Podcast Description
In this podcast, I was interviewed by fellow podcaster Jeremy Ryan Slate from the Create Your Own Life Podcast. We talked about many things related to business, advertising and the world of opportunity in front of us.
Podcast File
An Interview with Jeremy Ryan Slate – An Entrepreneur is Made not Born
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Podcast Transcription
Manuel: Hey guys! I hope that you’re doing fantastic. Today, I want to share an interview that I did the other day that was done on me by Jeremy Ryan Slate with Create Your Own Life Podcast. This was an interview in which there was a lot of fire on it. You know how I get really passionate about things. I think that you guys are going to enjoy it. The main thing that came from it is that I was being asked by Jeremy about entrepreneurs and how my parents had an influence on it. My daddy, my great-granddaddy. And I believe that an entrepreneur is somebody that is made and not something that’s on the DNA of an individual. So, I think that you guys are going to like it. There’s a lot of value on it. A lot of great viewpoints to have and I would love to hear your thoughts on it. So send me a message at m.me/theninjamarketer. Alright guys, here we go. Here’s today’s podcast.
Jeremy: Hey, what’s up everybody? Jeremy here. And guys, I’m very excited for today’s guest because I’ve been hearing his name all over the place and I know listeners would actually have been saying, “Hey, you’ve got to have this guy on.” Today’s guest moved to the US from Puerto Rico. Manuel Suarez launched the company taking it from $0 to $6 million in sales in just over a year. In this time he said everything marketing with a focus on social media marketing. He then decided to help others starting with his father and 3 years helped his business to go from $2 million in revenue in one country to $28 million in 8 countries. After that, he took his first client to $400,000 to over a million in six months. From there, he formed Attention Grabbing Media. And, inspired by Ben Cummings, decided to launch his own course on Facebook marketing which is currently nearing completion after its first launch. You can find out more about him over at www.manuelsuarez.com. Welcome to Create Your Own Life Podcast Manuel Suarez.
Manuel: Oh man, it’s a pleasure to be here, Jeremy. Thank you for having me.
Jeremy: Absolutely man. I can’t tell you the number of listeners that have told me I’ve got to have you on the show. So, it’s an honor to hang out with you today, brother.
Manuel: That’s awesome!
Jeremy: Very cool. So, I love to take a look at people that are high performers. They’re really doing things on a high level and kind of figure out what are those things that make them different? What are those things that make them tech? So let me ask you. What’s your story?
Manuel: Oh, man. What’s your story? I mean, 400+ episodes, man. I was looking at you the other day because I’ve heard a bunch of podcasts and I’m like, this guy, one of the things that I would always tell anybody that ask me, what is the number 1 factor in your success? Persistence. And, let me give you a big validation for that because that’s something that is special. But to answer your question Jeremy, I’ve been hearing throughout many years, there’s people that I follow, some of the guys that I’ve been listening to from Gary Vaynerchuk, that when I actually bought his book, I think about six years ago which he has crushed it, there are things that I’ve heard from his content, most of them have been the truth which has inspired me to do the special things that I’ve done throughout the last few years. But, a lot of other things like, there was one main thing that I’ve never agreed with. And I’ve even written him an email because we had a personal connection later on. I wrote an email that he was wrong in his viewpoint, that he said that you’re either an entrepreneur or your not.
Jeremy: You know what’s funny? That’s the exact same point that bothered me too and I actually got a conversation with Grant Cardone. Go ahead.
Manuel: One time, I was listening and I still do today, I listen a lot to his content and it’s something that keeps me going a lot. But, he talks a lot about that. He starts the seminar and he says like, “Well I’m sorry, this is awkward, I got nothing to tell you because you’re either an entrepreneur or you’re not.” And, I disagree so much, Jeremy, on this because I’m 37 years old today and the first 32 years of my life, I did nothing entrepreneurial. I literally was trying to get the most out of my family. My dad, we were middle class, you know? We came from a decent background. By the age of 8, my dad got divorced from my mom and after that, we actually had a meltdown in the family. And by the age of 12, my entire family was bankrupt. My dad, my mom, everybody. We lost everything. We started over. My dad’s story, it’s an incredible one. But we come from a background of like having a lot, being decent and then having nothing from my teenage years and then along the way, my dad would just help me survive. I would have a job, I will work 8 hours a day and just earn minimum wage and I actually was a waiter for a couple of years of my life.
