Living Life Living Business | Mastering Your Start-Up in Edmonton
Why Bruce Built This Program
Hey guys, welcome. My name is Bruce, and I am so thrilled that you are here today. You’ve invested time. You invested money into this program, Living Your Life, Living Your Business.
First things first, why the heck do I call it Living Your Life and Living Your Business? Because really, you can’t live your life without having a business, and you certainly can’t have your business if you’re not living your life.
I designed this program for two reasons. One, I want to tell you how I got to this point in my life. This point meaning I have a great wife, a kid, I’ve got a great business, but it doesn’t come that way. It didn’t start that way.
And there were a couple of significant things that I missed out on. I wasn’t taught. I wasn’t prepared for in terms of building my life and subsequently building my business.
So I want to share those pieces with you, and I want to design and build this program and work through this program with you with that in mind.
I can guarantee you, I may speak with a different accent. I’m in my basement right now where it all started in the first place, and I want to take you back a little bit to tell you what prompted me to build the program the way I’ve built it and almost flawless opportunity.
You know, I’m talking about three steps that you could take, whether you are starting a business for the first time, maybe you did the business before, you tried the whole thing, it didn’t work as best as you hoped it would, and you want to start off again, but you want to start off correctly.
Or let me say you want to start off better. Just remember, you failed once. That’s probably the best investment in your education you’ll ever get.
So failure, we’re also going to talk about, it’s not a bad thing. Failure is an awesome thing, and I’ll tell you a little bit more about that as we work forward.
So what is this? What does this program look like?
Starting With You Before The Business Mechanics
Where The Program Begins
Well, first of all, we’re going to start off with what you likely won’t get in other programs, is starting off with you.
Why you? Again, I want to just give you a little bit of a brief history about where I came from and why you or the concept of you is so critical for success.
When you look at so much business failure, so much small business failure, these businesses don’t fail primarily because, you know, they don’t know what a profit and loss statement is. They don’t know what logistics are. They don’t know what systems are, etc., etc.
If you are an average to above average intelligent human being like I am, I can promise you now you’re absolutely fine intellectually moving forward with growing a business and growing a business very successfully.
The difference is is you’ve got to really understand where you are at in your life right now and how you have ultimately constructed yourself, what you’ve built in terms of who you are today, failure and success, and start there and make very sure that you are positioned in a way that can drive you to the next level, whatever that next level may be in your life.
So where does it all start? Starts with you, as I’ve said. That’s going to be primarily the first part of this program.
And then we’re going to move over to the more, like I call in the program, nuts and bolts, the technical related stuff. So we’ll move there and we’ll put some stuff in action.
But first and foremost, we’ve got to put you into action.
Now you may be asking, well, Bruce, I’m already in action. I’m yeah, aren’t I? I’m starting this great business. I’m excited. I’m yeah, this is going to be me. But I want to do it properly. I want to make sure I succeed.
And I can guarantee you that putting yourself, immersing yourself into all of this, you’re going to succeed.
Why? Because I’ve been around this blog so many times, and newsflash, human beings are not all that different. We are pretty much all the same. Whether we speak with a weird accent or whether we don’t, at the end of the day, we are all the same, pretty much, right?
So I want to share that with you. And like I said, once we have done that, once we’ve focused on the u part, we’re gonna then move on to the nuts and bolts mechanics, the systems, the technical secrets that frankly not many people teach and certainly not many people teach the way it needs to be taught.
So anyways, let me get off my little soap dish there.
So what can we expect? Well, that’s there. It’s a mixture between you driving yourself through this program, but also you and I actually engaging one-on-one, right?
The program is not just there virtually for you to make your way through it when you get time to make your way through it. But I want to put my money where my mouth is, and I want you to do the exact same thing.
In this program, there are exercises. There are worksheets. All the fancy cool looking stuff, but they mean absolutely nothing if you don’t take the time to actually listen and think about what’s being taught and applying it.
When you apply it, it’s good to have someone partnering with you, an accountability buddy, if you will. I want to be there for you.
So where you have the opportunity through your journey through this training to take full advantage of that, I want you to do something, right?
As you can see, I’m not a very stern looking scary human being. I’ve got this gray Santa Claus beard that’s probably not as long, but nonetheless I have these Vulcan, if you know what Star Trek is, I have these Vulcan ears as you can see, very very prominent ears.
So other than that, I’m not a really scary person. In actual fact, connect with me and as they say, I’ll make you famous. I promise you that.
So now let me tell you what prompted me to want to share all this great information with you and what makes me excited is to see you succeed as a result of it.
Success Comes From Failure
Bruce’s Story And The First Breakthrough
It started off, you know, and I’m not going to get into a soppy story, and I’m certainly not going to put any sad music in the background because I want to come across being authentic and let you know that this is not an effect.
This is not a way for you to sympathize or empathize or feel sorry for. I want this to be a lesson to you if you haven’t been through something similar, but still I want you to know that success doesn’t come as a result of you being brilliant, right?
Lots of brilliant people in the world, but they’re not successful. Success doesn’t come from, you know, knowing something. Lots of people know lots of things, but it doesn’t mean that they are successful or they implement or produce value by virtue of them knowing these things.
Success comes from failure.
And only that, it comes from failure. And frankly, the only reason you and I stand here today is because we failed. That’s it.
The difference is, I want you to think about this. How do you interpret failure? How do you see failure? How do you deal with failure?
If you were like me when I started off thinking about my abilities, thinking about my traction, what I gained in life, etc, if I was successful or unsuccessful or failure, that’s where it all started for me.
And you know, it came very close to me not wanting to continue, but I pushed forward and I pushed forward.
But I realized something that I want to share with you.
