324. Wired for Success: The Essence of Being Wired Differently with Todd Saylor

Todd Saylor:
And so, once people learn that the subconscience can work for you, not just the way the world has subjected it to work against you, then you’ve arrived at what we would call the actualization phase.

Dr. Richard Shuster:
Hello and welcome to The Daily Helping with Dr. Richard Shuster, food for the brain, knowledge from the experts, tools to win at life. I’m your host, Dr. Richard. Whoever you are, wherever you’re from, and whatever you do, this is the show that is going to help you become the best version of yourself. Each episode you will hear from some of the most amazing, talented, and successful people on the planet who followed their passions and strived to help others. Join our movement to get a million people each day to commit acts of kindness for others. Together, we’re going to make the world a better place. Are you ready? Because it’s time for your Daily Helping.

Thanks for tuning in to this episode of The Daily Helping. I’m your host, Dr. Richard. And we’ve got an awesome, awesome guest to share with you today. His name is Todd Saylor and he is on a mission to become America’s coach. He is the man behind the internationally known brand Wired Differently and the Tiki Hut Business Retreat. He’s America’s functional business coach, and his mission is to build you personally, spiritually, and profitably.

Todd has been featured on CBS, Yahoo! Finance, Business Insider, MarketWatch, and others. And through his 30 years of entrepreneurial experience in business and leadership, he has helped so many people scale their business. He has 14 businesses of his own and all of them are successful. We’re not going to talk about all of those. We’re going to talk about his book. But Todd Saylor, welcome to The Daily Helping. It is awesome to have you here.

Todd Saylor:
Dr. Richard, you are spectacular. Let’s rip potato chip. It’s on like Donkey Kong. I’m excited. We’re going to change some people’s lives right now today. You inspire me. I just want to let you know, I got to tell you, I’m on this virtual tour right now. I’ve got a whole set of as many as 20 podcasts. And I got to tell you, I look forward to this one as much as any. You’re spectacular. Thank you for having me. I’m super excited to talk to your audience.

Dr. Richard Shuster:
Well, I appreciate that. I know there’s going to be some wisdom that you’re going to bestow upon us.

Todd Saylor:
Wisdom.

Dr. Richard Shuster:
Wisdom.

Todd Saylor:
Oh, listen. Let’s go. Just start fire away, baby. I’m ready.

Dr. Richard Shuster:
All right. Well, here’s what we’re going to do first, and you’re a guy who’s pretty close in age to me so you like the ’80s reference. To those of you who —

Todd Saylor:
Listen. You said you were 50.

Dr. Richard Shuster:
Hm-mm.

Todd Saylor:
I’m 59. Is that close?

Dr. Richard Shuster:
Close enough. Same decade, right?

Todd Saylor:
I’m going to 59, like, any minute, right? So, thank you for that compliment.

Dr. Richard Shuster:
There you go. See, we’re already starting off right.

Todd Saylor:
We’re done, man. I’m like, This is the best podcast ever.

Dr. Richard Shuster:
Ever.

Todd Saylor:
Ever. Ever.

Dr. Richard Shuster:
So, here’s your pop culture reference. Let’s hop in the Todd Saylor DeLorean fired up to 88 miles an hour. Let’s go back in time.

Todd Saylor:
Back in time.

Dr. Richard Shuster:
Tell us what puts you on the path you’re on today.

Todd Saylor:
Oh, wow. Literally, I have got so much to share with that regard. I’m going to say, this is going to be like a routine answer at first, but it’s going to get better. So, I’d say my father, amazing man, my father is the greatest football coach that ever walked the planet, literally. From 1967 to 1976, he basically never lost a football game in Hudson, Michigan. You know Michigan, we talked about where Hudson is here. And set the world win streak record. It was a blistering pace.

So, up until, basically, I was 12 years old, I never saw my father really lose a football game. And I went through that whole process of winning and watching him coach and build men. And I’m just going to give you a really interesting thing that I’m working on right now, it’s a movie about him, and the title of the movie is The Tiger In Us. So, if anybody wants to go see the trailer of this movie, thetigerinus.com, thetigerinus.com. It’s spectacular.

