As The Leader Grows with Ken Joslin
As The Leader Grows with Ken Joslin
David Steele | Redefining Success
Discover the transformative approach of David Steele, founder and CEO of One Wealth Advisors, as he redefines financial planning through the lens of authentic life goals. This episode promises a fresh perspective on aligning financial strategies with personal passions and faith-based values. David opens up about his journey from questioning external goal influences to embracing a more purposeful path, encouraging listeners to reassess traditional concepts like retirement and find their own "sweet spots" in both business and life.
Explore the delicate dance between ambition and contentment as David shares his own story of transitioning from financial planning to the restaurant industry. We discuss the powerful impact of finding tasks that feel almost effortless and deeply satisfying, and the importance of maintaining integrity by choosing clients who align with our values, even at a financial cost. David's candid insights reveal the challenges and rewards of harmonizing financial planning with true passions and life purposes, offering listeners a chance to reflect on their own journeys.
Gain valuable wisdom on nurturing meaningful relationships and a strong company culture as keys to fulfillment. David shares personal anecdotes, including lessons from his mother's influence on balancing wealth with core values like faith, health, and relationships. We address the intricacies of business growth, the risks associated with venture capital, and the importance of defining what "enough" means for sustainable success. Through inspiring stories of incremental progress and transformation, this episode encourages listeners to embrace a long-term journey while helping others navigate their life goals.
Welcome to the ATLG podcast I am your host Ken Joslin, former pastor turned coach & host of CREATE, the #1 Faith-based Entrepreneur conference in America. My mission is to help faith-based entrepreneurs become the best version of themselves by growing in our Core 5: Faith, Health, Relationships, Business & Finances. You can get more information as well as join our FREE Facebook group at https://www.facebook.com/groups/676347099851525
If you enjoyed the podcast, come join our FREE GSD Community of hundreds of entrepreneurs & a ton of FREE Content including CREATE Conference recordings with Ken, John Maxwell, Gary Brecka, Ed Mylett & more. growstackdrive.com/free
Hey guys, welcome to another episode of as the Leader Grows. I am your host, Ken Jocelyn, and I've got a super special guest for you guys. Today, David Steele is joining me all the way from New York. He splits time between San Francisco and New York. He's the founder and the CEO of One Wealth Advisors, managing over a billion dollars in assets and all fair. I've just been kind of asking some questions about where he's at but really is focused in his life right now on helping others achieve their goals and their dreams. David, welcome to the show, my friend. Thanks for having me Very excited to be here.
Speaker 1:Hey, will you take just a minute and just kind of touch base with our audience a little bit more about who you are, where you're at and kind of what you've got going on in this season of your life?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I mean, when I'm at a cocktail party and somebody asks me what I do, it's a difficult answer because I am the founder and CEO of a financial advisory company called One Wealth Advisors.
Speaker 2:It's my primary role. But 15 years or so ago I had to scratch an itch. I was in restaurants all through high school and college and I had to scratch a niche to open my first restaurant. I put a team together, went down to 75% time or so in my financial planning company and opened my first restaurant, ended up being one of the more successful restaurants in the history of San Francisco, as it turns out, and my partners and I then in that company got together and said, well, let's go build a real company. And it's turned into a bunch of different restaurants now and 250 employees and a consumer packaged goods division. That's eventually we're going to try to take a national, and so those are my two main endeavors. But I'm also an entrepreneur in some other areas, like yoga studios and some music festival stuff and weird stuff. So I live a life that is professionally where I don't say I do this, not that I do this, and that often.
Speaker 1:I love that you said something to me. You said something just a minute ago and you said something to me off air before. We hopped on air about literally about life planning or financial planning. Financial planning really is more than just I want to invest this in this space to be able to make X return or ROI on that, but it really is an emotional decision. It's wrapped around life decisions. How much of it in the financial planning side do you spend time with your clients talking about? What do you want your life to look like in five years or 10 years or 20 years?
Speaker 2:It's exactly what we do and I would say maybe it's a differentiator between us and the firms that are in our space. We will begin. If we're in the competitive situation for a client, we will begin the presentation and say I want you to understand that if you work with us, it's likely you will die with a lower net worth than if you don't work with us. That's the way you begin a presentation. That's not a very good selling point. Obviously, that type of pitch is not going to appeal to everybody.
