Ryan Blair
Appearances
Creating Confidence with Heather Monahan
Confidence Classic: Discover Your Calling! With Ryan Blair Founder Of AlterCall
Yes, I've graduated from the teacher of suffering. I no longer need suffering the same way that I used to, although suffering does show up. But when it does, I have a new perspective on it, and I actually learn from it, and I greet it as a friend. Every challenge that comes your way is an opportunity to grow. In fact, I'm going to be faced with challenges. I am faced with challenges.
Creating Confidence with Heather Monahan
Confidence Classic: Discover Your Calling! With Ryan Blair Founder Of AlterCall
Being an entrepreneur with 30 team members and hundreds and thousands of clients is a challenge. And so every day there's something new that comes my way that I didn't anticipate I don't want to do, but I have to do it because, you know, in that challenge is the next version of me. And when I pass through that challenge and when I master that challenge and when I extract the lessons from it,
Creating Confidence with Heather Monahan
Confidence Classic: Discover Your Calling! With Ryan Blair Founder Of AlterCall
then I actually step into a new version of me that wasn't there the day before. So it's not that suffering has disappeared altogether. It's that I greet it as a friend, and I don't self-inflict it. I'm not looking to learn from the teacher of suffering. And so I constantly am preoccupying myself with,
Creating Confidence with Heather Monahan
Confidence Classic: Discover Your Calling! With Ryan Blair Founder Of AlterCall
with trying to humble myself and keep my ego at bay and doing the things necessary to keep suffering away from me so that I can learn from the good of life as opposed to having to learn, you know, from a constant self-sabotaging, suffering way of being, which is the way most people learn. When people... are signed up for the teacher of suffering, I just give them a hug and love on them.
Creating Confidence with Heather Monahan
Confidence Classic: Discover Your Calling! With Ryan Blair Founder Of AlterCall
I'm like, that's a better teacher than me. Because suffering will teach you more than anything else in life. But unfortunately, most people just never learn how to graduate from suffering. And so they're kept in a perpetual state of suffering.
Creating Confidence with Heather Monahan
Confidence Classic: Discover Your Calling! With Ryan Blair Founder Of AlterCall
Yes, there's an awakening occurring right now. Most business people, especially when you become successful, you start to question, like, why am I doing this? Do I really want to be sitting inside of a room teaching and mentoring people so that they can make a living to give to their kids and I'm not giving the sustenance to my children that I should be or to myself that I should be?
Creating Confidence with Heather Monahan
Confidence Classic: Discover Your Calling! With Ryan Blair Founder Of AlterCall
And if you're really chasing money beyond a certain point, you're really not chasing the money. You're chasing the power, the fame. You're chasing something other than the money. Because after you get to a certain level of money, more happiness does not come with it. There's a diminishing return of it.
Creating Confidence with Heather Monahan
Confidence Classic: Discover Your Calling! With Ryan Blair Founder Of AlterCall
and so what i have found with the clients that i work with is they're often asking the same question that i was which is why should i be doing all this why am i not just out there smelling the roses or hanging out on the beach all day long and i i did that for two years you know for two years i did nothing and that brought suffering with it as well after a certain point there was a diminishing return there and that i had healed
Creating Confidence with Heather Monahan
Confidence Classic: Discover Your Calling! With Ryan Blair Founder Of AlterCall
And I no longer could spend all day long in tranquility and still feel alive and still feel like I was utilizing my God-given gifts to make an impact. And so there's a balance that we have to have between productivity and generosity. And the productivity is how are we productive as human beings?
Creating Confidence with Heather Monahan
Confidence Classic: Discover Your Calling! With Ryan Blair Founder Of AlterCall
And the generosity is how are we being generous with ourselves, our friends, our family, and the world as a whole? And if you're just collecting money for the sake of collecting money, you're not going to have that productivity dialed in, or that generosity, I should say, dialed in. And as a result of that, you're going to be miserable.
Creating Confidence with Heather Monahan
Confidence Classic: Discover Your Calling! With Ryan Blair Founder Of AlterCall
And all you're going to be doing is trying to get one dose of more money after, next dose of more money after, next dose of more money. And it becomes an addiction. And the high of money wears off over time. And eventually, you're miserable. And you start sabotaging yourself by collecting things. And the more stuff that you own, the more that stuff owns you.
Creating Confidence with Heather Monahan
Confidence Classic: Discover Your Calling! With Ryan Blair Founder Of AlterCall
And I'll tell you this, you know, I used to have homes all over the place. And then I had to worry about the people taking care of the homes, the people renting the homes, the value of the homes, the inflation in the homes, all of the stuff, right? All of those things that I owned end up owning me. And every day I just wake up having to maintenance all of the possessions that I owned.
Creating Confidence with Heather Monahan
Confidence Classic: Discover Your Calling! With Ryan Blair Founder Of AlterCall
And that's no way to live. So there's a balance that we must find in productivity and generosity. And that's what I help entrepreneurs do.
Creating Confidence with Heather Monahan
Confidence Classic: Discover Your Calling! With Ryan Blair Founder Of AlterCall
Every one of us has a journey of the soul that we're on. And our soul has a purpose. And it's up to us to discover what that is. And we discover that through a series of experimentations. If you look at your past, you've already been doing these experiments.
Creating Confidence with Heather Monahan
Confidence Classic: Discover Your Calling! With Ryan Blair Founder Of AlterCall
And each time you feel lit up and alive when you're doing something, like for me, when I'm speaking before an audience, when I'm writing a good passage, when I'm mentoring an individual, a new individual, giving them new awareness and giving them peace and awakening them to a new level in themselves. Like I could do that all day long.
Creating Confidence with Heather Monahan
Confidence Classic: Discover Your Calling! With Ryan Blair Founder Of AlterCall
And so when I look at the pattern of my past and I look at the things that light me up, in there I will discover the purpose. But what we don't realize is that each and every single one of us has the exact same purpose. We just have to utilize different vehicles to get there. And each of us has the same purpose, and that is to leave humanity better than we found it.
Creating Confidence with Heather Monahan
Confidence Classic: Discover Your Calling! With Ryan Blair Founder Of AlterCall
Now, the way that we do that might be by being a great mother or a great father or a great citizen or a politician or a business person. And the objective is to leave wisdom behind in such a way that the world is a better place because you were in it.
Creating Confidence with Heather Monahan
Confidence Classic: Discover Your Calling! With Ryan Blair Founder Of AlterCall
And so when you really simplify what a purpose is and you start to think about it in such a simplistic way, then you can challenge yourself each and every single day to just further your purpose, to contribute to the life of another person, to spread some light into someone else's life.
Creating Confidence with Heather Monahan
Confidence Classic: Discover Your Calling! With Ryan Blair Founder Of AlterCall
And when you do that over enough days in a row, eventually you accumulate such goodwill that it'll be easy for you to live on purpose each and every single day.
Creating Confidence with Heather Monahan
Confidence Classic: Discover Your Calling! With Ryan Blair Founder Of AlterCall
Yeah, well, I'm a Christian, and so my spiritual hero is Jesus, and he taught three things. He taught forgiveness, he taught love, and he taught God's law. And, you know, I never really understood the power of forgiveness. I could understand love, like, okay, I get it. We should have love, love thy neighbor, love each other. But, like, why do I need to learn this forgiveness thing?
Creating Confidence with Heather Monahan
Confidence Classic: Discover Your Calling! With Ryan Blair Founder Of AlterCall
And then it dawned on me that I could not fully love forgiveness. unless I could fully forgive. And that the other half of love, you know, everything is a double-edged sword. There's a negative pole and a positive pole. The other half of love is forgiveness. And forgiving ourselves means we love ourselves. Forgiving others means we love ourselves.
Creating Confidence with Heather Monahan
Confidence Classic: Discover Your Calling! With Ryan Blair Founder Of AlterCall
our neighbor as ourselves, and that, you know, that we truly love human beings. And being a spiritual person means we have two types of love. We have love for humanity and we have love for God. And in order to do that, we have to have forgiveness. And we have to seek forgiveness and give forgiveness as effortlessly and easily as we do pray. And so forgiveness is a is a very important modality.
Creating Confidence with Heather Monahan
Confidence Classic: Discover Your Calling! With Ryan Blair Founder Of AlterCall
It's one that I remind myself each and every single day and one that I teach even to my son who's 13 years old. I share with him often. I say, is there anything that you need to forgive me for? Because you know what? I'm a human being. And as a father, I make mistakes all day long. And forgiveness is an opportunity to clear a channel between another individual.
Creating Confidence with Heather Monahan
Confidence Classic: Discover Your Calling! With Ryan Blair Founder Of AlterCall
And until you actually exercise forgiveness among each other, that channel will become distorted or blocked or it won't be a pure channel. So the more you forgive each other, the more you exercise forgiveness, the clearer the channel is between the two human beings and the brighter the light that can shine between them.
Creating Confidence with Heather Monahan
Confidence Classic: Discover Your Calling! With Ryan Blair Founder Of AlterCall
You know, when he passed away, I was shocked. I was in my bathtub. I love taking baths. I was in a salt bath. I was meditating, and something, a voice came to me and said, your father just passed away. And I hadn't seen him since I was 13 years old. He tried to reach out to me a number of times on Facebook, and I was so angry toward him, I blocked him. So he couldn't reach out to me anymore.
Creating Confidence with Heather Monahan
Confidence Classic: Discover Your Calling! With Ryan Blair Founder Of AlterCall
Even though he was trying to reach out to me in the best way he could, with the best love that he could. He wasn't trying to pick a fight with me. He was trying to say, hey, I'm still your father. But I rejected that. I said no. I never let him see my son, Reagan, his grandson. And so when he died, it just hit me like a ton of bricks that I'd never have that opportunity to give him a hug.
Creating Confidence with Heather Monahan
Confidence Classic: Discover Your Calling! With Ryan Blair Founder Of AlterCall
I'd never have the opportunity for him to meet his grandson. And I denied him that. And I realized at that moment that I could have been a better man, that I could have just given him that knowing that, you know, that there's still love between us. And, you know, he didn't have to die with this uncertainty and this sadness around me.
