Disclaimer: The Transcript Is Auto Generated And May Contain Spelling And Grammar Errors
Intro: 00:00 From ABC News Radio, KIBT 1490 in Southern California, this is BizNinja Entrepreneur Radio, with your host, Tyler Jorgenson.
Tyler: 00:15 Welcome out to BizNinja Entrepreneur Radio. I am really excited today to have a special guest, Josh Forti on. Because Josh and I have set a world record together back in 2017 at an event with Russell Brunson and Gary Vaynerchuk. We set a record for soccer. I don’t often tell people it’s bubble soccer. But we set a record and I remember when Josh came up and he talked, you asked a question to Gary V and I realize, man, this guy, he’s got a big path ahead of himself. So I’m excited to talk about that path, about what’s happened since then and about where you see yourself going. So welcome out to the show, Josh.
Josh: 00:54 Hey man, Tyler, thanks so much for having me on here. I super appreciate it. That was a fun day, man. That was so, that was so fun. It really was.
Tyler: 01:01 Not only did you attack one of, like your digital mentors, favorite football team, but we also had a ton of fun. And so let’s talk a little bit about where you were there, where you’re at now, and where you see yourself going. So let’s go backwards. Let’s peel back the layers, right? So I remember that day you rocked up, you’re wearing a suit and you talked about some really big numbers, what was going on in 2017 and up to like 2018. What were you doing? And I think you kind of, you hit a big obstacle in your growth, right? And in your business.
Josh: 01:32 Yeah. So, I think that was like the end of September was when the Gary Vaynerchuk, Russell Brunson, like a van for the viral video was, and I was at the height of trying to grow my personal brand. I was in the middle of streaming my 365 days to seven figures. I was, you know, on that path to going down that. And from a business revenue standpoint, I was doing well, but that was about the only thing that I was doing well. But I would say around a dozen, I don’t think it was exactly a dozen. It goes more like 10 but around that give or take high paying clients that were paying me in the digital marketing space as well as you know, selling courses and kind of things that nature. We were doing anywhere from 30,000 a month on the super low end to like 60 65,000 I think my high month was like 68,000 I say we, it was just me, $68,000 on the high end.
Josh: 02:22 So like, that was good. Like I was 23 at the time, almost 24. I had made about a quarter million dollars a year that year. Like I felt like I was balling. The only problem was that I was working for 18 hours a day, seven days a week. I could not escape the trap of it. Like I was stuck. And so that event happens. I tried to rose, Gary Vaynerchuk, he rose to me and um, you know, I get put everywhere, which is awesome. But uh, you know, fast forward like a month or two, it was end of November timeframe. I remember sitting there thinking, I know that something has to break, right? Like I know I cannot keep up at this level. I have worked so hard for so long cause like, and we don’t have time to go into the backstory, but like I’ve been working that hard in that long for like three years.
Josh: 03:10 Like non exaggeratory. I can’t remember the last time I had worked for less than 12 hours a day, you know, six or seven days a week. So I was physically, mentally everything exhausted. But when you’re making that kind of money and you’re 23 years old, you think you can just conquer the world and you can just buy your way out of your problems. So for me, I was, you know, flying everywhere, trying to keep the high up, play the part, you know, do everything. I was going to move to Chicago to this right below the penthouse apartment. You know, like everything I was doing. I wouldn’t say heavy drugs at that point, but I certainly wasn’t sober when it came to that. Like trying to keep myself, anything that I could drinking, you know, all the monsters and Aderal and everything just to keep myself awake, right? And then like, yeah, that, I mean that’s where I was and I remember like I said it in November thinking something’s got to break and it was like two months later that it actually did
Tyler: 04:00 So describe that to us. So you, you’re running at this absolute like trying to maintain this unsustainable peak performance because it’s not sustained through balance and sustained through coping. Right. And you’re, you’re serving clients, so you have a fiduciary duty. Do these people who you’re taking, right, and you’re running and you’re getting towards the end of the year and you just know, like, what, what were you feeling at that time as you started to hit that kind of get to that point and then
Josh: 04:28 what happened? Yeah, so it’s like delusional, I won’t call it optimism cause I wasn’t exactly a happy person, but like I felt like I had a part to play, right. And my whole life, I have been told I wasn’t going to make it and that, uh, you know, that my dreams were, you know, basically a joke, right? And so here I am spending a ridiculous amount of money per month but also making money, right? So it’s kind of balanced it out. And I went to funnel hacking live 2018 so my birthday is February 1st I think funnel hacking live was like, end of February. So I would have just turned 24 and I remember, like sitting there on stage and I had spoken, so I spoke at the pre funnel hacking live mastermind with James Smiley and Steve Larsen, right? So like we’re there, I’m up on stage talking, chatting.
