Have you ever wondered what’s the secret to all round success? How can you become a master of not only your wealth but your health and relationships too? Join Mel Abraham (CPA, Entrepreneur, Mentor, Business and Success Strategist and #1 best selling author) and Eric Partaker as they share tips on how you can reach your full potential and win at life!
KEY POINTS
Strong Mind, Strong Body – If the body’s ready, the mind is ready. If you are lazy with your body, inevitably you will be lazy with your mind. Get up and exercise, create a healthy routine to stimulate your mind!
Nothing Is More Expensive Than A Missed Opportunity – Recognize opportunities when they reveal themselves to you, take them on, don’t let them pass you buy. You will only regret the chances you didn’t take!
Life Is Precious, Cherish Every Moment! – Everybody has been given a specific number of slices of life. The question is how are you going to spend those slices? Too often, people flippantly spend them with little care about how many they have left.
Give It All You’ve Got! – When you say yes to something, you are giving up a piece of your life. That means that you have to be prepared to give everything to that moment!
Keep Your Eye On The Finish Line! – Too often people do not define their finish line. If you don’t know where you’re going, then you will just keep going faster and harder. Define your end goal, and celebrate your wins along the way!
Live The Way You Want To Be Remembered – You have the ability to shift a life. Smiling at someone, a helping hand, a handshake. The little things create a legacy. Create your legacy everyday!
Things Happen For Us, Not To Us – Don’t get yourself down, often the toughest times in our lives provide us with the most valuable lessons. You either win or learn.
Fall Down Seven Times, Stand Up Eight – Keep standing back up. When a boxer enters a boxing ring, the name of the game isn’t to avoid getting hit, it’s about when he gets hit, can he survive the punch? Whatever knocks you down, embrace it, learn from it, and keep moving forward.
Your Journey Is Your Own! – Don’t measure yourself against those around you, those on social media, or those to your right and left. Instead measure yourself against who we were yesterday, and aim to improve yourself a little bit everyday!
TRANSCRIPT
Mel Abraham:
I started doing magic shows, half-hour magic shows and I got paid $50 for a half an hour magic show for kids’ birthday parties at 11 years old, okay? Now, we’re talking 1972. So that was a lot of money then. That lit the spark in me going, “We can make a living doing something that we love when we can make a difference in someone’s life.”
I had all these people in my head going, “You need to find work-life balance.” And that was the first mistake because there is no such thing as work-life balance. It insinuates that we’re going to put things in compartments and then when we live life in a bunch of different compartments, we are segmenting our life and that creates conflict. It’s not about balance, it’s about harmony.
Eric Partaker:
Hi, everybody and welcome to another episode of The 2% where we interview peak performers in all walks of life. Why? To give you the strategies, tips, and tools so that you can elevate your game, so that you can grow from your current self to your best self, and reach your full potential, to join the estimated 2% of people who are playing to their fullest capabilities. I’m super excited to have on the show my next guest, Mr. Mel Abraham. Mel, welcome to the show.
Mel Abraham:
Man, it’s so good to be here. Thank you for having me here.
Eric Partaker:
So awesome to have you here as well and I’ll give you a quick intro. We’ll get into more of what you’re doing obviously as the show progresses. I mean, you have quite a resume, certified public accountant, author, speaker, mentor, valuation expert, business and success strategist. You’re an avid, I know from our conversations, martial arts fan and practitioner. You’ve even provided financial expertise and advice to the Fortune 500 as well as some pretty big names including Arianna Huffington, Tony Robbins, and Brendon Burchard. And on that last note, that’s like a good segue, I guess to how we met because we met via Brendon.
This was a lunch that we had in January of 2020 in Puerto Rico. When I sat at that lunch with you, I shared quite a trying moment for me at the time, which was that my dad was battling bladder cancer. That really struck a chord with you. Would you mind maybe we could start there. What’s your own experience in that domain? Why did that strike such a chord with you?
Mel Abraham:
So for me, listen, life happens and we don’t realize it. We’ll go back to 2019, early 2019, April-May 2019. Life was good. I just finished a multi-six-figure launch. I’m speaking on some of the largest stages around the world. I am masterminding with some incredible folks, people running $100 million businesses, billion dollar businesses, and even smaller businesses. But bottom line is I felt like I was on cloud nine. Things were going great. I remember in Puerto Rico, after mastermind, flew back on a G5.
I mean, it’s an experience. I don’t do that often, but it’s an experience. And the crazy thing is two weeks after I stepped off that plane, I found myself in a hospital bed, where they said, “Hey, your CT scan showed a five centimeter tumor in your bladder.” I’m going, “What do you mean?” And he said, “95% chance that you have cancer.” So I mean, I heard the three words that I never thought I would hear. I’m not a smoker. I’m not a drinker. I’m not around chemicals. I had none of the risk factors that I should have had.
