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I want everyone to remember this. You are best equipped to help the person you used to be. You're best equipped to help the person you used to be. I used to be unconfident. I used to be broke. I used to struggle with direction. I used to struggle with goal setting. I'd struggle with leadership. I'd struggle with my reticular activating system. I struggle with laziness and managing my time. I'm best equipped, and so are you, to help the people that are most like you used to be.
Welcome to In Search of Excellence, which is about our quest for greatness and our desire to be the very best we can be, to learn, educate, and motivate ourselves to live up to our highest potential. It's about planning for excellence and how we achieve excellence through incredibly hard work, dedication, and perseverance. It's about believing in ourselves and the ability to overcome the many obstacles we all face on our way there. Achieving excellence is our goal, and it's never easy to do. We all have different backgrounds, personalities, and surroundings, and we all have different routes on how we hope and want to get there.
My guest today is Ed Milat. Ed is an incredibly successful serial entrepreneur and investor, and one of the most sought-after motivational speakers in the world. He is the Senior Executive Vice Chairman of World Financial Group, a financial services company that has helped hundreds of thousands of individuals and families
achieved financial independence and financial security, a company where Ed started his business career 30 years and seven months ago. In 2022, Ed was named one of the 125 most influential leaders by Success Magazine. And in a recent survey, he was ranked as the number one inspirational speaker in the world. He is the host of the incredible and top-rated podcast, The Ed Milet Show, and is the author of the recently released New York Times bestseller, The Power of One More, a truly incredible and motivational book whose premise is that you're
You're only one decision, one relationship, one thought, one new emotion, one interview, and one book away from completely changing your life. Ed has been a great friend over the past seven years, and I'm incredibly excited to have him on my show. Ed, welcome to In Search of Excellence. Holy smokes, what an intro. Great to be with you, brother. I miss you, haven't seen you in a while, and it's just good to see your face.
It's awesome to see yours. I always start my podcast with our family because from the moment we're born, our family helps shape our personalities, our values, and the preparation for our future. We were born in Boston and grew up with three younger sisters in a lower middle-class family in Diamond Bar, California, a city in eastern LA that has a population of 50,000 people. Your dad, Ed, was an alcoholic and drug addict when you were young, and he
and he had an incredible influence on your life, including being the motivating reason for writing The Power of One More. We're going to talk about him a lot in this podcast, but I want to start with your mother, Debbie, whom you've never talked about publicly. What was she like, and what kind of influence did she have on your life?
No one has ever asked me about my mom, and I've done four million shows. So my mom was a stabilizing force in my home. My mom had something, second to last chapter of my book is on equanimity. I talk about having calmness and peace under duress.
And my mother embodies that more than anybody I've ever met in my life. You know, when you're the, especially back then you picture my mother's got three children, four children, three little girls and a boy, alcoholic husband. Some nights he comes home, some nights he doesn't. She does not have a career outside the home. She's financially tied to this man and
And somehow every single night you would never know anything was wrong in her life. She never showed hurt. She never showed fear. She never showed anxiety. She was the stabilizing force in my life. I think some of the, you know, we learn a lot from our parents. Most things in life from parents are caught, not taught. You catch things. And I caught from my mom, the ability to be kind of calm under pressure and that's equanimity. And that's why I wrote about it in the book. I should have credited my mom in the book with that. And I didn't, but my mom is,
No question in my mind. I'm so grateful that you asked about her, Randy. She is certainly the most important person in my life ever, and I would not be here without her. So thank you for letting me honor my mom. I'll send her this clip. Please do. And please tell her I said hello. I will.
Because your dad was an alcoholic and drug addict, there was a tremendous amount of chaos around you when you were younger. There was constant yelling. Your friends wouldn't come over because of it, and you were ashamed and embarrassed when you left your house because your neighbors could also hear the yelling. When you were seven years old, your family moved to a new town and you were the new kid in school. You were very small in size, were insecure, you had no confidence, and were picked on and bullied and beat up. You were thin, and your next-door neighbor, a guy whose name was Ray Ray, who would call you Eddie Spaghetti, your meatballs are ready,
something that caught on with your classmates and caused you to come home crying to your mom who would console you. There were many mornings when you left for school and your dad didn't come home the night before, or there had been turmoil the night before. At this point, in the first grade, you had a teacher named Mrs. Smith. One day, your school was doing testing, and somebody from the school came to the classroom and said, Mrs. Smith, we need your smartest student to come take a test and represent the class. And Mrs. Smith turned to you and said, that is Eddie. He's the smartest boy in
You're surprised. When you looked up at her, she smiled at you and you lit up. It was the first time in your life that somebody thought you were special. So you get up, you walk to the back of the room, you take the test, you did well on it. You return to the classroom. The class was over, but Mrs. Smith was waiting for you. She asked you to come to her desk. And when you did, she told you that you were special and so smart and hugged you for a full minute. And it really changed your life a lot. Can you tell us how it changed your life?