Josh: 05:15 I don’t know how many people were in the room, whatever, 30 40 50 people that are paid, you know, 500 bucks to be in the room. And I go to funnel hacking live and I see everybody up on stage right there. Natalie Hudson is the Russell Brunson’s, the Alex Sharpens or whatever. And Dude, I remember like literally sitting there in the audience just feeling like crap. Like thinking, I don’t know how they did it. Dude, I can’t do it. There’s no way I will ever get there. And it was, it is a weird feeling because like, I feel like when you go into a state like that in the mood that I’m in, like that’s what it’s going to do to you. And it’s not meant to do that. It’s meant to inspire. It’s meant to go and like encourage people to go to these great things. But like when you’re in the position that I’m in, like, dude, I didn’t that I could possibly do any more than I could.
Josh: 05:59 I was exhausted in every sense of the word ever. And so I got done with funnel hacking live, was super depressed, met some really awesome people there. In fact, that’s where I met you the first time, like in person and uh, you know, sat there. We were doing great. I mean, like I said, from a business standpoint, we were doing great numbers, but I just couldn’t keep up with it. So I went, I flew to Chicago, I did a speaking gig there. I was going to sign it in an apartment but didn’t. And I flew home to Omaha, Nebraska where I was living and I remember waking up, well I was actually the night before when it all like would all came crashing down. I remember like standing out in the porch and like looking up at this guy and being like, God, I think I’ve hit it.
Josh: 06:39 I don’t think I can do it anymore. It’s got to stop. Like what do I do? And I went to bed, I woke up and the next morning like I just broke dude. Like I went, I wrap myself in a blanket. I went and I laid on my living room floor and I just cried and cried and cried and was like, like, I can’t do it anymore. And so in a matter of like, three days, I went from, you know, doing 60 70,000 or 50,000 whatever that number was. I don’t remember the exact number on too. It’s like nothing like less than $3,000 a month that has, I have recurring revenues through click funnels and different affiliate stuff. But like it was less than three grand a month. I canceled basically every client and went from peak point to nothing and it was six days I spent in bed and the only time that I got out of bed was to eat once a day and use the restroom.
Josh: 07:29 That was it. And during that time as I sat there, I was like, okay, I don’t know what’s next. Like I have no idea where I go from here. Keep in mind, no one knew. Not My best friend, not my parents, nobody online. No one knew this. I did not tell a single soul that this was happening. I wasn’t in a relationship at the time. So I’m dealing with this all by myself. No one knows and I’ve never been suicidal and I don’t like to even go to that point because I don’t know what that’s like. But in that moment I understood why people got to that point because it was like such lack of hope. Right. And I remember sitting there going, if mindset is the answer, like all the gurus tell me like, you know, like the successful people, all successes in mindset, it’s a mindset.
Josh: 08:16 Then clearly I have no idea what mindset is because right now I am broken. I feel hopeless, right? Like I had no idea what to do. And so that’s when I made a commitment like, you know, six days in I was like, all right, when I inevitably finally get back on my feet, whenever that is, I’m going to study the mind. And that’s what it did to 18 months ago is when that happened, end of February.
Tyler: 08:39 So what’s fascinating, I think that’s really interesting. I’m gonna pack a few pieces of this. When I went to funnel hacking live 2016 I had kind of that big emotional experience right where I’m sitting there. I had been invited by a good friend who had gone to the first one and you know, you told me how amazing
Tyler: 08:56 it was and I’m going there thinking it’s going to be this business meeting and I’m like crying in the seats because I’m like connecting emotionally with all these people. And I’m like, this isn’t like they’re teaching me marketing, but I’m like, they’re all going through their journeys and right. And then 2017 I’m at dinner with a bunch of top marketers and stuff and I’m talking with them and I’m realizing, man, they’re all talking about their successes the same way they talk about their failures. It’s just the facts. They took emotion out of it and you know, and then like, and then the next year I met you. And so what I’m realizing is from this right is like as we grow, right? Like we have different emotions attached to different things. And so the big thing I notice with you, right as you are willing to basically strip it down to zero.