Creating Confidence with Heather Monahan
Confidence Classic: Discover Your Calling! With Ryan Blair Founder Of AlterCall
And I knew that I had made him die that way, that I had rejected him and I'd withheld forgiveness from him. And all of a sudden it became completely clear that if he was alive for 10 more minutes, I'd have given him that hug. knowing what I knew after he had passed away. And once I determined that, I said, okay, now I have to go and reconcile and forgive him for everything I can find.
Creating Confidence with Heather Monahan
Confidence Classic: Discover Your Calling! With Ryan Blair Founder Of AlterCall
And I took out old pictures. I took out pictures of him and me and there wasn't very many of them because I only had 13 years and at the time we didn't have cameras on us at all time, but I found as many pictures. I reached out to family members and I got pictures of him as a child so I could deeply go into who he was as a child
Creating Confidence with Heather Monahan
Confidence Classic: Discover Your Calling! With Ryan Blair Founder Of AlterCall
When he was a victim, before he became a perpetrator, who was this man, this young man? And I connected to him there. And I did forgiveness exercises over and over where I'd bring up the good times. I'd tell him what I needed forgiveness for because I cursed his name a number of times. I was not the perfect son by any means. He certainly wasn't the perfect dad.
Creating Confidence with Heather Monahan
Confidence Classic: Discover Your Calling! With Ryan Blair Founder Of AlterCall
And I rebelled as much as I possibly could. And so I sought forgiveness. I gave forgiveness. And I repeated that. for about two years. And I would do these exercises until anything that I could find in my heart that I was still holding on to, I forgave him for.
Creating Confidence with Heather Monahan
Confidence Classic: Discover Your Calling! With Ryan Blair Founder Of AlterCall
And anything in my heart that I had done that I recalled and remembered that was wrong to him, like one time I shot out all of his lamps in the backyard with my BB gun because I was mad at him. So I went and broke every lamp, like every light in the backyard got a BB in it. And I felt justified at the time, but I still offered that up. And now I'll tell you that I have so much love for my father.
Creating Confidence with Heather Monahan
Confidence Classic: Discover Your Calling! With Ryan Blair Founder Of AlterCall
I have a different perspective. I don't see him as a horrible person anymore. I just see him as for who he was. I connected even to the journey that he had prior to me that I wasn't a part of. I have a deep sense of what he went through. And so I have deep empathy for him and compassion for him. And I laugh with him. I hear his voice all the time. I connect to him.
Creating Confidence with Heather Monahan
Confidence Classic: Discover Your Calling! With Ryan Blair Founder Of AlterCall
And I have to tell you, it's been the most magical experience. Although he's not with me physically, spiritually, I feel my dad's guidance every step of the way. And I can't, even though there was a lot of bad stuff, I don't even focus on it anymore.
Creating Confidence with Heather Monahan
Confidence Classic: Discover Your Calling! With Ryan Blair Founder Of AlterCall
Nice to meet you. Nice to see you. Thank you for having me.
Creating Confidence with Heather Monahan
Confidence Classic: Discover Your Calling! With Ryan Blair Founder Of AlterCall
The bad stuff, to me, I just think it's like consequences of who he was and how my soul chose him because I needed the medicine that only he could give me. And as a result of the medicine he gave me, I get to be the father that I am today to my son, one that would never intentionally hit my son or harm my son or do anything like that to my son.
Creating Confidence with Heather Monahan
Confidence Classic: Discover Your Calling! With Ryan Blair Founder Of AlterCall
Well, for nine years, autism was the scariest thing that I could ever face as a human being. The day that I found out, I thought my son had hearing issues because I couldn't get his attention no matter what I tried. And he would go into these really difficult seizures and it was a really difficult situation. And I got him tested and I found out he had autism and it broke me.
Creating Confidence with Heather Monahan
Confidence Classic: Discover Your Calling! With Ryan Blair Founder Of AlterCall
All a father wants, or a mother for that matter, is a healthy child. Like, that's all I wanted. And, you know, seeing how difficult it was for him to learn, for him to socialize, for him to communicate, to use his words in comparison to all these other kids that are excelling in school and doing this and doing that. And having to go through that experience was a very difficult thing for me.
Creating Confidence with Heather Monahan
Confidence Classic: Discover Your Calling! With Ryan Blair Founder Of AlterCall
And 10 times, 10,000 times more difficult for him. So it was a lot of pain in my family system during that period of time. And I got him early help. I got him therapy, speech, OT, psychotherapy, every test that you could possibly imagine. Got him into the right schools, got all kinds of help around him, changed his diet, and then started praying and meditating with him routinely.
Creating Confidence with Heather Monahan
Confidence Classic: Discover Your Calling! With Ryan Blair Founder Of AlterCall
And during one prayer, one moment, I witnessed a miracle happen. And I took him into a prayer and he was going deep. And when he came out of the prayer, he opened his eyes and he didn't make eye contact with me. And for the very first time, he made pure, deep, intimate eye contact with me. And I saw a change happen in his eyes. And I kept going deeper into prayer, deeper into meditation.
Creating Confidence with Heather Monahan
Confidence Classic: Discover Your Calling! With Ryan Blair Founder Of AlterCall
Yeah, that was a long time ago, but there's a lot of things that I reflect on to this day. And I was raised in a, I started out in a middle-class environment. So I had all the perfect situation. I had a pool in my backyard. I had new clothing come school time, lots of presents underneath the Christmas tree. And by the outside, it looked like we had the perfect family.
Creating Confidence with Heather Monahan
Confidence Classic: Discover Your Calling! With Ryan Blair Founder Of AlterCall
And the deeper that I went into prayer and meditation, the more that he was able to receive the light from it. And now I can tell you that my son doesn't show any signs of autism whatsoever. And in fact, they recently even changed his diagnosis. So, you know, I can tell you that...
Creating Confidence with Heather Monahan
Confidence Classic: Discover Your Calling! With Ryan Blair Founder Of AlterCall
that it was a product of both doing the physical work, the therapy, the diet, nutrition, and, you know, the early intervention, and then as well as the spiritual work. And now I don't have any worry whatsoever that my son will be 100% fully functional and productive as an adult. He's 13 years old now. And he is social. He communicates. He is very smart.
Creating Confidence with Heather Monahan
Confidence Classic: Discover Your Calling! With Ryan Blair Founder Of AlterCall
He negotiates me at a video game point, you know, like nobody's business. I've never had anybody out negotiate me to the degree that my son can. And it's a miracle. And part of my journey and my story is I've witnessed so many miracles like that. And that's why I'm so excited to share not only the miracles in my life, but to help people discover miracles in their life.
Creating Confidence with Heather Monahan
Confidence Classic: Discover Your Calling! With Ryan Blair Founder Of AlterCall
When we talk about science and spirituality, science is taking an approach to finding evidence to support some of the things that we've known spiritually for quite a long time. For example, it's been in many spiritual traditions to meditate and mentioned in Buddhism, not mentioned, it is Buddhism, it is Hinduism, and it's mentioned something like 23 times in the Bible.
Creating Confidence with Heather Monahan
Confidence Classic: Discover Your Calling! With Ryan Blair Founder Of AlterCall
So meditation was always deemed as a spiritual practice, but now scientists have actually started studying it. and found that not only does it increase your IQ, it increases your memory, it increases longevity, there's anti-aging properties to it.
Creating Confidence with Heather Monahan
Confidence Classic: Discover Your Calling! With Ryan Blair Founder Of AlterCall
So there's so many scientific benefits to meditation and prayer and breath work and a number of spiritual modalities, voice and singing and vocal work, things that were done primarily as spiritual practices, we're now finding that scientifically that these things have a lot of merit to them as well. And over time, we're going to find that science is going to catch up with spirituality.
Creating Confidence with Heather Monahan
Confidence Classic: Discover Your Calling! With Ryan Blair Founder Of AlterCall
And I think that there's going to be a perfect blending and harmony between both the way science looks at things, finding evidence to support the benefits of it, and the way spirituality looks at things, and that is to... have blind faith in support of the benefits of it.
Creating Confidence with Heather Monahan
Confidence Classic: Discover Your Calling! With Ryan Blair Founder Of AlterCall
And so I try to take both approaches to it and teach both approaches to it because I think that looking at both approaches is the best way to actually come to the best practices that both science and spirituality have to offer.
Creating Confidence with Heather Monahan
Confidence Classic: Discover Your Calling! With Ryan Blair Founder Of AlterCall
Miracles come when you're open to them. And if you're not open to miracles, they're not going to come. Miracles come when you're vulnerable, when your heart is open, when you are committed, when you are willing to do the work, when you're willing to step out in faith. That's when you start to see miracles. And every day is a miracle.
Creating Confidence with Heather Monahan
Confidence Classic: Discover Your Calling! With Ryan Blair Founder Of AlterCall
And so, you know, part of bringing miracles into your life is just being connected to and having gratitude for the miracle of life that is all around you each and every single day. The air that you breathe, the leaves that fall from the tree, the weather, everything around us is a miracle.
Creating Confidence with Heather Monahan
Confidence Classic: Discover Your Calling! With Ryan Blair Founder Of AlterCall
And so when you start to become present to the fact that just the fact that you are alive, that you are walking, that you are breathing, is a miracle. then you can start to receive additional miracles. And pretty soon you'll start to see serendipity and synchronicity and a variety of things that are elevated ways of experiencing miracles.
Creating Confidence with Heather Monahan
Confidence Classic: Discover Your Calling! With Ryan Blair Founder Of AlterCall
I've had some major miracles in my life, and the very fact that I'm alive here today talking to you and sharing this with you is a miracle. So I think the first step to bringing more miracles into your life is just to start to recognize those miracles around you and then opening your heart to the fact that if you're open to miracles, they can actually come to you.
