Jay Sargeant - Unlocking SHIFT: The Gift of Reinvention

In 3, 2, 1.

Welcome back to Becoming Preferred, the podcast that helps you become the best version of you.

Throughout our careers, we often talk about the importance of business pivots, but we rarely discuss the profound skill of personal reinvention.

Today's guest is Coach Jay Sargent, entrepreneur, teacher, reinvention coach, and author of Shift the Gift of Reinvention.

Across seven careers, from community organizer to tennis pro to business builder and coach, Jay has spent a lifetime studying how people transform themselves.

At 78 years young, Jay is the creator of the Shift project, and he believes that life's second half can truly become your masterpiece.

He helps high achievers recognize the hidden patterns in their lives, proving that staying relevant isn't about the credentials on your wall, but it's about your hunger, your adaptability, and your willingness to begin again.

Jay is here to show us that most major transformations change one conversation and one uncomfortable moment at a time.

Please join me for my conversation with Coach Jay Sargent.

Well, hey, Coach Jay.

Welcome to the program.

We're delighted to have you.

It's great to be here, certainly.

Where are we speaking to you from today?

I am in Woodland Hills in the San Fernando Valley outside of downtown Los Angeles.

But formally, I need to say this.

Although I've been here a long, long time, my roots are still in Boston, Massachusetts.

So Red Sox, Patriots, Bruins and Celtics go.

Oh, they're good team.

Well, actually a couple of my favorite teams, too.

So I've been to the games there with Boston's seen the green monster.

Well, listen, I'm really excited about our project.

We're going to talk about your book, the Shift Project.

Reinvent the life that you want.

And it's so relevant.

And I'm really excited about talking about just the process of that because a lot of people were living longer and there was a day where we.

If you travel to Europe and you look in the graveyards, you'll see no one lived past 50.

86.

87 Is kind of really the new number if you're pretty healthy.

77 Is our national benchmark, but that's including everybody that's overdoses, obesity, all the diseases.

So it's the road 86.

So we got a lot of time still ahead of us.

And the key is to stay relevant.

You don't have to hang up your cleats, so to speak, you know, just because you hit a certain age.

So delighted to talk about this subject.

It's near and dear to my heart as well.

But hey, before we get started, let's.

Let's go back in history.

A little bit of time you're back in high school.

So you're back in Massachusetts, you're in Boston, I'm assuming, going to school.

What does Jay want to be when he grows up?

You know, many people understood immediately my friend in my neighborhood, I grew up in Brighton, Massachusetts, a working class neighborhood, in an apartment house, not a house.

And my best friend was Harold Freeman.

And Harold and I would lay on a little patch of grass that we found in front of a convalescent home, look up at the sky as 10 or 11 year old, and Harold would tell me, jay, I'm going to be a doctor.

And he gave me the whole life path, right at age 11.

I have not figured that out yet.

At age 78, he was clearer at 11 than I've been throughout my entire life.

And you're right, I went to school.

I went to Boston Latin School, the oldest public high school in, in the United states, formed in 1626, one year before Harvard University.

And on the very first day when you get to Boston, land school as a seventh grader.

And they didn't call you a seventh grader, Michael, they called you class six.

It was classical.

Your teachers were masters.

We were Class 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1.

As a sixie.

Class 6, you're this little tadpole.

You're marched into an auditorium and all the pictures above you are Ben Franklin, the Adams family, all the founders of the country went to Boston Latin School.

And they're up there on the wall staring down at you.

The headmaster gets in front of the audience and says, look to the left and look to the right because only one of you will be here.

Thousand of you in the auditorium, only 300 will graduate.

We will flunk 700 of you out.

And here's the requirement.

Three hours minimally of homework a night or you won't get through this.

Michael.

I don't know if this is good news or bad news, but I immediately thought, not me.

I'm so bright, I'm so intelligent, I've done so well in grammar school.

I'm going to get through this veil of tears with virtually no homework being done.

And I did.

And I did.

And the reason I tell you this story is everything I learned by not doing my homework and having to explain it six years in a row times six courses every year give a dramatic, poignant, intelligently designed speech.

Got me in trouble all the time, but set me up for everything I have ever done in this lifetime.

So that's my origin story.

No, I love it.

I totally get it.

Back in our day, the homework was kind of like ooh, and, and I, I always, I learned very early that the doctor in medical school who finishes last in his class, you know what they call him?

Doctor.

So I thought, hey, wait a minute, this GPA thing, I know you can't go achieve and if you get 4.0 is great.

You mentioned Harvard.

Harvard last year turned down over 3,000 4.0 students.

So it's a commodity being a 4.0.

So there's, you got to have a lot more to it.