No one in my family has ever had cancer. I’m sitting back saying, “Life is good. How did it get turned over like this?” Then it even got worse because he looked at it and he said, “Based on where it’s at,” he said, “we may have to remove your prostate. We might have to put a tube in and a bag for the kidney. And if it’s really bad, you lose your bladder.” So I was like, “Okay. So life is in the balance now.” So when they went in, it turned out not to be five centimeters, it turned out to be seven and a half centimeters. It was a six-hour surgery and I’ve had three surgeries, 33 treatments and four tumors removed and everything.
When we had the conversation, you brought it up, it certainly hit home because I knew the journey that you all were embarking on. I knew the fear. I knew the pain. I knew the discomfort. I knew from the conversations to the physicality of it of what was in store. So it certainly did hit home because it was in my lap to deal with at the time.
Eric Partaker:
What gave you the strength to persevere? How did you get through that?
Mel Abraham:
So if I’m being brutally honest with myself and everyone else, at first I spiraled into a dark place. I start asking the questions of why and how what did I do to deserve this? All the things that you start to have conversations around this demon called cancer. And the thing is that I wasn’t able to find the answers. I wasn’t going to find the answers. They weren’t so easily found and I knew that if I stayed in that space that I wasn’t going to heal.
There was a far less chance of me healing. And I think, one, what I had to do is I had to accept where I was at. I didn’t have to accept my fate, I just had to accept the circumstances. Once I accepted the circumstances then I could say, “Okay, if these are the cards that I’ve been dealt, how do I play this hand? How do I do this psychologically, physically? Who do I need in my corner? Who do I need around me? What tools, what skills, what are the things that I’m lacking to get me through it. One of the things that happened was that I was able to look at the people in my life. And I have an amazing circle of support as I went through this journey, starting with my amazing wife of going to be 10 years next month.
Eric Partaker:
Congratulations.
Mel Abraham:
Thank you. And my son, and all of that. But I think that once I got to the acceptance of the circumstances, then I had to look at why and what was going to get me to fight more. So I looked at life. I mean, I really did. I mean, I was coming off the G5. I was speaking. I was doing the things that brought me so much joy and so much enjoyment in my life and I thought, “I got so much more in me. I got so much more that I want to share. I got so much more of life to live. I’m not ready to give this up. I’m not ready to just roll over. I’m not ready to just get in the fetal position and let this thing take me.
So we kind of had a family meeting and then we then said, “All right. So what do I need?” I need doctors in my corner. I need attitude adjusters in my corner. I need people that are going to kick me in the rear end when I need it in my corner. So back in the day when I used to fight competitively, I had a bunch of people in my corner whether it was strength trainers, and foot movement, and hand movement, and all that stuff. I said, “Okay. I’m getting back in the ring. This time it’s for my life.”
So who do I need in my corner? So we put a team of doctors from western medicine to eastern medicine to holistic medicine. I had one of the best surgeons at UCI that was taking care of me. I’ve got a holistic oncologist, a Qigong master, meditation, acupuncture. I just put them all together and I said, “Here’s the deal, y’all. I’m getting in the ring and I’ll fight this fight, okay? Because none of you can do it for me. But what you can do is prepare me for the ring. What you can do is get me strong. What you can do is tell me what I need to do so when I’m in that ring that I can beat this bad boy down.
I said, “If you’re willing to accept that, if you’re willing to go at this, the way I want to go at this, then you’re part of the team. And if you’re not, I totally get it. But I need people fully committed. I don’t need negativity. I want the reality, but I want us to be aggressive and let’s get after this thing and make sure that it realizes that this is not a welcome place for them and that I’m not the right host for them.” So that’s what we did.
Eric Partaker:
And you won.
Mel Abraham:
I won. I mean, it took a bit. What’s the date? Literally a month ago, we went in for another scope. So this was the one year mark from the last tumor they found and everything’s clear, everything’s clean so I passed that one-year milestone, which is a big milestone at least in my book it was. Now, I feel like we’re no longer on defense. We’re on offense. Now, we’re in preventative mode. And unfortunately that the bladder cancer and all that is a high reoccurring cancer.
So there’s a 60 to 70% reoccurrence rate. So now, the whole team as I said, we’re now in prevention mode. So I’ll go in for another round of treatments in September and another scope in November and do those things. I said, “Let’s be ultra aggressive on prevention, detection, doing the things.” The crazy thing is this. If you saw the amount of supplements and pills that I take from the naturopathic, oncologist, and everything, I probably take 45 or 50 pills a day.
Eric Partaker:
Wow.
Mel Abraham:
I do a shake in the morning and working out six days a week. The crazy thing is that I don’t know what worked to get me past it. So it’s like don’t stop any of it. We’re staying on it because the last thing I want to do is find out, “Oh, that was the thing that worked and I took it out of the regiment.”
Eric Partaker:
Yeah, exactly.
Mel Abraham:
We’re just staying on it.
Eric Partaker:
I took out the wrong thing. No, we don’t want to be there, right?
Mel Abraham:
Yeah, because you’re at the point of no return. Once this thing starts to invade the wall of the bladder and that type of thing, the game changes hugely. I’ll be 60 this year. I’ll be a first-time grandad in August. My son is having their first child, a little granddaughter and I intend to be around when she walks down that aisle.
