How To Manifest Your Dreams With Dave Mason, Author

The following talk is from the Within S Podcast with Azriela Jankovic.

Today's guest is Dave Mason,

Author and educator.

For more information about the Within S Podcast or Azriela,

Visit www.

Drazi.

Co I really never go by rabbi except when I absolutely need to.

I actually just did a podcast on the cash machine the other day and all my podcasts on the cash machine have all been about money.

That's our money book.

And it was interesting,

This guy,

I asked him what topic he wanted to talk about and he wanted to talk about tzedakah.

He wanted to talk about charity because what I wrote about.

What I wrote about charity really struck him.

And so it was funny for the first time in a money podcast,

I actually kind of put on my rabbi hat and I brought down all these rambam's on different aspects of tzedakah and went into Torah in a money book conversation.

But normally when I'm talking about the size of your dreams or the cash machine,

I'm just Dave.

I don't really put on the rabbi hat except for some interesting anecdotes or something like that.

The beauty of these books and what you guys are doing is that you are bringing so many different worlds together and it's really unique.

Wow.

I am so excited about my guest on the show today,

Dave Mason.

It is so awesome having you here.

Thank you for being on the show today.

So great to be here,

Azriela.

Incredible.

You know,

I've been following your work,

Your wife's work,

The work that you do together over the years and watching this evolution has been inspiring.

I think my first question for you really is,

How do you do it all?

You have novels,

You now have a book out about money management and you turned it into a novel and you're traveling and you're speaking and you're doing so many things.

So I definitely want to get into that.

Perhaps our talk today about the size of your dreams and masterminding is part of that answer.

I don't know.

We shall see.

But in any case,

We are here today to talk about the book you wrote together with your lovely wife,

Hannah,

Who has been on the show.

And this is the first time I've had a husband and a wife as guests on the show together.

So that's incredible.

And the book is called The Size of Your Dreams,

A novel that transforms lives.

Let me go ahead and start talking a little bit about this book.

What inspired this book,

Dave?

This book was inspired by an event in my life that really,

Really sort of shook me.

So it was a time that we'd been going through a number of financial difficulties and we were going to a low place and we realized that a lot of it came from the fact that we'd over invested in our house and we needed to sell it.

It was just too much of a weight on our shoulders.

But we put so much money into the house that we needed to get much more than kind of a standard pricing in the neighborhood in order to get our money back.

We raised the asking price.

We needed like the perfect buyer to get this place.

It was not an easy place to move at what we needed it for.

All right.

So take me back.

How many years ago did this happen?

Where were you?

So I know exactly what the date was because when I wound up doing,

After reading Napoleon Hill's Think and Grow Rich,

I learned this method of kind of setting goals and setting intentions for myself.

And so I wrote a note card that said the following things.

I intend to sell my house at 43 Beersheva Street for a certain amount of money and to sell it by July 27th,

2015.

So when I wrote this card was probably February,

March,

2015.

Five years ago almost exactly.

Almost exactly five years ago.

And that I was going to write,

Sell the house by this date for this amount,

Which is the amount of money that I felt like we needed to get out of the house and we felt the house is worth,

But they're just not buyers in our neighborhood for that amount of money.

And then I said,

To do this,

I will do the following.

And I listed all of these steps that I would take in order to sell the house at that price.

And every single day I read this card.

I read it in the morning,

I read it in the afternoon,

I read it in the evening,

I read it over and over again.

And the date never changed that I was going to sell by and the price never changed,

But the steps kept changing as they'd evolve.

I'd try something,

It wouldn't work.

I'd cross it out.

I'd think of another idea.

I'd add it.

I kept evolving through this process and we actually wound up selling the house to very close friends of ours.

And after we signed,

We went back to their old place and we opened a bottle of champagne and we drank a toast on selling the house.

And I brought up this note card and I showed it to them and they said,

What is this?

And I said,

I wrote this six months ago when we started working on this idea of selling the house.

And they're totally shocked because it was July 27th,

2015 and we just closed for the amount of money on the card.

And that was not a likely prospect when you created this card.

It was not a likely prospect at all.

And so the fact that everything came together the way I'd intended it really shook me.