I never had really any ambitions. I mean, by the age of 24, I got married. I met my wife. I met her in Mexico City because I was studying over there. I was studying some philosophical training in Mexico and then there I met my wife. And still, I had no hope, ambition, nor a desire to be an entrepreneur, own businesses. Or you know what? It was probably I’m thinking that entrepreneurs were smart and that was not for me. There are all these viewpoints about that’s just not for me. So, my wife married me not for my money. Funny story, I actually got a loan from her to get her a wedding engagement ring, you know? She literally lent me money for me to buy her an engagement ring. This is a story that I usually don’t tell publicly. So, I had nothing. I guess that’s a good sign that I have a woman that loves me for what I am, what I was in that point.
Jeremy: I hear you, man. My wife is way smarter than me. I came from the academic role where I was a high school teacher, she was the entrepreneur. So, I totally understand that viewpoint.
Manuel: Right. There you go. So, basically, Jeremy, for the next 10 years or so, I’m going to say, so I’m 37 now, so I’ve been married for almost 14 years now, I was 24 back then. For the next 9 years or so, I had a 9-5 job, Monday through Saturday. And then, something happened to me. Mostly, me realizing by an observation that there was a different era and there was a lot of people taking advantage of this era and why am I standing on the sidelines? I was struggling. I couldn’t meet ends meets. I was on a tough time paying for my mortgage and I couldn’t have my kids in a private school and I couldn’t do the things that I wanted to do. It was a struggle.
So, I think that the way that it happened to me was in early 2012. My brother-in-law, who is one of my partners today, he came in and he told me, “Look, there’s something going on with this Amazon world.” I think it was an amazing selling machine, the third launch, or something like that. And then he told me, “You can sell stuff on Amazon”. And I’m like, “Really?” Interesting. Come to think of it Jeremy, that in 2018, people still, most people in the world, not entrepreneurs, they think that when they’re buying something from Amazon, Amazon is selling it to them. They don’t understand that it’s a bunch of us in our homes, in our kitchens, in garages, getting inventory from other parts of the planet like China, and sell it to them. But, at that point, I was one of those. I was ignorant. And I was like, “Oh, wow. Interesting! You can sell your own stuff on Amazon? Oh, wow! Let’s do it!”
So, for me, that was a start. That was when I had my first wake up after 32 years of slumber, totally in this world of being able to produce money. And, things just started taking out, man. I mean, it was a big snowball effect for me and I’ve got so obsessed with it. I can go back in time right now and understand that generally in my life when I get obsessed with something I don’t stop until I conquered it. It used to be things that were not moral, okay? We’re not going to talk about that today. It also used to be women. Also, I hope that my wife doesn’t listen to this but we’re not also going to talk about that. So, in general, also, I was a really good tennis player my whole life. I was really into tennis. I was number 2 in Puerto Rico and number 1 for like my entire teenage years over there. I was a champion and I play internationally and everything. So, I was really good at that. So, when I learned a new subject and that was marketing, I became obsessed with it. I just couldn’t stop until I have mastered it. And, fast forward to today, if you would have told me five years ago that I would have accomplished half of the things that I’ve done in the last five years, I definitely would have laughed in your face, Jeremy. That’s basically the short story, summarized.
Jeremy: Absolutely. So, I want to take a look at, you mentioned in 2013 there was this big shift. That’s when you found Amazon, it was when a lot of these different things happened. I’d like to hear a little bit of you know, what were you kind of considering at that point, like what has moved you over the hump? Because a lot of people think about opportunities but they don’t move.
