From Addiction to Abundance: How to Rise from Rock Bottom with Samuel Smith

00:00:00 - Courtney Elmer
Addiction is rampant among entrepreneurs. And I'm not just talking about alcohol addiction or substance abuse or addiction to your phone or to social media, though all of these are very real and can be very serious issues. I'm talking about work addiction to the game of entrepreneurship itself and how, ironically, this prevents you from experiencing the freedom and the fulfilment that you got into business to experience in the first place. We're unpacking all of this and more inside today's episode, including the signs you need to look for and the pitfalls you need to avoid so that your love for entrepreneurship doesn't turn into something deadly that could hinder your growth and your progress and threaten your quality of life. That's all coming up next, so stay tuned. 

00:00:53 - Courtney Elmer                                                                                                 

Globally ranked among the top shows in business and education, we're known for helping overworked online business owners navigate the ups and downs on the way to seven figures each week. You're going to learn how to get the right systems, structure, and support in place so you can build a self-sustaining business that thrives in a rapidly changing digital environment and grow through what you go through to create the greater income, influence, and impact you deserve. This is AntiFragile Entrepreneurship™. Are you addicted to your business? It's a serious question because, for most of us, we love what we do. 

00:01:32 - Courtney Elmer                                                                                                          We would do it every waking minute of every single day if we could. We want to create an impact; we want to leave a legacy; we want to create change. We want to help people. But when is too much of a good thing, not a good thing? Samuel Smith is here with me on the show today to share how poor stewardship of his time and his talent led to the complete and total collapse of not one but two seven-figure businesses, along with his marriage and his life, all before the age of 35. Since then, though, Samuel has been sober for over six years, and he's built back his life, but this time with the proper fundamentals to ensure long-term success. But alcohol addiction wasn't the only addiction that Samuel had to overcome. There's another far more deadly addiction that threatens our livelihood as entrepreneurs, and that every entrepreneur needs to be aware of is work addiction. Because if it's left unchecked, it could cost you the very life that you're working so hard to build for yourself and for your family. So here's how to not let it happen to you.

00:03:02 - Courtney Elmer
Samuel, welcome to the show. I am truly honored to have you here. You are someone who is a living, breathing testament to anti-fragility. And I can't wait for people to get to know you and to hear your story and, even more importantly, to hear what you have learned from the adversity that you faced in your life and specifically in your business, and to achieve what you have achieved and accomplished as a business owner, as an entrepreneur. So thank you, truly, for making the time to be here today.

00:03:36 - Samuel Smith
Thank you for having me. Courtney. I'm really excited to get to talk to you, so thank you.

00:03:40 - Courtney Elmer
Absolutely. Well, you know, many entrepreneurs face challenges. We all face setbacks. We know about the roller coaster of entrepreneurship, the highs and the lows. But your story is particularly remarkable, and I'd love to start there with how you managed to overcome work addiction and turn your life around while simultaneously rebuilding your life and your business. Take us there. What was that like?

00:04:11 - Samuel Smith
That's such a loaded question. I managed to turn it around because there wasn't any other option. It was either that or curl up and give up and just crawl into some kind of nine-to-five hellish nightmare. There was no other option than to just stop doing the things I was doing and start doing the things I knew needed to be done, which was OD at the peak of my bad days. I guess you could say I had a lot of money and I could do really anything I wanted to. And everything collapsed in on itself. I was drinking just so much, so much. It was a case of a different liquor store every day so they wouldn't recognize me too badly, and there was no plan. I'm going to switch from doing this to doing that. I watched a friend of mine's life partner. They weren't married, but close enough. I watched her die from alcoholism in February before my company collapsed. 

00:05:24 - Samuel Smith
And I was one of her end-of-life helpers. I helped to move her around and helped to make her comfortable. And she was only eight years older than me when she died. Combining that with my company collapsing and I was over in England for a little vacation, we know I'd been drunk the entire two weeks and had no company and no nothing. My mom said she whispered in my ear when we left, she whispered, Sort your life out. And that was the catalyst. There was no magic game plan. There was no Alcoholics Anonymous. There was no nothing. It was purely, you know what, I'm not going to have a drink today. And when I woke up the next day, and it was the first time in God knows how long I hadn't had a hangover, I thought, wow, I wonder if I could just go another day and not have a drink. Let me just take a break from it. Let me see how it feels. I kept that in my mind the whole time. I'm just not going to have a drink today to where it wasn't like I'm never going to drink again.

