“Black Belt Wealth” Creating Financial Freedom with Damion Lupo

Evan Holladay: We are back with another episode of Monumental. I'm your host, Evan Holladay and today's guest is Damion Lupo. Damion is a best-selling author of 5 books in personal finance and money thinking. He's the host of the transformation nation podcast, he owns over 30 businesses and is a fifth degree black belt and a founder of his own martial art called Yokido. Damion plays by a totally different set of rules and bought his first rental house with a VISA, a move that then snowballed into owning over 150 rental houses in 7 states in less than 5 years. In 2008, he lost the entire 20 million dollars in rental houses but recreated his wealth and reinvented his life over 4 transformational years. Today, he actually leads Total Control Financial with one unified mission, to free people from money bondage. In today's episode, we dive into how to achieve your own financial freedom, how to learn from your mistakes and learn from other's mistakes and how to live a life on purpose in whatever you do. If you're listening right now, please go to iTunes, Stitcher, Google Play, I Heart Radio, wherever you listen to the Monumental right now and please leave us a review. The reviews really help us grow our audience and help us continue to bring other great guests just like Damion so we can continue to provide value every day to our listeners. If you haven't yet, go leave us a review now. With that, let's jump right into the show.

Hi, Damion. Thank you for being on the show today, how are you doing?

Damion Lupo: I'm good, Evan. It's good to be here, thanks for having me.

Evan Holladay: Let's just jump right in. Tell us a little bit about yourself and how you got to where you are today.

Damion Lupo: That's a loaded question. Who am I, where did I come from? I grew up in Alaska, my last job that I actually didn't get fired from I was working in the arctic circles with polar bears trying to eat me, which is a true story. The first entrepreneurial thing happened when I was 11 and I was buying and selling Nintendo games because my parents told me we couldn't afford anything and I was like, "Nope, I'm going to figure out a way." I did that for a while and then that led to the polar bear experience and I finally said, "I got to get out of here. It's 80 below zero, there's polar bears that are going to eat me if I take out the trash and don't see them." I moved to civilization, I left Alaska and came down to the lower 48 as we call it up there. Proceeded to go to college and ended up getting thrown out a couple times because they started a book store on campus that put the other book store out of business. I'm not very popular with the mainstream, I basically piss everybody off because I look for problems and I want to solve them and when monopolies are trying to protect those things, they get really annoyed. I've become the annoying factor in whatever industry I go into.

Evan Holladay: Now, where are you today? You're the Black Belt Wealth, you're helping people do everything, right?

Damion Lupo: It's funny, I'm still annoying. Right now, I'm annoying the Wall Street establishment because my focus is on empowering people because I have a different way of looking at financial freedom. I don't think that if someone is handed 4 or 5 million dollars or they are handed a bunch of cash flow from their apartment or something but they're truly free, I've seen enough people come to me and they go, "I've got 3 or 4 or 5 million bucks and I'm scared." I say, "What are you scared of?" They're like, "We're afraid we're going to lose it and we don't have time because we're 50 years old." My focus is on empowering people with the tools and the shift in mindset and it's easy to say, "We've got mind tools, we're going to give you better beliefs." Tony Robins is beautiful except it wears off by Wednesday usually, so after your weekend you're like, "OK, now what? I got to go get more of that Tony Robins crack." By the way, I seriously do love Tony. He changed my life and it was because I did stuff afterwards, I actually built the muscle and that's the freedom piece. If you have a way to build the confidence muscle around money - and that's where Black Belt Wealth is, it's like a martial art. You can't go to a martial art and learn the art by staring through the window into the dojo. You have to go into the dojo and you go there every day and you do it for like 10 years, and then you might actually know something. That's the same thing with money and finance, it's helping people build that muscle so that they are truly free. That's the shift and that's what most people aren't doing. They just think they can read themselves into freedom and that's not true.

Evan Holladay: You're exactly right. You see that time and again, too, with people that think they're on the journey but they're not really acting. Then there are some people that aren't even on the journey but think it'll just fall into their lap.

Damion Lupo: I had an old partner and she used to say the most idiotic thing. I would say, "How are you doing?" and she would say, "Making progress" and I go, "I think you're just running enthusiastically in the wrong direction. I don't think you're making progress in the direction of your vision, I think you're actually going backwards but you have no idea because you're making all this "progress"". People think that they're busy, it's a badge of honor and it's there for good. I fundamentally disagree, so the question is where are you heading and are you going in that direction or are you just moving in circles like a drunk merry-go-round?

Evan Holladay: That's a good analogy.

