Many of us have dreams that are left unshared, that we tend to hide away, and that we only keep to ourselves. Unfortunately, these are the very dreams that don’t get realized. If you want to fulfill what it is that you truly wish, then perhaps letting it out and asking about it could be the answer for you. Taking us further down into the reasons sharing your dreams matter, Scott Carson talks with not one but two very special guests, authors Crystal Dwyer Hansen and Mark Victor Hansen. Together, they share with us their new book, Ask! The Bridge from Your Dreams to Your Destiny, which highlights the act of asking as the only language by which the Universe can deliver a solution, understanding, illumination, or plan so we can reach our dreams and fulfill our destinies. Join in on this episode to learn the three channels that are important to understand in the asking journey—asking yourself, asking others, and asking God—and to find the courage and inspiration to close the gap between your dreams and your destiny.
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Ask!: The Most Profound Tool That Can Take You From Your Dreams To Your Destiny With Mark Victor Hansen And Crystal Dwyer Hansen
Thank you so much for reading and sharing. I would appreciate if you went over and left a five-star review and subscribe to the show, if you’re not subscribed already. We’re so excited about this special episode that we had to have two amazing guests join us here. I’m honored to have a very special person who has helped me out over the last couple of years. He doesn’t know it. His wife doesn’t know it, but I’ve read their works and follow them for a while. I’m honored to have Mark Victor Hansen and Crystal Dwyer Hansen.
You may recognize Mark from the author of the Chicken Soup for The Soul and a whole variety of things. Crystal is an amazing life coach and an entrepreneur as well. We are so honored. I couldn’t think of a better person to have on Episode 600. We’re going to talk about the book, Ask!: The Bridge from Your Dreams to Your Destiny. If you get a chance to go out and buy it, purchase it and let me know if you picked it up. You’re going to love the insight. I’ve got a special bonus. I want you to stick around to the very end of the episode to make sure you take advantage of that. Thank you for being a part of the 600th episodes of the show.
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This is episode 600 of the show. I am totally in joy like a kid that came in a candy store at Christmas to have two very special guests on. They have helped influence me over the last several years. I guarantee it to millions and millions of you, not only here in the United States but over the 130 countries that the show is followed to. I’m so honored to have this couple here to share some amazing things with you. You’re going to get some great stuff now. Let me introduce the first guest. She is a celebrity cut, certified life coach, business strategist, successful entrepreneur, speaker and author in US and China. She’s helped thousands and thousands, if not millions of people with her training and articles. Him, you might know him a little bit. He’s probably best known as a co-author of the Chicken Soup for the Soul, the brand and everything behind that. I first read Chicken Soup for the Soul, but also The One Minute Millionaire series as well. He’s probably the most successful author and book guy. We’re honored to have Mark and Crystal Hansen join us here in the show. I’m honored to have both of you here. How are you all doing?
We’re doing great, Scott. Thank you for that warm welcome. We’re so happy to be here with you.
Enthusiasm is a Greek word. It means the spirit within. ou exude and the new word I learned is exultant. Exultant means you’re over the moon. You are over the moon and we love it because it’s fun to be with people that love to be with you.
That’s the thing is life is too short to be in a bad mood. No matter what side of the bed you wake up or what’s going on, I’m a big believer that, “Gripe and complain for 30 seconds and move on because there are so many different things and there’s a bigger path than what we have in mind for our self.” I am so excited about your book. I got this delivered to me. It’s the book called Ask!: The Bridge from Your Dreams to Your Destiny. It’s an amazing book for those that are looking for something and are struggling right now with everything going crazy in the world. We need a little bit of excitement and a positive reaction to things to help you who are going through some things. First of all, you do such an amazing job. Crystal, what would you say was the biggest inspiration for Ask! going into it?
We are so fortunate to meet so many amazing people across the planet. What we found is most people are overindebted with talent, success, ability and all of these gifts. What we found was those who are able to take those gifts and turn them into a great success and those who maybe aren’t finding the success they want, we wanted to get to what is the heart of that? What’s the one thing that makes the biggest difference? That is your ability to ask. We found there are three channels and each of these channels is equally important to understand in the asking journey. It’s ask yourself, ask others and ask God.
