Reinvent Your Life with Steve Olsher

 

 

Listen to the podcast here:

 

Highlights:

01:27 Live and Learn 
09:38 Open Up Opportunities 
18:44 Try Something Different 
26:30 Radio Show vs. Podcasts
34:19 Write the Book That You Most Need
38:09 Be Icons of Influence- Join the New Media Summit 
40:31 The World is Waiting For YOU!

 

Resources:

Book
What Is Your What? :Discover The One Amazing Thing You Were Born To Do by Steve Olsher
Internet Prophets: The World’s Leading Experts Reveal How to Profit Online by Steve Olsher

How do you reinvent your life when everything seems to be working against you? Join at @myexpectation and @steveolsher as they uncover how to create opportunities and reinvent your life. #liveandlearn #podcasting #LifeAlteringEpiphanies… Click To Tweet

Quotes:

“We all have unique gifts… to really shine.” -Steve Olsher

“When it moves you to take immediate action, those are life-altering epiphanies… It can lead you down a path of finding yourself.” -Art Costello

“The person next to you could have the most incredible story and you’d never know it unless you talk to him.” -Steve Olsher 

“You are the solution to someone else’s problems…  We have an obligation to do whatever it takes to reach them.” -Steve Olsher 

“You should be paid extraordinarily well for what comes as naturally to you as breathing and not be apologetic about it.” -Steve Olsher 

“Figure out exactly what it is that you want to do, how you want to leverage that gift that you have to serve the world and ultimately, have clarity around the people that you’re most compelled to serve- once you have that clarity, things that used to bother you will carry a lot less weight.” -Steve Olsher 

 

Meet Steve:

Steve Olsher is the world’s foremost reinvention expert. He is also the New York Times best-selling author of What Is Your What? and host of the number 1 radio show and podcast, Reinvention Radio & Beyond 8 Figures. He also serves as an International Keynote Speaker and in-demand media guest. Steve’s backstory has a lot of messes in the hindsight. But he succeeded through them all by tapping into his ability to create opportunities from seemingly hopeless endeavors. Steve believes that all individuals have a unique gift that will make them shine. That’s why he is passionate and dedicated to helping others reinvent their lives. 

Website
Facebook
Twitter
Google+
YouTube

Transcription:

Art Costello: Welcome to the Shower Epiphanies Podcast. Today is a special day for me because somebody who I have a great deal of respect is going to be on the show. Steve Olsher is known as the world’s foremost Reinvention Expert, and as you all know, reinvention is what we all do at various points in our lives. Steve is a New York Times best selling author of What Is Your WHAT?, and Discover The ONE Amazing Thing You Were Born To Do. Author Business Technology Book of the Year, Internet Prophets: The World’s Leading Experts Reveal How to Profit Online. Creator of The New Media Summit, hosted of a number one radio and podcast Reinvention Radio and Beyond 8 Figures, International Keynote speaker, and an in demand media guest who has veered on CNN, HuffPost, and the cover of Foundr’s Magazine, and countless other media. Steve, welcome to the show.

Steve Olsher: Thanks, Art, I appreciate you having me, bud.

Art Costello: Can you tell us your story? I know it’s an amazing story, and I want you to start back at the beginning for you.

Steve Olsher: Yeah. Well, you know, man, how much time do we have? Right? So the story, I think, at least for this conversation really begins in my ears of just tapping into, I believe that we all have unique gifts, right? Seeing other talents, special ways, if you will, to really shine. And so, for me it’s always been as an entrepreneur, I mean, from the time I was old enough to pick a rake up and try to move some leaves around, to shovel in snow with the sidewalks and driveways. I mean, the whole nine, I think even from the time I was maybe 12, 13 years old, I was pretty darn entrepreneurial. And that led to a number of different endeavors, not the least of which was deejaying in clubs around 19, or so I had kind of a, I dunno, it was one of those just kinds of a burning feeling like you just have to do something, and you don’t know where it comes from, or I guess maybe it’s like in a shower epiphany, right? I mean, but it just comes from somewhere there. And for me at 19 it was, after having DJ in clubs for a long time it was, I need to open my own club. So I built up a pretty decent following, but I was 19, and I had known at that point that obviously it couldn’t be an alcohol driven club. It was going to have to be a nonalcoholic club. And I kind of thought that that would be a good idea, from the standpoint of we could do a nonalcoholic club that would cater to teenagers early, so maybe those 18 and under early, and then we could close down, and clean up, and then we’d reopen like around midnight, or something like that. And we’d stay open from midnight till three, four, five in the morning, however long people wanted to stay for those who are 18 and over.