I was just in the Super Bowl in February and I spoke to the NFL, and I got an opportunity to talk to these NFL players and their wives. And we actually did the trailer to the movie after the George Foreman trailer and we got a standing ovation for the movie trailer. So, we’re in the process of working in finishing that book. And the producers in the movie are kind of waiting there. We got a writers strike going on. We got all kinds of things going on in that regard.

So, just to set up, my father, that was really the most pivotal thing. And when we talk about my book a little bit later, Your Will Be Done – I’ve wrote three books, Wired Differently books – this third book, especially, focuses on the mindset that my father bestowed upon me over these years as a young man watching him set these records, and coach these athletes, and run these young men.

And one of the most inspiring things to me at all is when I was roughly 11 or 12 years old – I tell the story and the movie is based on this moment in time – when I realized my father in 1972, 1973, something like that, was training the athletes to play a football game. I went there to watch them play or practice because I was always handing out water and salt tablets, things of that nature back in the ’70s. But there was no football. There’s no helmets out there on the field. It was just a crazy day.

And I watched them and I saw one group was crawling under the agility ropes, and another group was doing monkey rolls in the mud, and another group had men, they were trying to get across the goal line with another man over their shoulder. And as I watched this thing happen, this man couldn’t make it across the line. All the other players had men over their shoulders, but they made it across the goal line.

But the last young man fell just before the goal line, and the man fell off his shoulder. And the whole team converged around him saying, "Get up. Get up. Get up. Don’t you quit. Don’t you let up. No one’s going to help you. Get up. Get up." The coaches were screaming. The players were screaming. It was just bizarre as a little kid. He finally got up somehow and put the man over his shoulder, carried across the goal line and they all celebrated, Doc. They said, "He lived. He lived. He lived."

And so, this also impacts to me, my father looks over and sees me on the sideline, like, bizarre. And he walks over, he says, "Son, what’s wrong? What’s wrong?" I said, "Dad, I thought you were a football coach." He says, "Son, son, son, I’m not a football coach." I said, "What do you mean?" He said, "Son, listen. These men are not going to go to the factories and work after high school. These men are not going to go to college after high school. They’re not even going to go on the farms. I mean, they’re not. I’m not a football coach, son. These men are going to Vietnam. I’m a builder of men."

And so, that moment, that pivotal moment, the movie is built around that pivotal moment where as a 12 year old boy and your mind literally says, "I want to be that man." You know my dad, for now he has dementia, but he’s still that man to me. He still took these men through this time of uncertainty. He took these men through.

And so, that’s my leadership side of me, friend. And so, he taught me mindset, and he taught me how to look at things, and he taught me how to be successful. It all came from that, that root and that base story of him being an amazing football coach, a winner, and a builder of men.

Dr. Richard Shuster:
Thank you for sharing that. And that resonates so strongly with me. I’ve said on as many platforms this will take me that my father was one of the most influential people in my life and an entrepreneur through and through. And so, it’s so often that people who are passionate about helping others have modeling in their background that is similar, and that’s obviously the case for you.

So, clearly, you’ve been doing this for a while and we won’t do the whole this is your life, Todd Saylor, and how we got from point A to point B. But I want to talk about your book because it’s your third book and it’s now available everywhere. So, Wired Differently: Your Will Be Done, what was the impetus for writing that?

Todd Saylor:
So, I think you got to understand just a little bit of me with my organizations and building people and building men and understanding the basis of, you know, where my mentorship came from.

And so, the first book I wrote is Wired Differently. Phenomenal book. It’s my favorite book. And it took me through my business life. It chronicled where my father had touched me early in regards to motivation and all the things that we’re doing. But it really was meant to really share with my family this never give up attitude and what’s different about us. Why do we get up earlier? Why do we go to bed later? Why do we work harder? Why do we cry harder? Why do we try harder? Why do we lose harder? What is wrong with me? Why? Why aren’t other people like us?

And we determined we’re wired differently. And so, this impetus for getting out there and sharing with people this idea of being wired differently, understanding that there’s more of us out there. Doc, I mean, there literally are more of us out there and we need to band together. And so, Wired Differently really brought that out, that was What Is Wired Differently?