Speaker 2:There are certain types of people that they just want the most For us. We're interested in harmonizing what people want with their lives and having that, then looking at their financial situation and say, okay, what's possible. Furthermore, I would like to contest that a lot of the goals people have in their life are not necessarily goals that are authentic on us. By our family's influence on us, that may, in fact, not be our own real, authentic goals for ourselves, and so one of the things we do is we really work with people to unpack not just what are your goals, but why are they your goals? Are they authentically your goals?
Speaker 1:I was going to ask you what percentage of clients when you sit down. I love that number one because they basically wash themselves out immediately. In asking that question of clients at the very beginning, you weed out the people you don't want. But what percentage of people, david, that when you have that conversation, they're not really sure what they want it to look like in 10 years, 20 years?
Speaker 2:Well, what I would say is 95% of people have 75% of the same goals Kids, education, buy a house, retire. Retire is a big one. That's an interesting one. I say I wouldn't wish retirement on my worst enemy. I've seen so many people retire unhappy, their sense of purpose being gone, and people you know. We often try to unpack that and say, well, what if retirement meant you wrote down all the things you hate about your job and figure out a way to pay somebody else to do those things or delegate those out and allow you to still apply your mastery and the things you love? That's a different way of looking at retirement.
Speaker 2:I don't want to be too harsh on the idea of if somebody should or shouldn't get married. I think anybody who wants to get married should, but I think they should think about it and make sure that that's what they want. And you know, kids' education is a little more straightforward. If somebody has a kid, they usually want to pay for the education if they can. But then there's some other goals taking care of other family members, philanthropy. People from other countries have a different version of what they think about philanthropy versus I mean so really unpacking these things, defining them, quantifying them and unpacking them. It's it's it's the most important work I think we do.
Speaker 1:And so I would imagine, as you walk clients through this process, when they're done number one, they're probably taken aback a little bit that this isn't just about finances, but it's a deeper thing than that, that it really is about purpose and why.
Speaker 2:Yeah, you know, I know this is a more I believe it's more of a faith-based podcast right.
Speaker 2:You're more faith-based. So you know I have a saying, which is goal setting is human magic. From a faith-based perspective, we would probably put some other definitions in terms of what's happening there with goal setting right, but I really do. You know, I tell people write down your goals for the next 10 years. Write on a piece of paper three, not 10, three. Don't look at it 10 years from now. Look at it. I bet you did all of them. What's going on there? It's magic. I love that. I always. You did all of them. What's going on there? It's magic.
Speaker 1:I love that. I always just call it a transferable spiritual principle. Yeah, there's so many different things and a lot of the leaders that I know I mentioned off air Tony and Dean and Brendan Burchard and John Maxwell, who's a dear friend. All these guys speak at my events, but there is a power paper and a pen. There is something to writing your goals down and I learned that even in my own planner that I created about four years ago. I teach everyone in our community or our collective or our mastermind.
Speaker 1:I write my goals down twice a day my business goals and my personal goals. I know exactly and I heard Grant Cardone say this. Grant's been a friend and a mentor now for about four years and I heard him say this about four, four or five years ago. He said he said, if I write my goals down, cause everybody's about five or 600 people in the room at this 10X bootcamp in Miami the first time I met Grant in October of 2019. So five years ago, this month, and I heard Grant say how many of you guys write your goals down at the beginning of the year? You know there's five or 600 people in the room.
Speaker 1:I look around, everybody has their hand raised. Well, how many of you guys write your goals down once a month? Well, about 75% of the hands go down. How many of you guys write your goals down once a week? Well, about another 15 to 20% of their hands go down. How many of you guys write your goals down every day? A handful of people in the room, because I write my goals down twice a day, every day, and he said let's just say I only hit it 300 times a year, which is about where I'm at. I'm writing my goals down 600 times a year. And this is what he said. He goes if you're in the same vertical as me, I'm going to crush you, because every single day, I realign with what my purpose and my goals are.
Speaker 2:And we can translate this to being an entrepreneur and running a business and organizational development right, I mean, whatever your method of strategic planning, is it better involve simple, definable, achievable, stretched but achievable goals, consistently reconsidered?