“We all have unique gifts… to really shine.” -Steve Olsher Click To Tweet

And so, as I was kicking around this idea and I thought that it held a lot of potential because there wasn’t anything like it in the area where I was at the time. I was talking to a friend of mine about this idea, it was actually a golf coach, and I was trying to learn the game, and he was helping me with that game, but it was also pretty good about talking about life and things that were going on in the world. And I told him about the idea and I kind of laid him through it, stepping through it. He was just like, okay, well, it certainly sounds like a good idea. Certainly sounds like it has a lot of potential. So why don’t you just share with me what your concerns are? Why wouldn’t you do it? And I told him: “I was like, well, you know, I guess I’m afraid of looking bad. I’m afraid of losing money. I’m afraid of not being able to recover. I don’t know. I guess I’m just thinking all these worst case scenarios in my mind here.” And he said: “Well, let me ask you this. What are you doing right now for money?” And I told him, I said, well, and this is what I was doing at the time. I was waiting tables, I was deejaying in clubs, and I was pumping gas. And you know, you have thousands of conversations with people and well, millions of conversations with people, and millions of things are said to you over the course of your years. So this is one of those sentences that has really just stuck with me for my entire career, especially, certainly from a business perspective. And when he said to me was, I don’t even know if you realize how profound that statement was, man, I’ll share it with you here now.

But what he basically said is: “Look, I like the idea of that club. I think it holds a lot of potential. And in a worst case scenario, if things don’t work out with the club, you can always go back to pumping gas.” And it was just one of those things, again, it really just laid heavy on me because he was right. You know, the fact is even at 19, I mean, I had accomplished certain skills that I could always go back to, if I absolutely have to keep the lights on, if I absolutely have to put food on the table, et cetera, right? So that’s a mantra I’ve tried to live by, really for the better part of the last 30 odd years. It’s true, no matter where you are in your life, I mean, you truly, something doesn’t happen in the way that you needed to happen with in your personal life or your professional life. You can always go back to pumping gas, right? Whatever that is for you. And so, yeah, I mean, I ended up opening the club, raise some capital to do it, and wrote a business plan to do it. And at the time, I mean, it was a lot of money. I mean, I was pretty stunned by how much money I was able to raise. And that was the huge lump sum of $25,000. And looking back on it, that was a huge mountain to climb, to be able to raise $25,000 as a 19 year old kid, but getting to open the club? We did really well for an extended period of time. And then like any venture that was run by a 19, 20, 21 year old, by the time I left, of course we had our bumps in the road and I ended up closing our doors. But it feels like that was many moons ago.

Art Costello: Was it profitable?

Steve Olsher: It was. And it was because I’ve always been really good at marketing. Marketing is something that comes as naturally to me as breathing. And so, I don’t know man, just in hindsight, I don’t even really know all the things that we did, but I know that on opening night, so the clubs sat in kind of a retail section of town there and ours was on the lower level of this building. Our club was on the lower level of that building. And so, as people started to gather for opening night on the sidewalk and lining up to get in, pretty soon that single file line became a double file line, became a triple file line. And pretty soon before we knew it, there was, by some estimates about a thousand people waiting to get into this club and it poured out into the street. And so, this was a huge five lane road, and they literally had to close two lanes of that road in order to accommodate the overflow of people standing outside. So yeah, I mean, we came out of the gate pretty hard, and there were some issues of course that had to be worked out. But yeah, we made money. Unfortunately, at the end of the day, it was a cash business, and then a cash businesses, cash has a way of sneaking out left, right, and center, and my partner and I didn’t make as much money, and all was said and done as we might have liked in terms of having some sort of golden parachutes, or a nest egg, or a pot of gold there at the end of the rainbow. But we did, we did okay, and live and learn.