Tyler: 09:41 And so I’m going to build something up. Mindset is great, but if you don’t have a vision, it doesn’t matter how good your attitude is. Right? So what did you decide? What is like you shifted your entire company, you basically blew your last company up and said, I’m going to start over. How did you decide, not only am I going to focus on the mind, but here’s all, I’m also going to turn that into a business, right? And turn it into something that can be more than just a personal hobby to study, right? So you’ve turned it into the thing, different theory podcasts. You’ve got the mindset playbook, is that what it’s called? Mind shift mind shift playbook, right? So how did you decide, okay, not only man, I gotta study the mind, but this is going to be my new calling, my New Vision.
Josh: 10:20 Yeah. And you know, quite honestly, first off, I a hundred percent agree with you. You’ve got to take action. You have to have a vision. But I didn’t know what that was. And so for me, I just sat there and I was like, what’s the first book that I can read? I’m like typing in mindset books into the, you know, Google and psycho-cybernetics popped up, you know, but that was essentially the first real mindset book I read and that led me down a whole rabbit hole of so many other things. I found Sam ovens and you know, Joe Dispenza and like, you know, all these other people. But for me, my goal was not to figure out what I needed to do in business. I was blessed to be in a scenario where I could take four months off without making a penny. Right? I still had enough savings to where I could live and that’s what I did.
Josh: 11:02 I mean, I didn’t make hardly any money for some time, you know, in the business. Right? I just studied the mind, study the mind, and I never wanted to be the mindset guy. Like I didn’t want that to strictly be, I wanted it to be known for mindset. I wanted to teach about the mindset, but I didn’t want to be like, oh, Josh is the mindset dude. Right. That like that was not attractive to me because that meant I actually had to like be good at mindset and I wasn’t even convinced that I would ever say was ever going to be able to do that. And so for me, I just went, okay, how can I build a business, any business that’s sustainable, right. By understanding the power of the mind. And so, you know, I went down that road and about four months in five months saying I did do one more launch after I kind of restructured everything in the social media side of things, I did realize that there was a lot of good assets and pieces that we had taught.
Josh: 11:48 And so I went down there, I did that social media thing and I was like, you know what, what just learned in the past six months about the mindset. I just applied to my business and in nine days I made $42,000 and I worked for a grand total of like, okay, maybe eight hours a day. Right? Which was like, to me it was like basically a part time job, right? I mean like nothing. And so I was like, Whoa, this mindset stuff is really powerful. And so I started sharing more of that on like social media, a lot more people who decided that, you know, start picking it up. I’m like full in study mode at this point. And so basically for the next like uh, give or take like eight months from the time that I broke to the time, you know, eight months forward, I basically did one off gigs, some consulting here and there.
Josh: 12:30 I mean I had connections in the network so I would walk into, you know, bigger businesses. They’d pay me five, 10 grand to come in, which was nice. Right? I mean once again, kind of a fortunate situation there, but I didn’t believe I was able to do that until I fixed up here. And then like probably like November again, November of last year, 2018, I sat down and I was like, okay, there is, there’s a whole lot bigger spectrum of business and possibility and mindset than just selling a course about social media. Like I want to go big, I really want to like get to the masses. And you know, algorithms constantly changing, podcasting becoming more and more popular. I was like, I wonder if I just did a, you know, put together a podcast or something if this would be know this would be powerful. And so that’s where the idea of a podcast came out of it and a show.
Josh: 13:15 And I realized that for me, I didn’t want to sell courses for the rest of my life. I have no mad respect for people that do. I am not against it. I continued to sell courses, right? Like I liked them a lot. Well that was not the path specifically for me. It’s an easy way to make money and it’s a great way to make money and I am in no way at all bashing on it. But for me it just wasn’t my path. So I decided, okay, what can I do to like learn my business skills and really learn about the mindset of business. I wanted to build a business that I could remove myself from the process of and really systemize. And the thing that worked best for us was to start an agency for funnel building. And you know, it’s a big industry. A lot of people in the clickfunnels world do it.
