Daniel Tolson is the founder of the Tolson Institute, the creator of the 100XDNA Formula, and Asia’s #1 business coach specializing in Emotional Intelligence. He has helped many celebrities, self-made millionaires, and billion-dollar corporations achieve unprecedented levels of wealth. Daniel Tolson’s remarkable journey began when he was diagnosed with a Linear Sequential Learning Disability as a child. He didn’t let this stop him from carving out a successful path for himself. His life experiences led to a succession of career highlights, including co-leading 17,000+ Emirates Airlines cabin crews, launching his clothing line, and building a global firm that helps over 15,000+ businesspeople accelerate and multiply their lives. His achievements demonstrate that there are no limits to what one can achieve and that it all begins with the right mindset and a clear goal.
Overcoming Difficulties & 100XDNA Formula
Daniel Tolson had to overcome a series of challenges throughout his all life. As a child, his learning disability and a physical defect brought him to a point when he had to drop out of school. Later on, he was betrayed by a business partner, had to move countries several times, and was broke three times in 3 different countries. All the past challenges & experiences forged Daniel Tolson’s character, and they became the foundation of his 100XDNA Formula.
Such formula has helped Daniel 100X his life in the last 10 years and helped him build a global business that impacts more than 15,000 business people to 100X their life and income. Daniel has recognized that entrepreneurs are dedicated and skilled in their field but are often blinded by their underlying emotional and social intelligence problems. Their unconscious self-limiting ideas are sabotaging them.
The 100XDNA Formula reveals where emotional intelligence prevents entrepreneurs from reaching their full potential. It brings the unconscious, deep-seated obstacles to the surface. Self-destructive behaviors are neutralized, and the DNA is altered due to this insight. By deploying these strategies and using emotional & social intelligence in their business, entrepreneurs can have breakthroughs and make more money faster and simpler. Over 15,000 businesspeople in 60 countries have benefited from the 100XDNA Formula, and Daniel’s goal is to teach 1,000,000 businesses how to increase their influence, accelerate their impact, and generate new revenue streams.
And now here’s Daniel Tolson.
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Podcast with Daniel Tolson. The Relentless Story & Emotional Intelligence of Asia’s #1 Business Coach.
SUMMARY KEYWORDS
learning, people, daniel, work, business, rewarded, success, called, tolson, years, problem, hard, job, school, big, book, started, age, learning disability, knew
SPEAKERS
Daniel Tolson, Mike Malatesta
Mike Malatesta 00:06
Hey, everybody, welcome back to the “How’d It Happen” Podcast. I’m so happy to have you here as I am with every episode. And before I get started with today’s guest, I just want to remind everybody about my blog/newsletter that comes out every Thursday at 8am Central time. I’m really anxious to grow the list of people are getting the newsletter because it’s a little bit different than the podcast, but it’s kind of the same. With the podcasts, I’m interviewing tremendously successful guests like, like my guest today. And we’re exploring their stories to inspire, activate and maximize the greatness in every one of you. And the newsletter has the same purpose. But it’s different content. So I’m basically bringing you really positive stories, mostly future-based, you know, on what is happening in the world, that’s good. But also what is happening in the world that you can take part in that is not negative news, or just like crowd group-think. I just want to kind of get out of that and get you some stuff that really gets you thinking about what’s coming and how you can use your greatness to make other people great as well. So you can get to the newsletter by just going to the website and signing up. That’s mikemalatesta.com and just check it out. And if you like it, let me know. And if you don’t, let me know, and I can, you know, take your feedback and try making it the best newsletter that I can. Okay, so self-promotion out of the way. Today, I’ve got an amazing guest for you so that I’m fulfilling my promise to you to bring you amazing success stories. I’ve got Daniel Tolson with me, Daniel, welcome to the show.
Daniel Tolson 02:08
Mike, wonderful to be here. Thanks for having me.
Mike Malatesta 02:11
So, Daniel, is joining us from Taiwan. I believe he’s my first guest from Taiwan. And what’s cool about this, Taiwan is that time frames, time zone is so far ahead, that it is tomorrow for Daniel and he’s assured me and all of you that the world is going to access tomorrow. So that really, really makes me feel good about going to bed tonight. So let me tell you a little bit about Daniel to get you excited. So Daniel Tolson is the founder of the Tolson Institute. He’s the creator of 100x DNA, and he is regarded as Asia’s number one business coach specializing in emotional intelligence. He has helped many celebrities Self Made Millionaires and billion dollar businesses to unleash new income levels. Among many things, he enjoys living the ex Pat life, and has competed with the world’s top athletes at extreme games. He is also a former Australian champion wakeboarder three times. And I do really want to explore how that happened for him because it sounds amazing based on what I’ve read. Daniel’s inspiring journey began as a child like all of ours do, from having a linear sequential learning disability. And we’ll learn more about what that is to becoming a consultant to self made multimillionaires. Disability did not stop him from carving his way to success. His experiences in life brought about a series of career highs such as CO leading 17,000 cabin crews for Emirates Airlines, launching his own clothing brand. Not in hats evidently based on our pre podcast discussion but and building a global business that impacts more than 15,000 business people to accelerate, accelerate and multiply their life. His goal is to teach 1 million businesses how to catapult their influence, accelerate their impact and unleash new income levels. Daniel’s accomplishments are proof that there is no limit to what one can achieve, and that it all starts with the right state of mind and a definitive and a definite and definitive purpose. You can find out more about Daniel at his website Daniel Tolson, T O L S. O n.com. He is on LinkedIn at Daniel Tolson, same thing, and actually on Instagram at Daniel Tolson as well. So Daniel, thank you so much for joining me today. I get started with everyone with the same simple question and that is How’d it happen for you?
Daniel Tolson 05:04
I know you start the interviews with that question, I want to have a really good answer. And the answer is It happened on the backseat of a bus. Like my grandfather, and a bus company, and I was conceived on the backseat of the bus. My mother and father were both bus drivers. So that’s how it happened
Mike Malatesta 05:23
during a smoke break.
Daniel Tolson 05:30
My dad was my dad was a farmer. And my mom got married to him. And they went up to the northern parts of New South Wales and had a farm. And after a few years being on the farm, they went broke, and they had to walk off the farm. So they came back to the city, and they both become bus drivers. So there’s my mum driving the big bus, and my dad’s driving it as well. And it happened on the backside of the bus.
Mike Malatesta 05:55
That is a first for me, by the way for that as a part of answer to that question. So thank you for something new.
Daniel Tolson 06:01
So for me, I remember, I was a paperboy and I was working for my uncle. And at the end of my shift, he would pay me maybe about $1 or $2. And I remember one day, I walked out of the news agency, and I donated half of the money that I earned to the Salvation Army. And my mum must have seen me donating money. She said, Daniel, what are you doing? Now? I thought I was in trouble. And I said, Oh, am I in trouble. She said, No, you’re not in trouble. I said, I just like to help people. So from a very young age, I knew that I wanted to help people. And I used to have this picture in my mind, where I could see myself helping people, it was something like a doctor. But I couldn’t see myself giving people injections or giving them operations. But I knew it had to do with something with the mind. So I really liked the thought of helping people. And then at age 11, I was diagnosed with a learning disability. And on the lead up to this diagnosis, I would be in the playground running along, I’d be at sports carnivals, I’d be running and all of a sudden, my knees would just collapse, knees would collapse and fall to the ground. And so I was going to the doctors because of my knees. I had a lot of allergies, I couldn’t breathe properly. And with these allergies, and this asthma, my bronchial tubes were collapsing. So I had to learn how to swim. And part of learning how to swim was to expand the lungs, and to be able to breathe correctly. So then they did some more X rays, and my spine was twisted, my neck was out of alignment, and then the platelets in the cranium were pushing down on the left hand right hand side of the brain. And this was creating a lot of pressure buildup. So my day to day life was living with a migraine headache, and that was my new normal. What’s tomorrow bring just another headache, but you kind of get used to living with this headache. And then I’d have these bleeding noses consistently, I’d wake up bleeding nose, go to school, bleeding nose, and it was all part of this body that was out of alignment. And then I got the diagnosis of linear sequential learning disability. And it had been frustrating, because many years, I knew I was trying hard in class. But my reports kept coming back to mom and dad saying, Daniel doesn’t try hard enough. If Daniel just paid a little bit more attention, then he’d be a good student. But in my mind, I was trying really hard, but I just wasn’t getting the acknowledgement for it. So around about 1991, I went into remedial therapy. And one of the first places they sent me was to a place at school called the Space Lab. The other space lab, I thought was for intelligent kids, I thought it was for the kids who are gonna be astronauts. But what I didn’t realize it was for the kids who are off the planet. They put me in the space within five years of remedial therapy. So that’s really how it started to happen at a very early age for me.