I think the biggest thing is learning how to learn.

And you started to evaluate those things.

You probably were bored in school, were you?

I was preoccupied.

Fell in love with two things.

Basketball first.

So I was a student of Bob Cousy, I taught at his camp.

I was being positioned to be a two guard, a shooting guard when he went to Boston College.

That never happened because the second thing, I wish I could say that I was bored.

I was preoccupied with the thought of having a good looking girlfriend.

And that's all I thought about.

In order to have a good looking girlfriend in my neighborhood, you needed to have a car and you needed to have a really nice car.

And my folks were broke.

My father made $7,000 a year working two full time jobs.

There wasn't going to be any money when I turned 16 for a nice car.

So from the time I was eight years old on, I worked constantly to have the money on day.

When I was 16, I went and bought a 1958 Oldsmobile.

Black, red leather seats and white convertible top.

Oh, did you have a paper route?

Were you a. Oh, for sure.

I had it all.

I shoveled snow, I had paper rides, I delivered drugs for pharmacies, I was a soda jerk.

And you know I've, I've had seven careers but 700 jobs, I've never stopped working.

And that with entrepreneurs, those who were successful.

I was asked, you have a paper out?

And most did because you learned how to deliver the papers, customer experience, you had to go collect and knock on the doors and get your 250 a week.

Yeah, Johnson.

And go back and go back and go back and you pull your papers in the wagon or on your bicycle and have one of those bags, do whatever.

So I think those are all good training grounds compared to, you know, what we see today.

Well and it's interesting because you've been a community organizer, you've been a tennis pro, you're a pickleball coach, franchise developer, entrepreneur, communication, it can go on and on.

And that's the point, and I think is that primary reason, like you wrote the book shift, the gift of reinvention.

What was the impetus for that?

Because you've been going along.

You've obviously had successful careers.

You're 78.

And I'm putting that out for a reason.

I hope you don't mind.

You look fantastic.

Great.

You're in great shape.

You're coaching.

When did that idea of the germination of the book first come to you, and who is it for?

You know, I didn't write the book for anybody to read other than my great grandchildren.

I'm acutely aware after having lost my parents at my age.

Of course, they're gone now, and there are many holes in what I know about their life.

And I wish I could call up my mom one more time and say, talk to me about Papa Boney the day that he got a horse and he went down the park street station and yada.

I mean, there's all that family lore, and it's gone.

So my kids.

I have three kids.

I have three daughters.

Three great daughters.

54, 37 And 34.

And they for years have said, dad, when you die, when you go to heaven, the stories go with you.

Would you please record them in any way you can?

Because we want our kids and our kids kids to know.

So it started off just simply doing that.

And then, honestly, it was such a joy.

And there are painful moments.

I mean, you know, I lost a wife of 28 years during the course of writing the book.

It's chapter 23 and 24.

And there are spiritual lessons in there that are just amazing.

But the key is I wrote it for the kids.

And then all of a sudden, I realized two things started to emerge that I wasn't anticipating.

Number one, and this is kind of a goofy memory, but I'm going to share it with you.

When I went to Boston College in 1966, I got invited at Christmas to Long island to the Belfort house for Christmas.

Now, remember, I'm a Brighton, Massachusetts, living in an apartment.

My father delivers newspapers at night and.

And my mother sells haberdashery at Filene's basement.

I'm invited to Long island to the Belford house for Christmas.

I'm Jewish, so I've heard.

Had noisy meals my whole life.

Relatives screaming and yelling.

Woody Allen was right.

Screaming and yelling.

And now I go to the Belford mansion on Long island during the Christmas break of my first year at Boston College, and they start talking around.

Number one, it's quiet, which is Amazing.

People are polite, passing food very nicely.

But most importantly, they're talking about the stock market and investment strategies.

And as a little boy, I was only 18.

I'm sitting there thinking, oh, my God, I'm screwed.

These guys got such an advantage over me.

They're learning things.

My folks have never had an investment strategy.

They don't own any stock.

We never had these conversations over Russia, Shana, dinner, that's for sure.

And so at the end of the day, what I realized in writing the book, my folks gave me a bigger blessing.

My folks gave me a bigger blessing than the Belfort family because my mom and dad were serial entrepreneurs.

They were dreamers.

They had nothing.

But they always believed they could create more, that they could be rich.

They could move from Brighton, Massachusetts, to Brookline, which is only one street over.

But the real estate is completely different.

They were dreamers.

And here comes the key.

No matter how crushed they were.

And I was part of every campaign because I had a little boy and we had failure after failure.

My mother wanted to sell shoes in the living room, cooking classes, Chinese cooking classes in the kitchen, dancing, mambo, and cha cha in the living room.