It showed me there's a power to having intentions.

And I want to be very clear,

This is not the secret.

The secret is all about the first two components of the note card.

I intend to sell my house by this date.

I intend to sell my house by this date.

You just keep focusing on it.

I intend to sell my house by this date.

What makes these note cards different and the methodologies we teach different is the third aspect and to accomplish this,

I will.

It's always bringing it back from what are your goals?

What are you intending to accomplish?

And what steps can you possibly take to manifest that?

And you're constantly implanting that idea.

You're constantly refocusing yourself on the goal.

You're constantly bringing yourself back to,

Okay,

You know what?

This isn't working.

I need a better thing in order to make this happen.

This step's got to go.

Or you know,

I'm seeing a lot of success here.

I need to ramp that up.

You're constantly bringing your mind back to what you want to accomplish and how you're going to get there.

And when I saw that,

I really appreciate that.

And I think making this differentiation between focusing on this outcome and then really shifting the focus to what is my role in creating that and how can I stay flexible?

So in your book,

You go through the story and we're not going to have any spoilers here,

But we have a group of high school children and they come together and they all have these different goals.

And so they're using this very method of creating this card that you discovered in your own life.

It was pretty incredible.

And this was again,

The motivation for writing this book.

Once I saw how powerful this was,

I wanted to teach this.

I wanted to get these ideas out there.

Now,

To a large extent,

They have been out there.

The note card method is all based on principles that I've read elsewhere,

Largely from Napoleon Hill's Think and Grow Rich,

Which is a classic book written in 1937.

But it's a very dated book.

The examples are hard to relate to,

A lot of them these days.

And it's been a book that has transformed so many people's lives,

But the idea of taking it and writing it into a fun novel so that this information would be easily accessible,

That was really what I was doing.

I discovered incredible wisdom that was out there in the world.

I wanted to put it into a vehicle that would be easier for people to comprehend and swallow and access.

I love your transparency and your humility and the wisdom of what you're doing,

Because let's face it,

We know there's nothing new under the sun.

But the way that you're packaging and the way that you're synthesizing and innovating,

I know that you have had readers from all over the world,

Including teenagers.

Absolutely.

And it was actually something really cool,

A really cool experience we had earlier this year.

And my son started going to boarding school up in the northern part of Israel.

And at a certain point,

He comes back and he tells us that there's a girl in his class who wants to meet us.

And if they're teenagers,

How many people want to meet you?

Like the parents.

When I was a teenager,

You pretended you didn't have parents.

Right,

Those are the last people you want to meet.

And apparently,

She'd want him to meet us from even before she met my son.

And she told him,

He says,

This book changed my life.

When I was struggling,

A friend gave me a copy of this book,

And it totally changed my life,

Which is one of the reasons why it's written with high school students.

I want to be dealing with a lot of the big struggles that I had back at that age.

I think by the time I was a senior in high school,

Which is the age of these students are at,

I was already sort of coming out of that.

But definitely the hardest part of my life was middle school and going through a lot of these whole questions about identity and who I was and who I wanted to be.

And so we really addressed that.

The main character Kelvin has a lot of the social issues that I had when I was younger.

And that really becomes his challenge to face while the other students are working on their goals,

Things they want to accomplish.

He's given a different type of card,

An identity card,

Where his task is to work on himself,

On his ability to love and appreciate himself and how he wants to interact with the rest of the world.

So this is fascinating because it sounds like there are so many different directions that we can take in writing our cards and writing down our goals.

And I'm curious if you can walk us back to,

You know,

I love getting into like the deep psychology and I love how you bring up the teen years.

That is the juncture and a lot of people can get stuck in this juncture where the identity breaks off and where the lack of confidence sets in.

So it sounds like you really discovered these tools at a young age because you mentioned by high school these issues had been resolved.

So I'm kind of curious if you can walk us back to like,

You know,

Junior high school Dave and what you were going through to inspire your character.

Okay.

All I was pointing out was that I had moved from a very awkward age to a slightly less awkward age that,

You know,

Friends had come into my life,

But I liked and appreciated words a few years earlier.

I really felt very much on my own.

Circumstances had shifted a bit.