Eric Partaker:
Beautiful, love it. Love the strength and love the approach, which is when you’re facing an insurmountable or seemingly insurmountable challenge, don’t do it on your own. Reach out to anyone and everyone and pull them in. How can we slay this dragon together rather than on your own.
Mel Abraham:
Right. That’s huge because I’m not good at asking for help.
Eric Partaker:
Why do you think that is?
Mel Abraham:
I’m one of those that’ll be the first one to step up. I mean, you know me from Brendon. Brendon and I are dear, dear friends. We’ve known each other well over a decade. I’m at every single one of his events. I’m helping him run his events. A lot of people don’t know, it’s kind of a funny story, but I don’t get paid. I do it because the love for him, the love for the message, the love for the mission, and I don’t often ask for help on anything, because I don’t want it to ever taint my desire to serve, and the holistic nature of just being there out of the spirit of being there.
So a lot of times I don’t ask, but this time I knew. I said, “I’m out of my league on this.” In fact, the holistic oncologist that I got is because I reached out to Brendon and he said, “Have you talked to JJ and Dr. Amen?” I said, “No.” He says, “Reach out to them.” And they’re the ones that introduced me. Within 15 minutes, I was connected with this oncologist.
Eric Partaker:
Yeah, that’s amazing. Absolutely amazing. Now, we’re going to be talking a little bit later about some of the incredible work that you do with helping entrepreneurs and helping people basically step further into their greatness. I know part of your work is to take that holistic approach that you’re talking about right now. And before we get into that though, you’ve made several references to a couple of occasions to martial arts, to training. So I know for you, I know that you’re an advocate of your psychology is driven by your physiology. So can you tell us a little bit about where does that come from and what do you do to kind of play your highest game professionally on the business front by focusing on yourself, on the health and on the physiology front?
Mel Abraham:
I was just actually having this conversation with a dear friend, Anthony Trucks about this whole idea that-
Eric Partaker:
Anthony Trucks. I just spoke with Anthony three weeks ago. That’s funny.
Mel Abraham:
Oh my god. We’ve been friends for a number of years.
Eric Partaker:
Okay. All right. Cool.
Mel Abraham:
We were just talking about how if the body’s ready, the mind is ready and that if we are lazy with our body, inevitably we’re lazy with our mind.
Eric Partaker:
Right.
Mel Abraham:
I think that one of the challenges is that we can sit back and hope for opportunity to show up on the doorstep. And it probably does and it probably goes by because we don’t notice it. But I think we don’t notice it because we’re not prepared for it. It isn’t about, do you have the opportunities? I think it’s more about are you prepared to take on the opportunities when they show up to recognize them and take them on.
If you’ve got a phone call today, and they said, “Hey, I’d like you to speak tomorrow. And by the way, it’s 2,000 people and I’d like you to speak,” in my case, “on financial affluence or something like that,” am I prepared? If I don’t get ready, if I don’t get my body ready, my mind ready to a point where I am prepared at a moment’s notice, then the opportunity passes us by.
I think that’s part of it. The other part of it is this and this is when someone asked me, we started with the cancer, but I think it really hit me is when someone asked me how has the cancer changed you? I said, “The interesting thing is it allows me to say no to things easier because as much as we’ve been told growing up that our days are numbered, until you stare mortality in the face, I don’t think you take it seriously.” I realize that my days are numbered.
I hope that that’s a really big number, but they’re numbered. We’ve all been given a specific number of slices of life and the question is how we’re going to spend those slices of life? Too often, we flippantly spend them and we don’t know how many slices we’ve been given. So what I realized through the cancer was that if I was going to say yes to something, our time here for instance, if I was going to say yes to something, that I was going to be handing away a piece of my life that I never get back.
The people that listen and watch your show, they are handing a piece of their life up and they’re not going to get it back. And if I don’t respect that, if I don’t understand that, then I kind of flippantly and passively go about my way and go… and pardon the expression, half-ass it. That’s disrespectful. Disrespectful to me, disrespectful to you. If I come in here and not fully invested, that’s not the way to show up. That’s not the way to live life.
So I realized that when I say yes to things as much as when I say no to things, but more importantly when I say yes to things, I’m giving up a piece of my life. That means that I have to be prepared to give everything to that moment, everything to that moment and just leave it out there and know that when I walk away from that moment, I gave it all and not expect anything less from the person on the other side of that transaction, otherwise it doesn’t make sense in the currency of life. And I think that’s how I’ve approached things.
Eric Partaker:
Love it, love it. Absolutely love it. And that mortality that you’re talking about, I mean, I can personally relate to that. I nearly died from a heart attack about a decade ago. I certainly hope, anybody obviously watching or listening to this doesn’t have a health scare as you had or as I had, but equally anybody listening or watching this also will probably have realized that they haven’t been giving life their all, that they haven’t been fully appreciating that you literally only have one life to live, that every second that passes is second gone.