They bought the rights to these Clowns, Tragedy and comedy, spent a fortune on reproductions, put a $500 ad in the New Yorker.

My father was making 7,000 a year and two jobs.

That $500 for that ad in New Yorker was everything we had.

And we came running home from work and from school to look at the slot.

We thought we would have thousands of envelopes buying that Comedy and tragedy clowns 3.

And that was our best day.

Now, the reason I tell you this story is the day after or the week after the defeat, my folks are dreaming again.

They never got defeated, and they eventually found.

My mother, found a glass business, an art glass business that put my brother through Harvard, paid all four years of Harvard University with a business she created just by walking into a store and saying, I love this glass.

I can represent you.

Let me take it on consignment to Boston.

I'll resell it.

And that glass money put my kid brother through Harvard.

My father sold ties to real estate offices and insurance agents to the day he died.

He loved ties.

He was a very natty dresser.

And they taught me the spirit of entrepreneurship, and it's lasted my whole life.

It's just an amazing lesson.

So while writing the book, it sort of honors my folks in that spirit, and then it comes up with three patterns.

Michael.

Michael.

Here's the punchline.

Credentials are overrated.

These are the stops.

These are the stops for reinvention.

People don't reinvent their life because, a they think they don't deserve it, they don't have the credentials.

B they don't understand and appreciate small moments can lead to big moments.

But you got to do something, for God's sakes.

No one ever made any money sitting still.

And last but not least, it's never too late to reinvent yourself.

Never too late.

So those are the three principles of the book.

And you know, I got stories around each one of them.

Mike well, and you were taught resiliency as well.

And so at the end of the day, and you've lived long enough to know it, to me it feels like Monopoly.

There's times you land on free parking, there's times you go to jail, there's times you get on boardwalk, there's times you own a railroad.

It's the there's one thing, it's just constant change.

And so we got to be comfortable with the change and evolution, not revolution.

So I think it's always moving, improving.

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And now back to my conversation with Jay Sargent.

Let's talk about reinvention just as a skill and as a business skill as well.

We have a lot of business professionals that listen to the podcast as well as professionals, so Jay Mini entrepreneurs view reinvention as something you do when you fail, but you suggest it's actually a skill to be developed.

How does a business professional shift from seeing reinvention As a last resort to seeing it as a competitive advantage.

You know, I'm gonna.

I had a sequence, but you just changed it.

So I love it.

I'm gonna ask.

Answer that very specific question.

I developed from scratch a franchise chain from one unit on Pico Boulevard in West Los Angeles to 154 units in 18 months.

And on the heels of that extraordinary victory, somebody took over the business.

Somebody bought the business and disbanded my division at the heels of one of my greatest successes.

And at that moment, I was crushed.

I felt really bad about that because I had equity.

We were taking it public through Alex Brown.

You remember them back in the day, they were doing tech things.

It was the first.

I had developed the first chain of software retail stores in the United States.

Then it disappeared.

Now I had some money.

I had.

You know, I didn't spend it all.

I had some money, but I had to make some choices.

So I called up a mentor of mine in franchise development, George Nanoff, arguably one of the great minds in franchise development.

And I called him up and I told him about this sad reversal of fortune.

I was fishing.

I was fishing.

I'm in Los Angeles.

He's still back in Boston.

And he says, kid, because he had told me when I left them to compete with him, the light will always be on.

I rented you.

I known you.

If you ever want to come back, give me a call.

So I gave him that call.

Many years later, he says, oh, my God.

I am developing a brand new franchise of chicken empire called Boston Chicken.

And you called right now.

I want you to be the president.

I want you to develop it.

I'll give you chicken, $10,000 a wire, wherever you want it.

This is a long time ago.

I'm going to fly you and your bride across the country.

I'll put you up in midtown Manhattan.

I will set you up, I'll move your furniture.

I now remember I'm a guy who's never had that kind of stability.

And I've just taken a punch.

I've just taken a punch.

I'm reeling a little bit.

I got some dough in the bank.

I got a Porsche 911 that I should sell.

But at the end of the day, this is very enticing.

So I go to the bride, who was only 22 at the time, and I say, george Nanoff wants us to go to New York.

Most exciting city in the United States.

I'm an opera buff.

I'm a theater guy.

I'm thinking, we're going to be cultured.

We're going to oh my God, we're going to have money.

We're arriving.

Yeah, we're arriving two days later.

I am just suffering because I don't want to build a chicken empire.

I don't see myself as the king of a chicken empire.

I don't want to stay in franchising.

I've already done it, I've done it at the highest level, but I don't know what to do.

So I go to the swimming pool.

We're in a transition.

We're at the Oakwood Garden apartment, monthly rentals.