So when it all started very very quickly, I had one of those childhoods. I’m not going to get into too much detail, but at the end of the day, let’s put it this way, I had to grow up very quickly.
I had to fend for myself pretty quickly. I had an amazing grandfather that broke me up, not around today, but nonetheless brought me up in an environment that was incredibly chaotic, full of dispute sort of conflict.
And lo and behold, I was one of the few male teenagers that ended up with my very first mental health condition called anorexia.
For those who don’t know what anorexia is, well you just decide to stop eating, and the rest is history. I managed to survive that, thank goodness.
Move forward into my primary early early adulthood where I hit an absolute wall, and unfortunately this wall meant that I was sitting thinking to myself how much of a failure I was, you know, thinking about putting a gun against my head and saying, you know what, I’m useless.
I’ve achieved nothing, even though I had achieved much. I finished a master’s degree in organizational psychology, industrial psychology.
I had the most, I still have the most amazing wife, amazing lady that I could have ever wanted, ever been with, known since grade school.
Heck, I had a lot of good things going for me. Why on earth would I be sitting down? I remember sitting on the sidewalk thinking that I wanted to be done.
I wanted to switch everything off. I had no value that I was contributing to anybody else. No, certainly no value to myself.
And then something dawned on me at that point in time, and it it really came from a place where I said, well, if I’m not going to do myself in in any way, well then what I probably want to do is think about if what I have right now, what I’ve built to date, I couldn’t have been more than about 23, I think what I built to date, maybe that is enough.
Maybe that would be enough, and that pushed me into a place where I had to, you know, consciously see what gains I made or I had made, and be very aware of those gains and see if that would be enough.
And what absolutely blew me away was how much I’d actually created. How much I not just created in terms of skill set and knowledge, I mean I had an advanced degree.
I mean what else? I mean come on, master’s degree, all those cool numbers looks in letters, quite frankly it looks pretty cool. But you know what else would I have needed?
What I was missing was actually acknowledging who I was and what I was equipped with emotionally and intellectually to do and to be able to achieve at that point in my life.
You know it’s like the survivalist from Mount Everest, for instance. I don’t celebrate only when they get to the peak. They celebrate when they get to their first substation, the next substation, and the next, and the next.
Why? Because the very first substation creates a foundation for you to move on to the next one. Same thing with me.
It certainly brought me out of my funk. It certainly drove me towards being a lot more of a spiritual person, but more importantly, and this is not about spirituality, this is more about my story, but it got me to drive myself in a different direction.
Now that was the first wall I hit, but also the first breakthrough I had.
And over about a span of about 10 to 12 years, I achieved a significant amount from a corporate standpoint. I became an executive director for a multinational company, you know, early in my late 20s elect 20s early 30s, I run about there.
And life was awesome, but what I was doing I was slowly but surely, as most of us do, slowly but surely forgetting one of the probably the biggest lesson and subsequent breakthrough I had learnt in my life.
Building Yourself Before Building The Business
Simplicity, Sophistication, And The Next Step
About 12, 13 years later, guess what? I’m back again, back hitting this wall, and this was probably been about 15 years now, but probably I was in a position where again, not just hitting a similar wall I did 15 years ago, but this wall and the force of me hitting it was far more amplified, far more devastating.
And luckily I got through it. Lucky there was a breakthrough which has brought me to today, where I’ve got the privilege and, you know, I certainly feel it’s a privilege to be breathing, to be standing here in front of you, and hopefully have constructed something of significant value for you and your business, your life in general, and the people around you.
But nonetheless, I hit this wall, and it was to a point where yeah, it just wasn’t worth continuing.
And why this time was a far more productive, even though hell on earth when I’d hit it, why this was far more productive and far more beneficial was because I had the opportunity to compare myself, once I remembered where I was 15 years ago and what I’d actually achieved by that.
I had the opportunity to compare where I was today, what I was thinking then, and what I actually achieved by doing what I did then, and seeing that once I stopped being conscious or aware of what my goals and objectives were, the traction that I was making or the gains that I was making, and not being aware of that actually is an absolute poison.
It is so easy for us people, humans, especially entrepreneurs, high achieving people, that, you know, we tend to forget what has brought us here in the first place.
And when we forget those wins, we’re in crisis. And I had the opportunity to see putting it in place and succeeding, forgetting about it, realizing thank goodness, realizing that I had to put that same perspective in place and went back this time obviously an older person in terms of yours, a lot more experience, a lot more failures that I could talk about.
And you’ll notice that those, when I say failures, that is not a bad thing for me. That is something that has brought me success and has brought me to where I’m at today.
And so I’ve got both sides.
The last thing I want to say to you folks is, as I said in the beginning, it starts with you and it ends with you.
This program is not here to teach you, you know, or to take you through a masters of business administration or an MBA. This is, and please don’t get me wrong, MBAs are awesome. Many MBAs are great.
But the message I want to send you, the feeling I want to give you in terms of your journey through this process, is one of simplicity yet sophistication, and there is a fine line between sophistication and complexity.
Complexity, folks, you and me, between us and this program, is the enemy of simplicity and sophistication.
You are worthless. You are going to kill this, and I want you to take this opportunity to enjoy yourself, learn as much as you can, not so much about the mechanics, and we’ll get into the mechanics, but learn as much as you can about building yourself.
We’ll start off with rethinking about who you are, shaping that, preparing yourself, whether you’ve started the business or not, and making sure you are in incredible shape to start talking about the technical components of building the business successfully and making sure that you are going to be successful.
I wish you all the best. I look forward to hopefully talking with you in person. Please take advantage of that.
Thank you for listening to me. Thank you for investing in yourself, and it’s an absolute privilege and honor to take you through this and exciting to see you be incredibly successful.
Thank you.