Art Costello: And you kept going. No matter what obstacles you ran into. One of the things that I find fascinating about it is, I have another friend who started out in the club business, but she had a really unique thing. She started booking couples into clubs in Phoenix, in Las Vegas. Her business was, she would go to the club owner and then they would hire her to bring couples into the club, and she, it led her into one of the most successful social media companies in the United States right now, she’s just flourishing. So it’s always interesting to me when we get into these businesses, what they lead to next. And that’s really what I’m after with you is, what was next? How it propelled you into your next venture?

Steve Olsher: Yeah, so when the club ran its course, ended up going back to Chicago, which is where I was born and raised, and my grandfather had started Foremost Liquor Stores in Chicago, which had at one point had stores in, I believe we were in 12 different States at some point there in the 80’s. But anyway, my grandmother started Foremost Liquor Stores, and my mom had gone to work for my grandfather back in around 77 or so when my folks got divorced. And so, when things went to hell with the club, my mom had invited me to come and take a look at what we were doing with the family business to see if that would be of interest. And they were sort of in this limbo period of trying to figure out what was next and so on. And while I didn’t love the liquor business and I’d never been a big drinker as I shared with you there, I mean, it was a nonalcoholic club that I opened, right? So never been a big drinker, but I thought there might be an interesting opportunity there. And of course, being whatever I might’ve been at that point 21, 22, 23, whatever it was, I didn’t know what my options were. I didn’t really know what I wanted to do. I just knew that at least I felt that I wasn’t wired as a typical corporate employee. Like where I wanted to go and get a a typical nine to five unless that nine to five was something that I was actually running, you know? And it was my endeavor, so, well, fast forward a little bit. So I came back home and had an opportunity to sit down with mom and grandpa, and we were talking about things, and there was a very small piece of the Foremost puzzle, which was called Foremost Liquor-by-Wire. And basically Liquor-by-Wire was, if you think about FTD for flowers, that’s what Liquor-by-Wire was.

So in other words, if you were in Texas and you wanted to send a bottle of champagne to a friend in New York who just closed a big deal, you would call us on our 1-800 number. And at the time we called it a WATS line, and we would take that order, and we would then have that ordered delivered by local New York retailer. And so, we had a pretty good network of foremost and non-formal stores throughout the country. But the business itself wasn’t doing much. I mean, it was, I don’t know, maybe doing a few orders a week, their days would go by and the phone wouldn’t ring, right? So nobody really knew about it, that has had pretty significant potential. So I said: “You know what? Let me, let me try to dig in here, and let me see what I can do.” And so, that was 1991, and that’s exactly what I did. I started digging in with this Foremost Liquor-by-Wire piece, and created a catalog that was supported by the brand, so the brands like absolutes of the world and so on would buy ads in the catalog, and we ended up then sending out that catalog to consumers, buying direct mail lists, and so on, and giving people the opportunity to send gifts of wine, champagne, spirits, gift baskets, to others across the country. And then we were able to expand into Canada, and then we were able to expand into Mexico, and to some of the other international places. And by the time AOL, and CompuServe, and Prodigy, and all that fun stuff started to hit the grocery store is pretty hard in 93 with their disks. I said: “You know what? This is a pretty interesting opportunity.” And so, looked into the different options there in terms of the online world and decided that a CopyServe was going to be the horse that we were going to ride. And so, sure enough, we launched a, I guess what you would call a store on CompuServe’s Electronic Mall in 1993. So we were really early in the online space that led to creating a fully functional ECommerce build from scratch site in 95. And by the time 98 rolled around, we were in a pretty decent position to try to move even further down the path. And so, I decided at that point that, number one, let’s move away from Foremost Liquor-by-Wire and just call it Liquor by Wire. And then number two, let’s see if we can’t find a better domain for what we’re doing here. And that’s when I was able to track down the liquor.com domain and the bourbon.com domain to a, sensibly a kid that was squatting on the domains, and he was in Northern California, we were in Chicago, ended up making contact with them, and ended up buying both domains for $7,500 in 1998, which interestingly enough at the time, it felt like a stretch.

