How To Take Control Of Your Life: Jacob Stahler - Entrepreneur

This is the Beyond the Story podcast, a show that goes way beyond the story. And now Sebastian.

Frost.

Jacob, welcome to the show brother. What's up, man?

It's great to have you, bro, I feel like it's been a long time coming.

I agree, I definitely agree with that I mean your neck of the woods. So it worked out all right. We had some construction, random construction. They're gutting the fourth floor that I've been blessed to be on for the past four years. Old school smells like a library. But they said, hey, eventually we're going to come gut this place and you're going to have to go to a different floor, and that time has come. But I didn't know that they would start ripping the floor out from one day to the next, so hopefully they put you on a higher floor so you have a better.

I'm going.

I'm actually I'm going to another floor with no windows. No, that's great. I've been in $300 more a month so, hey, things aren't getting cheaper. Economy? Yeah, Absolutely. So. I like to tell people's story on this on this show and I, so let's back up a little bit for some, for some context, help our listeners better understand a little bit more about you and kind of the beginning of the story, what really kind of brought you to present day with what you're doing right now.

Oh, it was all by accident, none of it. None of it was a model I built out. I've always kind of had a, I guess, a free spirit when it comes to doing things and so I've always done whatever I wanted whenever I felt like it, whether people agreed with it or didn't. And the I mean the first thing I ever did, obviously I got part time jobs when I was in high school. I worked at restaurants and grocery stores and whatever. The first thing I did that was really my own choice was doing mic work, nightclubs and I. So I started off at like a teen Saturday thing when I was 16 and did some DJ and did some of that stuff. Got into doing MMA announcing as a result. Oh, wow, bring it out soon. Yeah, got good enough. I was traveling all over the place for it went up to Canada a couple of times. I was on TSN up there and that kind of sprung off into me having my own MMA promotions, did a lot of shows doing that, started doing like marketing consulting a little bit on the side and, yeah, after that went back to doing like bar stuff and then I started doing business consulting, taking other people to market, helping companies to go public figuring out how to scale them. And then I went through three projects where basically we would build something and then I watched it get destroyed. And in my mid 30s I was like, well, I'm going to do this for me, I should probably get started. So I took a small contract in Texas, started buying businesses and here we are.

Love it. So you were just chatting before the interview. I have several businesses, but I'm more in the business of selling businesses than anything.

Yeah, I mean, the objective to build a business isn't to build it and run it forever, at least not for me. Yeah, that's why, like, if you ask a bunch of people who know me what I do, none of them know. I'm not the face of any of my businesses. I don't want people to associate me with my businesses. If that becomes the case, then I go to exit. It becomes a problem with multipliers, because if I'm the face of it, it's difficult for someone else to take it over and run it. So I don't want people to do business with my business because of me and I don't want to be the reason that people I don't know choose to do business with either.

That makes sense. What would you say the hardest part of this whole process is from. You know, the early days ring, announcing and consulting, et cetera. What's been the most difficult part of the entire process along the way.

I think the hardest part initially when it comes to scaling is giving up control. Yeah, because you, even with my MMA shows, I had a vision for how I wanted things to go and they didn't always happen that way. But it's such a big project you can't do it by yourself, but you try and things slip through the cracks because you know you didn't have enough fail safes in place to stop them from happening. And you know then the next time you set up for that thing to fall through the cracks, it's something else falls through the cracks, and so giving up control and trusting people to do what you hired them to do is probably the hardest part, or was the hardest part for me, because no one cares the way you do.

It doesn't matter, it doesn't matter. I I just funny I early days of before I even started my brand. I would say late 2009,. I get a. No, it was early 2010. I had started my first company, social Buzz. He was like an online media outlet and they were doing a local MMA fight there. So part of the poll, I'm new media, I could get in everywhere. Plus, I wore a bow tie at the time. I always had a camera or a flip camera. Everybody lets the guy with the bow tie and camera in the door. And I went to a press conference for this Scorpius FC fight that was happening in Miami and I shot the bunch of footage and posted it. And one of the guys that was associated with it was Dennis Robbins, old manager, and he was in the mix with everything kind of a mover and shaker making things happen. And the guy calls me at midnight and he goes hey man, we just fired our ring announcer. You showed up today, covered the whole press conference, did a great job and we think you could actually do a great job as a ring announcer and I'm like I mean, how hard can it be? I'm used to being on stage the whole night. Oh my gosh. I mean I had to get license, I had to get the insurance, the way that it was read. I'm like I'm watching Bruce buffer videos. I have to come up with my own line the whole night. So, needless to say, I only was a ring announcer for MMA one time, but it's not as easy as it looks by any stretch of the imagination.