Damion Lupo: I don't know how a merry-go-round gets drunk but it's like being drunk on a merry-go-round. You think you're making progress, but you're just going in a circle. If your attention span is really short - which it is, based on our Facebook Lives - everything looks new every 4 seconds. You're like, "Oh, amazing, this is so great" but it's truly the same thing over and over again. That's what our lives are, it's literally psycho that we think something new is happening and that it's exciting because there's motion, that's crazy.

Evan Holladay: Exactly. How are you getting people to make that shift and actually take action towards financial freedom or just financial independence or whatever that step is?

Damion Lupo: There's this thing, I had a conversation with some folks that are in the process of becoming clients with me and when we were talking, it was a couple and the guy said, "I'm scared, I'm not a numbers guy, I don't get it." He's a former marine and I said, "How are you scared?" It's funny because last night I was talking to a friend of mine who was a seal team guy and he was nervous about money, too. I said, "How are you scared? You are trained to be a lethal weapon." He goes, "Yeah, but we take all the risk out of it because we're trained and it's all automatic." And I go, "Oh, that's the huge shift." When you take the risk out of it because of your training and you go through the motions, they're not just reading a book. Seal teams, marines, they don't just read a book, they're actually out there doing it. They've got muscle memory. It's like my martial arts, I'm a 5th degree black belt. All that means is that I've got muscle memory so no matter what happens I wake up in the middle of the night and I can jump and go. I'm not thinking, it's just automatic. What we do is we find ways to get people engaged where they're not afraid of getting eaten by a polar bear, meaning we give them something that they go, "OK, I can do this" and they're not going into paralysis. That's where most people stay, that they're paralyzed thinking that the tiger or the bear or something is going to eat me if I go do this thing. They are told, "Go buy an apartment house or do something" and they're like, "That thing is going to bankrupt me" and so they don't do it. But could they go do a seminar that costs $50 or $100? Could they go to a mastermind? There's things taking steps that won't kill them and it starts to build that confidence muscle. That's where we have to figure out what is that next thing to create some momentum, not just progress but moving in the right direction.

Evan Holladay: Right. When you're working with your clients, is that something where you're looking at, that is the next step that pushes them outside of their comfort level a little bit and towards that big action?

Damion Lupo: The first thing is fascinating to me. There's a saying that I saw and it's, "O barato sai caro." It means cheap objects are expensive, I think it's Portuguese. What people tend to do is they turn their Walmart-ness on and they go find the cheapest advice you can get. Usually it's their neighbor or their cousin or their spouse or something, and they get this advice and then they do the dumbest thing ever because the advice was dumb. It's cheap and it's very expensive because they take action based on this information. The first thing is that you're going to pay attention to something that you have to pay for. If you make $100.000 dollars a year and you've got a coach, you've got somebody that's helping you and they're charging you $100 or $200 and you don't do anything, there's no pain. The first thing I'm always thinking about is if you're wanting to change something and you've got advisers or a team, are you paying enough to pay attention? If you're not feeling awkward and nervous around what you're paying for that support and that accountability, you're probably not going to make the type of progress that you would have if you actually hit that pain threshold. That's a big part of the equation, are you hitting the awkward, anxious like, "This is a lot of money, I've got to do something with this, I can't afford not to", that's where most people aren't at yet and it's a shift. It doesn't matter if you're paying $200 or $20.000 bucks for somebody's time. I used to pay $10.000 dollars for a half hour conversation once a month. Is that crazy? I don't know, it made me $5.000.000.

Evan Holladay: That's exactly right. You're ten times more committed when you know that your money's on the line and you know you've already invested in it.

Damion Lupo: And you're not going to waste time. That's one of the things about somebody that's at a very high level, there's lots of coaches and mentors that are out there that are working with people. I'm pretty leery about most people that want to have me as a coach or mentor, I don't do it very often. Maybe a couple times a year right now, because most people are going to waste my time and my time is too damn valuable. There's things that I'm doing to impact other people and if somebody steals my time and doesn't do something with it, I can't get that time back. They literally stole it from me. I'm going to make sure somebody's committed, that's why it's very high dollar. It's not expensive, what's expensive is getting cheap advice or free advice, that's expensive.

Evan Holladay: Exactly. You're investing in something that's going to impact every other part of your life, it is the total package. If you can figure out your financing, then that in turn will - It's not everything - but it will help you align certain other parts of your life to do what you want to do.