And there's this massive Olympic swimming pool with 250 chaise lounge around it, chaise cherleons around it, and the bride goes to bed and I'm watching the water and I'm looking up at the sky and I'm having deep thoughts in between trapezes.

And a bald headed Jewish guy in Bermuda shorts with a baseball cap sits down next to me.

There's 250 empty chairs.

This guy at 11 o' clock at night sits down next to me and he says, a penny for your thoughts.

And I said, oh my God, you don't really mean that.

I'm the most chatty, loquacious guy you ever met.

Do you really want me to tell you what's on my.

He says, go, I got nothing to do, Go.

So I tell him the story 15, 20 minutes and he leaves and I go, I bored him to death.

But he comes back almost immediately and he's holding a book, which Michael, you may know he's holding, but remember this is a long time ago.

He's holding a book that's obviously been read to death.

It's got notes, the binder is broken.

And he hands it to me and he says, read this book right now while I'm with you.

And the name of the book was Frogs into Princes, the seminal work of Richard Bandler and John Grinder.

The beginning way back when of neuro linguistic programming.

I read the first 11 pages like I'm 12 years old reading Harold Robbins the Carpetbaggers.

To me it is one of the most exciting 11 pages of my life.

I'm sitting there, I look to say thank you and he is gone.

Now I go up to the apartment, I wake up Lee and I say, sweetie, we're not going to New York.

We're sending the money back.

We're not going to be in midtown Manhattan.

We're staying right here in gorgeous Southern California.

And I am going to be an nlp.

I don't even know an NLP teacher Counselor, coach, whatever it is, I'm going to teach this book.

It's had that kind of impact on me.

And I sent back the money, and I turned down the job, and I took the chance that I suggest entrepreneurs.

So you got to see the signs before they're vivid, before it's real.

You've got to make it real by getting that sense.

And people often ask me, where does the motivation come from?

Michael, I have no tolerance for emotional pain.

The moment I'm out, I'm out.

I can take a punch.

I've been in, you know.

You're a hockey guy, I'm a hockey guy.

I've been in some fairly serious fistfights.

I used to fight like crazy under the boards for a basket.

I'd knock my mother's teeth out to get a rebound.

At the end of the day, I can take a punch.

But emotionally, when I'm bored, unsatisfied, something bubbles up in me.

It says, I gotta do what I want to do.

I gotta do what turns me on.

Because if it turns me on, I'll be very good at it and I won't feel like I'm working.

Yeah, well, that's such a classic statement, too.

And if you love what you're doing, you'll never work it in your life.

And I think people get on that treadmill and they just get stuck in that rut, or they get the golden handcuffs on them and they're not willing to take the leap.

Right.

Because it does take a leap to go and change careers or to take something and leave something that's really good and try something different.

So it does take some guts, if you will.

You have a wonderful line.

You call it renting confidence.

Confidence is often rented before it's owned by.

So for an entrepreneur stepping into a new industry or a larger room, how do they rent that confidence until it becomes theirs?

Well, we say in nlp, and you'll get a kick out of it.

Very often people will say, I didn't succeed, or I'm not succeeding because my parents didn't give me enough.

Enough love, enough intellectual property, enough support.

And we say in the NLP community, if you don't have resourceful parents, rent a pair.

Go take mine.

Use my model.

It doesn't really matter.

I tell people, number one, first and foremost, if you don't know your value, you can't reinvent.

It starts with a real serious appreciation and inventory of your value.

What do I know, Michael?

I know that if I'm standing up, speaking, I can move a Crowd.

I'll give you an example.

When I got sick and tired of being a tennis professional and I was at the top of the trade, 34 pros working for me.

I had my own stringing operation, the pro shop.

I had an academy, a summer camp, the Mount Auburn traveling summer camp.

I had it all.

I was making more than $100,000 a year in 1977.

It was like glorious and I look cute and I wore my outfit and every from the outside.

But I was bored out of my mind.

So I went to wealthy people who I taught.

I taught.

Fortunately, the owner of the Patriots craft, I taught little Jonathan, the president when he was in my 4 to 6 year old tiny tot program.

So I went to very wealthy powerful people and I said to them, you know me, what do I do next?

I don't want to do this anymore.

What do I do next?

And one of the people Mark Roberts set me up with, George Nadaff.

And we go back to George and he said, Jay, you should sell something big.

You, you're a salesman, but you need to sell something epic, large.

My buddy is selling quarter of a million dollar franchises.

You would be great.

And they're doing it the way you would probably want to do it.

Standing in front of fancy, in fancy hotels, in front of audiences of 50 to 100 while you be great at it.

I go take the meeting with George, Nana.

