RYAN BLAIR: Many times we can’t take back decisions that are made for us in youth. In my family, my father, specifically, made a decision to become addicted to drugs. And that was the demise of our entire family. My mother was a stay-at-home mom. She’d never had a career or a path to follow other than to raise her children and to be a loving wife to her husband, who made some very poor decisions, found himself in a state of drug-induced schizophrenia and was court ordered to leave because of fear or threat that he could harm our family. As a result he left. He disappeared when I was about 13-years-old. That was the last I saw of him. That left my mother with her youngest son, youngest of six, (all the rest were pretty much grown up or close to it) to fend for. She had no money, no child support, no career. So we went through a lot of hardship. There was a lot of hardship with regard to decisions I started making as a young man without a mentor, angry at the world, angry at the life that I had. My poor mother struggled to raise me. She struggled to try to keep me in school. In my freshman year, I was kicked out of a traditional high school and sent to what was called a continuation high school. I was placed in learning disabled classes. Because I was dealing with emotional issues, I was not able to learn at the right pace. My mother was always very optimistic, though. She saw in me something that no one else saw, not society, not my teachers. She thought I could become great. She used to tell me things would get better and that everything was going to be fine. She was working to try and find me a male role model.

When I was about 17-years-old, she found me a mentor, a person who invested in me and who saw in me an opportunity to teach what he had learned, what his success had been and to pass down to me a lot of the wisdom that he had received. His name was Robert Hunt and he was a very successful real estate entrepreneur. For the first time in my life, after being exposed to this man, after feeling love for the first time by a man, feeling integrity, learning about integrity, seeing a person who was a kind, loving human being, I started to change. I started to change very fast and shed the cocoon that was the decisions that I had made and that my parents had made that were wrapped around me and constraining me, holding me back. I started to free myself to go to the next metamorphosis, so to speak.

When did you decide that you were ready for something totally different than what you had experienced? When was that “Ah, ha” moment?

There were a number of visualizations that came to me that I can look back to now. One was, I was sitting in a youth camp, a facility for youth who have authority problems, I guess would be best way to say it. It was a tough environment. I was a thin guy. I was short at the time. I hadn’t really hit my growth spurt yet. It was Thanksgiving Day and I remember seeing the kids who would never leave that camp, who were sentenced to be there for the rest of their lives. The ones who, when they became adults, would progress into adult prisons. I remember thinking, “That’s not the life I want to live.”

I started a journal. I wrote in that journal that I wanted to start over, that I wanted to change, that I was afraid of change. I felt at the time that I’d made so many bad decisions that I could never free myself from them. I wrote that I wanted to one day make my mother proud. It’s funny, because I had not seen that journal for 15 years and I just recently uncovered it, about a year ago. It was so powerful for me to see that the elements of change and the seed of change was in me all along, as I believe it’s in all of us. And now that I have been in action on making those changes, I can reflect back and look at those pivotal moments in my life. This was one of them.

Another one was when I was faced with a question of integrity. I had made a commitment to God that if the mentor my mother gave me was my way out of the poverty that I’d lived in, I would give back and I would be a different person. So I was blessed that I’d received this mentor in my life.

One day he sent me on an errand to collect cash from one of his rental properties. It was several thousand dollars in rent that I had in my pocket. I remember thinking, “What a test this is for me. What a way for me to take a stand and say I’ll live a life of integrity. I will honor this mentor and the love he’s shown me. I will honor his desire to help me become a better man by delivering this rent money to him and taking a vow of integrity for the rest of my life.” That was one of those other pivotal moments.
It happens almost daily now, that I have some deep learning or insight to life that comes through my daily existence. There were many periods of time where those kinds of moments didn’t come to me as fast as they do now.

It’s like you set a powerful intention to have your life be different and it seems to follow along that path.

You know, it was such a powerful intention and it was built upon pain and anger and sadness and low self esteem. There were subtle hints that I had gifts as a child: the gift of an ability to talk to people or communicate with people and the gift of leadership. I would lead the kids. They used to call me Bossy. I realized I was turning all these gifts for good and that I was going to change my life.

I made that decision at about 17-years-old and I did so by setting my goals. I wrote them out on a napkin. My mentor had to force me to do it. It was very uncomfortable. I was mad at his request because I couldn’t articulate what I wanted and I felt that no one had the right to tell me that I needed to write down anything. I remember he said, “Well, you’re never going to go anywhere unless you do this exercise with me.” So I said I’d do it even though I was upset. But now I can look back and see that was also one of those pivotal moments.