It can’t be retrieved. Time is our most precious asset and our ability to focus in that moment and as you’re saying deliver our best for whatever we’re doing. That’s the best way that we can manifest our existence, right?
Mel Abraham:
You look at it and you go, “How many times…” Well, back in the day when we used to go to restaurants, I mean how many times do you go to a restaurant and you see people like this? They’re on a date, they’re out with a family, and everyone’s head is down in their phones. I used to do security and protective detail work and all that stuff, and I’ve only done it recently for dear, dear friends.
I had a friend of mine, she called me up and she said, “Would you be willing to go to Nashville with me this year?” Because last year they provided security and they were horrible. Someone got a hold of me and this and that. “I trust you and you’ve been with me before.” I said, “Yeah, I’ll travel to Nashville with you.” 22,000 people and I’m going to move her through the crowd. Do you know that we had no issues because by the time we walked past and they pulled their heads out of the phone, we had already passed them up.
Eric Partaker:
I’ve seen entire families when I’ve been, like you’re saying, out for dinner, I’ve seen a family of four all on their phones. It’s pretty scary.
Mel Abraham:
Yeah. So I mean how present are you in that time, in that space? To me, it’s a micro view of what’s going on in other areas of their life. How much attention and presence do you have to your health, to your relationships, to your money, to your business, to your customers? If you are that distracted that this moment doesn’t matter, then why are we even in the moment?
Eric Partaker:
Yeah, exactly. We’re all on a common quest. Our common religion is that we want to become the best version of ourselves, right? We want to become this superhero version of ourselves. And if that’s the case, our kryptonite, that’s our cell phone.
Mel Abraham:
Yeah.
Eric Partaker:
That’s the thing to keep as far away as possible. Now, you’ve talked earlier in the chat, we’ve talked about your focus on helping entrepreneurs. You have a really nice angle to it. Your angle is around affluence and it’s around helping people create a blueprint for… As a matter of fact, I think your main product is called the Affluent Blueprint, right?
Mel Abraham:
Yes, it is. It is.
Eric Partaker:
Yeah. So I I’d love for you to talk about that because everyone knows that if they’re given the opportunity to have more affluence in life and it was like, “Look, here’s a button. If you press this button, you’ll be more affluent.” Is there anybody on the planet who wouldn’t press the button, right? So we’d all-
Mel Abraham:
Yep.
Eric Partaker:
So in the absence of not having that special button to press, can you enlighten us a bit about your approach there and what that program is all about?
Mel Abraham:
Yeah, absolutely. Here’s the thing. Not necessarily going back to the cancer, but it’s what brought this thing so full circle for me. I’ll go back a ways. I actually started my entrepreneurial journey at age 11. I fell in love with magic at age nine. I started doing magic. I was hanging out at a magic shop. And in comes someone who says something about he just got paid X dollars for a gig. I’m this like 10 year old in a magic shop, 11 year old in a magic shop, “What do you mean a gig?” And they explain it to me. Then he walks out and I talk to the owner because I was friends with the owner, and I said, “You can get paid to do this?” And he said, “Yeah.” “Really? I mean, I love magic. I can get paid doing something that I love?” He said, “Yeah.”
So I started doing magic shows, half hour magic shows and I got paid $50 for a half hour magic show for kids birthday parties at 11 years old. Okay? Now, we’re talking 1972. So that was a lot of money then. In fact today, I guess it is too because that’s like $100 bucks an hour for doing something you love. But that lit the spark in me going, “We can make a living doing something that we love when we can make a difference in someone’s life.” And I go, “This is the way to make a living.”
So as I moved through that, that’s what kept me going. Then I went to a different route with the traditional accounting and started my own firm. I had some partners, but they pushed me out in the 1990s, in 1996 because I was going a different way. Most accountants look behind them all the time, I was looking forward. I had a big vision. It wasn’t the in the box kind of vision of accountants.
When I ended up terminating the partnership, we ended up in a situation where I had no cash flow, no backlog, no clients. I was 300,000 in debt because I just bought a house, but it happened to be the year that I became a single full-time dad of my six-year-old son, my five-and-a-half. He came and lived with me. So sitting there going, “Great, I got this debt. The greatest gift in my life is being a dad. How do I make sure that I care for this gift and build the business that I want?”
So I did what most entrepreneurs knew, I got on the treadmill. I started running. I stuck my head down. I was running fast. I was running hard. I was running long. And all of a sudden I started to get clients, and I got the cash flow, and I started to get things going. I’m looking at my son going, “Jeremy, this stuff’s going to work. We’re keeping the roof over our heads.” Then one day he comes running from school and he says, “Daddy, daddy. I drew a picture of you at school today.”
So I knelt down and he gives me this picture, and it was in blue-felted pen. I was a stick figure back then. I had more hair, and there I was standing in front of two computer screens with a phone in each ear and [inaudible].
Eric Partaker:
Wow.