Those are three huge channels. It probably is a varying degree of which one is important to what you’re going through in life at any given moment. Can we agree to that, Mark?
Yeah. When I was bankrupt and upside down, I wished I knew a guy like you in 1974. I’ve been in graduate school with the smartest guy in the planet, Bucky Fuller, who’s Einstein’s best student in geodesic domes. I was trying to be Bucky which is wrong. I went bankrupt so fast. I had to check a book at a library, How to Go Bankrupt by Yourself. I’m hustled on the bankruptcy courts. A guy comes up and is like, “For $300 I’ll take you bankrupt. I’ll be your lawyer.” I said, “If I had $300, I wouldn’t be going bankrupt.” After six months of hiding out under the sheets and sleeping in a sleeping bag in front of another guy’s room, I finally am smart enough to figure out what I want to do by asking myself, asking others and then asking God. I go to my three roommates in Hicksville, Long Island, New York and I say, “Does anybody here know anybody that’s young, not a lawyer, not a doctor, not a celebrity, that’s speaking.” The guys said, “Yeah, he’s a few years older than you. Here’s my ticket. I can’t go now.”
I raised my little beat up old Volkswagen. I got wowed by this guy for three hours, Chip Collins. At the end of which, I go up sheepishly a little bit, put up my hand and say, “Chip, can I ask you to lunch?” He said, “Sure.” “Can I ask you a plethora of questions?” He said, “First of all, I love a free lunch so yeah.” I said, “I want to do what you’re doing.” He said, “A chance you make it is 1 in 1,000. You’re not going to make it, but I’ll tell you what to do. If you stay out of real estate, because that’s my market in his five boroughs of New York. You go into life insurance. I’ll tell you what to do. I’ll never see you again. I’m going on vacation for two weeks. He came back. To make a long story short, only Tony Robbins and I, as far as I know, did 1,000 talks the first few years because we’re saying you’ve got to ask, but then you’ve got to take massive action.
The big A in Ask is take the action to get the results. I was talking at 6:00 in the morning, 10:00, 2:00 in the afternoon and 8:00. In between I was selling, I had nothing else to do. I was in heaven. People said, “Do you have that story in a book?” My first book wasn’t Ask!. It was Stand Up, Speak Out and Win. The first year I sold 20,000 copies from the platform at $10 each. I thought I had died and gone to heaven. I bought me a brand-new Cordoba car with Corinthian leather. I had to rock. In 1974, the market was at 28% interest. It was in the doldrums. It wasn’t going to go anywhere. Everyone said the world was coming to an end. Right now, ladies and gentlemen, it’s not coming to an end, but you’ve got to ask yourself like I did. What is it you can do and fix? What is it that you can change? What is it you could do to reboot yourself, to reinvigorate yourself, to read and transform yourself into something that’s going to be vastly sustainable and profitable?
I want to ask this for Crystal coming from a life coach. Do you find people have a tendency to be a little more Negative Nancy or don’t like the four-letter word called ‘work’? That’s the one thing that Mark outlined. He worked and you have to put the work in. You’ve got to put the time in speaking 4 to 6 times a day. A lot of people have gotten very lazy and don’t want to put in the time and realize that anything worthwhile takes work.
It takes inner work. It takes outer work. People look at the world around them, what’s going on out there and they take all of their cues from that. That’s exactly the opposite of what you should be doing because your life experience is created from the inside out. The first thing you need to do is have a meeting with yourself and ask yourself, “Do I like the way my life is going? What do I like? What do I not like? What is my vision for my future? What am I best at? What makes me feel purposeful?” Those two things need to come together. Those two questions are critically important. What am I best at? What do I like?
If you’re good at something and you don’t like it, that’s not going to be a winning combination. You need to ask both of those questions and where that comes together. What am I best at? What do I feel inspired by? What do I like doing? What do I feel purposeful about doing? I’m good at bookkeeping, but I don’t like it. I’m not ever going to do it. That’s not a winning combination for me, but my bookkeeper, Jen, she’s good at it. She loves it. She likes doing the puzzle of all of our books, everybody’s books and figuring it out. That’s perfect for her, but that’s where we all need to come to, by asking ourselves those questions. A lot of times, life keeps coming at people. They don’t do that self-examination, that asking yourself. That is the most powerful thing we can start with.
