Hi, guys. It's Tony Robbins. You're listening to habits and hustle. Crush it.

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How many locations, how many thousands of real estate agents, Dave, have you compiled over the years?

Jennifer? We're at 110 countries, 9000 offices, about 150,000 agents, and probably about 50,000 various employees.

Wow. And you were basically running the ship until 2018, right?

Yes. I co founded with my future wife Gail in 1973. We ran the company until I passed the baton along to Adam Contos about five, six years ago. Still heavily involved with re Max. We're public. We still own about half the company. So we're involved with the company about 80 to 90 days a year.

Oh, you are? Wow. And you spend most of your time now doing, are you still doing speaking engagements and all the things, right?

Yes. For the company, we do the quarterly public sEc board meetings three days in a row, four times a year. We do the major conventions. We do the major advertising productions. We also participate in the shareholder investor meetings, and then we do a great deal of traveling around the world for the company.

And your new book that's coming out, it's called the Perfect ten, right?

That's correct.

First of all, I want to just say this, which I find, I mean, your success is just above and beyond. Now, I always ask this question to people because you have to have some form of determination persistence to get to be that size, was that something that was innate in you, or did you have to become that? Is it a skill that you worked on?

No, I had to become that. I grew up as a farm boy in Marion, Indiana. I had a couple parents who were awesome. They taught me a great midwestern work ethic. I got midwestern values, Boy Scout, Cub Scout, you know, the normal stuff growing up, part time jobs, great parents. I was 17 and was expected that I would go to college. I had no interest in college. I went, I was very smart. My SAT scores were awesome. I failed out. I tried it a couple semesters. It just didn't work for me. I was immature. I discovered freedom. Mommy and daddy didn't sit me down and tell me, you're going to do your homework every night. And unfortunately, I didn't have a vision, a goal of what I wanted to be. Some people are fortunate. They go to college and they say, I want to be a teacher or a doctor. I want to be an attorney. And so they're off on their life's journey. I tried it and I just couldn't make that quite work. So the end result was I knew it didn't work for me. I knew I was immature and I joined the United States military.

That five or six year time period gave me the time to grow up, become more mature. It exposed me to the real world. I got to know real life heroes, and I was able to start my path down to being a successful leader. Ended up getting a real estate license, did extremely well at it, and the rest is history.

I mean, would you say timing was a big piece of it? I mean, that obviously the world is different today than when you started remax in what year, 1972?

Yeah, 73. The real estate industry was undergoing a dramatic change. Up to that time, there were a lot of small companies, one and two person companies in most major areas. There were one or two dominant players that had about 50% of the market. They had grown for 40 or 50 years. They had market share advertising, they had brand name awareness training tools and stuff. And then there's no barriers to entry to starting your own little shop. And so the end result was the two companies dominated. So at that time, franchising started in the real estate industry, Century 21 era. Dozens of others started franchising and said, look, you can't compete with the biggest company in town. You're just small. You don't get any group purchasing. Put on our jacket, our color will be at 50 offices, banded together, and you will be as big as your competitor and you can succeed, too. In that time period, three public companies came in. Caldwell Banker was a commercial company. Sears bought them and said, we're going to make you the largest residential company in the country. Merrill lynch came in, said the same thing. Prudential came in.

And by 1978, there were 178 national real estate companies were five years before there were none. And at the convention, the franchise salesmen were all running around saying, oh, in five years, this industry is going to be dominated by five or six players, 80% of the market. If you don't buy one now, you're going to be pushed out. Obviously, there's never room for 178 companies. And of those that were then, seven or eight of us are still around. The rest went away. But it took 50 years, 45 years, and the nationals, we account for about 60% of the US business.

Wow. So even if it was different timing there, your ability to stand the test of time and to even be relevant and standing up 50 plus years later, what is the secret? What made you guys stand the test of time versus all the other competitors? What made you guys different? What makes you guys different?

First place. Jennifer. We operated our commission structure differently. At, when we started, typically an agent worked for a company. The company got half the commission to pay their overhead, advertising, marketing, rent, etcetera, and make a profit. The agent used their half to have a living. If you split it four ways between a listing company, a selling company, you each got a quarter of a percent. So we decided to model ourselves after a co op, a group of doctors, lawyers, architects, dentists that decide, hey, we're all experienced, let's all get into one company. We'll share the expenses of running the business and keep most of the fee for ourselves. It was radical. It actually worked. At that time, the agents began maybe getting an 80 515 commission split. So far different, very difficult to implement. The industry hated it. They said, you know, we're rent a desk, you don't care about your agents, you just take on a fee to be in an office. But in reality, we ran our company just like every other good company. We just made it different. The agents were in business for themselves, but not by themselves. They had 20 or 30 professionals around them.

Took five years to convince the world it worked. And after that, it was very easy.

Did everybody copy you? Did Century 21 and Goldwell banker and all the other competitors, did they end up taking your business model and just replicating it because it's shown success over time?