Speaker 1:Yeah, I love that. And you were talking earlier about what if retirement doesn't look like retiring and you mentioned what are the things. And I walk clients through an exercise I call things only I can do. What are the things that only you can do. That is your sweet spot, Like when you do it. It's almost easy. And when you said that earlier I don't know if you know Dan Martell or not, but Dan's a dear friend wrote Buy Back your Time and it's exactly what Dan says is just find the things that you aren't crazy about and find somebody to do that and stay in your sweet spot.
Speaker 1:Do you find it funny talking to entrepreneurs and they mention retirement? Because in the back of your mind you know there's not really such a thing.
Speaker 2:Anybody that allows me in. I go down this retirement diatribe. Anybody lets me in. It's because I'm in a unique position, having done what I do for over 30 years, to have seen a lot of wins and losses in life. And when I say losses, I don't mean financially necessarily, I mean happiness, and I the you know there's a, there's a. I mean so many people have their, their, uh, their sense of purpose wrapped up in their creations in the world professionally that it's like to just say, okay, I've reached my financial goals, now I'm going to stop doing the thing that. Oh shit, I didn't excuse my language. I didn't realize that that was really, subconsciously, my sense of purpose.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's an amazing discovery, and so for me, I think it's fascinating that you're a financial planner and that's just not how we view financial planning. Okay, let me take care of my money. This guy takes care of my money. My pastor or my rabbi or my priest takes care of my spiritual. You know, friends like Gary Brecka or some kind of health guy takes care of this. My functional medicine team takes care of this. My functional medicine team takes care of this. But to be able to have that conversation with people and help them really get locked in and focused on ah, that's what I'm going at that's got to be super fulfilling for you.
Speaker 2:It really is and it's also you said it earlier. You know, when I go into a competitive situation or I begin a presentation in that way, it does weed out people. I mean there's some people just don't want to hear that and it's okay, like you know it's. You go to a. I always say if you go to an Italian restaurant, you don't want them serving sushi. They better be confident in that they're serving Italian food. Even if you want sushi, don't go to that restaurant. And so it's really good to know. You know what food you're serving.
Speaker 1:How much time or effort did it take for you to train your team that that was okay, to have the conversation that way?
Speaker 2:Well, first of all, I had to train myself, which?
Speaker 2:is to say I had to be willing to make less money in the name of not taking business.
Speaker 2:That was inconsistent with the role that I thought I wanted to play in clients' lives and that started way back when, when it was, you know me, one client at a time, and then my brother joined me as my first, you know, assistant, eventual partner, and it was him and I, you know, one client at a time, and he, you know, he, was my younger brother, six years younger.
Speaker 2:Just, it was a philosophy I embraced and he, you know, became his philosophy and then it became relatively easy. We did, interestingly, we did have a team member join us a few years ago, a very close friend of mine who left one of the bigger firms to join us, and he brought all his clients over and he had a few clients that were totally inconsistent with the way we do things and they paid a lot of money. They were paying him a lot of money and we I'll shorten the story and just say we essentially rejected them as clients, we didn't onboard them to our platform and he, just, it just was like huh, he didn't make sense to him because it was a lot of money, but it was like nope, we're going to. We know who we are, we know who we're not.
Speaker 1:And how did you lead him through that situation?
Speaker 2:Well, we, we're a little bit of a socialistic, capitalistic experiment as a company. We everybody's on salary Not the same salary, but everybody's on salary. Everybody gets an automatic 5% raise every year and everybody gets a percentage of distributable cash each quarter. And so he came in knowing what his set salary was going to be, and then he was going to get 5% raises every year. Therefore, the rejection of certain big revenue clients were really costing me and my brother, who are the large shareholders, more than it was going to cost him. So it was probably easy for him to have confidence because of that.
Speaker 1:I love that lead. So then you're doing this and you'd been financial planning how long before you started your first restaurant.
Speaker 2:Let's see probably 16 years, I think. I think.
Speaker 2:I wrote the business plan for the first restaurant. Maybe 13 years into it I had worked with a bunch of chefs who owned restaurants in Philadelphia and they were where I grew up and went to college. They were wonderfully talented artisans but didn't run businesses pragmatically. So I had this framework in my mind that in order to have a restaurant you had to be unstable financially. So I went to something that I could be confident was going to provide me with financial security, financial planning.