Josh: 13:57 We targeted people way outside of the clickfunnels world. I mean, you know, normal traditional businesses that are used to making 10 or 20% margins, not 80 or 90% margins. And so we went and you know, we started that and I over the past six months now, this started in January, January 1st I launched my podcast as kind of my passion project where we talk about mindset, we interview, you know, big, big people. We just had, we have Collin Wayne on there, Ryan Stewman, you know Steve Larson, bigger wigs of the world and this space and honestly do, we don’t really monetize that a whole lot. We have some upsells and backend stuff or whatever. But like just basically breaking even on that because my goal is to go to the masses with it. I want to be Tom and bill, you, Gary Vaynerchuk, Joe Rogan all tied together except without customers where and so like that’s the vision there.
Josh: 14:45 And then on the flip side of that, the vision of the vivid is I have a business partner. We partnered up. And my goal is we’re going to build this to a multimillion dollar business and I’m going to sell it to you. Like, my goal is to sell because I just want to train my mind and I wanted to learn how to do things and then I want to get out. I have no goal to own an agency long term, but I understand that the life lessons that you can learn by doing that are so amazing. And when it comes to having to put yourself in a leadership role, we have a team of five people. If you’ve never been the person to hire and manage five people, like the growth that you have to do as a human being to hire five people and you know, write their checks every month.
Josh: 15:27 You know what I mean? Like that’s a big responsibility, right? When you’re doing that. And so for me it’s very much of a life lesson. I’ve applied five core principles in my life over the past 18 months and I have found that as long as I stick to those five core principles and those five steps that I do every single day, if I do those five things, I’ve been able to be successful. And you know, now at my life, I look at my life and I go, I work eight hours a day, 10 hours a day, maybe five or six days a week by choice. I live a great life. I’m in a healthy relationship. I love life. I am totally happy and I have the ability to go and travel and do and you know, different things at different times. But I’m very, very focused on business right now.
Josh: 16:07 That’s the phase of my life that I’m in right now. But it all started by fixing my mind and when I got my mind right, that was what I was able to go and go, okay, here’s the vision of where I want to go. Here’s the vision of this, and be able to find the clarity through objective thinking, which is one of the five things that I do each day to go, okay, this is the Max logical step for me. This is what I’m doing in my life. And that’s, you know, that’s ultimately where I’m at now.
Tyler: 16:30 I remember once I was listening to one of Russell Brunson’s podcasts and he talked about how he hesitates to work with anybody who hasn’t cycled at least twice. We need, they haven’t gone through this growth cycle at least two times. Yeah. And I thought a lot about that because you know, I’ve gone through, I’m a little older than you and I’ve gone through a couple of these big turns that I’ve gone through where I’ve had, uh, 30 employees and they’d have to go back down to zero and have to rebuild another business and change and then leave that. And so I think we learn a lot about ourselves and about our potential when we have to like face the hardest challenges. Right? And so when you basically decided, okay, I’m going to close all this down and rebuild, you got to attack and explore your own strengths and your mind and learn about that. Right? You have five core principles they use, you said one of them’s, objective thinking. What are those principles?
Josh: 17:21 Yeah, so the five core principles are actually the five parts of the mind shift playbook, which is why I wrote the mind shift playbook, which step number one is called the question of why, and this is simply a question that I asked myself whenever I do anything. One of the first major breakthroughs that I had when I studied the mind and on this journey of 18 months was I found out that the subconscious mind controls 90% roughly of what we do. That blew my mind, which basically for those of you that don’t know what that means, 90% of all of our thoughts, our beliefs, our actions, how we act, how we think, everything we do without even being consciously aware of that. And so the question of why basically says, why do I do everything that I do? So everyday I try to ask myself one to three things of, you know, why did I get on this interview with Tyler?