No. The problem they had is a universal problem in the real estate industry, and that is 20% of the agents do 80% of the business. As a matter of fact, consumer federation came out a few weeks ago and showed that 50% of the 1,500,000 realtors in the united states have not closed the deal in twelve months. So we have a business that is extraordinarily filled with part timers and beginners. Turnover rates. Unbelievable. Everybody thinks it's an easy job. Get in your car, tour around, buy a NICE lunch, show houses, and get a big commission. It is much more difficult than that. The new people have to learn the business at the same time, earn a living. And so it's very difficult to do that. It's hard to get started as a beginner with no experience. But if you make it five or ten years, you've got hundreds of satisfied customers. Then you live off of referrals and it's an easy job.

Wow. So what do you think the secret is to longevity? Well, success, longevity, yeah.

Two points is we had the best agents. We couldn't hire beginners and part timers. Somebody had to pay us every month to work for us, let alone most agents just went to work for somebody and waited to make a commission. In our case, they had to pay upfront every month. So we didn't get the beginners and part timers. Our people out produced the competition three to one with twice the experience. And so that makes them very sophisticated. We pour people out of the top 20% in the country. The second thing that we discovered was we lived through nine presidencies. A couple of them were stupid, a couple of them were crooked, several of them were just God awful. You can look back on it, and we still made it work. We went through seven recessions. Theoretically, we're probably in the 8th one right now. And we made money in every recession. And at the time I said it was outstanding leadership, management, and outstanding agents. I've come to find out it's different. As I started writing the book, I really started analyzing why did we make it? And the truth of the matter is, you often hear that Darwin has said the strongest of the species survives.

He never said that. Darwin said the most adaptable of the species survives. The dinosaurs were the largest, most successful, biggest 100 million years ago. Mosquito is still here, and the dinosaurs are gone. And so the top producers, the ones that are creative, we live in a sea of change. The change is accelerating due to the Internet, technology laws, society accelerating at a faster and faster pace. The top producers know how to give good service. They have a book of business of people that like to use them. The technology does not replace a trusted advisor, and the top producers are the ones that are most easily adaptable. And so you have to lean in and adapt the changes. You can't do today's business with yesterday's methods and expect to be in business tomorrow.

That's a great answer. So adaptability, what you would say is the number one key to success.

I would think so.

And your book is called, let's just say the title, complete title. It is the perfect 1010 leadership principles to achieve true independence, extreme wealth and huge success. Okay, so is adaptation one of those principles? What is another big principle that you feel will make you a great success? And you can obviously use your own experience since you have so much of it. And your life, by the way, is amazing. But we'll talk about that after.

Thank you, Jennifer. I owe my success to hundreds of people. I started pretty naive, very uneducated. I wanted to succeed, but I knew I was starting with a disadvantage. The first thing I did was I interviewed 28 people for the position of administrative vice president of Remax. I turned down 27, and the 28th was a star. I knew I could be a sales manager. I knew I could teach how to sell real estate. I thought I had some leadership, but that was it. And I was looking for somebody that could you lease the office spaces? Could you furnish them? Could you set up computer systems? Could you hire the secretaries and bookkeepers and make contracts with accounting companies and attorneys and actually run the business? And I was very fortunate. My 28th interview was a woman by the name of Gail Main. She was my age. She had just moved from St. Louis. She was a trailing spouse. Her husband was going to be a general manager of made EnF department store. And so she was looking for something temporary. She had worked for Ralston Purina, had marketing and management degrees, and I sold. I told her I was going to build the biggest, most successful real estate company in the history of the world.

And if she could help me do it, she could be the CEO and run it. And she was naive and gullible and she bet and said, okay, let's try it. And it worked.

That's amazing.

Yeah. Best sale I made and best sale you made. We. We struggled the first five years. Our financial backers dropped out. We went into recession the year we started with the first oil embargo. The industry is trying to drive us out of business. And I was doing a pretty good job by myself. I didn't need help pushing me out of business. I was just dumb. But we were totally committed to it. It was a cause. We wanted to improve the life of real estate agents. It wasn't ever about making money. It was a cause for us to change an entire industry. Well, by the end of the first ten years, all five of the original officers were divorced. We had fallen in love with our company. She was the most beautiful mistress in the world. She was called Remax. We went from nothing to nobody, standing on the stage with thousands of people at our conventions, and we were taking on the world, taking on all the competition and winning place after place. So we got lost. We ignored our families. We went into the work 18 hours a day, seven days a week. It was exciting.

It was awe inspiring. It was just, wow, what a world. But we threw away our personal lives. And so a lot of this book is written around lessons learned, being a street fighter. They don't teach you this stuff at Harvard. And unfortunately, if I'd gone to a good school and I made good grades and I paid attention, the trail would have been a heck of a lot easier. But as it is, like many entrepreneurs, I didn't fit the mold. I didn't make it work. And so we went down through the college of hard knocks. Now, it's a hell of an education. Just most people can't afford the tuition. And so this book was basically based on the fact that we knew we started behind. We were desperate to make it work. We knew we were failing, and we were willing to accept criticism and advice from other people. So, Gail and I were 20 years younger than our managers, and if we were struggling. And I finally looked at my management team, and I said, come on, guys. What you like best about the company you used to work for, what you dislike the most?