00:06:33 - Samuel Smith                                                                                                             And it was a huge amount of pressure, and I'm counting the days, and I'm getting chips, and I'm telling strangers in a circle how I feel about shit. I never touched any of that. The power came from watching a friend die from the disease that I was suffering from. And my 63-year-old mother let me know how disappointed and ashamed of me she was with that one little sentence. When you tell your son to sort your life out, there's no greater measure of I'm ashamed of you. And I'm disappointed in you, and you need to get shit together. I mean, that was it. And so we said there was no miracle plan. There were no 90 days to a better you. It was just, you know what? I'm not going to have that drink just today. And then I kept moving the goalposts. I made it a week. And about day three or day four, I forget which day it was. The withdrawal symptoms started, and it was awful. It was like having food poisoning, almost like having flu, like just shaking. And it was awful. As I was going through that, the only thing I could think of was, if I have a drink right now, if I ever want to stop, I'm going to have to go through this again. And that's pretty much it. That's how I started to come back from that. And to be an alcoholic was to just tell me every morning, hey, you know what? I'm not going to have a drink today. Maybe tomorrow. Yeah, maybe this weekend. Yeah, okay. But I'm not going to have a drink today. Oh, it's been 20 days. Wow. I wonder if I could make it to 30. And that's all I did. And I've done that for the last six years. And six years and one month and 14 days and a few hours.

00:08:23 - Courtney Elmer
Wow. Samuel. That's amazing. I'm curious to know how did that affect your relationships? How did that affect other aspects of your life? When you were really at that lowest point, did it affect your business? How did that play out in real life, so to speak? Certainly, there are internal battles you were facing, but how did that play out externally?

00:08:45 - Samuel Smith
My business, of course, was toast at that point. It was completely done. So, I was starting from scratch with whatever it was I was going to do. Obviously, it allowed me to be able to focus when my business did collapse. And before I got sober, my response was to just drink. It was just there. The bottle was there, and you could numb the pain of this. And just you can't move forward if you're sitting down and you're drinking, and drinking is like a hole, and the only way you can go is down, and there's no way forward. And the only way out of situations, especially in business, is forward. It's through. You have to go through you have to go through fire to become steel. You've got to go through it. And so from a relationship perspective, though, because the business was a fresh start, I just had to move forward. The relationship perspective surprised me because there were two very clear distinctions. You see, it was my friend's partner who passed away, but we were part of a bigger friend group, and all of that friend group supported me. 

00:09:49 - Samuel Smith
Now, my identity then was drinking. You could find me in the same bar seven nights a week, like, Cheers. Everybody knew me. I did a lot of business there. That was my identity. So, to say stop drinking is also to say stop hanging out with your friends. Stop keeping those close relationships that you've had for ten or 15 years with people who have the same afflictions as you. They like to sit at the bar. They like to drink. You get a community aspect around a local bar that everybody knows your name, and it's your comfort zone. And those friends, actually, because they had watched what had happened to my friend's partner, they all supported me. When they did a round of shots, they bought me a shot of Diet Coke. It came like that in a shot glass, and I got to hang out with them. And then, over time, gradually, those relationships started to fade. Now, it's been six years. I live in a very transient town. I live in a college town. So people come and go with jobs, moving all the time, and I have very few friends left. Now that drink. And I do make a point to go see them a couple of times a month. I do. I love those guys, and yet I'm always kind of sliding out of there by 830 or 09:00 at night. For me, the drunk guys are not fun to be around, and the split in my friend groups happened with that. You're no fun when you're not drinking. Come have a drink with us. 