Creating Confidence with Heather Monahan
Confidence Classic: Discover Your Calling! With Ryan Blair Founder Of AlterCall
But on the inside, my parents were addicted to alcohol and drugs. My father was very violent. And as a result of him becoming addicted to drugs, he disappeared on us when I was 14 years old. And my mother was faced to raise me on her own. He never sent a dollar child support and never gave her any assistance. And she didn't have any career skills or corporate skills whatsoever.
Creating Confidence with Heather Monahan
Confidence Classic: Discover Your Calling! With Ryan Blair Founder Of AlterCall
Yeah, so this is another interesting scientific discovery. We've looked at different breath monitoring devices, and through your respiration, you can actually gauge your level of anxiety, your level of calmness. Respiration is an indicator as to how you're feeling. And so if you wanna change how you're feeling, change the way you respire. And to respire correctly is to be inspired, right?
Creating Confidence with Heather Monahan
Confidence Classic: Discover Your Calling! With Ryan Blair Founder Of AlterCall
That's the word, the derivative of the word inspire is to respire. And so by focusing on your breath, you retrain yourself. And breath is an automatic thing, but breathing deeply and richly and fully expanding your lungs is not automatic.
Creating Confidence with Heather Monahan
Confidence Classic: Discover Your Calling! With Ryan Blair Founder Of AlterCall
And we get conditioned and we start breathing very shallow because the content that we're taking in, the work environment, the way we're operating, we start breathing really shallow and we actually train our breathing to be shallow. And when we do that, We're not actually fully experiencing the energy that breath has to offer.
Creating Confidence with Heather Monahan
Confidence Classic: Discover Your Calling! With Ryan Blair Founder Of AlterCall
And so breath work is basically going back and expanding and relearning how to breathe. And when you do that, you will release anxiety. You'll release emotions that are trapped within the body. You'll release old traumas because the body keeps the score and it stores emotions and experiences. And your breathing, if you're breathing very shallow,
Creating Confidence with Heather Monahan
Confidence Classic: Discover Your Calling! With Ryan Blair Founder Of AlterCall
then what you're doing is you're basically trapping those emotions within the body. And so as you relearn to breathe and you learn to breathe deeply and you follow, there's a number of different types of breath work that you can dive into that'll expand the way you breathe and teach you how to breathe in a new way. And it's something that I have to do each and every day.
Creating Confidence with Heather Monahan
Confidence Classic: Discover Your Calling! With Ryan Blair Founder Of AlterCall
I have to remind myself to breathe correctly because I get excited, I get energized, and pretty soon I'm breathing in a shallow way. And as a result of that, you know, anxiety might pick up or I might get triggered or frustrated. And so when that occurs, I have to remind myself to ground myself and go back to the breath and relearn to breathe.
Creating Confidence with Heather Monahan
Confidence Classic: Discover Your Calling! With Ryan Blair Founder Of AlterCall
One of the tricks that I do is in between sessions, you know, I might have a mentoring session where there's some heavy, heavy conversation and it might weigh heavy on me. And so I'll go take a quick breathwork session, say five minutes, recenter myself, and then go back into the next session with my energy cleared. And breathwork is one of the most powerful ways to clear the energy.
Creating Confidence with Heather Monahan
Confidence Classic: Discover Your Calling! With Ryan Blair Founder Of AlterCall
Yeah, that's a great question. And I use a technique where I have people first focus on removing something from their life. So what you would be surprised, I did an analysis on my time the other day, and I'm actually teaching this to the entrepreneurs that I work with, where we look at all the things that bring us light in our lives, like catching a sunset, a sunrise, playing with my dog, right?
Creating Confidence with Heather Monahan
Confidence Classic: Discover Your Calling! With Ryan Blair Founder Of AlterCall
All the things that bring us light and joy in our life. And you write all those things down. And then you write all the things that you have to do, like work and stuff like that. And then you add up how long each of the things that brings you joy, and then how much time it takes to do work.
Creating Confidence with Heather Monahan
Confidence Classic: Discover Your Calling! With Ryan Blair Founder Of AlterCall
And then you try to find balance among the two groups, and making sure that you prioritize your time for the things that bring you joy. Because work will eat up all of the available time. So if you don't have boundaries around the things that bring you joy, work will eat that up.
Creating Confidence with Heather Monahan
Confidence Classic: Discover Your Calling! With Ryan Blair Founder Of AlterCall
And next thing you know, you'll be doing more work and more work and more work at the expense of actually having joy in life. So you have to have boundaries around that. You have to write out those things that bring you joy.
Creating Confidence with Heather Monahan
Confidence Classic: Discover Your Calling! With Ryan Blair Founder Of AlterCall
So she had to try to raise me at 13 years old on her own. And as a result of that, I rebelled. I rebelled as a result of the way I was raised. I knew there was something wrong. with my family, although I was forced to lie about it and, you know, to put up with this whole charade, basically, that we were, you know, this perfect family when we weren't. And so I was forced into a gang at the time.
Creating Confidence with Heather Monahan
Confidence Classic: Discover Your Calling! With Ryan Blair Founder Of AlterCall
And what I tell people to do is after they write up all the things that bring them joy, and then all the things that are required in the roles that they have, the work that they do, Then we have to say to ourselves, let's make some space. And the thing that surprised me is like 10 minutes a day is five days a year, right?
Creating Confidence with Heather Monahan
Confidence Classic: Discover Your Calling! With Ryan Blair Founder Of AlterCall
So if you cut back on your Instagram for 10 minutes a day, if you cut back on reading the news for 10 minutes a day, you could do five days a year worth of breath work. You could do five more days a year worth of vacation. So when you look at the amount of minutes that you spend wasting time in life, procrastinating. Social media is a big time waster. The news is a huge time waster.
Creating Confidence with Heather Monahan
Confidence Classic: Discover Your Calling! With Ryan Blair Founder Of AlterCall
Netflix is a huge time waster. And you look at all the things that you spend time wasting, and if you start restricting those things, and I'm not saying eliminate them completely, but just cut them back in such a way that you're fine with that. It's like, all right, I'm going to spend five days a year reading the news.
Creating Confidence with Heather Monahan
Confidence Classic: Discover Your Calling! With Ryan Blair Founder Of AlterCall
But if I spend an hour a day, that's like 20 days a year, whatever the number is, right? That's a lot of days a year that you're dedicating to the news of all things, right? And so we just don't realize how important 10, 20, 30 minutes of time is on a day-by-day basis. But when you add that up over the year, you'll find that you have a lot of time for the things that you're neglecting right now.
Creating Confidence with Heather Monahan
Confidence Classic: Discover Your Calling! With Ryan Blair Founder Of AlterCall
I'm on Instagram. So I'm at RealRyanBlair. And if you shoot me a DM, we can have a conversation. Or you can find me at AlterCall.com. And it's A-L-T-E-R-C-A-L-L.com.
Creating Confidence with Heather Monahan
Confidence Classic: Discover Your Calling! With Ryan Blair Founder Of AlterCall
Thank you, Heather.
Creating Confidence with Heather Monahan
Confidence Classic: Discover Your Calling! With Ryan Blair Founder Of AlterCall
This is the 1990s, mid-90s, early 90s. And gang violence was glorified. It swept most of the nation. The movies and the music and the things that we grew up on were basically inciting violence. And so next thing you know, I found myself involved in that. And I spent a couple of years involved in a gang. And the gang that I was involved in was very violent.
Creating Confidence with Heather Monahan
Confidence Classic: Discover Your Calling! With Ryan Blair Founder Of AlterCall
They were involved in all kinds of criminal activity and murdered, drive-by shootings, all kinds of things like that. And so the experience that I had growing up was, you know, anything but normal.
Creating Confidence with Heather Monahan
Confidence Classic: Discover Your Calling! With Ryan Blair Founder Of AlterCall
And as a result of seeing the middle class and then going into poverty, I think that it gave me a unique perspective, one that I would leverage to quickly move through the middle class in my adult life and then, you know, shift into the wealthy class.
Creating Confidence with Heather Monahan
Confidence Classic: Discover Your Calling! With Ryan Blair Founder Of AlterCall
When you're involved in a gang, they really... bond you to it for a variety of things. One is protection. Two is your friends and your community. You also get some power from it. So people are intimidated by you. They give you respect. And so there's a lot of things that bond you to that environment. And it's also a way of making money. So it pays the bills.
Creating Confidence with Heather Monahan
Confidence Classic: Discover Your Calling! With Ryan Blair Founder Of AlterCall
And as a result of that, it's very difficult to break that bond. I had made a deal with God. I'm very spiritual, and I always was, although I strayed from it. But I had made a deal with God that I would leave the gang when I was granted leniency in a sentencing. I was facing four years for a strong-armed robbery. And I begged the judge for leniency.
Creating Confidence with Heather Monahan
Confidence Classic: Discover Your Calling! With Ryan Blair Founder Of AlterCall
And when he gave it to me, I made a commitment that I was going to leave the gang. And so the first thing that I did was I started working nonstop. Generally speaking, a gang won't hold you accountable for working. But if you're in your house and you're not showing up to the required events, they're going to come get you and pull you out of your house or intimidate you to get out of your house.
Creating Confidence with Heather Monahan
Confidence Classic: Discover Your Calling! With Ryan Blair Founder Of AlterCall
But if you have a job, and in my case, I had a job because I had to pay restitution. for some of the criminal activity I was a part of, if you have a job and you're forced to work, otherwise you go to jail, they'll tend to give you a pass for that. And so my strategy was simple.
Creating Confidence with Heather Monahan
Confidence Classic: Discover Your Calling! With Ryan Blair Founder Of AlterCall
I was going to work as many hours as I possibly could, as far away from the neighborhood that I lived in to get as far away from the gang as I possibly could.