And in search of excellence, how important is it, regardless of your age, for somebody to tell you that you're special and that they believe in you and make you feel loved? And on the flip side, how important is it for us to do the same for others? Great question. That's a defining moment of my young life because I just felt horrible about it. To the point, Randy, where probably, I think probably I contemplated why live.
I think I really had some of those thoughts as a kid. And so that moment of someone going, you're special, altered me. In your life, even right now, people listening to this or watching it, on one hand, if you're lucky, you might have two or three people in your life who have really made you feel special and they believed in you. And even when you picture their face, if you're lucky to have one, you get emotional, whether they've passed away or they're still here. They
There's something about you that's your souls are glued together. And all of you are thinking of that person or those two or three people right now. It could be your grandmother, your mother, your dad, a coach. It could be a mentor. And for me, it was Mrs. Smith. It was the first person that really I felt like believed in me. And it altered me because I finally thought, well, maybe I'm special. Maybe I am it. It
At least it was possible that I was. And then when I went to work at an orphanage, when I got out of college, my baseball career, and I went to work at an orphanage and I would, these boys that I was with, I figured out very early, they just wanted someone to love them and care about them. And here's the big hook. You use the word.
believe in them. Oftentimes, even from our parents, maybe we feel like they love us, but do they believe in us? And so Mrs. Smith is the first person to believe in me. And how important is it? Well, you will glue yourself to somebody as one of those people the rest of their life if they really sense that you love them and you believe in them. One thing with my kids I've tried to do is obviously I think most parents get over to their kids that they love them, but I don't think most parents are conscious of getting their kids to know they believe in them. And I spent a lot of my time when I was raising my children on that one thing because
For me, I'm 51 years old. And if I talk much longer about Mrs. Smith, I will weep. When I was in fourth grade, Randy, I've never said this on a show, but because it's you, I'll share it. In my school, you could see the other classes. There were no walls between the classes. So it was like I could look into other classes. The first day of school, fourth grade, and I was a good little boy. I had my hands folded. I wanted the teacher to see me. And I looked over my right shoulder into a classroom. I'm going to get emotional.
into a classroom that was across the structure we were in. And Mrs. Smith was in the back of her classroom and she was watching me. And I watched her and she was praying for me. And she had tears coming down her eyes and she was praying for me. And I just caught it for like about 10 seconds. And then she went on to teach her class.
And I remember thinking three years later, she still cares about me. She still believes in me. She still loves me. And it just stuck with me that on this earth, there really are good people. There really are special people who will pray for you, that will believe in you. And she was that person, not just that one moment, but that moment in fourth grade when she was just looking at me and praying for me, of all the kids. And the reason was she knew something's going on in this little boy's home that's so painful for him. And she was just praying for me. So yeah, big time.
You had a lot of trauma when you were a kid, in a lot of ways a normal home, a lot of ways dysfunctional home. Can you take us through your very first memory of the trauma you experienced as a child and a few of the other memories, including the more than 40 fistfights your dad got into, including at an Angels baseball game at church, in line at the donut store, and even on the freeway, and how this affected your self-esteem? And what's your advice to those listening and watching?