00:11:13 - Samuel Smith
Why don't you just relax a little bit? And I'm like, I'm plenty relaxed. I'm good. And so, as you evolve and you grow over time, you find you let friend groups go that don't align with where you're trying to go. There's a tremendous amount of social pressure to build strong friend groups in high school and college and maintain those relationships in a lifelong pattern. And most people evolve differently at different speeds to different goals. Some people are very, very happy working a manual labor style nine to five, going to the bar every night. Some people love that. That's what they want to do. And God bless them. I love them, too. Let them go. But if you're trying to become something more than you are, and if you're trying to elevate yourself from the groups you're in, a huge part of that is understanding that eventually, I'm going to have to let these people go. You could still go back. You could still go hang out. But I don't hang out six nights a week with the same crowd. I see them a couple of times a month. I let them know we're still friends. They need anything. I need anything. Cool. But they understand that my life's moved on.

00:12:26 - Courtney Elmer
Yeah. I think this is true in entrepreneurship, too. As we reach new levels, new levels of growth, new levels of business growth, and inward growth, some of the relationships that we relied on for so long just tend to naturally fall away. And there's a bit of a grieving process that happens. When that happens, and you're in a different place, there's also a part of you that's okay with that because it's indicative of growth.

00:12:50 - Samuel Smith
Absolutely is. And I think it's our job as the more experienced entrepreneurs now, the ones with the few grey hairs, it's our job to let the guys coming up know that it's a natural part of the process that you will, I hate to use the word levels, but there are levels to the game. And if you want to be in and among seven, eight, and nine-figure business owners, then before you can get in that room, you've got to let go of the six-figure room. You've got to let go of the five-figure room. You've got to let go of the room where people are exchanging time for money, and you've got to go and serve drinks in the eight-figure room just to get to the table. But by getting around and changing the people around you it naturally leads to some relationships falling by the wayside, and it's a natural part of the process. And I think if some of us could maybe let go of some friendships a little bit earlier can't save everybody. Entrepreneurship isn't for everybody. And if you want to get to the level that defines success to you, you have to let go of people who are happy living beneath where you want to go.

00:14:02 - Courtney Elmer
Absolutely.

00:14:04 - Samuel Smith
It sounds so judgmental. I'm not trying to be that way. I'm not. I'm talking directly to the entrepreneur. I'm not talking to it's so difficult. I love all of my friends, whether they want to do what I do or whether they want to have the security, safety, and comfort of a nine-to-five. I love all my friends, but some of them you just have to see less. I don't want to sound judgmental.

00:14:30 - Courtney Elmer
No, not at all. It is part of the process. And I think to your point about letting people know that this is normal, it's very normal. And there's something that you say a lot that I really like about how there are no superhumans in the world, just humans who decide to go do super things and commit to them step by step. You are the breathing example of that.

00:14:51 - Samuel Smith
Yes.

00:14:51 - Courtney Elmer
Moving through those levels, as you described, from five to six figures, six to seven, seven to eight, those are significant milestones. And a lot of times, we think that it's going to unlock certain things for us. And I'm curious to know, as you have moved through these levels in your business, what were some of the misconceptions that you've learned along the way. Maybe you didn't expect any beliefs or narratives that you found to be totally unhelpful or totally misleading.

00:15:21 - Samuel Smith
Man, everybody I know that has built stuff themselves and is sitting in that seven-figure room or sitting in the eight-figure room. Everybody I know that got there from their own sweat and their own work addiction and their own validation wants nothing more than to help the people in the seven-figure room step up to eight or the six-figure room step up to six and a half figures or seven figures. They want nothing more than to connect with other like-minded people and help solve their problems. Yeah, I connect with people and solve their problems all the time, but they solve my problems, too. It's like having stuff to bounce off. And I think a big misconception about successful people is that there's a great distinction between inherited money and created money. And everybody I've met who's created their own money is willing and open to mentor people who are coming up and are trying to do the same thing, provided they can see that they are doing the work. The caveat to that is that whenever we mentor people, and we give them a roadmap, and we push them, and we hold them accountable whenever they don't do the work, it does feel like a very it's waste of time. It feels awful. What I want the listeners to know is that the people you perceive as successful and way above you and there's no way I could reach out to them because they're on a different level. 