And the second book I wrote was Drift Again, Wired Differently: Drift Again. And it talks about the eight supremely purposeful traits that wired differently people have. This is the why we’re wired differently. We have seven great traits, but one bad trait.

Dr. Richard Shuster:
Do you mind going through those quickly? I’m really interested in this.

Todd Saylor:
I can. I can actually do that. So, I will preface it by saying the seven good traits we have, we all have. But the seventh trait or one trait that we all have become supremely purposeful is that we drift and then we drift again. We sin and then we sin again. We lose focus and then we lose focus again. I think wired differently people, A-driven people, that is our nemesis. And so, the book was built about the principles of, you know, why we’re wired differently and these eight traits of supremely purposeful people.

And so, this is the cover of the book. And just for ease, I’m going to actually take you through those if you’d want to hear those.

Dr. Richard Shuster:
Yeah. Let’s touch on it.

Todd Saylor:
Yeah. We’ll do it quick. So, the first trait is Drift Again. So, the first trait is Drift Again, and that’s the bad one. We drift and then we drift again. We sin and then we sin again. The second trait is the Mark. We all, as wired differently people, we have a mark. So, this whole chapter is about the Mark. I triangulate my goals and wired differently people tend to triangulate their goals on marks. Not just marks of goals, but I triangulate on people.

Sometimes we just have to understand that there are people in our lives that we go after. We want to surpass. Most of them are good, but sometimes there’s people out there that we can motivate ourselves with because they’ve done us wrong or they’ve done things to other people that are wrong. There are things out there that just motivate each of us differently. So, that’s the Mark.

The second one is the Ego. And I talk about the ego empathy battle, where we need to leverage our ego and our empathy. And wired differently successful people are very good at understanding that there’s an ego empathy balance, and so we talk about that.

The View. We look at things differently. We just look at things differently. You know, there’s a story and then there’s a teaching on each one of these. The View, I tell the story about buying a house when I was 28 or something with my wife. And the insurance guy came over and I was showing him the whole house and it was like this garage with a hotel for raccoons and all this kind of stuff.

And I said, "Listen, it’s 20 acres. It’s going to be beautiful one day. I just love it. I love it. Can we insure it? What do you think we should do with it?" And he looked at me and he handed me a box of blue tipped matches and he said, "Here’s a match. What you do with it, I’ll never tell." And he got in his truck and he drove out. So, he couldn’t see. He couldn’t see the beauty, the majestic of what was going to be there. And, ultimately, in ten years, that house became amazing, obviously, and I raised my children there.

The Pain. We see pain a little differently. We understand the pain of emotion, but we also understand that we don’t have such a big problem with the pain of pain. We can move through pain a little differently. We know how to leverage pain.

We’re Odd. Number six, We’re Odd. I want you to understand that we’re odd. We’re just a little different. And then, there’s this number seven, No Mas. I talk about that we don’t like to quit, we don’t like to lose. We know all those things. But, you know, the wired definitely person, although they’re stubborn in that regard, they need to learn and we definitely find a way to understand that there are no mas moments for us. No mas is Spanish for no more.

And last but not least is the own. We own our identity. We own who we are. We own our mistakes. We own our misgivings. We own our sinful nature. We own the things that we do wrong. And we live up and we legitimately apologize and move through it. And we understand exactly who we are. We try to do these things.

And I think those are the seven traits of successful people that become supremely purposeful. I know you’re a doctor. I never had a doctor analyze my seven good points. But I just want to remember, the faithful drift. The drift. The drift is something we write about in our first books, which is what we talk about, the land of quo. It’s a land of quos.

A nasty place. A place where people just kind of drift off to and they take a whole ecosystem of status quos, and they put them in one place and they’re all driving the same car that’s going one way. And they’re all talking about the same people one way. And they’re all just like having the same credit card problems in the same way. And they just kind of feed off themselves in this ecosystem. It’s the land of quo. Because we know that we’re either going up or we’re going down. And when you’re in the land of quo, it’s just kind of like a tablet that drops in a bottle of water and you just watch it just kind of evaporate.