Mel Abraham:
And at the hands of a six-year-old, I was handed the most important business money lesson of my life because I looked at it and I said, “I’m screwing this thing up.” It was easy for me to be able to look at that and say, “You have a kid. The profits. We get these profits, it’ll allow us to live here. It’ll allow us to do Disneyland. It’ll allow us to do the things that you should be drawing about and he’s not drawing about it.” But I realized that he didn’t care about my profits, he cared about my presence. And it was this time where I started to look at how do you do business and money differently? How as an entrepreneur can it coexist to make an impact to have a family, to do the things that matter and is it possible?
I had all these people in my head going, “You need to find work-life balance.” And that was the first mistake because there is no such thing as work-life balance. It insinuates that we’re going to put things in compartments and then when we live life in a bunch of different compartments, we are segmenting our life and that creates conflict. It’s not about balance, it’s about harmony. It’s about knowing that we’re living life in business in harmony with each other. They have to work in concert with each other in a way that fuels it, because no matter what decision you make, in what context, relationships, business or otherwise, every decision affects lives. And when they affect lives, every decision becomes a life decision. And therefore harmony is more important in my book. That’s when I start to look at this and say, “How do I run business differently?”
Now, let’s fast forward to 2019 and the cancer because through that lesson, I changed the way I did business. I changed the way I built wealth. I changed the way I did money. And then when the cancer came about, I knew that I had to pull myself out of my businesses because I had to focus on healing. So I had to fight the cancer medically, physically, emotionally, spiritually, energetically, but I didn’t have to fight it financially. And it was because of what happened at the hands of a six-year-old boy.
It is the process that I’ve used with my clients, with my son and with myself to create the financial independence, not dependent on savings and not dependent on stimulus or anything else, but to create the true independence by creating a financial machine through the business, so I could operate, so I could keep my lifestyle, and then pass the machine on. So the Affluent Blueprint is really about how do we become an affluent entrepreneur. Instead of being on the treadmill like I was at what I call a treadmill entrepreneur, because if you stay on that treadmill too long, instead of being on a treadmill, you’ll be on a dread mill. You will live in dread every freaking day.
Eric Partaker:
And when you say treadmill, you’re basically meaning that your work is only just enough or potentially not even enough, but only just enough to like cover your costs, to cover your lifestyle. You’re not actually building wealth or affluence?
Mel Abraham:
Yeah. Or there is a possibility that the way they look at it is what I’ve seen them say, well, the only way to build more is to run faster, harder, longer.
Eric Partaker:
Okay.
Mel Abraham:
So they just keep going. And one of the biggest mistakes that many of us make, and I made this mistake too until someone smacked me in the face with it, is we never define our finish line. We don’t know what we’re going for. So we just keep running. I mean, it is like Run Forest Run, and we’d never stop because we don’t even recognize it when we get there. So if we don’t know where we’re going, then we just keep going and we go faster and harder and we aren’t thinking of it.
So it’s important for us to define… One of the first steps that we do in the Affluent Blueprint is to create truly an affluent vision, which starts not with the money, it starts with the lifestyle and then backs into the money. So we are lifestyle planning with the finances and not financial planning to look at life. We changed the situation so the idea is to build a business that gives us a richer lifestyle. That’s one of the critical outcomes. And I’m not talking about wealth. Wealth is, as a statistic, richness, is a feeling, it’s an experience, it’s the way we live. It’s all of that.
It gives us a richer lifestyle. It gives us a deeper impact. We become greater because of it. We impact the people we serve. We impact the people we love and we impact ourselves internally. And we truly have complete freedom. It’s not about just financial freedom, that is the most fundamental basic freedom that most people look and stop at. You mentioned the other one though that is time freedom, that we have the ability to control our time and dictate our time. If you have $100 million in the bank, if you have $10 million, if you have $1 million, I don’t care what it is, if you don’t control your time, you’re still living in poverty in my book, because that’s something we can’t deal with.
Now, the third freedom that I think that we’re in for is mind freedom, to have peace of mind. So for me affluence is less about the money and more about the life. It’s about the fact that we’re living a meaningful life, an impactful life, a fruitful life and a peaceful life.
Eric Partaker:
Awesome. Amazing. I could totally relate to it as well because when I was sharing earlier that nearly died from a heart attack, I was in the ambulance and they were administering nitrates to open up my arteries, increase blood flow to the heart. The very first words out of my mouth were, “Please don’t let me die. I have a five-year-old son.” It wasn’t, “Please don’t let me die, I haven’t made enough money. Please don’t let me die I haven’t cleared out my inbox. Please don’t let me die. I haven’t closed that deal.” Right?
So my affluence in that moment related to my relationships and my ability to spend time with those dear to me. So I love that you take this holistic approach. That affluence for you isn’t just about money that it’s about the combination of our health, our wealth, our relationships. All the things that make life meaningful, right?