Ask! The Bridge from Your Dreams to Your Destiny
First of all, studies show that when you ask yourself a question, a different part of your brain lights up. It’s the part of your brain that does critical thinking. You have a different part of your brain that’s going to work helping guide you and then you ask those questions. Question by question, answer by answer, you get an idea. You start to get a solution or an illumination comes to you. Pretty soon, if you keep asking and you keep recording your asking journey, you find yourself moving along. That’s why we say asking is truly the bridge from your dreams to your destiny. If you keep asking, you will keep moving and your journey will take you there. It is the simplest but most profound and amazing tool to take you there.
You outlined that so well. Many entrepreneurs struggle with the unfinished bridge syndrome of doing so many different things and never moving along that bridge to completion so that they go back and forth. Maybe the bridge to your dream starts out as a rope bridge, but then over the years, it becomes the Golden Gate Bridge. You said something very important, especially in the book, in Micaela’s Fable. She’s sitting there collecting rocks for the King every day. I love the analogy. Many people feel like they are indentured servitudes or they have to show up to a job every day. They hate what they’re doing. They’re not passionate about it. Everybody, including the foreman’s grouchy because they’re not doing something that they’re called to do. They’re not something that they’re passionate about doing. What would you say would be maybe some of the keys identifying some of the things? What are the emotions or the questions that they should be asking themselves first?
She wrote Micaela. She did it brilliantly, beautifully. We think a parable is such a metaphor. It’s what Christ dealt with full-time, the stories. You’ve got to interpret it and understand it. I will let her answer that, but I want to go back to what you said. You’re not the first person that’s asked it. What about this thing about lack of ambition? Many people, particularly the Millennials, it comes back to the reason we use that word dream is because once you unveil your dream, you’re willing to go do something. It becomes your magnificent obsession. You wake up and say, “That is my destiny.” When I knew it was my destiny to be a professional speaker, I ate it.
I slept it. I thought about it. It was the last thing I thought about at night and the first thing I thought about in the morning. I was beating up my chest. I was asking myself, “How do I do these speeches? How do I do a better, how do I learn more? How do I share more? How do I make sure that the audience is getting the result, their take-home value so they go out and change it? I was doing life insurance. I was dealing with the world’s biggest company at that time, Metropolitan and State Farm. They’re 1,800 of those companies. They kept hiring me. Chip Collins, every Friday, we met and masterminded to come together. I’d tell him what was working, what wasn’t working because it was working so well.
He said, “We’re going to go from $25 hourly to $50.” I thought, “I can’t do it.” Then it got to $100 and then it was $1,000 and I thought, “Nobody’s going to pay that. What I didn’t get is that I was teaching a guy to sell a $1 million policy. When they sell a $1 million policy over a lifetime of the policy, they make a $100,000 at that time. I don’t know what they’re going to make now because it changes. The fact of the matter is $1,000 is one $100. If you give me a penny and I give you $1, are you going to be a happy camper?
We have a section in the book, How to Prepare to be A Good Asker, and it talks about that. The first parts of preparing to be a good asker is belief. You have to start with the belief that your answers are out there for you. That’s why that Fable of Micaela is so powerful because it’s every man, every woman’s story. That’s why we started the book with that. It’s so often we all feel like we’re hauling rocks every day and there’s no purpose to it and what are we doing? When the beam comes to Micaela and implores her to start asking, she starts looking around more, being more curious about what’s going on around her. She starts asking more questions even about what she’s doing there and what the purpose is for what she’s doing.
She discovers all these answers and then noticing the people and being more curious about the people. Little by little as she starts being more curious and starts asking more questions, her life opens. You know the conclusion. We’re not going to give it away, but it’s an amazing journey that metaphorically we can all go through with. That’s why we want to give people the model in their mind because stories are metaphors. Metaphors are patterns. Our brain thinks in patterns. When we read these powerful stories, we go, “A-ha.” There is so much learning that happens all at once. Back to preparing to be a good asker, number one is belief. We have to believe that the answers are there for us.