00:016:58 - Samuel Smith
They built it themselves. They have been sitting where you're sitting. One of the greatest joys that most people I know have made it one of the greatest joys they have is making other people helping other people make it. And so if you're thinking about, oh, man, I wish I could reach out to that social media guy or that quote-unquote celebrity or influencer, whatever it is, you can reach out to successful businessmen, and they will help you. It's wonderful. I think the biggest misconception I found is that don't let impostor syndrome get in the way. If you do the work, and if you show that you are doing the work, everybody that is successful will turn around and help you succeed. I think that's it.

00:17:43 - Courtney Elmer
How encouraging, too, to think about. Right. Because I know for me, in many stages of my own journey, there have been many times it feels isolating. You feel alone. You feel like you're the only one who understands what you're going through. Right. Even though we know other people go through similar things doing a business, managing family responsibilities, juggling it all. But sometimes, it can feel like you're the only one paddling this boat upstream, right? Or pushing a boulder up the mountain, whatever metaphor you want to use.

00:18:08 - Samuel Smith
Yes.

00:18:08 - Courtney Elmer
And knowing that there are people out there who they're not just out there riding on their high horse, oh, I made it to seven figures. I made it to eight figures that they're willing to reach their hand back out and pull you up with them. Go find those people. What a powerful and refreshing thought. It's not a gatekeeper. I'm sure there are some people who.

00:18:28 - Samuel Smith
It might kind of gate again, but it does.

00:18:30 - Courtney Elmer
Go at levels, but the genuine ones who really want to see you succeed.

00:18:34 - Samuel Smith
Yeah, I mean, I know CEOs of multimillion-dollar companies that I can just pick up the phone to, and they'll take my call, and it's incredible. And it's all because I paid to be around those guys, and I built relationships with them. And I really think that one of the highest ROI activities I've ever done is educating myself inside of rooms full of business owners where you pay to go to a seminar about a specific topic or where you pay to join a five-day workshop and mastermind. Not only do you get the education, you get the network, and you get to build personal relationships with other business owners that are maybe ahead of you, maybe behind you, maybe around you. Having that network is what's really helped me because I can lean in and get any question I need answered on the understanding that when the network calls me, I help them answer their questions, too. I mean, it works both ways, but education and networking have been the most powerful tools that I've used in business. And also, when you think like that, you get around people who think like that. Everybody I know that's at a high level of entrepreneurship has a high level of discipline, a high level of personal accountability, and generally a high level of fitness. And so it inspires you. 

00:19:59 - Samuel Smith
You say, if I want to go where Stephen is over there, I've got to have his level of discipline. How do I do that? How do I have his level of attention to detail? And you learn what millionaires do, and then you learn what deca millionaires do, and success leaves clues. So you just copy what's laid down in front of you. You emulate what these guys are doing, and by getting around them, you think you're doing well. But you go to a meet-up in a big city, and there are 27 millionaires with six packs; it really makes you think about, am I going to eat that cookie, or am I going to stay on my diet and stay disciplined? And those guys, they help to raise up your basic minimum standards. And the minimum standards of your peer group are the minimum standards you'll set for yourself. So if you want to be successful, set higher standards and start there. I tend to ramble when you let me go online.

00:20:57 - Courtney Elmer
Oh, no, I love it. I mean, everything is so spot on, and for a lot of people, listening. They might be a little disappointed to hear, really, that's discipline and accountability. Like, I know this, and this is the truth. We know it logically, but until you are doing it until you are living it, until you are practicing it, then you're not going to be able to go out there and actually generate the results that you want.

00:21:17 - Samuel Smith
Everybody says I'm not a morning person, and I'm not. Just not. I love getting up whenever I want. And yet, if I set the alarm every morning for 445, and if I'm out of bed and in my running shoes by 515, whether I walk or run, it doesn't matter. I'm home by 06:00. I've already got my exercise in my brain's awake, my body's awake. I jump in the shower, I grab my coffee, I'm reading a book, and boom, it's 830. I'm starting work, and I've already accomplished more than most people do in a day. So I'm not a morning person, but man, when I'm awake, dude, I love mornings. And if you have a good morning, you can have a good day. And if you have a good day, you can have a good week. And so, dude, your morning sets up everything. You just have to follow the clues that successful people leave. That's it.