Speaker 2:But I had this itch that was nagging me that I wanted to see if I could in fact have a healthy tension in the restaurant world between business practices, pragmatic business practices, financial discipline and artisanship. And I had to scratch that itch. So I was about 15 years in that I had the financial security and the confidence that that was going to be sustainable. And I went to my brother, who was super supportive, and I said, hey, I'm going to go scratch this itch and reduce some of my time here in the finance business and pursue this thing over here. And I guess I got lucky with the first restaurant that was so successful because it allowed us to grow from there.
Speaker 1:And one of the things you said I think I mentioned this earlier. You said this off air that you're super passionate about helping other people and you mentioned seven restaurants. I believe is what you said you started or you own. Now we have seven, yeah, and then really your passion is to help your partners in those restaurants be successful.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I mean everybody's like, oh, you have 250 employees, it must be a lot to manage. And I say, no, I don't. I have a nine-person executive team who my goal is to help those people be everything they could be professionally and personally, and that's who I work with. And it's not that I don't have an interest in the people that are working at the actual restaurants, whether it be cooks, dishwashers, waiters, et cetera. I do. I care deeply about them and we at the at the top of the company culture, company culture, employee happiness is a big part of of what we talk about on a corporate level. But for me personally, all I really think about every day is my CEO of the restaurant company's name is Tom McNaughton. How's he doing? What can I do to help him? And my CFO, kara. What can I do to help her? And so forth and so on. Go down the list.
Speaker 1:How much of that? Because I really connect and resonate with where you are, because the majority of my friends that I spend time with either in private equity or they've exited or they're hedge fund guys. I was just in Costa Rica doing stem sales with RMI. He's one of my largest sponsors I was with one of my board members and investors and friends for three days and does all the funding for Topgolf in Europe and he's putting an offer on the table now with Goldman to buy Topgolf in the United States. So we're having conversations, but it's the same type of conversations. So how much enjoyment and fulfillment do you get out of now, David, helping other CEOs and visionaries and leaders grab that kind of a vision for the people that they get to impact in their life?
Speaker 2:It's my favorite thing I do. I mean, I see each of our private clients in the financial planning company as CEOs of their family, you know, helping them. And then the, the, the, you know the restaurant company. I have a CEO there and I, you know, to me helping him is it's about the most rewarding thing I can think of, and so I have begun to get on boards and really in those roles I really see the CEOs of those companies as well. It becomes really scalable To the extent that I have wisdom and some mastery in in this stuff. It's it's a way to to scale it because hopefully some of these things, um, are going to be passed down to, you know, to their, their, the people that they're going to eventually help.
Speaker 1:Where did that come from in you, David?
Speaker 2:My mother. You know I was raised. We were pretty, pretty, pretty poor single mom two, two kids, my brother and I and uh, I've told this story before, actually on a podcast or two. Um, a few years ago, uh, my mom's birthday came around and I called her on the phone. I didn't send her a gift that year. I called on the phone, didn't say a word about her birthday, seemingly narcissistically went on a rant after she asked me how I'm doing, about how great my financial planning company is doing. My restaurants and all the stuff I'm involved with is flourishing and our turnover in the companies are low, our revenues are growing, everybody seems happy, we're involved in the conversation of culture and I have amazing relationships with my team members, my clients, and it's just incredible. That's how things are going, mom. Oh, that's amazing. She asked me some more questions. Hey, mom, I couldn't have done any of this if you didn't teach me about the importance of people and relationships.
Speaker 1:Happy birthday. That had to be a phenomenal moment between you and your mom.
Speaker 2:It was awesome. She taught me, she showed me how rich someone's life can be in the way I define rich, if you have deep relationships with people.
Speaker 1:Do you think the understanding of how you become rich through the power of relationships helped you understand how to gain wealth?
Speaker 2:Maybe. I mean, I do think there's a little bit of Maslow's hierarchy of needs going on, right. I mean, if you're not dry or not fed or not warm, you're not really able to focus on love, whether you're loved or not. But if you know you're going to be dry, warm and fed, I think the next place you probably go is to make sure you feel loved, right? I do think people that try to assure that they are radically more than warm, dry, fed and fed, that is to say, they never stop pursuing infinite amounts of wealth infinite amounts of wealth I think they could be they're misdirecting their time. But remember there's also your family. Maybe you have a family of 10 and then grandkids. That makes it a family of a lot more. So I'm not here to judge what level of wealth somebody should pursue, but I do think it's probably lower than most people think it is.
