A Second Chance At Success: The Stephen Scoggins Story

 

Everyone deserves a second chance at success. And as long as you have the mindset primed for the win and you are ready to transform your life, then that chance, and success can be yours. In this episode, Patty Ann Tublin interviews entrepreneur, author, speaker and coach, Stephen Scoggins. Stephen talks about how a second chance from a mentor changed his life and how he wants to teach and impact a million lives, for the better. Tune in and be inspired by Stephen’s story.

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Listen to the podcast here

 

A Second Chance At Success: The Stephen Scoggins Story

I have a treat in store for you, so buckle up, folks, because Steve Scoggins is going to take us for a ride. Welcome, Steve.

What is going on? I’m super stoked to be here. Thanks for having me.

You are welcome. We can start with the homeless to the bazillionaire. Why don’t you tell us what challenges you faced because Lord knows there have been plenty of them? What’s the greatest challenge that you faced that helped you get to where you are, both business and personal?

The most common denominator is going to end up being the power of living out a lifeline. Here’s what I mean by that. My father missed a huge chunk of my earlier childhood. He was back in my life after my grandmother passed away when I was probably 12 or 13 years old.

Where was he in the early years?

Unfortunately, he struggled with alcoholism, so he was back and forth to Colorado. My mother didn’t deal with alcoholism but unfortunately, did deal with abuse, the aftereffects of PTSD, and things of that nature, so both of them missed a huge chunk of the early part of my childhood because they were both in the process of healing. It’s a very early stage. They were both in that process.

They didn’t even know they were in that process.

They are great-great-grandparents now. I’m very proud of the hard work that they put in. I will never forget this. My dad’s first business failed in the mid-’90s. I remember when his business failed, he looked over at me with tears in his eyes and said, “I always want you to remember, Scoggins don’t get ahead. They get by.” I was like, “This is my father. This is someone who’s supposed to love me.”

Granted, when you are young, you don’t realize what your parents are struggling with. They are mom and dad, and he says this to me. I remember having this sinking feeling in my stomach. Coincidentally, for the next several years, we live that out. We are losing our family home, the cars, repossessions, all that stuff, having to rent cars and buy the rental car places on the weekends. My dad got involved with check cashing places.

It wasn’t a coincidence. That’s what he believed.

People that are wealthy always invest in things that invest in more things.

I was very fortunate a few years later, my dad’s employer, who had been trying to mentor my dad, who was hard of hearing when it comes to personal development, came to my dad, met him for the first time. He saw something in me that I didn’t see in myself. I remember he used to pull me down with my dad’s framing crew on a regular basis and put me in his Jeep Grand Cherokee. He would ride me around the subdivision and talk about flipping real estate and staying away from alcohol.

People that are wealthy always invest in things that invest in more things. He poured in me regularly. I will never forget this. It was a hot summer afternoon, I’m still a teenager, I had sweat dripping off me everywhere. When he motions me to come down and get inside of his Jeep Grand Cherokee, I’m super excited because I’m like, “Come on, give me the AC.” I get in the car and he shuts the door. I don’t know what happened to Steve on that particular day.

Is Steve your mentor’s name?

Yes. I’m sure you have dealt with this. You can tell something that someone has something on their mind they want to cover with you. The whole air in this little confinement changed. He looked at me dead serious and went, “Steven, what’s the difference between a rich and a poor man?” I was like, “Of course, it’s money. Rich people have money, and poor people don’t have money.” He practically snapped at me and said, “Absolutely not. It’s the way they think.”

Do you remember how earlier I mentioned the life that my dad mentioned? Steve did something very different. He turned that lifeline to a question in that he said, “Let me ask you this then, a person of wealth, stewardship, and influences is the way they think. Do you want to think like me or do you want to continue thinking like your father?” What happened in my head was this Rolodex of my dad borrowing and never repaying and not being able to provide for our family, even though he was working incredibly hard.

Meanwhile, I’m having this other side of me who’s watching Steve put $1,000 tips under baskets of hush puppies at little restaurants for single waitresses and all of this stuff. It was the first time that I’ve ever got stunned and I knew I had a choice. Up until that point, I had always been told what I was supposed to be. If I managed to swing a hammer for $12 an hour and live in a single-wide trailer, that was a successful life.