Mike Malatesta 08:57
And that is the real name the space lab they called it that
Daniel Tolson 09:01
was the spice lab,
Mike Malatesta 09:02
what the colloquial name for
Daniel Tolson 09:05
the school name was the spice lab
Mike Malatesta 09:08
is so amazing. I don’t think you get away with that these days. No, unless it was an actual space.
Daniel Tolson 09:16
I think they wanted to make the, the special kids like myself feel more creative. And you know what I what I learned about school, and I say to my clients, it’s not always about you having a learning disability. It can also be a teaching disability. And so the rooms like the space lab were made to put the kids there that they didn’t know what to do with. You know, it’s not really the teacher’s fault. You get a kid who’s got a learning disability, and you’ve got other 20 you got 29 other students who have to learn. It’s very hard to give students like myself the extra attention, but they’re also not trained how to deal with learning disabilities, and it’s not their job. So the school system has to do something with it and I think it’s probably the just the best thing they could do at the time.
Mike Malatesta 09:59
Okay, and this is in Australia, of course, just protect context.
Daniel Tolson 10:02
This was in Australia. Yeah.
Mike Malatesta 10:05
So that the learning disability, this linear learning disability did that. I’m trying to make the connection between the physical things you described and the learning disability. Is there a connection? Are they totally separate? I guess that’s the first question that I asked the follow up.
Daniel Tolson 10:28
I think that a major contributor to the problem was, the cranial plates were pushing down and putting a lot of pressure on the left and right hemisphere. So the brain wasn’t being able to communicate correctly. Now, because of the pressure built up, it gave me a form of visual impairment. So it’s not that I didn’t have 2020 vision, my vision was perfect. But it was the processing of the incoming information. That was the problem. So if you threw a bowl to me, you might have thrown it straight to my face. But I might have been seeing it come over here to my right. And I’d put my hands out over here to the right, but the ball might just smack me in the face. So it was the processing of the incoming information, that was the problem. And there was a lot of pressure build up. It also created tone deafness. So I could hear there was nothing wrong with my ears and the processing of sound, it was just that I was tone deaf, that everything sounded the same. So I was going through as pilots, remedial therapy was also musical therapy. So here I am learning how to play the guitar. But I can’t hear the different sounds of the notes. So imagine that you’re strumming away on the chords, everything sounds the same. You don’t know if you’re getting the notes, right, you don’t know you’re getting them wrong. So what would happen, I just play the notes over and over and over again, making mistakes nonstop, because I couldn’t hear the difference. And then they started to train me in singing as a as a voice soprano. But I couldn’t hear the different notes. So as the music teacher hit the keys on the piano, everything sounded the same to me. So then, with the linear sequential learning disability, it was very hard for me to process information, lineal ABCDEFG, 123456, my eyes and my mind, in my hand would tend to bounce around. So what I would say on the board would be the words that the teacher wrote. And then by the time the information came through, and then I put my pen to paper, the words on my paper would be totally different. That’d be mixed up, that’d be out of alignment. If I was reading a book, I would read all the right words. But imagine one is looking over here to the left of the page, and the other ones looking up to the right. My mind’s picking up all this information from different places. And so as I see the words, the root words are right, but the order and sequence was wrong. I remember the kids laughing, just looking at me God, like, What the hell is that? The words, right, but the sequence wasn’t there. So it was very hard for me that learn in a linear manner. So my mind would jump around a lot.
Mike Malatesta 13:06
And when you were five years that in in the Space Lab, what was that a good experience? Overall? What was the did you? Were there epiphanies in there that you? Or did they? Did they have special people who could work with you in a special way and get you understand what was going on at least what happened in there?
Daniel Tolson 13:31
Well, my mum was an entrepreneur, she owned an arts and crafts business, and my father was in construction at this stage. So I believe that mum had sold a business, and then spent a lot of time with me over the next five years, just correcting these behaviors. So I’d go to school, I’d still be in a lot of the normal classes, I’d go to the Space Lab. And then between classes, and after school, I’d go for special remedial therapy. So I went to one place in talking about a good or a bad experience. It was a weird experience, it was an experience that you just didn’t want other people to know. So I remember going to a special optometrist, and there’d be a string hanging down from the ceiling. And on the bottom of the string, there was a tennis ball, and he’d hit the tennis ball. And then I just have to sit there and watch it go around the room and just moving my eyes. Okay. And so, you know, there’s something not right with you. And you know that the other students have to don’t have to go through that. So you don’t really want to tell them. So I’d go to this room and I just watched this tennis ball, go around the room, and I’d wear these thick glasses. After that I’d go to another place in this place was probably about 100 Kilometer round trip for my mum. It was a place called Strathfield. And this was probably the weirdest one of the more I would go to her a special remedial therapy place where all the other kids had learning disabilities. I was bigger than them. I was older than them. So we Everybody was younger and smaller. And I’m the big kid in the room. And one of the tasks that may they had me do today, we call it cross calling crawling, we call it Hemi sync, that give me a big piece of butcher’s paper. And that give me a handful of crayons. And I had to do or draw a figure eight, on this paper. That’s all I did. I just drew this figure, right. And this was to realign the left and right hemisphere of the brain, get that crossed, crawling at the left and right hemisphere, communicating, then I do it with my left hand. And that’s what I did. And I knew as a bigger kid at 11, and 12, drawing figure eights with crayons, was very different to what all the other students were doing. So I probably felt embarrassed about it. I didn’t really understand what it was, but I knew I was very different. And then I got back to school, and my grades would always be bad. And then after school, I’d have to go do coupon, I’d have to rely on math, I’d have to relearn English. But it was always very hard for me. It was very challenging. For me, it wasn’t that I wasn’t a I was a bad student. I was a good student I wanted to learn, but everything was slow for me. So by the time I got to high school, my mum would be always called by my senior master. Mrs. Tolson is the Senior Master of boys. And my mom would say, yes, Senior Master, what is my son done this time. So even in high school, and I was going to a grammar school where they rewarded academic, I still couldn’t fit in. So my grades weren’t as good. Again, Daniel doesn’t try hard enough if you only paid attention. And so it was just that cycle. And that really hating school. I had some great teachers, and my best teachers were in, you know, in, in techniques and woodworking because I was working with my hands. Other client, other teachers that were really good with the the PE teachers, and also the cooking classes. So everything that was very hands on and kinesthetic I was fine with but it was the academic side that the problems came.
Mike Malatesta 17:00
Okay. And that the pressure that you described on your on your brain would dictate that start to relieve itself with the alignment of your body and our was there. Was there some other or do you still have it or what happened with that?