If we keep asking, we will find our answers. Whether we’re asking ourselves, asking others, asking God, the answers are there. Keep asking and they will come to you. Believe that you deserve the answers. That’s part of your inner journey work. You’ve got to start with yourself always. The action part is so important. You cannot ask these questions and then sit on the sofa with your blankie wrapped around you and go, “Make it happen someone,” because it’s not a true asking journey. A true asking journey means your physical body is taking action. Your mind is taking action. You’re doing those things. You’re immersing yourself.
As Mark was saying, he asked everybody. He started meeting with the people who were doing what he wanted to do, finding out everything he could, finding out what he could learn to become better and then becoming better studying and doing it. Find out what’s going on in the world. Take that action. You will start to see your asking journey become real and alive. The third part of preparation to becoming a good asker is visualization. We have both used visualization our entire lives because sometimes when we started doing something new, our left brains, especially with all the negative stuff going on, it will talk us out of it like, “You can’t do that. You don’t know how to do that. That’ll never work.” Try to quiet your left brain down.
What Mark and I say is go to that place in your imagination. Pretend you’re making up a story and you write down your absolute ideal vision in its greatest form. Every single thing you want, whether it’s career, your relationship, whatever it is. From that beautiful picture, that beautiful movie that you created, put all the rich details in it. What it feels like, what you’re doing, who you’re talking to, how much you’re earning and what sales you closed. You then go backward and re-engineer it. Start writing down the steps. “How did I get here? Who did I talk to? What did they say? Where did I go next?”
You’ll start to see that magically it starts to happen for you, but you have to take time to do these things, the belief, the action, the visualization. It makes life so much richer, so much more interesting because right now, as you were saying, there’s so much garbage in the media. We’re all listening to negative and if you think about it, whatever you put in your mind becomes your reality. You’re letting it in. You’re letting the opposite of what you want to dominate your thoughts. That’s crazy, isn’t it?
It is crazy. Our brain is such a programmable device that leads to everything else, our health, fitness, well-being and how we approach the rest of the world. I love the symbolism that you talked about in there in Micaela’s story. She’s listening to these four different dreams that she’s having, coming out of the dream and writing it all down detail by detail and journaling that was one of the most important thing people don’t realize is that’s reprogramming and our inner thoughts becoming real-life world for us. The fact that so many of us want to be viral. I want to do something. I’m going to record a video or do a training. I want to sell it the thousands. I think it needs to come back to the power of one person and building a movement with one person at a time. We’d all love to be viral, but the fact that we can influence one person, in our case, one borrower, one reader, one entrepreneur at a time, it starts to build a real movement to help not only yourself reach your dreams, but the river rising. It was all hitting and being successful in our dreams.
When I wrote Chicken Soup for the Soul, I said I want to change everybody’s life one story at a time. What happened is we are at our zenith. We were getting 5,000 stories a day. I said, “We’d sell one million in 1.5 year.” After 144 publishers, I asked all of them to take us because I’m the salesman. Dr. Canfield is a third niche class Harvard genius in sight. I’m not taking anything away from my partner, but when they all said, “Hit the road, Jack,” I said, “It’s okay if you don’t like him. He’s a nice guy.”
Jack is great. I’ve had the chance to hang with Jack and meet Jack. He had a little bit different personality, but it’s yin and yang, which works well to get things done.
Ask!: Life is too short to be in a bad mood, no matter what side of the bed you wake up of.
The yin and yang is where we’re at right now. It’s a 6,000-year-old symbol that means crisis equals opportunity. Scott, we are in the biggest crisis ever, eight billion of us are more or less in lockdown. We’re starting to emerge. The government imposed a lock on it. For the first time, a lot of us are going to have to rethink this reinvention. They’re turning trash to cash. A guy spent $300 million in twenty years figuring out how to take all garbage. All are garbage dumps, 10,000 of them are full. They’re closed. They can’t take any more. We all create five pounds of garbage. He’s recycling every atom and every molecule of metal, glass, plastic and water.