What do you like most about Remax? What do you dislike the most? What am I doing right? What am I doing wrong? And be honest with me. How do you grow me up to be the leader you want me to be? Ain't that hurt? I didn't have a thick skin. I wanted my dream to survive. I was willing to take the hits, and they were very vocal about it. And so, basically, my company grew me up into the leader I eventually became that, followed by hundreds of books, hundreds of lectures and seminars, conventions, mentors, and people that helped me up along my way to success. So, part of this concept of this book is, it's my legacy. I started without a dollar. I ended up extremely successful financially, but I also succeeded personally. I went through a very nasty divorce. I realized that the kids were not being properly taken care of. They didn't have the male in the family that they needed. My wife was bored with the world, and she was off kind of starting her own career. And so I woke up in 1978 and said, hey, I expected my stay at home wife to take him to the soccer game, the baseball games, the school plays, and I was off building the empire.

I caught it in time, and I said, man, I mismanaged this. I'm throwing away my family. So I lost the marriage, but I didn't lose the kids. And so in the nick of time, I realized what was happening and I cut back on my hours. I made my hours more meaningful than ones I worked. But I said, no, there's time for family time, there's time for the evening, etcetera. So what I've done with this legacy book, if I can, is admitted to mistakes and failures. I did. I talk about some successes I managed to eke out, but it's basically ten major sections, and of those ten sections, ten major ideas. So you have 100 ideas in the perfect ten, whether it's leadership, management, entrepreneurship, scalability, personal development, handling change, etcetera. And it's meant to. You don't have to read all 500 pages, but if you're having issues with. Well, I've started my company, but it's not scaling the right way. I can't figure out how to build a team. This is a world of experience. About 25% of the examples I use, Jennifer, is things that I personally saw, lived through and learned about. The best 75% is my education of.

I watch Google and Amazon. I have listened to great authors like Jim Collins, who wrote some books on good to great and all that sort of thing. I studied business. I studied everything I could figure out of how do I make our dream successful? And we became an incredible success story. So my book is met as a hand up to somebody who's struggling, too, and they're in a leadership position, or they own a small entrepreneurial shop. They want to grow bigger. Everybody's a leader. If you're involved with Boy scouts, Girl scouts, you're leading children. If you're in your church group and you're doing Bible studies, you're a leader. If you're a parent, you're darn sure a leader. Or if you're in business, you're probably in a leadership position someplace. So this is all about leadership and growing up.

So. Right. So let's. Let's start with not start, but what is, what would you say would be your definition of success, then? We've had a lot of success. You've had a lot of failures.

Success is a simple formula. I want to do what I want to do, when I want to do it, where I want to do it, with who I want to do it, and where I want to do it. A very simple, simple statement. It is not dancing to the drumbeat of somebody else, not meeting somebody else's expectations. It is, I have matured to a point. My time is limited. As us pilots say, I've got a lot less Runway in front of me than I have behind me. Or another way of saying it is, if you look at a roll of toilet paper, the closer you get to the end, the faster it goes. And so the whole point is, what do you want to do with your life? You have x many hours a day, and it gets shorter and shorter. It's, I want to do what I want to do, when I want to do it, where I want to do it, how I want to do it, and most important, with who I want to do it. That's success.

I love that. I love that. So really, autonomy is your definition of success?

Autonomy is a good word. Shall we use the word freedom?

Freedom's a good word, too.

So, you know, I became wealthy. Wealthy really is the greatest example of freedom there is, because now you have freedom of choice. You can go to work or stay home. You can start something else, or you can do nothing. You can choose who you want to choose to be with. And so this book is truly about unkindling your life and having a life that is meaningful to you and everybody wants to talk to. Balance. There's no balance in life. It's just literally, there's no balance in life. It's just so overwhelming in so many different places that different times of your evolutionary growth, you are out of balance. You have to be. Your business is struggling. I'm sorry. It's an 18 hours day. I had an absolutely awesome man that grew up in my company for 1520 years, and I went to my board and said, look, I'm older now, and I'm confident in who I am. I want to be just chairman of the board and a mentor and a financier, and he's ready to take my position. He came up from the bottom. He was a swat guy. He's a marine. And yet I mentored him for 20 years.

And they said, dave, he doesn't have a college degree. And I laughed at him. I said, well, neither do I. And they said, yeah, but you're a public company, and you're an icon, and everybody knows you built what you built. He doesn't even have an undergraduate degree. So I went to him and I said, adam, I want you as my CEO. My public board has said you don't have a degree. So we went to Denver University. They waived his undergraduate degree on life experience, and he got 18 hours of study in two years. Interesting enough. 2000 hours a year for remax, 200 hours a year as a cop, 18 hours and 18 months, 1800 hours. He got a 4.0, and he became the CEO. So here's a dumb cop marine that came up through the ranks, showed he was totally committed, became an incredible leader. He was an incredible leader in the military. He was an incredible leader in the cops. And so that transitioned over to being an incredible leader, handling re max. And so it's what you make of the world 100%. It's an amazing place.

