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What's going on everybody. Hey, welcome to another episode of learning from the experts.   Today I'm actually going to talk to you about something I'm learning from an expert named Ryan Holiday. And if you don't know who Ryan Holiday is, he is the freaking man. If you haven't read his book, trust me, I'm lying and you're in marketing, then you're missing out huge because this book is going to just blow your mind when it comes to different techniques and how people's minds work. When Writing taglines or headlines, Hooks, different things and how people react to a certain things in the marketing world. But I want to actually talk to you about a different book that he wrote that I've been reading recently and I've had a lot of thoughts in my head because of this book. And so I kind of wanted to go through some of those thoughts and talk about what I've learned from him in this book, but also what I'm learning about myself that you can take from and use in your own life. So here's the deal. I know how frustrating it is as an entrepreneur to waste countless hours sifting through, wanna experts who've never actually helped me in the end. Then to learn years later that there was an expert who really could help me a hundred times faster than learning it on my own. I have created this podcast to save you time and money while taking you on a journey with me as I learned from and interview, real experts who can actually help you grow your business. My name is Coulton Woods and you're listening to Learning From The Experts. Thanks for joining me today. I'm actually talking about the book called the obstacle is the way and the tagline on it is, the timeless art of turning trials into triumph. If you don't know Stephen Larsen, he talks a lot about the obstacle is the way. He kind of, he has to remind a lot of people that the obstacle is the way, because a lot of people just don't want to go for the obstacle. They don't want to, they don't want to go overcome the obstacle. They want to look for a different way around the obstacle. To kind of illustrate this a little bit more, I want to talk to you or tell you about a story of my own and how I see this in my own life and how you guys can learn from it as well. It's a little bit more of a personal story. It's a little bit more of something that you're probably not used to for me. And I don't share it a ton. My wife shares it with people who are asking, but we don't share it a ton just because it is a little bit more sensitive. But I think it has such a huge point to it that I decided that I just need to share it. About eight years ago me and my wife got married. When we got married and I remember telling my wife, I do not want to have kids for like at least a couple of years cause I want to be able to get things rolling and started before we start adding kids to the mix and not being able to afford to take care of them. So I remember telling her that and she's like, oh yeah, totally get it. And then about six months into being married, she says, you know what? I feel like we just need to start trying actually. And I'm like, Oh man, I don't know if I can start trying six months into being married. Like, I don't want to be that person, you know, I'm not saying that's bad, but that was just my thoughts back then. So I remember talking to her and kind of thinking about it and pondering on a bit and I decided that, yeah, let's go for it. Let's start trying to have kids. So we started trying. Months go by, nothing. More months go by, nothing. So I'm like, okay, well maybe that's why we were supposed to start trying now because who knows when this is going to happen now. So we go to a doctor and they're like, oh, well let's, let's put you on some of this medicine. It helps people get pregnant. It'll help with like different hormones and things like, and trust me, it definitely helped with the hormones, so I won't lie about that one. We took this medicine for months and still just nothing, nothing, like nothing different, nothing new was happening. So we're like, okay, this isn't working. We would go back to the doctor and take a look at some things, see what we can figure out. And by this time, over a year at least has passed, year and a half, maybe two, I don't even know, it's been a little while. So we go back to the doctor and he's like, okay, let's take a look at some different things that may be causing this. So they look at some stuff, they try to figure it out and they're like, okay, yeah, you have some issues. We need to have surgery on you in order to possibly fix this. Well if that's what we gotta do, let's do it. So we schedule it and it's like forever out there cause yeah, you know how it works. We have surgery, well apparently it didn't quite fix it all the way, which we didn't learn for another year or so later. But in between then we tried different other procedures in different things and then learn that it didn't quite fix it all the way. So we had to do it again. So she had surgery again. Other issues popped up, it's crazy. I can't even begin to tell you all of it, and I don't want to take all day. I just want to let you understand a bit of what we went through for this. So you have a little bit of an idea, but I could spend all day on all these different stories in between every one of these surgeries and different things. It was just an astronomical amount of things that happened in between everything. So multiple surgeries, multiple procedures and I'm talking not one of these is covered by insurance and we're like poor college students. I had to figure out a way to provide and cover some of this stuff. Which was probably a good thing that actually to push me a little bit more. But nothing was working, nothing was happening. We've tried several doctors, we've tried several procedures, we've had several surgeries and nothing is happening. Fast forward five years later, still nothing after all of this that we've spent on so many surgeries and so many procedures and not to mention it is killing my wife. Not just the fact that she's having to go through all of these surgeries, but the fact that she's always wanted to be a mom her entire life and she can't not be a mom and nothing's working for her. So what's going on? What do we need to do to make it happen? And you know, one lesson we actually learned in between, there was so many people told us just to quit and give up. So many people told us, you know what, you should just adopt, adopt a kid. It's probably not going to work out. Or Hey, I've heard about these people where they adopted a kid and then they got pregnant right after. So you guys should do that too. There's your solution. That doesn't really quite work that way for us. So the lesson from that though is in this entrepreneur game, in this online business, marketing, all that stuff, is there are going to be so many people that tell you to just give up and quit and take a different route that other people have seen to be a successful as well? I just want to implore you to continue to go. I want to encourage you to just not listen to all of the naysayers along the way. I remember plenty of times in college just as I would tell people that I wanted to be an entrepreneur, they were like, why would you ever want to do that? You know you're going to start a business that has a 90% chance of failing. Like all LLCs, all businesses, 90% of them fail. And at first they got to me, but then I realized that you're going to be working for a business, no matter what you do, no matter what work you're in, no matter what area of business you're gonna