I had shifted a bit,

But it was more just a process of growing up and people being less mean and circumstances being better and becoming just naturally more athletic and becoming less awkward.

It was not that I'd been presented with tools or I discovered powerful tools.

The tools I discovered are things I've discovered recently and that I look back and I say,

Wow,

If I had that in my life,

Then my process during those years would have been entirely different.

And so how can I create things in a book that I got?

Intentionally made this book so that it is going to be accessible to middle schoolers.

It's not a kid's book,

It's an adult's book,

But I wanted the subject matter,

The language,

Everything to be presented in a way that a fifth grader could pick it up and totally understand everything going on because I wanted to get this in the hands of kids who were going through those incredibly difficult years to give them the tools that I wish I did have back then.

Incredibly difficult years.

What does that mean to you when you think about the difficulties of growing up?

What do those look like?

I remember a time sitting around in college watching the movie Dazed and Confused with a bunch of friends.

I'd lived in this house in college that was called the Living Learning House.

It was kind of a geekier crowd,

Very academically oriented people.

And I remember going around after this movie and people talking about the hazing they went through,

The difficulties they went through,

And all of the various struggles for identity.

And it was one of those kind of aha moments for me because I was so into my own struggles,

So absorbed with my own struggles that I really failed to see how many people around me were struggling with the same things.

And so I really put that into Kelvin.

Kelvin in the book goes through that entire exact same process of he feels bad for himself being this kind of looks at himself as a loser,

Looks at himself as not being very popular,

He wants to be well liked,

He wants to have girlfriends,

He wants to have all those things that he looks and admires from other people.

But he actually is struggling with a lot of the same things that other people are struggling with,

But he can't see,

He's got no empathy for those around him,

Because he's so into his own self pity and his own struggles over that.

He doesn't have a lot of self love.

He doesn't appreciate who he is or what he has to give.

He doesn't realize that he actually has a tremendous amount out there to give.

He's so into looking at status,

Popularity,

Where do I fit in,

That he actually blows off the people who actually do want to connect with him,

Because they're not cool enough and he wants to be cool.

He wants to be liked,

He wants to be appreciated,

But he can't appreciate anyone else.

And he really goes through this whole process of having to look at himself and identify himself and understand who he is.

And that actually opens things up for him.

Once he does that,

He's able to see other people for what they're going through.

And his whole perception,

Not just of himself changes,

But of the world changes.

He's able to see himself for the first time.

He's able to see himself for the first time.

And once he can see himself for the first time and they appreciate himself really for the first time,

He's then able to see others.

He was at a certain point,

He's going on a walk with his sister,

Megan,

His little sister and comes out that she hadn't realized how unpopular he was or how out he was in middle school.

And he looked up to him as her big brother and he's like,

Where was she?

Was she so out to lunch that she couldn't see all the struggles I was going through?

And then he stops and thinks and says,

Well,

Wait a second,

That's ridiculous.

She was a little kid at the time.

Of course she couldn't see that,

But where am I?

Here it is.

She's telling me that the girls who used to be her best friends are having a sleepover and she wasn't invited.

And she's actually really struggling.

I can be there for her.

How come I didn't notice that she was struggling?

I was so involved in my own struggles that I didn't notice that my little sister is really all alone and going through difficult times herself.

And only once he starts to love himself and appreciate himself does he start to see where other people are struggling and how he can step in and help them.

This is so powerful.

It's so powerful and understanding the brain science of even shifting out of these self defeating beliefs,

This cycle of stress and then being open to possibility.

And you've nailed it.

You've just really nailed it in the sense that it all boils down to learning to appreciate ourselves and learning to serve.

What an incredible model.

Now is that something that you,

I mean,

Was that a moment for you in real life that you had such a powerful shift?

I'm trying to think if I can make it into a moment.

I know moment is coming up for me,

But definitely that shift happened.

And in the book,

A shift that took decades for me,

It takes place in months for the characters.

How incredible.

And how incredible that there's this model now that one can look at and really see it,

See how it's done.

Because the work,

I mean,

Without that model,

It's a painful process.

It can be.

It can be.

It can be.

I feel you on that.

I really feel you on that.