00:22:11 - Courtney Elmer
You know what's interesting about that, too? Success does leave clues. And I think the clues that we realize when we are looking at successful people and what they do and how we can I emulate that. Sometimes, it's not the clues that we expected. Discipline seems so basic, but yet it is fundamental. And usually, more often than not, the clues that we find are not these secret insider, nine-figure business strategies.

00:22:37 - Samuel Smith
It is not.

00:22:38 - Courtney Elmer
It's the basics. Go pay 100K for a mastermind to tell you that necessarily, right? It's adopting these things. Now you can have a seat at the table with these people because that's what they do, too. And I think that's refreshing to hear and it's a great reminder that it's it's not all of these complicated things. Gosh. Samuel, I remember when I got into business and, you know, I'm following these seven and eight-figure leaders, so I thought I had to have the teams that they had and the marketing funnels that they had and the systems that they had, and it just wasn't my reality because I hadn't even learned the lessons yet. To get to five figures, to get to six figures, right, and there were those levels I had to go through first.

00:23:15 - Samuel Smith
All you need to do as a startup, I don't know, listeners. All you need to do as a startup is have a minimum viable product and sell it. That's it, right? You don't have a problem until you get revenue. You don't have any issues until you've sold your you don't even need a product to sell your first one. You can sell it on a website that you create yourself for $200, sell it, collect a credit card payment, and then email the guy, thank him for his business, and say; I'll have that with you in seven to ten business days, and then go, you don't have any issues at all. So you've got revenue coming in. So we waste all of this time worrying and making assumptions about, well, I'm going to need this, and I'm going to need that, I'm going to need the other. When I started selling what I sell, now I sell consulting, when I started selling, that it's. $300 for 30 minutes. Click the button, let's go, and that's it. Right now, I've got a website, now I've got systems, now I've got follow-ups. But, like, minimum, you don't have any problems until you've got revenue. And I think I've made the mistake, and many of us make the mistake of trying to design the perfect sales funnel, the perfect client experience, the perfect everything based on our assumptions and not based on real testing and real data. And so when it comes to launching businesses, just throw it up in the air. Let's get it out in the market, let's get some revenue coming in, and let's adjust as we go. You don't need 16 email automation following up with this and that. You need to find some revenue and sell a product. And then we work backwards from there to fill it in.

00:24:45 - Courtney Elmer
Yes. You know what else, Samuel? It comes to mind. We're talking about how success leaves clues, and I believe failure also leaves clues. And I'm curious, in your journey as an entrepreneur through this five-figure level, the six-figure level, the seven-figure level, helping other people through those levels, yeah. What are the clues that failure has left you along the way?

00:25:06 - Samuel Smith
Man, every time I failed, it was because of a lack of discipline, a lack of accountability, and me not doing the things I knew I was supposed to do. It was me trying to take shortcuts and find a different way. I have failed due to having too much money invested in one particular thing as a market, correct? But I knew I knew how to spread my investments out; I knew how to spread my risk around. But, man, I've got the chance to turn a few hundred thousand into a few million. I'm going to put a few hundred thousand in it, and we'll ride with it. Well, if I'd only put maybe half of that or a third of it, so it's all stuff, you know? You know, not to invest all your stuff in one project, everybody knows that. But boy, if we hit this and boom, off it goes.

00:25:55 - Samuel Smith
And so, every single mistake, no matter what it comes back to, did I have the discipline as an entrepreneur to do what I knew I was supposed to be doing? And if you ask yourself honestly and do an honest audit of your business from the beginning to the end. If you look and say, how are my customer acquisition channels looking? Does my social media look as good as it can possibly look? Mine looks great, but, dude, it could be a lot better, okay, so honestly going to have to go in and start tweaking that, and then how does my customer sales process look once they've come through the acquisition and they're on my landing page and they click it, what does that look like? Could it be better? And most business owners are going to look at it and go, yeah, my website does need help, or, I've been meaning to build a website, or I got half a website, but I haven't finished. Come on, guys, you know this is true. I'm talking to you like you all know that your website looks it could look better, couldn't it? There's probably 20% of you have banging websites and 80% of you going, Shit, he's right. 