Josh: 18:04 Why do I want to be, you know, why do I want to go and have a podcast? Why do I want to drive the car that I drive? Why don’t I eat this stuff that I eat? Why am I, you know, whatever. All I want to do is I want to get to the source and I want to bring awareness to things. I don’t really need to act on them. I just need to be aware that I’m doing them and I need to be aware of what’s affecting them. Step number two is objective thinking and I would say that if I could single handedly in one single core principle sum up by success to this point in the last 18 months, it would be objective thinking. Obviously there’s a lot more factors into it, but this is by far the biggest one which basically says, Tyler, you are going to know exactly and probably a lot of the listeners as well.
Josh: 18:40 You ever been able to look at somebody else and figure out all their problems but can’t do the exact same thing for you? Objective thinking is doing it for yourself. It’s taking a third party approach of your life. looking, removing all emotions from it and saying, let’s use emotions as facts and look, look at the facts. Let’s not put our emotions in it and get clarity with that. So that’s number two. Number three is actually, ironically what you said, it’s having a vision, knowing exactly what you want out of life everyday I need to know my goals, I need to know my daily goals, weekly goals, monthly goals, yearly goals in five year, decade long goals, and I’m not looking at my decade long. Goals are your goals every day, but I’m looking at my daily goals everyday and I’m looking at my weekly goals every day. I’ve got to know where I’m going constantly every single day so that I can go and step number four, shift my identity and make sure that my identity is not holding me back.
Josh: 19:28 One of the other major breakthroughs that I had during this journey is understanding that everything that we do comes from our identity, which is our belief about ourselves. That’s definition of identity. So if my goal is to go out and become a millionaire, or my goal is to build $1 million business, I need to identify where I’m going and I need to be able to identify the type of person that I need to become in order to go and, and have that success and kill the person and the version of me inside of me that is unable to achieve those goals. And so getting very clear on that and starting and being consciously aware of shifting my identity. That’s step number four. And then step number five is creating habits that will allow me to shift my identity because a belief, which is you know, your identity, your belief about yourself is simply a circumstance plus it an emotion.
Josh: 20:13 And if I can program my circumstances to have positive emotions about whatever it is that I’m trying to do, I can shift my identity. And so the mindshift playbook goes through each one of those parts and dives down much deeper into what they are. But those are the five principles of, of what I do every single day.
Tyler: 20:28 Those are awesome. I went through a similar kind of mental, you know, growth journey a long time ago, and I started studying NLP and then I actually, I actually ended up becoming a certified Hypnotist. Right. Wow. Process. And the main takeaway for me through all of that was the power of state. Understanding your state and the state of the person that you’re communicating with. And I’ll tell you one of the biggest takeaways I had was there were two primary things. One, the supposition that everybody is acting in what they believe at the time to be a positive action. Yeah.
Josh: 21:02 By meaning that deep down, most people are not malicious. They just may be pointed the wrong direction, but it’s usually survival or whatever, right? They’re more protecting themselves and trying to hurt someone else. Right. And then too, it’s that we are responsible for the way our communication is received. Meaning, you know, if you’re often feeling misunderstood, that’s not the other person’s fault. Yeah. And I think about that when I think about marketing and messaging. When I think about interpersonal relationships that we have to be in charge of doing better in our communication. And I think what I really think is Fascinating about what you’re talking about with think different theory in mind shift is that that has to even be introspective, right? Like we have to say, okay, where am I miscommunicated with myself? Yep. Or Am I out of alignment with myself? And so you have this five steps to really stay in alignment and create a clear vision to go forward, which I think is really cool. Tell me a little bit more about identity shift. Yeah. And about killing the past version of ourselves. I think that’s really powerful.
Josh: 21:53 Yeah. So what we have to remember, what I learned along this journey is that your subconscious remembers everything about you. Okay. From the day you were born, it has a hundred percent perfect memory. Now you can’t remember it cause that’s not conscious, but your subconsciousness, or it’s actually technically it’s your unconscious. But technical terms, I’m with Ya. It remembers everything, right? Your conscious mind tells your subconscious mind what to do. However it does not tell it how to do it. So every single day you’re sitting there and you’re like going and let’s say your whole entire life you have gone and you’ve been in a negative state of money. Money was a bad thing. Money was for ugly jerk people, rich jerk people, right?