Meanwhile, Steve is traveling the world, going on vacations, paying cash for things, being incredibly generous to the people around him, and pouring into people like myself. To this day, I had to ask his widow. He passed away in 2003. When I wrote my first book, I was like, “Why did Steve do that for me?” She said, “He saw himself in you and your father but you were the only one that would listen.”

When I think about what is the major common denominator in life, business, relationships? All of which comes down to this knowability that I have a choice. I get to decide. I can decide to keep living like I have been living or think, grow, and learn differently. Have amazing mentors like yourself, teach me something new and unique that I haven’t thought about before, and shift my perspective. As a result, we both get to have a beautiful future.

We all have a choice and can choose happiness. You don’t seek happiness. Happiness doesn’t find you. COVID is a great example. Everybody is faced with the same lemon. Are you going to make lemonade or moan and groan? You are either the victor or the victim. You chose to be the victor, clearly. I have another question for you. I’m dying to know the answer to this question because every single thing that I know about you, everything I have ever read, talks about you quoting somebody that quoted to you what the wisest man on the planet, King Solomon, said, “This too shall pass.”

 

I can remember my mother-in-law, mother, and people I love and care about saying that to me when I’m young. The world is going to end over who knows why but it’s a blip on the screen. Tell us a little bit about why that was also a pivotal moment for you and got you to where you are now. It sounds like Steve, having that mentor, and there is nothing like that relationship but there was something about, “This too shall pass,” that resonated with you. That changed your life.

I agree that King Solomon was pretty wise and wealthy, come to think of it. It’s the way they think. It was an interesting season. I would have to get to go backward and forward a little bit. At nine years old, my grandmother was raising me at that time, I literally have a GI Joe in one hand and a Transformer in the other, and they were having a battle royale.

I remember her looking at me in the eyes and saying she is going to need help around the house. What I didn’t know was about to teach me how to cook, clean, boil water and do something. I’m nine years old. Your mental acuity at nine is like, “What cartoon am I going to watch?” That’s the starting point behind a lot of adversity followed by that. It’s growing up super-fast and early, being relied upon to provide and give to other people and make an active role in fast-forwarding out of youth into some level of adulthood.

That trend continued until my late teens, almost 20 to 21 years old. It continued in a lot of different ways. I mentioned that Steve had poured into me and all this stuff, which is all true and good but I didn’t take action on hardly any of it. It was that old adage in one ear and out the other. I had one of these moments where I was going through that. It was my junior year in high school. Our lights get cut off for the umpteenth time.

I will wake up to cold water because we had well water. The water would pump but you could warm it. I finally had enough. We didn’t have a family car. I didn’t like hell back in fifth grade. I was able to walk into my junior year and pretty much drop out of school. I dropped out of school, went immediately into working in the work-life and going back to that provider. I have to provide and help my dad. We had this old adage that I think is another lifeline, which is family helps the family get smarter, not do dumb.

In this particular situation, that’s what I was doing. I went to a buy here, pay here, helped us get a car, got the family stable, and I moved out when I was seventeen and never looked back. On the surface, you are like, “That’s good.” That seems at least you are taking action. It’s not the course of trajectory that we are taught by going to school and doing all these other things. It’s definitely a harder lifestyle doing it that way. I ended up finding myself in an environment where I never could get a sense of identity, purpose, and meaning.

You are going through the motions, working for the man, whatever that meant.

As I’m going through that, I know there’s something more. I decided I wanted to join the military because I figured what they were going to feed me and get to travel the world. I don’t have anything to spend money on so I can save a bunch of money and get myself out of all this trouble.

Women like men in uniforms.

I hang all my hopes and my dreams. I already had several environments where I couldn’t make ends meet. I was basically reliving the same thing my dad had always told me. I worked my butt off. For 6 to 8 months straight, I’m busting my hump. I’m scuba diving regularly because I wanted to be a SEAL and carry logs. I’m doing all this weird stuff that most people wouldn’t do. Lo and behold, I go to ship out and am supposed to go to the Great Lakes up in Michigan for my bootcamp.

