A Personal Note From Orion

Welcome, Stellar Life listeners! In today’s episode, we have the pleasure of speaking with Joe Polish – a renowned entrepreneur, philanthropist, and connector. Joe has an incredible story of overcoming addiction and transforming his life and business through the power of marketing, empathy and genuine human connection.

Joe started out struggling with a carpet cleaning business, but a pivotal conversation shifted his mindset. He began studying marketing intensely, learning about crafting offers, storytelling and sales copy. This knowledge completely transformed his business, dramatically increasing revenue. He then went on to teach these same strategies to other carpet cleaners, building the largest training organization in that industry during the 1990s.

But as Joe shares, the keys to his success go far beyond just marketing tactics. He emphasizes the importance of personal growth, seeking mentors, building real skills, and most importantly – focusing on providing value and cultivating meaningful relationships. Joe has a gift for distilling wisdom on topics like navigating discomfort, overcoming trauma, and leading with contributions in business and life.

Tune in as Joe talks about his journey from addiction to impact, why empathy is the ultimate business skill, how “giving is living,” and so much more. You won’t want to miss his profound insights that are applicable to entrepreneurs and anyone seeking to live a more connected, growth-oriented and contribution-driven life. So, without further ado, let’s dive into the show!

In This Episode

• [04:49] – Orion welcomes Joe Polish to the show. Joe shares one of his best childhood memories and his background as an entrepreneur.
• [12:44] – Joe recalls starting a carpet cleaning business in Arizona and struggling with debt and profitability, and meeting a successful real estate investor challenged his thinking about business.
• [19:13] – Joe elaborates on why marketing is the quickest path to sales.
• [21:43] – Joe describes how he established Genius Network.
• [31:32] – Joe emphasizes the value of trust and rapport in business interactions and the need for consumers to feel confident in their decisions.
• [35:56] – Orion asks about Joe’s experience with overcoming sex addiction and his insights on intimacy, abuse, and addiction.
• [47:29] – Joe discusses the importance of setting boundaries to avoid internalizing other’s stories.
• [76:26] – Information on where to find Joe’s book and receive his emails.

Jump to Links and Resources

About Today’s Show

Hi, Joe. Welcome to the Stellar Life podcast. Thank you so much for being here.

It is great to be here. Thank you for having me.

I’m happy you’re here because you are an incredible man, a great influence in our lives, and just a really wise person overall. Everyone who listens to this is going to benefit a lot. I know that already. No pressure, though. Before we begin, can you share with me one of your best childhood memories?

It’s interesting when you ask that because what comes up is a lot of what my initial thing would be like what would be one of the most difficult ones because I certainly have more memory of those than I do of good ones. I would say winning a BMX race. My first race was when I was racing BMX bikes because I never played sports. I quit Little League because I had a sadistic coach. I was never in the sports. Winning a BMX bike race was the first time I think I ever got a trophy for anything. That’s one that just immediately comes to mind.

How old you were?

Maybe 13 or 14. That was not super young.

I had a difficult childhood, too, and I thought, “Oh, my God, all bad memories.” When I think about my childhood, I think there is so much more bad than good. I did 40 Years of Zen with Dave Asprey.

I’ve done this with Dave Asprey before.

For me, what happened was that a lot of good memories started to come up. I was like, “Oh, wow, selective brain. That’s not all bad.” There are some really beautiful moments there.

It’s interesting that you asked that, too, because it also goes to show what I normally think about when I think about my childhood. I don’t always often think about the good things because the bad, negative things were kind of traumatic for me because I have an addiction recovery foundation. I’m often getting asked a lot about what happened to you in childhood. The emphasis on the positive is good. I also learned something just now: that most of the thinking in my childhood was not very good. It’s mostly negative; it’s a bit of an exercise here to think about, “I did have some really good moments. What are those?”

I think just the awareness will bring up really good memories in your dreams tonight. As you listen to my voice, you will know that tonight, you will have great memories coming to your mind from your childhood. I like that you’re really happy, joyful, and excited.

I’ll wake up tomorrow and say, “Today is the last day of the way I used to be.”

Awesome. Share with me a bit about your journey for those who don’t know you. I would like you to share it in your own words—your journey, your passion, and who you are in the world today.

Well, it depends on whether I go into personal or business, but I’ll try to throw it all together. It’s like a big soup of stuff. My name is Joe Polish. That was not our original family name. The original family name from way back in the 18th century was ‘Palissy’ or something. They changed the name when the family came from Italy to America. I don’t know if they were assigned the name or what even really happened. 

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I’ve heard all kinds of different stories, but I was born in El Paso, Texas. My mother was a former nun, and she left the convent because she had gotten ill. My father was in church, ended up getting married, and had a brother who was four and a half years older than me. We moved every two years for my entire childhood because, initially, my mother and I had allergies. We moved to San Antonio, Texas. Then, we ended up in a small town called Kerrville, Texas. My mother, unfortunately, died of ovarian cancer when I was four years old. My father was broken-hearted, lost the love of his life, and never could settle down anywhere for long.

I was a super shy, introverted kid, and I was basically scared of people. I would smile a lot because that kind of disguised the fear, angst, and anxiety that I had. But I wasn’t the sarcastic kid who grew up to be an adult with a lot of defense mechanisms and whatnot. I lived in different parts of Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas, and I had some bad childhood experiences. I won’t go into detail unless you want me to, but I had a lot of sexual and physical abuse. I became a drug addict, basically. Throughout high school, I was getting high every day. I started taking psychedelics, mostly LSD and mushrooms, back then, but it wasn’t for therapeutic reasons. It was for just trying to escape. 

I was taking speed, and I became a cocaine addict, which led to my worst state. I was 18 years old and weighed 105 pounds when I had gone almost an entire week without eating anything. But on average, I weighed about 120 pounds when I was in active addiction. When you’re a male, 18 years old, and you’re 5’10, that’s pretty skinny, right? I ended up moving away when it had gotten so bad. I looked in the mirror one day, and I looked like just a skeleton. I just had sunken eyes.

My life was a total wreck. I had this thought that if I didn’t leave, I was going to be dead. I moved to New Mexico, lived in a trailer with my father for a couple of years, and got sober. It took about six months of taking Tylenol and aspirin, and I didn’t go to a treatment center trying to do this cold turkey. I had headaches every day, and I was just in such poor physical shape. I eventually got through it, and I ended up getting a job selling gym memberships. For the first time in my life, I started exercising and working out.

I worked out a little bit in high school, but again, I never played any sports. I ended up meeting someone after learning how to sell gym memberships and doing really well in Las Cruces, New Mexico. That’s where I moved to. I told everyone I was going to college, which I was. I was really just; I went there to escape the entire environment where I was hanging out with people, I was doing drugs with and that sort of stuff. I met someone after working at this gym for a while who offered me a job at basically a mental health institution. I went there and worked as a mental health tech.

One of the things that I would do is they would have me drive the people who were there for addiction to AA meetings and NA meetings. They were outside twelve-step meetings,  Narcotics Anonymous, Alcoholics Anonymous, and Cocaine Anonymous. I would sit through these meetings as an employee, not realizing how much of this was going to be beneficial to me in my life. At the time, I was hearing stuff, but it wasn’t until later. I ended up getting sober from drugs. I never really dealt with the underlying trauma and the emotional issues that caused me to be an addict in the first place. I came back to Arizona and ended up starting a carpet cleaning business with a friend, and that was a lot of struggle. For two years, I went into debt on credit cards from 1990 to approximately 1992.

Those were the roughest years of just working really hard, recently getting sober from being a drug addict, just trying to survive. I wasn’t making any money. It was costing me more money to be a business owner than I was bringing in. I was just searching and studying for what to do. I had a mentor that I accidentally met. I’ll tell you that story in a minute. I just want to put a pause on it to see if there are any questions or anything he has before I start rambling.