And I think that there are certain skills like that you have innately. You can obviously get better with them with practice and time. But it sounds to me, and I talk about this a lot on this podcast, right? People who are too smart, academic, tend to overthink things versus other people who are bold. My whole thing is about being bold. And, you know, some people just, they overthink to a place of analysis paralysis, where they make no decision or poor decisions, versus the other people who have much more eQ, emotional intelligence, street smarts. Like you mentioned to your, you mentioned the first, one of the first things you said on this podcast was, I don't have a, I don't have a college education, but I sure, I sure learned how to street fight. And in your book, you talk about the four lessons that you learned street fighting. You're not going to learn that at Harvard. I tell you that. But do you want to talk about your four, the four lessons that you learned street fighting? Are you.

Well, it's pretty simple. I have black belts and three styles of karate. I got my first one when I was 19 in Vietnam. I ended up moving from one style of karate to another. The first one, it was the only instructor I had, and it was taekwondo, but it was really meant for people with longer legs and longer arms, a lot of kicking and punching, and I was kind of short and squatty. And then I went to Kenpo, which was more of a korean style, short and squatty people, and it was a different style. And then I eventually merged and went into Shotokan. And so a lot of people will train hard, get in a black belt, and think that they're qualified to, you know, to protect themselves if they get into a fight? Well, they're a hell of a lot more qualified than somebody that doesn't know anything. But I'm sorry, if you get into a street fight with the gangbangers that have served ten years in prison, that have known nothing but violence, and I'm talking acute violence that you and I can't imagine, and they get into a street fight, there's no rules.

Now, when you can gouge eyes out, you can kick somebody in their testicles. It doesn't make any difference. There's no rules. The only rule street fighting is survive and live. Don't die. And so if you ever have to go to a knife fight, take a gun. And if you have to go to a gunfight, take a gun and a machine gun, and maybe four or five friends that have machine guns.

That's right.

And I mean, this. That's the whole thing about street fighting, is entrepreneurs who didn't get the advantage of a college education. They start a small little mexican restaurant, they start a small little italian restaurant. They start a doggy daycare. And all of a sudden, without formal education, they're faced with all these problems. Those that can't figure their way out of it will fail. Those that have the persistence and the grit will say, I'm not going to quit. How do I do this? And so you find out, yeah, there's a storybook answer. There's a textbook out of Harvard that says, you should do this and you should do that. But in reality, you find out the jungle you're in, and this is the fight you're going to have to win. That doesn't mean you're bloodthirsty or nasty or awful. It means you get street smarts. You start figuring out what are the shortcuts I can take to survive. I have to feed my family. I have to make payroll. I have to pay the rent. I didn't anticipate any of that when I started my own company. But, man, it rears its head awful quick. So you either sink or you swim.

No, I agree. What would make a great leader?

Well, when you start talking leadership principles, I have a friend by the name of Darren Hardy. I don't know if you're familiar with Darren or not.

Darren's your mentor. I read that in the book a few times.

He is one of the most brilliant men I've ever met in my life. And he taught me a while back. He said, all great leaders have one common factor. They sell hope. And so whether you're Martin Luther king, selling hope for equality for people of your race or of all races. And of course, he had a tremendous following of white people that felt the same way that blacks and people of color should have equal opportunity. Or you have a religious figure like Jesus who is saying, be kind and turn the other cheek, etcetera. He was selling hope that there was salvation to, basically to slaves and to the poorer people of the world, not to the kings and the queens. Or you have a Reagan who was saying, make America great. Or you have Obama, whose only slogan was hope. Or you get Trump, who said, make America great again. All great leaders are selling hope to their followers that we can have a better life than what we currently have. That's the first inspiration of leadership, is in leading. You have to sell hope to the followers that we can do this. You have confidence, not arrogance, and we're going to make the world a better place.

What is the difference between. Where is the fine line between confidence and arrogance?

Yeah, that's a toughie. You know, I had Stan McChrystal, four star general, on a podcast two days ago, and I asked him the same question, and I said, can ambitious people as a leader really turn off the followers? And he said, yes. He said, if your ambition is only for you, everybody around you knows you're going to do what the hell you have to do to become who you want to be, and that stands in your way. But if your ambition is I want my entire team to win, all of a sudden, that sells. So the ambition is, we're going to win together or we're going to fail together. It's not I'm going to win and get the four stars and you get nothing. It's, we're in this together. We're all going to win or all going to fail. All of a sudden, the arrogance goes away. Now it is, my boss cares about me as much as he cares about himself. Let's make this thing work. That's a great idea.

Right? So it's about the idea of we versus I. Basically.