Creating Confidence with Heather Monahan
Confidence Classic: Discover Your Calling! With Ryan Blair Founder Of AlterCall
Well, it was a transition. I got a mentor and he gave me some personal growth lessons and tapes. He gave me Lead the Field by Earl Nightingale, Think and Grow Rich, The Richest Man in Babylon, a bunch of Tony Robbins related material. And I was about 18 years old, you know, I'm tattooed and I was listening to, you know, gangster rap basically.
Creating Confidence with Heather Monahan
Confidence Classic: Discover Your Calling! With Ryan Blair Founder Of AlterCall
and he bribed me he persuaded me and he told me he'd buy me clothes so i could get rid of the gang uniform and i could actually get a job if i was able to master this content and i listened to these tapes over and over and over i would sleep to them i would i would play the cassette tape at the time we had cassette tapes and when it would pop i would wake up and i'd flip it back over and hit play again
Creating Confidence with Heather Monahan
Confidence Classic: Discover Your Calling! With Ryan Blair Founder Of AlterCall
I wanted to reprogram my brain. I didn't know this consciously, but that's what I was doing. On a soul level, I knew that the information contained in this material would change my life. I'll never forget, I was playing basketball one day. I had my Walkman in, and at the same park I'd play every day.
Creating Confidence with Heather Monahan
Confidence Classic: Discover Your Calling! With Ryan Blair Founder Of AlterCall
And one of the lessons was from Lead the Field by Earl Nightingale, and it talked about a vagrant going from a park bench to becoming a millionaire. And at the time I looked over across the park and I saw a person that was a vagrant that was sleeping on a bench. And I thought that person could become a millionaire. And if that person could become a millionaire, I could become a millionaire too.
Creating Confidence with Heather Monahan
Confidence Classic: Discover Your Calling! With Ryan Blair Founder Of AlterCall
And I'll never forget the chills rushed over my body. I believed in that moment that I could become a millionaire if a homeless person could become a millionaire. So could I. That was a simple logic that that wisdom had given me. And I believed it. I get the chills right now just sharing it with you.
Creating Confidence with Heather Monahan
Confidence Classic: Discover Your Calling! With Ryan Blair Founder Of AlterCall
And from that point forward, I stopped listening to gangster rap and started listening to old 1950s audio tapes. I reprogrammed my vocabulary, my thinking. At the time, you had to go to a bookstore and you had to rent audiobooks. I couldn't afford them, of course, because I was poor. So I had to go to an audiobook store and rent the audios and listen to them.
Creating Confidence with Heather Monahan
Confidence Classic: Discover Your Calling! With Ryan Blair Founder Of AlterCall
And I would just absorb this content nonstop, 24-7, until I mastered business vocabulary. I started getting into science. I started getting into all kinds of different extracurricular activities. And then eventually I went to college and went to business school.
Creating Confidence with Heather Monahan
Confidence Classic: Discover Your Calling! With Ryan Blair Founder Of AlterCall
No, I have not heard her story. But it doesn't surprise me. I think that when the student is ready, the teacher appears.
Creating Confidence with Heather Monahan
Confidence Classic: Discover Your Calling! With Ryan Blair Founder Of AlterCall
Oh, yeah. I always had a spiritual calling in my life. My grandmother, best thing I could describe her as is a saint. She lived 99 years, and she never cursed. She never drank caffeine. She never drank alcohol. She lived a high vibrational life. She always had joy, would always sing. You know, she was just filled with joy and happiness. That was my grandmother's spiritual walk.
Creating Confidence with Heather Monahan
Confidence Classic: Discover Your Calling! With Ryan Blair Founder Of AlterCall
And so she was an example. And I would always ask her questions. I always was a seeker. I'd ask her for explanations about the Bible. I'd question things. I would always bring to her my interpretations of biblical stories and so forth. And so I had that in me from the time I was born. And I would seek that out all the time.
Creating Confidence with Heather Monahan
Confidence Classic: Discover Your Calling! With Ryan Blair Founder Of AlterCall
But when I lost my father and when I witnessed what he was doing and I witnessed
Creating Confidence with Heather Monahan
Confidence Classic: Discover Your Calling! With Ryan Blair Founder Of AlterCall
what was going on in society as a whole at the time i thought you know i really questioned my faith and i doubted it and i became anything but faithful i became a predator basically so you know i i have to tell you that i ventured away from it and then you know by the grace of god and i didn't even see this pattern a mentor comes in my life i received mercy and grace and i didn't see the pattern of god's hand in my life but it came after a lot of prayer
Creating Confidence with Heather Monahan
Confidence Classic: Discover Your Calling! With Ryan Blair Founder Of AlterCall
So I would pray, miracles would happen, but I wouldn't kind of equate the two. I wasn't smart enough to see God's hand in my life. And then I'd venture away, and then I'd hit a rock bottom again. And what I've come to realize is that rock was God, basically. So I'd strip away all the worldly desires, get close to my faith, and then I'd rebound in life.
Creating Confidence with Heather Monahan
Confidence Classic: Discover Your Calling! With Ryan Blair Founder Of AlterCall
And then I'd do that again, and then I'd rebound, and I'd do that again and rebound. And so my journey up until I was 40 years old, I'm 45 years old, was a constant growth through, you know, growing, attracting worldly material things, and then getting on my knees as a result of the circumstances and crisis in my life.
Creating Confidence with Heather Monahan
Confidence Classic: Discover Your Calling! With Ryan Blair Founder Of AlterCall
And then, you know, reconnecting to my faith and then growing and then attracting worldly things and ego things and then going back to my knees and
Creating Confidence with Heather Monahan
Confidence Classic: Discover Your Calling! With Ryan Blair Founder Of AlterCall
and then growing again and if you look at the trajectory of my life it's you know it looks like i went straight up from poverty but there was a lot of this it was a lot of a roller coaster ride and at 40 years old i said how do i get off of this roller coaster this constant need for crisis and suffering to grow and i went deep into my faith over a period of a you know two years where i did nothing but work on the internal and
Creating Confidence with Heather Monahan
Confidence Classic: Discover Your Calling! With Ryan Blair Founder Of AlterCall
And now having done two years worth of internal work, you know, my daily practice is connecting to my faith. In fact, I do my best to connect to my faith in everything that I do all day long.
Creating Confidence with Heather Monahan
Confidence Classic: Discover Your Calling! With Ryan Blair Founder Of AlterCall
Not everybody's gonna have picked up as much negativity and trauma and suffering as I had done. I pushed out my trauma and I thought success was going to heal me. So I thought, you know, yeah, I was abused. I was violated. I went through hell. I thought if I just win this award or if I make this next $10 million, or if I do this, then all of the pain inside of me will be healed.
Creating Confidence with Heather Monahan
Confidence Classic: Discover Your Calling! With Ryan Blair Founder Of AlterCall
I've had some major miracles in my life, and the very fact that I'm alive here today talking to you and sharing this with you is a miracle. So I think the first step to bringing more miracles into your life is just to start to recognize those miracles around you and then opening your heart to the fact that if you're open to miracles, they can actually come to you.
Creating Confidence with Heather Monahan
Confidence Classic: Discover Your Calling! With Ryan Blair Founder Of AlterCall
And the best way to describe my energy was I was like a hurricane. I was just chasing success. Nothing mattered more than success in my life. And then I got success. And the more success I received, the more that the holes were amplified, the more that the salt came into the wound, so to speak. And so I realized the more successful I was, the less happier I was.
Creating Confidence with Heather Monahan
Confidence Classic: Discover Your Calling! With Ryan Blair Founder Of AlterCall
And the more I had to get the next dose of success to try to feel alive and try to feel worthy. And so the two-year journey that I went through, not everybody has to go through two years worth of isolation. And my full-time job was meditation, prayer, and reconnecting to my true spiritual self.
Creating Confidence with Heather Monahan
Confidence Classic: Discover Your Calling! With Ryan Blair Founder Of AlterCall
And that was because I'd picked up so much baggage, so much mud, that I had to cleanse my vessel for two years. Not everybody has to do that. But I had two years worth of hard work to do. Now, some people have more than two years worth of hard work, truthfully. And truthfully, I'm still doing the hard work to this day, but I don't have to do it in isolation on my own.
Creating Confidence with Heather Monahan
Confidence Classic: Discover Your Calling! With Ryan Blair Founder Of AlterCall
During that two-year period, I did vows of silence. I quit working altogether, but I had the privilege that I had a home and a beautiful environment. I had a person, a housekeeper that would take care of me. I had great books, great access to content and information to study. I had hiking trails out in my backyard, a gym.