He's in an office so gorgeous, he looks like the Pope.

He's at the end, he, I mean it's so.

He looked like a warlord meets Pope Leo.

And I'm intimidated a little bit.

I had to get over myself.

And I walk and I sit down in front of him and George says, mark Roberts says great things about you, says you're an amazing talent.

First I need to see your resume, please.

And I said, I don't have a resume.

He said, wait a minute, you don't have any resume?

I said, none.

He said, okay, so you don't have a physical resume.

Talk me through who you are and why you qualify for a franchise development job.

He said, what's your talking resume?

Give me your business background.

I said, well, I hate business.

I would never read a Fortune magazine in a thousand years.

I mean, I have no interest whatsoever.

He said, well, what are you doing here?

I said, hey, here's what I've heard.

You sell high end things to powerful, wealthy, intelligent people in beautiful hotel rooms all over the country by giving a speech.

And if you want someone to give a speech that gets people to do something, I Am your man and I can prove it.

Give me your brochure.

So he gives me a three trifold brochure.

I say, here it is.

I'm going to go in the lobby, get your whole management team and the people I'm going to be competing with your franchise sales department.

Get them in this big beautiful office.

I'll come back in 15 minutes and give a presentation of your franchise opportunity.

If it's good, hire me.

Give me a commission, whatever will set it up.

And if it's not, throw me out.

I went into the lobby at that brochure and I went, now I knew nothing.

Do you understand?

So the content, I realized I'm not going to wow them on the content, but I'm going to use what I learned at Boston Latin School by not doing my homework.

That's the inventory.

I know where my value is.

I walk in that room, move my hands, tell stories, flounce around, get dramatic.

He throws everybody out.

Now, by the way, people want to kill me.

Do you understand?

The group watching me wanted to assassinate me.

This I guarantee.

I deleted them.

I teach this.

I deleted them.

They were gone.

I had an audience of one.

George Nanna, he intelligently throws them the heck out of the room.

And he sits down, he says, kid, you didn't say one thing that was right, but you said it really well.

And you're very good at speechifying.

And I could clean you up and put you on the road and you could do this.

And so I took a commission gig.

At the end of the day, I had no credentials.

This is what I teach.

I had no credentials, but I knew who I was.

So I start people off with what is your assets?

I mean, I believe that the second half of your life can be the big half of your life because you've had 40 years, 45 years of great experiences.

If you can extract that, if you can understand that, if you can take what you know about yourself, the value proposition, and put it someplace where you fill a hole.

But you got to not believe that you're being held back.

I mean, listen, I became an nlp.

I became a pickleball coach.

There are now more pickleball coaches than Carter has little liver pills.

And they all go spend 500 to $1,000 for credentials.

I didn't get any credential.

I just can create value.

And when I did, the word got out in a whole seventh career.

Emerged at age 76.

So that's what I teach.

Well, I know it's interesting.

And you know when you talk about nlp, you know, I've got a lot of friends in the business and a lot of successful people obviously practice and use it.

And for those who don't know, it's the Neuro linguistic programming.

We're all programmed.

We are completely matter of fact, if you look at our traditional programming, our school systems that came out of the Soviet Union way back in the 30s and 40s where we wanted factory workers, so the industrial age, we wanted somebody up the front of the room with number two pencil and you get your three Rs and if you could do that, you could get a factory job and get a job.

We don't teach the things that matter.

We don't teach the things that are important.

We don't teach finances, we don't teach independence.

And so you're, let's call it a rebellion because I share that with you.

Of that system you recognize very early, hey, there's something wrong with this process.

All right?

And like I say, majority of my learning, my PhD came from post work.

I went through traditional school, went to college and got a degree.

But let's talk about that because I call that the credentials trap.

And then I'd like you to address some people have some hesitancy around NLP or if they're very strong, say in a Christian faith, they sometimes question it like oh, is this voodoo or is this not a good thing?

And I know you've heard that argument before many times, I'd love for you to address that.

But in our world of degrees and certifications you argue that credentials are often overrated and you've addressed it.

What should entrepreneurs be focusing on instead of to try to prove their value to high level clients, what should they focus on?

Number one, I counsel a lot of people one on one over a very long lifetime.

The trap is credentials.

They think they're not worthy.

They've got when I, when I do.

Yeah, unbelievable.

The second piece is that people get stuck.

And I always say you can't make your next fortune in your living room.

You gotta go take a bad gig, take a bad meeting, do something ridiculous, but move, do something.

Because there's no small moments.

There's no small moments.

Real quickly, I take a meeting many, many, many years ago.

I don't want to leave the house, I don't want to smell good.

I don't want to have to put a suit and tie on.

It was back in the day, all wore suit and ties.