be working for. So I would get that response and then I would, ah, man, it drove me nuts so much. I would literally respond and say, oh well don't you know, you'll be working for one of those businesses. Would you rather own it or would you rather work for it? Like it bothered me so bad, I would just be straight up with people. And it was like the first time they'd ever thought about it, they're like, oh, you're right, I will be working for a Business. I will be working for somebody in a business. And I'm like, yeah. And if it fails, you're gonna lose your job and have to find new job, I'd rather be at the top and know when it's going to fail or have the option to help it not fail and to do what I need to do to keep it going instead of being on the bottom and not knowing when it's going to fail, not making that much money. And then having to just switch jobs in between like, anyway, so that little rant is over. But all of these procedures, everything just all out of pocket, all just horrible things to do. All of these horrible surgeries, none of them are fun, lots of pain that she went through. Hopefully that kind of helps you just understand a little bit of what it was like going through all of that. But finally we found, I mean the biggest procedure you can do is called IVF, for trying to have kids and if you cannot naturally get pregnant. So IVF is literally like, they just kind of help your body do it. In the certain way that your body should do, cause a lot of times your body just doesn't do it correctly. And so they just help guide your body to do it the right way and then they do a couple of different procedures that are going to help you. Your chances go up even higher. So there's nothing that's not really, like, I wouldn't say it's not against the body or not natural. It's just sometimes your body doesn't quite work correctly, so this is going to help it work correctly. And that's going to be your best chance for getting pregnant. So that was like the big thing. That was the next step. I mean, it costs typically on average $20,000-$30,000 to do this procedure. So it's not a cheap procedure and we just didn't have the money for it and so we kind of decided that that was going to be too much and we weren't gonna be able to do it. Well instead of just saying that's the obstacle, that's like the thing that's going to get us there, but I can't do it or it's not possible. We started asking, how can we make this possible? How can we make it happen? I'm not going to lie. My wife started a Go Fund Me for it and just kind of put it out there and said, hey, like we really want to do this. If you guys are willing to help at all, like it would be, it'd be fantastic. It'd be awesome. That's really hard to do. It's not easy to ask people for help. It's not easy to be vulnerable like that and say, hey, we can't do this on our own. We would love your help. That's not easy at all. And I'm actually surprised how much people helped on that. It was a huge blessing in our lives at the time. Huge, huge blessing and lots of help. Lots more help than I even ever imagined getting, which was really awesome. But because of that, we were able to confront that obstacle. We were able to go forward with IVF. And because of that, we now have, I mean, he's nine months old now. The whole time was not easy, but it's so worth it now that we have him. And if you and your wife or your wife or you as a woman is going through that trial, I'm so sorry. Nobody really understands it unless they've been through it and I'm sorry to hear that. I don't wish that upon anybody that is not anyway, it's just, it's horrible. So because we pushed through it though and we tried, it's now possible that we have our baby boy. So this book that I've been reading is called the obstacle is the way by Ryan Holiday. And it made me think of that and it makes me think of all of the different obstacles that I've had in my life and the ones that I've overcome and gone through and pushed through that I've made so much more impact in my own life. If you guys are trying to start a business online, a lot of the times what I see is people will see the obstacle and say that's too hard or that mountain is too tall to climb or I'm not capable of doing that, so I'm not even going to try. Not even going to start, not even going to go anywhere. Well honestly, we didn't know that IVF was the thing that we were going to have to do in the beginning. We just saw the obstacle was, these different procedures and as we overcame one obstacle, another one would come and then another one would come and pretty soon we're just overcoming all of these different obstacles. And then it became the way, it became the end result that we were looking for. If we would not have gone through those obstacles, we will not climb those mountains. We would not have the results that we have now. We would not have our baby boy. So I say that because I've seen it in business too. It's the same thing. There are so many obstacles that you're going to have in front of you. You don't know the entire path. You don't know every obstacle that's going to come your way. But the fact is that you just need to take a step, work on it, and then see what the next step is and go from there. Then you will naturally climb that obstacle, that mountain and overcome the obstacle. So that's my drop to you guys today. And hopefully you get some encouragement from it and start looking at the obstacles that you need to overcome in your business, your life, that are gonna help you go that much farther and become successful in what you're doing. So that's my 2 cents for you guys today. Hopefully you enjoyed that. And hopefully you can overcome some obstacles. And honestly, I would suggest reading the book. The obstacle is the way, is huge. I totally bought the coin that says the obstacle is the way on one side. And it was cool to get it, it has the quote on the backside that says the impediment to action advances action. What stands in the way becomes the way. I kind of want to read you this card. They send this card with it too, that says the obstacle's the way. Then it says that same quote that's on the coin right below it. And then it says, "the stoic grows stronger and better with every obstacle they face. They rally to every challenge and thrive as a result. So can you." And if you don't know what stoic means. A STOIC is a person who can endure pain or hardship without showing their feelings or complaining. Someone who's able to go through hard things without showing that emotion, or complaining about it and will grow stronger and better with every obstacle they face. That's the same thing with business. Like, you are going to have so many obstacles in it. As you overcome each and every one, you get that much better. And pretty soon those obstacles, even when you face the same kind of obstacles again in the future, you will now be able to face them so much easier because you've already done it and you know the path. That's one reason why I pushed so much about finding experts because they've pushed through those obstacles, they know the path and they can help you get through it as well. So follow the expert in your field, in your area that's going to help you understand what obstacles are in your way and how to get through them. That's all I got for you guys today. Thank you very much. Are you looking to jumpstart your business by learning or getting help from the real experts? Go to LearningFromTheExperts.com to find preapproved experts that I've handpicked for you. Please don't forget to let me know how I'm doing by subscribing, rating, and leaving feedback.