Creating Confidence with Heather Monahan
Confidence Classic: Discover Your Calling! With Ryan Blair Founder Of AlterCall
So I could spend two years doing nothing but fixing the parts of me that were broken and basically leaving behind. A lot of people say, oh, you're not broken. I was broken. And all the pieces of me were on the ground, and I got to pick up the good parts and leave behind the bad parts and put myself back together again. And that's what I did during that two-year period.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Transformative Power of Mentorship with Ryan Blair
Two entrepreneurs that were struggling with a vitamin company came to me at Sky Pipeline. The company that I was operating was VC funded. I took an interest in them. They told me about their business model. It was highly scalable, external sales force. I had a friend, one of my investors at Sky Pipeline owned a company called Party Light Candles.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Transformative Power of Mentorship with Ryan Blair
I was trained to cultivate marijuana, bag it. I would give it to my friends in the neighborhood. At 11. Even before that. So marijuana, we grew it, you know, we bagged it. I would give it away. I'd trade snakes for it, skateboards for it. Older kids in the neighborhood love me because I just hand them handfuls of it. Yeah, drugs were in my house from the very beginning.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Transformative Power of Mentorship with Ryan Blair
and they had a 60,000 person home party business that was doing billions in sales. So I thought to myself that I could get them involved and I could help these two young entrepreneurs. That's what I did. So you can put that together. Yeah.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Transformative Power of Mentorship with Ryan Blair
No, well, I bought it. I organized the buyout at about 20,000 a month, scaled it to 65 million a month and then sold it. Yeah. I mean, so, okay. So where did you learn how to do this? You learn everything as you go. That's the secret. Everybody that we see, like Elon Musk and everybody, they just learn it as they go. Every day you wake up and you learn it as you go.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Transformative Power of Mentorship with Ryan Blair
None of these people had any of this stuff figured out that they have figured out now when they started. It's just every day you have to have principles and a philosophy to figure it out as you go. Dude, that is such the right answer. That's it. And you meet these people that are doing remarkable things and you go to tour Elon's facility now and you say, how could I ever get to this level?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Transformative Power of Mentorship with Ryan Blair
He figured it out as he went. Every day he made mistakes. He made errors. He took risks that were absurd and dumb. He figured it out as he went and he just got better every day to now. He's the Elon Musk that we know.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Transformative Power of Mentorship with Ryan Blair
No, no, not at all. I didn't learn very much in a classroom at all, even though I did go to computer sciences and then eventually- They're not teaching about VC capital raising. I took some business classes and some marketing classes that were very valuable as part of my program. But no, it was all self-learning for the most part. And then mentorship.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Transformative Power of Mentorship with Ryan Blair
Mentorship, I called in great people onto my board. I had great people in my corner. I had people around me that held me accountable. drove me and were impatient with me. They did not like that I was underperforming.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Transformative Power of Mentorship with Ryan Blair
And as a result of having people that were way outside of my league on my board and as advisors, I had to constantly raise my level of competency and my level of character nonstop throughout my career.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Transformative Power of Mentorship with Ryan Blair
So how do you get that level of player to believe in you at an early age? One, you have to have the belief that you're worthy of their mentorship. Two, and what people don't understand, every great leader, entrepreneurs and so forth, has a mentor in their corner. The VCs act as a good VC is a good mentor. A good private equity group is a good mentor.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Transformative Power of Mentorship with Ryan Blair
So when you hear about these massively funded companies that have these huge exits, there's mentors involved in that entrepreneur's life. They're keeping them accountable and helping them from stopping self-sabotaging behaviors and helping them scale in their leadership. Otherwise, the companies fall or go backward. Well, yeah, they're not just going to write you a check and walk away.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Transformative Power of Mentorship with Ryan Blair
No. And in fact, they're going to write a check and then they're going to beat the crap out of you until you perform. Be very involved in all of those things.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Transformative Power of Mentorship with Ryan Blair
I would immediately score every person on the team A, B, or C, and I would eliminate all the Cs, and I'd tell the Bs, you better upgrade to A. I would have a recruiting group that I have on staff right now, which I have on staff. start backfilling the roles prior to me showing up. So that way I have talent lined up that wants to be a part of the opportunity.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Transformative Power of Mentorship with Ryan Blair
And I'd move in, I'd cut people as fast as I possibly could. And I'd cut all the fat out of the business. All right, stop for a second. How do you ascertain who's talented, who's not? 50% of every company is operating, I'm sorry, 100% of every company is operating at some number under 100% productivity. Mm-hmm. If they need a turnaround, they're probably at less than 50% productivity.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Transformative Power of Mentorship with Ryan Blair
So I'm going to get in there and I'm going to cut 50% of the staff out right away, essentialize the business, prioritize it, and drive it as hard as I possibly can.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Transformative Power of Mentorship with Ryan Blair
I'm looking for work ethic, first and foremost. In a turnaround, we all need to work 10 hours a day, six days a week, minimum, right? So it's really, in a turnaround, it's nine by nine by six. And so who's willing to join me? Nine by nine by six. I'm willing to incent them to do this though. So I'm willing to pay overtime. I'm willing to carve them in on equity.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Transformative Power of Mentorship with Ryan Blair
I'm willing to put bonuses on the table, but we got to be all hands on deck because we have to stop the bleeding. And that's what we're doing. Day one is we're stopping the bleeding and it's going to take tough decisions. We're going to have to get rid of people we love, but we got to stop the bleeding. That's the first step that you do in a turnaround. Okay, perfect.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Transformative Power of Mentorship with Ryan Blair
So we got our people scored away. Nice. I like that. Yeah. People, programs, products, you know, you're cutting everything you possibly can. Anything doesn't matter. You're looking at everything.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Transformative Power of Mentorship with Ryan Blair
Yeah, when you're in the middle of a turnaround, the mistakes that I have made is that the entrenched people will fight to keep the resources, to keep the team members, to keep their spend high. People love spending money. No one loves saving money, right? It's not fun to save money. It's fun to spend it.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Transformative Power of Mentorship with Ryan Blair
So you have to take it from a spend money culture to a save money culture, and not everybody's going to be along for the ride. So for example, there's a company that I've been very close to that raised over $500 million. And they were a spend money culture. Now they have to turn into a save money culture. That is a very hard shift for a company to do.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Transformative Power of Mentorship with Ryan Blair
That's an exceptional operator. Most people are not brave enough and smart enough to make those tough decisions. We use a zero-based budgeting method where we just look at what are a couple known factors in the business. Let's say we have 100 leads coming in. We have 100 leads. Now we need software for the leads. What do we need next? Well, we have to spend money to buy those leads.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Transformative Power of Mentorship with Ryan Blair
What do we need next? We need somebody to call those leads. What do we need next? We start from one particular influx, whether it be on the revenue side or one known, we have X many customers to serve. And then you take a blank canvas and you just add back each expense one by one until you've essentialized the business.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Transformative Power of Mentorship with Ryan Blair
Yeah. And maintain the level of service to your point. Yes.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Transformative Power of Mentorship with Ryan Blair
Yeah, I have a thousand customers. So if you and I have a thousand customers that we have to serve, all right, we need, how many people do we need to serve those 1000 customers? Great. We need 10 people to serve those 1000 customers. We need one manager for those 10 people. Now you and I can run a business with one manager and 10 people.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Transformative Power of Mentorship with Ryan Blair
That's all we need in the software, of course, you know, to track and manage and run some analytics. And so, you know, essentializing it to the bare minimum and then everything else that you keep should have an ROI attached to it. What is the return on investment of this expense or this employee that I'm keeping?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Transformative Power of Mentorship with Ryan Blair
And then we have to drive that return on investment per expense, per program, per product, per employee to make sure that we're actualizing the ROI that we've identified. Now, that's how we would go about the additional spend is that it should be ROI generative spend outside of the essential spend.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Transformative Power of Mentorship with Ryan Blair
Well, one, if it could be done in two minutes, do it now, right? You know, a lot of times we're adding up a bunch of stuff on our list and we're, you know, we're creating a ton of tasks. You only need three or four things per quarter to move the needle that are, you know, significant initiatives.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Transformative Power of Mentorship with Ryan Blair
So what I've learned is to really focus on just a few objectives per quarter, knock them out and then add to it. So if I get them done earlier than 90 days, I might add three more. So three at a time, what are the things gonna move the needle? Everything else is nonsense, right? So that's one. Two is, you know, I don't like, I value my time at a high rate.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Transformative Power of Mentorship with Ryan Blair
So I tend to outsource everything that is not at that rate. But you've earned the right to do that.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Transformative Power of Mentorship with Ryan Blair
Right. But I would say that to those people, you have to master each process and you have, there's two things. You have to design the process, you have to run the process, and then you have to hand that process off to someone else. And so once you've designed the process and you've optimized it and it runs effectively and you've documented it, then you can hand it off to someone else.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Transformative Power of Mentorship with Ryan Blair
That's the critical thing. If I were starting a real estate firm, and I know very little about it, you know, in terms of to the extent that you do, the first thing I would do is I would go knock on the doors or do whatever you told me to do. I would design the process. I'd optimize it. And I'd hire somebody to fill that role.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Transformative Power of Mentorship with Ryan Blair
And I'd move on to another process or another problem that I was looking to solve on my way to scaling the business one process at a time. Because you're backfilling yourself.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Transformative Power of Mentorship with Ryan Blair
Yeah. Yeah. And documentation is easy. You know, get a note file, step one, step two, step three, step four, step five, and just have a simple documentation. And then, you know, it's a good process when you can hand it to someone else based on your documentation. And then ask any questions. And yeah. Yeah.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Transformative Power of Mentorship with Ryan Blair
Yeah. There's a book called The E-Myth that changed my life early on in my career by Michael Gerber. I read it and I said, I have to, you know, Learn how to properly document process. I learned that in the tech field. And now, I will tell you, very few people can both create a process and run one. It's rare. That's really the entrepreneur's job. I don't hire people to create process and run them.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Transformative Power of Mentorship with Ryan Blair
I generally lead from the front. I create the process. And then I bring someone else in to run it. One mistake I see many entrepreneurs doing when they scale is they hire people to create and run process. And oftentimes, you just don't get optimal process. Because they don't truly understand your business. And they don't understand the business.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Transformative Power of Mentorship with Ryan Blair