Damion Lupo: The truth is the way that we do anything is the way we do everything. If your financial life is all jacked up and doesn't make sense, your relationships are jacked up, everything is going to be jacked up, your health is going to be jacked up and even if you have a six pack and you look real strong, your insides are probably all jacked up. The question is, where is your level of commitment for your life in general? I see the biggest progress with people, they go into a space where it's uncomfortable for them to commit and they commit anyways and everything changes. It's like a domino effect, once they make that one choice. Truly, if you pick the right coach or the right mentor or the right accountability person in your life, it's fascinating how everything starts to happen. All the crap gets pushed away, all the things that matter get the time that they need. It really does change everything because you just can't not do it. It's too easy to not do things, we can be very lazy nowadays. You look around, it's not hard to be lazy in America. You can just kind of get by.

Evan Holladay: It's set up for it.

Damion Lupo: It is. That's also based on our booming economy and a bull market. It changes a bit when you have a correction, but right now it's not very hard. People can get by and then they can bitch and complain at any level. 50 thousand a year, 5 billion, they're still complaining.

Evan Holladay: I know in your Reinvented Life book you took readers through your journey of reinvention. Could you walk us through that a little bit for our listeners?

Damion Lupo: When Chris and I wrote Reinvented Life, there was this process where we decided we wanted to share our experience and the stories and actually go behind the curtains of shifting. We didn't just decide to go from H in our block to KPMG as accountants. It wasn't like that, Chris went from being a musician, a professional world-class touring musician to a partner at a big four firm. I shifted from this place of saying it was all about the money and it was never going to be enough, it was all about more to a place of, "What is my purpose?" Not my passion so much, this is where Steven Pressfield really goes into this in his books that there's passion and you get a bunch of people that are literally running around enthusiastically with scissors in the wrong direction and they're stoned or you have your purpose. The purpose is where you start to tap into yourself as an artist and that's where the impact happens. That's what we're here for whether you want to talk about our god given purpose or talents or whatever. That's the shift, the Reinvented Life was about saying, "What do I need to do in terms of rewiring to move myself into that place of purpose so that I'm not just going around this merry-go-round the rest of my life?" Because that's really what it is. When you focus on money and consumption and that's it, that's your primary driver, it's never going to be enough. That merry-go-round just gets faster, maybe bigger, maybe shinier, but it's the same thing. You have to get off that thing and go into the darkness, that's called the hero's journey and that's a reference to Joseph Campbell's work about finding out who you are. Once you know who you are, the real work begins by going into a place where you're on purpose and you become like a crazy person because nothing can disrupt it. You literally go a little nuts from most people's perspective because they're not on purpose.

Evan Holladay: Take us through that really low point for you and how you finally decided to make that transition.

Damion Lupo: In the story of my meltdown, a crash, I think a lot of us have those different moments in our lives and it doesn't really matter the number. For me, I'd built up a 20 million dollar portfolio, had a 5 million dollar net worth and in a matter of 12 months went to negative 5 million, so lost the 20 million in assets, had to start over. I did what I think is a rational thing, I just pretended it didn't happen for two years. It seems like a good idea, at the time it seemed like a great idea.

Evan Holladay: It's rational in the moment, right?

Damion Lupo: Very emotionally rational. That's what I did and after a couple of years when I got fired as a volunteer on a political campaign, who gets fired as a volunteer? I remember going, "What do you mean I'm getting fired?" They're like, "We just think you'd do better somewhere else." I go, "I am free" but I was crazy about winning and I stepped away from the thing. I denied that I got fired for a while, I said I quit but they literally fired me. I'm now friends with the candidate, we travel and teach finance around the world together. It's funny though, after I acknowledged that I had been fired I was arguing on blogs and things, I stepped back and I said, "I did get fired. Why?" It's because I wasn't on purpose, I was just doing something to try to hide from the reality of who I was and I hadn't done the work yet on the actual reinvention process which is hard. The hardest work anybody would ever do is the work on themselves and what that looked like was finding somebody that I could get help from where I sat with this guy for two years in Austin, Texas and we asked one question. The question is, "What is true?" Every week, we went deeper and deeper into what is true. You want to go conscious? You want to find the pain? You want to rewire yourself? Ask that question and then be honest about it and have somebody stare back at you and when you say something and they say, "Really?" and you go, "Oh, no, maybe not. Maybe it's something else." Eventually, you pop out of that thing where you've gone through perturbation. It's where you literally have so much pressure on yourself by going deep that you pop out. [Inaudible 16:18] talked about this. He's a UT professor, or he was, and the whole idea is that if you put pressure on something whether it's coal or a caterpillar it pops out on the other side in a different form and a higher energy level. David Hawkins goes into this in Power Versus Force that everything is at a different energy level. There's enlightenment and love and truth as a higher level, then judgement and blame and victimhood, those are very low. I popped into a different level after doing that work for a couple years and since then it's been about finding ways to contribute to more people which is a totally different thing than figuring out how to buy another Ferrari.