Art Costello: You could buy a dollar back then, a domain name–

Steve Olsher: Yeah, I mean, he earned early on when we were looking at domains, because we had started looking at domains in 95, when we built that fully functioning commerce site. Our webmaster at the time told us: “Yeah, you don’t need any of the other domains like rum.com, or vodka.com, or wine.com, you don’t need any of those. Just do your company name and that’s it, right?” So in hindsight, of course, there were some pretty big misses there, but that’s a story for another day. But we ended up investing in the liquor.com domain, got the bourbon.com domain as well. And that really gave us the opportunity then to take advantage of so much of what was going on in that whole.com world. Because that was around the time where things were pretty crazy. I mean, the venture capital world was going pretty nuts. I guess the best way to put it is ideas on a napkin were getting funded with millions of dollars. And so here we were, we had a great category, killer domain, all of the quote unquote, heavy lifting was done. All of our foundational pieces were in place. We were doing millions of dollars in revenue. We just needed more people to know that we existed. So that’s when we thought, you know what? Maybe we can take this company public because that’s what a lot of companies were doing at that point. And so, yeah, we just really got blinded by the.com light, and bought into the whole, just the whole mentality of, look, you need to raise a lot of money. You need to sign away your management rights. Wall street wants to see gray hair, like the whole nine.

You’ve got to bring in all these lettered saviors, the CEO’s, CFO’s, CTO, the WTF. I mean, all these people, right? And again, just being blind about the.com light, being blinded by the potential for making millions, hundreds of millions. I mean, just, it was nuts. We did exactly that, and we invested a lot of money to take the company public, and raised a lot of money to take the company public. And then March of 2000 was the time that we had everything put together and we were ready to go public. And I think it was roughly a week before we were slated to get out the market imploded. And that was when, that whole .com bubble burst, and it was pretty clear pretty quickly that all of these people that we had brought in to take us to this promise land, really had no clue what they were doing. And they, and really how they were going to do is they were just going to spend their way through it, figuring we’re going to go out, we’re going to raise $118 million here, which is what we were planning on doing. And with that in hand, they’d be able to just spend their way to figuring it out. So within nine months of that debacle, I literally walked away from the entire company, including the domains which I had brought in more on a personal level, on a corporate level, but that was 2000, and by the end of 2000, I literally walked away from everything.

Art Costello: One of the things that I have recognized in our conversations is that you see potential. You see potential and things. And I think what makes the difference in you is that you take action. You just don’t see it. You start making it happen. You’ve done that with your businesses. I know that you’ve been through some stuff personally. What personal challenges, and what role does your entrepreneurial ship have in actually getting through your personal challenges?

Steve Olsher: Yeah, so I mean, this was certainly on the professional front, but at the same token it was on the personal front as well. I mean, when your whole identity is tied up into a company and that’s why you live in what you do, it becomes quite a blow to your ego. And so, I really didn’t have time to rest on my laurels. I just didn’t, because I was the primary breadwinner. I mean, my wife was working, but she was a Chicago public school teacher, so it wasn’t exactly making bank. They don’t pay teachers what they should as you know. And so, just couldn’t really sit there and grieve too much about it. But yeah, man, that’s when I really could see the writing on the wall in terms of where the next trend was headed. And that next trend was really headed towards real estate, and real estate development was not really something that I knew well, but I hadn’t dibbled and dabbled a little bit in that world. And we’d actually owned that time a multi unit building that we lived in. So we lived in a fairly nice size unit, and then we were renting out the other units who were making money every single month. So it’s like, you know what? This looks interesting. Maybe this is something I can give a whirl to, and that’s where I then spent the better part of the next 10 years of my career, and is in real estate developments.

Art Costello: And of course, real estate is an up and down market. I mean, it’s like a roller coaster ride. Anybody that has been involved in it knows it’s highs and lows.

Steve Olsher: Yeah, you gotta be able to weather the storm and all that fun stuff. But the reality is, when I first got into it in 2000, there was no such thing as a bear market. It was a bull market for the better part of, at least in Chicago is six, seven years. So everything that I would touch, everything that I would do every year, apartment building, I would buy that I would flip into condominium units, and anything that I would do just really did quite well until it didn’t. And so, when I’m in Chicago specifically, it was around 2006, actually a little bit earlier than most markets, things started to crumble. And so, I had developed about 50 odd million dollars in real estate, and again, was doing really well with it. But as things began to get a little bit more difficult in 2009, I really had my own personal wake up call. My stepfather, who had been very much a father to me, unfortunately, was just suffering from a really powerful illness that was winning the war. And I remember my mom calling me towards the beginning part of 2009, maybe around April or so, but I remember mom calling me and telling me that, Al, again, my stepfather would raise me since I was very young, just that he was dealing, he was really in his final days of life is what she was saying to me. And she said: “You got to come here, and you got to spend some time with him.” And of course that’s what I went and did. And I was sitting there, just he and I, and he was in a sort of a hospital like bed, and that was set up in the living room of my parent’s apartment. And so, I think the family was off elsewhere,