There is no I, right? There's no I in anything that I have done. I am humble about that. Dale and I became romantically involved about ten years after being partners. I was blessed with the fact that she absolutely, for that ten years, was the best partner I could have ever had. We never had an argument. We respected each other's position, and we gave each other the freedom to run our jobs. Interestingly enough, we got married. So 40 some years later, not only have we been partners, for 50 years, but married for 40 years, we've never had an argument.

Seriously?

Yeah, seriously.

How?

And so that's mutual respect. The ability to sit back and understand if somebody's frustrated and maybe a little bit angry, to shut up and maybe go with blows for a while and try to reason with each other instead of being angry with each other. I'm very fortunate. I have a life partner and a business partner that has been the most successful partnership I could ever have.

So you pick really well.

I'm a very picky person and you pick well.

What is your secret to being a really good picker?

Make a lot of mistakes and be a bad picker.

So. But basically frogs and the print. You got to kiss a lot of frogs, right, to get to a prince.

Yeah. They called me Wartlib.

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Trust me, you will steal. Incredible. You know, your background is extraordinary. So you, here you are. You are the founder of the most successful real estate, you know, empire of all time. You are a NASCAR race car driver, which is unbelievable. You're like an adrenaline junkie. The stuff that you've accomplished, which, which to me says something in itself, right? Like, it's no, it's no accident that you were able to build what you built, right? There's like a, through a line in your personality. Obviously, you are fearless, you're not scared of taking risks. You are obviously able to put yourself in really scary situations. Like, again, I started this podcast by saying, were you born like this? And the truth is then you have this accident that they said you were going to be paralyzed when you were an adrenaline junkie, not able to jump on a plane, scuba dive, do any of these things that you wanted to do, and you persevere through that as well. Can you just talk about your level of grit and determination and perseverance? And how does someone build that when they don't naturally have that ability?

Nobody has that ability. Courage comes from confidence, and confidence comes from experience. And so you can't expect somebody with zero experience to have the courage of a warrior. And so if you go to basic training and they put you on your belly, and you got your arm cradling your gun, and you're inching along and they're shooting live machine gun rounds six inches above your helmet, and if you make a mistake, friendly fire is going to kill you. So your first friendly fire is controlled and it scares the bejeezies out of you because you're an 18 year old kid that's just dumb and stupid, and you made a mistake and joined the military. Well, they do that to you several times and it goes into your psyche that I can do this, I can do this, I can live through this, move forward. And the first time that you get thrown into live fire, military action, that you may die and they're not shooting over your head, you've already experienced the terror and the fear and peeing your pants. Okay? It happens. And all of a sudden, it isn't as terrifying. Been there, done that. My first time on Daytona, a two and a half mile track, and I looked to the right as I went on the track to the infield, and it was a mile down to the right and a mile down to the left.

And I'd been driving a three mile track on a local track at 120 miles an hour. Now we're stepping up to two and a half miles at 200 plus mile an hour. And they told me, all you do is you put your foot on the accelerator, and when you get to the corner turn, do not lift your foot off the accelerator, do not touch the brake, and the car will hold. And I can guarantee you, Jennifer, on the first turn, I didn't need a seatbelt. The pucker factor was so tight, you couldn't have got me out of that fire suit and that seat with a crowbar and all of a sudden, four or five laps later, I realized it's designed, the banking is designed to hold this car and everybody else's car is holding it, and mine's holding it. And then it was fun. Then it was, hey, this a hoot. This is more fun you can have with your clothes on. And then when you get into wreck or two or three, and they're a lot safer now than they were 20 years ago. But even 20 years ago, you, most of the time, you got a broken rib or wrist or something.

And unfortunately, two or three drivers a year would die. But most of the time, you total a car and you get out and walk away. And so all of a sudden, courage comes from confidence, and confidence comes from experience. And by the time you've gone around a racetrack 500 times in a race, and you've done it for over 400 or 500 races, it is no different than getting on the super speedway and driving around in the super speedway. It is. It's just the way it works.

But how about your walking? How about when you became paralyzed?

Oh, that's an amazing story. They did all these tests. I was in a coma for three months. I flatlined on a valentine's day, of all things, 2012, two months into my coma, or two weeks into my coma. And so when I woke up, I had the mental ability of a six year old. I was a total quadriplegic. They did all the nerve tests and said that my nerves were shot. I would, at my age, I would never regrow them. And I apologize to your audience. I looked at the doctors and I said, well, let's get this shit straight. I said, you don't know what the hell you're talking about. My name is Dave Lediger. I'm a walk out of this place on day. I leave there and you can kiss my ass. And they said, well, you can't talk that way. We're trying to save you and help you. We got psychologists who are going to teach you how to live with being a quadriplegic. And I said, no, you're not. If I can't walk, I'll kill myself. This is my vow to you. I'm walking out of this hospital. I didn't. I sat with my therapists, my nurses.