00:27:01 - Samuel Smith
Every mistake I made came from me not looking at whatever process it was. The big one that cost me everything was my not having a full understanding and accountability of my credit card processing, my fraud prevention, and my chargeback software. I had allocated that to a manager that I wasn't supervising properly, and bless her heart, she didn't have the skill set to manage it, and I just poured it onto her because I didn't want to do it and I was lazy. And so it came from a lack of discipline, a lack of accountability, and something I already knew how to fix. So when you sitting there with your head in your hands crying, going, this doesn't work, and I've got no money, and I don't know what the fuck to do, the first thing you have to do is be honest with yourself. Have to be honest with it and look through your entire business and say, is this the best I can possibly do? If I was worth eight figures a year, would this be an acceptable website to land on? And the answer for 80% of you is, oh, no, it wouldn't. If I was worth eight figures a year, would this be an acceptable follow-up process to people who were leads but didn't engage? Well, if I was worth eight figures a year, it wouldn't be acceptable. And you go down that list one at a time, and you say, Is this the best I can do? And if it isn't, you have to be honest with yourself and either do better or get help to do better.

00:28:31 - Courtney Elmer
Yes. Gosh, Samuel, so refreshing to hear you share so openly and so honestly in a world where people often try to hide the know; we think, well, we don't want to talk about these things, right? We just want to show the glory story. I'm curious, given our conversation today, if there's anything else that we should have discussed but that we didn't. Would you like to share with our listeners?

00:28:53 - Samuel Smith
Oh, man. I don't know, dude. We can go anywhere you please. What would benefit your listeners the most? If I talk about it because I can talk about pretty much anywhere in the entire circle of business and how it works, would it benefit them more to talk about mindset and attitude? Would it benefit them more to talk about technicalities? What are you thinking here?

00:29:15 - Courtney Elmer
I think mindset and attitude. Let's go there.

00:29:17 - Samuel Smith
Okay.

00:29:18 - Courtney Elmer
Because I think it's one of those things that's overrated and undervalued. Like, we know we need a mindset, right? But we don't often live it.

00:29:26 - Samuel Smith
All right, well, I'm going to talk to you about just going with me here. I believe the universe is just made up specifically for us, and we make it up in our own heads. And so whatever truths we allow to be true in our minds are true because it's our perception. Like, my face only exists in your mind. I can't see it most of the time, right? And so if you think of it like that, sorry, and you think there are levels to it, a lot of entrepreneurs, it's human nature that we live in this ever-expanding vessel. We live in a fishbowl where every chance we get, we expand because we want to do more. We want to be more. We want to have more impact. We want to help more people. We want to make more sales. Like, all of it is more more. And if you think of it as a simulation, the higher the number of points you get, right? The larger amount of money you get, the more friends you get. Every video game you play is ranked by he who has the most wins. 

00:30:29 - Samuel Smith
And so those of us who are afflicted with the entrepreneur gene are addicted to the game with the message that he who has the most wins. And when I get asked about winning and losing and success and work-life balance and all that other stuff, I want you to think about Courtney when you come home, and your partner's on the couch, and they're playing on the phone, and they're glued to social media, how does that make you feel? When your kids are sitting in their bedroom glued to their video games, and you're talking to them, and they're not responding, they're just staring straight down. How do those two things make you feel? Alone, right? They make you feel like you're not important. Now, when it comes to entrepreneurship, we're addicted to the game. I got to work; I got to work; I got to work. There's never an end. And your family and your kids see your business as that video game controller with you glued to the screen. You know that their video games can be switched off, and they can come into the room and have their dinner, and they should sit with the family for dinner. But you're addicted to your video game because you want to score more points, and you want to have more impact, and you want to make more money, and you want to hire more people, and you're sitting there glued to the controller, staring at the screen. And you're missing your family, and you're missing your kids and you're missing real valuable human-to-human relations because we're addicted to an ever-expanding goldfish bowl that we're building ourselves. That goldfish bowl is going to grow over time. It doesn't matter to the goldfish bowl if you work 40 hours a week or 80 hours a week. 