What does that mean? It means America is resource-rich. We’ve got so much stuff. It’s like what you’re saying when we were talking and luckily, he’s been a student of mine. Our minds are so rich, are so vast. The big guy says my mind, your mind has many rooms, many dimensions. If it works, I wouldn’t have told you, but in spite that it is where I am, you may be. What we’re saying is all of this talent only comes out one way, as far as we can tell by asking, and nobody has ever said, do a book on ask. We couldn’t believe it that nobody did a book called Ask!. We’re the only ones. It’s like having the most important thing ever and no one’s ever thought it. That’s why our book is going from nowhere. It came out on April 28th, 2020 and we’re now one of the bestsellers.
Crystal, you being a life coach and working with the business owner. Many people are struggling right now because they’ve been doing business normal. I agree with what Mark said about, “There’s a lot of opportunity.” Besides asking themselves or asking their families and God, what are maybe a tip or two you would tell them to do, to look back to identify opportunities? Sometimes we get so done trying or so close to the forest that we’re hitting our tree against the head. We can’t see the full picture. What are some things that you would recommend to those business owners that are struggling right now?
Like any personal crisis, this big global crisis has created a tremendous amount of potential opportunities for us. We need to be awake to these and don’t discount them as something that’s for somebody else. Take a look and say, “How can I participate in this new opportunity?” What’s happened is it’s caused us to as a country and other countries are doing the same. Who knew? Nobody knew. None of us knew. Ninety eight percent of our pharmaceuticals were created overseas. That 99% of our Advil was created in a country that doesn’t necessarily have our best interest at heart. That all of our manufacturing is long there for the past 20,000 years, that all of our important medical equipment and being prepared and all of that. China that doesn’t have necessarily our best interests at heart. That is the truth. We all know it now.
You will see a big change in our economy and there will be so much opportunity in that change. Many jobs will be brought back here and so get ready, get qualified, open up to the opportunities. The supply chains are going to be reworked. The manufacturing is going to come back. Look at some of the training that’s available, in cobots and robots. A lot of the manufacturing now is going to require a little bit of this specialized knowledge. It is an exciting thing to learn right now. I know you can tap into some of that specialized training, but start to think, how might I participate in this new resurgence of America and other countries around the world? We’ve come to this collective conclusion that this needs to change. This needs to shift. We need to take more ownership of our destiny here, so to speak, but let’s get excited about this together and start researching. Every one of us is going to be needed in this new economy that we’re going to be creating, every one of us. There are many brains and talent that all of us need to throw in our chips and say, “I’m going to figure out how to be a part of this.”
What would you say has been the biggest surprise since the book has been published for you two? Is there anything that stands out that wasn’t expected?
We’ve been doing all the podcasts. I know the book industry backwards and forwards and I love it. It’s contracting at the time we’re expanding. We’re doing five podcasts, two in America, one in Ireland. At 5:00 at night, the last one was in Vietnam and the guy who’s got ten million downloads. We’ve been to Vietnam twice talking so it’s not a question of, do we love the Vietnamese? We don’t like communism. We’re flaming the capitalist, but we love the Vietnamese people. He was in Vietnam. He had six Nobel Prize winners in listing.
We get a call from one of our friends that says, “You’ve got to talk to this guy in the UK that heard you now.” The guy says, “My name is Simon Leslie. I own all the airline magazines on 33 major airlines like American Airlines.” I went all on Norwegian and they’re not letting me take magazines on it. First of all, he listened to our podcast. He said, “That’s the most content rich-talk I’ve ever heard in my life for an hour. I’m going to listen to it a couple of times more. We can’t take magazines on airlines anymore because they’re considered dirty. Mark, I’m told that you have the best ideas ever because I’m an idea factory and so are you.” Scott, I don’t know you very well, but I’m convinced you live in ideation. Am I telling the truth?
You’re correct about that, yes.
Every good entrepreneur knows he or she has got to be in ideation. The guy says, “What are you going to do?” One of the guys we interviewed is a guy who did 50 Academy awards like Rocky, Batman, and Rain Man, Peter Guber. He taught us, “Everything’s going to go into the smartphone. Everything’s going to be video centric.” I said that to Simon. He said, “What are you saying?” I said, “When they get on a plane, they’ll automatically go on their phone and it won’t go out until they cancel it. They got it.” Back when flying works, I’d travel 250,000 miles in a year. Forty-four years of riding the friendly skies, so to speak. He said, “I do the American way. I could get them to change. What do you want?” I said, “I want us to be the contributors. We’ll make the videos for it, bring in friends and tell stories that nobody else could do. We’re going to interview you later on that because you’ve got a business nobody ever heard of. No offense intended, but you’re popularly invisible.”