Learning how to pronounce names. That's it, fantastic thing. Like you're in the locker room, you're going okay, how do you say this again? And you'll get in there and you're trying to like replay how they said it in your head so you can enunciate exactly the way that they did. And there is some. You get into some five, six syllables like foreign names with weird what would you call it punctuations and stuff like that.

I would have to like write it out on the car.

Oh, I had it too, and like I would try and write it phonetically, I write, I write like a three year old, so I can't even read my own handwriting. So that poses own problems.

But and there's no room for real error, like really going back on there Cause, you know, spotlight is on you, you're in the middle of a ring in a tuxedo with a mic, you know, and not, you know, not as cracked up as I thought it would be, so, needless to say. And then I quickly found out I'm like well, this is great, I did it one time I made 500 bucks. Well, if I did this once a month, twice a month, and be extra side income. And then they're like well, there's this one guy that does all of the local Miami stuff and it's probably pretty hard to get him bumped on there. So I quickly gave up my M, my MMA ring announcing career on there. But are you still an MMA fan this day?

Honestly, it's gotten. There are so many shows now I can't keep up. I watch more boxing now than I do MMA, which is weird, but I couldn't tell you the last time I sat down and watched it. It also doesn't help. I go to bed at 830 seven days a week. Yeah, that stuff happens after that and I'm not into it enough to wake up at four in the morning and be like let's watch the three hour UFC thing.

It's like I'll just watch clips on on Bleacher report and I'll go to the gym I get excited about, you know, every now and then, like a Saturday I think it's those phases when it's not football season there's nothing exciting happening with sports on, like Saturday night. Well, there's going to be a UFC fight on it and I can kind of get into it here and there.

I watched soccer or football. So all the games that I would watch they're over by two in the afternoon, like they start at six in the morning. They're done by two and and that's that. I don't watch them. I don't really watch American sports at all. There's so many commercials and timeouts and huddles and whatever it. Actually someone did a thing and said that if you take a football game and condense it down to just plays, it's like less than 10 minutes of sport. Oh, wow, yeah. The rest of it is everything else.

Well, I never understood soccer. And then a friend explained to me and said you know, number one, it's the I don't know the biggest sport of the world. Number two. And I'm like, why does the clock keep running? That makes me crazy. He's like listen, we, we stopped the clock for everything with American football. They don't stop it for anything. And then the ref decides how much. What's called stoppage time would happen and I'm like I got it. Then I realized that English Premier League starts at 730 on Sunday mornings and keeps me completely occupied until kickoff at for NFL at one o'clock. So about five or six years ago I got into soccer and of course I'm in Miami, so Messi's there now, so that's a worldwide phenomenon. I'm dating an Argentinian. Soccer is life, whether I like it or not.

So people are weird to find out that it has almost the same rules as hockey. But they can't fight that's the only difference, and you can't just randomly sub people on Like when they're running.

They don't fight like. I've seen a couple of fights with soccer, but like this, that's pretty. They're pretty rigid with the yellow red card. So, yeah, you can't go.

Why don't everybody that says that soccer is soft. I would love you to go play a game, yeah, well, yeah, go run for 90 minutes. Yeah, have fun having people kick you in the heels and in the shins and it like it's not. It sucks.

Yeah, so what gets you fired up and excited? You've you've amassed a Solid amount of success in business and what you're doing right now, what? What's the motivating factor Now where you've kind of got all the things and the stuff that life and the success can bring there? Once you get to that point, what's the like, the motivating factor?

I'm a disruptor. I like to basically go into a, a business, and and see like a big market and be like how can I, how can I rattle this, how can I do it differently? How can I enter the market and do it in a way no one's seen before? And Then how do I? How do I scale that? And that the thing is, too is it's like money has been great, but money's I wouldn't say. Money has always been the, the focus. It's kind of like this is my hobby. Then I figured out how to make money doing it, which is what everyone says you need to do in order to be successful. But Whether or not I'm good at my hobby is determined by revenue. So it just happens that you know my hobby is if I'm good at it, I'll make money. If I liked painting or it, you know, whatever I would be judged in a different way. It just so happens that that money is that people always ask like oh, you know, if you lost Everything, what would happen? Nothing, I would drive a different car and probably live in a different house, but I would still be the same person doing the same things, and I don't have. I Don't have an issue with that.