Josh: 22:40 And guess what? Your subconscious, every single time that it hears, you know, you’re consciously telling it, hey, it’s time to go make a sales call, right? What’s it doing? It’s sitting there going, well that’s a bad thing, right? So your subconscious mind gets the signal. It’s being told what to do by your conscious mind. But your belief about yourself in your subconscious, which is your identity, is telling you, okay, well this is how we react to it. And so your subconscious mind will literally go out and self sabotage you from trying to go and accomplish whatever it is that you’re trying to do until you actually change your belief about yourself, which is your identity. The way I like to think about it is imagine a rope, a tug of war. Your conscious mind is 10 people. Your subconscious mind is 90 people, right? Who’s going to win?
Josh: 23:25 Your conscious mind can make all the noise in the entire world that they want, but at the end of the day, 90 are always going to outpull 10. So you’ve got to get those 90 people on board. And what was fascinating to me is, hey, in order to change my identity, I need to learn how to change my beliefs. So that’s when I really started studying belief systems and how beliefs were formed. And when you realize a belief is simply a, uh, an experience plus an emotion, and every experience that we have has an emotion tied to it. That’s what forms our identity. So if my identity has always been negative towards money, if I can create a habit every single day that puts me in a positive state when I’m thinking about money, then over time I’m going to shift my identity. And this is why the environment is so important, right?
Josh: 24:09 You’re going around a lot of rich people. All of a sudden the million dollars doesn’t seem like a whole lot of money anymore, right? Donald Trump, small loan of $1 million, right? It wasn’t a whole lot of money to him. Why? Because he’s around that environment. Same thing is true with positivity and negativity, your environment at all. So when it comes to shifting the identity, your body, your brain will literally hold you back from your goals until you reprogram that too, to think a different way. That is done through habits and that is done through changing your environment and getting around people that are going to change your way of thinking subconsciously because you’re absorbing everything all the time.
Tyler: 24:42 One of the things you talked about is that now in your healthier approach to business in this round, you get to do things and you get to travel. And for me business is all about creating the lifestyle that we want. For a lot of us as entrepreneurs, we enjoy the journey. And so it’s not like we’re, we’re not always looking forward to checking out of work or punching the clock. Right. But I still think we have to have that balance of just life. So what does one major item on your personal bucket list that you’re going to accomplish in the next 12 months?
Josh: 25:10 So I’ve actually not told anybody this. So this is exclusive. We are actually gonna go and we’re planning a four-month world trip and we’re going to go to 14 different countries as we go. We’re going to film the whole thing and I’m going to get to do something that I’ve wanted to do my whole life at least. Hopefully, I can’t promise this going to happen, but I want to go skydiving in Dubai. Awesome. That’s on the, on the list to-do before the end of the year. Actually, we want to go to Dubai and skydive out there. So I’m very excited for that. It’s gonna be Super Fun.
Tyler: 25:39 So I’m actually planning an entrepreneur retreat in Dubai. Ooh. So maybe we’re going to have to time these up. Maybe we can have a whole crew are watching you dive. We can jump back. We all have to come to bro. If I’m jumping, you’re jumping. I have no aversion, right to heights. I just have, four kids and a wife who may not be like, yeah, you should definitely do that. I don’t think work is in a way of stuff. We’ll see. We’ll see. Maybe we’ll see. Yeah. So dude, I’m, I’m super grateful for you coming on here. I think it’s really important that people stay in touch and follow you. So they should go to thinkdifferenttheory.com and where can they get the Mind Shift Playbook?
Josh: 26:16 Yeah, thinkdifferenttheory.com will have all the information on the podcast. thinkdifferenttheory.com/playbook actually, we’ll get you right to the playbook. So you can get it a hundred percent.
Tyler: 26:24 Where did they find you on this? Where did they find you on the socials?
Josh: 26:26 Socials, add Josh Forti everywhere. J. O. S. H. last name Forti with an I, F.O.R.T.I, and they can find me everywhere, Instagram, Facebook. Mostly active on Instagram.
Tyler: 26:36 And the best quarterback of all time.
Josh: 26:38 Tom “freaking” Brady
Tyler: 26:40 Awesome. Thank you so much for coming out. Now remember, my BizNinjas, it is your turn to go out and do something.
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