Joe, I love listening to you. I always do. Keep going.

Here I was in this carpet cleaning business that I had, and I didn’t like it. It was hard work. I’m doing hard manual labor. On top of that, I wasn’t making any money. I was going deeper in debt, paying bills on credit cards, and I had racked up about $30,000 in credit card debt. That was a lot of money back then. Today, I don’t even know what that would be today, but it was a lot, especially for a single-person business owner trying to figure out what the hell to do.

I had a friend I went to high school who invited me on a trip to go jet skiing on a Saturday. He called me up. He’s like, “Hey, you want to go jet skiing?” I’m like, “Nah, I got so much work to do. I’m busy.” He said, “Well, the guy that owns the jet skis is a multimillion-dollar real estate investor,” and that piqued my interest. My whole thinking was, “Let me go on this jet ski trip and talk to this rich guy, and maybe I could get some advice on how to make more money,” because I was just really struggling. I drive out in this piece of a crap pickup truck that I had to Saguaro Lake with my friend Pat, and then there’s a guy who had the jet skis, and then his friend—and I never even remember the guy’s name. This was approximately 1991. I’m going to do a timeline. I’m going to try to find the exact time.

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But even Pat, who I’ve not spoken with in years, couldn’t track this guy down because I wish I could just say thank you to this guy. But what ended up happening was that there were two jet skis, and there were four of us. I finally had a chance to sit down with this rich guy on the back of the tailgate of his pickup truck. I said, “I hear you do really well in business. I have a small carpet cleaning company. I’ve been doing this for a while, and I’m certified. I do a really good job, but it’s a difficult business, and I was wondering if you have any advice on a business I could go into where I could do really well.” And he said, “Well, are other people in your industry making money?” And I said, “A couple of companies in Phoenix make over a million dollars a year.” Back then, to me, that’s a lot of money. He goes, “Well if there are other people that are doing well in the business you’re in and you’re not, there’s nothing wrong with the business. There’s something wrong with you.” In my mind, I’m like, “Well, this isn’t the motivational speech I’m certified.” I don’t do bait-and-switch advertising. A lot of these companies are established. They’ve been in business for a long time.

I was just telling him what I thought was why I wasn’t succeeding in the business. He goes, “Well, young man, you’re like most people. You think the grass is always greener on the other side. What’s going to happen is if you go into another business or industry, you’re going to spend another six months, another year, another two years learning the technical skills of another business so you can go out and repeat the same bad business habits that have caused you to be a failure in this one.”  It’s interesting, too, because I probably had people say something similar to what he had said to me. For some reason, when the students are ready, the teacher appears on that whole line. He wasn’t being nice about it, but he wasn’t being a jerk. I knew he was coming from a ‘trying to help me place.’

It wasn’t what I wanted to hear, but it was what I needed to hear. He said, “What you need to do is you need to just learn fundamental business skills.” He says, “If you learn how to make a business work, you can enter any other industry, and you’ll have a better chance of success. But if you don’t, you will keep repeating these bad habits.” I left that trip really sunburnt. I drove home, but I thought the whole time that I’d have a lot of personal problems. I’m not the brightest guy in the world. I’m a hard worker, though, trying to make this thing work. I’ve been at it for a while, and other people are doing well, and I’m nothing.

I got to figure out what the hell they’re doing. I made a commitment in my mind that I was not going to get out of the carpet cleaning business. I went on that trip looking for an escape hatch. I left saying, “I’m not going to get out of this.  I’m going to use it as a lab rat experiment. I’m going to use my carpet cleaning business as a way to figure out how to make a business work.” Now, I still didn’t have any answers on how I was going to do that. What happened, though, is I changed my mind. I will often say to people that I was doing a Genius Network annual event, the one we did last December of last year.

I started by asking, “How many of you care about your health?” A bunch of hands go up. “How many care about their families?” A bunch of hands go up. “How many care about your business? How many of you care about your clients?” Everyone’s raised their hand. I go, “Well, who will say they don’t care about their family? Or you don’t care about your clients? Of course, you care.” But there’s a difference between caring about something versus being committed. We all care about our health, but that doesn’t mean we eat well, drink enough water, or we exercise, or we don’t sleep, or deprive ourselves. Something happened from that conversation that caused me to become committed. Something took place in my mind, and I’ve thought about it a lot since then, but that was the most instrumental conversation I had had up to that point in my life, what I now call a ‘domino.’

Like the first domino, what is a book, a conversation or a person that changes the trajectory of your life in a positive way? Because I had many negative dominoes, too. Getting sexually abused created a trajectory of addiction and a bunch of maladaptive ways that I dealt with my life and dealt with the world. But that jet ski trip was profound. All of a sudden, I started reading and studying. I was like, “What the hell do I need to learn that is going to help me with my biggest problem, which is I don’t have enough business?” I don’t have enough clients, so I started studying marketing.

With that focus, a friend gave me a newsletter by a crazy copywriter named Gary Halbert. I got this newsletter. I never read anything quite like it. He said that any problem in the world could be solved with the right sales letter. I didn’t even know what that meant. I didn’t even understand what marketing was. I thought marketing was your brand or your name. There was no Internet back then. There was no social media. 

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This was all space ads—Yellow Pages, Valpak coupons, postcards, door-to-door sales, telemarketing, and fax machines. Cell phones weren’t even out. We carried around pagers. I was driving around town with a Thomas guide, a manual thing where you would cross-reference streets to find out how to drive across town. There was no GPS.

There was just a bunch of stuff. I ended up studying marketing and learning about writing sales copy and making offers. Today, marketing is the quickest path to sales. Think of selling as influence or persuasion and marketing as storytelling. Selling is what you do to get yourself on the phone or face-to-face with somebody, and marketing is what you do to get someone on the phone or face-to-face with you properly positioned. By the time you’re talking to them, you’re talking to someone who’s pre-interested, pre-motivated, pre-qualified, and predisposed to do business with you. 

I started changing all my messaging. I hired a copywriter for $1,800 on a credit card because I still wasn’t making any money yet, but I was getting these concepts and ideas, and I was like, “Okay, now, how do I execute this stuff?” I taught a copywriter everything I could about choosing a carpet cleaner so that we could create an educational guide on the subject.

It was called ‘A Consumer Guide to Carpet Cleaning.’ I could go through that whole process because it’s a very template-able formula I’ve now taught thousands of business owners. I transformed my carpet cleaning business, and I started generating business. Within six months, I went from grossing 2,300 a month to over 12,000 a month with a single van. I didn’t learn any more about it. I didn’t become a better carpet cleaner. I just became a better communicator. I became a better communicator in print, not face-to-face. I learned how to clone my messaging.

It’s so funny even to say that term today because now you can do this stuff with AI that just took months to create, and you can create instantaneously if you know the psychology. AI can’t teach somebody that in the same way as just doing the reps. It’s similar to you can’t pay someone to do your pushups for you. AI is not doing anyone’s pushups. I studied and learned certain levels of things, but I put them into play, and I turned this small business around. 

I started teaching other carpet cleaners how to do the same thing. I built the largest training organization in the ‘90s in the world for carpet and upholstery cleaners and people who do fire and flood restoration in the area of generating business using direct response marketing.

Your story is so amazing. How did you get from being a really successful carpet cleaner to a marketer to creating the Genius Network, and what is it?

The way that worked is that I started teaching other cleaning companies how to market themselves using consumer awareness guides, free recorded messages, joint ventures, endorsements, effective sales copy, how to package their services, and doing something called a ‘carpet audit’ instead of an estimate. I came up with offers like a free room of carpet cleaning for up to 200. We would demonstrate stuff. I created ethical services. I would teach carpet cleaners how to market themselves, not with the lowest price but by doing the best job. 

