Welcome back to the show, my fellow extraordinary Americans, for today’s guests. We have a special guest, whose name is Harlow Riesberg. Harlow is an experienced Craftsman, martial artist, entrepreneur, and performance coach with over two decades of experience driven to find the limits of human potential, he takes pride in finding the best possible daily rituals to maximize personal satisfaction and productivity in life, his primary goal is to work with highly motivated, independent, and aspiring entrepreneurs looking to develop self-mastery practices to increase their overall impact and make a better world. 

He has also been a semi-finalist in Richard Branson’s and Tim Ferriss’s Build a business competition. He helped find and negotiate solutions for several projects and advised hedge fund managers, Angel investors, New York Times bestselling authors, and startups. Harlow is what I would call an extraordinary American, and I’m grateful to have him. On this show. Hello, are you there?

I am here. 

Harlow, Thank you so much for taking the time to do this podcast with me. I know that you are an entrepreneur. You’re a performance coach. You have been a martial artist. Can you tell me in the audience a little bit more about yourself, your background, and how you got started?

I’ve done a lot of different entrepreneurial things. I’ve worked a lot of different jobs and whatnot, and I guess the first thing to point out is that I didn’t get married and raise a family, which is Like a huge obligation and, you know, something that you take on to do. So having been single my whole life gave me a lot of time and effort—you know, time and resources—to be able to have an adventurous life. 

So, I think that’s The first point to make—I mean, I’ve Managed a martial arts studio. I got a degree in technology; that was my formal education. I quit that and became a professional artist. Blacksmith because I wanted to do that instead, and so I’ve had this sort of winding road through my life of entrepreneurial endeavors and a lot of self-cultivation practice, I read a lot of books and did that kind of thing. So, it’s been an extraordinary journey along the way, and that’s what has developed in this set of diverse skills that I have at this point.

So, Harlow, I know it’s usually a great decision, right? You either start a family and then, a lot of people, once they start a family, they have all these duties and responsibilities. But then, when you’re single and everything, that’s when you can take more risks and all of that. What do you think about where you can actually take more risks when you’re single and you have left things going down like it’s fine, but a lot of people who have a family find it riskier to start a business. 

I think it goes back to Stephen Covey’s 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, which are pretty commonplace. A lot of people understand that it’s about whether family is sort of your core value system or whether you use that to navigate your life. Some people say money. Some people say religion, right? 

There are these different things that become more at the center of how you make your decisions in life. And I think maybe if you switch around a lot, you will switch around some in life until you really kind of figure things out. But if you switch around too much, that can be confusing too, but you’ve got to switch around enough in order to kind of get your bearings. 

For me, it was one more example of being principle-centered, which Stephen Kobe recommends as the core tenant. And so, yeah, I mean it. It depends on how seriously you take your commitments in life. But if you’re going to raise a family, that is a long-term commitment. Heavy commitment, right? It’s a big commitment to raise a family. 

And I’m saying it just in terms of that amount of time and commitment. Then I was able to allocate, and you know, being a businessman or an entrepreneur or something like that. so having the ability to show up powerfully and authentically in the world, I think it’s about holding your commitments well and being able to articulate yourself well; that’s what I help people do in my coaching. Those are the choices that we each make, and it’s important to make those choices. And then follow through on them, but not make those choices and then have your actions and your life be something else, right? 

No, totally like one of the things that came to mind, right? It was my father. Is a business owner, right? When he did his business, he did it with his family. But in my case, one of the reasons I chose a career, or a family was because I wanted to be able to take these risks to basically do the business. Altogether, there are these two different worlds, right? There’s a calm misconception that you cannot start a bit like you cannot start a business. 

If you have a family, but at the same time, people are saying that they take a lot of financial risks, they have this feeling that they’re missing out on, it’s kind of like the grass is greener on the other side. So, it’s just a thought that came into my mind. 

I mean, there are also seasons in life, right? And to some degree, I feel it’s up to you to engineer your life. And so, you can sequence these things separately. And I’m not saying that being a successful businessperson or successful in anything else is mutually exclusive to raising a family. But if you’re raising a family, like you said, taking the risk is a good idea. You can just travel faster and lighter if you’re, say, single. Then, if you have a family, you have to negotiate those risks more carefully. 