The difference between a rich man and a poor man isn’t money. It’s the way they think. 

I get to MEPS and walk in the door. They had these little high school table things where you scoot your butt in the sideways to sit down. I’m there with half a dozen other people or whatever. We all got duffle bags. Some are going to the Marines, the Navy, and so forth. Out of the blue, this guy came up and said, “Scoggins, come here.” I go to get up. He’s like, “Grab your bag. Come on.”

Inevitably what happens is he brings me up, we go into another room, he sits me down and says, “I’m sorry. We can’t let you enlist.” You have to understand, and in this time and age, when that moment happened, the military was practically taking everyone that showed up. I’m serious. There was something going on with the military, building it up or whatever.

Here it is another time. I learned that I have scoliosis at the top of my neck. I learned because I had a GED at the time that my ASVAB score had to be higher than it would have had to be if I had a high school diploma. He’s like, “Not only can you not enlist, you can enlist next year, six months from now, whatever we think you are going to have medical conditions,” all this kind of stuff.

It’s basically game over.

That’s a good way to put it. I felt it’s game over. I had worked my butt off and dropped out of school to take care of my family. I tried to take care of my grandmother when I was growing up. I had tried to solve my own financial needs and stuff by outworking my circumstances and all these different things. This was my last-ditch effort.

You couldn’t work any harder.

There was nothing else. As I walked out the door, I knew something was up. By the time the glass door closed behind me, I had started weeping so hard that literally, I could not see through my eyes. I don’t know if you ever noticed those rainstorms. It was raining so hard and on the windshield, you couldn’t see anything. I was going through it as hard as I possibly could.

As I was walking through that moment, I remember hearing all these voices, so to speak, not audible voices but feeling these things. Have you ever seen the angel and the devil thing that you have when you go watch one of the Looney Tunes episodes? That’s exactly what I felt like. This is something that’s pretty profound that I felt is the little devil on my shoulder was telling me how worthless I was. All of these are garbage, and meanwhile, I felt like I had this other little piece of me that was whispering.

It was basically saying, “That’s not true.” That battle waged inside my mind and my heart. The profound thing is I have learned that opportunity always whispers, negativity always shouts. The limiting beliefs that you occupy your mind, heart, and soul will always provide themselves louder than an opportunity around the corner that maybe you are not seeing yet.

The world presents itself in a place of scarcity.

 

I have continued that battle as I’m waking up. I found myself overlooking an eight-lane highway at the capital of 440. I go into that bridge or over that bridge several times a year nowadays. I was legitimately thinking, “That truck right there that’s too small, that won’t do enough. This truck is too big. Maybe that will do too much.” I’m contemplating how I was going to make this happen if that makes any sense.

You didn’t say you are assuming we know to make that happen.

The only way I could explain it was my aspiration, at that moment, in the suffering and the pain. I was going to do that by ending my life. As I sat across that bridge, it was a chilly night. I could still remember the breath escaping my mouth. I breathe out and watch the smoke go out, the smell of diesel fumes, the cars honking, feeling so isolated and alone that I thought that was my only choice.

That little whisper turned out to be a divine encounter for me, specifically said, “At least call people and tell them you love them.” It so happens that my grandmother had given me a broken Nokia 5160 phone with a cracked yellow screen. I could call her when I’ve got to bootcamp to let her know I was okay. I picked up the phone, dialed a number, got a busy signal, dialed another number, got an answering machine message. An answering machine is a big box that used to sit beside the phone in the house that you would push play on.

Every time I would try to dial a new number and that was failed, that voice of failure, “It’s never going to work. It’s never going to do this.” All of this stuff would come back up and kept getting louder and louder all the way to the point where I finally kicked off my shoes and was going to push myself off. That little whisper said, “Try one more time.” I don’t know if you have ever had this thing happen, where you pick up the phone and the other person is already on the line.

I believe that’s energy. She felt you or somebody felt you.

It was crazy. I remember picking up the phone and her old raspy cigarette voice already being there. She doesn’t miss a beat, “Where are you at? What’s going on? What are we going to do?” She knew that I was in more trouble than I was letting myself know I was instinctive. The woman on the other line is named Susan Batts, who passed away from breast cancer in 2016. Her nickname was Mamawama. She was my high school girlfriend’s mother, who, like Steve, every time she got around me, she would talk life into me, speak life over me, and remind me that I wasn’t my circumstance and I was the culmination of opportunity.