Speaker 1:I love that. When I started this four years ago and now we've built this into the largest really faith-based movement with the conference and the mastermind that we do around the world we started that with what we call our core five, which is faith, health, relationships, business and finances. And every year at my conference, when I opened it up, I said you know, this weekend you're going to hear from some of the greatest communicators in the world. I mean some of the greatest authors and some of the greatest people when it comes to faith. And Gary Braca, who's the number one bio hacker in the world, who's a dear friend Like he.
Speaker 1:Literally I get a picture from him two months ago and he's on a video and he's on Emirates flying to Saudi, and he's like hey, man, I'm going to send you a picture of where I'm going. And then, two days later, I get a picture of him standing next to Cristiano Ronaldo and he stayed at Cristiano's house for three days. And him and Dana White and just all these. You're going to hear from some of the greatest people in the world. You're going to hear from some of the greatest business leaders, some of the greatest wealth managers and people in the world. But if you don't have your faith, your health and your relationships in alignment. You can build great businesses and you can amass a lot of wealth, but you can also be very miserable, and I think that's very similar when I hear you talk we're talking about the same thing.
Speaker 2:It's the same thing.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I think that you can boil down where your energy should be spent to not all that many categories. What are some conversations that you remember with clients in the past who may have not seen that as important and you've kind of helped navigate them through understanding like there's a greater. I call it in my first book that I did, I call it Returnal Mission. I had a whole chapter. Returnal Mission is greater than Returnal Investment. Returnal Investment is important but Returnal Mission or purpose or why is even greater. What does some of those conversations look like and do you remember any of those conversations where you've helped people have that kind of aha moment?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I mean they're related to the goal setting, the why I mean the retirement one is a big one. That was a real big discovery of mine that we're able to use with a lot of people now, non-binary thinking, that is to say it doesn't have to be this or that, it can be. You know, I live in New York, san Francisco and Lake Tahoe and I that you know, I see that all the time with people like, oh, I really want to live in so-and-so, but I can't, I have to live here. It's like, well, do both. You know it's, it's, it's little things like that. So I, you know it's, it's it's unpacking goals and it's trying to remove people from binary thinking. I don't know that. That answered your question, though. Are you looking for a very specific?
Speaker 1:I think it did, david. I think what I hear you say is that you just give people permission to maybe think outside the box a little bit and go. It doesn't have to be San Francisco or Tahoe or New York City.
Speaker 2:It can literally or just a financial planning company and a restaurant company, not one or the other. I mean, these people are dumbfounded when I tell them about my life and then when they hear I work about 30 hours a week, how huh? Well, there it is. Do only the things that only you can do. I love that.
Speaker 1:How long did it take you to learn that lesson?
Speaker 2:Wow, I had to open my first restaurant and I was forced, by necessity, I think, to be efficient with my time. And yeah, I think I think once I realized the less I did, the more I scaled and I started picking up in this correlation. But the more I had to coach, guide, coalesce people around a vision or visions, so it was an evolution. But I didn't really learn it until I opened my first restaurant. I was sort of forced by necessity to kind of scale myself.
Speaker 1:Were there any mentors that helped you along that way whether it be a personal or a podcast or a coach or a book or something like that that helped you in that journey? David?
Speaker 2:I had no. As it relates to what I just said, that was just, I just trusted my instincts around doing this other thing and look what happened. That was wow, that was cool, okay. But you know, of course I've had some mentors along the way. I had a in my financial planning practice. I have a partner who was not our partner anymore we ended up splitting away from him but he was probably the biggest mentor I had for years and and he really he, the the big one with him was was helping me think a lot bigger. And I do think we have these and he helped me break through that, that, that ceiling I had on what was possible for me, which I think is sort of related to what we're talking about here. Right, we have these self-limiting beliefs, um, which we're not aware of, um, and and this guy, greg, really sort of helped me bust through some of those self-limiting beliefs.