Evan Holladay: That's a big shift and that takes a lot of time and effort and energy and digging into yourself. It all starts in yourself and that's where everything radiates from. If you can't figure out yourself, then nothing else is going to get figured out. I love that line, "What is true?" and then asking that every week. People can do that to themselves, right? Just do that in the mirror.

Damion Lupo: That was the idea behind Reinvented Life when we wrote it. If you look at the book and if you go to reinvention.net, you'll actually see that you can download the workbook which is all the questions from the book and you can download it for free. Basically what we wanted to do is get people a way for them to take themselves through a book. This is not a Harry Potter book, you don't just read this thing from front to back. This is interactive and it's really asking the questions that are going to give you clarity because if you have clarity, you have power. If you don't have clarity, you have no power. When somebody says, "I know what I want" and I go, "Tell me where is it written" and they say, "No, it's in my head." I say, "You don't have clarity" because our brain will play tricks on us. That's why it's so important to mark your books up, to find the things that you can write down and then have them stare back at you. The reason that I write books - and I've written a bunch of books - is because when I think I know something and then I start writing about it, I realize how little I know about it. I go, "Oh my god, I'm an idiot." The book helps me clarify my understanding and it brings something out that's actually in a language that other people can understand. That's the process of doing it, that's why I write. Some people write for different reasons, that's how I do it, so I can clarify my own thinking. That's where we start.

Evan Holladay: I can relate to that because whenever I teach somebody something I realize I'm like, "There's a better way to do it" or, "I didn't realize I thought about it that way." You just realize things when you actually take time to write it down or put it into words what you're doing.

Damion Lupo: That's a huge shift, but it takes time and we've gotten into a space where everything is instantaneous. We're addicted to the idea of a four hour work week, god bless Tim Ferriss, but that is not reality if we want a deep, meaningful life that it's going to be four hours of work. Give me a break, does anybody really think that we're meant to have 164 hours of just goofing off? What we're not meant to do is have a job that we hate for the next 40 years, that's not what [Inaudible 19:23]. But this idea that we outsource our life is like passive income. To an extreme, imagine passive sex. How excited are you going to be with your partner and your partner's like, "I'm totally into passive everything, including sex." You'd be like, "This is terrible."

Evan Holladay: "I'm kind of here, I'm kind of not."

Damion Lupo: You don't want that, nobody wants that. [Laughs]

Evan Holladay: [Laughs] I can agree to that. Where to go from here? You just touched on how it takes a lot of work to get to where people want to be, so how have you been able to actually put in the work and don't just talk about it but actually make shit happen? How have you been able to put in that work?

Damion Lupo: One of the things that I found, people tend to be very resistant to having a schedule calendar. They go, "That's like a trap." And I go, "People that have the most freedom have the most focused calendars." It also is really helpful to figure out what your values are. People all the time will say, "I value this" and I go, "Really? Let me see your calendar, let me see your check book because what you're saying and what you are doing are totally different" and they go, "Wait a second, I don't want to show you that." With the calendar, the way to get anything done is to be really diligent about where your time is going and where your money is going. We dictate our values based on how we spend our time and money, so that's the first thing, get really clear and figure out. Is all my time doing something that is just for more money to get more objects that make me feel better about myself because I'm focusing on security and significance, or if I look at my calendar, is a chunk of it - maybe a big chunk - focused on the contribution that's actually deeply fulfilling? Which to me is more important than the success. The success is one of the secret, it's the security and significance, I was going to say it's a four letter word but the success is really a moment in time and we tend to get obsessed about, "I'm going to have an MBA" or, "I'm going to retire" or, "I'm going to have this moment in time that's going to define my life and then the moment's over." You think about the people that are embarrassing to be around, the ones that their moment in time was the high school football game and that's it, it's all downhill from there or they're looking out like, "When this job ends..." My dad did this. He said, "I've only got 12 more years." I said, "12 more years of crap, you hate your job, you hate it." He came home mad as hell every day yelling, screaming. He was addicted to the idea of security and it was just this one moment in time. Here's the problem, right before he died we had a conversation, like six weeks earlier. He looked at me and he said, "There was so many things that I wanted to do" and I remember being speechless, what do you say to that? It's somebody that has run out of time and they were always looking to the future for the moment, the success that they were going to have and they never did the life on purpose that was fulfilling along the way. That's the mistake people are making, they're not in their lives, they're waiting for their lives to happen someday. They're living on the someday isle. It's really horrible to see that and if you want to experience hell on earth, it's meeting the image, the man that you could have been, and that's what my dad was seeing few weeks before he died. Like, "Shoot, I don't have any more time." Worst regret ever. There's the pain of discipline or the pain of regret. Regret is a thousand times heavier than discipline will ever be.