I did five different TV shows on anti-bait and switch advertising. I became a big spokesperson for the cleaning industry. In 1997, I was picked as person of the year, which is funny. I was completely surprised that they had asked the industry, the largest trade magazine at the time, Clean Facts, who was the most impactful person in the carpet cleaning industry. In 1997, I was chosen from all of these people all over.

I was the most well-known person in the world at the time in the carpet cleaning industry. That never got me dates or anything, but it was really cool for business. I had never done any general marketing stuff. I had clients like Bill Phillips, who wrote a book called Body for Life. He had written this book, and I helped him tremendously before that book even came out, which helped him create that book. 

He also built the largest sports supplement company in the world. I consulted with him, and he did these physique transformation contests in which I was instrumental. I also gave him an idea of how to distribute this film called Body of Work, which he had made by donating money to the Make-A-Wish Foundation. He became the single largest individual contributor in the history of the world for the Make a Wish foundation with the idea that I’d given him.

His company had gone from 60 million a year to 200 million in revenue. In 1999, he sold that company for $300 million. I was his main marketing guy, teaching him the same stuff I was teaching: carpet and cleaners. I learned, “Wow, these methods apply to any industry.” But I had never gone outside of niches. I have licensed my marketing materials to auto sales, heating, air conditioning, printers, painters, florists, jewelers, hair and nail salons, pest control, and licensees paying me licensing fees and royalties. Here I was, this young guy making good money, just good and bad. The good part was I was helping a lot of people.

I was selling really good stuff, and it was working. The bad part was I had not yet dealt with the underlying addiction issues. I had gotten into a very toxic relationship, and there was a ton of betrayal in it. One of the ways I dealt with it after we broke up was that I went deeply into sex addiction, meaning I was acting out sexually and was hiring escorts. I was paying for sex, and it was stuff that I never told anyone about because of the shame that was attached to it, but I never dealt with that. I had been sober from doing drugs. I wasn’t going out and getting inebriated. I drink alcohol once in a while.

I wasn’t an alcoholic, but I had not been abusing drugs, and I was a functional addict. But my addictions were sex and work because workaholism is a respectable addiction. You get a dopamine hit from all forms of addiction as a way to soothe pain. There’s that Johann Hari line, which is the opposite of addiction: connection. I was still very disconnected from myself, and I wanted relationships, but I was betrayed. There’s this line that one of our Genius Network members, Dr. Don Wood, says, “If you understood the atmospheric conditions of somebody’s life, it would make sense why they are the way that they are.”

I love Dr. Don. He was on the podcast, too.

He’s great. I was having financial and reputational success, but I had this really difficult part of my life that I didn’t quite know how to deal with. I didn’t know how to enter into healthy relationships. You find people whose dents match your dents. I had a woman that I had hired who embezzled a bunch of money from me. There’s just a bunch of difficult stuff. I haven’t even gone into most of it. I want to take up all the time with that. I want to share things that will be useful and helpful to people listening for their lives. 

What I did to go back to the business stuff is that I never did any non-native marketing because there’s a lot to be said about being a specialist versus a generalist. If you’re selling expertise, you can do better if you go after a specific niche, like financial services or carpet cleaners, or pick a category, graphic designers, whatever, versus like, oh, I’m going to be all things to all people. There’s a company called Nightingale-Conant, the largest seller of audio-learning programs at the time—a big company. All their materials are licensed to be audible, and they have asked me to do a marketing program.

In 2004, I created the first with Tim Paulson, who was working for me. We created a program called Piranha Marketing: The Seven Success Multiplying Factors to Dominate the Market You Enter. It was the first course we ever created for the general market that would apply to anybody. That became the number-one selling marketing program of all time for Nightingale Conant, the largest audio-learning program at the time. They sold everything from Tony Robbins tapes to Mother Teresa to Brian Tracy, you name it. My program beat everything. It sold more than Seth Godin. It sold more than anyone.

It was cool, and it was a great program. People can still buy it on Audible to this day. We did that in 2004, and it just started transforming people’s businesses. We were getting a bazillion testimonials. It was working. I was teaching education-based marketing. Today, I have my latest book right here. Of course, I will talk about what’s in it for them because I’m a marketer. But the question is, even if someone never gets my book, it’s always how I operate. 

People care about themselves. Now, empathetic, caring people obviously care about others. However, most people are walking around the world like, well, there are things I want. There are things that I want. We all want something. Nobody would even be listening to this or watching it if they didn’t want to get inside or whatever they were looking for. We’re going to want to eat lunch. We’re going to want to eat dinner. We’re going to want to go to sleep when we’re tired. We’re going to want to have entertainment. 

Humans interact with each other because we all want something from each other. My whole thing is, “How do you make your giving equal to or greater than what you want?” Because when I’m going out into the world and interacting, I want something from someone. I’ll say to people, “Well, what do you want?” Think about what it is you want, and you’re going to interact with somebody, and you’re going to want something from them. How do you show up with energy, a contribution, or anything where your give is greater than your want? Because the people that we tend to like in our lives are people who show up and they care about us. You can feel it.

They’re not just takers. I’m not entitled to anything. Anything that I have in my life comes as a result of sometimes it’s luck. If I walk around with an entitlement attitude, life doesn’t tend to give me much. If I show up, though, with let me figure out how to give more, how do I produce more than I consume? If I have that sort of attitude and I operate that way with people, my life works better. When I was an active addict, it was always about what was going to make me feel better. What’s going to make me feel better? What life gives to the giver and takes from the taker. One of my books is called Life Gives To The Giver.

I always did that, even with my advertising marketing, like my first sales letter for carpet cleaners was a consumer guide to carpet cleaning. It said, “Read this guide and discover seven questions.” “Ask a carpet cleaner before you invite them into your home.” I’ve got all this in my memory. “Eight mistakes to avoid when choosing a carpet cleaner.” “Six costly misconceptions about carpet cleaning.” “Crawling critters and crud.” “A guide to the slime, grime, and livestock that’s seeping, creeping and galloping through your carpet.” “How to avoid four carpet cleaning ripoffs.” “The difference between value and price.” “How do you get your carpet cleaner to 100% guarantee their work?” 

That was all on the COVID-19 of my consumer’s guide to carpet cleaning. A printed, cheap guide that I would mail to people. Or if we went to trade shows, I’d always have them filled up in my van. I would have these little magnetic plastic things that whenever we were doing a cleaning job, I would have it on the outside door of the cleaning van, walked by, they could pull a consumer awareness guide, or they could pull a card where they can request a consumer awareness guide to do lead generation. 

Then they would open up the guide, and it said, “Dear homeowner, choosing a carpet cleaner isn’t easy. Why? Because you’re bombarded with confusing claims, simply bad information. They’re worthless methods, unqualified technicians. How do you ever find a qualified, competent carpet cleaner? You start by reading this guide. Now, with this information, you can make an informed, intelligent decision.” 

That’s what it boils down to. People don’t want to make uninformed, idiotic decisions. People don’t want to get taken advantage of. People want to feel like the number one job of a business owner and a human because everyone has this question in their mind: “Who can I trust?” If you go to a restaurant and you feel like you’re going to get food poisoning if you eat the food. You’re probably not going to feel comfortable when you’re going to hire anyone or any business and you’re going to buy a car.

“Who can I trust? Can I trust this company? Can I trust this person?” That’s why there’s such an emphasis on brands because certain brands can be trusted. But I think the brand conversation gets taken completely out of context because you can’t deposit name recognition in the bank. All you can do is deposit money. Most small business owners don’t have the ad budget and revenue or the Apple computer brand, which would cost millions to get to that level. 

You have all these people running around trying to promote a personal brand, but they don’t have any substance to what the consumer perceives them to be. So, I learned how to establish trust and rapport because trust with comfort is the best way to build rapport quickly. Trust takes more time. And so what I did with the consumer’s guide was I made my advertising valuable.