She had a love for me that you can only feel with a mother’s love. I’m not saying my mother didn’t love me but my mother wasn’t present at that time, and here was this woman who I wasn’t biologically hers. She would watch me go through a breakup with her daughter after thinking we were going to end up soulmates, everything altogether, and all this stuff. She was, “You’ve got to tell me where you are at. I’m coming to get you.”

I don’t know if it went on for 1 or 10 hours, or whatever but I was combative like, “You don’t need to do that. I’m fine.” “You are not fine.” She finally got me to mention or to concede that I would call her at 9:00 AM the next morning, which was a battle for her, by the way. That meant I would have to get off the bridge, go somewhere else, and pick up the payphone the next day to call her.

She made you accountable to someone that you cared about that believed in you more than yourself. She was a lover of life and loved everybody. Bring us the story.

Opportunity always whispers. Negativity always shouts.

I’m sitting there, and we are going through that, and I will never forget this. I get tingles every now and again when I tell the story. Before we hung up, she said, “Steven, I want you to repeat after me.” I’m like, “Repeat after me?” She’s like, “Just do it.” “Yes, ma’am.” She says, “This too shall pass and what comes next will be greater. Say it.” I said, “This too shall pass, and what comes next to be greater.” She’s like, “Say it as you mean it.” It’s like I went to bootcamp already. I’m serious. She was screaming at me.

It sounds like she knew what was at stake.

I know that she did. I found that out years later when I was able to connect with her again.

She was fighting for your life when you couldn’t fight for your life.

I was utterly exhausted and empty. I remember screaming those words at the top of my lungs and having a sense of emotional release that I can’t fully explain. Within a week’s timeframe, I was back on a crew with Steve Mark. I was pulling lumber out of a trash pile to build scaffolding to do a second chance of something that I screwed up, to begin with. That became the first day of one of my businesses that’s now one of my flagship companies that do over eight figures in revenue.

The reason I say that is because sometimes, you have to conquer or confront your darkness to appreciate the light, the opportunity, what could happen, and could be the power within it. It has become a battle cry. I put the, “This too shall pass and what comes next will be greater,” in my first book a number of years ago. I’ve got people that wrote to me all over the place that those words meant something to them. It’s easy for us as human beings to get lost in the moment, not realizing it’s a blip on the radar screen.

Take us now, Steve, for the readers, someone who grew up with a traumatic childhood being an understatement on the precipice of ending their life to who you are now. I read somewhere that you said your first company, which is what you referenced, the construction company, that’s eight figures. People can only dream that. You said your first company taught you how to build with your hands that led to building with your head that followed had to build with your heart.

Those are great platitudes. Can you operationalize them for us? What is it that got you from stuck to unstoppable? Clearly, on some level, when you didn’t believe in yourself, you found the right people. I don’t think that happens. You had that little whisper. Somebody had to amplify it for you. How does somebody else do that?

For me, the first thing that I had to do was open myself up the possibilities were, in fact, possible.

How did you do that?

 

The way that I did that was I would replay those words that we hit, “This too shall pass and what comes next.” It wasn’t like a rocket ship rise. I still ground it out for over twenty years to get to this business of this size. There were times when I didn’t know If I was going to make payroll, lose a customer, gain a customer or defeat a competitor in the marketplace that was trying to take over my market. There are all these different things that happen in life and business. I felt like if I kept going, it would work out. Some would call that faith. I call it faith. It’s one of the attributes of faith.

There are this element of possibilities that is always wrapped up on the other side of faith. Being able to own and be present in the thing that you don’t know or the unknown, and being okay to have that nervous energy to know that you are going to have to work on yourself to excel. With the construction company, I was asked a number of years ago, “Why is that business successful?” We had COVID this last couple of years, the 2000 downturn that my company shot up in size and scale during that timeframe, none of that makes logical sense. How? Why?