Daniel Tolson 17:18
Well, with the knees being out of alignment, by the time I was 18, and 19, I went through two major knee reconstructions and was in and out of rehabilitation for two years at 18 and 19. It’s taken me 41 years, I’m 41 this year, and I’ve only corrected sorry, 42. This year, I’ve only just corrected my hips now. So my hips have only just come good after 41 years, it’s taken me 41 years to figure them out. Because what they do is when I’d walk that click, click, click, click, click click in the ligaments would flick backwards and forwards when I’d walk. And I’ve only just sorted it out now at 41 and a half. So did it really go away? It was hard, because from age 11, that’s when we really became aware of it. But then throughout school, when I got to about age 1516, I got Epstein Barr Virus, chronic fatigue, teenage chickenpox, and then I dropped out of school. So it was just like this five year run of illness and sickness and rehabilitation, and remedial therapy, it just seemed all to blend into one. And then I dropped out of school. That was 17. And then at 18. I mean for my first knee reconstruction, second operation coming at 19. So that first 19 years was a very, very strange experience, one that a lot of students didn’t have to go through.
Mike Malatesta 18:45
Well, hopefully no other student had to that, but as you were you said you were the biggest kid. So you guess I’m wondering, you know, from a physical standpoint, when did it become? Or was it noticeable the whole time that you had these misalignments and stuff? Because for your
Daniel Tolson 19:06
what, what, what I meant by that was being the biggest that the other kids in the room were like age seven or younger, okay? And I was like 11 or 12. Okay, so I’m the older the bigger kid there, and there’s all these young kids and that’s when you start to know that something’s not right here. You know, why am I in this room with these babies? Pretty much because you’re almost a teenager. And that was the confusing part.
Mike Malatesta 19:30
And the, the I guess, you probably you know, you mentioned that, you know, you throw a ball this way. I might look this way to catch it. So you had this I had to be very frustrating to trying to figure out that you probably weren’t able to play the way you want it to play.
Daniel Tolson 19:51
Like you said, if Daniel got the ball, you couldn’t stop him. Yeah, but the problem was getting the ball to him. Because I couldn’t see and I couldn’t process things properly. It was even if you’re on the football team, you might have been the fastest runner. But the problem was catching the ball. Yes. And so even when I was playing football, I remember my coach. And I would think it was really directed to me, but my coach would just yell and scream and curse. And I remember my dad pulled me off the football team, he’s just like, I’m not putting my son through that. So even that experience, even playing. Come here, for as much as I love, don’t come on in your shoes, I just really can’t do it. And at that age, you don’t have this comprehension of what’s happening. All you know is that the teachers keep telling there’s something wrong with you, Daniel, stupid Daniels dumb. So you start to believe this as well. And that’s the confusing part because I knew I was intelligent. My IQ test came in at 130, which is starting to move up in that gifted range. However, I’ve got this high IQ. But I’m being cursed. All of my teachers saying Daniel, stupid Daniels, Damn, he’s getting DS, he’s getting easy. He’s getting gifts. So that was confusing as well. But I knew within me that there was something special, but I just couldn’t utilize it in this environment. And so I was actually quite happy to leave school. But then the problems came as soon as I left school, now you don’t have a school certificate. Now you don’t have a degree. Now you haven’t been into university. So the problem really didn’t stop it kept going till I was probably 34. That’s when I had had the big epiphany went, Oh, these limitations are actually still impacting me as an adult.
Mike Malatesta 21:47
No kidding. So for the next 17 years, really. So you dropped out at 17 and 34.
Daniel Tolson 21:55
I’ll give you an example. When I started to work with Emirates airline, I had to do what’s called an aviation license. So you have to get a license to operate these big aircrafts, these aircrafts are worth half a billion dollars. And you’ve got to have a special type rating to fly on each of these aircrafts. So I would study hard, very committed to my study, I would study, study, study, all of my friends, they’re out drinking, smoking, having fun, but I’d be at home at age 2829 3032. still studying. But when it came to the exam, I couldn’t pass the exams. So the exam would have a pass mark of 80. But my score would come in at 79. And I’d get so angry, I thought I have just studied this inside out. And these learning disabilities are getting in my way, again, as an adult. And so I’d be called into the office, you know, Daniel, you found your exam, if you fail your exam, you can’t get your license, if you can’t get your license, you’re gonna lose your job. And so I’d go back through this whole cycle. And I’d say, you know, when I was at school, I had these learning disabilities. And I found it really hard to do these paper based tests with these computer based tests. If somebody can sit beside me, and I can give you the answers, I guarantee I can get 100%. I said, I’m smart, I’m intelligent, I know the answers. But something’s happening when I’m trying to get it back out on paper. So the problems from a younger age dad come back in my career. And every year I was called back into my manager manager’s office to explain why I had failed my exam. And so I explained to the teach to my manager, what was happening, and they said, Look, we can’t give you a scribe, it’s not how it works, you’re going to have to do the exam. But the most confusing part, Mike was, I would go back to the examination room the second time, and I’d get a perfect 100. Taking the test the same way, same test, same way, now getting 100. So this is when I started to sit back and I started to take notice of my behaviors. And one of my behaviors was a very much of a self-sabotaging behavior. And what I figured out unconsciously I’m not doing this consciously, but unconsciously, what I’m doing is I’m failing my exam. I’m repeating the habit at school. And then I’m calling to the manager’s office in the manager says, Daniel, you’re so intelligent, you’re so smart, I believe in you, you can do this, if anybody can do this, you can do it. And all of a sudden I’d start to get significance. Then I’d go back and I get the perfect 100. And then what I get from my manager, amazing. So this whole pattern of behavior came back and every year it happened and then I started to realize I’m actually sabotaging my own success. There’s a pattern of behavior here that’s been unconscious and I’ve been rewarded for many years. But now it’s actually impacting my ability to perform and to succeed. So at this stage, I went on a journey to relearn how to learn and it’s is when I really got into the depths of personal development and figured out what was holding me back. And how could I deal with those mental and emotional blockages? And once I figured that out, that problem disappeared almost immediately.
Mike Malatesta 25:13
Okay, well, I definitely want to talk about how you figured that out. But before we go there, I want to get, I want everybody to sort about hear and understand how your sets 17 years old, you’re out of school because of these issues that you described. You have knee replacement, you have another knee replacement, and then you end up well you as I understand it, you went to your uncle got you started in real estate, and you did really well for a couple of years there and then you decide you you’re going to try to become a world champion. wakeboarder and that’s not like a story I just want to forget about because you had most people work forever from the time they’re a little kid to be a world champion at something and here you are never having I’m assuming never having done much wakeboarding certainly at a competitive level.
Daniel Tolson 26:14
I started waterskiing at age five. Oh, you did?
Mike Malatesta 26:17
Okay. So tell us take us through that. That journey.