Speaker 1:We just had this conversation Eric and I did yesterday on the flight home from Costa Rica last night, and one of the guys that's in my mastermind is a nurse practitioner and he has five Optimize you franchises in Atlanta and in Tennessee. Hormone replacement, peptides, all the red light, all the stuff. And when he set a goal, they're in there. They just. They're about to start their fourth year, they just finished their third year and they're about 3.8 million in revenue and he goes. I'll never forget setting that goal of having 1200 monthly recurring clients. I thought there's no way we're going to get to 1200. He goes now it should have been 2400. What do you say to it? Because that's a huge principle you just mentioned.
Speaker 2:For sure. But it does seem a little bit counter to what I was talking about earlier, which is how much is enough, right? And so I do think there's a little bit of think, there's a little bit of specificity with you trying to thread that needle between not having self-limiting beliefs, cap what you're capable of, but on the other hand, being satisfied with saying, you know, okay, enough's enough or that's enough and I'm not just talking about money, although I am not talking about money, it could be. You know my financial planning company. I woke up one day. We went from five team members to 12. And I was like whoa, whoa, what are we? You know, on our way to 30. And I had a conversation with the senior partners of the practice and I said do we want this? Do we really want this? And the answer was no.
Speaker 2:So what have we done since then is we've become, frankly, unfortunately, a little bit more selective about what clients we bring on, and we've had to figure out a business model that allows us to stay small and yet have every team member satisfied in every way they can be. I love that.
Speaker 1:Literally this morning. Taki Moore is a good friend of mine. He lives in Australia and he helps basically online coaches guys scale their businesses to about a million a month. But he wrote an email today about helping clients, and one of the clients, I think they did about 30 million in revenue in a year and he was having this conversation with her. He's like what do you want? And so she starts telling him they scaled their company back from 30 million to about 14 million a year because it allowed her to live the life that she wanted to live and she works three days a week.
Speaker 2:What about intimacy with your team members? I mean, right, I, you know, when I we were five, the depth of the relationships with each team member, in fact, may have been stronger than now that we're 12. I can only imagine how that will be diluted if we're 30 or 50, you know, and that matter. And not to mention, we have 383 clients. To mention we have 383 clients. I'm already not emotionally connected to every client. It's not realistic for me to be so if we have 3000 clients, it's even going to be more of a problem. So just decide what you want.
Speaker 1:I love that. What's next for you, david? What are you dreaming of? Because obviously you're a big dreamer, you're a big visionary. What's next? What's next for you, david? What are you dreaming of? Because obviously you're a big dreamer, you're a big visionary. What's next? What are you Every?
Speaker 2:day. I try to meet with as many people I can that I care about and work with them on achieving their goals. My goal I really. I don't have any more tangible goals in my life. I'm not the wealthiest person that I could be if that was more of a goal. I don't aspire to more tangible goals in my life. I'm not the wealthiest person that I could be if that was more of a goal. I don't aspire to more financial wealth. I do aspire to keep helping people achieve their goals and, whether it be in the financial planning company with actual clients or doing the pro bono work which I do a lot of, working with my business partners and the different companies I'm directly involved with or on the board of, it's just an everyday thing for them.
Speaker 1:Tell me something. In the last few months, that's been one of the most fulfilling moments for you working with other people and watching them experience what you've been experiencing the last 10 or 15 years.
Speaker 2:Well, there's a woman on my financial planning team who didn't go to college and she was an admin, just like a receptionist, when we first hired her and we'd been in the process over the last few years and she's worked her way up in the company and earned this completely but not without coaching and nurturing to the point where she's about to be made a director of the company. That's something that's been growing some steam over the last few years. I won't publish this podcast once it's ready to be published, until after she hears this news.
Speaker 2:That's awesome she hasn't heard it yet.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's got to be. I can see you're counting it. It's like you're counting it, it just shifts. When you talk about things like that, what would your last words of encouragement or wisdom for our audience? What would you leave them?
Speaker 2:Entrepreneurial from an entrepreneurial perspective.
Speaker 2:Mm-hmm, you know I've been on this mission lately to try to express to people the dangers of taking venture capital investment.
Speaker 2:Express to people the dangers of taking venture capital investment and I don't I'm not at all negatively creating a negative feeling around the venture VC community, but there is something called the power law, which is to say that the venture capitalists generally want an outcome within 10 years and they want the outcome to either be really really big or zero.