Outside of my faith, I would say that one of the things that comes up all the time is I realized that I wasn’t operating or building a construction business. I was building a personal development company masquerading as a construction business. As I was doing that, it became viable for me to try to emulate the people whom I admired most. That’s where I started. I tried to emulate Steve, Susan, Dave Ramsey a number of years later, and then my good friend, Evan, and these people that I admired and respected that I felt like I could trust their character and integrity. When I didn’t know what to do, I would do what they did.

You didn’t reinvent the wheel. For all entrepreneurs, it’s not as a straight line. If you want to grow, especially as an entrepreneur, what you said is you have to get comfortable being uncomfortable. In this world, with everything changing so rapidly, COVID or whatever it is, if you stay still, you are falling behind. I love what you said about the personal development company. All success is based upon the ability to create, nurture, and sustain healthy relationships.

Business is 80% people, 20% product or service. Having said that, you are all where you are but I believe that you have faced some challenges in your business partnerships. What can you share that will help people through those times, perhaps lessons you have learned that when you look back on it now, “If I knew then what I know now,” what you may or may not have done differently?

There’s one major mistake that I made in building businesses. It was that the direct route of a bunch of other things that would break or fall apart or not be reliable, including some people that I had in my business working for me a number of years ago. That was as I tried to build a business without building myself. As a result, I would operate out of fear and insecurity. Here’s a high school dropout who’s owning and running a multibillion-dollar business, has people with MBA, CPAs, ABCs, EFG, everything under the sun, reporting to them.

You know that instinctively. They’ve got the street cred, been to school, got the degrees, and done all this stuff, but yet they are looking to you for leadership, advice, play an active role as an owner, founder, CEO but that, no one has ever taught you how to do that. What do you do? Will you cover up your insecurities by being defensive, not listening well, not taking ideas or being combative? It all comes from that place of fear.

If I let them know who I am and I don’t know what I’m doing, they are going to leave me, which brings up the abandonment phase. I find that all leaders go through this transitionary season where everything about the business is about them, where soon everything about the business is about others. The only way you get there is by continuing to develop yourself.

Basically, one of the tactical practices that I have, even is any time I have the ability or capacity to accept the affirmation, the blessing or the credibility from some achievement that the company has done, the first thing that I do is I try to select people that I can give that credibility, affirmation, and those things, too.

We’ve got an award for X, Y and Z. It would be easy as the owner, “I’m the owner. I’m so awesome. feed me more.” I have learned that in times past where I have done that a number of years ago, the people who were ultimately following are like, “I helped you do it. What’s going on?” I have learned if you want to build a well-oiled machine and a strong team that is unified and brought together, you have to put yourself in a position where you are giving away the achievements, but then taking on a responsibility. When my company is not doing well, it’s my fault. It’s not our processes and our systems or that person’s fault necessarily, because who trained and hired them? It turns out I hired a lot of them.

You have to conquer or confront your darkness in order to appreciate the light, to appreciate the opportunity, to appreciate what could happen, what could be the power within it.

You are the captain of the ship and you can’t lead where you are not willing to go.

It was John Maxwell, a good friend who says, “The scalability of your organization is going to be directly tied to the scalability of yourself.” If you don’t have a reinforced routine daily about learning something new, doing something new, and stretching yourself regularly, you will slide into comfortability. It may be comfortable for a little while but meanwhile, there’s another hungry Steven Scoggins out there, Evan Carmichael or Bo Hawkins coming in who’s like, “I’m going to do this.” Some of these people have huge chips on their shoulders as I used to where I’ve got something to prove.

Talk about authenticity.

What you see is what you get with me. If I’m frustrated, you know it. If I’m happy, you know it. If I’m contemplating, you know it. To be authentic, one of the number one things you’ve got to do is you have to be honest with yourself. Most of us are not honest with ourselves. We judge ourselves by our intentions, but yet we take negative actions or counterintuitive actions to those intentions. We self-sabotage ourselves because we are scared. We feel alone and abandoned. There are all these different things that you have to confront. For me, the authenticity side comes directly from trying to be honest with myself. I start with the things I know I need to improve upon.