Evan Holladay: That's powerful. I think it goes to what would you want the people beside you as you're about to pass away, what would you want them to thank you for or what would you want them to be talking about, about you?

Damion Lupo: I think about this a lot after going through that experience. Anybody that's lost a parent or lost somebody close, especially a parent, it's a unique thing because it's not like we have this experience 50 times, just once or twice. I just remember thinking, I heard Wayne Dyer being interviewed by 20 Robins years ago before Wayne passed and I think the question was something to the effect, "What would you want people to remember" and he's like, "Nothing." His response is weird, and I was thinking that was not very profound, but is it? My thinking is when I leave, I'm not looking for somebody else's validation of my life. I'm looking for my own experience to be I gave it all and I am good, this thing is complete. That's it. You know right now in your life if you're on that path, if you're literally on that journey of fulfillment or if you're thinking, "When I retire, my life starts." Have you seen people that do that? They're the ones that are holding up the lines when you go overseas and you're travelling. They're slow and they're all cranky and all they can think about is the next buffet, it's really embarrassing.

Evan Holladay: There are quite a few people out there that are just looking forward to a future period of time that may or may never come.

Damion Lupo: No, and if you want to knock yourself around a little bit, go on a cruise ship sometime. You'll literally see heaven's waiting room. You'll see these people, they're going in on oxygen and they're in line to go eat and then they leave and then they jump in the pool and the water level changes and they bob around for a while until their next feeding. This is what people are looking forward to. To me it's sad that we've built ourselves a society where people are waiting to actually go in because they're afraid to engage. They're afraid that something's going to eat them. Nothing's going to eat you unless you wash dishes in the Arctic Circle like I did, I promise [Inaudible 25:34] doing that.

Evan Holladay: [Laughs] I was just going to say, "Something happened in Alaska."

Damion Lupo: It also happened in Africa. I was there and our guide said, "Do not get out of the jeep, because we had a lady last week and she got out of the jeep and she was rearranging the tiger cubs or the lion cubs and momma came over and ate her." I was like, "There's another opportunity to be eaten" but I promise you if you make a mistake - because I know you're told in school if you make a mistake, you get 50% wrong, you're a failure and they kick you out. The truth is you get 50% wrong which means you got 50% right in the real world, you're a freaking billionaire. You're impacting the world. You've been trained wrong, our educational system is training us wrong, it's teaching us the wrong thing telling people that they're stupid because they made mistakes. That's how you create change, that's how you live a life that's well lived, that's a fulfilling life. You stub your toe, you grow. That's how it works.

Evan Holladay: You said something along the lines of, "Make more mistakes more quickly than anybody else", is that right?

Damion Lupo: Fail faster. That is the key. If you want to have a life where you're literally not going, "Oh, damn", the whole regret thing, you fail faster. Here's the shift that you have to make: you have to disconnect the failing from you, meaning you can't be the failure. If the failure's a noun, if you're identifying - when I lost my net worth, the problem is my self-worth was my net worth. I had negative 5 billion and I'm like, "Shit, maybe I should put a gun in my mouth." I'm being serious, it's a very dark place when your entire identity is your balance sheet and that is what people are doing, they're afraid to make a mistake. They're just saying, "I want to look good, I want to feel good." They're afraid to make a mistake because they think that makes them the mistake.

Evan Holladay: I think you're exactly right and people need to realize that as long as you're putting yourself out there long enough and learning from each mistake then you will grow as a person and those around you will also grow and you'll be able to do some amazing things.

Damion Lupo: Here's a little hack if you want a little Tim Ferriss hack, don't make the same mistake every time. Actually learn from it. You have 20 years of the same year of experience, you've literally done the same thing for 20 years, you're not more valuable, you're just in the middle of ground hog day.

Evan Holladay: You're back on that merry-go-round.