I’m not exactly sure where they were, but somewhere else in the house, or maybe they’d gone out to get some food or whatever it was. And as I was sitting there alone without, I was holding his hand, and this was about 48 hours or so before he pass. And so, he could no longer talk. He wasn’t communicative in terms of anything verbal, but I was holding his hand, and I believe we were able to perhaps connect them through that point of physical touch. Because as I held his hand, I actually had a vision of my funeral, not of his funeral but of mine, and I was in a coffin. I mean, it was dark, it was damp, it was cold. There were little sort of slivers of light coming through. I can kind of make out handful of people gathered around, couldn’t really see who they were, but I could tell it was a huge crowd by any stretch. But I remember being in that coffin being lowered. They were lowering me into the ground, and basically the words that were being spoken graveside were, here lies Steve Olsher. He dedicated his life to chasing the almighty dollar. And that was all that was said. And so, as I tried to make a sound, as I tried to let people know I was alive, I was in there, nobody could hear me. I couldn’t, obviously, couldn’t make any sounds. And that was the scene. And so, it was interesting because I think that my stepfather was really just trying to connect with me in that moment to say, yeah, this is your inevitable fate, unless you change course, unless you do something different here, you might do well, you might make a lot of money, but your life is really going to be important to you and those closest to you, but really no one else.

And so, that was a wake up call that hit me really, really hard. And it was one of those moments where it was like, I’m going to either continue down this path that I forged, or I’m going to try to do something completely different. And I really didn’t know what to do. I didn’t know how to do anything different. I just didn’t know. But I knew that there had been certain struggles, and trials, and tribulations that I had didn’t do over at that point, this call it 20 years of being an entrepreneur. And I thought maybe I could help others save themselves from some of the inevitable brain damage that goes hand in hand with trying to do this on your own. So I didn’t know, but I knew I had to put some things down on paper. I knew I didn’t want to reach my deathbed without having shared some of the things that I felt like had worked fairly well for me in my life. And so, that’s what I started doing. That was really the first step there is, let me try to write a book, and put some of these ideas down on paper that might, again, help people become much clearer on who they are, and how they can get from point A to point B faster with less trial as tribulation, and with a lot more sense of contribution of the [inaudible].

Art Costello: What you had was quite an epiphany. When you really think about it, when it moves you to take immediate action, those are life altering Epiphanes that we have. Trouble with most people is they don’t pay attention to them, they just buried them, and they don’t listen to them, and they don’t take action. And when you do, it can really lead you down a path of finding yourself. And tell us where it’s led you now because you’ve built a powerful platform, and you really do help a lot of people in a lot of different ways.

“When it moves you to take immediate action, those are life-altering epiphanies… It can lead you down a path of finding yourself.” -Art Costello Click To Tweet