I had to go to a bad meeting with idiots.

But I said to the wife at the time I got to get out.

I got to meet someone new.

Something's waiting for me somewhere in the world.

I go to the meeting and they were schmucks.

They were just as bad as I thought.

The meeting was worse than I thought it was.

And I hear some guy as we're leaving, grousing two seats over from me, a Canadian, by the way, two seats over from me, saying, I got this new consulting contract.

They're unfixable and he's got a problem he can't solve.

I say, I don't know.

I say, excuse me, I don't mean to be impertinent or rude, but I overheard what you said.

I can fix that.

Now that's the moment where we all.

That's the great divide in entrepreneurship, in reinvention.

I had.

And I couldn't say, maybe I can fix that.

I had to say, I can fix that beyond a shadow of a doubt.

That led to a contract.

That led to a trip to Florida.

That led to me getting in front of an angry mob.

They wanted to tear the company apart.

And I basically be quieted them.

I turned a lynch mob into Woodstock Nation, into Kumbaya.

Okay, lovely moment.

I didn't save that company.

I didn't save that company.

I earned my money.

I be quieted that crowd and I moved on.

One year later, I get a phone call on a Tuesday morning at 10 o' clock in the morning, and someone says, you don't know me, but I was in that crowd in Florida.

I watched you do something I could not believe happened.

I'm in the same position here.

I need you to do something for me.

Can you come to Vancouver?

I said, vancouver is one of my favorite cities in the world.

Of course.

Let me look at my calendar and see if I.

Let's just sync this up.

When do you want me?

Tonight at seven o'.

Clock.

I said, oh, my goodness, somebody reneged.

Somebody's not coming.

She said, the representative from the company won't come because they heard that.

You're going to love this.

200 Calgary Cowboys with big biceps, cowboy hats and boots are caravanning towards British Columbia to beat the living daylights out of whoever's not paying them what they deserve.

And we're scared to death.

Will you come and give that speech?

I go downstairs, I say to the wife, I'm going to Vancouver.

She said, I didn't see that on the calendar.

It wasn't.

Are they paying you good money?

They're paying me bupkis, nothing.

But they're in trouble and I know I can go do that job.

And I don't know where I'm going, but I'm going.

I get up there and I'm not going to talk.

I did the deal.

I turned the big muscled guys who were so irritated into photo opportunities, handshakes and hugs at the end of the event.

The three principles of what I didn't even know was a company at that time.

Say, we want to show you something.

Michael.

When you're in a strange hotel, it's late at night and someone wants to show you something, it's invariably an opportunity or they're trying to make get cash.

So I tried to avoid that late night meeting like it was the bubonic plague.

I said, can we do it in the lobby?

Can we do it tomorrow morning?

Can we do it in the lobby?

No, it's got to be now.

And in your room.

They then show me.

You're going to get a kick out of this network marketing which I'm not experienced in at that moment in time.

They're showing me wellness products for which I have zero background.

At the time I was a cigar aficionado.

Remember those days?

You know.

Yeah.

And so I'm not a wellness guy at that moment.

They have a brown grocery bag of 30 products, none of which have the same labels on them.

Looks like they fell off of a turn up truck and everything is cleaning something.

By the time the woman got through the 8th or the 10th product, I'm thinking, which orifice of the body have we not cleaned at this moment in time?

This is ridiculous.

She then pulls out a product which you would know and I won't mention, but it's.

She says, this one's a nighttime collagen formula, describes it.

And I say, could you accurately say if you took a tablespoon of that at night before you go to sleep, you wake up smaller?

She said, yeah, you could say that.

I said, good, I'm now your partner.

You don't have any Money.

You have 56 distributors in all of Canada, none in the United States.

You can't afford me, but you gotta right now before I leave this room.

Call up your partners and I need 20% of the company and I'll go home and build this at the end of the day.

That turned out to be 675,000 distributors domestically.

A billion dollars in worldwide sales.

And in the United States and Canada, we created 70 millionaires on a shoestring.

Do you understand?

I came back to Los Angeles and just did it all alone with one bottle of the Product.

Now, it all began because I took a bad meeting and I spoke up for myself and I took a bad contract, and then that led one year later.

So I teach no small moments.

If you know who you are and you know the hole that you can fill, if you uniquely understand your value and you fill a hole, the world will pay for it.

You'll get compensated for that.

So that's what I teach.

No.

Well, and you talk about it.

Clients don't buy your degree.

They buy your hunger, your communication, and your ability to persist through their specific problem.

You know, credentials tell people what you studied, but your shift stories tell people who you are.

And as you've just said, mastery is proven in the moments when the playbook fails and you have to adapt.