Mel Abraham:
Yeah. Well, if we live a lopsided life, there’s plenty of people that are out there that I know that are extremely wealthy, but they’re freaking miserable. Their health sucks, their relationships suck. People don’t want to work for them and everything. What’s that about? To me, that’s not affluence. That’s why I specifically chose the word affluence. I didn’t choose the word wealth. We talk about money. We talk about wealth. We’re building that. but if it is at the sacrifice of an affluent lifestyle, that the sacrifice of lifestyle in general and the things that truly matter when you know that you’re at your last days, then I don’t see it as affluence.
Eric Partaker:
Now, one of the things that you also talk about is that life is about living a legacy rather than leaving a legacy. What do you mean by that?
Mel Abraham:
So it’s really interesting because so many people, when we talk about legacy, they’re they’re always talking about having a legacy that’s impactful once they leave earth, when they leave this place. But wait a second, to me even us just having the conversation in Puerto Rico has the ability to shift a life. You, smiling at someone has the ability to shift a life, a helping hand, a handshake, all those things. The little things create legacy.
I mean, when I met my wife 11 years ago, she heard me always talking about legacy and she thought… Now, she came from Philly, so I understand where she got this from. She thought, I was thinking legacy. I wanted a statue on top of the steps like Rocky. And I go, “No, no, no, no. The moment is a precious moment. I realize that in this moment I have the ability to shift someone’s life.” Every time, I do an episode of a show like this or on my own show, I realize that I have the chance to talk to someone and that someone’s life might be better. That creates legacy.
And too often, we think legacy is something that happens post-death, once I’m gone, once I’m six feet under, and everything. I don’t think so. I actually think that it’s something that we are doing each and every moment or we have the ability to do each and every moment of the day. So I look at it as a a present day thing and not a future thing.
Eric Partaker:
Awesome. Love it, love it. It’s not this like post-humanist award, right? It’s like something that we need to achieve while we’re here, while we’re on the planet. A lot of people when they’re looking at success view it as this glamorous ride and it’s just one achievement after the next, when in reality it’s only through incredible hardship mistake and disasters that we learn key things to make ourselves more successful going forward. Can you share a particular low point in your entrepreneurial journey where you kind of felt bottomed out and what you learned from that?
Mel Abraham:
Yeah. I mean, I have a lot.
Eric Partaker:
We need another hour though.
Mel Abraham:
Yeah. Look, here’s the thing. Our greatest lessons are born out of our greatest disasters. So probably one of the biggest things that has kind of shifted the way I look at money, investing and those kinds of things in recent years was I, in 2005 got myself involved in an investment that turned out to be a Ponzi scheme. It wiped out one-third of everything I owned. So between me and two buddies, the three of us lost over $4 1/2 million.
Eric Partaker:
Oh my gosh.
Mel Abraham:
It’s funny because Jeremy keeps coming to the rescue. So the three of us, one of my buddies had already been retired. So all he did was shrink down… And he happened to have the least amount invested. So he shrunk down his lifestyle a little bit and just continued on, and had since had wrote it off, and said stuff happens.
Eric Partaker:
Yeah.
Mel Abraham:
The other buddy who happened to be the one that got both of us in it, he spiraled into resentment. He ended up getting angry, he ended up destroying his business, he ended up destroying his marriage and he ended up destroying his liver. He is now coming back from that and rebuilding, but we’re talking 15 years later now. And then it was me looking at it going, “Okay, how do I do this?” I had the same feeling of bitterness and anger and all that stuff.
For me, I had an extra layer of shame and embarrassment because I’m a CPA. I’m a financial guy. I shouldn’t have been caught in this. I didn’t want to talk about it. But then I looked at Jeremy and I said, okay, if I, once again, curl up in the fetal position, I’m going to teach him that when adversity hits, you just ball up and hope it passes. So I sat him down and said, “Here’s what happened. Here’s why it happened. Your dad made some stupid decisions.” It’s going to hurt, but it’s not going to destroy us.
It changed me in the way I look at investments. It changed the rules that I use. I’m very dogmatic about some of the things that I do. It’s part of what I end up teaching in the Affluence Blueprint now. And some people would perceive it as ultra conservative, ultra safe, but it is and it’s what’s allowed me to… In 18 months, we recovered what was lost and surpassed it by three times. We went past it by 3X, because principles are principles. They’re fundamental truths.
So what I needed to do is get back to the principles, use the proper system of behaviors to make it happen and Jeremy learned from it. He’s now 31. They’re expecting their first child. His wife is 27. They own three homes and they’ve got a multi-million dollar net worth at that age. Had I curled up in the corner, I don’t think he would be there right now.
Eric Partaker:
Yeah. Sometimes we need to go through those things, right? We need to…
Mel Abraham:
Well, I do think, yeah. I mean, they say things happen for us, not to us. In a sense, I get that now. We sometimes never know why they’re happening for us, but they do. I don’t know. I can get just depressed. I can get angry, but then I look at it and go… Then I’m letting the circumstances… To me, I feel like I’m letting the circumstances win twice. Once when it happened and now that it’s controlling my future. Then that’s insult to injury to me. So I look at it and say, “Okay, that’s why for me that acceptance is a huge thing.”