Let me ask you a question about that. Hopefully, we can bring this full circle back to the business partners because most entrepreneurs have a business partner story. When we are authentic and genuine, that also makes us vulnerable. Many leaders and owners don’t want to be vulnerable. Help us with that.

I wish I could tell you I’m a case study for how to do it correctly. I did it wrong.

We can all learn from everyone’s mistakes, so that’s great.

I’m about 10 or 12 years into my business. I built a successful organization and had a team of people who I felt were my brothers and sisters in arms. Only to find out that the night before a live event, I’m supposed to teach for three days straight, that they wanted to take my business out from under me. As a result, I have to stop what I’m doing, lock all the computer programs out, and all this stuff. That proceeded to become a year and a half struggle to not necessarily rebuild my business as much as it was but understand the depth of the malfeasance that had taken place.

Were you totally blindsided, Steve?

I was because I have a huge heart. I believe the best in people, even if they are not necessarily acting.

 

You know Ronald Reagan, “Trust but verify.”

It forced me to take my blinders off, start looking at the nuances, and say, “If that person lies about that, they will lie about something bigger.”

What do you think you missed when you look back on that, whenever anyone has been betrayed? You were betrayed in a marriage, a business partnership. After the initial shock, if we try to learn, regroup, and do a debrief, usually, we miss something. What do you think you missed?

I missed two things. The first thing that I missed is totally on me, which is I missed the ability to treat those people correctly early stage. What I mean by that is when I told you I was going through that growth curve of trying to operate as a secure leader versus an insecure leader. Have they gotten a huge brunt of the insecure leader, the growling, the tenacity, the extra grit, the extra drive, and the extra push? Hindsight being 2020, that’s my responsibility. I opened the door for them to feel like maybe Steven doesn’t care about me, and he’s only in it for himself.

They were working for you, not with you.

What they did differently is I made a mistake. I went through a divorce a year earlier than that. I made the mistake of giving my management team complete access to my financial data. They saw some profit and loss statements and things like that but I gave him complete carte blanche access to things that normally you wouldn’t share as a CEO and owner. It should be shared with shareholders but not necessarily you.

Why did you do that? What made you do that?

I felt like I was fighting a war on two fronts. It was very difficult for me to be in a toxic divorce situation and be a present business leader and owner. Try as I might, I felt like my emotional energy kept drawing me towards the divorce and my former wife’s emotional traumas, and things she was working with that caused a lot of the stuff. As a result, I didn’t have the emotional fortitude or capacity to pour myself out in two different places at the same time.

You were exhausted. You only had so much energy.

I was, “Guys, I could use your help. I’ve got all this going on. Would you please help me?” They were like, “Yes. We’ve got you.”

Possibilities are always wrapped up on the other side of faith.

It was misplaced trust. You gave people trust that wasn’t trustworthy.

It turned out that would be the case. We literally uncovered $1.4 million we can’t account for. We weren’t able to prosecute to the way we would hope to.

To this day, you can’t account for it?

Exactly. They went out to start a competitive company later on. Their company has not done as well as the flagship thing. At the end of the day, one of the things that had taught me specifically, the thing that I missed, was accountability in the ordinary.

Tell me more about that.

The accountability in the ordinary is nothing more than when they had a chance to have character, they did or didn’t. When they had a chance to do the right thing, they did or didn’t. When they had a chance to earn a significant bonus or give some of that bonus to other team members around them that needed the money for themselves, you can see greed, ambition, and breaks in character if you are looking for it. I had my blinders on it.

What I thought of as you are speaking, the book, All I Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten, they failed the kindergarten test like the character, integrity, be kind and share.

At the end of the day, that’s accountability in the ordinary. I, to this day, have been put in positions where I could technically make more money and excel faster if I cut this corner. I have decided that if I have to cut a corner to get there, it’s not for me.

It sounds like you would feel you are cutting a piece of your heart.

Some of these people were with me for 12 to 15 years. They were with me from the early days all the way through the very successful days. I’m going through it and trying to figure everything out. I had to mourn the loss of the people that I thought were my family.

 

Clearly, time and time again, you pick yourself up from that. What would you like to share with the readers? What are some of the skills, the nuggets, the takeaways, and the actions that they can do so that when life throws them a curveball, they will be able to hit it out of the park-like you did? I wish I knew I had a hockey analogy but I know it’s checking.

