You want to reach your true goals in life – freedom and autonomy – but not necessarily stop what you're doing, and certainly not stop being relevant and significant. But it’s important to be able to do it on your own terms, and help your kids and the next generations have the same opportunity. 

It's going to become a lot tougher to get to that point of having true freedom and not being dependent on always having to go to work and trade time for dollars, or depending on the government; half the population depends upon entitlements and stimulus checks. You have to make sure that you and the people you care about are able to rise above that.

So, how do we do that? 

First, it’s changing the way you think. And that starts with what you take in – what you listen to, what you read, and what you watch. Be very careful of the news and the general media, because it's so slanted that if you suck that in and it starts contaminating your mind, you're going to be relatively helpless to yourself and other people. So, you have to be very discerning about what you take in and who you listen to.

Who are you? Who are you following? 

I’ve spent four decades of my life elevating and investing in myself, by getting in the circles of influence of other people that I could learn from. I still had to find and vet, because it's a wild West out there, and finding the right people wasn't a straight shot. I found a lot of people who were frauds and fakes, and unfortunately, the world's full of people who promote themselves as “I got this lifestyle and I got this all figured out.” 

But when you get the opportunity, as I have had, to get behind the scenes and get inside their world, most of the time it’s to pay to play. This means paying to be a part of their group or part of a group that they're in. That's where you really get to find out who people are because, on the outside, when they're just spouting off on social media, you have no ability to see what's really going on in their life.

Now, I'm not saying that everybody is a fraud. But the percentage of people who really live true to core values and who they say they are is relatively small – and that's sad. I won't mention names, but there are plenty of big ones out there today who I know have huge baggage in their lives that they're not talking about. They only show the world the good stuff, and they don't talk about the bad. 

There are so many people who I thought at one point were doing good things and had it figured out, but I would come to learn later that there wasn't much infrastructure or solid ground to what they were promoting. Great promoters and marketers, but substance-wise: pretty shallow. So be careful.

You have to find the right groups. It takes time. It takes effort. I put myself in other groups on a regular basis, and I’m always elevating. I pay to get inside the world of other people because that vitality—who someone knows, who someone else knows, the exponential resource ability—from having that kind of group is tremendous. It's probably one of the best investments I've ever made in my life.

My premise is to really force you to think about what you're doing, to up your game, and get outside your industry and the small circles that you run in because they make you feel good. That's all fine and good, but you've got to make time to get outside and find other people who think differently.

In Freedom Founders, I always bring in outside thinkers. I don't bring in the rank and file, even if they're good people. You have to get outside thinkers who come in and lay out the bigger picture. You have to get back to where you were as a kid, when you were exploring and thinking bigger, and not just in this tiny world of everyday business: “I’ve got to do this and that and put these fires out.”

If you’re going to get where you want to go, to change and transform your own life so you can then help other people have freedom and autonomy, you have to change the way you think. And to do that, you have to change the people you spend time with, that you listen to, that you take advice from, that motivate you. You have to find real people with real substance. If you listen to people who are frauds or don't have much substance, then it's going to be empty for you. 

So, put yourself on a mission to find the right people. It can take some time –