Daniel Tolson 26:21
So my dad was a champion barefoot waterskiing. So a barefoot water skier, uses no skis, they just use their feet. And, and he was one of the best. So we grew up on the river. And I remember, I was probably around about nine, and I was at waterskiing with one of my cousins. And he said, never dropped the rope. He said, If you’re skiing, and you’re about to fall off, never drop the rope. Because once you drop the rope, you lose control. And he said if you drop the rope, I’ll leave you in the river. And you can swim home. Now this this river is 110 kilometers long. It’s a feared river. And when you’re that age, it’s twice as big. So I remember one day I was on the water skis, and I dropped the rope. And he just kept driving the boat. He kept driving, he kept driving, kept driving and left me in the river. So I had to swim in the bank. And then I had to swim back upriver to where the property was. And so I’d been waterskiing and learning these lessons from a young age. And I knew that I should never drop the rope. Now as I was growing older, my brother and I started to get really into wakeboarding. And my dad bought a boat, we would train on the weekends. And my brother became really good really fast. He did have more opportunities to ride, he was a little bit older, he could go down to the cable skate park, and he could ride more often. And he became a an Australian champion athlete really fast. However, when I looked at my brother, he could ride at a more advanced level than me. But it seemed that he had no fear. So he’d try all of these tricks, and he wouldn’t have any fear. And I’d try the same tricks. But I seem to have a lot of fear. And as I recall it, I had a few have been injured. Now I don’t know if this had come directly from my knees collapsing when I was younger, because my hips were out because my spine was twisted. I don’t know why I had that fear. But I always had this fear that I was going to get hurt. And my brother was hurting me and say, Danny and say, You’re a better writer than me. But the problem is, you get caught up in your head, you get stuck in your head, and you don’t try these tricks. Now when I would go to a competition, it was the opposite. I would go out, I would do bigger tricks than the others more technical. And I’d learned new tricks that I’d never tried before first go. And my brother said to me your problem is when the spotlights on when the pressures on you perform. But when there’s no spotlight when there’s no audience, you won’t perform, and you get in your way. So I saw this patent coming through. So I was three times state champion athlete, and then I tore my posterior cruciate ligament. And then the following year, I tore the cartilage in the knee. So I had two major to major knee surgeries. And then in and out of rehabilitation in the doctor, that stage was saying, you know, your knees are like a 50-year-old man, you shouldn’t be riding, don’t go back to the sports. But I really wanted to ride. So during this time of rehabilitation, I was pretty wild. And my uncle reached out to me, and he said, Danny Boy, you’re out of control. You’re off the tracks. You’re like a train and you bet to have a head on. He says you got to get your shit together. He said, Come and talk to me. So I went over inside to talk to him about working in real estate. And I remember he gave me a book. It was from Brian Tracy. It’s called Maximum achievement. And on the inside cover, he wrote to Danny Boy, this is your blueprint of success. He said go away and read this book. And he said if you read it apply everything in them, you’ll become successful. He said, It’s not about the grades at school. It’s not about the score on your report cards. Success in life is about your attitude and your willingness to try new things. So I read this book, it made a lot of sense to me. And it was kind of like, intuitively, I knew all of this stuff. I knew this stuff in this book intuitively, and it was just a confirmation of what I already knew about myself and what I’ve learned over the past 19 years. But it gave me a system and a system to follow. So I started to apply these strategies from Brian Tracy started to manage my time more effectively, I started to set my goals, I started to have a look at my self-concept, my self-image, myself ideal my levels of self-worth, and self-esteem. And then I started to do affirmations. And I started to work with my uncle. And he said, Look, let’s apply what we’ve learned from this book. And he said, I promise you’ll become a big success. Now, within my first year of real estate, I was already in the top 10 sales creators in the country four times. So here am I have gone from school, and I’ve been penalized on all of my reports, told I’m stupid, I’m dumb, I won’t succeed. Now, I’m in the top 10 sales creators in the country. And I’m applying this stuff called personal development that I never heard about at school. And I started to get rewarded for being an individual. When I was at school, I just kind of wanted to fit in, I wanted to be like everybody else. But now in the real world, I’m getting rewarded for my personality. I’m getting rewarded for my discipline, my hard work, my ability to work long hours, my ability to communicate and get along with others, my ability to negotiate and persuade, and sell, and I’m getting rewarded for it. Now, before I was 19, and a half, my uncle said, let’s set another goal. He said, I want you to get into sales, I want you to get out of creating sales. And I want you to become an agent. But before you become an agent, because you’re young, I want you to understand what it’s like to go through the buying process of a house. So when you meet a buyer, or meet a seller, you can say congruent Lee, I know what it’s like to go through this. Yeah, so we set a goal. And we bought a house to get that. So I was buying my first investment property before age 19 and a half. So when I’m going out to see these home sellers, I say, I know what the experience is like to buy a home. I’ve purchased one, they’re looking again, you’re 19 and a half, and you’ve got an investment property. I said, I know it’s crazy, isn’t it, and I dropped out of school. So by that stage, I’m already making more money than my school teachers, these people who said, You’re stupid, you’re dumb, you won’t succeed, the ones who are calling my mother saying come and pick up your son from school. On me, I’m making more money than them. And then by 21, I’m buying my second investment property. Now, back then I couldn’t really understand the scale of this. Now I’m 41. And I look back and I go, Oh, my gosh, I was buying real estate investment properties at 910 and a half, little to no education. And I’m already starting to make more money than my teachers who had been in a system for 20 years. And I was blown away by that. Right? Who wouldn’t be. So through that I’ve had this success. And I thought, well, if I can do that I can do anything. So I got back into my sports. And in 2002, i 2001 i finished real estate, New Year’s Eve of 2000 2002. I landed into England, and I went over to the UK. And when I got to the UK I was out of my comfort zone. And I started to realize that my qualities and characteristics of my attitude, my values, my ability to influence and persuade, were being rewarded in a totally different environment. Nobody asked me about my education. Nobody asked what grades did you get at school? Because they saw this big personality. And so I travelled around Europe, got along with people. I got a job in the United Kingdom at a nightclub in a bar. I started to coach watersports, and I thought to myself, I’m gonna get back into my watersports, because I’ve still got that goal of becoming an Australian champion athlete. So I trained hard, I eventually went over to America. I trained hard and America did some coaching in America, and then I busted a rib. So we’re coming into the world championships in 2002. And I’ve just busted a rib. Now I can’t compete at the World Championships. So it’s like you have these successes, and then you have an obstacle. So I had to overcome that obstacle. I came back to Australia started a business ended up creating a clothing company. We even created hats, T shirts. Yeah, we created board shorts, board bags, we started to create movies. And I built this big business where people were buying my clothing all around the country. We’re shipping around Asia, and 50 retail outlets across Australia. We’re stocking my clothing. I launched a video in 2005 2006 and we had six 100 People come to the live event 600 People come to the movie launch. Like this is like Hollywood Scout 600 people in a room coming to see a sporting movie. So I’d build a brand, I’d build a following. And I had people buying my products from all around the country. And none of these people ever asked me, Do you have an education? What scores did you get on your HSC? Did you get a school certificate, nobody cared about that. We had created something that people wanted to be a part of. And then in 2006, finally, after nine years of trying, I eventually won the Australian titles, become the Australian men’s wakeboarding champion. It only took me nine years to achieve it. And I went from failure to failure to valley to injury to injury to injury, and eventually, success. And what I learned about myself, and what I know about myself today is I’m relentless. I get object fixation months, I decide to do one thing, my mind focuses on that, and I’ll keep going until I achieve it, I refuse to quit. Because I know that my high school certificate marks won’t help me get a degree. But my ability to be relentless and refuse to quit, will help me ultimately succeed. And that’s what I’ve learned is that Emotional Intelligence Component, that’s really helpful for me. So I had that success.
Mike Malatesta 36:25
Yeah. Congratulations on that, by the way. And, yeah, it’s an amazing overcoming story, right? Not just the I like what you said, you know, the fixation, right? That’s relentless and fixation, fixation, but And it’s amazing story with the learning disability, the physical disabilities, and the age at which you came back, right? Because wakeboarding is like every, like so many sports. It’s a young man’s game, right? Flexibility, elasticity, or all those things is. So you have that. So you have this. And I, by the way, I love what you said when you mentioned Brian Tracy’s book, because you said, and I think everyone listening should should, should get this, he said, something like, I already knew what was in the book. But reading it gave me the confidence in what I already knew. And so when you said that I thought of the word activate, because, you know, you read something that you kind of already knew, but it but by reading it, it activated what you knew and put you on a path to actually doing something more about it than you had been previously. Is that a fair way to characterize that?