I oftentimes think about,

You know,

If I could go back to being that age,

What would I have needed to hear?

What would I have needed to hear?

So I am looking at this beautiful book right now and all over the front,

It is filled with cards.

Let me take a moment now and talk about a card.

If I'm going to make a card for myself,

How do I get started with that,

Dave?

Okay.

So we teach three kinds of cards in the book.

One of them is the outcome card.

And the outcome card is probably the one I encourage most people to start with.

It's really the simplest in a lot of ways.

And it's got three components to it.

So like my selling my house was an outcome card.

And the three components are the goal you're going to achieve,

You hope to achieve,

The date you hope to reach it by,

And the steps you will take to accomplish it.

That's really all there is to it is the goal,

The steps,

The goal,

The date,

And the steps.

What makes it so powerful is its repetition.

You don't make a card and put it to the side.

You go over it constantly.

So I recommend at least three times a day,

First thing in the morning,

Last thing at night,

And at least once in the middle of the day.

Some people like to put them up on their bathroom here.

So when they,

You know,

You go to the bathroom first thing when you wake up,

You go to the bathroom last thing before you go to bed.

So it's right there right before,

After you brush your teeth,

It's right there where you can see it,

Where you can't ignore it.

But it's the constantly being,

Bringing yourself back to that focus that really makes it powerful.

You know,

I find if I'm not doing what a card says,

I can't continue reading it.

I make a card for myself and I say,

Okay,

I'm going to do XYZ.

If I don't do it,

I just have to rip the card up or throw it away.

I just,

I can't face it if I'm reading it three times a day and I'm not actually engaging in it.

In fact,

One of the characters in the book does this,

The character,

Jared,

Who's basically given up on school,

Just trying to graduate and get his degree,

Has no interest in doing another stupid teacher thing.

When he's forced to do a card as part of this class,

He reads it because he committed to reading it,

But he never committed to following any steps.

And he's just determined,

Okay,

I'm just going to,

I'll read it three times a day because I committed to it and the teacher will fail me otherwise,

But I'm not going to do anything with it.

But as he keeps reading it,

It enters into a place where deep inside him,

He says,

You know what?

I started to realize like,

These weren't the teacher's goals.

These were my goals.

Why am I blowing this off?

Why am I not actually doing the things to implement in my life the things that I want?

And so after a couple of weeks,

He's gotten to the point of saying,

Okay,

You know what?

I'm sick of just blowing this off and ignoring it.

I've been reading it three times a day and I actually want to start doing it.

I want to start engaging.

I see the impact that the other students are having in their lives and I want that in mind too.

It makes so much sense that our intention is going to move where our attention is going and really putting it up on the wall and having a look at it,

You know,

On the mirror,

On the wall in a prominent place three times a day,

We're really shifting our attention and our intention and then our actions onto this,

This goal,

Whatever it is.

So this is the first one.

This is the outcome goal.

Yes.

Okay.

The outcome card.

The second type of card we teach is what we call the continual growth card.

So there are certain goals in life that are not really measurable,

Manageable.

You can't say,

I'm going to be healthy by January 2nd and assume that that means you're going to be healthy for life.

You know,

Health is something you're going to be continually working on.

It's not a goal that you hit,

You check off and now you can eat whatever you want.

I got healthy by January 2nd.

Now I can eat as much ice cream as I want.

Your health is going to go right down the toilet again.

So there are certain areas of our lives where we want to continually be growing.

And so,

Whereas on a goal card,

The step,

You know,

The goal and the date,

Those things have to be very manageable.

You have to have a very clear measurement for when you've achieved them.

You know,

When you've reached the goal card,

A continual growth card,

You will never reach.

I want to continually grow in my ability to be present,

To have empathy for people,

To be healthy.

I want to continually grow as a writer.

There's so many areas I want to continually grow in.

So it doesn't fit the model of having this goal that you're going to hit by a date.

So instead of the goals itself being measurable and having a date,

The steps do.

So you say,

I want to continually grow in this area in my life and to do so I will do XYZ.

So if I want to continually grow as a writer,

Well,

What are the things I can do?

I can make sure that I'm writing every single day.