And so, it sets you up for a different set of experiences, and I think it’s important to point out those experiences create the platform for your decision-making and how you develop your business, whatever that would be. And that’s what I run into a lot when working with entrepreneurs or visionaries who are trying to launch a really great idea, whatever that idea is. What I see oftentimes is that because the person’s life path has gone this way, whatever that would be, they’re making decisions and saying,

Oh, I’m going to do this, and I’m going to do this, and I’m going to do this, but it’s like I’ve taken these risks this way. I know what it’s like to utterly fail. That’s maybe not the best approach. You know that’s kind of how experience, I think, helps each other, right? To go, Hey, there’s a pothole there. You, you, you can fall into it if you want. I’m just saying. There’s one there, you know. 

Like Harlow, the one question I wanted to ask you is connected to this is You, so you know the motive. Everything in business, it’s about motivation, right? Like you go through the toughest times it’s all about motivation. 

So, there are business owners with families whose main motivation is their wives and children. Then for those of us who are single, our motivation comes from something else that’s independent of family, and so in your case, what was the motivating factor that drove you into entrepreneurship and ultimately becoming a performance coach? 

Probably my early commitment to martial arts and getting into that as an interesting thing, and it was, really, I had a tough childhood, and so it was a pushback, you know? So, it started out as something I was pushing back against. 

So, I embraced something that I needed to protect myself from. The situation I grew up in, but then I really embraced it and looked for where it could take me, and that’s what I want. Where I wanted to go. And so that really, I think, was sort of the space in which I felt like I really found myself. I felt like I became a man, right? It was during that part of my life, right from going into my teenage years to going into becoming an adult and moving out and going on my own.

It was circumstantial. To that part of my life, which also created That and so on, are these separate variables, and then the third one is that I was raised to just be a really hard-working blue-collar type of person.

And so, I had a full-time job while I graduated high school. I got two more jobs—two more part-time jobs—along with that full-time job. I used to work seven days a week. I would drive a triangle, you know, and so it can be daunting when you see my resume to see the amount of experience I had, but it’s like I just had a ton of time to put in. Now, like experience, I have over a decade’s worth of time and I’ve worked 100 hours a week. 

Wow. 

And so, that’s a couple of salaries. 

How did you do? OK, look, I know what entrepreneurs and businessmen like. They are. They are. Ready to do 60? 80 hours to make the Business: How did you do it? 100 hours. Like, how’s that even sustainable? Even the surgeons. 

It’s not sustainable. And that’s kind of the point. Like, I’ve spent a lot of time in that area, and so now I run into people who…

 I’ve had that question typically for somebody who’s really a type A personality and really moving forward. My typical question is, do you know what the difference is between working an 80-hour week and a 100-hour week? Because an 80-hour week is fairly sustainable if you don’t have a family, the family is going to ask for some of that time too. But you can still sleep. and stay somewhat healthy. If you’re working 80 hours a week, by the time it becomes 100 hours a week, you’re now sacrificing sleep as well. 

And so, it’s not; that’s why I say it’s over a decade’s worth. It wasn’t all continuous because that leads to pretty radical burnout. And it’s not good for your health and things like that. And so, it’s about being able to have a pace. That is sustainable to your point, and so you can’t do it continuously, but you can do it seasonally.

So how? What was your overall vision regarding your career? Did it change over a period of time, like from when you were in your early 20s to when you went through your 30s and 40s?

Yeah, totally. It changes. I mean, I think that’s true for everybody at this point. It’s just that, if you look at the old Industrial Revolution template of a career, the term career was typically very long. It also had this thing at the end of it, which was called retirement. 

And I think that that whole thing, you know, is kind of part and parcel of the Internet revolution and sort of the more fast-paced, ever-changing work environment because of the increase of all the technology and moving from the industrial age into the information age and more into the experiential or Wisdom age…Depending on how you frame it. Career is now much shorter. More frequent changes. And so, certainly, mine has evolved. It’s just that, I guess. 

Maybe I had a little bit of an earlier start with regard to that, so I got to see the evolution of The implementation of computers, so This is before the Internet when I was in junior high school, kind of between grade school and high school. The school where we got the first three computers went into the grade school office for administrative purposes. One went to the high school office. It was like a Two-part building. And then one went into my science lab. 