I think a lot of people are scared of that. I mean, I know that I I call post traumatic broke syndrome, and I just know one thing I never want to go back there. And not that I've made it yet, I consider making it. Well, you've amassed a wealth that you'll probably never be able to spend and you're out there in the world doing phenomenal things with it. It's that I'm all. I'm well on my way. But when I look at that, I think and fear, in our subconscious too. Can you know it's? It's remember 2008, remember 2008. I find myself subconsciously going back there while still moving forward and going up. I think that that's that's a relevant thought process.

Yeah, but what if it doesn't?

right. Tony Robin says what's wrong is always available, so is what is right.

Yeah, and so for me is this I just I'm not scared of anything, and I don't. I don't say that lightly either. A Lot of people are like, oh, I'm fearless, I'm not fearless, I'm just not afraid of everything. Yeah, and I think a lot of people are afraid of failure. They're afraid of the unknown. I'm just not afraid of it. It doesn't. It's still gonna be the unknown until I figure it out. Yeah, I always use the the pool analogy, like when you were five years old and the first day of the pool open and your babysitter took you there, like you didn't even stop, you ran down the stairs and went straight into the pool. Yeah, it didn't care that the pool water was 65 degrees and you didn't act, shocked that it was cold. Yeah, you went straight in the water. But somehow, between five and 15, all of a sudden, the temperature of the water somehow matters. But walking around the pool Doesn't warm it up. So that means that at some point, when you do get in the water, all you did was waste sunlight and swimming time Because the water is the same temperature. No, it didn't change anything. So dipping your toe in it doesn't help your body, you know, acclimate to it faster. It just gives you something else to be afraid of, and I think people are like that with most things. They're like, well, I'll do like a baby step this way. I've never been like that, but do you? How many people do you know that have a nine to five that have a side hustle Most of them and they want this side hustle to become their career. Right, are they obsessed with the side hustle? Never, it's one of those things that they just get to talk about, right? Well, you know, I do this on the side. In one day I'm gonna, because it sounds good, I'm working on it and I Hate that word or that sentence I'm working on it. How many people you know that openly have anger issues and they say I'm working on my anger? You know what that working, I'm working on anger Do you know? It gives them freedom to do yeah, be angry Because they're working on it. They didn't. If they say I'm not gonna be angry anymore, what happens when they get angry? They let themselves down. Right, so one is a decision, the other one feels good to say yeah. So you have all of these people that have all of these side hustles and they go to all these masterminds and they go to all these speaking events and they go to all this stuff. I'm working on it. That's an excuse not to do it because they're working on it. If they give themselves a deadline like, hey, in 18 months, wherever I'm out in my side hustle, I'm quit my job. Yeah, if they put that out, they make it real, they make a decision. Now they have something that they have to hold themselves to. So it's easy to say I'm working on whatever. I'm working on my drinking, I'm working on my anger, I'm working on my mindset. Like, what is that? There's no deadline to working on it. Right, I'm working on my fitness. That's not a goal and unless you have something you're running at, you're not running at anything. People ask me all the time how I stay motivated in the gym. They're like oh, you run 40 yard dashes, you do cone drills, why? What else am I? What other data am I holding myself to? What am I? If I'm going to the gym and I have nothing to compete with, do I actually have motivation to go? No, like oh. Well, what about body fat? I'm kind of happy with where my body fat is, so that can't be the number. Like well, how many like what if you? What if you do a number of pushups, like I've done 1600 pushups in an hour before, so it can't be that either. Well, what if it's? You know running, I hate running, I'm not going to run Like it's not option. But unless you have something out there that can challenge you, there's no urgency and no reason to do it. So you can wake up and be like I just don't feel like going to the gym today. There is absolutely no deadline. Yeah, so in your head it's like well, you know, I'll go on Saturday. It's they didn't go on Thursday. What happens on Saturday? You don't go, you don't have a reason to. And so if you're not, if you're not out there and you're not setting the deadlines and you're not creating the urgency and all that kind of stuff, it's easy to be like I just don't think so, not today. And it's like that with your side hustle. It's like that with your nine to fives. It's like that with all of your people that are working on stuff, like you can't get to success unless you're making decisions and you're making moves and you're doing things Like when you decided to start your brand and stuff like that, you had to give up another life that you were living?