Manuel: Right. It’s a great question, Jeremy. I think that I got to a point in which I remember I had an iPhone which I was really proud of. I don’t know if it was an iPhone 3 at that point or something like that, maybe it was close to 4. I used to play a lot of Tomb Raider, or Temple Stones, or something like that. I used to waste so much time. I mean, I would look at my kids and they would waste time and I was just wasting time right with them and my life just felt like purposeless. I used to work, get out of work, get outside my house and my kids, that was fun going to skateboard, shoot some hoops. But then, I felt quite about all the things that I wanted to do and I remembered I wanted to go to a vacation, wanted to go to the Caribbean, maybe taking my wife somewhere nice, going out to dinner and I’m like, “I can’t afford that”.
And then, it just started like bothering me that I started seeing people that were doing all these stuff and I couldn’t access any of that, I couldn’t afford any of that. So, I just felt an urgent need. So, for the last couple of months before I was presented with the opportunity, I was already thinking about, “Man, if I don’t change something about this.” It’s like you know, for example, like let’s say that you’re dreaming about greatness and you want to accomplish all these great things in your life and you want to travel the world and buy yourself expensive cars and help your organizations and whatever it is that you want to do, you know? Like you want to work for non-profit, you want to change the world, but then, you’re driving Uber cars. I mean, it’s just like that’s one of the things the people have to understand. Like if you have dreams, goals, ambitions, whatever they are, if your actions do not match those ambitions then you’re stuck. Nothing’s going to happen. So, like, at that point, I was already open to the possibility of like, “Wait for a second, I think that, since we have 24 hours in a day and I have to sleep 6 or 7, and I have to work 8, I could probably do something with the other 8 hours of my life.”
That just started making sense to me. You know, like, one of the key qualities of smart entrepreneurs is common sense. So, I was like, “Hmm.” And I started thinking about that. And I’m like, my great granddaddy, we had a great company that he formed in Puerto Rico called Suarez Toy House. If somebody from Puerto Rico is in your audience, they’re going to know about this company. We had a big company that ended up being bankrupt down the line because Toys R Us came into the equation when I was a little kid. Toys R Us is now gone, which is a crazy thing about how the world, like Amazon, became the new Toys R Us because they got them out of business but we had this big business called Toys R Us and we, in Puerto Rico and the Caribbean, we were the main distributors of toys on all these places.
So, I come from a family of entrepreneurs but my great granddaddy, he used to come out of work at 5:00 PM and that was it. He was done. Over. But, what do we have? We have this incredible era of the internet in which our shifts don’t have to end. We can keep going, 9 – 5, 9 – 8, 9 – 1, it doesn’t matter. So, that’s an opportunity that just sank in. And I’m like, what for a second. It makes sense where we can build businesses faster than ever right now because instead of having to work 8 hours a day, I can work 14, I can do that. Which means that whatever they’re doing at that point, I can do it triple as fast or more. I can just produce more in less time because of this online world. It was not an overnight process Jeremy. Right now, you’ve seen a lot of what I do. I do a lot of videos, I have a course, I have a blog, I have a podcast, I have a lot of these things going on. At that point, I didn’t even dream about that.
Five years ago, which is not that long ago, I already had 3 kids. All I wanted was to get behind that keyboard on my computer and just sell some products so I can survive a little bit better. I was not thinking about being a podcaster, being a teacher, helping the world. I was not at that point. So, just like anything else it slowly progresses through time. There’s no such thing as an overnight phenomenon. You get better every single day, you improve, you learn something else. And for me, maybe from my viewpoint now, I can look at it and be like, “Hmm, it happened pretty fast” – especially considering that it was only 5 years ago. But it feels like you don’t really feel it. Two weeks later, you already did another 10 hours of training, you don’t feel dramatically different. You just feel a little bit better.
Jeremy: And I think that’s huge though, too. I feel like, especially like being the person in it. You’re like, “Man, I just want this to be faster and it’s just like wow, look at what you’re doing!” And I feel like sometimes, we are our worst critic in that way.