And so, I was one of those geeky kids who had, like, a three-ring binder full of floppy disks and all that kind of stuff. So again, timing and circumstance helped me sculpt the way I developed the arc of my career and how that’s changed over time. 

And so now, if you were asking me the same question, as far as age goes, or if somebody else was talking to us, those things play a large role. It’s actually a big part of risk mitigation if we’re talking about finance, to understand investment and divestment as AS2 levers for risk. And so timing and circumstance are actually very large variables in how that developmental cycle works for each of us and it’s well to clarify what those are, I believe. 

It’s interesting that you mentioned computers, because, let’s say, you’re like in Generation X or Generation Y, like the millennials, and then the generation before that, like they went through this transition. We have Generation Z who feels they were born into computers, but there was a time when computers were not real and were not applicable. When it came to doing business you and I, had to go through this transition where we grew up in a world where computers weren’t that important and slowly became Important to business altogether, right? If you take a look at all the businesses that have to have A website, if You want to get traction, you’ve got to… if you want to make it in this modern world, like when you were in the 1980s or something, business was more offline, right? Right. 

And it’s just like we live in a revolutionized world altogether. It’s crazy how, for thousands of years, there was no such thing as The Internet. And suddenly, we’re living in this crazy world, and everybody just thinks it’s normal. And it’s not, you know. 

You’re right; it’s paradoxical that to look more real, you have to have a more virtual presence. You know what I mean? Like you have to. As you said, you have to. Have a website. You have to have a way to be contacted through a form or, you know, lead capture. Or you should have a download or something. You know what I mean? Like all of the typical things that we’re thinking about, but when you think about it, those are all virtual. 

And so, we’ve somehow heard that we’ve actually gotten to a place where, to look more real, or maybe more capable, astute to how the world is today. You have to have a more virtual presence in order to be real.

But that’s ironically it takes away the authenticity, in businesses back in the day, where for thousands of years you had this authentic connection where you saw the customers in person, but now you have this virtual reality where they see you online first, and in a way, it gives you more freedom all the time. 

The online world has given rise to more businesses, and more people have become financially free because of their online presence. But at the same time, it has also created a sort of inorganic Ness, but that’s just a thought that came to mind. It’s like a paradox. You were talking about. 

It’s very true. I work with younger people, but I also work with older people. And that’s why… so. So, I’m a But depending on how you put the timeline, I’m a very late boomer, early Gen. X, 

So, you see no complete transition take place like you.

I was there for it to turn over, and so boomers seemed to struggle like they had this email thing. I don’t know; do you know? But then, young people also sort of have this… I’ll call it blindness because it’s sort of taken for granted. They grew up as children in a constantly connected world. They don’t have any experience of what it’s like not to have that connection right there. 

They’ll even go viscerally into a panic when they are not fully connected. Andrea, we had spoken about her in a prior interview that you did. She runs into this all the time. You know, and so there are struggles in both directions. 

And I think that’s why I say I feel very fortunate to have grown up at the time that I did. It’s very strange, but it’s important to factor those things in contextually. The Boomers are the people who now have All of the Experiential wisdom, right? They have the longest track records in careers, business, and stuff like that. Sometimes the biggest struggle is just getting them to relate to Gen. Z and Zoomers effectively without it just being a bumping heads kind of scenario. 

I think it’s more the boomers lived in a different world, right? It was a world without the Internet. It was a world of more authentic connection. But then, Gen. Y and Gen. Z are living in a totally different world where it’s considered normal. But the world that they’re living in, is happening for the first time in human history. 

There’s a lot of confusion. There’s a lot of chaos. People don’t know how to adjust to this new reality, right? Like there’s no manual or guidebook telling them how to adjust to this new situation? Like all the online games, it just changed everything, not just in business but in dating as well, right? 

Normally, let’s give an example. In ancient times, it would just be community; you’d get to know your future wife, and you’d get to know her in the same social circle or a Friend group, now there are online dating apps and all social media. 