I said, I'm the toughest sob you've ever met in your life. I'm ex military. I will never quit. Your job is to not let me quit. I don't care what it takes. I will never quit on you. Don't quit on me. And it took forever, and the stretching and the growing of the tendons and getting feeling back on my fingertips and getting the point where I could drive an electric wheelchair. And it took me twelve months of back breaking, 12 hours a day, and I made it. And so you walk now? Oh, yeah. I use an electric wheelchair about half the time, but I usually walk about 4000 to 5000 steps a day, still play a little bit of golf. I had a wonderful german shepherd, Max. I got him when I was a quad. He taught me how to walk. I could balance myself. He was 120 pounds between a cane and him, and I had braces on my legs. Eventually I got rid of the braces and then eventually I could walk with just Max on the cane. And the dog was within a foot of me every day of my life until about September when I lost him.

And his replacement is one of his sons from his five litters who is absolutely awesome smart, and he's by my side all the time. So I learned how to do it. I managed to make it in that rehab center for spinal rehab because I had gone through a lifetime of successes and failures and you don't win every time. And I had learned how to handle that. The majority of the people that have a spinal cord injury are usually 15 to 22 years old and they're male. The little boy babies brain doesn't work like a girl baby does. And girls are mature and have some common sense at age 18. Boys don't figure it out until they're 20 or 25. And in my case, I probably didn't figure it out until I was 65 or 70, but it's basically boy boys hurt themselves. They're on a skateboard without a helmet. They're on a bicycle without a helmet. They get drunk and get on a motorcycle at 100 miles an hour because they're stupid and they're a construction worker and they don't put a safety harness on because they think they're macho. They walk along the roof of a building and they fall off and they're paralyzed.

The interesting aspect of the rehab center was I was the oldest person there. They don't have old people there. Old people die. And I made it. The majority of the kids wouldn't get up and do the physical therapy. It hurts. I mean, I'm talking incredible pain. They want to watch tv. They wanted to give up. They wanted to play on their xbox, and their parents are kissing their butt and the nurses are begging them, you've got to do this to get better. And the doctors are trying to tell them you got to do it better. And they just say, I'm screwed for life. You know, my legs don't work anymore. I don't have any future. They never had any success to build on. They never had the failures they had to overcome to become a success. The same time I was in, there was a motocross rider. He was 18 years old, a national champion. He drove dirt bikes up these mounds and did flips and inverted himself and rolled over and landed. He had national champion, and he broke his back. The first thing he said to his therapist was the same thing I had said just 50 years younger.

He said, I'm not a quitter. I'm a winner. I know I'm screwed. I'll never walk again. I will be the best quadriplegic you will ever know in your life. I want to go to college. I'm going to get a degree. I'm going to make something of myself. Help me do it. And he would go out and take every minute of physical therapy he could get. He had had a lifetime up to age 18 of overcoming obstacles and finding out, I can do this. I failed at this, but I can do this. I'll try again. I'll try again. So this attitude, this simple equation of confidence, comes from experience, and courage comes from confidence. It's what's missing from most people. And most people start in a sales job and they don't make it work, and they quit because they get told no, and they can't handle somebody telling them no. Once you beat the confidence, it's not arrogance. Maybe arrogance helps a little bit, but once you have the confidence to do it. Katie, bar the doors, man. You're going to get it done.

Yeah. I love that. How old are your kids now, Dave?

They're all in their fifties.

How old are you?

I'm 78.

Okay. I have a question for you about your kids, because now, your kids obviously grew up very privileged, right? They had a father who was very successful, made a lot of money. How do you not spoil your kids, for a lack of a better word, into getting too comfortable with being wealthy, where they lose that ability to put in the hard work, have the grit, have the hustle that their father had, right? Because sometimes, like, I see it all the time for where I live. You know, you come from an upper middle class, upper class families. How do you not create a soft child?

I never give him a damn thing except for my love.

Is that true?

I never gave him a car. They had to buy their own car. They had to have their own part time job. I told them I'd pay their college education, but they had to work the entire college education. All four of my children worked at McDonald's as they were teenagers. They all worked at a dozen different part time jobs. I told them I am an unusual person. You will never work in my company because I don't want you, number one, to follow in my shadow and think you have to fill what I did because I am a one in a million. And number two, I'm never going to promote you over the vice president that built the company with me. You did not hit the lucky gene pool. So your original mother and my wife, Gail, and I love you, and we're going to help you move forward and become human beings. But it's not an easy road, and we're not going to give you a damn thing other than our love, our attention and education. And you're going to have to make your own way. And if you make your own way and you have a business idea, I will be your partner.

I will fund you, I will help you build your business. You can buy me out for a dollar after it's successful and you run your business. And as it ended up, I'm very fortunate. I have four of the greatest kids in the world. They've all found their own way. Interestingly enough, the oldest boy is now a partner with me in a family business, a private equity company. And we've worked our way through that. But going through grade school, high school, college, they had to pay their own way and they had to earn it, and they had to become a good citizen. And so no drugs, no problem. They love me, they love their mother, they love Gail, a very forcible man. This perfect ten concept is not about, you have a perfect life and everything's just la la. Maybe somebody has a fairy tale life. I am incredibly disappointed that I screwed up my first marriage. Multiple tours overseas, the military, leaving a wife at home who was young, working 18 hours a day for seven or eight years, trying to build remakes. That wasn't fair. I made my mistakes and so I tried to make up for them.