Damion Lupo: You're on the merry-go-round, so learn the mistake and then grow and find a new mistake. What's even better is find people that are mentoring you that can teach you from their mistakes. When I work with people and the books that I'm teaching from, it's not that I've done well. There's a ton of clowns out there that have done well in real estate, just go watch HDTV and Flip the House and you can see all these people making all this money. That's not who you should learn from, I always look at people and figure out how much ball to how much gray they've got. I want to know if people have been out there that they've actually got scar tissue, that they've been through cycles where they've got emotional intelligence that they're not just saying, "Yeah, it's easy. I can just flip 5 houses and I'm going to make $250.000 a year, it's a piece of cake. I've been doing it for three whole years, I've got a track record." I'm like, "You're full of crap." You want people that have been through stuff, you want people that have been around 15, 20 years. Somebody that's been around 10 years right now has not been through a cycle. That is in general, baloney. That is unicorns and lollipops and puppy dog logic.

Evan Holladay: Speaking of real estate, I saw you bought your first rental house with a VISA and then eventually got up to 150 rental houses. Are you still in owning real estate?

Damion Lupo: I love real estate. What I do now is I basically focus on building and I lend so I'm in a different place just based on my philosophy. One of the great things about doing real estate when you're 22 years old is that you're naive. As I'll get out, you think, "I could build the Great Wall of China in a week, no problem." I thought it made sense to buy a house with a VISA. I don't recommend that strategy. It's a very stupid idea.

Evan Holladay: [Laughs] I don't know if that's allowed anymore.

Damion Lupo: Here's the thing, you can make up a lot of things and just go to town. When you're 22 you just think you're 10 feet tall and bullet proof and nothing can hit you. It's why people will drink 2 bottles of vodka and think, "No big deal." Because they can get away with it. Then you get to be 30 or 40 and you're like, "Oh." Some of those things you can't get away with. In the real estate, I did what the seminar guys told me to do. The people that don't make it in real estate are too afraid of making a mistake. They tend to hesitate instead of taking action because they're afraid, "I might make a mistake and lose some money, it might cost me some money." You're doing your playing not to lose, you're not playing to win. Watch a sports game, any game that's ever been played and wait until the team starts playing not to lose because they're ahead, guess what? They lose. That's your life. I decided to go out there and I tried things, when they stuck I did more of them, that led to 150 houses. The problem is my ego took over and it led to Ferraris and Lamborghinis and big life styles and a $75.000 monthly overhead. Stupid stuff.

Evan Holladay: $75.000, wow.

Damion Lupo: A month. I remember when I melted down and it was funny because I thought that I had cut my expenses and there's no way I could go below $20.000 a month. I was like a $22.000 and a buddy of mine looked at my stuff and he said, "You're not making any money, you just lost everything. I go, "I know, but I can't cut anything else." He said, "What do you mean you can't cut anything? You're basically spending what the top 1% is making. Are you crazy?" and I said, "Yeah, but I can't cut anything else, man. I got a lifestyle." And I defended that thing right until I had no money. Then all of the sudden I didn't have a choice. I'm like, "Shoot." I make $400 to pay for a vehicle payment. It really changes things and then you end up sleeping in your car and you're like, "Maybe I didn't need a $20.000 overhead." And that was my baseline. Perhaps my baseline is a different number.

Evan Holladay: I think that brings up a good point, people need to figure out what they're comfortable living with and then go through like you had talked about before, figuring out financial freedom for them based on that number so that they can live a good lifestyle and live it off their passive income.

Damion Lupo: Here's a further step back in that idea and how we structure and how we envision and what we create, is to really start figuring out how you're going to contribute. I think a lot of times, people look at the fireplace of their lives and they say, "Once it puts out some fire, then I'm going to put some wood in that and I'll do the work after I get the thing." So they go, well, the lifestyle. The lifestyle is the heat, the lifestyle is what you get after you do the work and people start with that and they go, "I want this lifestyle, so what's the minimum work I can do to get the lifestyle?" I look at that and I go, "No, do work that matters. Do it with enthusiasm, do something that actually contributes to other people. The money takes care of itself. If you're on purpose, the money takes care of itself." I just don't believe in this idea of going and working for money and being a whore, because I think that's what most people are doing. They're absolutely whoring themselves out and wasting their lives. It doesn't mean you don't have to eat, what I'm saying is that when you do it year after year, you've literally put yourself in a trap and who wants to be a hooker your entire life? Probably nobody.

Evan Holladay: I don't think that's on too many people's list. Like you're saying, if you can find something that you really care about and you can add value for other people or the world then that is tremendous value. It will reciprocate and it will come right back to you.

Damion Lupo: It does. It happens in different ways. I was watching a Ted Talk and there was a kid that showed up. You may have seen this kid, he basically said, "I want to fix the problem that's called a giant plastic ocean. In the middle of the Pacific, we've got this giant pile of plastic." And he's now 6 years, 7 years, 8 years later he's fixing this problem. He's out there and he's building these collection systems. He found a problem, he is on purpose and when he started he was like 18 or 16.

