, ‘Hey, this is who you are’, but they're also opportunities. It's an opportunity to understand your differences and why they make you great. And so opportunity to understand the innate motivation and to harness it so that you can go do anything you want. And it's an opportunity to know that you have the call or hearing the call of contribution so that you can use that as the motivation, the pressure and the push to go out and do what you want to do to make the world a better place. I want you to internalize these and think about these and understand that this is who we really are. And this fourth quarter, in just about a month from now, I'm going to be working with a small group of entrepreneurs, beginning on the day after Thanksgiving on Black Friday, to show you exactly how to create the clarity, the plan, the path and the execution system so that you can use these Three Awakenings to make a greater contribution in the world than you ever thought possible, but also to make the income and the impact that you want. If you're interested in working with me, go to charfen.com/blackfriday. Again, charfen.com/blackfriday. I can't wait to help you create massive clarity so that you can understand why you're different and how quickly you can move forward, harness your innate motivation and go out and make a massive contribution. charfen.com/blackfriday. I look forward to seeing you there.