Manuel: Absolutely. It’s progressing as an individual. You get better and better and better just like the analogy of somebody that gets on a bike for the first time like a four years old kid and he doesn’t know how to ride a bike. He needs to have the training wheels on it because if he doesn’t he’s going to crash. It’s a must. So, he put the training wheels on and then he gets on it and guess what? He still has a tough time even with the training wheels. So now, he gets a little bit better and then he trains a little bit more and he gets on it and daddy pushes him around and now he’s doing a little bit better. So maybe 2 months on the line, he can take off the training wheels. But, in the beginning, he’s going to probably fall a couple of times or maybe really get close to falling or like it’s going to be a struggle. So, that exact same process, that’s just how it works. People start thinking about, when you talk about the 40-year old community, 45-year old, 50-year olds, I wasn’t born in this online world. So what? None of us where. That’s the reality.
Everybody listening to this podcast probably remembers how the world was 20 years ago. I know I do. I was actually on the outside, on my playground playing tennis, playing basketball, hanging around, there’s none of these devices and wouldn’t have any of these opportunities. So, right now, for me, it’s like, how do we take advantage of these opportunities that our ancestors, my daddy, my granddaddy never even dreamt about having access to. So, it’s just a matter of not taking it for granted and at that point, 5 years ago, I made a decision. And I said, “I am not going to take for granted the greatest communication era ever in the history of humanity.” So, from that decision, everything starts adding up afterward. But, if somebody doesn’t make any decision about it first, nothing really happens.
Jeremy: There’s a lot of guys doing marketing out there, Manuel. But, you’re world class. Let’s look at these numbers. $6,000,000, $28,000,000, $400,000,000. What has allowed you to scale marketing at that level? Because there’s a lot of people that if they get lucky cracks six figures. But, what have you been able to do to scale that level?
Manuel: The number one thing Jeremy, like when I do seminars, the number one thing that I push really hard on because it’s pretty much impossible for somebody to do a seminar with me even if it’s a whole entire day seminar and come out in the other end being Facebook Masters and being complete super mega professionals. It’s not going to happen. So, what I tried to accomplish from my podcasts, from my seminars is, as a first step, understand how little you know about these platforms. Just for one second understand that what you know is not 1% of the potential knowledge. And, I tell you that with the most sincere viewpoint that I could ever give you Jeremy. In reality, for all the listeners, to you and to even myself, I am convinced of one thing right now, I am convinced that I know 2% of the potential power of this platform. Meaning that even myself, for example, I’m a mega-marketer on this platform, I call myself a Facebook Ninja and a Facebook expert.
But, tomorrow, if Facebook stops working, I’m going to call myself whatever marketing channel expert I come into existence because a marketer is somebody that knows how to capture attention. I know how to capture attention. It just so happens to be right now that the greatest opportunity to capture attention is through the Facebook platform. And, it’s not something that I’m dreaming about. It’s not a hallucination of mind, Jeremy. It’s the reality of what’s going on in this world today. This platform, Facebook, Instagram, Messenger, Whatsapp, which is owned by Facebook also, they are babies, they are 14 years old and it only impure evolution. And not only that. Even though they’re babies, they already control in the United States, 77% of the adult population who are actively using the platform.
Not only that Jeremy. Do you know what’s shocking about it? Let me tell you something really shocking and crazy. For me, it blew me away. I went to Mexico. I have been to Mexico City for the last couple of years to do seminars. I have friends and I have staff over there. So, it’s a place that I like to visit a lot. So last year, only about 13 months ago, I went there and in my seminar, because I like to survey people. “Okay, so, raise your hand if you here are actively using Facebook.” At that point, it was 50% of the audience which I thought was pretty impressive because it is Mexico. I also asked, who here has bought stuff on Amazon in this last week? About 15% which is still pretty impressive for me at that point raised their hands. Meaning, almost 2 out of every 10 Mexicans are already buying stuff on Amazon.