So, like, you are now having access to hundreds and hundreds of options, but in the process, your connection, especially in business, is just creating a kind of distance, but simultaneously, it increases your freedom as well

yeah, yeah, yeah. It’s such a great point. And to the entrepreneur in me or in us … To me, that is that circumstance is also the biggest opportunity. I think of entrepreneurship or wealth generation as having a very similar type of ability to rearrange time, effort, and resources from one person’s plate to the time, effort, and resources of another person’s plate by way of a transaction right in exchange, and sometimes that’s money.  A lot of times, it’s other things too. But that. That whole circumstance prior to more tribes and being connected only to Mother Nature, or the phenomenal universe as we would think of it, versus this new circumstance where there’s so much hyperconnectivity.

I mean, if you think about it, we used to have—I believe it’s called Dunbar’s number, the tribe. The group would get to about 150, and then it would naturally subdivide. But now, like the average person, I don’t know if the last number I heard has like 600 Facebook friends or something like that, right? 

Actually, I would say more, like 1000 at least.

Yeah, and it’ll probably just keep getting bigger, right? But the simple fact is: We’re not genetically … Certainly, our brains are not configured to function well with that much connectivity. It’s hard to sort out.  So, it creates a great deal of confusion. 

And so, I think this is sort of where we’re evolving with regard to technology. All things having sensors in them in order to create intelligence and stuff like that means we’re evolving the technology because that can iterate quicker than we can handle it biologically or genetically, and so on. 

As long as you can develop a healthy relationship and clear edges with regard to that in the same way that you can across generations or with other people, there’s huge potential value to be captured, therefore, wealth, financial stability, and that kind of thing. 

Yeah, the one reason I just brought it up is because, now in order for people who are aspiring entrepreneurs, who want to start a business, they have to know the online game they cannot… if they want to be truly successful. I mean, they can do it without it, but it’s just going to be so much harder. But in order to transition, they’re going to this whole New World. 

So, Harlow, what do you think, from your perspective, was the biggest lesson you learned all throughout your life? Made the transition and then got into entrepreneurship, and then he became a coach, Throughout the years as you saw this technological change happened around you. 

I mean, honestly, the point that you’re just putting out is probably the biggest, fundamental understanding is coming to terms with kind of having one foot in the brick and mortar and one foot in the virtual… And how do you play that well? 

Well, you know, like I use the metaphor, there’s a lot of being on the mat in martial arts, right? I spent thousands of hours playing that game, and it makes a great metaphor for learning. Or I’ll use, say, the trades because I grew up in a trade skilled in construction, and so typically when I’m talking to somebody, I’ll find some avenue that is common to them because that helps to facilitate the conversation. 

But ultimately, I think to your point and to your question, it is something like this: In order to function at the highest level of capability, you have to integrate both perspectives and figure out how to use them well. 

Because there’s obviously value and capability there. There’s scaling potential that you can get online that you can’t get in brick and mortar, but if you completely divorce yourself from brick and mortar, you’re not necessarily factoring in everything that you can do either, and so having a healthy relationship of being able to just sort of be objectively self-aware as to what are your capabilities and how do you use everything available. 

Why would you not use everything that’s available to you? You should do all the research. Just give me all the research that’s known because I want to factor in all of it, you know. 

No, totally. Yeah, on this note, I personally think that when it comes to financial freedom, a lot of people have to pay a lot for offices and everything they have. And now all they need is a laptop and an Internet connection, and they can literally do business online. 

And then it actually gives greater fire, and this podcast, it’s all about financial freedom. Right? And like financial education, a great part of this education is understanding how the online world works, and the fact that you don’t have to incur these overhead expenses causes a lot of businesses to struggle because they have all these expenses and don’t know how to deal with them. But now we have this new opportunity.

It’s huge. And to thread it back to brick and mortar, I’ll give you an example. So, I’m a Carpenter. Like, kind of, one of the first things I learned as a kid was to swing a hammer and to build things. I grew up in a small house that got much bigger as we grew up. 

And so, let’s say I’m a carpenter. Or a woodworker. Let’s say I make furniture, right? So, in the old version of that, you would make a piece of furniture and then sell it. And so, the biggest expense that you had was the cost of the materials, your time, and whatnot, in order to sell. But if you combine the virtual with this, you could now create a course on how to make that chair that you just made and sold. or the table if you know what I mean.  

I love it. Yeah. 