As I began checking off the list of things I had achieved, I started to become addicted to it, like an endorphin energy release in my body and in my mind. Every time I checked off something that I had strived for that was difficult, that was above average, I now believed that I was an above-average individual. I was relegated to a below-average existence for a very large period of my life. To be now living an above-average existence was such a contrast. It was a 180 degree shift.

Then from that, I said, “If I can achieve what I have already, with no skills, no education, with the upbringing I have, with the obstacles I’ve overcome, think about what I could achieve if I stay this course.” And that’s the course that I’ve been on for the 13 years hence.

You are a very successful businessman in the eyes of the world. In the eyes of many people, you are also a successful mentor and spiritual leader. You are often very open about saying you’re a spiritual person. What does that mean to you, to be a spiritual person?

You know, I believe that we are all connected. These are my own beliefs that I’ve come to through learning with great mentors and great teachers and through the readings that I’ve done. It’s something that I’ve felt. I can connect to people in a way that, when I shed my ego and put all the stuff aside and try to let my energy shine, something happens. It happens in other people’s lives. As I started feeling this energy – some people call it a presence – I started realizing there was a greater purpose to my existence. I began praying and meditating and trying to strip away the ideas and programming that I had with regard to everything in life and trying to understand it in the world and moment that I live.

So, to me, my spirituality is my guiding energy, my guiding light. It is my higher power. I meditate. I do so on my knees every single day. I spend at least 15 to 20 minutes in meditation every morning before I set out on my journey. I pray many times a day. Every time before I do a public speech or I’m out into the public world, I will get on my knees and pray and seek to be the catalyst and give all glory to the Universe, to God and not be the person who’s seeking to receive the gratification and the glory, but rather be a catalyst or conveyor of a message that I’ve been granted. What it is to me is indescribable. It’s something that lives with me. It gives me my energy, my voice, my words, my talents, my gifts, my experiences. It is something that is feeding a purpose within me and every day I work my hardest to see that purpose through but I’m also most critical of myself and humble that I have not even tapped into the potential that I have on this planet. I have not spent all of my energy and talents to date. So every day I wake up knowing there’s more that I can do to be better and to honor my spirituality and humanity as a whole.

You have the ability in your speaking to empower others to want to become leaders and entrepreneurs. You have an innate mentorship.

It’s interesting, because I don’t know what it was. I never could read as a young child, so I had to learn to speak and listen. After I studied psychology and sociology and the spirit, I found that I was given an auditory gift where I could hear things and recite them and repeat them. I could pick up the context of a word. I would not understand its definition but I could reuse it. I could pick up words much differently through hearing them than through reading them.

Only recently, I have become a person who loves to write as well, but that was only because it’s been so much work for me. It’s taken a long time for me to learn how to write correctly.

So I picked up this gift of being a speaker. I’ve learned to refine it and strip away the nonsense and try to connect as deep as I possibly can, to people who are willing to be connected within a room. I speak about entrepreneurship because I really believe that the tragedy of today’s American education system is that it’s lacking the one thing that needs to be taught, entrepreneurship and goal setting. Teaching independence and that people can create their own destiny and do not have to follow the destiny of others – this is not being taught in our public education system. It was almost as if the information is withheld on purpose.

It was so profound when I learned it and I understood that I could be a great individual through that vehicle of entrepreneurship that I decided I would make my life about empowerment. I would make my life about education of entrepreneurship and about mentoring, because it was a mentor in my life that changed it forever. And hopefully, because of that moment and my paying it forward from that moment, I will change many a life and bring mentorship to many people that would have never had it otherwise.

What does it take to become a successful entrepreneur?

It takes discipline. Being a successful entrepreneur is an interesting code to crack because many people get there so many different ways. There’s not one formula of success for every single person to follow. If there was, everybody would be successful entrepreneurs.

The secret to success in entrepreneurship and in capitalism as a whole is that certain people with certain education and certain information and certain knowledge and certain understanding do better than other people who don’t have that knowledge and education and understanding. That’s the existence that we live in.

What it takes first and foremost, is a discipline to do more than what everyone else does. And it’s not a lot more. It’s like one percent more. So a person who is successful who applies himself one percent more than the average person, at the end of a year, will have a far greater result than the person who just applies himself on an average basis. It requires you to break away from the norm.