This year, I just came back last week from a seminar to 170 people that I did live over there. When I asked the same question about Facebook, 98% of the audience raised their hands not only actively using it monthly, they said actively using it every single day of their lives which means that out of 170 people, 2 people in that room raised their hands that they didn’t have a Facebook account. That was pretty impressive because I did the same question for Amazon and almost 50% of the entire audience raised their hands. And, I told these guys, “Guys, anybody here that’s a listener and anybody that’s actually paying attention anywhere, you’ve got to understand that if you are outside the US, there are other markets outside the US, you have to understand that you have a microscope into the future because you understand how and what is happening in the United States right now. And, you also understand that historically anything that develops in the United States is going to be imported into that country.” Which means that those things are happening. Like right now, I can tell you that 90%+ of the audiences are buying stuff on Amazon and there’s like 170M+ Amazon Prime users in the United States. Whatever that’s going on is going to happen in other countries – Mexico, India, Japan, etc. So, the same phenomenon, those 2 companies, Amazon and Facebook are going to be dominating these game for a long, long time and that’s what it’s all about.
Jeremy: Absolutely. Well, I want to come back now since we’ve been talking about being world class in what you do, I want to come back to you. And, you have mentioned earlier that your dad was a very strong person in your life. You have seen his perseverance, you have seen a lot of the things he pushed through. I guess for you, how do you feel like having a strong father figure has helped you develop the entrepreneur you are today?
Manuel: I think I’m going to say close to zero. My dad and I have not been really connected. When I got connected with him, I was already selling a lot on my own e-commerce. I love my dad. He’s an amazing guy. I would tell you that he saved my life many times along the way and he was always an amazing dad. I’m 37 years old. I left Puerto Rico when I was 18. I moved to Mexico for a few years and then I came to the United States 2006 and my dad was never a part of my life along that way. I have a connection with him just to find out how he was doing, make sure that everything was okay and just being a son to him along the way. But, me being influenced by him as an entrepreneur? I could say that right now, in the last several years, I learned a lot from him because now we’ve been really connected. Ever since I got into his world about 5 years ago, we got really connected with what he was doing with his business and he started to understand my power and he just basically let me take the reigns of his business and make him an international superstar which he is right now. Yesterday, he crossed 700,000 subscribers on Youtube. We have close to 700,000 on Facebook, we’re generating 25 million views every single month. And now, we have this company that is in 8 countries.
When I got in it, when I started helping him, he was in one small little island in Puerto Rico and not really that successful yet and we took it to the stratosphere. So, we got really connected and he and I are really different minds. He’s like a business mind organization structure. I’m a marketing mind, I know how to capture that attention. I know how to get eyeballs, how to turn something into income, how to build a business that really provides value along the way. So, my entrepreneurial genes just came into existence on my own without having any influence from him, Jeremy, in reality. Just to answer your question, what is one of the things that I can say is at the top of my list when it comes to my successful actions? I don’t know exactly how to do it but it is just an obsessed desire to learn, man. Just continued desire to number 1, know that I don’t know anything yet; number 2, see what I can learn every day. And, if I go to sleep, I have a routine every day which is something that I religiously do in which I, literally in bed, ask myself, “Okay. So, what did I learn today? What good thing can I keep for the rest of my life out of today’s day?” If I don’t have an answer to that question, I wake up and I get out of bed and I look for something.
So, every single day, it just made a lot of sense to me to have that as an approach, Jeremy, because I figured 365 days a year, every single day, a new piece of information in my mind, in my universe is going to be very, very beneficial in the long term because there’s a lot of information. And, what I tell people is like, “Do you realize that Doctors and all these people are highly paid because they know more than you?” They all have certificates on the walls. Those certificates allow them to charge you a lot of money because they have more knowledge than you. That’s what it’s all about. So, if you gain a lot of knowledge, that is the greatest protection that you can ever have no matter what happens to the economy. Like if the economy collapses tomorrow, I know I’m going to be okay. Actually, it’s going to be fun to actually rebuild me or do something about it because in the end, what makes a winner is not a certificate, is not anything else but how much do you know? And, I just want to be obsessed with accumulating knowledge. That’s my number 1 thing, Jeremy.