Daniel Tolson 37:45
100%? I think we’ve all heard the analogy. Now it’s like asking a fish to climb a tree? Who’s the idiot? Is that the fish trying to climb the tree? Or is the person who told the fish to climb the tree? Well, when you’re at school, and they’re asking you to climate train, you’re a fish. The stupidity is from the educational department. But within you, you know, you said yourself, this is not my strength. Math is not my strength. Science is not my strength. English is not my strength, Social Studies is not my strength, and all of these things, you know, intuitively, and then you start to get into the world of personal development, and then you get that confirmation, oh, I can actually get rewarded for my personality where my personality wasn’t rewarded at school. My resiliency wasn’t rewarded at school, my ability to show up every single day living a life of pain was never recognized or rewarded at school. But in the business world, in the business world, if you can perform under pressure, then that is a skill that people will pay a lot of money for. If you can be consistent and show up day after day, you’ll get paid for them. My father, very simple man. He dropped out of school at a very young age. However, his attitude towards life is you get up before the sun, and you don’t come home to the work is done. Now, you can’t buy that quality. You can’t get it out of a book, you can only get it from a lifetime of building that habit. So for me, I’ve been in that environment where my father gets up before the sun and he doesn’t come home to the work is done. Now, obviously, my father come home at 12 o’clock at night, and go back to work at four o’clock in the morning. And I’ve seen him do that for decades. And he just keeps going never compliance just doesn’t, but you get rewarded for that in life, not in academia, but in life, you get rewarded for it. And so today, those qualities is what I get paid for.
Mike Malatesta 39:43
And there’s so there’s so many lessons there. One is because the US is is like Australia, I think in education, where, you know, there’s a set way that we educate People and if you fit into that set, you do marvelously, right. You get rewarded for you get decent grades, you get rewarded for being smart, you get, you get Pat’s on the back for cooperation, you know, you’re, you’re, you’re seen as, as a person that’s, you know, ready for the world. And if you’re not you’re seen, as, you know, maybe seen as having a learning disability, maybe you’re seen as dumb, maybe you’re seen as uncooperative, maybe you’re seen as a troublemaker, maybe you’re seen as all of these things. And as you said, so Well, teachers are equipped to handle people that fit into the system, because they’re not one that I have time to, are they trained to handle people who don’t. But now, especially now, that you are early to this, but especially now that realization that if I don’t fit into this particular mold, it doesn’t mean anything, when it comes to what I am capable of. It only means that in this particular mold, I may not. I may not excel, in the same way that someone who excels here wouldn’t Excel on a wakeboard, for example, or witness excel as a salesperson. Right, there’s so there’s,
Daniel Tolson 41:21
oh, it was about 25. And I’d had to spend some time with a friend of mine and his dad, and I looked at the guy. And he looked at him from the outside, there’s nothing special. Here he is, he’s got this big belly. He’s belly hangs out over the front of his jeans. The back of his jeans hangs down, you can see his bum crack all the time. He can’t sing a string a sentence together. He can’t speak a full sentence, any mumbles. However, when you get to see behind the main, you start to see what he’s created. I asked him and I said, Hey, so can I ask you a question? I said, I know it’s taboo. I said, Look, how much money does your company turnover every year, I said, I’m just trying to put this picture to get the books. I know you’re super successful, you’re super generous. But I’m trying to figure it out, because you don’t seem to be educated formally. And he said, Daniel, I’ve got revenues of $300 million a year. He’s a guy who never finished school. However, he could get along with people. He had the ability to influence and persuade people, he had the ability to bring a deal together, he had the ability to recruit people to come and work for him. He had the ability to work long, hard hours, and was absolutely relentless. Never skip a day, never skip a beat. And he was super consistent. And if he made a promise, he could deliver on the promise. And now he’s getting rewarded with $300 million worth of revenues every single year. But see, he didn’t fit in at school. But once he got out of that box, he was rewarded differently. And we’ve noticed it’s nothing new. Since 1936, they started to do some studies on success. And what they used to discovered in their Carnegie studies was that success can be broken down into three components, knowledge, skill, and attitude. They discovered that that knowledge only contributes to seven and a half percent of your success. They discovered that skill only contributes to seven and a half percent of your success. So when you go to school for random, about 16 years, something like that in total. And we’re just acquiring knowledge and skill. But it only attributes to 15% of your success, fully 85% of your success is attributed to your mental attitude. And we’re seeing this in the business world today. They used to hire for knowledge and skill, and then they’d fire for attitude. And today, the world works differently in business, they want to hire for attitude. Because you know, if you can find, find somebody with a positive attitude, you can teach them any skill, they can acquire any knowledge. So we know this, and I think the world’s really catching up, especially through COVID, we’re starting to discover that it’s the attitude that’s much more important because knowledge and skill becomes redundant, so fast. The level of information on the planet today is doubling, doubling every one to two years. Something that you learn today can be redundant in one- or two-years time from now. So a lot of people who have gone through the educational system, and then they apply for their first job. But does the employer say we want five years’ experience? And where do you go to school, but you go to school, and then they look at your degree and they go, Oh, this is outdated doesn’t mean anything anymore. So we’ve got to remain current. Now somebody who’s got an optimistic outlook on life, somebody who’s very high in the air of emotional intelligence, and they very have a very good accurate self-assessment. These people will often look at themselves and say, What do I need to learn in order to succeed, and they’ll constantly learn, learn and learn that gets rewarded. Learning is a recognized skill around the world today. And when I help companies build winning teams, I look at people’s ability to learn. Some people stop learning. Some people have learned at 10 and 20 years ago, and that knowledge is worth nothing. And they’re not getting paid a good wage today. But it’s because of their knowledge is now redundant. So we have to have that
Mike Malatesta 45:24
skill of learning. Why did they stop learning?
Daniel Tolson 45:28
Why do they stop learning? I don’t think it’s important. But I think learning is important. They think people should hire them just because of who they are. Right? And that’s important. But they’re not bringing value. So we live in a society where we get paid for our contributions. So what I do is I want to make
Mike Malatesta 45:51
concert interrupt, and they’re thinking about getting paid for the time doing,
Daniel Tolson 45:56
not the contribution, sorry, successful, successful people focus on results, unsuccessful people focus on actions, hey, I’m running around the office. I’m shuffling papers, I’m here. I must be working, know their activities. We get paid for output. So six successful people, what they do is they say, How can I contribute to my company? How can I bring new ideas into this company. And the more they learn and apply the applications, the important, knowledge is only potential but applied knowledge is power. It’s like having a nice big red Ferrari sitting in your garage. If you don’t drive it. You never get to use the power. It’s a nice car to look at. But you’re never using it. So what successful people do is they consistently learn. And Brian Tracy, he was saying this 20 years ago, he said you work 40 hours a week in America just for survival. He said an every hour over that, that you work on your software you work in your business, contributes to success. Successful people Self Made Millionaires today, it takes on average 23 years to become a self-made millionaire. These Self-Made Millionaires never stop learning, they’re always learning, they’re always going to a course they always have a mentor. They’re always receiving feedback; they’re always reading a book. And they these Self-Made Millionaires work a minimum of 60 hours. And that could be 40 hours face to face in the business. And then it could be 20 hours working on themselves. And then they have this accumulation of knowledge and skill, and wisdom, and the application of it. And that’s what they start to get rewarded for. So the average CEO earns 60 times more than the average wage in any company. Why? Because they’re constantly learning and applying, learning, applying. And they’re making bigger contributions, and we get paid for the contributions.
Mike Malatesta 47:54
I love that stat that you said 40 hours at work, and maybe they spend another 20 hours. So they spend 60 hours but maybe 20 of that is on
Daniel Tolson 48:02
them. Because during further education, yeah, furthering
Mike Malatesta 48:05
their education being the best selves they can be right because if you’re going to be the best leader and the most successful from lead the most successful company, you have to be the best version of you always have to be pushing through breaking through right to whether you call it learning or curiosity or just challenge challenging your capabilities, growing your capability. So I there’s so many people on the other side of that, even entrepreneurs, Daniel, I think, who think that it the 60 hours is all about movement. I know, I was like that for a long time. 60. You know, it was all about outworking everybody, not out learning. Everybody was out working everybody. So I was confusing. And I think a lot of people do this, they confuse that mu like I’m putting in all the time, you know, why isn’t it happening for me? Well, you’re putting in time doing things that make you feel busy. And, and they make you feel valuable. But unfortunately, those things that you’re doing that or doing that are taking away from the time you really need to be working on, you know, yourself and being the leader you need to be and being that you know, knowing what you actually want. And being able to help the team achieve that.