You could host a weekend workshop. We’ll talk about the workshops here in a little bit, but you could host a workshop and teach other people how to make furniture, you know. So, the thing that did cost you the most and impeded your ability to scale… If you think about the old ways to scale, either write a best-selling novel or create an album that gets really, you know, The Rolling Stones album, or, you know, YouTube would… If you put your time and effort in once and it sold 1,000,000 copies, that was scaling. 

Now you can do it at any scale. Because there’s no barrier to entry to posting YouTube videos or putting content out there, just have a landing page and say, I’ll teach you how to make a chair. And so now I can make one chair. And it can have all the ornate details and everything that made it harder to sell before, and it took you more time, right? So that was riskier to say. I’m going to make a really, really, really high-quality chair. This is going to be a throne, you know. But it would take you a year to build it, and then hopefully you would sell it. Now you know that’s not an efficiency loss. It’s a unique value proposition that scales up. And so now somebody goes, wow, I really like the way you make those things. Now you’ve got your niche market, right? 

So, this is like this whole complete reversal of how you can generate wealth throughout your life. How can you migrate through these different career paths if there is no retirement? You don’t need to retire; you create value, value, value, value, and then one day you’re done, you graduate, you know, and then. Everybody’s trying to figure out how to handle the rest of the projects in which they’re involved. Because that’s psychologically the healthiest way to go.

You just talked about graduation, which made me think about this. 

So, another thing about online is that before you had to buy these expensive books to get an education for business or whatever, or you had to go through an apprenticeship program, and now you have YouTube. And you have a lot of online resources, and websites, that actually teach you about business. And that’s the greatest thing.

This shows Extraordinary America is all about financial freedom through financial education because you have to be educated in today’s world to basically get to that point. 

You don’t have to go through all these things, all this college debt, and everything else to basically get a business education. You can do it for much less, and then you can basically go to the right sources, and that was just something that came to mind. 

You can do it for free. You know, and that’s the irony, is that people still don’t pay for college, or, I mean, a lot of people go to college, but either you pay a bunch of money for college, which is basically when you’re graduating, you have a house debt without the house, right? 

Or you spend thousands of dollars and go to the gurus and pay, you know, 5/10 thousand or 15,000 to learn the secrets. And it’s like, you know, you can go to MIT online and essentially get everything that you need for a degree from MIT without the certificate. But you have the knowledge. 

You know, I just took a Hillsdale College course on the decline of the citizenry and, again, the whole history and all that kind of stuff. You’ve got the Khan Academy there. I mean, there’s just no way you can get college-level stuff all the way up from nothing. In many different places for free. There’s no excuse not to really know what it is. You know how to do whatever it is you want to do, including financial literacy. 

No, I totally agree. I’ll tell my audience that, hey, look, the Internet is a great tool for financial literacy. And you must take complete advantage of it. Don’t spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on a college degree that is not going to get you financially if you learn how to create a business and monetize it, and you can do that by going to YouTube and liking the right sources. There are a lot of sources there, but yeah, that’s something that came.

My yeah. And if you have one of the things that I talk about, I talk with a lot of visionaries, and one of the biggest things about dealing with really big, great goals is to get them on the ground, get them clearly articulated, and start somewhere. 

And to your point: The metaphor I always use is to set up a lemonade stand. Right, like, because I use the brick-and-mortar metaphor, and it’s like, you’ve got to start selling something. You’ve got to start creating something of value. You’ve got to see how the markets are going to work with that and that method that you’re talking about gives you the ability to do both, right? You know, because a lot of times a formal college curriculum is very rigorous. You’ve got a lot of work to do, you know, regardless of the price. It’s just another alternative to raising a family, right? It’s really an all-enveloping thing, and so to be able to do it at your own Pace, you can then weigh in some of these other objectives to have in life. But it also gives you the ability to have a small, low-risk pilot project. 

That’s my technical definition of the lemonade stand, and that gives you a feedback loop. It mitigates your Risk, right? It allows you to learn along the way that you are proof of your timing and circumstances, so you know that you are right. You know, so if you take an online course if you’re watching YouTube or whatever, that’s still theoretical; you know, you may understand it intellectually, but if you’re applying it to a real thing in your life, you can find out that it is true and that it works, right? And so now you have an application. You know. So now you’re doing the whole game in a positive ROI fashion. How hard is that decision to make? 