And I want people out of the land of quo. I want people not to drift and get away from that. I want them to be on the seven traits of supremely purposeful people. So, you asked for it, you got it, Doc.

Dr. Richard Shuster:
That was awesome. No, listen, as you were going through those, I was like, "Yeah. Yeah." You can’t be an entrepreneur and not be different, right?

Todd Saylor:
Yeah. You’re wired differently.

Dr. Richard Shuster:
It’s just different. So, thank you for setting that context. Now, I want to spend some time talking about Wired Differently: Your Will Be Done. So, this book, take us through what a reader will get out of this book.

Todd Saylor:
Yeah. So, I’ll just preface it one more time. The first book is What Is Wired Differently. Second book, Drift again, is why we’re wired differently and how those things are working. But the third book was really the book I wanted to write in the beginning, but I just wasn’t ready. You know, I didn’t have the foundation. I didn’t ever say to my mom and dad I’m going to be an author one day.

And so, the book hit me as a concept of, you know, getting to people about being wired differently. And I want to collect people. I want to collect people and help them understand that God made us different. So, there’s three stages in becoming wired differently, and we talk about those in my last book, my most recent book, Your Will Be Done. And in Your Will Be Done, we triangulate your free will and God’s will for us.

And so, I think if anything we want in our life – I do a podcast every morning at 7:30 a.m., new content live Monday through Friday, it’s a haul but I do it and I love it. And I talk about, obviously, wired differently as a mindset – when I want people to understand the three stages of being wired differently, I literally talk about the creation stage, which is the very first stage of being wired differently, Doc. That’s when we’re born. That’s the piece in life where we’re born. We come out in this world. We have no choice in what we’re going to be. We’re just kind of plopped there.

And then, we got what? Some 1,000 or 100,000 or 100 million neurons populating every minute when we’re incubating in the baby’s brain and all this kind of stuff’s going on. And then, somehow 250 billion neurons are calculating when the time you get out of the womb and you’re growing. And then, by the time you’re three years old, Dr. Daniel Amen shares with us that there’s 1,000 trillion neurons in a baby’s brain about the size of a softball. And those neurons can be connected in any cocktail you could ever imagine.

Now, I know I’m talking to a man of pure wisdom in your regards, but this is what’s going on in the brain. Are you familiar with Dr. Daniel Amen?

Dr. Richard Shuster:
Yes, I am.

Todd Saylor:
He’s a monster, right? And so, we look at that and so you cannot deny that we come out of this world wired differently. Those cocktails are infinite. That’s 15 zeros you think about. That’s actually not a number. It’s a quadrillion. And so, when you think about that, we’d look at that, that’s the creation stage and that’s where we’re definitely wired differently.

But then, we look in stage two is when we learn and, hopefully, can teach people to actualize in their mind the simple things that my father taught me growing up, like how to help a headache dissipate by thinking through it, how to see a football play happen before it happens, how to see your marriage, how to see life before you, how to really program your subconscience.

And so, once people learn that the subconscience can work for you, not just the way the world has subjected it to work against you, then you’ve arrived at what we would call the actualization phase.

Dr. Richard Shuster:
The most powerful thing that people don’t understand is language, right? The things that we tell ourselves are actually more powerful than the things that other people say to us. And so, you know, if we build the neural pathways —

Todd Saylor:
Neuroplasticity. We got room to grow more, don’t we?

Dr. Richard Shuster:
We do. But the point being is that if we create a foundation, if you think about your brain – I think of our brain as trees and so the neurons actually look a lot like roots. And so, if the roots you’re putting down are predicated on self-doubt, are predicated on I don’t deserve, I’m not good enough, then it becomes harder for you because you have essentially created this programming of negativity.

Todd Saylor:
We call them ANTS, right? What’s ANTS?

Dr. Richard Shuster:
I don’t know the reference. What do you mean what’s ANTS?

Todd Saylor:
Automatic Negative Thoughts.

Dr. Richard Shuster:
There you go. Okay. That’s one of your terms.

Todd Saylor:
Come on. Let it rip, baby.

Dr. Richard Shuster:
ANTS. ANTS. I was thinking about ants, like the little guys.