So even if someone never hired my carpet cleaning company, the fact that I’m teaching them, they didn’t know. There were seven questions asked of a carpet cleaner, and most people would say, “How much do you charge?” Because they didn’t know what else to ask. But the moment I said, “Oh, there’s seven questions. Oh, there are eight mistakes to avoid. There are six costly misconceptions. How to avoid four ripoffs.” All of a sudden, I was teaching them what they didn’t know that they didn’t know. That is the key to a lot of ways. You can be a world-class copywriter who can write the most emotional copy, but most people don’t have those skills.

Most people wouldn’t even know how to prompt an AI to write that for them. Suppose they don’t understand that psychology is infinitely more important than technology; they can’t even use it. So, what I ended up doing was creating a template. I started teaching people to understand why we’re doing the sway. I made my advertising valuable. Most people were like, “Wow, if this person’s going to teach me all of this stuff, then I probably should use that person.” So, I started teaching this to other carpet cleaners, and I started teaching it to all kinds of other service businesses.

Then, I started teaching it to the world. My ads, promotions and campaigns have generated several billion dollars for my clients over the years. But this works. And it’s just you don’t need to be an expert. You need to be a caring person who wants to deliver value and be able to package it up and present it to people in a way that you can become useful. It’s how to be useful; it’s how to be valuable; it’s how to show up with your give being greater than your want and operating ethically. And if one does that, their life will get a lot easier and a lot better. And so I now call that E.L.F.

You can have an E.L.F. business, which is easy, lucrative and fun, or an H.A.L.F. business, which is hard, annoying, lame, and frustrating. So I try to have elf versus half. I used to think of it just as a business strategy. Now I think of people, “Is this person easy, lucrative and fun, or hard, annoying, lame, and frustrating?” Sometimes, it can be hard, annoying, lucrative, and frustrating because most people can relate to it.

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I’ve made a lot of money, but I had to work my ass off to that wasn’t E.L.F. It was H.A.L.F. It was heartbreaking, annoying, lucrative, and frustrating. I try to help people with E.L.F. strategies. When I remember to do it, I put everything through the E.L.F. filter as much as I can.

Amazing. I love Genius Network. I was a member for a little while. My husband still is. He’s been for a while. I’ve been coming to the annual events, which were super fun—great, successful people with big hearts. You are a mega-smart marketer, and when you’re a part of the Genius Network, you just notice how hard-driven, spiritual, and loving they are. They say that the fish stinks from the head, but I guess the dolphin jumps from the head. Your leadership is so beautiful, and you come from a hard place. 

I want to talk about all that, but I want to go back to a missing piece in your story. What are your practices today to be more balanced with your desire to work? Why sex addiction is so bad, and how did you recover from it?

Sex addiction is actually one of the most difficult addictions that there is. It’s very similar to food addiction or even work addiction because process addictions or behavior addictions are different ways to refer to them. A term in AA says ‘to put a plug in the jug.’ If you’re drinking alcohol, doing cocaine, doing crystal meth, or taking opiates—because you’re consuming them, you’re putting them in your body—everyone has to eat, every human desire, sexual connection. 

Abuse is anything that takes away a safe place.

Could you imagine not working and not being productive? People who don’t work often don’t have very good financial lives. They just create money and revenue. But people need to be productive. What is received free of charge is seldom of value. You look at what happens to people who win the lottery or inherit a lot of money, and they don’t work. There’s tons of addiction among those individuals. Most of them lose the money. Most of them don’t have any conception of it. 

So, there’s something very powerful about work. When does it become unmanageable in your life? What makes sex good or bad? With sex addiction, let me define intimacy, which was taught to me by an 80-year-old gay man who I never met in person—I just talked with him over the phone because he had been helping a person that I had sponsored in a twelve-step group years ago. He said intimacy is a mutual exploration of a shared safe place.

Abuse is anything that takes away a safe place. Addictions are what we do to make ourselves feel good when we don’t have a safe place. If people don’t feel safe in the world, they’re going to look for a way to scratch the itch. Many entrepreneurs could be very wealthy, and there could be professional athletes who can physically hurt and defend themselves in most cases, but they walk around the world with a tremendous amount of not feeling safe. When you don’t feel safe, you’re going to look for a way to scratch the itch. If you’re depressed, lonely, or anxious, there’s nothing wrong with wanting to be out of that state. The problem is the mechanism you use to scratch the itch. Is it making your life better, or is it making your life worse? So when you ask, how did I get over the sex addiction? Well, let me say it this way.

I don’t think you get over it. I think what happens in my view of addiction is that addiction is a solution. Dr. Don Wood and I first bonded when I gave him what I thought was my definition of addiction. I said, “It’s a solution to pain, and I don’t think you can punish pain out of people.” And currently, we live in a system that punitively treats addiction. Let’s take the incarcerated population. So there’s a guy you’ve met, Andre Norman, a big black guy that I’ve been funding for six years now, and he spent 14 years in maximum security prison. He was the number three gang leader while he was in prison. They just made a movie about him, too, which is cool. That’s going to be coming out soon.

Andre had a spiritual awakening while he was in solitary confinement in prison, and he just completely changed from being this very violent guy to being just a very loving, caring person. He got out of prison over 20 years ago, went to Harvard, and started helping people. He’s one of the speakers currently among the highest-rated at YPO. We helped so many people. He’s currently in charge of 650,000 tablets in prisons with Genius Recovery content and Genius Network entrepreneurial stuff. We’re reaching people who are incarcerated through the only they can’t get on the Internet, but they can download things through these tablets. 

We’ve been taking Genius Network members to prisons here in Arizona before all the meetings. What we’re working on now is wanting to be able to record those speeches that our members are giving to the incarcerated women at Perryville prison here in Arizona and other places and putting them on the tablet so prisoners all over the country can see this, and hopefully one day, maybe all over the world, depending on how that works.

But the reason I bring that up is that 80% to 90% of everyone that’s thrown in jail or goes to prison, drugs or alcohol were involved. That doesn’t even include behavior addictions. Secondly, 40% of people who are incarcerated have committed a violent crime. None of what I’m saying is an excuse that it’s okay to because they had an addiction problem that somehow takes someone off the hook for hurting other people. That’s a whole other separate conversation. The point is, though, there are a lot of addicts that are in jail. There are a lot of people with mental illness that are in jail. There are a lot of people who do bad things, not because they’re horrible people.

We live in a society that has a hard time having a compassionate perspective toward when people screw up their lives.

They just have had a lot of pain and difficulty in their life. I just recently interviewed here at one of our 100K groups, Marilyn Murray, who’s 87 years old. She was the first woman to bring women’s female support groups to Arizona. She was raped when she was eight years old by a group of military men. And she’s the first woman to ever go into prisons and consult and help rapists, child molesters, and sex offenders, which is almost unheard of, someone that was raped themselves. During the interview, which we’re going to put out my interview with her son, she went through the criteria of every person that has become a rapist, what happened to them in their lives, and not that this is an excuse to make it okay, because, believe me, there are horrible things that people do to other people that damage their lives. The thing is, it gets carried on.

Most people that are out there hurting people have horrible lives. It’s a very difficult thing. So the reason I bring all this up is that we live in a society that has a hard time having a compassionate perspective towards when people screw up their lives.

That’s why you see so much judgment, especially online. Even for the littlest things, it’s become like a. People feel some relief when they feel that others are less than them. It makes their lives look bigger and better.

A lot of envy. Trained people are literally programmed to have a perspective. They think this is their own thoughts. When you’re getting thousands of perspectives every week, if you’re on any sort of social media, if you’re hooked into any algorithm—the algorithm is designed to program—you take Internet addiction, porn addiction, gambling addiction. It’s a constant dopamine hit. There’s a great book by my friend Dr. Anna Lembke, an addiction doctor at Stanford who wrote a book called Dopamine Nation. 