If that's a step or five days a week,

Whatever it happens to be that I,

You know,

Read a book on writing at least once a month,

I take at least three times a year,

A course on writing,

Whatever it happens to be that I think are the steps that will help me,

I want to have measurable steps in a continual growth card.

The steps don't have to be as measurable in a goal card.

It kind of shifts where the specific measurable aspect is.

So these are areas you just want to grow in over and over and over again.

Well,

That makes a lot of sense.

It makes a lot of sense in terms of goal science and how goals work.

So that is excellent.

The continual growth card.

I love it.

And you mentioned there's a third.

The third is the identity card.

We discussed that a bit earlier when Kelvin was talking about getting to love himself.

And this was a card that is very different.

It's a lot of this.

The other cards were taken more from say Napoleon Hill.

The inspiration for the continual for the identity card was taken more from Louise Hay from her aspect of mirror work.

That and a bit from Tony Robbins from some of the things I learned about him about labeling yourself,

Putting a really positive nickname to yourself.

And this is all about being able to look at yourself.

The identity card is like red,

Looking in the mirror.

And like you literally look at yourself,

You say your name,

You say,

You know,

I'd say,

You know,

Dave,

I love you.

And like you are and I say all these incredible things about myself and I have to find examples for them.

So in the book,

Kelvin has the hardest time doing this.

And he has to think like,

What does he want to be?

Okay,

Well,

I want it to be funny.

He wants to be,

He wants all these different traits.

He wants to be really what he wants to be as well liked at a certain point.

You know,

When he's first starting that he's saying he's popular and the teacher stops him right there.

He's no,

No,

No,

No,

No,

No.

That's a goal in somebody else.

Popular is not a trait in you.

It's a trait that's how other people see you.

What are the things that you want to see within yourself?

I love it.

And so he has to look at these things that he creates fun nicknames for each of the different traits that he wants to see in himself.

And he then has to think of examples.

Well,

How have I actually exhibited this trait in my life?

And if we think about it,

We can,

We can always find that if I want to say I'm dependable,

We're all dependable to a certain degree or rather,

But not dependable to a certain degree.

But if you look at yourself and not being dependable,

You could look at yourself and say,

Okay,

I am told Dave,

I love you and you are dependable.

In fact,

You're so dependable as another character in the book says,

You know,

You're called the rock.

You know,

That's how you look at yourself and here are the examples.

Well,

How do people,

How do you,

I know that I'm dependable.

What have I done that's dependable lately?

And you lift off examples.

So you think about all of these traits you want to see in yourself.

They give them kind of a fun name that goes with them.

And each time you read off the card,

As opposed to the other cards where each time you read it off as more or less the same thing,

Except you need to make a change.

When you do the identity card,

Each time you read it off,

You have to think of new examples that back up the identity you're trying to anchor in.

This is so beautiful because it really shifts out of default mode,

Which is if one is in default mode,

Right?

If I'm in default mode,

I'm scanning the world for threats and I'm really looking for the negative and the negativity bias comes in.

But what you're saying is no,

We're going to shift and we're going to latch onto those parts of ourselves,

Those traits within us that we want to blossom and that we want to grow in this world.

And by giving ourselves evidence,

We're proving to ourselves who we are in this new way.

And that's powerful.

And I,

I'm really curious about this idea that,

So every time if I were to say,

Dave,

I'm going to look in the mirror every morning,

I would say,

Azriela,

I love you.

You are a kind hearted person.

And then I'm going to find evidence every day that I'm a kind person.

And one more step.

If you can give a kind hearted person is nice language,

But can you find language that really speaks to even more,

That really gets you jolted.

In fact,

You're so,

You're so kind hearted,

You're called so and so what it would be like a nickname.

My English name is Carrie and that's what I was called before I was about 20 years old and started using my Hebrew name.

And when I was a kid,

They called me Care Bear because I valued and I guess it was sort of ingrained in me to really value kindness.

There you go.

So Azriela,

You're a kind hearted person.

In fact,

You're so kind,

You're a care bear.

Yes.

And what have you done lately that shows you're kind hearted?

It's each day.

Think of things that you've done that help enforce that.

And just your ability to see yourself as kind is going to go absolutely through the roof.

I love that so,

So much.