on how to get over, work through these traumas, as well as your advice to parents whose kids suffer greatly from them. By the way, you're the most prepared interviewer of all time. The first thing I remember on trauma was we were driving in my dad's car and we were on a two-lane highway and I was about four years old and my sister was in the backseat with me and my dad was drunk and we were going too fast and he has his family in the backseat and he started to swerve
into oncoming traffic at over 60 miles an hour. And they're coming at us at over 60 miles an hour. And I don't know we're swerving because I'm in the back seat, no seatbelt on back in those days. Both my parents are smoking. You know, it's back in those days, you're just bouncing around the back seat of a car and we start to drift. And at the last minute I hear, and my mother grabs the wheel and swerves the wheel over and we avoid being killed in a head-on collision. And I remember us getting over to the side of the road and
And I remember my dad being mad at my mom for grabbing the wheel. And she had saved our family. And I remember him yelling and yelling and yelling. And it was weird. I'm three years old, maybe four. And I remember consciously thinking, I'm going to go with my mom when they divorce. I'm going to go with my mom when they split up. So I do remember that. And what I would say to parents about these things is your kids are, you know, when you go to a little league game,
ranting with your kids or anything, a recital, Christmas play. You see one kid up there, don't you? There's 50 kids. You're watching one, and it's yours. For your children, they only have one daddy. They only have one mama. They're watching you constantly. They're watching you when they don't know they're watching you. They're watching you when their eyes aren't even on you. And so you're their entire universe. And there's a lot of forms of child neglect in the world. There's abuse. There's alcoholism. There's drug addiction. There's
all kinds of different stuff. They don't love someone enough, but there's an insidious form. The most prevalent form of child neglect in the world today is a parent raising a child and that parent is not in pursuit of their potential or their dreams. The subtle form of child neglect is a parent not in pursuit of their potential or their dreams because you're installing in that child that it's
that it's okay to settle. You can be whatever you want, sweetheart, but why aren't you, daddy? You can be the president, honey, but why aren't you, mama? You can be happy all your life. Why aren't you happy, mama? Your children see you driving in the car alone. They see you getting ready in the morning. They see you with your cup of coffee. They know whether you're happy. You can't fool your children. Eventually, they figure you out, and you're installing in them that it's okay to settle. It's okay to be average. It's okay to be ordinary. It's okay to have a lifestyle
that's less than worthy of who you are. And the truth is, that's the stuff as a parent that matters the most. It's the lessons, but it's caught, it's not taught. And I think that's a form of neglect.
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Your dad essentially lived two lives. For his first 40 years, he abused alcohol and drugs and wasn't the best husband or father. And for the next 36 years, he was sober and lived an extraordinary life before he passed away from cancer. We're going to talk about how he helped people in a few minutes. But before we do, I want to talk about a car ride you had with your dad on April 20th, 1986. It was your dad's birthday and was seven days before your 15th birthday. The two of you were driving to one of your baseball games and out of nowhere, he started crying.
You'd never seen him cry before. You asked him what's going on, and he continued crying until he finally pulled over and he turned to you and said, I'm going to try to get sober one more time. He had tried many times before unsuccessfully. You asked him what would be different this time, and he said, I'm going to lose everything. Your mom's going to take you and the girls, and I'm going to lose my family. He said that you deserve a dad and you can be proud, and your mom deserves a husband she can respect. Then you asked him, Dad, are you going to stay sober forever? You're never going to drink again. What did he say to you? How
How can all of us apply these lessons in search of excellence? Yeah, that's where the one more started. One more try to get sober. And I said, Daddy, are you never going to drink again? This is after he came back from going to rehab. He goes, I can't promise you that. I can promise you that I'm not going to drink for one more day at a time. And I'll never forget it because for me in business, and you know this, you've had successes and failures in business just like I have. There's been a lot of times I wanted to quit, like maybe 45 million times. Yeah.
And the idea, the notion of, you ever, people, motivational, we say, you need to decide to plant your flag and you're never going to quit. Well, that's a big damn decision when you're going broke. And my dad would say to me when I was really struggling in business, he goes, hey, just don't quit for one more day. See how you feel tomorrow. And then I'd get up that next day and not quit for one more day. I've done that in relationships. I've been married for 25 years and there
there's been times where I'm like, I don't know. And I just don't quit for one more day. And then that love ends up prevailing, right? And in business, many different times, I've just been like, that's it. I'm out. And I'm like, well, I just won't quit for one more day. So that one more is a huge illuminator for me in my life. Here's why in the book, I have this chapter where I talk about invisible progress, compound pounding. And I use the analogy, I went to a birthday party of a five-year-old. My wife's half Mexican. So
there was the Latino side of her family. There's a pinata. And these kids are hitting this pinata over and over again. First birthday boy gets up, just a hundred swings in this pinata. No candy comes out. He finally quits. Next kid gets up, hits a pinata. No candy comes out. They go through like eight kids. Finally, the last little boy that nobody wanted to pick gets up. He hits the pinata one time. Bam, all the candy comes out and everybody celebrates. The question you have to ask yourself was, was it that one swing that that last boy did that broke open the pinata or was the cumulative blows over time from
from everybody that broke it down. And we all know the answer. It was the cumulative blows. But when you're hitting that pinata, there's no external progress. It's invisible. But what's happening is compound pounding is breaking that thing down. That's how life works. Our goals, our dreams, our visions, typically we're making more progress than we know. We're making invisible progress.