And it's a special talent for someone who can show up to no process whatsoever, no structure, no organization, and create order out of chaos. That's a rare talent.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Transformative Power of Mentorship with Ryan Blair
Well, everyone has a different stack and using a software term, I've just built a stack, right? So you have your character and your competency and you have a stack of character traits and you have a stack of competencies that are necessary. On the competency side, as you can tell I'm a math guy, so I'm gonna break this, engineer this down for you. I try to reverse engineer everything.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Transformative Power of Mentorship with Ryan Blair
But on the competency side, you have to have sales, you have to have marketing, you have to have supply chain, depending on the product. You have to have finance, you have to have technology. You might have to have international, you might have to have treasury. Like, there's a lot of competencies that you have to learn to scale a big business. Yeah.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Transformative Power of Mentorship with Ryan Blair
Um, and, and those are skills and you have to have the capacity to learn those skills. You have to have the desire to learn the skills. You have to have a life where you say in a belief that you believe you can learn any skill, right. Which is on the character side. So beliefs is on the character side.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Transformative Power of Mentorship with Ryan Blair
Yeah, I think I have that belief, but I also hire people that are really brilliant at that particular area quickly.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Transformative Power of Mentorship with Ryan Blair
I get people very smart to teach me. So the best mentors I've had are team members that I've hired from, you know, into my company that knew finance or that knew software engineering. You know, these are the people that educated me. You know, I've had the privilege of serving alongside, you know, the former heads of major companies that I've been able to recruit into my company.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Transformative Power of Mentorship with Ryan Blair
And so that they educated me.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Transformative Power of Mentorship with Ryan Blair
uh tremendously so and you know so i'm always and i'm also interviewing people that are in roles constantly uh to gain intel so if i if i want to start a business i'll hire i'll interview the product manager for x company or y company so i can better understand what they're doing and how they're doing it and then apply those best practices to what i'm building see it's interesting because you just kind of answered both and what i just said which is you
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Transformative Power of Mentorship with Ryan Blair
Yeah, you have to get to a level where you're not incompetent. If I'm incompetent on finances, you would not want to partner with me. So I have to have a degree of competency on this, which means I got to learn. I got to read books. I got to go to seminars. I got to hire people until I increase my competency. But I'm never going to be the guy
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Transformative Power of Mentorship with Ryan Blair
organizing every transaction and figuring out the FASB rules, you know, and the gap rules and this, that, and the other for each and everything. I'm not going to figure out Sarbanes-Oxley to every degree to go public.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Transformative Power of Mentorship with Ryan Blair
I have to hire people that know that, but I have to be competent enough to know, you know, how that stuff works and be able to speak finance with the finance people and lead those finance people to be effective and productive in finance, for example. What makes a great leader in folks? Empathy. What makes you a great leader?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Transformative Power of Mentorship with Ryan Blair
Thank you for having me, John.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Transformative Power of Mentorship with Ryan Blair
I had a lot of entrepreneurial excess. Yeah, excess. It was.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Transformative Power of Mentorship with Ryan Blair
What do you do that install that? We've had programs like that. And in fact, I own a health, a dog food company. I'm an owner in it that does similar things that you just described. So, Um, there, there, that, that math adds up when you, when you, uh, create connection with people, you know, it, and, and you create a relationship with people that adds up.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Transformative Power of Mentorship with Ryan Blair
I had a good friend that was Vegas based named Tony Shea, the founder of Zappos, who's no longer with us. And he did things like that too. And he was a highly analytical, brilliant Harvard guy. And, you know, and he pioneered a lot of those things. Yeah.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Transformative Power of Mentorship with Ryan Blair
Yeah. at delivering happiness. And he would deliver flowers. And he taught me a lot about that subject. And this was one of the smartest entrepreneurs I had known. And so I've implemented a lot of those programs because they add up. The math adds up to it. You're creating belief in people. What is belief worth? If people are filled with belief, they will do anything for you, right?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Transformative Power of Mentorship with Ryan Blair
That's all right. It's early in the morning.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Transformative Power of Mentorship with Ryan Blair
If they have no belief, they will do nothing for you. So we need to constantly fill that belief tank in people. And then with regard to customers, knowing that you care, every other company out there doesn't care. So when they, your customers know that you care, that's what your competitive advantage is that you have empathy, right? So all these other companies don't care. You care.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Transformative Power of Mentorship with Ryan Blair
That's your, that's your winning formula. We're going to care more. Yeah.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Transformative Power of Mentorship with Ryan Blair
Yeah. And that's an evolution that you've come to based on the fact that you've gotten to the level that you're at, and now this is going to separate you from the pack. But in order to get to where you were, you first had to be ruthless with the numbers. You had to process everything, analyze everything, do everything in a very numbers-driven way.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Transformative Power of Mentorship with Ryan Blair
And then now you're at this place where the machine is working, and now you can add gasoline to the fire in ways that you couldn't before. So you can't do that day one to the same degree that you can today. Right.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Transformative Power of Mentorship with Ryan Blair
Yeah, I have a technique that I utilize where I look for love in every meeting. Oh, I love that. So if I'm thinking to myself, this is going to be work, right? This is going to be hard or this is going to be a long day. I go, okay, I have 16 opportunities to find love today in these meetings. I have 16 opportunities to connect to a human being. Today's not going to be a hard day.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Transformative Power of Mentorship with Ryan Blair
Today's going to be a day that tests my endurance. So I'm turning it around every moment to try to optimize for happiness and to optimize to have fun as I'm working. And so that's the technique that I've utilized as opposed to saying, it's going to be rough. I got to talk to 10 people today that have this. I say, oh no, I have an opportunity to find love in 10 meetings today.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Transformative Power of Mentorship with Ryan Blair
And I'm on a scavenger hunt in each of those meetings to find it, right? Yeah. Yeah, I try to look at everything as I get to do it.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Transformative Power of Mentorship with Ryan Blair
That's beautiful. I'm going to use it. I also have had lots of friends go. And I pay tribute to my mentors that are no longer with us, Tony Hsieh being one of them, John Wooden, the UCLA-famed coach. So I'm often thinking about the shoulders that I stand upon and the great ones that have poured into me that are no longer with us and dear friends as well. So I love that.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Transformative Power of Mentorship with Ryan Blair
I think I'm going to get something engraved in their honor. I love that. Best practice. Yeah. Dude.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Transformative Power of Mentorship with Ryan Blair
Either answer is fair. Yeah. You know, in retrospect, I was an imposter. I just didn't know it.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Transformative Power of Mentorship with Ryan Blair
Yeah. And so looking back, like that guy that showed up to that room to raise money from VCs, I'm like, I can't believe he did that. Yeah. You know, but I didn't walk in, you know, it was a mission. But I think because I was a fighter and I was, you know, I was a tough kid growing up. I had a thought in my head that I could beat these guys in pretty much every sport.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Transformative Power of Mentorship with Ryan Blair
I could beat these guys in a fight. I could beat these guys in nine out of 10 things, maybe not in finance, maybe not in business, but I'm going to learn everything I can from them in those subjects. So I showed up very aggressive. I was intense. I was there to get the information out of them, to extract what I possibly could so that I could achieve my objectives. Just unapologetic about
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Transformative Power of Mentorship with Ryan Blair
Because I showed up to a person, it's like I sized the person up and I'd say, if we were in a street fight, you would not be disrespecting me right now. So I'm showing up to you with respect. I want the information that you have. I need the help that you have. But I was man to man in those meetings. I wasn't afraid of those people.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Transformative Power of Mentorship with Ryan Blair
Love that.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Transformative Power of Mentorship with Ryan Blair
What was that like? So I grew up in the Los Angeles area. My dad was an engineer, a really brilliant man. My mom was a housemaker. A lot of love. And they both get addicted to drugs. And I was a child. So my house was in turmoil and trauma and violence. Brothers and sisters all went to prison.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Transformative Power of Mentorship with Ryan Blair
So I was raised by a grandmother that was very faith-driven. She taught me the foundational values. But when my family got addicted to drugs, I strayed from it. I also was partying and living like a rock star. Then when I started making tens of millions a year, I was really living like a rock star, you know, decadent life. And I got completely away from it. Then my mom died.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Transformative Power of Mentorship with Ryan Blair
And as she was dying, I made a commitment to her. I confessed to her. She died tragically. She fell down a flight of stairs. She was in a coma for two years. I couldn't see her all the time. And I was partying like a rock star. And so sometimes I wouldn't go see her. And I was out partying in Vegas and doing crazy stuff. And I felt bad about that. I had guilt about that.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Transformative Power of Mentorship with Ryan Blair
And so as she was dying, I told her, the reason why I haven't been able to see you is because I've been living this double life. I'm not the son you think I am. And on the other side, you're going to see everything. And I'm going to change. I'm going to honor you. I'm going to do things differently. And that then broke me wide open.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Transformative Power of Mentorship with Ryan Blair
When she passed away, I broke, hit the rock bottom of all rock bottoms from an emotional and mental and spiritual level. took two years off of work, went and rebuilt myself, prayed, meditated every day, nonstop until I was ready to go back out there and reenter the world of entrepreneurship. And I did so through mentorship. I decided day one, I was just going to start mentoring people.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Transformative Power of Mentorship with Ryan Blair
I didn't have a good business idea. I was pretty weak coming out of the cave, so to speak. And I said, you know, I'm just going to mentor people and see where that takes me. Let's see what happens. And now I'm building an AI tech platform and doing autonomous coaching and deploying software in many different companies.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Transformative Power of Mentorship with Ryan Blair
And I have a movement of coaches that are serving companies all around the world right now.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Transformative Power of Mentorship with Ryan Blair
I only want to work with people that I like at this stage of my life. If I don't like you, if we don't have a shared sense of humor, if I don't admire the entrepreneur- Life is too short. Right? I don't want to take calls from people on a Sunday that I don't believe in and care about and want to help.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Transformative Power of Mentorship with Ryan Blair