This is incredible.

I love these.

And you know,

The one thing that I think is also so key with this book and something that's really never been more obvious to me,

Dave,

You know,

As much as I studied relationships when I was getting a doctorate,

I have never been more convinced than I am right now in the times that we're in,

In these times of Corona,

That we are wired for connection and that we can help each other so much.

And that's in your book too.

There's really,

This isn't about one guy writing a card and going it alone.

There is something beyond that as well.

Can you speak to that a little bit,

That this power of the group and the power of collaborating?

Absolutely.

So this also goes back to Napoleon Hill.

He actually talks about from all the different factors he looks at that can help make somebody successful,

Powerful,

Impactful.

He says the number one is the mastermind group.

The mastermind group is really the ability to draw expertise from others.

Now I want to make a little bit of a distinction in the way that we tend to use the phrase these days and the way he used it,

Which are not exactly the same thing.

So I tend to think of three different types of mastermind groups.

One of them I'd call like a mutual group.

We have another couple that my wife and I would go,

Pre-corona,

Would go have lunch with once a week.

We'd alternate who hosted it.

And this other couple,

They had strengths that we really felt complimented our own.

And so we'd have like a two hour lunch every week and we'd all kind of go through what we were working on and the others would give us feedback and suggestions and we'd help each other out.

We're all sort of equal partners in that group and we were drawing an expertise outside of ourselves to help each other get better.

So that's what I'd call a mutual mastermind group.

What a great idea.

Yeah.

It just sounds like so much fun to get together with the same couple every week.

I'm going to try that.

It was great.

And you can do it with a group of friends.

It doesn't have to be couples.

You want to find people that you think,

If I was to bring out what I'm struggling with,

They're going to have a perspective that I wouldn't hear elsewhere.

You want to have a mastermind with people who are much more insightful than you.

In fact,

There's a great story in a book called The Aladdin Factor.

The Aladdin Factor is by the two guys who wrote Chicken Soup for the Soul.

And they had a certain point,

Talk to Tony Robbins.

So Jack Canfield and Mark Victor Hansen,

They wrote The Aladdin Factor and they talked to Tony Robbins at a certain point.

And they said,

Tony,

We don't get this.

We do the exact same work you do,

But we're each making about a million dollars a year.

And you're making $10 million a year.

This is a long time ago,

Back when Tony was only making $10 million a year.

And say,

Why is it?

Why are you making 10 times what we are?

And Tony looks back at them and he says,

Well,

Tell me,

How much do the people in your mastermind group make?

And they respond,

Also about a million dollars a year.

It says,

That's the reason.

The people in my mastermind group each make a hundred million dollars a year or more.

Tony was saying that I've put together a group of people who are so much higher than I am,

Who are really pulling me upwards.

It says,

You're not going to exceed the level of the people in your mastermind group.

So as you grow,

Make sure that you're people who are growing with you or might even want to be challenging yourself to be pulling in people who are at a level higher than you.

I love that.

You know,

Dave,

That's just,

It's so brilliant and it's so wise and it reminds me of the ancient Jewish texts.

It is better to be the tail of a lion than it is to be the head of a fish.

This book is published through my personal press,

Lion's Tail Press.

Love it.

My corporation is called Tail of the Lion Incorporated,

Taken from that mission empirical avot.

So yes,

I absolutely know that that idea,

It is a big one.

It is a big one in my life.

So you want to think a lot about who your mastermind partners are.

I'm very big into this idea.

I remember sharing this at a group,

At a table at a certain point and somebody getting very upset and saying,

It's like,

Oh,

So you're just going to like chase those who are,

You know,

At a higher level and everyone else can go,

You know,

Forget about them.

And I was very clear,

Like,

No,

No,

No.

It's so important for me that I have three different levels of interactions in my life.

I've got the people who I think are at a similar level than I am.

That's kind of my mastermind group,

My peers.

I've got mentors that I can tap into.

And so I will go and attend Tony Robbins events.

And I've been on the volunteer crew at some of his events.

I have other people like that who I think are at such a higher level than I am.

And I want to be tapping into them to be getting guidance.

And I've got the people that I teach and that I'm trying to be reaching at their certain point.