You talk about in the book how to ask like a child. Can you explain that a little bit? That’s such a great analogy.
It is so important, Scott. Honestly, when each of us were born, we were all born with this incredible ability to ask. We had insatiable curiosity. We wanted to know what, where, when, why. We wanted to ask for more and more because that is natural. That is our human spirit expressing itself. Overtime, we start to get shut down a little bit. Maybe your parents were like, “That’s enough. Don’t ask any more.” You go to school, the teachers, the authority are like, “Don’t ask unless you’re called upon.” Whether it’s the military or jobs, it’s like, “Submit to authority. Don’t ask the questions.” Other things happen. We’re rejected. We get shut down and we start to hold back. Some of our ability to ask gets crushed out of us.
That’s why in the book, we write about the seven roadblocks to asking. Those are unworthiness, naivete, fear, doubt, pattern, paralysis, where we’ve gotten stuck in such a pattern. We don’t ever break out of it. We do the same thing over and over again. It’s so important to break out of some of these roadblocks because every one of us has at least one of these roadblocks. Another one is disconnection where we’ve been shut down enough. We’ve given up on the dreams in our hearts and that’s tragic. No one should give up on the dreams in our hearts. We need to rekindle our human spirit and get back into the asking journey and realize that’s what you were made for. You were made to express and ask for the most in life you can.
That’s not saying you don’t want to be a selfish person and a taker. We always say that the science of getting rich or the science of richness means you always want to consider how much value. Half of the circle is how much value am I contributing to the world, to life, and to everything? That’s part of getting in there every day and being a valuable person in every way that you can. Our daughter is a school teacher. The janitor at her school, she’s so in love with him because she said, “Mom, this man is the kindest and most giving guy.” He’ll find out. He goes out of his way to find out what the teacher needs. He goes in there and builds things if they need a little this or that or something changed in the room and does it out of the goodness of his own heart.
Ask!: Asking is the simplest but most profound and amazing tool to take you from your dreams to your destiny.
He is inundated with gifts, nice restaurant certificates, gift cards and all these good things. He increases his abundance naturally. Not because he’s out there going, “Give me more.” It’s because he’s saying, “How can I make this whole experience, the children’s and the teacher’s experience more valuable?” If we approach life that way, how can we create more niche or whatever it is? There’s a way to create value every single day. Get out there and ask for more. It will come to you. It’s incredible.
You hit the next question, the seven different ways to ask. That was one of the most impactful parts of what I’ve read so far was flipping through that. I said, “I’ve got to read that and then flip through that. I love what we’re putting together. I can’t wait to finish everything out here.” What has been a big ask for each of you? Mark, you shared about asking the insurance and Metropolitan Life and speaking with a guy in real estate. Crystal, what’s been a big ask that stood out in your life?
I think back to a personal crisis that I went through when I was young. I was 21 years old. I was one of those kids that found high school to be pretty easy. I accelerated my curriculum. I graduated at age sixteen and married my boyfriend who was five years older. Two and a half years later, I’m divorced in a city all by myself, no friends, no family and a baby on my hip. I had no idea how I’m going to support myself and no job. I applied for food stamps. It’s the only thing I could think of.
I remember going to the grocery store at the time and getting ready to turn those food stamps over to the cashier and I had the most amazing epiphany. As I was getting ready to turn those over, a question dropped into my mind. First of all, how did I get here? The second question that followed that one was, are you doing everything you can to get out of this or are you taking the easy way out? The second that question flooded into my mind I knew the answer. I knew I wasn’t doing everything I could to get out of it. It was this strangest moment like a light was shining on my head. I felt that was such an epiphany. It’s like turning over those food stamps to the cashier I’m already feeling so convicted inside that, and I’m saying to myself, “This will not be my future. This will be the last time I do this.”