Steve Olsher: Yeah. So I couldn’t just walk away from obviously all the real estate stuff that I had, and there were a number of properties that were in trouble, and I was going to have to see those through, and so on, and there were new properties that were doing well. So it was a mixed bag there. I couldn’t just walk away, but I knew that I wanted to transition out of what I was doing and into more of this work along the lines of coaching, or consulting, or writing, or speaking, or even podcasting. And so that was 2009, and again, because I had been online for as long as I had been online, I was familiar with the whole world of podcasting. And radio to me has always been the Holy grail. I mean, I love radio, I love the banter, I love chit chat, the whole nine. And so, I thought to myself, you know what? Radio’s great, but the reality is, you can only reach so many people with a radio show. You have a signal, that signal is going to go as far as it can go. And then the number of people who hear that signal, or tune in that signal, it’s only going to be is as many as, number one, that radio station is marketing for people to tune in. And then number two, just the luck of the draw in terms of timing if someone listening at that exact moment in time where they can actually access that signal, right? And so, I had always felt like, as soon as I heard about podcasts, and that might be something that would be pretty interesting to pursue. But reality is, technology had not caught up with demand even at that point in terms of the ease of accessing a show. I mean, today you just push a button on the dashboard of your car and poof, there you have a podcast. But for many, many, many years, you’d have to go through a significant number of steps in order to access a podcast. I won’t go into the details, but just know that if you weren’t fully committed to downloading and listening to that episode, it wasn’t going to happen easily, right? So I said, you know what? Let me see what I can do here to start a show, right? Yeah, I’m looking to reinvent my life. Maybe I can sit down and talk with people who have been reinventing their lives. And the idea for Reinvention Radio, which is kind of a funny name because it was a podcast which I first started doing in 2009. So the idea of Reinvention Radio was really born at that time that I started to write and started to think about, Hey, if I’m doing these things to help others and sharing what’s worked well for me, maybe I can bring on other people who reinvented their lives, and they can share what’s working well for them. And I was fortunate enough to somehow stumble across, Steve and Bill Harrison, Bradley Communications. They have a radio and television interview report magazine, and they have a program called Quantum Leap, which I believe they actually still do to this day. And somehow I came across them, and it was a huge leap to be able to do it cause I think it was like a $12,000 investment to work with them for a year in 2009. But I said, you know what? I’m gonna go ahead and do this. Because their promise was to be able to help get a book out, to be able to create a podcast, and be able to become a speaker, the whole nine of becoming this expert, if you will.

And so, I took that leap of faith, and yeah, they were very, very helpful in helping to show me what was possible in this world because the reality was, I was a businessman, I had no idea how to become the business itself, right? Where I would actually be the man of the business, so to speak, and that people would be investing in me and my personal brand. And so, it was really helpful, really opened my eyes to a lot of what’s possible there. And so, I did finish the book. It ended up becoming called Journey To You: A Step-by-Step Guide to Becoming Who You Were Born to Be. I won’t bore you with the details, but I had thought that I had written the best book on God’s green earth. When I first wrote that manuscript and I submitted it to a couple of contests, and basically in both cases they said: “You know, this is pretty much the worst thing that we’ve ever read.” And so, it was a blow to the ego. But I ended up saying, you know, Hey, if I’m going to commit to doing this the right way, let me sign a really good developmental and grammatical editor who can help make this thing what it needs to be. And sure enough, I did exactly that. Originally the book was called, Break the Pattern. And this gentleman that I hired came back with the name Journey To You, and he took my 80,000 word document, and it was really a diatribe at that point, and cut it down to about a 40,000 word, much more concise, much more clear document that ended up becoming, as I said, Journey To You.

And so, it’s just been a really interesting learning process all along the way. But I certainly will say that, number one, having the ability to put my thoughts down on paper, it’s really kind of lifted a certain weight from my shoulders. Like I said, I knew I didn’t want to hit my deathbed without sharing some of these things that had worked well for me in the hopes of really being able to help others shorten their learning curve, et cetera. It also wep my appetite for continuing to write, and I ended up doing a book around internet marketing called Internet Prophets at a live event called Internet Prophets LIVE! Ended up with a book deal from Wiley, and that book deal basically gave us the opportunity to redo Journey To You and it’s new updated form after having, conducted an event that I call The Reinvention Workshop, and working with thousands of people over the years there, I’d learned a lot more about really how to help people discover the one amazing thing they were born to do. And so, that book Journey To You ultimately became What Is Your WHAT?: Discover The One Amazing Thing You Were Born To Do, which hit the New York Times list in 2013, proudest achievement of that is we hit number one overall on barnesandnoble.com, stood above Bill O’Reilly and Smothers at that point, which was super cool. But like you said, man, it’s been a journey and nowadays I teach people how to leverage the power of new media to share and monetize their mission and their message. So specifically podcasting and we met, I know you’ve come to our event, The New Media Summit where we give 150 attendees the opportunity to take center stage and pitch top podcast on who they are and what they do, and they literally get booked on the spot. So yeah, it’s been an interesting journey. Lots of ups and downs along the way, man. But I know we only have so much time.