Now,

What I don't want to be doing is confusing which group people belong in.

Take somebody who's at a very introductory level and say,

This person is going to be my mentor or even my mastermind partner.

You know,

If they're somebody who wants to be tapping in,

They might be a pupil.

So I have to understand,

Like,

I need to be going and seeking out who are the people that I know who I think I can grow from and building intentionally building those connections.

When my wife and I did this,

We looked around at all of our friends and we said,

Who are the ones who can challenge us in the areas we most need to grow?

And that's how we settled on this one couple that we approached and asked them to be our mastermind partners.

And they fortunately looked at us as being the same in different aspects that we could help them as well.

So that's interesting.

And I think you're really tapping into how dynamic each one of us are and how while I might have a mentor who's ahead of me in business,

Perhaps I became a parent many years before she did.

And I have expertise in that area of my life that I can share with her.

Or perhaps it's my creative abilities or,

You know,

I think there are so many different parts of who we are that while someone might be ahead in one place,

We have what to offer somewhere else.

So I want to make sure that anyone listening to this right now that you're not underestimating that about yourself.

You always have assets that you can give and you can share.

And so the first type of mastermind group,

Like I said,

Is a mutual group.

Mutual group.

Okay.

Equal partners.

The second type is the one I know that you've started running lately and my wife has been participating in with you is a facilitator group where a facilitator group is one that's really what we have in the size of your dreams as well.

You've got the students in the classroom and the teacher who's teaching this concept to the class.

He is the mastermind facilitator.

He's somebody with a certain amount of expertise guiding a group of people who are all really a mutual group for one another.

So there are a lot of mastermind groups out there that people can join,

Which has somebody who has been more experienced at mastermind groups than they are,

Who has a bunch of techniques they can be bringing in and could be giving things to the group that they might not be able to give to one another,

That they might lack in that expertise,

But the person can trigger them.

He can help bring out the best ideas.

She can ask the right question to help promote certain type of thinking or give an exercise.

These are types of,

This is a facilitator group where you've got one person who's bringing something to the group.

It's a leadership aspect.

A mutual group has no leadership usually.

A facilitator group has a leader and then has participants has a mutual group.

I love that.

You know,

I actually fell into doing this sort of accident that I tried to create a mutual group,

But I started feeling as though people were turning to facilitate and then it turned into a facilitated group,

Which is what I'm now offering.

Awesome.

I want to touch on the last type of mastermind group and this one we don't tend to think of as a mastermind group,

But this is really the original type of mastermind group that Napoleon Hill was discussing in Think and Grow Rich.

And these days we much more likely to give an entirely different name like a board of advisors.

In the original idea of a mastermind group,

It was not a bunch of people sitting around helping one another.

The example that Napoleon Hill gives in his book,

He gives a really funny story actually of Henry Ford was in court at a certain point.

Why was he in court?

Because he was called by a certain newspaper an ignorant pacifist and he sued them for libel.

And so they were in court having this trial and the newspaper decided it was going to defend itself by proving how incredibly ignorant this man was.

So it would ask him all kinds of questions like how many soldiers did the British send to America to put down the rebellion of 1776?

And Ford replies,

I can't tell you how many sent,

But I can tell you they sent home a lot fewer than arrived.

And the guy keeps asking them question after question after question.

At a certain point,

He just gets totally fed up with it.

And he says,

Why are the answers to these ridiculous pieces of common knowledge important?

I've got buttons on my desk,

Which I can push anytime I need.

I get an expert in any area that I need to help me run my business or to answer any ridiculous question you have.

So why should I have ridiculous knowledge?

I can get somebody to answer that question in two minutes if I actually ever need an answer to that question,

But I never will.

It's totally unnecessary information.

I want to focus on my core business.

And therefore I surround myself with people who are experts in the different areas that I need to draw from.

And that's really what the original mastermind group was about.

If you think about FDR had his brain trust,

His group of people that he assembled who could advise him in the presidency.

We've been on a number of nonprofit boards over the years and the ones that are run badly,

Israel requires a nonprofit to have a board to be signing off on the different paperwork.

And the nonprofits that we find are not run so well are those that have boards of the friends and fans of the CEO or founder who just sign off.