Jeremy: That’s really certainty against any economy because when it falls back you have yourself and you’re the one that can actually go and create it, whether the economy is good or the economy is bad. So, if you have that knowledge, if you have that ability, you can actually go out and handle yourself.
Manuel: Exactly. Makes sense.
Jeremy: So, I want to find out too. So, what is one thing that let’s say you believed at 18 or somewhere around there that you don’t believe now?
Manuel: This is a great point. I thought about this recently, Jeremy. I thought I was a loser my whole life and this is a reality. I was really good at tennis like I have explained. When I was 15 years old, I started getting interested in other things and I stopped playing tennis that much. So, my career that I had dreamed about in tennis in which was my only “hope” to being successful making money was gone. So, when I was 16 or 17 and I had just concentrated on having fun in my life and not being successful or studying, funny story about my studying ability, whenever I learn something right now, Jeremy, I dominated and I get really good at it and I have a great learning ability now. But, at that point in high school, I couldn’t care less about history, or math, or nothing. So, I was out partying all the time. I remembered that out of five days in school, the fellow school students that graduated with me can actually attest to this, I used to go to school three times a week and usually skipped two of them. So, my weeks were pretty crazy because I have four days off and then I went to school for three days. So, it was fun and I used to party like crazy.
So, I was not supposed to graduate. I remember, my mom went to my graduation – this is high school graduation when they announced my name, I got a standing ovation. It’s about 100 students in there and I’ve got a standing ovation and my mom was so proud. She was like, “Wow! I’m so proud. My son is so awesome. Look at him.” And, what she didn’t know was that I was really cool, people like me, I was a people person, I had a lot of friends. So, they were giving me a standing ovation because they couldn’t even begin to understand how I actually graduated. So, it was one of those weird things. And, the way that I graduated, Jeremy, I actually had an F in History and I had a teacher who didn’t really like me. I couldn’t charm her enough. I had to go to the principal and beg her and promise that the future is going to be bright. I mean it turned out okay after all, who would think? I’m probably more successful than all the students that graduated with me at that point. I told her, “I need you to help me”. My principal in the school, she actually went to the History teacher and convinced her to give me a C so I can graduate.
So I did. She did that. And then, I went to a University a year and a half, Jeremy. I didn’t want to go. I didn’t study anything, I didn’t learn anything. I skipped a lot of classes. I was into other things until I eventually quit. The only way that I got into a university The only way that I got into a university is because again, I was really good at tennis. So, I got 2 letters in the mail. One of those letters was, “I’m sorry but you are not qualified to be a member of the University of Puerto Rico. We can’t have you here. Your grade score is too low, it’s ridiculous. I don’t know how you end there and applied. Ha-ha-ha.” And then, I got another letter, five days later, Jeremy, saying that I was being invited to become a student at the University of Puerto Rico for acquired special skills. So, I got in because I was a tennis player. I didn’t play tennis. I actually joined the club and I never showed up. So, eventually, after a year and a half, I just dropped it all and then I became a waiter. Imagine that. For years, I’ve become a waiter. It was just roaming around and likes. So, what I’m telling you that there’s no such thing as a pure-bred entrepreneur. There is no such thing. If you decide that you want to be an entrepreneur, you make a decision, Jeremy, and you study about it and you master something and you do it. Not in this era, I think that being an entrepreneur in the 1960s or even in the 1980’s you had to have some pure brightness in you. It was a challenge. Why? Several reasons. If you didn’t have a college degree, you were not respected, people would not do business with you, you were looked at as a loser.