No, I totally agree with you. So, Harlow, on a different note, this is about mindset, and I know you’re a coach and you’re into the mindset. Right. So, what is the greatest challenge that Americans have in terms of mindset when it comes to realizing their own personal American dream? And how would they overcome that? 

Probably the most common thing that I’m faced with in my one-on-one work, but I also see in the culture, and what I know to be true based upon the research that I’ve read, is that, especially here in America, if we look at it as this little microcosm, the majority of people are intellectuals. 

So, they spent a lot of time in their head between their ears, and certainly all of this technology and all of this hyper-connectedness sort of keep a person in their head. And so, I think one of the most important objectives is to get out of your head. Get the ideas out of your head and into the real world in some sort of practical application. I think that’s the most important thing. Does that answer the question that you asked? 

I’m sorry. No 

I mean it kind of does. But, essentially, a lot of people in this modern world… One of the things that I noticed is that, like in the 1950s, 1960s, and even the 1970s, there was a time when most Americans had stable jobs and could rely on each other. They could work in the same place for like 40 years, and then they could retire with a pension plan and all of that. 

But now, there is no job security, and it’s a continuation of what we are talking about regarding the online world, the modern world, and the transition, and a lot of Americans are having a challenge with regard to Realizing the American dream because the security that they had back in the day is no longer there. 

And so, I think, from my perspective, we require a mindset shift. In order to get into the new world, we had to, like, take it with us. There’s fight or flight syndrome. We have to. Grow in a fighting-like opportunity kind of way. And we’ve got to, like, create like. A new world for us, but that’s more of where I was going. 

Yeah, yeah, yeah. The mindset shift is OK, so maybe it’s part and parcel of our earlier conversation. It’s not strictly a Boomer type of thing, and it’s not strictly A Zoomer type of thing. 

If we go. 

I love that term, Zoomers. 

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. 

Z should be called the Zoomer generation, yeah. 

I’ve heard. I’ve heard of it called mind mindset shift, but I think this is like the idea of, let’s say, web two points. Oh, and then Web 3.0. You have to. Go post conventionally on whether it’s either or. 

It’s both/And 

That’s the thing to factor in from a mindset perspective: Yeah, you’ve got to be able to start up… You’ve got to get going. Somehow, action is important, but you can spend an extraordinary amount of action going in the right direction. Wrong way, or just running around in circles. But the same thing can happen in the abstract. Your idea that you’re stuck in decision fatigue, or, you know, paralysis through analysis, is what you know from the way you say. 

I know, I know, I know. I’ve suffered through that paralysis analysis a lot.

Don’t ask me how I know. 

And so, I think that’s the important mindset. To have again clean edges and to be able to know when you’re working on what you’re doing versus working in what you’re doing, and periodic periodize and cycle between the two and keep moving forward. 

Keep factoring for both camps, right… factoring for the brick-and-mortar world and being able to operate safely in a healthy fashion within it, but also being able to embrace what we’ll just call the virtual because the two of them work really well in collaboration, 

No, totally. Yeah, that is one of the things that I’ve noticed since I came here as an immigrant. A lot of Cultural and technological shifts are happening, and a lot of people are being lost in the transition on a national level, right? 

They started off in a different world. It was a whole different world. In the boomer world, the transition happened in the space of 34 years, and it’s never… if you’re in the audience and you’re feeling lost, it’s not your fault. We’re living in a unique time in human history. This has never happened. Happened in all of human history. 

Yeah, I like that all. Recorded history, at Least like I don’t know.  Thousands of years before that. But like all of recorded history, we’ve never had a time where there was Internet technology and all of that stuff on this level, and yeah. So, a lot of people seem to 

And we can’t put that back in the box, right? We’re not going back.

But, you see, the situation is that a lot of people feel like they can’t realize they were because they didn’t know how to adjust to it.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, and I think it’s maybe important in the context of us talking about the different generations, right? Because when you first come in, you have to be able to make choices and decisions and sort of be meritocratic about what is the best way to go until you get some traction for yourself, but at the same time you have to make sense of the fact that if you’re talking to, say, an advisor or a guru in one generation versus another, that advice, although it may be true and appropriate, can feel conflicting. Right. And so that can create artificial confusion. 