Here’s what’s funny: the more I learn about marketing—I have spent over $2 million and three decades of my life studying marketing—the more I learn about addiction. The more I realize there are so many layers to it. Even though I know more than the average bear and have helped many people, I’m constantly trying to, like, “What do I not know? What else out there actually helps?” I believe that addiction is caused by two things: a response to trauma and a solution to pain. 

As long as I functionally manage my life, sleep, connect with others, be productive, not overwork, drink water, get sunshine, exercise, and eat healthy food, my life works. But if my life gets too stressful, I’m going to think about all of the things, like drinking this booze, eating this food, eating this sugar, start having euphoric recalls about sexual experiences that might feed the carnal desires of the brain, but they’re not healthy for you. I think addiction is a solution. Whereas a lot of people like the war on drugs, it’s not the drugs that are the problem. The drugs are actually the solution. The problem is the underlying trauma. Like let’s take opiates as an example.

In the United States, over 100,000 people a year are dying from opiate addictions. Most of those opiate addictions start with legal opioids, opiates, not people buying heroin on the streets or fentanyl. It’s actually many of these addicts who’re being prescribed these drugs. A lot of them aren’t even addicts. They were injured, they had surgery, and they got hooked on opiates. And then the availability of it or its overprescriptions. The first time I interviewed Bobby Kennedy Jr., he made this comment because RFK was a heroin addict for 14 years after his father was assassinated. From the age of 14 to 28, he was a heroin addict.

He’s now been in recovery this year. He’s been in recovery for 40 years. He’s gone to hundreds, thousands, probably of twelve-step groups. He said, “We have two Vietnams every year in America.” There were over 50,000 soldiers that were killed during Vietnam. He said, “We now have two of those in America every year. Every eleven days, we lose as many people from overdoses as we lost in 911. This is a massive problem.”

If you could imagine a 737 plane crashing every single day, that’s how many people are dying every day in America. If there was a plane crash every single day, you would hear nothing else. You’d hear politics, divisiveness, and everything, but it’d be everywhere. But you don’t hear about it. Why? Because there’s shame. They try to hide it. It’s a big problem. One of my things is that I want to take my marketing skills and hopefully utilize them in the area, and I shouldn’t say that because we’re working hard; we’re doing a lot of stuff.

My goal is to help change the global conversation about how people view and treat people with addiction with compassion instead of judgment, find the best forms of treatment that are efficacious, and share them with the world. One of the ways that I work on my recovery is by helping other people. People will say very nice things to me and say, you’re doing great work in recovery. I appreciate that because it feels good when people say nice things to you. It’s not because I’m some philanthropic angel. It actually helps me in my recovery. When you are in a position where you’re having difficulty, and you start being helpful to other people, and I hear incredibly sad stories almost daily. People share things with me because of my genius recovery and just what I do.

One of the ways that I work on my recovery is by helping other people.

Also, because of who you are, you emanate this nonjudgmental caring, like, “I’ve been there. I see you,” so people feel more open to talking to you and connecting with you. Then, you have to bear the burden of listening to all these sad stories. How do you set boundaries when you hear all the sad stories?

Certainly, I have not to internalize it. I have to listen and be present to the best of my abilities because sometimes I’m like, “Wow, that was really heavy.” It really can really weigh on you because I am pretty empathetic. I mean, I do feel the pain of other people, which is why I want to help, try to help people with pain. I hate seeing people in pain. I mean, even when I was in school if I saw someone sitting at lunch by themselves. I’d try to sit with them.

I was a super shy kid. That was difficult to do, and I was not a very physically strong kid, so I would get picked on a lot if I saw people who were fighting; unless I was going to get hurt or something, I would try to break up the fight. I don’t like seeing people hurt each other. And so there’s always been this thing: try to take away pain, try to interrupt pain. So, it does help me in a weird way; it gives me perspective because I tend to wake up and not feel very good. I have to work to feel gratitude. Not that I don’t, because I certainly do. Oftentimes, I can get caught up in it. “I want this. I want that.”

That side of me is like, “Oh, you know, I want to have all this cool stuff in my life, and I think I’m cool.” It helps center me; it helps give me the perspective of not letting the ego because it is necessary. The ego, if used in the right way, is a protective mechanism. It allows you not to get taken advantage of. Ego is used in the wrong way where you’re just thinking about yourself; you can just become an arrogant asshole. Doing the addiction recovery work really helps my recovery. I tell people all the time, if you think your life sucks or it does, let’s say you’re in a time where you’re just, things are not working. I mean, you’re not making any money, you’ve gone through a betrayal, you have people close to you that are dying, you’re dealing with some illness, you’re very depressed.

I’m trying to connect other people with ideas and with other relationships so that they can connect better with themselves.

If you can drag yourself into a children’s hospital, a homeless shelter, an animal shelter, if you can go volunteer, if you can go to a recovery center, if you can step foot in a twelve-step meeting, it is amazing how you instantly feel better when you put yourself of service helping other people that are having a difficult time in their life. Thank you for your nice words about the Genius Network and the environment. I learned that in recovery rooms, you can take people who have done pretty awful, and they become better human beings. If there’s an environment of people who share experience, strength, and hope and are trying to be helpful to each other, then it takes on a life of its own. So that’s all I try to do. I create a connection network because that’s what I’m about. If there’s one word that encapsulates what I’m trying to do, I’m trying to connect other people with ideas and with other relationships so that they can connect better with themselves because it’s really hard to connect with other people.

If you’re disconnected from yourself, like in my book, What’s In It For Them? Most people buy it because they want to learn. How do you meet people? What do you say? How do you develop relationships? How do you get to know the right people? How do you interact? And I do my best to deliver that. The underlying message is to connect with yourself because if you can become more connected with yourself, that’s how you connect with other people. And when I’m disconnected, my life is not working. My life is react. When I am connected, though, I’m responding, which is responding to life, responding with ability, and being responsible. And so that’s kind of what I do to the best of my ability.

You do it so well. I wish we had another 10 hours to dive into just that. There are so many topics that I want to talk to you about, and you have so much wisdom to share, and I just like, oh, I want to talk to you for longer and hear more and more. So, let’s dive into how to become a better connector. I’m really good with one or two people, like keeping a connection with one or two people, and I don’t know how to connect the way my husband connects. He’s a really good connector. He’s got files in his brain where he remembers everyone, and he knows how to connect everyone and bring them together. 

How can someone like me be more like you in a way that connects with more people and fuels that connection? Because I know there is a lot of work going into fueling that connection, which I don’t do. They didn’t text me for a year. I’m just going to forget about it, you know?

I have a dear friend who passed away. He spent half of his life in a wheelchair. He had all the trappings of material success. In the 1970s, when he was in his mid-thirties, he became a millionaire. He had a house in Huntington Beach. He was in great physical shape.

He told me that back in the seventies, you could jog down Huntington Beach, Manhattan Beach, and often, you barely see anyone else jogging.He was working out and lifting weights when lifting weights was not a big thing back in the seventies. There were a few bodybuilders like Arnold Schwarzenegger, Lou Ferengo, and those old-school guys. It wasn’t like a bunch of gyms and all that stuff. He had a weird accident that he got a spinal cord injury. He had pain in his back, by the time he had gotten home, he was in excruciating pain. They got him to the hospital, but they didn’t have the technology back then to fix the spinal cord injury.

He spent two years in a wheelchair, traveling around the world trying to find a surgeon. Anyone that could fix him was not able to do that. What ended up happening was his business partner stole most of his money, his girlfriend left him, and he was stuck paralyzed from the chest down. Never to be able to have sex again, never be able to walk again. In spite of that, he became such an amazing human. He spent most of his life studying spinal cord injuries and created a life extension foundation.