I didn’t even finish the food stamps. I went home and started asking myself more questions. “How can I go to work tomorrow? What can I do to earn money tomorrow?” I had heard about the Kelly Services, the Kelly girls, temporary service agency. I registered for Kelly Services and they would call you every day and go, “Do you want to do this job or that job?” You could say yes or no. I started getting some jobs and then realized there were two other temp service agencies. I thought, “I don’t see any rules you can register for all three,” so I did because it came with more options and I started picking the best job. I started working in attorney’s offices, filling in and setting up booths at malls and doing sales of different kinds of conventions that would come to town. I learned a lot about myself. I learned that I liked business.
I learned that I like sales. I’m pretty good at it. I love people. I decided at that point to put myself through real estate school, get my real estate license. A year and a half from that moment where I was turning those food stamps over to the cashier, I was working for the top home builder in our valley. I became the number one realtor. I also, in the meantime, had approached the modeling agency because people said, “You should try to model.” I had approached this modeling agency. I got signed with them and a couple of my commercials started running nationally. I was getting residuals. I went from that moment, probably the lowest moment anybody could describe to being at a completely different place.
I often think back that moment and I did throughout my life. What if I had caved in to my misery because I’m telling you as easy as it sounds here, it was a terrible time for me. It was a miserable time and a scary time. I was crying on my pillow every night, saying, “How am I going to survive?” It was very difficult, but I’m so tremendously thankful that those tough questions came to my mind. Probably more importantly that I was able to answer them honestly. That’s what I’m trying to share with your audience. We all go through these tough times. I know you’re going through tough times. You are not alone, but let’s get honest. Let’s get serious with ourselves and ask those tough questions that we need to ask. Don’t cave into the misery. Let’s challenge ourselves out of it. Be honest with our answers. What more can we do? I know everyone tuning in here is way more resourceful than they realize. We want to help you all find that resourcefulness through this asking journey.
Mark, is there a story that sticks out and asks the stories throughout it? The one I chose to read was the Deborah Rosado story. She was at Target and your books fell on her literally that she took home the second day. That’s a good one, but is there a story in there that stands out?
She’s a superstar, but she came out. Here’s a blue-collar worker working in an umbrella factory and not making a lot of money. Her husband leaves her. She’s got three little babies, boys that all of which are friends of ours. She’s walking through Target and she keeps going down this one aisle, and God directing her and the same book keeps falling off the shelf in front of her. She goes, “I don’t know what the sign is here, but I’ll get this little book of yours.” She went home and read it. It said, “You ought to ask yourself, what is it that’s available to you right now that’s causing you a great deal of pain that if you fixed, you’d make a great deal of a substantial profit?” That’s the question.
Way in that night, it was raining like hell. She had an umbrella. She’s going up the stairs and rips her knees open. You’ve got three little kids, bags of groceries and you’re bleeding and there’s no man there. There’s no console. The kids don’t know what to do. You’ve got to take care of yourself. She’s lying in bed and reads that and says, “I think that’s it.” I’ll put a light bulb in the umbrella. That ended up selling the company for $360 million to Walmart of all things. She ended up becoming from an invisible person to a very visible person. She’s considered one of the three most powerful Hispanic women. She’s on the board of PepsiCo. She’s like, “I’ll climb this stuff now.” She’s happily remarried.
She says, “I thank you in my prayers every day that you’d write a line like that.” Crystal said to you, when you ask a question, you get revelation, illumination and insight. You can’t ask a question without getting an answer. The question here is you’ve got to do positive questions, not negative questions, “What if I go back or what if I get sick?” I did that. What if I go bankrupt and I went bankrupt. A dumb question gets a dumb answer. Forrest Gump said, “My Mama always said, ‘Stupid is as stupid does.”’ Let me hitchhike on that because you’re so open to this. I’m sure you saw the movie Sully. You heard about the guy who lands the plane and then they’re taking away his retirement. They’re taking away his life. They’re saying, “You could have done something else.” He asked one question that saved his life, saved his retirement, saved his fortune and got him out of besmirchment by the FAA.