Daniel Tolson 49:29
The biggest breakthrough for me, Mike was when I was working with Emirates airline and calculating a team of 17,000 people was I could get a wage. And that’s all I got all the other leaders didn’t matter how much input you had. You got paid the same wage. So I had to ask myself the question, Where can I take this knowledge and this skill and get a better reward for it? So you’ve also got to have a look at where you take your knowledge and skill and it’s really important. So when I took these leadership IDs, when I was a leader, I might have got paid $50 an hour. But now I can train leaders and earn $750 an hour, right? same skill set, it’s just in a different environment. So a lot of people are also confused by their environment, and what prevents them from moving out of the environment is their fear of losing their stability. So they stay in the comfort zone, and they never venture out of the comfort zone. And not all physical locations, not all environments are going to pay you the rewards that you need. Remember, for me, it was the biggest breakthrough for me. And I’m really proud of this, especially for me, because I was told I was stupid, I was dumb, you’re not gonna succeed. I remember just before the pandemic, I was, I did a consulting gig, 90 minutes of consulting, and I was paid $5,000, for 90 minutes consulting, because I was able to solve a problem for a company was one of the Australia’s oldest companies that they hadn’t been able to solve. And they were willing to pay $5,000 for the solution. And it only took me 90 minutes to do. So I went from earning 5000 a month to earning 5000, in 90 minutes. And I bought the value that, but it was years, it wasn’t that I just earned $5,000 in 90 minutes. It was that 10 years of constant study and application to be able to walk in there and go bang, bang, bang, you problem solved. That’s contribution.
Mike Malatesta 51:32
i And I love that sort of ongoing message of relentlessness and time, you know that nothing happens overnight, right? Because now, you know, there’s so many places you can look, Daniel, where people say you deserve to be a success today. And I’m going to help you make that happen. Like right now, you know, and people get like, Oh, why would I put in all this work when there’s this hack, or this shortcut or this, you know, secret formula that I can buy for $394, whatever. What you know, and it’s just, well, you, you’ve dealt with 15,000 companies a year telling us that ain’t the way it works. And it’s not the way it works.
Daniel Tolson 52:20
It’s like people say to me, Hey, Daniel, what you should do with your pricing is this. Don’t charge $1,000 an hour, charge $999 an hour?
Mike Malatesta 52:33
Because that’s all everything else.
Daniel Tolson 52:36
Yeah, I said, this is this the dumbest thing I’ve heard. I said, that’s not how it works. What happens is when you go into a business, and you can contribute to their bottom line, they will reward you for that. And this is what the successful guy said to me, the one who’s making 300 million a year. This is his mentality. He said, Daniel, if I can do a job for $100 million, and come out with $1 profit, he said, I’m profitable. He said, Of course, I want to make more money. But if I can make $1, after all of my expenses, my company is still profitable. He wouldn’t laugh at $1 he would take the dollar, he’d do the job for 100 million and make $1. And he’s successful. And because what happens, he said, Look, if I win that job, and I make $1, I’m going to get rewarded with their next job, and then I’m gonna get the next job. And then I’m doing such a good job, that they’re gonna stop giving jobs to other people, and I’m gonna collect all the business. And eventually this guy just built this monstrosity, because he had a reputation for getting results. And in business, we only care about results, we only care about output doesn’t matter about the inputs, we get rewarded for the output. And we got to remember that in ongoing education I, I was up till 1130. Last night, I was training entrepreneurs at 11:30pm. Imagine that they’ve worked all day. I’ve got doctors, lawyers, salespeople for oil and gas companies, and they’re staying up till 1130 at night to fine tune their skills. They know that they might get an early run on the board tomorrow. But their success is virtually guaranteed if they consistently stay in this environment, and expand themselves, overcome their fears. Lick all their doubts, face their limiting beliefs, learn behavioral psychology, learn how to read people’s emotional makeup. They know that they can get that competitive edge. ultimately they’ll succeed. And to get a competitive edge in any business, you only need to be 3% better than your nearest competitor. It’s like the horse that runs the race. It doesn’t have to win the race by a full length. It doesn’t even have to win the race by a head. It only has to win the race by a nose. However, the horse that wins the race by a nose wins 10 times the prize money than the horse that comes in second place. And it’s a 3% competitive advantage. That’s what we’re gonna focus on consistently. And with competition today, everybody’s playing this game of Leapfrog. It’s so easy to break down your business strategy. It’s just a copycat strategy, hey, I can do exactly what you’re doing. And if I do that, and reduce my price, I can get ahead of you. Or if I can do it and do it a little bit better, I can get ahead of you. And so every time you come up with a good strategy, you’re successful competition, again, a copy of what you’re doing, and then they’re going to one up you. So you’ve only just got to keep moving forward at 3% consistently. But it does take a lot of discipline to stay in that Learning Mode. Because it’s not just about what you’re learning. It’s also what you’ve got to unlearn. You got to unlearn all of those bad habits.
Mike Malatesta 55:43
Yes. Good. Yeah. Nice. And that three, so that 3% thing that you’re talking about, which I I agree with that completely, the bar is not that high to being better.
Daniel Tolson 55:56
But the bar is not high. The bar is low.
Mike Malatesta 55:59
Yeah. Right. But once you do that, you can’t say, Hey, I’ve made it we’ve we’re done. Right, those breakthroughs have continue to come because you’re being you are being chased. You’re being copied, you’re being marginalized, you’re being all of these things. And so it’s very important what you were just saying there.
Daniel Tolson 56:18
You know, one thing I learned about success, and this is my 25th, year of coaching Mike, this year is my 25th year I started coaching in there’s a there’s an article in a magazine called Australian water skis news. And I was interviewed at age 16. And they said, What’s your special skill, and in the magazine that says he’s a good coach. So it’s been 25 years of me, coaching other people. However, I’m still a student. And what that means is, I’m always learning, I have four coaches in my life that I’m always learning from other people. I’m taking courses, I’m reading books, because I have to stay ahead. And if I don’t stay ahead, then my customers aren’t going to purchase my services. They’re going to go somewhere else.