Art Costello: Yeah, we do. One of the things that I recognize, again, that you see the big picture, you see the big picture in things, and then again, as always take action. That’s really, really important because if you can’t see the big picture, you can’t see the potential in things, then you kind of stymie yourself, you kind of get into that fearful thing, but when you have competence and it really moves you. Steve, it’s been a pleasure having you on the show. I really want to give you an opportunity to tell us what’s coming up, where people can get ahold of you. And I’m going to encourage the audience to reach out to Steve because he is really the real thing, and he’s genuine, and he cares. He really cares about what he’s doing, and people that he helps. Can you kind of tell us in the next five minutes what’s coming up? What’s going on? And what we’re going to hear from you in the future?

Steve Olsher: Yeah, man. So appreciate the opportunity, and look, I think I should probably just backtrack for two seconds and just say, an author land, we write the book that we most need, right? And so Journey To You, which eventually became, What Is Your WHAT? really was the book that I needed during those transitionary times where I was trying to figure out how to reinvent my life and what to do next. And for most of my adult life, believe it or not, I’ve actually struggled with trying to identify how I’m naturally wired to Excel, and trying to identify what it is that I’m really good at, and the gifts that I have, and how I can share those gifts, and then make money from those gifts. And so, Journey To You and then subsequently, What Is Your WHAT? really is the book that I wish I had when I was in that phase of trying to reinvent my life. Because having done The Myers–Briggs, and What Color Is Your Parachute?, and the StrengthsFinder, and you name it. I mean, they already really just left me with more questions than answers, and so I knew there had to be an easier way, as I said. And that’s what we ended up doing in terms of my editor and I, in terms of creating the What Is Your WHAT? framework. Because in What Is Your WHAT? it really does help people to identify their core gifts, the primary vehicle they’ll use to share that gift, and then who the people are that they’re most compelled to serve. And so, if you’re struggling figuring out your core gift, and your primary vehicle, and the people that you’re most compelled to serve, those are the three pieces of the What Is Your WHAT? framework that really enable you to hit the ground running once you have those answers.

And Lord knows the majority of the world, including myself for so long, struggled with venturing one part of that equation, let alone all three. And so, look, if you are in that place where you want to figure out really who you are, how your NAPSI wired to Excel, what comes as naturally to you as breathing, and really what puts fire in your soul, then I highly recommend starting there. Because my work has really helped, shall we say, over the years I’ve helped tens of thousands of people, hundreds of thousands of people now, discover, share, and monetize their WHAT, so that really is the basis of the work that I do. And it all begins with answering that core question of What Is Your WHAT? And so, if you’re there and you don’t know that answer, we actually give away the entire New York Times bestseller for free, Art. And we do that at whatisyourwhat.com. So folks can start there, and to go to whatisyourwhat.com and grab a free copy of the entire book. And then if you’re more in the, I want to, I know what my what is, but I need to share it and monetize it in a much more powerful way, then I’d certainly say that you do what art did, right? Which is coming to The New Media Summit. I mean, it’s a phenomenal opportunity for you to get booked on today’s top podcasts, for you really to learn how to leverage and monetize the power of new media, and how to turn every visibility opportunity into revenue. And of course, the highlight of the show there is you get to take center stage, and Art, even changes the last time you were there, man. But now everybody takes center stage to pitch the entire audience. Everybody on the livestream on who they are and what they do, and we just have a rockin good time there, and you’ll leave with more friends, and you can shake a stick at, and you will get booked on the spot. We have a 100% track record of people coming to The New Media Summit and getting booked on the spot. So yeah, we’ve got a couple of events coming up, and of course you can get details at newmediasummit.net, and we’d love to have you there.

Art Costello: Well, I can attest to The New Media Summit and its effectiveness in helping become better and certainly meeting friends. I was booked 37 times on the first one I went to, and this last one I attended, I have not only booked guests on my show, but I’m now booked on a lot of the icon shows. Can you tell us a little bit about the icons and how it works?