He said, “How many times did you run a simulation to see how fast I could go to LaGuardia Airport or Newark?” They said seventeen times. He said, “I had seven seconds. I had to make a decision and I landed the plane down so everybody could walk out on the wings and get out.” Two thousand people at the FAA gave him a standing ovation. I get goosebumps telling you that because you love my Chicken Soup stories. That’s a perfect Chicken Soup story because Tom Hanks played Sully. The bottom line here is that all of us are going to have a Sully moment and some of us is grabbing it right now. You’ve got to understand that you’re going to be asked critical questions. You’ve got to ask yourself the right question and ask others the right question. He saved his future, his family, his fortune because they took away his pilot’s license. They made him feel bad that he saved whatever it was, 217 lives on a plane.
Somebody had been nothing but flying for 40 plus years had to make a decision in seven seconds and being judged like that. I agree that totally. We all need to be asking that. You said something very good. We have to ask the right questions, the positive questions. If we keep asking, “What if we fail?” the others say, “What if we succeed? What happens if we succeed to make things happen until our dreams come true?”
It doesn’t care. It will make you answer your negative question. Do you want to go bankrupt? We’ll show you how to do that.
For our audience, what’s an ask of our audience? We’ve got investors and people all across the country. Besides going and buying the book, what would be a big ask of our audience from you two?
First of all, buy the book and then I’ll get the biggest ask we have in a book. The first one is we’re doing the Ask! Challenge. We’re saying, “Get the book at Amazon,” because bookstores aren’t open. Go to Reception@MarkVictorHansen.com. Send us your receipt. We’re going to invite you into the biggest book club in history, Live and Living with Crystal and Mark. We’re going to answer all your questions. It’s going to be outstanding and it’s going to be fun. We’re going to all grow together. We want to reinvigorate America to its greatness and wonder and awe. Americans here is we’re good at work.
The second thing is, we’ve got a question in there by Peter Diamandis and Ray Kurzweil, two of the smartest guys in Silicon Valley. I can give you their credentials, they’re outstanding and geniuses, but they say, “What are you personally going to do to positively affect one billion people in this decade?” Remember, there are eight billion. If you helped one billion people, you got $1 on each one of those transactions, you made $1 billion. I do believe a lot of you are going to hear that question. If you keep asking that question, you’ll figure out how to help one billion people and you become a billionaire and you’re going to end up thanking us like we did the Deborah Rosado story.
It’s a lot more fun to ask the positive questions. It’s a lot more fun to have a positive outlook on things. Your dreams will appear for you. You’ll see things that you’ve never seen before if you open your eyes and ask the right questions. That’s why I love talking about asking like a child because a child’s eyes are open to so many new possibilities there and things in life. I want to thank you both for coming on the show. Thank you so much for taking the time. It has been a great honor. Thank you for being my guests on my 600th episode too. I’m honored to have you here.
We thank you. It’s been thrilling every second.
Thank you, Scott. You’re wonderful. The show is great so thank you so much.
I appreciate it. Go and buy the book, send the receipt to Reception@MarkVictorHansen.com. It’s one of the largest mastermind group and start impacting the world, one billion people. We all have the ability to help people. Start off with one. Start by asking yourself the right questions to help yourself and others out there. Take care of what you need to get done and learn to pivot. There’s a great section here on pivoting as well too. It is one of the most impactful books I’ve read in a long time. Go out, ask the right questions and we look forward to seeing you all at the top.
Important Links:
- Chicken Soup for The Soul
- Ask!: The Bridge from Your Dreams to Your Destiny
- Chicken Soup for the Soul
- The One Minute Millionaire
- Stand Up, Speak Out and Win
- Kelly Services
- Reception@MarkVictorHansen.com
About Mark Victor Hansen
Mark Victor Hansen is probably best known as the co-author for the Chicken Soup for the Soul book series and brand, setting world records in book sales, with over 500 million books sold. He is also a prolific writer with 307 books authored or co-authored, including The Aladdin Factor, The Power of Focus, The Richest Kids in America, The Miracles in You, You Have a Book in You, and the One Minute Millionaire series. Crystal Dwyer Hansen is a business strategist and successful entrepreneur, speaker, and author in the US and China. Crystal, also known as the “celebrity coach,” is a certified life coach and wellness/nutrition expert, whose personal coaching, speaking, CD and video programs, books, and articles have helped people all over the world.
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