Evan Holladay: I know who you're talking about, I think it's Boris something.

Damion Lupo: Try to tell me that you can't go do something. The worst thing I've ever heard from somebody is, "I can't take a risk because I've got kids." That's why you take a risk, so your kids are proud of you. You do the thing that matters because guess what they're going to turn into? You, a chicken shit. That's who you want your kids to be? They're modelling, they're going to become you. Whatever you're doing, if you're playing not to lose, that's what your kids are going to do and you're going to trap them. You want to break their financial prison? You want to break their shackles? Go be bold. That's what they're going to turn into and I hate that excuse when parents do that, it just makes me cringe.

Evan Holladay: Also just putting your purpose first because if you can put that first then like you said, your kids will model you and you'll be able to better serve your kids because you'll be in a much better, happier spot in your life and you'll be able to appreciate your kids and give joy to their life.

Damion Lupo: What I see a lot of parents doing is that they focus on their kids instead of focusing on the purpose and focusing on the relationship with their spouse, assuming they have one. It's basically the world revolves around their kids. Do you have any idea how much pressure that puts on a kid and how ridiculous that is? Your kids are going to leave. I see a lot of parents, successful entrepreneurs, business owners that are afraid of their kids actually leaving. They want to keep their kids weak in a weird way to keep them close. That's pathetic, it's devastating, you're literally wronging your kids. Maybe think about that a little bit, if you want to be a role model. Even if you don't have kids, you're still modelling. People are still seeing you, they're still picking up on things. It's amazing what happens, the impact we have that we're not even conscious about, sometimes we hear about it later. What we do is not neutral, it does matter.

Evan Holladay: Exactly. I just wanted to take a side step and talk a little bit about Yokido and mixed martial arts, and martial arts and how you got into it. Then also how you created Yokido.

Damion Lupo: Martial arts is an interesting space because there's no end, people will say, "How long does it take to get a black belt?" and I go, "Fifteen minutes. Go to Academy or go to Amazon and get yourself a black belt. You want to become a black belt? Five, ten years." It's a process of mastery. George Leonard wrote a book called Mastery and if you want to understand life in a totally powerful way, read that book. Martial arts basically calls to you if it's something that's supposed to be in your life and when Aikido called to me 20 years ago, I showed up at a dojo and I walked up to the guy that was running the class and I said, "Do you do private lessons?" He said, "If you last a month, that'd be amazing." I said, "Here, I'm going to show you." I ended up becoming his first black belt and then over the next 5, 6, 7 years kept training. When you do something long enough, if you're really on purpose something else shows up. It's a combination of the teaching, the learning and you and your spirit, and the essence of you becomes that thing. That's what Yokido was, it was me showing up and it wasn't anything that had ever been taught before. It was completely different, it was more about presence, it was more about connection and ultimately the thing that I infused into this martial art style was being able to be in relationship with conflict and heal the conflict while you're going through and redirecting it and grounding the energy. That's never been done before. That's what came out of this and it had to, I didn't have a choice. It was like I was pregnant, it was like the Virgin Mary or something, like I got pregnant with this thing and I had to get it out but it was coming so there it was.

Evan Holladay: That's amazing, I love the idea of you have some passion of yours or you're going on this journey with your passion and it helps you grow and eventually something comes out of it. That's totally different and unique. You've created something out of it.

Damion Lupo: It's an artifact. Buckminster Fuller talks a lot about this in his works. If you want to talk about somebody that's brutally hard to read and understand, he's probably the smartest guy of the 20th century and he talks about artifacts and we're here. Robert Kiyosaki studied with him and he talks about him a lot, too. The idea is we're here to be creating artifacts to serve humanity, that there's a higher use for us and it's god, the general overall director. That's what god stands for according to Buckie and it's a great way to look at it. There's a purpose, we're not just here to procreate and run around like savage animals, there is something more and when you let go and you really go into that space instead of trying to force it or just trying to be a money bee where you're chasing money, it's fascinating what happens. It's almost like magic but it's you letting go and going with the universe versus fighting it.

Evan Holladay: Have you been able to incorporate things you've learned from martial arts and creating Yokido and taking that over to how you're helping people?

