What Happens When Money Stops Being the Goal? | Ryan Levesque

Which many people don't have any connection with, right? I, so that, that was part of what became clear for me as well, is when I, when I did walk away from everything and I moved to the farm at that time, one of the big things that I discovered is that there was actually a disconnect between my mind and my heart.

I had a, a network chiropractic professional tell me this.

I didn't know.

I, my mind did not trust my heart, and my heart did not trust my mind.

And I, and I'm curious, did you know that you were listening to your heart when you were in Brownsville and later on when you, uh, moved to Vermont? Or do you only know that now?

So I think this'll be, this'll be interesting for us to have a conversation about.

Um, so there...

How do we attack this? We'll talk about this a few different ways.

So you talked about my, my first big business that, that did really well, that seven-time Inc. 5000 business built around this concept called the Ask Method, which is all about, um, finding out what your market wants and giving it to them.

So it's about, like, it's, you know, how do you figure out what to sell and how much to sell it for and what do you say in your marketing and all this? It's, well, it's you just ask.

You just ask your market, and your mar- if you know how to listen, your market will tell you.

Um, the m- the Ask Method's incredibly powerful, um, but what it does is it forces you, um, to listen to the voice of everybody else at the expense of silencing the most important voice of them all, which is yours.

You learn to listen to what does the market want? What should I do next? What, uh, but, but at some point, there's a growing distance between what your market wants and what you feel called to do.

And at some point, you wake up, and that's that disassocia- dissociation that you're describing, where it's like you've got, you're doing this thing, but it has no connection to who you are when you actually take time to reflect on that.

Um, Jason Gaddis describes it as true self versus strategic self, which is something I, I, I write about in the book that, you know, we have two selves within us, and at a young age, we learn that we have to, um, uh, silence our true self.

So our strategic self is you're in any relationship, and there's what you really wanna say, what you really wanna do, but then you have to kind of mute that, and, you know, you gotta, you can't be...

Yeah, it's exactly in service of the other person.

But then there's your true self, which is what y- your spirit really wants to do.

And, and at a young age, we learn that in order to be accepted, in order to just function in society, we just have to constantly push that down.

And, um, at some point, you wake up one day and you say, "Wait, who am I? Wh- how did I show up in the life that I'm living right now?" And, and I think for me, it was a reckoning ...

moment when I was on this rocket ship growing our company and received an offer, uh, to buy the company, which you and I have talked about before, um, which was a life-changing amount of money.

It was a big offer.

It was a $70 million offer, uh, to buy the majority of my company, and we spent almost a year with this group in diligence, uh, due diligence, and everything-- I had everything together.

I had a purchase agreement.

Like, they had spent a million dollars in diligence.