Yeah, I sure did. Yeah, that's a decision, though no 100%, it was a non-negotiable. I had a conversation with Sebastian. Sebastian said what do you want to do? I want to do comedy, I want to launch podcasts and I want to speak. That's it. That's what I knew I was really, really good at and that has probably been one of the best short of having my daughter at 20 when everyone told me I was crazy and raising her on my own. Being able to make that decision. That's come a lot from the work that I've done on Sebastian. The personal development, I think the real personal development, where you're forced to. I heard a phrase one time and I never forget it the only way out is through, and once I was willing to go in and realize, hey, I got everything. I need to not even fix this. I don't believe anybody needs any fixing. We just need some adjustments here and there. But accountability, self-accountability, and that's your burn the ships moment.

You know, cortez realized he didn't have enough dudes and his dudes were scary and they were talking about going back to Spain, so when they went to bed, he fucking burned the ships. Well guys, we're here, we're gonna do it. And if you don't have that in you, everybody creates all these fail safes for themselves, these safety nets or excuses, and no one can take your excuses from you. Right, it's impossible. So if you want them, you can have them. Oh, I, you know we have. I always have conversations with people around fitness and it's, I think, it's the one that most people can align with. There are people that are clinically more difficult to lose body fat. Those are the people I think work the hardest. You know, the people that know that they're fighting something internal on a medical level. They're the ones that are more dedicated to going to the gym because they know that they can't screw up, because the stakes are higher and those people are having less physical results, visually, than the people that don't have these medical problems. And the people that don't have the medical problems will find an excuse to why they can't work as hard as a person who has it. That's all in your head and it what is an excuse? It's just a sale. Yeah, unto yourself, yeah. And if you're the buyer and the seller, how difficult of a sale is this?

And well, I mean, we live in a world where I'll sell you my bullshit and you sell me yours and we'll call it a deal. Yeah, and I don't know about you, but life is just too short to just settle for that is. That's just the way that it is. It is if you say that that's the way that it is. And when I first learned this analogy, or the start process rather, the guy used an analogy about Steve Jobs. He's like 30, 40 years ago, if I came to him, go, hey, man, I'm gonna create this device. It's gonna be a handheld computer. You're gonna be able to call anybody in the world anytime. We're gonna send pictures, these things called text messages. You're like, dude, check this guy. You'd have got committed 100%. But Steve Jobs said I'm creating the iPhone because I said that I'm creating it. That was it. There was no permission or anything and that was his own leverage on himself.

And that's the thing, though, is I think people try and seek approval or permission from external sources when they wanna do. Something Starts in childhood. Yeah, and I said this downstairs a little bit ago. I use kids that are raised by parents who are, like, first generation wealthy. Those parents were broke to start out with, and they had a lot of struggles to get the success they have, so they know what it was like to fall down and skin their knees. They know it's like to fail, be broke. Whatever what they do is, they try and shelter their kids from experiencing any of that. Yeah, and so it's a monster. Yeah. So I used an IKEA bookshelf recently as an analogy, so I've been flipping it because it wound up being good. But when you order an IKEA bookshelf, they ship it to you and you open it and you have these instructions that were drawn by a left-handed four year old that were printed with half ink and there's no words. But you know it's a bookshelf. So, like the long sides probably the long side and you sit down and you build your bookshelf, you cut your fingers, you put the screws in backwards, the shelves going upside down, Like you have to take a break. You come back in an hour and a half later you have a bookshelf. Then you realize you need a second one. So you order the second one, but the second one gets built in 20 minutes because you have all the experience of building the first one. So if you're a sheltered kid and you go to college, you have absolutely no systems for dealing with failure. And now you're in the real world and shit breaks and you're locked out of your dorm room and you have no problem solving ability because the people that went through all of that to get successful thought that it wasn't necessary for you to experience the same. Yeah, and that's why they talk about the cycle of. You know, strong people make good times, good times make weak people. Weak people make. And that's how it happens, Because who wants to sit there and watch their kids struggle? Right, nobody. The problem is it's part of personal growth, Sure. That's why, when you look back and you look at people that have become great and big and whatever you look at their life, it's been terrible. Most of them come from broken homes. Most of them didn't graduate college, didn't graduate high school, had alcohol access parents, Because we got forced at a very young age to fend for ourselves. So when we get hit with adversity later in life, it's not new. What on a duck's back? Yeah, and we've developed systems to figure out how to get through difficult times because we didn't have a choice. There was no pillow, there wasn't anybody come in to build our bookcase. We had to figure it out. And so you know people will come to you for help. And this is how you know. The difference between people were the way people were raised. If you asked them well, what have you tried? And they say nothing, it's because they're used to having people help them for the first time.

Or they say everything no, because if you tried everything it wouldn't be in the center.