Helped a tremendous amount of people live better, healthier lives. Still continued to work out with a rowing-type machine. An incredible guy. The reason I bring him up is he wrote 100 Kekich’s Credos. One of the credos is that lasting happiness does not come from consuming values but producing values, and producing more than you consume is the only justification for existence. And so what my brain interprets that to mean is that who we are is who we are.

I can only do what I’m able to do and the skills I’m able to develop. You’re who you are. Going out and meeting a bunch of people may be good, but it may not be. Some people are wired to be extroverted. Like I’m an introvert who’s forced myself to put myself in situations that are uncomfortable. Most people think I’m an extrovert. Most people think I like going out and meeting a bunch of people because I have a lot of relationships.

But I’ll tell you, though, when I go to a cocktail party, it causes a tremendous amount of anxiety. Small talk with people that I don’t know. It is not comfortable. I do it.

Small talk is really boring to me.

I would rather move scared versus be frozen stiff.

I wouldn’t say it’s boring. This is difficult for me, like just chatting with people. But I have people who work for me and are infinitely more social than I am and who are really good. It doesn’t cause them any sort of anxiety. Now, all that being said, feelings are not facts. Just because you feel uncomfortable, or you feel like you’re a loser, or you feel like you’re a winner, or you feel like you’re confident, or you feel like you have no confidence, doesn’t actually mean that your life is working or not working. I mean, what it’s like, okay, you see an uncomfortable situation. So the thing is, you’re either moving scared, or you’re frozen stiff.

And so I would rather move scared versus be frozen stiff. And if I find myself getting locked up, it’s like, okay, just start talking to the person. Just say something. And the more you do it, the more comfortable you get. So the thing, though, where most people become uncomfortable with it is they get so caught up in how they think of themselves. Like, how do I look? How do people perceive me? And believe me, I’m not saying anything that I have not struggled with. I mean, the only reason I wrote, like, if you want to know what someone struggles with, what are they writing books about? What are they talking about? I mean, that’s why they do it. So I have a lot of my male friends, mostly male, some women, too, that they won’t go to a therapist, they won’t go to a twelve-step group, they won’t deal with the hard work.

And look, I know you and Stephan have done a tremendous amount out of work, so I can speak to you very much about the layer of an onion.

It never ends.

Exactly. And so a lot of my friends won’t do the work; what they do instead is they start a podcast. And that’s better than doing nothing, of course. But a lot of people only deal with the surface-level stuff. And I’ll say, look, read books. I mean, listen to things; there’s a tremendous amount. And if you’re still really struggling with something, get a mentor, get a therapist, get a coach, get someone who can push you. I mean, I know how to work out, but I pay a personal trainer.

Most of my workouts I do on my own because I’ve been doing it for many years, but I still pay a personal trainer a couple of times a week. And it is frick*ng hard because I will just put more intensity into my workout with someone who is pushing me than if I don’t. But there are also parts of my life where I don’t want someone screaming at me. My personal trainer has permission to make me uncomfortable. Other people, I’m not paying them to make me uncomfortable. I’m paying them to make me feel comfortable. So part of it is, what do you want to solve? Who do you want to meet, why do you want to meet them? And how do you show up with what’s in it for them? And so that is the key. The key for me is to focus on every human being.

When developing relationships and any skill, you have to work through the burn.

I’ve become more comfortable. It’s very hard for me at this stage to get so intimidated or starstruck. Not that there are certain people that I admire, but I want to make sure I make a good impression. I don’t get caught up in it, though, anymore, because I have sat in rooms with billionaires and famous people, and every human has some area of their life. I believe that they’re completely fucked up. They have a lot of pain; they’re lost, they’re broken. And in that brokenness and in that pain is where you can find connection and where you can find support. And so when I think of what’s in it for them, and I’m like, okay, how can I be most useful? See, a lot of people like, hey, let’s collaborate.

What they want to do is they want to do a joint venture. That’s not a collaboration. Collaboration is when you create or produce something together with someone that you couldn’t do without. That doesn’t mean. For a lot of people, there’s nothing wrong with pursuing opportunities. There’s a problem if you’re an opportunist; there’s nothing wrong with people utilizing you or utilizing other people. There’s a problem with using people or having people use you. And if you’re a giver, you’re going to meet takers.

And so, my whole approach is that I used to not only ignore red flags but also not notice the yellow flags. I didn’t even know there were yellow flags. So today, you got to get screwed, betrayed, taken advantage of, hurt, insulted, humiliated, and rejected in order to learn these skills. This is part of the deal. And so people are like, well, I want to avoid pain. Well, fucking life is filled with pain. Life is filled with struggle. And you’re going to be on top of the world some days, and you’re going to be down in the dumps at others.

So it’s that line of being nice to the people you meet on the way up. They’re the same people you’re going to meet on the way down. And so don’t burn bridges, don’t leave scorched earth. I wish I could just tell young people, do this, this, this, and this, and your life is going to work out. And I often say to young people that if I had known being successful is this much work, I would have stuck with being a loser because you have no idea the amount of lies and deception and mistakes and enthusiasms that were put into the wrong people. You made contributions that you tried to make, but you did it with people who didn’t appreciate you and then people who really loved and adored you and were sometimes the most caring people. You want to chase after the unavailable person because they’re unavailable.

And so today, I’m just kind of looking at things and saying, okay, what’s in it for them? Always lead first; lead with contribution first. And I test people. I’ll send them books, I’ll send them articles, I’ll give them compliments, I’ll be nice, sincere compliments. So there’s a big difference between just going and saying something to somebody just to curry favor. So when you’re pursuing growth, I think your life will get better. And oftentimes, growth, like in a workout, you have to work through the burn. If someone’s not worked out for six months or a year and you start lifting weights all of a sudden, you’re going to be sore as hell the next day. The reason most people don’t continue to exercise is they don’t want to work through the burn.

You don’t build a great reputation by talking about what you’re going to do; it’s by actually doing something.

So, when developing relationships and any skill, you have to work through the burn. But once you do it, you start getting better. It’s not that the weights got lighter; you got stronger. It’s not that the uncomfortable, anxiety-provoking situation of asking somebody out on a date or asking someone to sit down with you and go through a business proposition or whatever is difficult. You just get better at it. And you get better at it by doing the reps. You can read about it and listen to podcasts about it, but it’s not until you get out in the real world and talk with real humans and connect. All humans, I believe, except the sociopaths, the psychopaths and the full-blown damaged narcissists.

And they’re out there. Most humans, almost all of them, want connection. They question deep down inside, am I lovable? Do I matter? And so if you’re coming from that place, it’s okay if people reject you. My friend Sean Stephenson, who was my best friend, unfortunately, passed away; he had this line that rejection is God’s protection. And it used to annoy me when he would say that. Now I look back and say, “Look, even if you’re an atheist.” However you want to interpret it, rejection is God’s protection. There are people who will reject you, not because they are rejecting you as a human; they’re rejecting whatever you’re showing up with. Either they’re not ready for it, or it’s not a right fit.

I have a bunch of strategies in my book. One of the best though is to start with the question, what’s in it for them? If you show up knowing something about the person, what matters to them? And if you don’t know, ask them.

For me, something that you said that really resonated with me today is basically feeling the fear and doing it anyway. And I love everything you said about rejection because I love to have my life soft and cushiony. And right now, I’m going through a big challenge in my life, and it’s a big shift, and I keep complaining to myself about it, and I’m like, no, wait for a second, this, like when it’s comfortable, nothing changes in your life. When you’re in your comfortable home, comfortable environment, nothing changes. Everything changes, and everything grows, and everything expands. When there is a shift happening, when you’re dealing with being uncomfortable, when you’re getting out of your comfort zone, you have to grow. It’s almost like your words came at the perfect time, just for me specifically, and I’m sure for everyone who is listening because you were covering so much good stuff. And one last question, and then one more last question.