And you obviously demonstrated that and take care of it.

No, no, Michael, let me cover the NLP thing.

I'll just do it real quick.

I don't like the question hanging out there.

I know that you asked that.

NLP has nothing to do with spirit.

I don't care.

Obviously, both of us, we.

I respect all religious, spiritual paths.

I think God is in everything.

The key to nlp, which changed my life because my father sold life insurance as one of his iterations.

And we lived in this little apartment.

And I heard him every night through a thin wall, going, Mrs. Kelly, if Mr. Kelly dies in the middle of the night, how do you take care of the rest of your life?

If I heard my father ask that control question once when I was a little boy, heard it every night, five times a night, as he was making appointments, clawing his way out of being a teamster.

And when I heard that, I said, I am never going to go into sales.

I don't like it.

It sounds manipulative.

It's horrible.

I don't want to hear, Mrs. Sullivan, we have a lot of Irish in Boston, as you know.

And so I heard that line when I discovered that book, Frogs into Princes, just so everyone understands this.

What changed me in that moment, that's why a book can have tremendous impact, is I understood it was about building a relationship.

I understood it was making a friend and then having a friend understand what's the appropriate choice.

And so everyone had emphasized in my very early development in sales, closing skills.

Closing skills.

And then I realized it ain't about closing.

It's about opening.

It's about.

And the techniques developed by Bandler and Grinder early on, many, many decades ago, were really therapeutic techniques.

They were ways to meet someone who was suffering in a clinical setting.

And instead of Fighting with them, joining them in, maybe even their hallucination, discovering what's their model of the world?

How are they seeing it, feeling it, hearing it?

What are their metaprograms?

Do they need little information chunked down or chunked up?

So when I saw that sales and persuasion could be gentle, could be kind, could be pinpointed.

I hate scripting, I hate memorizing.

I mean, when I used to do big companies and I go into human resource departments, the first thing that I hated the most was, people go home tonight and memorize this.

That's not the way the world is.

You got to make a friend, you got to gather information, listen carefully, watch carefully, and then customize your remarks so that fits the other individual.

That's the NLP model.

There's nothing mystical, there's nothing anti Christian about it.

It's not.

So I just wanted to make that clear.

No, it's changed.

And great, great definition of that as well.

Let's talk about patterns and recognizing those hidden patterns.

So your work at the SHIFT project focuses on recognizing hidden patterns.

What is one common pattern you see in professionals that keeps them stuck in a chapter that they should have ended years ago?

Well, number one, we already talked about it.

They're worried about do they have enough credential?

Right.

Number two is they're not recognizing that in small.

You know, sometimes people, especially in certain distribution channels, talk about million dollar sales.

My mantra is sell one thing to somebody tomorrow.

Learn the lesson of that transaction and then move on.

If you get spreadsheet excel rich, you've done absolutely nothing.

Get engaged.

I took a buddy of mine, I relocated a kid from Boston to LA for the big franchise development campaign.

He was a young Italian kid from east Boston named Mike Massetti.

I brought him on.

He killed.

He and I and another two guys, we just had a great moment in time.

And then when it got bought out and we were destroyed in a moment, I had the most amount of money.

So I suffered a little less.

Mike was spending money like it was never going to stop.

So he was suffering.

And one night I saw on a post, on a telephone post, a handmade sign that said, guru giving prosperity lesson tonight at a YMCA in the hippie version of Venice, California.

I see the sign and I say, this is perfect for Mike.

He's depressed, he's not shaving.

I can't get him to come out.

I'm going to get him dressed up and clean and I'm going to fake them into this prosperity thing.

I go pick him up and he looks like he just walked out of Harvard Square, the bookstore at Harvard Square.

He's wearing a blue blazer, a striped red tie, an oxford cloth button down blue shirt, a pair of 10 slacks, and tassels on his shoes.

He comes out and he's a little bit Mussolini, like, you know, that J.

He's a very proud, smaller guy.

And I go, oh, my God, is he going to be incongruous at this thing at a YMCA in Venice with a guru?

We walk into the room and it's all hippies.

This is a long time ago.

In a semicircle around a guy with a dot on his forehead, in a gossamer gown, in a.

Sorry.

And I don't even look at Mike.

You know what?

I don't want him.

I don't want to give him permission to leave.

Do you understand?

So we sit in the middle of the semicircle and it becomes clear that he's going to give business advice starting at once.

End of the business circle.

Now I'm going to tell you something funny.

His name was Wami Sawami.

You know, who knows what he was?

He was a great guy.

But I hear the first two interventions and I go, this is as smart as anybody at Harvard Business School.

This is genius information.

Mike is to the right of me, so it's going to be him before me.