We're taking swings every day. And if you looked at your life, you'd go, I've made no progress. This isn't working. I'm going to quit. And most people in life, in business, in relationships, in their faith, in their body, they quit before the candy comes out because they aren't willing to wait for that invisible progress to compound long enough to where you break it down. And so the pinata is the perfect analogy for that.
After your dad died, you came across several index cards as you were putting away some of his things. On these cards were scribbled codes like 14JL and 13PT. The note cards were scattered on his vanity unit and taped to his bathroom mirror. The codes were the dates and initials of someone's name. There were hundreds of them. And you soon figured out that every one of those cards represented a person that he had helped get sober. And the dates were that person's sobriety birthday date. And on those dates...
Your dad would call that person, wish them a happy sobriety birthday, and congratulate them. He made these calls hundreds of times a year, every year, including the last days of his life, even while he was on oxygen and in severe pain and was struggling to breathe and could barely whisper, knowing that he was going to die soon. This is incredible, and there are a lot of lessons to learn from this story. And I want to start with a couple of questions. What was your dad telling people when he called? And in search of excellence, how important is it not to quit and overcome our challenges?
And how important is it to be of service and to give back to those less fortunate in our community and to try to make the world a better place?
Yeah. So when my dad would call, no matter what he would say, the most important thing he would say is, hey, just stay sober for one more day. And it was this thing my dad said to everybody all the time. It's funny, Randy. I'm lucky that I've become a pretty public person. And so my dad would often meet with me and go, are you Ed Milet's dad? But every once in a while, because we have the same name, every once in a while I'd be driving somewhere, going to a store, and they'd go, are you Ed Milet's son? And they'd go, your dad called me on my birthday. I wish I could tell you about it. And I had no idea what they were talking about.
And years later, after he passed away, I found out, which is that he would call and say, just stay sober one more day. You got this one more day. And so that just altered me to know that about my dad. And that this is the same guy, as you said, that I've watched in all these fights, the same guy that I was afraid of, the same guy that almost killed our family in a car accident. Totally. Why am I in personal development or self-help or entrepreneurship? Because I really believe humans can change. I know they can. I watched my hero do it. In terms of
helping people and being of service, I have to tell you, I want everyone to remember this, you're best equipped to help the person you used to be. And that's why it's so important to grow because as we grow, there's former versions of us. But my dad was best equipped to help the
the people that were much like he used to be. And me in business, I help millions of people that are much like how I used to be. I used to be unconfident. I used to be broke. I used to struggle with direction. I used to struggle with goal setting. I'd struggle with leadership. I'd struggle with my self-worth. I'd struggle with my reticular activating system. I struggle with laziness and managing my time. I'm best equipped, and so are you, to help the
people that are most like you used to be. And so that's why it's so important to be in service of other people. What most people think is, well, I'm not qualified to help people. That's what most people believe. What would qualify me to help people? And Randy, about six months ago, I woke up in the middle of the night and I wrote the book already. And I was really emotional. I woke Christiana up. I said, babe, wake up, wake up. She goes, what? I go, someone helped daddy. She said, what, honey? I said, babe, all these years of my dad being sober, someone helped my dad get sober.
Someone helped him. She goes, oh my God. I said, I don't know who they are. This precious person changed our entire family tree forever and I have no idea who they are. And she says, oh my gosh. I said, do you know what's more crazy than that? What qualified this person to help my dad? Their qualifications were the following.
They screwed up their life previously. They were an alcoholic. They were a drug addict. The very things that they thought probably disqualified them for ever doing something great in their life was the very preparation to qualify them to help my dad because you're best equipped to help the person you used to be. And so the truth of the matter is, whatever you've gone through, divorce, bankruptcy, failures, things you're ashamed of, those are the very things that are going to qualify you to contribute and help other people and be in service of them, not disqualify you.