Now, acceptance without beating yourself up because I watch people in the pandemic starting to ask things like, “Mel, I didn’t listen to you. I didn’t. I should have, I should have, I should have, I should have.” They get the big stick of the past out and they’re beating themselves up. But that doesn’t help you. The fact is wherever we’re at, you’re either in debt, you’re not in debt, you have millions, you don’t have millions, it doesn’t matter. And there’s no judgment there. The question is, do we know where we’re at so we can move forward? What are the lessons we learned from the past? If we learned something from the past, it may have been an expensive lesson.
Listen, losing well into the seven figures in a Ponzi scheme, I could have gotten three PhDs from high level schools for that price. So if I’m going to pay that much for an education, I better not let it go to waste.
Eric Partaker:
Nice. That’s a good way to look at it, right?
Mel Abraham:
Yeah.
Eric Partaker:
I love what you said about that things happen for us, not to us. It’s such a beautiful way to look at it. I haven’t heard of that before. I always say that we either win or learn rather than win or lose.
Mel Abraham:
Yeah.
Eric Partaker:
So it fits very well with that. So I really like that. Thank you for that one especially. Now, one of the things that I do on this show is I want to make sure that for the watchers, the listeners that we’re making sure that success is within reach. And part of that is to make sure that the people that I’m interviewing are just perceived and recognized as everyday people at the end of the day. So with that in mind, I’d like you to not be your superhero self because I know that’s the intentionality that we want to bring into every day, but I want you to just fast forward 18 months from now and I’d love for you to just think. Suspend this belief and say everything has failed that you’re trying to work on right now. It’s all failed. If that were to happen, what would be the cause for that in your… In the context of your reality, what would drive failure if that were to happen?
Mel Abraham:
I think that for me what would drive failure is me quitting more than anything else, me giving up. I’ve had launches that haven’t gone well. I’ve had deals that have gone south on me. Any one of them, I could have picked up my toys and gone home. Now, I have had to deal with the uncertainty that would creep in after that and go, “Maybe, I’m not good enough. Maybe I’m not smart enough. Maybe I don’t know enough.” Those kinds of things to continue to move forward because… Especially in today’s… To me it’s an oxymoron. You’re talking about calling it social media, but it really seems somewhat anti-social at times. It disconnects us versus connecting us. It puts technology [crosstalk].
Eric Partaker:
Social media?
Mel Abraham:
Yeah. There’s so much judgment from people that you don’t even know and yet we care about it and going… So now all of a sudden, if things don’t go well, it’s on public display. Now, all of a sudden you take it in. Now, where I think the failure would come in is me allowing that to get to me and not be willing to go again. In a sense, I went through a little bit of this because like I said, I pulled myself out of the business two years ago to focus on healing. And as I started to to think about coming back and opening the business back up again and doing the Affluence Blueprint and the show and all that, I kept talking about it but I wasn’t moving. And I thought, “Why am I not moving?”
There was a fear there, honestly. I’m no different. I mean, you use the term superhero, but I am no different than anyone else. I’m just this guy that was an accountant that’s kind of following a path and having fun and trying to impact lives. But I’m no different. I feel, I hurt, I fear, I cry. I mean, I do the same thing. So I was actually fearful to go back out again because I hadn’t been out there and it was going to be slightly different message. Would it be accepted? You’re coming off the heels of all of the vitriol that was going on at the end of 2020 and all that stuff. I’m going, “Do I really want to play in the game?”
And the only way I did it, frankly is that I put something on the calendar. And then I publicized it. So I had committed myself to something three, four weeks down the road, but now… And I announced it to the world and I said, “I’m going to be doing this training. Come on in.” Now, all of a sudden, as soon as I had one person registered, I said, “Uh-oh. I got to get serious. But it doesn’t mean… So I think that the failure would have come if I would have given up. The failure would have come if I would have walked away and said, “You know what…” And in my situation, and I don’t mean this in any egoic or bragging way, I didn’t need to do it. I didn’t need to work. I didn’t need to come back.
But what I did realize is that the lack of need to come back was a financial definition. From a richness of life definition, I needed to come back. I needed to do this. I needed to get back in the game and I needed to be able to say that I’m not… If I was going to walk away, I had to walk away on my terms, otherwise it was quitting and to me that’s where the failure comes in.
Eric Partaker:
When you talk about never giving up, it just reminds me of one of my favorite proverbs, it’s a Japanese proverb. “Fall down seven times, stand up eight.” Just keep standing back up. It’s like when you go into a boxing ring, the name of the game isn’t to not get hit at all, it’s to, yeah, but when you get hit, can you survive the punch? And can you hit back harder? It’s refreshing to hear that you’re presenting not this infallibility, but that you should almost expect the knockdowns. Expect that they will happen. Embrace them and just stand back up every time.
Mel Abraham:
It’s part of the game. Look, I screw things up all the time. I make mistakes. So I used to do a lot of webinars as the talent then I decided to do I was going to do my own webinars. So I was the talent and the tech. And this was for an organization where I had… They had given me a lifetime achievement award. So everyone knew me. Now, that’s an organization of financial people and legal people, so they’re ultra conservative.