Mike Malatesta 57:05
So I want to I just want to mention a couple of results. Daniel’s been talking about results, you know, and the results that he provides a nice are some staggering numbers that I got from his from, I think it’s from his, his LinkedIn. But you know, he’s helped a company double their bottom line to $90 million a year. That’s a big number. He’s increased monthly revenue by 75%. For another company, again, huge. He’s helped another company do 1 million in new sales in 90 days, 90 days, you’re talking about 90 minutes worth, you know, this much money and the impact. Imagine, you know, 90 days of 1 million in sales, and you think about okay, so that’s just the start, right? How do we keep compounding off of that? Just amazing stuff. And I want to, I want to so congratulations on that. But I do want to kind of end in wrap this up
Daniel Tolson 57:58
with Can I can I give you won more than a mile? Yeah. Let me give you a more. A young woman by the name of Virginia Lau came to my program called 100x DNA. And when it comes to success, it’s not always learning this new strategy. And this is what you mentioned before, it’s not this quick fix. A lot of people are saying what’s this one line I can use to close another sale. What’s this one sheep trick, I can pull the wool over somebody’s eyes. It’s less about that. And it’s more about you. Virginia Lau she’s a sales manager for a company in Malaysia. And her biggest mental block was she couldn’t read the emotional makeup of her boss, she always had this conflict with her boss. And because she had this conflict, and she didn’t know how to deal with the situation, her self-confidence, self-esteem and self-worth it started to drop. Now once your self-esteem self-worth and self-esteem start in self-value starts to drop, you stop asking for what you want. So what I did with Virginia is I helped her build up that self-worth and self-esteem. To start to feel worthy of success. I started to show her how people’s behaviors are different and how to adapt, adjust and respond to people’s behaviors. All of a sudden, she had a better relationship with her boss. But as a byproduct, she started to read the emotional makeup of her clients very differently. She started to see patterns of behaviors in others that she couldn’t pick up on before. And in the middle of the pandemic. She made 138 million Ringgits worth of new sales. That’s a roundabout 14 million US dollars’ worth of news out in the middle of the pandemic. She didn’t learn a clothing line. She learned to read other people’s emotional makeup and then increase her self-worth and self-esteem. Beautiful story that’s
Mike Malatesta 59:45
fantastic. Well, thanks for adding that one in there. That’s a That’s amazing. I want to I just want to wrap this this thing up because I think the elephant in the room here is 25 years ago. Ching, you explained the success you had in real estate. And then the success you had as an athlete, brands, clothing. You know, you were you were coaching watersport you were doing all these things. And then you went, for some reason you went to Emirates Airlines and you got a job, which struck me strikes me as a little weird. And then something happened there and that job, I think it was something happened to your wife or something, and you had this sort of family emergency and that that Job went away for whatever reason. And then you start this coaching business out of your grandmother’s spare bedroom, as I understand it. And now you’re, you know, Asia’s top business coach, that, so I kind of saw if it was just like, the real estate, the athlete and then the next thing, and then you’re the coach, I say, Okay, I got that. But this little, you know, interlude that you took to Emirates, which is, which is a significant job. I just didn’t, it just doesn’t fit the, in my mind, at least doesn’t fit the pattern. So could you put that all together for us?
Daniel Tolson 1:01:18
Absolutely. So my parents had a pawn broking business for 17 years. And my brother and I would work in the pawn broking business, my brother and I also build a business together. And then in 2007, I went and did a consulting gig in Dubai. And I was helping a gentleman launch a watersports business. So we went over there, and I did the successful launch, but because of my own ignorance, and I didn’t protect my company, my brother and I, both my brother took my business away. And whilst also doing consulting gig, my business was taken away from me. And so I came back to Australia to try to resolve it, but it became a family conflict. So the business I had been building ended whilst I was in Dubai. And then I came home, and I said, Well, I can’t work in our family business, next to my brother, if this has just happened with our business. And so I had to reinvent myself. And so in 2007, I lost my business. I walked away from working the family business, and then I moved back to Dubai. And I took another consulting gig. And it wasn’t what I wanted. So in 2008, I then returned to Australia, and this was my dark day. So I came back to Australia. And I realized then I’d been an entrepreneur, I had no certifications, I had no degrees. And at this stage, the world wanted certificates. Nobody would speak to me about a job. I had all of these skills that I’d built up over the years, being self-employed. And now I couldn’t get a job anywhere. I wasn’t in a position to start a business again, because I’d lost everything. And I had to find work. So I took work as a builder’s laborer, I was working on building sites, I was concreting, I was working with builders and pulling off roofs and putting roofs on houses. And then the worst job I had was what’s called a lollipop, man. Now lollipop, man hold day stop, slow sign, and they direct traffic. And that was 2008. And I had applied for so many jobs, and nobody would even talk to me with all of the success I had, they wouldn’t talk to me because I didn’t have a certificate. And then I thought to myself, well, I better go back to university. So I went to university, I enrolled as a as an adult student, I did one semester, and they said, Mr. Tolson, this is not the right place for you. You’ve got to go back to high school, and you need to learn the basics. And I went, I ain’t doing that. I am not doing that. So I’m on this construction site every single day. It’s, you know, zero degrees in the morning, freezing cold 30 degrees in the sun all day. And I thought to myself, is this all I’ve got? After everything that I’ve achieved? Is this Is this really how far I can come? And so one day, I was driving home over the Sydney Harbour Bridge, and I looked up, and there’s this building that said, Emirates, and I said, You know what, I love being in Dubai. I had a girlfriend who worked for Emirates. I said, I’m gonna go work for Emirates. And I picked up the newspaper our recruiting. And as soon as I got to the interviews, they loved my personality. I got rewarded my personality again. So I went back to Dubai, but I had an intention that I knew that cabin crew would be a short-term role for me. So I said to myself, what do I really like to do? I love to coach and I’d love to help people. So I’m getting back to that core of what I really like to do. So I started to train myself in behavioral psychology. I started to study psychology, I was reading all these books, I’d fly around the world, and I’d fly to a place in Singapore. And I’d go into Singapore, I’d take an empty suitcase and I’d fill up my suitcase with books. And I remember there was one author by the name of Dr. Edward de Bono, and I read all 76 of his books and I studied them inside and out, and I started to self-train myself. balls with balls dolls with Emmerdale. I learned critical incident stress management. I got involved in peer support. I took every single course Emirates airline had on what they call ml Zed, which is my learning zone. So for four years, I just nonstop studied, balls, people are out having the six drinking smoking. I’m at home studying, I’m traveling around the world studying in hotel rooms, I’m taking courses, and I start to get certified in coaching. And then in 2010, that was another dark day. I got a phone call at 4am in the morning, and it was the duty controller. Now the duty controller would call me if there was a death on the aircraft, or if there was a major accident. And the duty controller rang up and said, Daniel, this is the duty controller. This is not a piece of pork core. And I said, Okay, it’s not a piece of pork called what is it? They said your fiance’s been involved in an accident, and you need to come down to the landside hospital really fast. So my fiancee, who’s now my wife, she had an accident on the aircraft coming into Dubai. And then she fractured her knee in five places. So for the next two and a half years, she’s in rehabilitation, with three major surgeries. So towards the end, 2012, she’s now pregnant, she loses her job comes close to miscarriage three times. And once you stopped working for the company, you have to leave the country. So my wife’s now six months pregnant, she’s forced to leave. Now, during that time, I kept studying, I kept learning, I’d been promoted to a senior flight steward who co leads a team of 17,000 cabin crew. But now I’ve got to choose between my career and my family. Do I stay working and miss the birth of my daughter? Or do I resign from my job which I loved to be there for her birth, they were the only options I had no holidays available, because I’d used all of them over the two and a half years of caring for my wife. So I had to resign from that job. And so I go to a country that I don’t speak the language. Now my wife tells me last night she says husband, you’re you’re speaking Chinese in your sleep. So now I’m sleep talking in Chinese. But in 2002, I 2012 I came to this country. I can’t speak the language. In Asia here. I applied for 600 jobs, 600 hours on LinkedIn nonstop. I was on all the recruitment sites. What did everybody want? They wanted somebody who could speak Chinese a second language in who had a university degree, I applied for 600 jobs. And I came to the decision, Daniel, you are unemployable. The only way you’re going to succeed is if you just launch your own business and you be your own boss. You’re unemployable just face the fact. But you’ve got value that businesspeople will pay for. And so middle of 2000, middle of 2013 I started to have these breathing problems. I said to my wife, I said I’m sick, I gotta go to the doctor, I can’t breathe. I think I got a lung infection. So I get down the hospital X rays, blood