And it's just a,

Whatever the person wants to do,

They'll sign off on to fulfill the government's requirements that a board member has signed.

These documents has signed the budget,

All of those things.

The ones that run really well assemble groups of people with expertise where the CEO or leader really is lacking in.

And they know that I need somebody that I can turn to whenever I've got a tax question.

So I need a tax person.

I need somebody who's really strong in social work.

I need a social worker there who is a really experienced person here.

I know some need somebody who's great in business administration.

Let me get an MBA person who's had a lot of years running business and let me assemble a group of people around me who can advise me on what I need to know.

You know,

A lot of companies have boards of directors and those,

Again,

Some use them well,

Some don't use them well,

But this is the original concept of the mastermind group.

Not that there's a group of people helping each other out,

But that you have people that you can turn to to get the advice that you need,

Whether you give back to them or not is immaterial.

It could be that you've got consultants,

People that you pay,

And that's what you give back because you just,

You've got,

You need somebody's expertise and they might not want what you have.

They might be incredibly busy.

They might not have time for a meeting with you,

But you know,

There's some,

There's somebody who's really strong in an area where you know that you are weak and it could be that you pay them a hundred bucks,

You know,

An hour to be calling them whenever you need advice in that area and that you start thinking about what are all the areas of my life or my business or whatever it happens to be that you want to be working in that I know I'm periodically need going to need to call on an expert in that area and that I can do so.

And most business people,

They have their accounts,

They have their tax advisors,

They have consultants to different areas that really fits the original rubric of what a mastermind is even though we don't think about it that way because it's not a mutual relationship and it's often a paid relationship.

But the core of mastermind is can you access the expertise that you need when you need it rather than thinking that you need it all to be in your own head?

Are there people you can turn to who are experts who can guide you so that you not being an expert in an area can still make expert decisions and choose an expert path?

Incredible.

Incredible.

We are constantly surrounded by people who know things that we do not.

How are we utilizing that and how are we really serving in greater capacities by utilizing the people that we have access to?

Dave,

It has been such a pleasure hearing from you,

Hearing all about this book,

Your stories,

Your wisdom.

Thank you for sharing with us today.

I want to make sure before we sign off that our listeners know where they can find you and what you're up to these days.

Absolutely.

Anybody can go to the size of your dreams.

Com and download a free digital copy of the book or if they want the hard copy,

You can go to Amazon and hopefully the maybe even by the time this airs,

The audio book will be ready.

We're finishing the audio book right now.

And what we're working on right now is a couple of things.

So I rarely only have one writing project going at a time.

So we just came out with the cash machine.

The cash machine really came from a feeling like a lot of the reason we found ourselves in tough economic situations was not because we weren't making enough money,

But because we were making stupid decisions with the money we were making.

Because we went through all of my years of education.

I went all the way through law school.

At no point,

Not in middle school,

High school,

College,

Law school,

Did I ever learn anything about money.

Think about all those years preparing yourself to earn an income.

And we never actually learned how to make smart financial choices.

I learned calculus.

I can't tell you a thing about calculus,

But I never needed it again in my life,

But I need money all the time and I didn't know how to make intelligent choices with it.

So we wrote another novel similar to the size of your dreams,

All about money called the cash machine.

And we've been really kind of stepping up,

Trying to get word out about our books,

Talking to people,

Being on podcasts like this one.

It's a lot of what we've been doing,

Writing three new books in two of them in this genre of the size of your dreams and the cash machine.

One of them in the biblical fiction series,

The age of prophecy that I've been working on for the past decade plus now.

Incredible.

Incredible.

I remember having met you guys like 17 years ago,

A long time ago in Jerusalem,

I returned to LA.

I remember the first time I saw your book on the shelf of a friend's home and it was just so neat that you're sharing this biblical wisdom.

You have so much to give.

You went to law school,

You are an ordained rabbi,

You've studied money,

Personal development,

You're writing with your wife.

It's just incredible.

I'm going to put your contact information as well as a link to that free download.

How awesome is that?

In the show notes so that everyone can have access.

And thank you.

This has been incredible.

It's been such a pleasure.

Awesome.