As the brilliant marketer that you are, what can bring this podcast to a million subscribers?

Well, I guess a couple of things. One, you could pay to have it reach a bunch of people, but to get the ones that would really listen to it and resonate with it, that would be to keep doing it. So, for instance, I would venture to say the reason that you’re doing the podcast is that it is probably outside of your comfort zone to ask people questions about all that sort of stuff. And the more you do it, the more comfortable you’re going to be, the better you’re going to get, right? So keep doing the reps. That’s how you do it. You just keep at it. You don’t build a great reputation by talking about what you’re going to do. You build a great reputation by actually doing something.

The Man in the Arena by Theodore Roosevelt, have you ever read that? If someone listening to this is not, just do a search online and read Theodore Roosevelt’s little speech of the man in the arena. It’s fantastic. It’s the person that’s in there doing it every day. That’s one way to do it. The other is to figure out all the different things that we have said in this podcast or in any of the podcasts that you want people to listen to. My friend Dean Jackson, with whom I do the I Love Marketing podcast, has this great line. A compelling offer is ten times more powerful than a convincing argument.

Being able to present things in a way that is compelling for the listener. If they haven’t heard the podcast, what do they need to hear about it that’s going to compel them to want to listen to it? If there was an easy way, as a marketer, to just say to every person that had a business, here’s a compelling offer, then I wouldn’t be able to make any money in the marketing business, right? Because that’s something that requires introspection. It requires you to really think through the messaging of what you’re doing. It’s like, who are the people that are most likely to identify with this? But who are the people who will look at you and be like, “She knows what’s in it for me,” where you’re able to frame what is being said here, and you can share? Listen to this and think of my consumer guide to carpet cleaning. I had to figure out how to successfully sell something nobody wanted to buy. No one wakes up and says, I hope the cat pisses in the corner today so I can call a carpet cleaner. I hope my husband spills his coffee so we can call a carpet cleaner.

I can’t wait for my kids to go back to school so I can call a carpet cleaner. Maybe they want. But the fact is, I had to figure out how to sell something successfully that nobody wanted to buy. So when we have to figure out how to get people to listen to our stuff, consume our products, buy our stuff. For one, you just find the bait that the fish are going to bite at because only the hungriest fish are going to snap the crappiest bait. And the better we get, and the more skilled we get, the better the stuff becomes. I love watching comedians that are famous today, their very first comedy shows, compared to who they are. And you see just the evolution of skill, like Jerry Seinfeld. If you watch old Jerry Seinfeld.

The book by Cal Newport. Do you know who I’ve interviewed before for my podcast? One of his very first books. He’s written a bunch of books, but one of his very first books was called So Good They Can’t Ignore You. That was a quote from the comedian Steve Martin. His whole key is, how do you become a great comedian? He’s like, “You got to be so good they can’t ignore you.” That is the key to keep at it to where you just become so good out of this podcast, as an example, to get a million people.

If you were tasked, why would I object to you having a million people listening to a podcast that I’m on? That would be a good PR for me. If you went through this whole frick*n podcast that we just recorded everything that we said, there’s probably only a couple of things that I’ve said that was probably better than if you had to compare what people would find interesting or a good quote or a good insight, or a good marketing strategy, or something valuable, or something I said about addiction recovery, or the definition of intimacy, or difference between sales and marketing. I’m trying to think of stuff or the jet ski story that I told.

There’s a variety of things that are little vignettes.

But, Joe, it’s not what you say. It’s how you say it.

No, absolutely.

There’s a lot of value in everything that you said, and there are so many, even in the things that were said before, like you said, in a completely different way and really resonates.

No, thank you.

What you were trying to say? Let’s keep going.

No, you’re right. In terms of it, it isn’t what you say; it’s how you say it. And it’s weird, too, because I don’t sit and think of myself as being very articulate. I say, um. and, ah, I pause. I don’t use proper English. I don’t have a lot of expansive world knowledge. I have this funny line that I got from Gary Halbert.

When God was dolling out brains, I got about 98% of my brains on how to design marketing campaigns and the other 2% on how to run the rest of my life. And so there’s only a handful of things that I’m pretty good at and that I produce results with. But iif someone is developing a relationship with someone, you’re absolutely right. You can feel who cares about you and who’s just trying to pull the wool over your eyes. And not to naive people. That’s one of the unfortunate things. There’s a difference between being a connector and a connector.

The unfortunate thing about being a giver is it’s a matter of when you will be taken advantage of.

A conductor is someone who conns people by pretending or acting like they care about them. That’s where you see a lot of politicians and people who are at very high levels in society. That they could give a rat’s a** about the people, but they’re just bulls**t artists. When you are able to feel authentically the energy of someone, that usually comes from being skilled in just being able to pick up on who someone is; it’s not what they say; it’s how they say it. And so there’s definitely that. And I think every human is a giver because, like one of the things that I hope, I want to help protect the givers of the world from the takers by creating better boundaries for themselves. Because if you are a giver, the unfortunate thing about being a giver is it’s not a matter of if; it’s a matter of when you will be taken advantage of. Frankly, most people end up finding things like my book and things like that after they have been taken advantage of and have gotten so frustrated. They’re like, you know what? I work my ass off.

I’m a caring person. How do I do this better? So there’s that great Zig Ziglar line. It says you can get anything you want in life if you help enough other people get what they want. I’ve talked about that, and I’ll say that again: You can get anything you want in life. You help enough other people get what they want, but only if you pick the right people, like How to Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie. Amazing book. I mean, I highly recommend everyone read that book.

I would not have written my book had it not been for that book. And it’s not just about how to win friends and influence people; it’s about winning the right friends and influencing the right people. So, part of it is like chapter two, I talk about Tammy. Time, attention, money, effort and energy. Those are what we can spend. We can spend our time, we can spend our attention, we can spend our money, we can spend our effort, we can spend our energy. Don’t waste your Tammy on people that you’re not aligned with. Don’t waste your energy on people who clearly show you that they don’t care and are not interested.

And also, I’d say this to people, too. What is the type of person you would always answer the phone for? And if you think about the relationships in your life where someone calls you on the phone or texts you or however they reach out to you, you get a feeling of who. Because what people want is more woo and less ah all day long, we’re like, “Who ah. Woo ah. We pursue woo, and we try to avoid ah.” Some people represent woo and excitement. Other people are like, ah.

And I was like, “Do a test for the next ten people. Today, tomorrow, whatever. How do you feel when you see their name come across the screen of your phone? Or if you run into them and you’re feeling like, see, because we’re either in communication or we’re trying to escape.” That’s how we interact with other people. We’re either in communication with them, or you’re trying to escape. And whenever you’re trying to escape, it’s either the person represents, like, they’re a taker, or there’s something that’s off, or there’s something internally with ourselves that you just don’t feel comfortable with for some reason. So even people that want to connect with you and would be good to connect with, it’s difficult because there’s some sort of internal dialogue or some internal turmoil or something internal. And so, with being the type of person you always want to answer the phone for, the people that we like and admire are usually people who have a give that’s greater than their take.

Like, and I’ll say to people as a warning, if you owe somebody money and they call you up and they’re like, and you’re like, “Whoa, they’re not the jerk.” You need to pay them back the money you owe them. And so it’s one of these things to which I am constantly looking. There’s this Abraham Lincoln line that he’s credited with, which is like, I don’t like that person. I need to get to know them better. I think that’s how it’s said. And there are people that rub me the wrong way, and there are people that I rub the wrong way. And if you get to know most people just a little bit more, you get underneath their pain, you get underneath their struggle. You actually like the people.