When you were growing up, you had a lot of fears. You were always scared and afraid of everything. You were afraid your dad was going to leave. You were afraid he was going to get hurt or be killed, or that he would hurt you and your mom and your sisters, and were afraid your family would no longer exist. You were afraid you would embarrass yourself at school. You were afraid of being a failure and of letting people down.
You were afraid people would figure you out and that you weren't that special and find out how average you were. And even when you had success, like when you played baseball, which we're going to talk about in a few minutes, you feared that it was a fluke. Even today, despite your massive success, you still have a lot of that in you when you're telling yourself it's a fluke, that people are eventually going to figure you out and think that you're not that big of a deal. You fear that your incredible podcast wouldn't be successful and you fear that your best-selling book wouldn't be either.
In search of excellence, is our fear of failure necessary and even healthy, and how should we deal with it? And if we lose it or don't have it, will we be less motivated to succeed? And what's your advice about this? Is it different for high school and college students versus people in their 20s, 30s, 40s, 50s, and 60s? Well, I have a whole chapter on emotions. I say that I don't think there are negative or positive emotions.
For example, fear. Part of my fear of not doing well today causes me to prepare. Part of your fear of, hey, I don't want this to flop, is you've done this tremendous amount of research. So it's not the emotion necessarily that I want to avoid. It's the quantity or dosage of it. Too much fear paralyzes. A little bit of fear helps us prepare. Even anger. I don't want a lot of anger in my life, but every once in a while when I'm angry, I go into a state, I'm going to dispense some justice and compete here. So I've been playing golf before. You've been out there with me. Well, I'm
where I'm pissed. I bogeyed three holes in a row. A little bit of that getting pissed focuses me, as opposed to if I was just never angry about it, maybe I'd just roll with the losses, right? So that's the thing I would say about the emotional part of it. I believe we can change ourselves, though. I believe we can find ways to change those emotions. And so I don't think necessarily fear is a negative thing. I don't think it's driven necessarily by age either. I like having a little bit of that. I like a little bit of the fact that I still want to stay on edge. The
The greatest athletes that you and I both know personally had that wanting to win, but there was this part of them that, hey, I don't want to fail. I don't want to lose. You ask Tom Brady or anybody, what's greater, the joy of those Super Bowls you've won or the pain of the few you lost? And almost every athlete will say, as great as winning was, the pain of that loss just stays with me. And so,
the fear of losing can be really, really healthy. Now, I think you can take that to the extreme where it freezes you, where it causes you to procrastinate and not take action. But in my case, I think I have healthy doses of it. I like my recipe for it. And
And the last thing I'll say is this, is that I think successful people have a different relationship with pain than unsuccessful people, meaning they embrace it. They almost chase it. I had Phil Heath on my show. You should have him on. Seven-time Mr. Olympia. One of the greatest athletes of all time. You were the one person. That's an individual sport. You win it once. That's seven times. Are you kidding me? And I asked him on the show, I said, hey, Phil, why do you think you're so successful? He gave me some answer. I said, brother, because we're friends. I said, man, that's not why.
It's because you have a different relationship with pain. You get into the gym, you pursue pain. You pursue it. You chase leg day. You chase the extra rep. You chase it. Other guys like me, I'm like, I did legs. Ouch. I don't want to do anymore. Right? So there's a difference. That's why I haven't won seven Mr. Olympias. Randy, you're successful in business because you're willing to go through different pain. Napoleon Hill says in Think and Grow Rich that on the other side of temporary pain, we get introduced to our other self.
I'm a product of, I've met different versions of me over the years through pain. And so I'm not going to avoid pain. I actually have a relationship with it where I find it to be indicative of an opportunity for me to find another part about myself I didn't know. I'm not saying I want to live in pain.
What I'm saying is our brains are wired to avoid it completely. That's caveman days to live. So you have to almost overcome your wiring in life to be successful. The same things that make you successful are opposite of what we're naturally born to be like. So you have to look at that and say, okay, I'm willing to pursue some pain because on the other side of it, I meet another version of me.
Thanks for listening to part one of my amazing conversation with Ed Milat, one of the most amazing motivational speakers of all time. Be sure to tune in next week to part two of my awesome conversation with Ed.