So, myself, I grew up, my own mother which I loved, she felt my whole life I was a loser. Imagine that. Guess who pays for most of her stuff in her life right now? Guess who’s keeping her going? And, I’m the youngest of four kids. I have two other brothers and I have a sister and they don’t make a quarter of what I income, of what I produce in the last three years. And, now my mom looks at me and after five years she was like, “Okay, I get it. You’re awesome. But, are you dealing with drugs or something?” And I’m like, “No, it’s all legal. Look, Mama, I’m doing it with hard work.” She still doesn’t believe it. I mean, we were raised on a society, Jeremy, most of us, 20 years old, 30 years old, 40 years old, maybe not the teenagers right now, because this is a different world, but we were raised in a society in which we were supposed to believe that if we don’t go to school and we don’t graduate from a University, we should put a big sign on our foreheads that says I am a loser. I think we’re still going to have a couple of decades of that until the whole thing collapses. But for me, it’s even more of a challenge, Jeremy. I just love proving people like, “Hey, this is something that you can build on your own.” I got no certificates on my wall. Do you know what my only certificate is? I have a Facebook certification that many people don’t have which certifies me as a buyer and a planning professional in the Facebook advertising world. That’s the only thing that I can tell you that I am proud of when it comes to certificates.
Jeremy: Well, you know it’s really interesting now that you’ve mentioned that too, though. Because I do think the education system especially in this country has a big need for change. I came from two very, very blue color parents. So, the whole thing was, you go to college, you get all these degrees. So, I got my bachelor’s, I got my masters, I studied in Europe and all that stuff and I’m not using any of that. Everything I’ve learned now has been self-taught. I’ve learned from YouTube, I’ve learned from doing and I think that’s the biggest difference that we are going to see, we’re going to see things shifting back to a lot of self-study and a lot of apprenticeships again. I think that’s really the direction we’re going to see and it’s not going to matter as much how much paper you have at that point.
Manuel: That is so cool. When you told me that, I got goosebumps because you say something like this, Jeremy, “Oh, everything that I’ve learned, I learned from YouTube”. Are you kidding me? This is a free platform. All you’re doing is you’re paying for the internet service and I hope that you’re not stealing it. You probably are paying for that service and that’s all and you have at your fingertips anything that you want to master and learn. The only thing that you should actually get a certificate for like if you’re going to Universities, if you’re going to be a doctor, well, I’m sorry but the law states that you have to have a certificate. If you’re going to be an engineer, an architect, you cannot build a building unless you have a certificate. “I don’t want you to build a building, I’m not buying a building that you built if you don’t have a certificate.” But other than that Jeremy, it’s all within our fingertips and it’s exciting that all you’ve got to do is just got to decide something – what do you want to learn? “Oh, I wanted to learn the site”. Type it in and learn it. “Oh, I want to be a Facebook advertiser”. Type it in and learn it.
I mean, no matter what it is, you have access to it. Within a couple of clicks, of buttons and then you can just get access to it is something that we take for granted man, we all take for granted. I know I don’t and you don’t, right? But most people, 99.9% of the population takes it for granted in a very, very wrong way. It’s so ridiculous. I’m sorry that I say this to you, man, because I’m venting here to you. Jeremy, I do seminars, okay? I do a lot of them. I’ve done seminars with thousands of people already all over the world – Caribbean, United States. I speak Spanish and English so I talk in both languages and I get questions. I don’t say that to them because I’m really polite and I have manners. But, internally, I’m thinking, are you kidding me? For example, how do you run an ad on Facebook? I mean, seriously? Do you know that you can Google that, YouTube that, Facebook that and find out a million videos that teach you some of the basics so you can go? There are questions like, “How do I open up an account on Amazon? They’re saying it will sell products on Amazon.”