tests. And the doctor says to me in perfect English, Mr. Tolson, there’s nothing wrong with your lungs. It’s all in your mind. He said, You need to go and see the psychologist. So through everything that I’d been through, I was depressed. I’d lost a career. And I was grieving the loss of my Korean. I had lost the country that I’ve lived in which I love so much. And I was grieving that loss. I was grieving the loss of a business that I’d booked for so hard, and I’d never really dealt with it. And it all came up in 2013. So I went and saw a psychologist, they said, Take this medication, I was highly opposed to the medication. Because I with everything that I knew, I knew that that medication would only mask the problem and wouldn’t deal with the depth of it. So I was on the medication for about two weeks. And then I threw it away. And I said I feel like a zombie. This is not the solution to this problem. So I got into the study. And then by the end of 2013, I’d run out of money, I couldn’t get my business succeeding. And I said to my wife said, I’m really sorry. And I’m really embarrassed. I said, as a husband and as a father, I can’t provide for you and my daughter, we’re living here in your grandmother’s house. And I can’t provide I said the only thing that I think I can do is go back to Australia. And I said if we go back to Australia, we can go on social security. So we went back to Australia at the end of 2013. And we got on Social Security we got on government payments. And I knew if I could just get on those government payments for about three months. That would give me enough time to get my business launched in Australia. And so I had this 100 day plan. In the first 100 days of business I made my first $100,000 people heard about this skill set, they started to see the results. I was working with real estate agents and now a doubling their sales, doubling their sales in 90 days going from 50,000 a month to $100,000 a month. One guy went from 300,000 a year to 800,000 a year in commissions. And all of a sudden people went This is phenomenal. How do you how do you get these results? was because of everything that I’ve been learning since 16. It was everything that I’d studied in Dubai. And then I started to get rewarded for it. So 2013 comes around 2014, we’re living in Australia, in the middle of 2014. The market just collapse, something happened in the middle of the year, we were on fire, and then we couldn’t make a sale. So in September 2014, I said to my wife, I said, I’m sorry, you’ve married a man who can’t provide for you. Once again, I’ve got a one-year-old child I can provide. The only solution is we go back to Taiwan. So now we go back to Taiwan, and we are living with the grandmother again, I’m working on moonlighting teaching English, which was my worst subject ever. The only reason I got the job teaching English because I had an Australian passport. So I’m teaching English, which is my worst subject to nine-year-old and eight-year-old Taiwanese students. But my basic English was good enough to teach. So I was teaching during the day, I was teaching adult English at night conversational English. And I was making enough money just to pay for food and rent. And then I started to build my business again. And I’d had enough knowledge and I started to write books, do podcasts, do webinars, and then my business just started to grow, grow, grow, grow, and then eventually remember that book I got at age 19. From Brian Tracy, I ended up buying a Brian Tracy business, and he ended up becoming a business partner. And so then I traveled around the world teaching Brian Tracy’s Eat That Frog teaching these exact principles from maximum achievement, which is called performing the best. I started to build businesses in the United Kingdom, US had to have clients in Australia, clients in Asia, in today’s some of my trainings, we get 1300 People in my trainings at a time. So my overnight success was a shit fight. It’s dark, it’s terrible, it’s dirty. And nobody likes to hear that, because that’s the truth. But it is the truth. And that’s the elephant in the room. That’s that, get Mike. And this is the one that most people don’t want to hear about. But it’s the one that every entrepreneur I know goes through. And it’s about that resiliency, I if I have to go and teach English, I’ll do it. Because I can get that money, I can reinvest in my business, they have to teach adults at night and gives me another shot at the title, I’m going to do it if I have to go in the government support for three months. And I have to lose my face and feel shame for the rains. But I’m going to do it. Because it’s another way to get my goal. And that’s all I know is just to be relentless. That’s what I learned through the learning disabilities. Just keep going, keep going, keep going. Just keep going. And what happens is, you quickly learn that everybody quits. But if you refuse to quit, ultimately, you must succeed.
Mike Malatesta 1:12:38
Well, I appreciate you wrapping that up for us because that some of that I was expecting and some of that I wasn’t expecting so I think I think people listening will be in the same boat as as I was. And this this you got to you got a remarkable story. I mean, you you’ve mentioned relentless many, many times, but there’s the I call some of the places where you were I have this thing I call it the value of uncertainty, right? It’s like this deep value drop into and you are just
1:13:09
hit a despair. Yeah, yeah. And it’s hard as hell
Mike Malatesta 1:13:13
to get out of there. Especially without help. And you know, you found yourself in that in there many, multiple times. And you may again,
Daniel Tolson 1:13:25
but who many times, but what’s guaranteed Yeah,
Mike Malatesta 1:13:29
but what’s great is that, you know, taking us through that you sort of given us all one couple things. One, maybe it’s not even abnormal to fall in there. We all have different circumstances that get us there. You told us yours I could tell you mine. But it doesn’t actually matter what the circumstances were that gets you there. What matters is what are you going to do to get out of there? Keep moving forward. So yeah, I really appreciate you sharing that and I appreciate you sharing your whole story with us Daniel, this message is fantastic your successes is is amazing and your impact the results like we talked about a few of them. Especially my guys, you know nobody, you know had to go to a foreign country where you didn’t you didn’t even speak the language and now
Daniel Tolson 1:14:19
it’s cash but my slope inspirational.
Mike Malatesta 1:14:24
Yeah, I speak it in my sleep.
Daniel Tolson 1:14:27
When I when I when I started the program called 100x DNA, DNA, what were made of, if you stretched your DNA out in a straight line, it will stretch to the sun and back 300 times. What you know, the average person on this planet is using less than 2% of their potential. All of us the statistics, and Brian Tracy was talking about this back in the 80s and 90s when he wrote maximum treatment 84% of the adult population have a feeling of an unfulfilled potential. And everybody knows they should be earning more money. Everybody knows they should be far more successful than they are now. Everybody who’s put on weight knows they should be much slimmer than they are. Now. All of us know that we’re operating at levels far below our potential. We know it has nothing to do with knowledge and skill. We know it has to do with our fears, our doubts and our limiting beliefs, it comes down to our mental attitude. I’ve got a client at the moment, through all the setbacks, she just keeps winning. She has four children, she has one daughter with Down syndrome. She’s been in an economic climate, she has just lost her father, she has just got three promotions into pay rises. all successful people realize that you have a succession of valleys and then you have a success. You have a succession of failures, and then you succeed. My father is a farmer, simple man. He says, Daniel, if you have one good year in seven, as a farmer, you’ll be fine. But if you have two good years, in the seven, you’ll set yourself up for life. So just accept that failure is a prerequisite for success is the prerequisite. And if you’re failing, and you keep failing forward, then get up, try again, get up and try again. And there’s a connection between the amount of times that you try, and the amount of success that you have. And if you refuse to quit ultimately must succeed. But the numbers actually work in our favor, Mike 99% of the adult population give up on their goals. Before the very first attempt is success that had success is easy. You just gotta have the willingness to try many times, and to refuse to quit because 99% of the population give up on the goals. Before they don’t even think they give up so fast. 99% they quit. So success isn’t that hard. If you know your numbers,
Mike Malatesta 1:17:03
good way to end it. Success is not hard if you know your numbers and the chances are in your favor. 100% or 100%. Well, Daniel Tolson, thank you so much for joining me, it’s been a great conversation I mentioned where to get a hold of you at the beginning, is there anything else that you’d like to share with people in terms of connecting with you or whatever, before we sign off officially,
Daniel Tolson 1:17:25
I think the most important thing is, is that we are living in the most exciting times, we have tools and technologies that can help you understand yourself at the core. Today, I use a piece of technology, and it uses artificial intelligence to measure our levels of emotional intelligence. And every time we have an emotional experience in our life, if it’s a significant event, if it’s a traumatic event, this memory in the emotional memory gets imprinted into our amygdala. And today, using the science the artificial intelligence can measure the unresolved emotions that exist inside the amygdala. And once you start to deal with these repressed memories, once you start to deal with these traumatic memories from the past, then you start to get all of your energy back. The traumatic memories, your fears, your doubts, your limiting beliefs, they consume your mental and emotional energy. It’s like a handbrake on your performance. You’re trying to drive through life, but you’ve got the handbrake on. Sure. And as soon as you start to know who you are, you can start to release all of those limitations. So we are in the most exciting times for people who want to become their best.
Mike Malatesta 1:18:34
That’s a great way to end. Thank you, Daniel.