Damion Lupo: The interesting thing about "How we do anything is how we do everything", when I'm teaching in the dojo or whether I'm teaching somebody about finances it's the exact same thing. It's the same lessons, it's the same process, it's the same conflict, it's the same moving around, it's the same practice. They are one and the same. There's literally no difference in how I show up anywhere and the process of going through and growing. It's the exact same thing in both of those and so I'll use the dojo as a place to study and learn how I'm going to do better and teach better more effectively and empower people with different skills and tools to be able to move freer through their financial lives. It's a fascinating thing when you stop fighting amongst the different compartments of your life.

Evan Holladay: Have you taken in Yokido, it blends yoga, is that right?

Damion Lupo: Yes, it's a blend of yoga and aikido and reiki. People have obviously heard of yoga, and aikido is the blending art, if you've ever seen Steven Seagal. I don't stick pool cues through people's necks but that's a version of it. Reiki is a healing hands modality, it's a body art where you're using your hands to heal through the energy. That's the idea with Yokido that you're not only moving around people and blending from their energy and redirecting them but you're also healing that conflict and that anger and whatever the struggle is, the aggression. You're healing it in the process of moving around and redirecting it. That completely changes everything, it's not just about getting rid of the problem and walking away. It's about being part of the solution.

Evan Holladay: Do you meditate on a regular basis or is Yokido part of your meditation?

Damion Lupo: Meditation is something that I do every day and I struggle with it. When you have an engaged mind, it's fascinatingly hard to get it to stop. I do it and I may struggle the rest of my life with it, I'm nowhere near anything that would be called mastery in meditation but I do it. I think it will change your life when you do it. It's the opposite of Facebook.

Evan Holladay: The opposite of Facebook, #meditation.

Damion Lupo: [Laughs] that's right.

Evan Holladay: I love it. Alright, let's jump into the Monumental Questions.

Damion Lupo: Alright.

Evan Holladay: What does success and fulfillment mean to you?

Damion Lupo: Fulfillment is where you lose yourself in the work that you do and there's nothing that you can imagine doing that would be more important than the thing that you're involved in.

Evan Holladay: I love it. Do you have a morning ritual or a daily habit that contributes to a good day?

Damion Lupo: I truly believe that health is the first wealth and so every day I work out. Sometimes it's literally ten minutes, it doesn't make any difference, I'm working out every day. It's not just the workout, it's what I'm putting in my body. I think that you see a lot of people that are working out and they forget that they're creating toxicity with the crap that they're putting in their body, bad food, alcohol, whatever. I'm super conscious that rhythm every morning at working out though, is how I start my day.

Evan Holladay: What kind of workouts do you do?

Damion Lupo: It's a combination of weights and cardio and yoga. One of the things that's really powerful is the environment that you're in so I've moved into a building that has a gym, a world-class Olympic gym in the ground level. That's why I moved into this thing. You have to decide whether you're going to make it hard or easy. One of my friends built a gym into his house so when you walk in the front door it's probably a 1500 square foot gym. It's the size of most people's houses so if it's important to you, trip over it in your life. If you trip over it, you tend to do more of it because it's there, you can't get around it. I think that's a very powerful thing. What matters, if your health matters, find a way to trip over it every day.

Evan Holladay: Exactly, make it easy on yourself so you don't even think about it, you just do it.

Damion Lupo: Yes.

Evan Holladay: What is your favorite book or book you're currently reading?

Damion Lupo: Mastery and Principles. One's new, one's old. Principles by Ray Dalio and Mastery are timeless. If we're focused on success, we're missing the whole process, I think we're losing the point of life and that's where Mastery really comes into play. If you're not running your life based on Principles, I wasn't for 10 years. I was running it based on hedonistic tendencies so the reboot was in part to figure out what my values and principles were and then make decisions based on that. Dalio does a brilliant job going into business and life principles in that book.

Evan Holladay: Damion, this has honestly been a blast. How can people reach out to you or follow you?

Damion Lupo: Best place to find me is damionlupo.com. Grab a copy of the book, the download for Reinvented Life. You can see all the books on damionlupo.com. Get a copy of that thing, I think those questions in there are going to help you find some answers that are going to help you shift whatever you're trying to shift. It's my gift to you.

Evan Holladay: I love it. Thank you very much, Damion. I honestly had a blast. Thank you.

Damion Lupo: Alright, Evan. Thank you so much.

Evan Holladay: What a great episode with Damion, guys. Did you notice at the end he talked about, "If it's important to you, trip over it" and really just making things that you value so easy to do every day you don't even need to think about it. I think that's so powerful in everything we do and forming habits. Let us know what you think about today's episode. Make sure to share the episode on social media, share it with your friends, leave us a review as well. That really helps us grow our audience and help impact as many people as possible with Monumental. With that, have a Monumental day.