And the end result was I did get the perfect ten life. When I was in the hospital for almost eleven months, all four children took turns by, you know, hours of the day, of staying with me 24 hours a day. So I was never alone.

Wow. So that says that you, your life, that means that your life has meaning. That is success to me. Because your kids actually love you.

I think so. I've told them, I've taken care of you while you're alive. You don't get anything while I'm dead. Obviously they will.

So what's your belief system on mentorship then? Do you believe in mentors? You have one. I know you like this guy, Darren Hardy. You talk about him a lot.

You know, I've been very fortunate with a series of mentors, both in the military and in the civilian world. And mentoring is very important. The thing that's fascinating about being a mentor is I've mentored probably two or 300 people in the last 55 years, and in reality, maybe five or ten of those really executed what our conversations were. And in the vast majority of the time, people sat there and listened, said, oh, that's a good idea. That's a good idea. And they walked out and never did a thing with it. That's discouraging because the knowledge is out there. All we can do is give you the knowledge. It's up to the individual to execute. And you can actually tell they're not taking notes. They don't call you back. They don't say, dave, I tried this and it didn't work. What am I doing wrong? They just say, oh, thanks, see you next time. And so why talk to a wall when they're not going to execute?

Yeah, that's a great point. I think what we, I say is, it's 99% is perspiration, 1%, you know, one percent's inspiration. Right. I mean, obviously you can talk to a wall, and I think that's the same. I get a lot of people asking me, oh, I want an information session, and then I give them advice and nothing ever gets done with it, too. So I'm on the fence with mentorship. So I wanted to ask you about that. The last question is, you were the main sales, like you taught sales for re Max, for your own company, for the majority of your career, correct?

Yes.

What makes somebody an exceptional salesperson? And how important is sales to any business? I mean, you're a real estate agent. Yes. But isn't sales like the crux of any successful business? If you can't sell, you're kind of screwed.

If you can't sell, you can't market, you can't stay in business. So sales is everything. You hear, there's a natural born salesman. Nobody's natural born at anything. I don't know if you've ever seen in a couple of the success magazines, Rob report, Wall Street Journal, there's a man, half body, a male, muscular. He's got a hammer and a chisel and he's making a statue of himself. It's called the self made man. I don't know if you've ever seen that. It's everywhere.

Yeah, I have seen it.

And so the laughter is, no, there is no self made man. Other people made you what you are, whether it's your parents, your peer group, your friends, the business you decide to go into, the people you followed. And so mentoring is important. But in salesmanship, there's no natural born salesman. There are two types of salespeople. There are hunters, and there's farmers. And the hunter has the attitude of, I want to go chase the enemy down, or the animal. I want to kill it and throw it on the fire, and I'm going to go get another one. And the farmer has the attitude, I want to go get it, but I want them to be my lifelong friend and buy from me the rest of my life. You have to have both. So when you build a sales team, you got to have the hunter that's willing to go out and take on the world by themself. But you also have to have the stabilizing influence. If somebody says, I'm not in this for one quick deal, I'm here to make you my customer for life. Both of them fit in the equation. Often you'll find out that the one that wants a person for life eventually moves out of sales and goes into servicing as a regional director or a franchise manager.

That keeps the equation going and keeps that person buying from the company for 20 or 30 years. Sales is a learned trait. Everything that we as adults learn, we learn by memory, mimicking. You have a baby, it's born. Mommy and daddy play baby face and say all kinds of stupid baby shit to them. And they're laughing and smiling, and the baby starts to smile back. They are mimicking the smiles of the parents. If they don't smile in two or three months, they probably have autism. That's one of the first signs. And so, but the normal people that don't have autism, they mirror the parents by the time they're five years old. Daddy, I'm eating all my green beans because I want to be big and tough and strong like you. And the daughter says, mom, you know, I'm eating all my food, and I will learn how to be a cook and have a wonderful family, and you're just the most wonderful mother in the world. And so they mimic parents, and that goes away. At about age seven or eight, another little asteroid. They just, oh, I want to imitate the other eight and ten and twelve year olds, and that's bad enough, but then they get to be 15 or 16, and they mimic other 15 or 16 year olds, and then they go to college and they mimic each other.

And of course, the whole thing is we're smart and our parents are stupid. And so that's just a mimicking deal. And then they start mimicking the people at the office. And if the woman that they admire dresses sharply and she's very confident, they'll start following that leader and acting like that leader. So we go through our life mimicking things. So if I can close out with just a great idea for you, that is, if you're a ditch digger and you ditch dig and all your friends are ditch diggers, you will dress the same way they will. There's nothing wrong with being a ditch digger. You probably didn't get the education. You're in a lower social, economic group. That doesn't mean you're bad or you're wrong. It just means those are your circumstances. You'll go to the same bar on Saturday night and drink the same beer and the same label on Saturday night. And if you take a vacation, you will go to the river or the lake, and you'll go fishing, or you will go hunting one week a year, and you will drive the same pickup truck, and you'll have the same jokes, the same vocabulary and the same whatever.