There are two practical things. One has to do with purpose. If you have a clear purpose, then you can suffer through much any pain. I discovered this by watching Steve, Susan, and many of my mentors before me. The greatest purpose in life that you will ever have is serving the person you used to be.

Your former self as Ben Hardy calls it.

The second thing has to do with perspective. Perspective says that if I’m going to make a meaningful impact and have a meaningful life, what I leave behind is as important, if not more important, than what I had when I was here. I look at that in the form of legacy. I like to say that the greatest thing or the greatest legacy you will ever have is the one that outlives you. I talk about Steve Mark and Susan all the time in interviews and things of that nature. They both passed away a long time ago.

I talk about the wisdom, the nourishment, and the things they’ve got. I don’t look at anybody else. I still have days. I’m like, “Is this really for me? I don’t know. Maybe I should give up.” Somehow in the next day, I do it anyway and it works out, and you begin to build momentum. The interesting pivot is it’s not about you in the first place. If my whole ambition in life was based on, “We will build a big business as you possibly can and get to collect as much money as you possibly can,” and that’s the extent of my life here on Earth that I have totally missed out and screwed it up.

However, if I focus on taking that, which is painful for me, that I have to overcome, and then pulling the lessons out of that and giving those to someone else. Maybe an earlier stage than when I had it. I’ve got significance and meaning. Viktor Frankl calls it, Man’s Search for Meaning, “When suffering has its meaning, it ceases to be suffering.”

The trick is getting out of that moment of suffering. If you are so focused on the pain, you can’t be focused on the possibility, so why not focus on the possibility of moving through the pain quicker? I feel like if we do that consistently, we are going to understand something very clear and powerful, which there is no transformation. Whether it will be business or relationship, no transformation or whatsoever without a super degree of transparency, being honest with yourself, knowing that you need to grow continually, and never having it all figured out.

I find that people who stay stuck the longest, one of the number things that they do more than anything else, and I did this myself was, I tried to convince myself and other people that I already had it figured out. I already knew it. I joke around with my son all the time. I said, “I will be glad when you are not nineteen. You get a twenty or something like that.” He said, “Why?” I said, “When you go from being a teenager, you finally won’t know everything.”

The older our children get, the smarter we become. What’s the legacy that you want to leave behind, Steve? Your purpose is to serve if I heard you correctly.

I think of a quick story. I‘ve got to meet Steve Mark’s granddaughter after a number of years of not seeing her for a long time. She came to my live event center here in Raleigh. I have a lot of event centers, stages and studios, and all this stuff. She came here and was walking around the building. I’m showing and introducing her to our team members and all this stuff. She’s so enthralled and goes, “My granddaddy is all over this place.” I said, “Yes, he is.”

The scalability of your organization is going to be directly tied to the scalability of yourself.

The team was saying stuff to her that Steve used to say that to her and other people in a variety of different ways. On the way out the door, we had this very interesting cool thing happen. About that time, one of my team members on my team came up, and he was trying to leave the building. She’s leaving the building, and I stopped him because this is a young man that I have been trying to pour into.

If I see something in you, I’m going to pour it into you a little bit. I go to say, “Connor, this is Steve Mark’s granddaughter.” I’m introducing him and stuff like that. She goes, “What do you do here?” He goes, “I do this and this for this business.” She goes, “That’s so awesome. What do you want to do with your life?” He goes, “I want to make a difference.” She goes, “What do you mean?”

He goes, “I want to make a difference like he’s making in my life. He’s my Steve Mark.” When you ask me what my legacy will be, I want to be a Steve Mark for as many people as humanly possible before I leave this Earth. I don’t even need him to talk about me when I’m gone. I need to make a difference and give them hope, aspirations, and empowerment to help them get to another level they honestly don’t think they can get to but I know they can.

What is a misconception people have about you that you know they have and you choose not to correct it for whatever reason? Here’s your chance. They think they know this about you but you are not like that.

It’s changed but for a long time, people thought that I had extensive degrees because of how I do business with people. They thought that some of what I have accomplished had been given to me or was government-funded. I’ve got help from somebody or whatever. It has always been bootstrap. As a result, there’s a certain level of people looking at me from time to time and saying, “Of course, he was successful. He had it all given to him or taken care of.”