That's a way to say nothing, but the people I'll be like. You know, I went through this way, I tried this and I tried this. I can't figure out another angle. Okay, I could work with that, or I can say those would be the three ways I would try. I'm not the person to help you Like you should ask somebody else, but because you've been rejected for help before, there's a process for figuring out who you're gonna ask next, and that's why there's so many people that are just helpless out there, because they're not being put to the grindstone at all, they're not being forced to struggle, they're being hand-fed and propped up.

Yeah, I'm a firm believer in kicking your kids out at 18. Mine went to college at 18 and I said don't come back. And she's like ha ha. I'm like no, no, no, I mean that yeah. Yeah, I'm moving to a one bedroom, don't come back. And by design I learned that from Tony Robbins Good friends with his son, jerrick, and Jerrick told the story of when he turned 18. And his dad said I mean, he might be a Tony Robbins kid and he's like get out, see ya. And he went to Africa and slept in a hut and sweep leaves and went to a lumber yard in Toronto and like went and now he's got a phenomenal life, a great coach, and doesn't have to beat as much in the shadow of your Tony Robbins son. He's able to stand in his own two feet, but he attributes a lot of that. The best gift my father ever gave me was throwing me out at 18 years old.

And it's weird too, cause you look back at difficult times in your life and in the moment you were very upset. I can't believe they did that to me. Yeah, the thing is like I was very vigilant when I was younger, so, like when people would do things that were bad to me, I felt like I had to prove them wrong or get them back, and that's a very bad motivator, cause you're doing it for the wrong reasons. It's not. I don't need to vindicate myself Like that isn't the point of it. However, I wasn't given any type of system for any of that. So if you're around people that are hotheads, you become one, and so when dumb shit happens, you wanna get angry, you wanna get mad because it's what you've seen. You become your Programming, yeah, and it's just your environment. And it's like when you're around people who don't know who they are, then you conform to a lot of societal norms because that's what's programming, what you're doing. And I didn't have my like come to Jesus moment about who I am as a person and what made me happy until I was in my late twenties. You know, I used to party and drink a lot and do a bunch of blow and all that stuff and it was a great time. I met a lot of good people, but it was awful Like for my progression as an adult, yeah. And I remember waking up one Sunday morning, hung over his shit, being like I am like I don't even like this, you know like I don't think I'm gonna do this anymore. So I started hanging out with the same people doing the same stuff, but not drinking. Like bowling is not fun sober. You're trying to play dark sober why? And like I wasn't even good at it sober, I was great drunk, terrible at it sober. But I'm out there doing all these activities I really don't even care about. Darts have made a comeback, by the way, yeah, especially in England. They were showing it on a sports channel and I was making fun of all my English friends that were watching it. That's like all the rage now.

Yeah, it's, everyone's wants to throw darts. It is a good time, well, in a dive bar.

If you think about the shape people are in globally, it makes a lot of sense for people who want to be good at darts. Yes, you can be a shape and also throw darts Be a shape.

I love it. I love it. Jacob's been great to finally sit down with the man and chat with him for a few minutes. I've heard through the grapevine you're a wealth of knowledge. I got to experience that today. So I really appreciate your time and hanging out with you for a few minutes. Good to know you. It's just proof I fucked up a lot because you only learn stuff when you screw up. There it is. I've always seen you hanging out at the fly-ins and I was like who is that guy? What's that guy do over there? And then I, finally, we finally met and we had a chance to connect and you've always got your thumb on the pulse in Apex and knowing who's up to what and where's what, which is fantastic, which I absolutely love.

Makes me sound like a stalker.

No, not really. You're able to call a spade a spade pretty quick, Like your predictions elicited. Smells like a duck, looks like a duck, walks like a duck. It's a duck. So it's been. Finally, I was able to finally meet the man myth legend of you know. I kept hearing her name constantly. I like this guy. I need to connect with him on here. Yeah, it was, I think. I've heard several times. Well, it's because of Jacob Stoller. I'm like, okay, cool, I want to meet that guy.

See, and I hate getting credit for stuff.

No, it's good, it's all good. Thanks again, matt. Appreciate it. Yeah, of course. Until next time, friends. Thanks so much for tuning into this episode of the Beyond the Story podcast. Be sure to appreciate it. If you haven't done so already, make sure you're subscribed to the show. This way, you'll get updates as new episodes become available. If you feel so inclined, please leave us a review. Be sure to appreciate it. Signing off from the podcast launchlabcom studios. We'll talk to you next time, rather explore.