As you observe this planet, it requires you seeing things that aren’t working correctly or things that could work better or things that do not exist. An entrepreneur thinks of creating them or making them more efficient so they work better or actually fixing them completely. Sometimes entrepreneurs are born from a simple observation of something small that they then took and made great and big. Sometimes it happens through a desire for an endgame or outcome in mind, greater than one that traditional vehicles of corporations and jobs can get you.

So every entrepreneur is born differently. What does it take to be a success? The traits I’ve found in all successful entrepreneurs are ambition, dedication, sacrifice, desire and passion. Those are character traits that I’ve found in every successful entrepreneur that’s achieving a significant level of success. There are people who win the lottery who don’t embody those characteristics. But winning the lottery is statistically difficult to do. I recommend people follow something far easier to achieve and that is be disciplined and follow the characteristics I just spoke of, to get to become a successful entrepreneur. That’s my methodology for getting there. I grow every single day to get there.

Then once you’re there and once you’ve made it, your philosophy is that you must give back, correct?

I believe you should give back before you’ve made it. I believe the reason why I ever made it was because I was giving back. My entrepreneurial vehicle was giving back to a number of people. It was giving back to the employees of my company because they had a good job that they liked, that they enjoyed, that fulfilled them creatively, that they could participate in and had passion for. And it gave back to my customers because the path that we created made their businesses more efficient. We facilitated greater communication among their employees, from their home offices to their offices. I always look for how I was contributing to the lives of my employees and the lives of my customers, through my product and through my company. So in effect, I was giving back to the universe and so therefore, the universe gave back to me. Being present to that and learning that and believing in that, I then decided that my new entrepreneurial ventures, from the point at which I sold that company, would only focus on giving back in very direct, tangible ways that were measurable. Not necessarily indirect, like the ways I spoke of, but in measurable, tangible ways. Like creating products that change people’s lives through their health or creating products that change people’s lives by training them, educating them and giving them tools they wouldn’t have otherwise.

Excellent! Could you tell me a little about Make The Difference Network?

Yes. Make The Difference Network (MTDN.com) facilitates donors with charities and causes and to take a step back, I realize the gift that I received from the universe and through my experience was that of a toolmaker. For many charities and cause-oriented individuals and organizations, their gift is their passion about others. But their gifts may not be in the making of tools and the creation of tools to make their giving more efficient. I’m an efficiency expert. I look at things and see that they’re not being efficient. I look at tools of technology as ways to make things in life more efficient, whether it be communication; whether it be dollars from a donor to a charity or education from a charity back to a donor. I look to make things more efficient.

Make The Difference Network is the most efficient assembly of tools for a charity and for a donor to become cause oriented, to become educators, to become greater, more efficient organizations. It is a tool kit for charities, for donors and for cause oriented people. The mass globalization of the world as we know it and the use of the internet is the catalyst. That is what the internet was created to do and what it is manifested to do. MTDN is literally bringing charities from a micro basis to donors who participate in those causes, allowing those charities to post wishes and then donors to get behind those wishes, to donate to them, to comment on them, to inspire the charity to keep moving forward and then have the donor inspire their friends and their network of influence to donate to different causes as well. It’s a very powerful tool kit for this process. It’s a revolutionary technology that will change humanity as we know it.

Excellent! I’ve taken notes while we’ve been talking. To be successful in life is to set goals, journal, continue learning, connect daily to something larger than yourself, do everything with great passion and give back.

Yes. Absolutely. And journaling is something that I do constantly. I’m constantly taking my notes on the day. I’m blogging. I use blogs to speak my voice out into the world, to take a stance. Some of my journals are private. Some I make public just because I want the world to see and hear the thoughts that are existing.

If there was a last pearl of wisdom you’d like to leave with us, what would that be?

Most important is have a purpose greater than yourself. Know that your existence on this planet is for a reason and that there’s a purpose in you that none of us have yet to absolutely fulfill. The truth is that we’re lucky that we’ve found our path and that we’ve fulfilled that purpose. You don’t worry about the outcome so much as you worry about the process. Don’t worry about exactly where you want to be a year from now or two years from now, worry about how you’re going to get there, what you look like and how you feel when you do it. Don’t worry about the end. Worry about today, the moment. How are you proceeding in life in a way that is going to help fulfill your purpose?

Excellent. Thank you so much.