The misconception is unlike any other entrepreneur every day, who wants a better life, to do better by people and fought, clawed, and refused to give up. I feel like if you are an entrepreneur, you are a leader, and you are not where you want to be, you’ve got to keep fighting. I feel like that’s probably the strongest one for me.

Isn’t that interesting when somebody is successful? They don’t understand everything that’s behind it and the work it takes. They assume that it was given to you because they are not willing to do the work now that will give them what you have, they won’t have tomorrow. I have another question for you. This is so great and I appreciate your time, honesty, and transparency. If you were to be a lead actor or actress in any role on Broadway, who would you want to play and why?

I want to be the guy that did the Ringleader, the guy with the top hat.

I’m in Connecticut. I think he was up in Hartford, Connecticut, here. What’s the story that you love? What resonates with you?

There are possibilities for somebody who’s willing to dream. Unlike any hero story that somebody took a chance to dream and no matter what came at them, how it came at them, no matter what happened, they held onto that dream like it was their golden ticket to life because it was.

If you’re going to make a meaningful impact and have a meaningful life, then what you leave behind is just as important, if not more important than what you had when you were here.

What’s your secret to that empowerment?

My secret is believing. Believing is possible. It goes all the way back to the very beginning of our conversation where Steve said, “What’s the difference between this and this?” It’s always how you think, view it, see it, work on it, and go after it, whether or not you go after it. Do you give up when it gets tough or do you continue to fight? All of those are mini micro choices. If we are going to win in life, business, and relationships, we are going to have to do the hard thing. You have to do the hard thing before the easy things come. Steve told me a long time ago, “You have to be willing to do now what others won’t, so you can have tomorrow what others don’t.”

That’s what I was trying to say before, thank you. That’s why you are the rock star. What’s the information you would love to leave with our readers now that I didn’t ask you about? I don’t know enough to ask you or I don’t have that prison into your breadth of experience. What would you like to leave people with that will enable and empower them to believe in themselves now, maybe more so than they did when we started this show?

The message that I would leave is there’s more at stake than you think there is. One of the things that motivate me is I know that life is not after me. Life is after the generations that are hidden inside of me. We are in an environment in the day in time where, unfortunately, whether we like it or not, our country is more divided than it has ever been. We’ve got people who don’t communicate more than they have ever communicated before.

Isn’t yelling communicating?

Not necessarily.

Thank you for clarifying that.

There’s this essence of we’ve forgotten what it’s like to be real with one another because we have forgotten what it’s like to be real with one another. We can’t understand one another because we can’t understand one another. We can’t sympathize with one another. I find that most of the opportunities in life that I have had in business and everything have come through, being honest, vulnerable, and transparent with people. Also, finding your tribe along the way, those who share those same common values and build something special with them, and moving forward, it’s going to come down to making sure you are paying attention, doing the right thing, and becoming the right person.

From what you are saying, you are your North Star. Nobody else sets that for you.

No parents, nobody likes you, as far as we know, this is the only life you get to live on Earth. I figured that somebody else maybe it’s different. That’s what it is. Why shortchange yourself? Why not go for it? Why not see how far you can go? I’m not saying that far you go, like how much stuff you can buy. I’m like, “How big of an impact can you make?” It starts with the one impacting yourself, so you can then impact others.

You pick a stone, throw it in a lake, and have that ripple effect. Steve, thank you so much. This was so awesome. I know the readers learned so much from you. I learned much from you. I feel like I’m unstoppable now. If you have been stuck and you are now unstoppable, we have Steve Scoggins to thank. Everybody, thank you for reading. Remember, if you liked this show, make sure you like, comment, and share. We will see you next time. Thank you.

 

Important Links

• Steve Scoggins
• All I Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten
• Man’s Search for Meaning
• https://Twitter.com/stephen_scoggin
• https://www.Facebook.com/stephenscoggins
• https://www.LinkedIn.com/in/stephenscoggins/
• https://www.Instagram.com/stephen_scoggins/

 

About Stephen Scoggins