I have to feel a noble duty to serve this human being and that I know in my way of giving them what I know and helping them through whatever problems they're up against, whether personally or professionally, they're gonna tithe more, they're gonna give back more, they're gonna do good in the world. And I get to participate in the legacy that they create directly or indirectly.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Transformative Power of Mentorship with Ryan Blair
I'm not trying to make money on, I'm not trying to optimize for money at this stage of my life. I'm trying to optimize for the good that I can create And knowing that I'm helping a young man like I just did this morning, he's got 500 people on his team and he's serving a bunch of individuals. And I help him with just a small practice that is going to help him in the season. And he's a young CEO.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Transformative Power of Mentorship with Ryan Blair
And I told him, look, if I were in your situation, I go do this. He goes and does it. He gets results. He moves on to the next challenge. It's life-giving to me. It doesn't take anything from me. It actually fuels me up. It makes me excited about my life because I can serve.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Transformative Power of Mentorship with Ryan Blair
Yeah, he was an aerospace engineer. So he was very intelligent. In fact, too intelligent. His mind got the best of him basically toward the end. Wow.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Transformative Power of Mentorship with Ryan Blair
We all have those days. So, you know, anybody who says they don't have those days, it's a myth, right? You look at the Tony Robbins and people like that, that we, that I love and adore. They have those days too. I know them personally. Everybody has them. It's being able to recognize that you're having that day. I like to look at it as an input output ratio.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Transformative Power of Mentorship with Ryan Blair
If I'm drained, I need to put more into me. That means I need to spend more time in nature or with family, or I need to optimize around my health and my wellbeing, then I'm putting too much out. Out is action. So I'm looking at input output ratios every day. And if I'm drained, today's an input day. If I'm, you know, inspired and I'm ready, today's an output day.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Transformative Power of Mentorship with Ryan Blair
And every day I'm looking at my input output ratio. How much am I putting in the tank versus how much am I taking out? And then when I don't have any more to give at the end of the day and I'm exhausted, well, I know I haven't optimized my input output ratio correctly. So during the day I'm putting things in the tank. It might be a quick meditation. I might go do a boxing lesson.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Transformative Power of Mentorship with Ryan Blair
You know, things like that that are going to fuel me up. Are you a TM guy? Yeah. Yeah. Me too. Yeah. I love it. So, you know, so if, but if I miss my midday meditation, I'm going to be cranky, I'm going to be triggered. And if I'm triggered, that's an indicator as to where I need to do the work and where I need to do the optimization. I get triggered all the time. I get frustrated all the time.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Transformative Power of Mentorship with Ryan Blair
You know, my team feels that I feel bad about that when that happens. And I just take responsibility for it and say, I still got work to do. Let me go back and do some work and I'll come back, you know, refreshed and energized, but sleep is everything. Yeah. And I've learned, I found a device. It changed my life. I'm not affiliated with it. It's not a plug for anything that I own.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Transformative Power of Mentorship with Ryan Blair
It's called the Pulsetto. Put it on your neck. The Pulsetto. Yeah. It stimulates your vagus nerve. And I sleep like a baby. It's like 300 bucks. The Pulsetto. Pulsetto. And I have no affiliation with this company. Really? I was sleeping like four or five hours a night. Now I'm sleeping eight hours a night on this thing. Really? Yeah, no medication, no sleeping pills. Yeah, dude, I track my sleep.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Transformative Power of Mentorship with Ryan Blair
You put it on your device 10 minutes before sleep. There's a sleep program on it. It sends electric shockwaves into your vagus nerve, and I sleep like a baby because of it. Dude, I'm in. Yeah, it's like 300 bucks.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Transformative Power of Mentorship with Ryan Blair
He said, it's just magical.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Transformative Power of Mentorship with Ryan Blair
I was in the middle class. So in the middle class, dad had $100,000 plus salary. How does dad start using drugs? Do you know? How does this happen? Cocaine.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Transformative Power of Mentorship with Ryan Blair
Yeah, one of the things I do, by the way, I'm a newlywed, so I'm taking- Congratulations. I'm taking your advice on- That's it, they had to pause and withdraw. Marriage. One of the things I do is I write up a list of all of the activities that give me life. The sunset, the sunrise, watering the plants, walking the dog. And I have that long list of activities.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Transformative Power of Mentorship with Ryan Blair
And in the event that I have a gap or I'm a little exhausted or I get triggered, I just go do one of them. Some are less time than others. So I might pick one that's more optimized for whatever the window is. Oh, I love this. You know, I got a speed bag in my house. It gives me joy. I get into a flow state. I hit that thing for 10, 15 minutes and then I'm pumped.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Transformative Power of Mentorship with Ryan Blair
I got a little trampoline that I'll go bounce up and down on. You know, I'll go dance on the thing, play some good music. And it's just a way to get my state shifting and to put something in to shift that, you know, frustration energy or that negative energy. Dude, what a great.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Transformative Power of Mentorship with Ryan Blair
Yeah. Just pick, draw one, draw one from a hat real quick. The other thing though, If you want to shift the energy into you, there's two things you can do is one you pour into you. The other is you pour out to someone else. Tithe, give to a friend, do something good, anonymous. Don't take credit for it. Try to help a friend and they don't even know you're trying to help them.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Transformative Power of Mentorship with Ryan Blair
So, you know, take on a project where you do some good that will shift energy heading in your direction as well.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Transformative Power of Mentorship with Ryan Blair
And, you know, he was, you know, in the middle class, doing really well economically. He had some vices and, you know, some self-sabotaging behaviors. He's no longer with us. So I've healed my relationship with him spiritually, so to speak. But yeah, yeah, his brain got the best of him. He had a lot of unhealed things that he was dealing with. How old were you when you knew this was going on?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Transformative Power of Mentorship with Ryan Blair
Yeah, you should be doing things in secret as well as things publicly. That's why they call it Secret Santa. It's not Public Santa. Secret Santa. The greatest, the most pure gift that we can give is one where we have no intention of anything in return. whatsoever. So I don't want it on social. That's the most pure gift, but it's okay.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Transformative Power of Mentorship with Ryan Blair
If we're, we're giving with some intention, there's nothing wrong with that. We just want to be public about that. And you know, yes, I have an intention. I want to drive traffic to my firm for these gifts because I believe every firm should do that. Nothing wrong with that. We want to give with pure intention and we don't want to be honest about the intention that we're giving the gift with.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Transformative Power of Mentorship with Ryan Blair
Just giving. I like to involve people in the conspiracy of giving and they don't know it. So I might tell you, hey, let's give a gift to someone that we both mutually know, let's say. And then I ask you, hey, I'll send you a hundred bucks. You give it to them. They don't know that I've given it to them. You are now involved in the gift. I'm involved in the gift.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Transformative Power of Mentorship with Ryan Blair
So we're unlocking multiple blessings. So it's a conspiracy of giving. And they have no idea that I was the person that was a catalyst there. So I say to you, don't tell them that I'm involved. I'll send you a hundred bucks. You give it to them. You say, okay, let's do it. And then you involve me in a conspiracy to give. And so together we're conspiring to give more.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Transformative Power of Mentorship with Ryan Blair
And we're involving multiple people in the gift. I do it with my son all the time. I love that. That's great.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Transformative Power of Mentorship with Ryan Blair
You call up and not on your team because that's different. There's people outside your team that you know in the industry. You could just call up and say, hey, I just want to tell you, I think what you're doing is great and just keep at it. That will shift the energy because we give to our team all the time.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Transformative Power of Mentorship with Ryan Blair
But when we take time to give outside of our team, that also shifts the energy heading in our direction.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Transformative Power of Mentorship with Ryan Blair
kids young adults kids whatever blah blah come up to me and ask me what do you do yeah and how do i do like what advice would you give for me at your age you can do that i love that i don't recommend a lot of young people will do that and they'll buy the lambo because no no no it's dumb yeah and they'll they'll buy it because they try to justify it that's going to be a lead engine generally speaking you're not going to pay for the lambo through leads no you're not
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Transformative Power of Mentorship with Ryan Blair
I used to have a classic car that people wanted to take pictures with. And it was always a privilege. Like people would just say it's a life dream of mine to take a picture with this car.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Transformative Power of Mentorship with Ryan Blair
And I'd say, please, get in it. Do it.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Transformative Power of Mentorship with Ryan Blair
Do your thing. I agree. And it's important for us to share in our wealth in different ways. And so congratulations that you're doing that.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Transformative Power of Mentorship with Ryan Blair
It's great. And it's good to share that inspiration. And, you know, I've had a lot of rock star moments, right? And I'm very careful now. And I measure my intention very closely. But I like nice things as well. And I like to share those nice things with others.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Transformative Power of Mentorship with Ryan Blair
It was always in my life. So it was always marijuana, always weird stuff going on, always violence. But I recognized that we had a drug problem in the household at about 11 years old or so. I knew that that was a problem. Oh, man. Yeah. And I would, I would, uh, I was trained to cultivate marijuana, bag it. Uh, I would give it to my friends in the neighborhood at 11, uh, even before that.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Transformative Power of Mentorship with Ryan Blair
No, I dig that.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Transformative Power of Mentorship with Ryan Blair
What advice would you give them? Get a mentor. Pursue multiple mentors. Keep going until you find somebody. Extract information from every individual. And acquire skills. Your life is about skills. Skills pay the bills. So acquire skills at all costs.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Transformative Power of Mentorship with Ryan Blair
Yeah. Being a mentor is a role. It's an assignment. There's something spiritual there. And whether you're spiritual or not, there's something there. It's a part of our tradition and humanity and in teaching and in passing on to the next generation. So it's hardwired into our DNA to mentor.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Transformative Power of Mentorship with Ryan Blair
So when that young man invoked mentorship and told you that you had that coveted role in his life, that then activated you at a new level in your relationship. Oh, 100%. So it's important for us to carry the mentorship tradition on and to be good mentors to people. But I think the reason I said that was to young people listening.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Transformative Power of Mentorship with Ryan Blair
It has to be authentic. Yeah, and it was. Yeah, it has to be authentic. And the first job when you're pursuing a mentor is figure out what you can give to them, right? He was giving to you. He's giving you his time, his energy, his desire to help build your firm, right? Yeah. So there's an economic connection there. Most of the time, we don't figure out what to give to the mentor first.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Transformative Power of Mentorship with Ryan Blair
So I was always saying, what can I do for you? Can I donate to your charity? Can I donate time to your charity if I don't have money to donate to your charity? How can I serve you first and foremost? Because I know what you're going to give me. I understand clearly what I want from you. So I don't understand clearly what I can give to you. So help me clean up your yard, your garage.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Transformative Power of Mentorship with Ryan Blair