If you're a cardiologist and you went through four years of college, three years of medical college, two years of residency, and you're in a hospital setting, and every person in that hospital setting has a college degree, and the other cardiologists all have Mercedes Cadillacs because they can afford it, and they all send their kids to private schools, and if they take a vacation, it's to the Swiss Alps or to Aspen, and you'll have the same vocabulary and tell the same stories and build the same churches and join the same country clubs, that's the game. You will mimic the people you're around. Jim Rohn, great philosopher, said once, you're the average of the five people you spend the most time with. And so when you and I look at each other and we talk about all the business people we've met, we've been surrounded by literally the best in the world. Not everybody gets that opportunity, but everybody can make that opportunity.

Yes, we can. We can. We can change our own circumstances. We can take control, right?

Absolutely, Dave.

Okay, so I loved your book. Where can people find more on the book? When the book, where is the book sold? Tell us about where people can find you.

Perfect. Ten, you can go to Amazon and pre order, you can go to Dave leninger.com. We have lots of good management leadership ideas on it.

You really do. And also, I wanted to say one other thing quickly. When I was reading your book, I saw you said something about go to relentless.com and it took me to Amazon. And I know the original, yeah, the.

Original name for Amazon was going to be relentless and the attorneys talked him out of it, but he had already had the domain done. And so if you type in relentless, you go to Amazon.

That was amazing. I didn't know that. I checked. I tried that. I'm like, oh my God, that was really cool. That's really interesting. And Amazon is the largest river in the world. And that's why, yeah, that's why I met the largest river.

So it's an amazing story. So the world's amazing.

I love it. Dave, thank you so much for being on the podcast. I appreciate you very much. You're such an inspiration. Really are.

Well, thank you, Jenner. It's fun to share ideas with people and you hope that maybe they'll catch one or two good ideas of making more money tomorrow.

Yeah, I caught a few more than one or two ideas. I actually haven't even finished your book completely because I was legitimately reading it and taking notes. And I have to say I'm very impressed because you meet a lot of people doing this work, right? And you're really one of the, one of the people that I admire. Your life has been phenomenal and what you've done and how you express it. Like I said, I want you to be my mentor and I'll listen and I'll execute.

Well, I'll tell you what, I was in the coma for quite a while back in 2012. Came out of quad. They tried to put me in hospice three different times. My friends and family said, absolutely not. If we run out of insurance, we've got the money, we'll give him every chance he's got. And so I've got a paper I've been writing since I died to say all those people, all those doctors and nurses and therapists and what they did for a 60 some year old person. And what I accomplished after I survived, of taking re Max public, bought a 3500 acre ranch, have started eight or nine different businesses, and have been able to give several hundred million dollars to various philanthropy efforts of what's the impact of your life? Of what that extra ten years was worth? So I don't know if I got another day or if I get another ten years, but I'm paying back the doctors and nurses, my family, everybody that helped me survive by stating, hey, the world's a wonderful place. Pass it on to the next person.

That is amazing. Good for you. I'd love to have you back. I have so many other questions, but we could do it another time. Wow. I mean, the fact. Okay, I got so much. Do you mind if you come back for like a quick one? Maybe for 20 minutes sometime soon?

Anytime you want. Thank you.

Where do you live?

I live in south of Denver. It's castle Pines, it's golfing community, mountainous. Spend part of my winters a couple five days a month in Scottsdale, where I'm at today. And then in the summers I spend a lot of time up in the ranch. So I actually have a 3500 acre ranch with a abbey of 28 nuns that are on the property that guard my home for me.

Wow.

That I've taught them how to shoot and do self defense, so they're well armed nuns and guns.

My God, that's amazing. Wow. That's awesome. Okay, well, I'm going to be in touch with you. I'm sure I can find your. I'll get your information. But like I said, you are incredible. Incredible. Thank you.

Thank you, Jennifer. I appreciate the compliments. Bye bye. Have a great day.

Bye.

This episode is brought to you by the Yap Media Podcast Network. I'm Holla Taha, CEO of the award winning digital media empire Yap Media and host of Yap Young and profiting podcast, a number one entrepreneurship and self improvement podcast where you can listen, learn, and profit on young and profiting podcast. I interview the brightest minds in the world, and I turn their wisdom into actionable advice that you can use in your daily life. Each week, we dive into a new topic like the art of side hustles, how to level up your influence in persuasion and goal setting. I interview a list guests on young and profiting. I've got the best guess, like the world's number one negotiation expert, Chris Voss, Shark Damon John, serial entrepreneurs Alex and Layla Hermozy, and even movie stars like Matthew McConaughey. There's absolutely no fluff on my podcast, and that's on purpose. Every episode is jam packed with advice that's going to push your life forward. I do my research, I get straight to the point, and I take things really seriously, which is why I'm known as the podcast princess and how I became one of the top podcasters in the world.

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