Steve Olsher: Yeah, yeah, sure, sure, sure. So we call the podcasters who come to the event, we call them icons of influence. And these are all professional podcasters, if you will, from the standpoint of they’ve all done more than a hundred episodes. They’re all making money leveraging what I call the business of podcasts you supposed to looking at, strictly podcasting as a business. And they all conduct interviews, and they’re all looking for guests just like you. And reality is that they like me and my team, we actually take great pride in featuring people that the world hasn’t heard from a million times, nothing against the usual suspects, the people who you’ve heard from over and over again, nothing against them. But we know their stories, we know who they are, we know what they stand for, right? And frankly, inviting people like that onto our shows, that’s easy. The hard part is finding people like you, right? People who have these amazing unique stories that the world hasn’t heard from a million times. And so, the icons that we bring into The New Media Summit all share that same approach as we do, which is, we’re looking for awesome guests, we want to feature people that the world hasn’t heard from a million times. And we understand that some of the most quality conversations that we’ve ever had are with people who have been through the most extraordinary circumstances in life and what they had to endure to get to where they are now. On Reinvention Radio we say everyone has a story to tell, what’s yours? Right? So many people, it just, even the person next to you, I mean, you’d never know unless you had a conversation with them. I mean, just the person next to you could have the most incredible story, and you’d never know it unless you talk to them, right? And those are the people that we like to bring on to the shows. Those are the people that the icons of influence like to bring onto their shows, and runs the gamut of people who join us at the summit, from coaches, and authors, and speakers, and holistic practitioners, and business owners, to even podcasters who are looking to get booked on other shows, and so many other different types of amazing people, and people fly in from all over the globe would be there.

“The person next to you could have the most incredible story and you’d never know it unless you talk to him.” -Steve Olsher Click To Tweet

Art Costello: Is there anything, any one liner worth of wisdom that we can close the show with from you?

Steve Olsher: Sure, yeah, I’m happy to do that. And here’s what I would say, which is the fact of the matter is that the world is waiting for you. There are people who are literally praying for you to show up in their lives, and no matter how you slice it, you are the solution to someone else’s problem. And they are literally right now, as I said, are hundreds, thousands, even tens of thousands of people literally praying for you to show up in their lives. And I think we have an obligation to do whatever it takes to be able to reach them. And ultimately when you already able to reach them, and they can get up off of their knees, and they can stop praying, then it’s time for them to start paying, right? And I’m a full on, full blown advocate of the fact that you shouldn’t have to succumb to life as a starving artist simply because you’re compelled to draw. I mean, if a ballplayer can get paid millions of dollars annually to hit a ball with a stick, you should be paid extraordinarily well for what comes as naturally to you is breathing, and not be apologetic about it. And the idea is to figure out exactly what it is that you want to do, how you want to leverage that gift that you have to serve the world, and ultimately have clarity around the people that you’re most compelled to serve. And once you have that clarity, the things that used to bother you will carry a lot less weight. There won’t be enough hours in the day to get done what you’ve got to get done, and you’ll literally jump out of bed with a fire in your soul every day to reach those who, again, are literally praying for you to show up in their lives. So you’ve got to do what you can to reach them. I believe it’s our obligation to do everything in our power to share the gifts that we’ve been given ,and you are exactly what you’re supposed to be. Everything that happened to you happened for exactly the reason that it was supposed to happen, for good, for bad, for ugly, for worse, for better. And I’m just happy to be sharing this moment in time with you.

“You are the solution to someone else’s problems… We have an obligation to do whatever it takes to reach them.” -Steve Olsher Click To Tweet “You should be paid extraordinarily well for what comes as naturally to you as breathing and not be apologetic about it.” -Steve Olsher Click To Tweet “Figure out exactly what it is that you want to do, how you want to leverage that gift that you have to serve the world and ultimately, have clarity around the people that you’re most compelled to serve- once you have that clarity, things that… Click To Tweet

Art Costello: Thank you Mr. Steve Olsher. Those words of wisdom are really worth everything that we do. I mean, you just have so much wisdom, and such a heart to help people. Thank you Steve. Thank you audience for tuning in today. Again, you can find me at expectationtherapy.com, Shower Epiphanies Podcast on iTunes, Stitcher, and all the rest. Thank you for attending today, and I look forward to being attached to you always.

 

————————————————————-

 

Love the show? Subscribe, rate, review, and share!

• Here’s How »

Join the Shower Epiphanies Community today:

• expectationtherapy.com
• Shower Epiphanies Facebook
• Show Epiphanies Twitter
• Shower Epiphanies LinkedIn
• Show Epiphanies Instagram