So I roll out of bed that morning to do it in superman pajama bottoms, no shirt. I’m doing a webinar. It’s just slides of me talking, so no big deal. I don’t have a shirt on. I put my headphones on, I start the webinar, and I’ve got 250 people on the line that know me. And next thing I know in the chat, I see Mel is naked. He’s not wearing a shirt. I look and somehow I hit a button because it’s the first time doing the tech and turned the webcam on. I’m standing there in my pajama bottoms and no shirt.
Eric Partaker:
Oh, geez.
Mel Abraham:
So I found after a little while, have Post-It notes close by at all times. So I got a Post-It note because I couldn’t figure out how to turn the camera off. So I put a Post-It note on the camera and just continued. Just push forward. And the interesting thing is that first off, I actually end up selling really well on that webinar. I don’t know if that says anything. They had asked me back. I do keynote for the organization, all that stuff.
Eric Partaker:
With your shirt on, right? They asked you back.
Mel Abraham:
With a shirt on. It’s a stipulation in the contract. But here’s the thing, there’s very few things that we’re going to do that are terminal. If I can get away with, “Oops, I forgot to put a shirt on and I turn the camera on, and still survive, then what are we worried about?”
Eric Partaker:
Wonderful. Love it, love it again. All right. Now, if you could take us home here. So the show is called The 2%. It’s rooted in the fact that it’s estimated only 2% of people are operating at their full potential. There’s this stickiness that’s keeping 98% of the population together. So if you could just impart one secret to the world, one secret, one way, one thing, daily habit, whatever it may be, which if done consistently, regularly would help someone break free from the 98%, join that 2%, what would it be?
Mel Abraham:
God, there’s so many. But I think probably one of the biggest things that I think we’re horrible at is celebrating progress. We want to wait until we get to the destination, but how we get to a destination is a step at a time and there’s this momentum that gets built up as we move. In fact, I talked about this where I said, “Let’s celebrate the micro successes and the progress because that’s what keeps us going.” If the destination, if I want to be… Yesterday happened to be… I don’t know who makes these things up, but it was National Be A Millionaire Day, okay?
Now, you could be in debt, you could have no money and you’re sitting there looking at a million bucks saying, “I want to be a millionaire and everything.” That looks like a long ways away. But if we only just look at it and say, “Okay, you’ve got $10,000 in debt and in a month’s time you have $5,000 in debt”, I want you to celebrate progress, because in another month’s time, it’s zero debt. In another month’s time, it’s probably five. And yet, we are horrible at celebrating progress. Yet what we need to be doing is measuring our self not against those on the social media and right and left, but measuring ourselves as to who we were yesterday or the moment before than when we do that. You put those micro successes together, then someday, some way you end up in that 2%.
Eric Partaker:
Love it. Thank you, Mel. On that note, if somebody wants to further their progress and if they want to get in touch with you to see if you might help in that regard, what’s the best way that they can do that?
Mel Abraham:
So a couple places. First off, my show The Affluent Entrepreneur Show is live. You can go to the affluententrepreneurshow.com. My website, I’m there. And on Instagram and Facebook. My Instagram handle is @melabraham9. I don’t know who the first eight are, but we have to hunt them down. Reach out. DM me. Send me a note. Send me questions. They’ll end up on my show. You’ll end up on my show or it might be an episode. I don’t know. But the idea here, here’s the thing. A dear friend of mine, David Bach said, “Why are you doing this? Why are you doing a book? Why are you doing a show? You don’t need to do this.”
I said, “I spent some time in the darkness with the cancer and I didn’t know. I couldn’t figure out why.” But what really resonated with me was when I realized that I kept looking in the past for the why. But the past isn’t where the why exists. The why exists in the future. And once I understood that, I have the opportunity to make the cancer valuable and make the cancer mean something. And my ability to help entrepreneurs and people navigate things financially, business-wise, and find that independence and have that peace of mind is what’s going to allow me to give a reason to the cancer and a positive understanding of cancer, and value to it. So I feel like I have to do this. So that’s what I’m here to do.
Eric Partaker:
Oh, man. Your why doesn’t exist in the past, it exists in the future. Love that. Mel, thank you so much for the hope you’ve given, the courage, the perseverance, the wisdom. Just the energy. Thank you for all of those qualities, all of those attributes, all of those characteristics. You’re living your legacy as you say rather than leaving one. And super grateful for you and super grateful for having met you that year and a half ago. Thanks for coming on the show.
Mel Abraham:
Oh, yeah. Thank you, my friend. It’s so good to see you again and I feel blessed that you asked me on the show, and many more.
Eric Partaker:
Thanks a lot. All right, everyone. If you enjoyed what you heard from Mel, be sure to reach out. You’ll see links in the show notes as well. Incredible man, incredible story, and can help you do incredible things. Thanks a lot, Mel and thanks everyone for watching and listening.