What do you want me to talk to your son? What can I do for you? And then once I get that, you know, that, that relationship established that it's going to be reciprocal, then we have a mentorship relationship. It has to be reciprocal. He's giving to you.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Transformative Power of Mentorship with Ryan Blair
Well, they have to want to learn. They have to take action on what you taught them. And then they have to at least give you some gratitude in the process, right? So what you receive back is gratitude. And that gives you fuel, right? Yeah. Sometimes that's enough for me. Hey, if somebody gives me gratitude, that adds to my life. That gives me good energy. I feel that. I'm thankful for that.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Transformative Power of Mentorship with Ryan Blair
But there's a concept spiritually called bread of shame. We want people to know how they can earn your time. So I will make people, they say, I want you to mentor me. I'll say, I need some help in my garden.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Transformative Power of Mentorship with Ryan Blair
So marijuana, uh, we grew it, you know, we bagged it. Uh, I would give it away. I trade snakes for it, skateboards for it. Older kids in the neighborhood love me because I just hand them handfuls of it. Yeah. Drugs were in my house from the very beginning. Oh my Gosh.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Transformative Power of Mentorship with Ryan Blair
I do. Just show up. Yeah, you always need some help. I need some help. I'm like, show up. I need some help. Why? Because I'll resent you if I don't feel like you are showing up to contribute. Now, what can you give me? You can't give me money. If you're broke, you want to help me? Help me with my trash. Help me with my garden. Help me with organizing my garage. Give me time back.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Transformative Power of Mentorship with Ryan Blair
And then I'll give you $10,000 worth of my time, which is an hour. Yeah. Right? So just give me a couple hundred dollars worth of your time, and I'll give you 10 of mine, and I'll be happy with that trade. Well, dude, that is a trade that anybody should be willing to make. Oftentimes people want, though. They ask, they ask, they ask, and they're not willing to give in return.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Transformative Power of Mentorship with Ryan Blair
Yeah. That's the litmus test that I have for people that want my help. I have a, I have a property.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Transformative Power of Mentorship with Ryan Blair
I have a property in Northern Arizona and, and, uh, off the grid, uh, 80 acres. And I got work to do there at all times. So if somebody wants my mentorship, I'll put your hands to work.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Transformative Power of Mentorship with Ryan Blair
On Instagram, I'm at realryanblair. Or you can go to altercall.com, A-L-T-E-R-C-A-L-L dot C-O-M. Cool.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Transformative Power of Mentorship with Ryan Blair
I had two paper routes. I had a little marijuana distribution business, but I didn't understand the value of it. You know, I'd give them probably a pound for a snake and they'd be like, you know.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Transformative Power of Mentorship with Ryan Blair
No, I mean, I was raised, my dad had a criminal element to him and I was raised, you know, to, I knew it was illegal, meaning that if the cops came, this was a problem, but I didn't understand the consequences of criminal behavior by any means, because it was just naturally a part of my environment. You were just exposed to it. Yeah.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Transformative Power of Mentorship with Ryan Blair
Who went to jail? Uh, brother went to jail for one brother, went to jail for armed robbery. Another, uh, brother, uh, went to jail for many times. My sister went to prison, uh, many times. Um, and then one sister was the good, the good, the good sister. She was a straight A student. She kept to herself. She read books, everybody else. Uh, you know, we acted out on our trauma. Went their own way.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Transformative Power of Mentorship with Ryan Blair
Yeah. She went internal and we all went external.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Transformative Power of Mentorship with Ryan Blair
Where is she? How's she doing? She's doing great. She's amazing. She ended up marrying a police officer. And so one side of my family was criminals and the other side were cops. Interesting family reunion for sure. It was quite fascinating conversations.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Transformative Power of Mentorship with Ryan Blair
There's only a small degree of separation between a cop and a criminal. There's a fraction of a percentage, because to be a great cop, you have to be able to catch a criminal. So you have to be able to think like one. You have to have some of the same attributes. You just have values that steer you toward the law as opposed to away from it.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Transformative Power of Mentorship with Ryan Blair
Oh, yeah.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Transformative Power of Mentorship with Ryan Blair
Yeah. I was facing four years in juvenile hall, and I was being sentenced. What'd you do? Allegedly. Strong-armed robbery. Oh, my God. And battery. So you mugged somebody? Yeah, a couple times.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Transformative Power of Mentorship with Ryan Blair
no they they placed a case on me uh so i was in a gang and i got in a fight with an older guy and he was over 18 years old and i took his hat off his head in the fight and so they they loaded me up with charges now because i had a public defender and i didn't know any better you know i was i was going to prison if you have a wealthy family that can hire a good attorney you'd never get uh you know come on the scales of justice are blind i thought are they you
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Transformative Power of Mentorship with Ryan Blair
You'd never get armed robbery for taking a hat off a person's head during a fist fight. It was a hat. I took a hat. But, you know, my mom didn't know any better. And so next thing you know, I'm heading to four years in prison. And I knew that because of the path of some of my family members and people in my neighborhood, in the event that I went to prison, I was done.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Transformative Power of Mentorship with Ryan Blair
I'd be a professional criminal because I was very smart. I was very capable of creating a lot of problems. I was leading over 100 people in the gang I was in at a very young age. And so I knew that once I went to jail, I was done. So I wrote the judge a letter begging for leniency. He granted it to me under the condition that I never returned to see him again.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Transformative Power of Mentorship with Ryan Blair
And he told me I should be writing in college, not in prison. And that changed my life because no one had ever believed I should go to college at all. I was a dropout, went to a continuation high school. And all of a sudden, this man believes I should be writing in college. And so I had the dream to become a writer at that point. Okay. All right. So you had your GED at this point. No.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Transformative Power of Mentorship with Ryan Blair
No, I was 15 years old. I got my GED shortly after that. And then a mentor came into my life and he was in real estate and he was a very wealthy person. Let's talk about that. How did you meet your mentor? So he started dating my mom. And because my mom was near and dear to me, she's no longer with me. I protected her. The neighborhood we lived in, I wouldn't allow any man to come near her.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Transformative Power of Mentorship with Ryan Blair
I had to be very protective of her. We were worried about drive-bys. I was always worried about her. being killed and so she said i met this man he's a good man uh he's wealthy he's in real estate and he wants to meet you and i thought to myself this is my way out of the ghetto right and uh i had the meeting with him and and he was very harmless nice man and uh next thing you know my life changed
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Transformative Power of Mentorship with Ryan Blair
You or your mom? He took me under his wing. By the grace of God, he took me under his wing immediately. He saw I had tattoos all over me. He saw I was heading in the wrong direction. He gave me motivational personal growth materials like Lead the Field, Tony Robbins, Earl Nightingale, Dale Carnegie. He insisted that I read these things. In fact, he paid me to read them.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Transformative Power of Mentorship with Ryan Blair
He bribed me because I wouldn't have otherwise. He said, I'll buy you new clothes to go get a job if you just read this book. And so he really leaned in on me. Then he gave me his job is what they, back then they called it a person Friday. And because I was a big kid, I was tough. He would have me do evictions for him. So I'd knock on the doors of his rentals and I would evict people.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Transformative Power of Mentorship with Ryan Blair
And, you know, that was my job is to process serve basically. Process serving at that.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Transformative Power of Mentorship with Ryan Blair
Yeah, there's a proverb, when the student is ready, the teacher appears. So my job is to give to anyone that's ready, right? I pay it forward as much as I can. And because I'm a spiritual person, my desire to mentor people is really, beyond that, I think of a traditional like coaching or something of that nature. I really see it as an assignment.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Transformative Power of Mentorship with Ryan Blair
I'm here to help this person through whatever season that I've been assigned to. If they're suffering from trauma, addiction, or if they're just trying to scale a business and figuring out how to rise to that level of success, I'm there to mentor them. Okay. Did you, did you go to college? Yeah. Okay. So. So he insisted, my mentor insisted I went to college.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Transformative Power of Mentorship with Ryan Blair
So you started just community college, I'm assuming. Went to community college. And then from there, it turned out because in the gang, I used to steal computers and I used to have to reprogram them. And I was really good at that. That was my racket. And this was at a time when computers were, you know, very valuable.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Transformative Power of Mentorship with Ryan Blair
The skill of computer programming and computer engineering was highly coveted and, and people were paying good money for it. So I went to college, studied computer science, and then got a job in the computer sciences field and took off. My career accelerated right away. By the time I was about 20 years old, I was making over $100,000 a year and going to college in the computer sciences field.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Transformative Power of Mentorship with Ryan Blair
Just doing that. Yeah.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Transformative Power of Mentorship with Ryan Blair
At what point did you realize you were unemployable? So the company I worked for, the engineering company, bought a company out of Las Vegas that did player tracking and player management for the casinos. And they dispatched me to meet with the casino heads and to meet with their heads of IT and to develop the product and to actually be a part of the sales of the product.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Transformative Power of Mentorship with Ryan Blair
I said, I'm developing the product. I'm selling the product. Why do I have to have these other boneheads in the room with me? And that's what had me go out on my own and start my own technology company. So that was the first thing was a technology company for casinos? Was it that? No, it was just tech in general. It was called 24-7 Tech. Our byline was, if your network is a wreck, call 24-7 Tech.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Transformative Power of Mentorship with Ryan Blair
And I just dispatched network technicians to help people with network issues. I love that. Dude, we...
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Transformative Power of Mentorship with Ryan Blair
Yeah, the blue screen.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Transformative Power of Mentorship with Ryan Blair
land. So I pivoted. I went to go raise a venture capital and they said that my business model was unscalable. It was hard. And I was, I was devastated. You know, I took these meetings with very esteemed venture capitalists and they looked at me and they said, this is, this isn't going to work. Not going to happen. Not going to happen. So there was a broadband wireless services company.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Transformative Power of Mentorship with Ryan Blair
And this was when prior to broadband being ubiquitous, ubiquitous, I was doing about 15,000 a month of revenue. I bought the company and then scaled it up and sold it. and a $24 million transaction when I was, $25 million transaction when I was 24. Well, let's talk about that.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Transformative Power of Mentorship with Ryan Blair
I leveraged my credit cards. You know, I bought it at 21. I sold it at 24. So no seller financing, nothing. You just, what'd you pay for it? $15,000. All in for this company. Well, then I raised some venture capital because I'd met some VCs. I raised about $3 million in venture capital about 21 years old. Leveraged that to then scale the business and then sold it at 24.