Todd Saylor:
No. I got you on that one. But, I mean, that’s exactly what you’re talking about. That’s what I would tell them.

Dr. Richard Shuster:
The point being, the point being is that we can unwind and undo. So, if we start new habits, if we have a new framework upon which we think about things, then what will happen over time is those neuronal pathways, those connections in our brains, the stuff that’s bad for us, those will literally – and I do mean literally, like we can see this on diagnostic imaging – wither away. And where we put our focus, where we put our energy will pull us towards the new.

There’s something in our brain called the reticular activating system. The example I like to use, let’s say you went out and bought a Hyundai Tucson. That’s the Todd Saylor car. Todd Saylor bought a blue Hyundai Tucson. So, let’s say you’re driving around your Tucson and you’re driving down the road, and, "Oh. There’s a Hyundai Tucson. And, oh, there’s a Hyundai Tucson." Are there more Hyundai Tucson’s on the road? All of a sudden, no, of course not.

But your subconscious, through the reticular activating system, is pulling your awareness to that. So, you know, what you’re talking about from a scientific framework is really that the models we create for ourselves determine the way we see the world. And that can be adaptive in your case because of the lessons your father taught you. That is highly adaptive because it instilled in you at a neuronal level early.

Todd Saylor:
We didn’t know what we were doing. He didn’t know what he was doing.

Dr. Richard Shuster:
But he did it, right?

Todd Saylor:
Yeah. He did it.

Dr. Richard Shuster:
And so, the same thing can happen if you’re talking about the inverse of that. If your dad was a terrible person and berated you and made you feel like less than, as an adult, you may have some of those experiences today for that very reason. But the good news is that we can unwind and we can undo. It didn’t happen. It’s not a snap of a finger. But we can undo some of these things and create a healthier way of viewing it.

You said the ANTS and, again, I was thinking about the little black ants crawling around.

Todd Saylor:
That’s exactly it right there. Good job.

Dr. Richard Shuster:
But cognitive behavioral therapy teaches us, if you look at cognitive behavioral therapy, it talks about that we basically have these core beliefs. And then, the core beliefs lead to these intermediate thoughts, which lead to these automatic thoughts. And the automatic thoughts are the ANTS, which you were talking about, right?

Todd Saylor:
A-N-T-S, ANTS, Automatic Negative Thoughts.

Dr. Richard Shuster:
Yeah. So, those automatic thoughts are when something happens to us, we, at a millisecond level, have an automatic thought which triggers an emotional response. And that’s where, for most people, the pitfalls lie.

But we’re out of time. It went so fast. That’s a sign you’re having a good time. Tell us where people can find you online and get their hands on your book.

Todd Saylor:
I would love it. So, go to toddsaylor.com, that’s T-O-D-D-Saylor, S-A-Y-L-O-R-dot com. And you can get the book there and we have got a promo code for you, WIRED12, WIRED12, and you’re going to get 12 percent off on anything you buy there, shirts, books, any of the books you get there, any of the coaching, any of that.

And if you want to go to thetigerinus.com, you can see the trailer of the movie. And coming up November 8th, 9th, 10th, and 11th, I’ve got the Tiki Hut Retreat in Longboat Key in Florida where we have four days, and I take business minded people through four days of business training on the ocean, on the sand. We go to Egmont Key for a leadership scavenger hunt on a secluded island. It’s an amazing, amazing experience.

And, man, I hope to get to see you in person one day. I think you’re just spectacular. Thank you so much.

Dr. Richard Shuster:
Appreciate it. And we’ll have everything Todd Saylor in the show notes, and you can find it at the all new drrichardshuster.com. So, everything we talked about, including this episode, is going to be right there. Well, Todd, thank you so much for coming on the show. I enjoyed it. It was a fun one for sure.

And I want to thank each and every one of you who listened to this episode as well. If you liked it, if you learned something from it, if it fired you up, go give us a follow and a five star review on your app of choice, because that is what helps other people find the podcast. Most importantly, go out there today and do something nice for somebody else, even if you don’t know who they are, and post it on your social media feeds using the hashtag #MyDailyHelping because the happiest people are those that help others.