And so, it’s a matter of being able to take in seemingly conflicting perspectives and integrate them well. In order to be successful, you must be able to hold your core perspective, and then add to it in a healthy way, and still continue to make decisions that move you forward on your line of intention. You might even be moving forward, and you’re not even sure right now, which creates that confusion. 

So, it’s important to maintain a sense of objective self-awareness but then to continue to bring in perspectives because modeling success is a fundamental efficiency exchange. It’s a huge lever in your ability to get forward quickly by modeling successful actions, but you also want to bring in your own creative energy so that you’re doing something unique has to weigh in also, right? 

And so, it’s that parlay that occurs between those two perspectives, which is sort of what we’re talking about between the internal world and the external world, and how you integrate into that and create good value and utility for the people around you that you’re connected with because that’s ultimately how this works. It makes you the happiest, it makes you the healthiest, and it brings you the wealth and prosperity that we’re trying to help people achieve. 

I couldn’t agree with you more. The only issue we have now as a nation is that we have all these conflicting perspectives that you’re talking about. People identify themselves with that perspective, and it becomes a central part of their identity, whereas versus realizing that their identities are temporary and impermanent after they die, it’s all going to be like they’re the objective self-awareness behind those perspectives, it’s like they’re not there. 

They believe it’s not even their identity, but it is. Hard thing to tell people. Because they have invested so much into that identity that they forgot that they are the awareness behind what I did. That’s why their permanence is not connected to those thoughts.

That’s the loss of the clear edges, right? And it’s a meditative practice to say, I’m not in my car. I’m not my job. I’m not my emotions. I mean, there are different ways. That’s not the meditative practice, but that’s the question that you’re asking, right? And that’s it, basically a spiritual practice that helps to distance you from those things. 

I would go on to say that it might. Sound heretic to a lot. Of people, I’m not even my beliefs. Those beliefs are councillors, beliefs. 

Right, absolutely true. Right, right. They’re valuable. They’re malleable, and you have to change them to suit the timing and circumstances that you’re living in order to function well. Which means changing your beliefs so as not to compromise your integrity. And that gets conflated a lot. You know, the simple fact is that religions today, entire religions, are struggling to survive. To move forward due to the rapid changes in the world and to the hyper-connectivity right, because now all of a sudden you know you used to live in your village; you were in your tribe like you were talking about before. 

You just never ran into anyone like that and didn’t share some sort of commonality because of you. An environment that you were in, but now you jump on these things, and we’ve got a podcast, and somebody’s listening to this who has a completely different belief structure than you or I do. And so, how do you relate in a good way? Because if you don’t, the alternative is not good. 

That’s a deep subject, and time is running out.

A whole other podcast. 

A whole new podcast 

What you’re talking about is literally the reason why nations go to war. Millions of people die from so much persecution. All that stuff, all of this is the conversation that can literally solve stuff like that. Like, yeah, you’re not your identity. You don’t have those beliefs and everything like that. You are something more than that, and once you’re gone in this world, your beliefs go with you. You know, it’s like you become another person in the afterlife. But that’s a whole conversation, yeah. 

Well, clearly, it happens between two people trying to do business together. Or two people of different faiths to be able to be ok because now they’re going to live together in the same village. But clearly, I think we’re hoping that it’s becoming very clear on a global stage. If you’re a bully. Nobody’s going to play well with you anymore. And I think we all know what I’m inferring. You know, it’s like you don’t get to be a thug. You have to… 

No, totally.  

You have to. There is civil discourse. There is the ability. I mean, it’s imports and exports. That’s good stuff. We’re talking about financial freedom. We like that stuff. But if you’re going to be a bully, nobody wants to play with you. 

No, totally Harlow. But Harlow, on a different note, I know that you’ve been doing retreats based on coaching, performance, and everything. Can you tell the audience a little bit more about the premise? How do you know what the retreats are about? 

Yeah, there are different formats for them depending on the particular audience. So, I’m not just doing one. And it plays into what we’re talking about, basically, we’re doing some joint venture projects; I’ll give you a good example of one coming up towards the end of the year. It’s a veteran’s workshop that we do over the weekend. We don’t call it a retreat because you don’t want veterans retreating. You want them in a workshop because they like to work hard. 