So, any questions that you have, if you’re a listener and you’re listening to this podcast right now and you want to learn about something, all you’ve got to know is you don’t need a mentor, you don’t need me to answer your question, you don’t need Jeremy. You can just google stuff and get answers. And it’s all accessible. Somebody has answered your question along the way. Let me give you a reality check. There is so much to learn that sometimes you’re going to have to get something that is like a roadmap. For example, I have a course called the Facebook Masters and that’s a whole different thing. Why? Because that one is forty hours of professionally recorded step-by-step over 200 lessons. That’s a different thing because that is like step by step by step, this is how you accomplish it. “Oh, you want a roadmap? Here you go.” But if you want to get started on something there shouldn’t be an analysis paralysis or an implementation paralysis. “Oh, I wish Manuel could answer my question because if he doesn’t answer my question, I am hopeless and I am lost.” That doesn’t work and that’s not how I did it.
I learned from some people. I can tell you a bunch of names that I’ve learned a lot from along the way. I learned from Russell Brunson, I learned from Ben Cummings, from Jason Fladlien, I learned from Gary Vaynerchuk a lot on the marketing philosophy, on the overall philosophy and the opportunities. I’ve studied a lot along the way. But, when it comes to implementing stuff, learning what to do, a lot of the needy greedy work like the hardcore actions, you do it yourself and you figure things out along the way. At the end of the day, it’s about how much you can learn and what you do with that knowledge. Learning and implementation, learning and hard work. And, those are the two most important things that you need to keep in mind when you want to be a successful entrepreneur.
Jeremy: Absolutely. Manuel, as we’re running low on time here, I just want to come back to one final question for you. If we can look at everything you’ve created in your career and everything that you’re leaving behind is a legacy and farther in the future, we can sum that up with a quote in your tombstone, what does that look like?
Manuel: Wow, that’s such a good question.
Jeremy: It’s profound, right?
Manuel: I would say something like I lived in the greatest era of opportunity.
Jeremy: That’s awesome.
Manuel: I would say that because I definitely am working really hard, Jeremy, I’m not taking it for granted. Do you know what I try to do which I recommend all of you guys to do? I try to do this exercise. It’s just closing my eyes and trying to put myself 50 years ago and trying to imagine the hard work that my grandpa went into to try to get clients to walk into his store and all the energy and all the strategizing that it took him to be able to get twenty people to walk into the store. I remember him actually being home after a long day of work tired and exhausted celebrating maybe a thousand dollars in sales with 27 employees that he has to pay a lot of money to. When in my case he had 20 visitors, I have 8,547 visitors every day in my store and I sell tens of thousands of dollars every single day in e-commerce stores.
So, when I look at that and I understand that it’s not the fact that I am smarter than him, it’s just the fact that I am living on an era that he didn’t have the privilege or the fortune to be born in. So, just because of that from the bottom of my heart, I know that I have to work my butt off because, in reality, it’s something that I know he will actually be screaming over and asking me to take advantage of it because he didn’t have any of that. So, when I say I lived in the greatest marketing era or the greatest era of opportunity, I mean it. I don’t think it’s going to be around. I think that we’re going to have great grandchildren that are going to be looking back at the 2018 world and they’re going to think about how lucky were they to be born in this era in which the internet was basically just starting out.
This is something that I can give you as an analogy that is going to make it really real. In the United States, Jeremy, back in the hundreds of years ago, we had this big battle for land and territory, right? And, also, later on, we had the wild wild west in which people were battling for pieces of land. And, some of the wealthy families that we have today, most of them come from that era. Some of these people that have generations of money, they come from this era in which people capture acres and acres and miles of land. We are going through the exact same thing, Jeremy. It’s just the digital land, that’s all it is. And, it’s so new right now that people forget that it’s new, that it’s just the beginning. Just a few years ago, these things that we all have in our hands, these mobile devices, these computers, these wifi signals everywhere, they weren’t even in existence. So, just based on that, I urge anybody to do everything that they can to take advantage of it because if you have dreams, if you’re a dreamer, then, you live in the best era that you could have lived in to be a dreamer. We belong here as dreamers.
Jeremy: Absolutely. Well, Manuel, this has been awesome. So, Manuel Suarez, thank you so much for hanging out with me today in Create Your Own Life Podcast.
Manuel: Thank you for having me, Jeremy. My pleasure and lots of success to all of you guys.