Speaker 2:An outcome within 10 years and they want the outcome to either be really really big or zero. And I think you can make that statement about institutional capital in general. So, as an entrepreneur, if you go down the route of taking institutional capital, there is possibly going to be some subconscious or even conscious pressure on you to swing for the fences in a bigger way rather than go low and slow. Then if you just were a little bit more modest and maybe didn't take such big capital and didn't try to go so quickly, because what the power law doesn't talk about is it always talks about the Googles and the Facebook metas of those successes. What it doesn't talk about are the 999 failures and the trauma that the entrepreneur felt when he or she failed, from being forced to pursue that power law like outcome. So I guess what I'd like to leave entrepreneurs with is you know what do way, or if you take sort of big capital because you've made promises to have crazy growth and scale.
Speaker 1:You know, one of my mentors years ago told me he goes, ken, we tend to overestimate. No, he said, we always overestimate what we can do in the short term, but we always underestimate what we can do in the long term.
Speaker 2:Oh, I love that. That is so good. I'm stealing that. That is great.
Speaker 1:I don't remember who told me but I know it was either a pastor friend or one of my business guys but we always underestimate, or always overestimate what we can do in the short term and we always underestimate what we can do in the long term Because, especially in this society with social media, even more so than ever before, we think that we have to be the anomaly that can just make something happen overnight, when the reality of it is. And I think the reason and I'll ask you this question, do you think the reason is is because we're in such a hurry to get there or to get to that outcome. I think it's envy.
Speaker 2:I think it's envy, or to get to that outcome, because we really I think it's envy. I think it's envy Our media. The media celebrates the winners, the big winners, the big success stories, and oftentimes the big, quick success stories are really celebrated. I mean, we see it with, I don't know, openai right now and ChatGPT. I mean, they're not an overnight success if you look at their history, but they, you know it's pretty short term. So we hear a lot about this and all the VCs now are looking for the next open AI, and so the media creates this envy and then you know you like oh, I want that and I can do a quick two, and it's just, that's a unicorn. That is just the rarest of rare. Sometimes low and slow is better. I'm somebody everything I've built has been low and slow, so I'm biased here.
Speaker 1:Well, I think part of it too. I agree, I think part of it too is people don't embrace the journey or the process. Because one of the things I teach is morning routine. John Maxwell, I don't know how well you know John or not, but John said in pretty much every one of his books if you show me your daily routine, I'll tell you how successful you're going to be. It is about my concept. I call it incremental, not monumental. Small daily discipline, decisions over time, always equal, monumental results. I don't ever do this on my podcast, but I'm going to do it for you.
Speaker 2:I'm going to show you real quick. This is my before and after picture.
Speaker 1:That's a hundred pounds in four and a half years Congratulations. And I learned through this and started my company the same time. I started this health journey and I learned that it's just-. I don't think that's a coincidence to this health journey and I learned that it's just-. I don't think that's a coincidence. No, it is not. No, it is not. And it is understanding the power of small daily discipline, decisions over time, always equal monumental results. I tell people, success cannot escape you when you do the right things every single day. So, david, what's the best way for people to connect with you, get in touch with you, follow you and learn more about what you've got going on?
Speaker 2:I have this silly little website I created for all this weird stuff I do, called David. It's davidsteelexyz. My financial planning company, which is my main endeavor, is onewealthnet, and you can reach me at dsteele at onewealthnet. And you can reach me at dsteel at OneWealthnet.
Speaker 1:And we'll put all these links in the show notes as well. And thank you. This was a pleasant, pleasant surprise this afternoon to be able to connect and hear your heart, and it's refreshing. Every time I get to connect with someone at your level. It's super refreshing when they really understand the importance of purpose and why and helping people navigate, especially in the financial field, helping them navigate literally a whole life version of themselves and what they want their life to look like. So thank you so much for spending your afternoon with us my pleasure. Thank you, guys. Thank you for joining us on another episode of as the Leader Grows. Listen, jump in, check out David Steele davidsteele6000 on Instagram, davidsteelexyz and all his crazy little ventures he says he has. Go, follow him. Let him know how much you appreciate him adding value to you today on our show and, as always, I'll see you next week on as Leader Goes.
Speaker 2:All right, well, thank you very much.