But the simple fact is, once you’ve gone through essentially the work that we’re talking about in this podcast and you come up with, you know, your life lessons, your message, and your intention, what do you want to do in the world… then Jump on Zoom or something like this. Start recording those conversations as you start to create your course. You start to create some sort of virtualized DIY type of thing that you could sell for value. But then there’s also the group activity, right?

So, you have the virtualized summit kind of thing, but you also have weekend workshops. And so, I live in Colorado and Denver, which are right in the middle of the United States, which makes it easy. It’s a quick, you know, couple hundred dollars and a few hours on a plane, and you can come and spend the weekend. 

So, they’re shorter. It’s just a weekend type of thing. And then we combine, you know, health practices with understanding things like what we’re talking about: entrepreneurship. To the veterans, we’re talking specifically about ex-military personnel, I guess, is the right way to say it. People who were in the service and now come out and they’re in the civilian sector and they need to know, you know, but they’re middle-aged. You know that they’re not ready to retire, so they want to create a life for themselves, and that transition can be very difficult. There are some programs. There that they can avail themselves of, but fundamentally it’s about talking about doing what we’re doing on this podcast, we talk about figuring out how to get your center.

Because, military life, it’s very structured and very coordinated at the group level. And so now you’re like a self-employed entrepreneur or an employee. And that’s sort of a limited set of decisions. 

You know, and so there are different ways. To continue to have a really great life and create a lot of value. And so that’s the type of thing that we address in the workshop format. But then we have a media person there who’s going to capture that stuff, and you know, then we can do the virtualized version of that also. And of course, the upsell is for these other coaches to help one-on-one workers essentially grow their own version of that as well.

Oh, that is awesome that you’re helping out veterans and everything. And yes, after you come out of the military, the transition. The thing is, it’s a very important factor. How do you go from that to the world that we’re living in right now, which is a very chaotic world compared to the thousands of years we have had so far? 

So, are there any other projects that you’re doing right now that you want the audience to get a glimpse into… Other than this? 

The workshops are the big thing from a collaborative standpoint. I do one-on-one work. You’ll have the links for when I work one-on-one with people. I am starting my own group aspect of things. You alluded to the focus on the solutions group project that I had that’s been a little bit on the back burner right now, but that’s more of a philanthropic one. Endeavor. 

And so, I’m doing These can all be found on my website, including all my social media and stuff like that. But I’m also of the opinion that the focus on solutions lends itself to a more ecological argument. And so, because of my martial arts background and my craft background, I’ve hosted a Japanese timber frame carpentry workshop of all things, which was crazy, but it speaks to having a more high-performance home that you live in and doing that kind of stuff because of my construction background. And so, I’ve gotten my hands on a lot of interesting things. Pockets and projects. 

And so, I’ve been self-employed for over 20 years now. You can’t say that it was ever just one thing. I didn’t carry a name tag through that whole thing. It’s sort of an evolving process. So, if you’re interested in any of those crazy things or want to figure out how to implement them for yourselves, that’s fine. Hit me up, you. 

Know which is the next question I was going to ask: how well can the audience connect with You and your work so that they can get to know it? More about you and your stuff

The main thing is just to go to the main website or the link tree I sent you to the main website, and the link tree stuff sort of has the calls to action for the current array of things that I’m working on. 

I’ll put that in the link below. So yeah, I want to. I want to let you know that, as we’re concluding this podcast, I’m really grateful that you took the time to be on it and share your wisdom. With us and I really. I appreciate you and want you to come back. On the show at a later time. 

That would be great. I very much appreciate it too. I’d love to see what you’re doing. We had a mutual friend introduce the two of us together, and so this is the first time we’re getting to see each other face-to-face and interact this way. And so yeah, it’s exciting. I’d love to see what you’re doing. It sounds like we’re walking very similar paths. And so yeah, I look forward to collaborating again soon.

That is awesome. Harlow and I want to conclude this show by telling my fellow Americans that, look, there’s something extraordinary within each and every one of us. And it’s our duty to awaken it and unleash it until next time. Bye for now.