I don't look at him.

I continue not to look at him.

And then I'm wondering, when it gets to Mike, is he going to be confrontive, Is he going to be passive?

He stands up and the guru says to him, please, your name and where you're from and what you do.

And Mike says, I'm Michael Macedi from Boston, Massachusetts.

I now live in West Los Angeles and I am the greatest salesman who ever lived.

And the guru, God bless him, says, oh, my God.

With no irony.

Do you understand?

No irony.

Oh, my God, what a privilege it is to be in front of the world's greatest salesperson.

I am so eager to hear, what are you selling right now?

And Mike says, well, nothing.

Our campaign just.

And he tells the beginning of a sad story.

He gets busted by the guru.

The guru, stop, stop, stop.

If you're going to break this pattern and you're the greatest salesman that ever lived, go home tonight.

Find anything in your house and sell it tomorrow.

Give yourself a job tomorrow.

I go, wow, that's a beautiful pattern.

Interrupt.

That's a great piece of counsel.

You start when you want to start, right?

He disappears.

I got the car.

Mike leaves.

One week later, he went Home sold a compact computer.

You remember compact?

I do.

They were giant.

Absolutely.

He had a busted compact in the bottom of a closet.

He calls up a retail store and says, you want to buy this off of me?

He said, are you kidding?

I got 10 of them.

Can you sell mine?

He puts himself in the middle and creates a brokerage business that created a million dollars in volume by the sixth month.

So my counsel is, move.

Don't get stuck on credentials.

Move like crazy.

And it is never, ever, ever too late.

That's my key call that movement before mastery rule.

So it's brilliant.

The world rewards movement before mastery.

So that's why we need to work on that.

Time runs out quickly, and I wanted to get this question in for you.

You've had seven careers and you're still launching new projects at 78.

What can the younger generation of entrepreneurs.

We've got five generations out there now.

You and I are the baby boomers.

All right, we're on that.

I think you're on the front end of it, and I'm kind of on the back end of it.

So we're in there.

Well, what can they learn from the long game approach to work and life?

You know, take nothing for granted.

Find what you love, find what you're good at, and then find opportunities.

Network around what you're good at, because at the end of the day, you're going to be doing something.

An entrepreneur has to do something.

I'll give you a quick example.

My brother's credential I already referred to as Harvard education.

I mean, he's done really well in this lifetime, but he's different than me.

And I need to make this difference clear.

My brother couldn't work one day without an office, one day without an administrative assistant, one day without a parking space, one day without an executive lounge.

He's tried it.

I've tried to help him, but it's just not who he is.

He needs that structure.

If you're going to invent your life or reinvent your life, and if it's at the beginning of your life, the key is, can you operate?

Can you motivate yourself?

Can you deeply appreciate who you are, what you offer?

Again, value, and then stick with it.

Take meetings, take bad gigs.

All my kids were interns.

All my kids were interns.

They created great careers in different areas, in therapy and public relations, in marketing.

But in the beginning, they basically gave themselves away while they could in order to get the kind of experiences that taught them how good they were at anything.

So to me, the Youngsters really need to do that, especially now.

And I love that.

You and I, before we got on, we talked about AI.

AI will never replace what you and I are doing right now.

Now it can replace.

I don't make a flyer anymore.

I don't know about you, Michael.

I. I talked to ChatGPT.

I say I get, I brainstorm, I say make me a flyer.

And it's incredible.

So I don't need the same marketing department I needed way back when, but my ability to talk and teach and coach and counsel and get into somebody's heart and it's irreplaceable.

Don't worry about that.

Yeah, no, I think the key is to use it as a tool.

It's an amplification tool.

Takes already your wisdom, your insights and can amplify you.

The book is called Shift the Gift of Reinvention by Jay Sargent.

You can order it at Amazon or where you buy your books and great place to get it instantly.

So after 78 years of seven reinventions, you put it all down.

What works, what doesn't, what it really takes to start again.

So never too late.

Credentials are overrated and there are no small moments and reinventions of skill.

And I think you approach that subject just beautifully and you articulate it just as well.

Jay Sargent, Coach Jay, thanks for being our guest today.

This was amazing.

Thank you very much, Michael.

Thank you for having me.

Bye everyone.

As you are listening to this episode, what is one idea that you've heard that's caught your attention and why does it matter so much to you?

And who is one person who you can share that with?

Either sharing this episode or just sharing that insight that occurred to you while you were listening.

Perhaps it is understanding that there are no small moments, only moments we don't understand yet.

Or maybe it's that in business you must break your patterns, move constantly, and see the signs before they are vivid.

Thank you for listening, for learning, and for investing in yourself so that you can become the best version of you.

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Goodbye.