Now, there are some people. The more I get to know them, the more I actually don’t like them because of a difference of values and opinions, or I think they’re abusive, or I think they’re psychopaths or sociopaths. But for the most part, most humans are just trying to get along. And so part of it is just feeling in the gut. And you’re really good at this. I mean, you’re really good at this. You’re a very empathetic human. And so you just say, okay, what is it about that person that they represent? So, the million followers, the ten, are all part of a domino effect.

If you owe somebody money, you need to pay them back what you owe them.

You just keep building upon the people that you want to connect with. Through that connection and that deeper connection, you develop a reputation, and the more people know about you. Also, what’s weird is that I don’t like fame. There’s a side of me that wants people to like me. I want people to think I’m cool. But I also know that that’s a total ego status pursuit. So, if I focus on status, my life is more empty than if I focus on growth. So people are like, one of the things we’re doing.

Then I’ll wrap this up. We’re putting physical recovery kits in pharmacies all over America in September of this year. It’s like a first aid kit for recovery, for Genius Recovery. It’s going to be a companion to a recovery program. It’s going to help mostly family members and people who have loved ones who are struggling with addiction. We’re going to sell it for the lowest possible price we can in order to produce it and put it in stores. I don’t care about making money off of it. It’s actually for Genius Recovery.

We have recoverykit.com, and we haven’t put these out yet, though, at the time that we’re having this conversation. Part of it is there’s a term that I like called cruel optimism, and I can’t remember the name of the lady who came up with it. But there’s a lot of cruel optimism in the world where they make it sound like it’s so easy to get rich, it’s so easy to lose weight. And when you go out into the world and try to make it sound like it’s easier to do than it actually is, it’s cruel optimism because you get people, hopefully, but then they’re left empty, and hope heals. If done in the right context, hope could be very damaging if you give people false hope. So part of it is walking through the world, exaggerating or lying or doing stuff. If you do that for even short periods of time, you stay consistent with that. People tend to like you, people tend to respect you, and people tend to appreciate you.

Our goal is to save 20,000 lives a year of the 100,000 plus people that are dying. But I can’t just say save 20,000 lives a year. You first got to start with one person, then you got to do five, then you got to do ten. You have to create something that works. And then when you do, it perpetuates, it grows, as does your reputation. Education is painfully slow. Even though we can do amazing things with AI, there’s a lot we can do. We want to be really connected with real humans.

The best way to learn how to connect with other people is to cut the amount of online shopping you do.

The best way, I think, to learn how to connect with other people is to cut the amount of online shopping you do. Even though it’s a pain in the ass, cut it in half. Go to stores, talk to people, don’t do the self-checkout in the store, and talk to an actual person. We should be around humans because we are more connected than we’ve ever been before in human history, electronically and digitally, but we’re more disconnected as humans. So have a pet, have a dog, go meet with people, be in groups, and interact. And, man, if people do that, not only do I think you can reach a hell of a lot more people in an authentic way, but you just feel better as a human. Right?

And when people have healthy connections, then it’s much harder to deal with any addiction or even look for an addiction as a solution if you have deep connections with people and with yourself. Absolutely. Joe, I really appreciate you. You’re amazing. Thank you for taking the time to be here and the extra time to be here and sharing everything that you shared and from your heart and just being the magnificent human being that you are.

You’re totally welcome. Thank you for being awesome.

Where can people find you and get the books and all that good stuff?

Well, there’s a bunch of places you can just type in my name on Joe Polish. Go to joesfreebook.com. you can download a copy of Life Gives to the Giver. You can also see my three a week emails that I send out. You can decide to get those or not. They’re not pitches, they’re just really good, useful emails. We try to bond with people. My book is really good, Life Gives To The Giver. That’s a free book. If you want to get my latest book, What’s In It For Them? 

Joepolish.com is my main website. If someone’s struggling with addiction or you yourself have an addiction, we have a great blog geniusrecovery.org, and you can find links to meeting videos with all kinds of world-class addiction experts like Gabor Mate and different people that I’ve interviewed. It’s an educational platform, and they will soon have recovery kits that you can also see at Genius Recovery. That’s how you follow me.

Joe’s Free Book, I think, is the best place because people can immediately just start reading the book. It’s short chapters, and they’re really good. If you don’t like that book, then you probably won’t like the other stuff.

I do. Thank you so much.

You’re welcome. Thank you.

Your Checklist of Actions to Take

{✓}Acknowledge feelings of discomfort, but don’t let them hold you back. Embrace the fact that personal growth happens outside your comfort zone. Take action despite the fear.

{✓}Invest in your personal development by seeking out mentors and therapists who can guide you on your journey. Never stop learning and growing, even after achieving success.

{✓}Focus on contributing value to others and building authentic relationships based on mutual benefit. Lead with a giving mindset and create meaningful connections.

{✓}Don’t fear rejection; instead, view it as an inevitable part of the process. Keep putting yourself out there, refining your approach, and learning from each experience.

{✓}Surround yourself with uplifting individuals who bring out the best in you. Avoid energy-draining people and situations that hinder your growth and well-being.

{✓}Operate your business with integrity and intention. Strive to be useful, valuable, and ethical in all your dealings. Focus on creating an E.L.F. business: easy, lucrative, and fun.

{✓}Be empathetic and caring, but set limits to avoid taking on others’ burdens. Prioritize self-care and maintain perspective to prevent burnout and emotional exhaustion.

{✓}Seize opportunities that align with your values and goals, but don’t be opportunistic at the expense of others. Embrace the challenges and struggles that come with growth and learning.

{✓}Focus on creating irresistible offers that speak directly to your target audience’s needs and desires. Communicate authentically and effectively, emphasizing the value you provide.

{✓}Visit Joe Polish’s website at joepolish.com and download his free book, Life Gives to the Giver. This book serves as a great introduction to Joe’s work and philosophy.

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About Joe Polish

Joe Polish is the Founder of Genius Network, one of the highest-level groups in the world for Entrepreneurs. He curates the Annual Genius Network Event, Genius Network ($25,000), and GeniusX ($100,000), all three groups being home to some of the most successful Entrepreneurs alive, and is considered one of the most influential Connectors in the world.

Joe has also helped build thousands of businesses and generated hundreds of millions of dollars for his clients. He has been featured in INC, Fortune, Forbes, Success, U.S. News & World Report, and has spoken at Stanford University. Joe also hosts three of the top-ranked marketing and business podcasts on iTunes, including iLoveMarketing, 10xTalk, and GeniusNetwork. He’s also changed the lives of many others through his charitable causes including: The Make-A-Wish Foundation, Artists For Addicts, Genius Recovery, JoeVolunteer.com, as well as being the single largest contributor to Sir Richard Branson’s charity, Virgin Unite.

His documentary “CONNECTED: The Joe Polish Story” premiered at the historic TCL Chinese Theatre (formerly Mann’s Chinese Theatre), and his documentary “Black Star” won the Audience Choice Award at the Sedona Film Festival. Joe’s mission with Entrepreneurs and Genius Network is “to build a better entrepreneur,” and his mission with Genius Recovery is “to change the global conversation of how people view and treat addicts with compassion, instead of judgment and to find the best forms of treatment that has efficacy and share those with the world.”

Disclaimer: The medical, fitness, psychological, mindset, lifestyle, and nutritional information provided on this website and through any materials, downloads, videos, webinars, podcasts, or emails are not intended to be a substitute for professional medical/fitness/nutritional advice, diagnoses, or treatment. Always seek the help of your physician, psychologist, psychiatrist, therapist, certified trainer, or dietitian with any questions regarding starting any new programs or treatments or stopping any current programs or treatments. This website is for information purposes only, and the creators and editors, including Orion Talmay, accept no liability for any injury or illness arising out of the use of the material contained herein, and make no warranty, express or implied, with respect to the contents of this website and affiliated materials.