00:32:17 - Samuel Smith
It doesn't matter to Grand Theft Auto if I play that thing 40 hours a week, 80 hours a week. But if I don't make time to go bowling with my cousin and all I'm focused on is the score in a video game, I miss out on life. Most of us who play this game are completely addicted to it. It's all I think about. Twenty-four, seven. I love it. I love running up the score. Yeah, sometimes we take a hit and we lose a bunch of points. But you know what? There's always an extra man. There's always tomorrow. Every time you wake up, it's a new life. It's a new day. Now we go play the game again, right? You're addicted to a game. So the message for the entrepreneurs, as far as mindset, as far as work-life balance, remember, this is all a game. Don't be addicted to the game. And somebody extremely famous whose name I can't remember, probably Aristotle or Shakespeare or I don't know, he said, I think, therefore I am. And if you really think about that phrase, that's the secret. That is the secret to entrepreneurship. I think, therefore, I am. If you want to be an eight-figure player, you must think like an eight-figure player and therefore, become an eight-figure player. But you have to think like one and be like one and do like one before you can become one. And that comes through discipline, consistency, and time. How about that?

00:33:55 - Courtney Elmer
Drop your mic. Thank you. That was so spot on and so true. And what a jarring way to look at entrepreneurship, particularly for those of us who do have families, who do have kids, who do have people in our lives who are important to us. I think about that often, quite honestly. My son is five. My husband and I love our work addiction. We had the chance to go to dinner last night, and we looked at each other, and we said if we didn't have our son, we'd both be workaholics and have work addiction. We would just work all the time because we love it.

00:34:27 - Samuel Smith
Addicted to the game. It's a great thing. You can build the most epic thing. It's like Minecraft, but real. Oh, you got to go get this bit and this bit and this bit, and then put it on a tape. The only reason people do it on the screen instead of in real life is that it's harder in real life to play, and you get the same dopamine from building it on the screen, but all life is Legos and Minecraft, and we're keeping score. So just put down the controller, just let it go every now and again.

00:34:53 - Courtney Elmer
That's the important piece, yeah, because if I'm sitting here running my business, saying that I want to show my son what's possible, but all he sees from his perspective is a mom who never stops working, how am I actually showing him what's possible?

00:35:06 - Samuel Smith
You're showing him a mum who's addicted to playing the game instead of addicted to enjoying the results of the game.

00:35:12 - Courtney Elmer
Exactly.

00:35:14 - Samuel Smith
The way I do that is to split everything by percentages. Some money goes to charity, some money goes to savings, some money goes to investments, some money goes to paying off a little bit of debt a little bit quicker, and then we live off the rest. Because if we don't, we spend all of that money ever expanding our immediate surroundings, buying the car we want, buying the house we want, going and doing the things we want, with never any attention paid to how big our goldfish ball is getting. And so it's so important that you keep that in check and learn to put the controller down and enjoy spending the points that you've made inside of the game and spend them properly and know that, hey, I got some points tomorrow morning, I got an extra man. Tomorrow, we're going to go out and play this again. And when you play Minecraft, you design it, and you build it, and it starts small, and it grows over time. It's the exact same game. You just play it in the real world.

00:36:13 - Courtney Elmer
An invaluable reminder. Samuel, thank you so much for your time today, for being here, for sharing your wisdom with us, your hard-earned wisdom through all the ups and downs that you faced on your journey. We appreciate you.

00:36:24 - Samuel Smith
Thank you. Thank you so much.

00:36:26 - Courtney Elmer
And thank you so much for joining us here today for another episode of  AntiFragile Entrepreneurship™. And if you want to connect with Samuel, we've linked all of his social media profiles in the show notes to make it easy for you to click over and follow him, follow his journey. He is definitely someone to watch. And if you've listened to the show for a while and you're getting value out of these episodes every single week, then I have a humble request for you. Would you take a moment of your time today and scroll down in your Apple app and leave us a five-star review? Your reviews help me and my team to continue providing you with the kind of content that you want to hear. And even more importantly, it lets other listeners know that this show is worth their time. Now, next week, we're going to be talking about the most powerful tool that you have in your arsenal right now as an entrepreneur. It's completely free, and it's available to you 100% of the time, but it's also a tool that 99% of entrepreneurs overlook. What is it, and how can you use it to join the top 1% and create a legacy that will be remembered not just now but for generations into the future? Join me here next week to find out, and until then, let's go out and grow through what we go through together.