The podcast features an engaging dialogue with Bart Merrell, who shares insights into the importance of trusting one's instincts when making decisions—a principle encapsulated in the advice to "trust your gut." The discussion explore Bart 's unconventional journey from aspiring FBI agent to successful entrepreneur, revealing how the unexpected twists of life can lead to unique opportunities. Bart recounts his experiences in bungee jumping and the various entrepreneurial ventures he pursued, emphasizing the necessity of embracing risks to achieve financial independence. Throughout our conversation, we delve into the concept of monetizing one's skills and experiences, highlighting the value of identifying and capitalizing on personal strengths. Ultimately, this episode serves as a clarion call to embrace one's potential and take actionable steps toward financial security.

Takeaways:

• Trusting one's instincts is crucial when making significant life decisions and choices.
• Embracing opportunities, even if they seem risky, can lead to unexpected success and growth.
• The importance of having multiple income streams cannot be overstated in today's volatile job market.
• Each individual's life experiences hold the potential for monetization if one is willing to explore them.
• In business, taking calculated risks is essential, even if the outcomes are uncertain or unpredictable.
• Developing a mindset that focuses on identifying and leveraging personal strengths can facilitate financial stability.

Links referenced in this episode:

• thesidehustlesamurai.com
• youridealsidehustle.com

We welcome Meryl to the podcast. How you doing today?

All right. Thank you. How are you?

I'm good. Looking forward to talking to you today. Your life is interesting to me. I don't like heights, so I'm curious to learn more about you.

Okay, well, let's get started.

I'm going to ask you my favorite question to kind of get us warmed up here. What's the best piece of advice you ever received?

Trust your gut.

Mm.

Because there's things that are going to happen to you throughout your life, and you're. You're going to have to make a decision. And making the proper decision in a timely fashion is important.

So instead of dwelling on it and overthinking it, trust your gut and make that decision. And go.

I love it.

If you get it wrong, you get it wrong.

That's true.

You go back again.

That's right. It's not like you're hanging onto a rope or anything, are you? So, Bart, let's talk about your story. Your life is anything but ordinary.

So let's start with your entrepreneurial spirit. Before you could drive a car, you crashed a car at 8. Eventually, you launched a commercial bungee jumping internationally.

What shaped your early entrepreneurial spirit?

So I didn't start this because this was my goal. At age 16, my goal was to get in the FBI and chase serial killers. That was my dream job. That is what I wanted to do.

We had a family friend that said the easiest way in is through accounting. Once you get in the FBI, then jobs open up, you apply for the job, and you don't have to stay in the white collar crime section.

So with his advice and my dad's advice, I went and studied accounting. I was almost done with my accounting degree, and I had RK surgery done on my eyes, wanting to correct my vision. And it worked great.

I got to the point where I was starting the application process in the FBI, and I had probably a couple of months left of school, and I found out that that surgery automatically disqualified me.

Wow.

Now, before that, when I started my accounting degree, I found out very quickly two things. I didn't like it, and I wasn't good at it.

And so I am graduating in a degree that I don't like and I'm not good at, and I'M not going to get the job that I was doing it for. I was devastated and I didn't know what I was going to do.

I had my landscaping job that I was doing part time at college, and I was just like, like I said, I was devastated. I kind of fell back on what my dad taught me. Not. He never set me down and taught me the birds and the bees of business. But he showed me by example.

Growing up, he was a pig farmer in southern New Mexico. But he didn't just have his hands in pig farming. He had his hands in multiple different ventures that were all in the agricultural industry.

But he didn't rely on one income. He did many different things. And so as I'm trying to figure out what I'm going to do, this bungee jump opportunity opened up.

A buddy of mine who worked for the bungee tower company jokingly asked me, hey, would you like to go back to Japan? I'd spent time in Japan. I spoke Japanese fairly well. And I thought about it for a split second. I'm like, I think I would.

And he didn't even know I was an adrenaline junkie, because I am an adrenaline junkie.

And when I met with the bungee jump company people, they said, well, there's a Japanese company, they want someone to train the staff and they want someone who speaks Japanese. Are you game for this type of thing? And I'm like, oh, yeah, I'm game. I'd never been bungee jumping before, but man, I did a few things.

Oh yeah, I like this. And I contracted with the Japanese company, went over there. I worked with them, you know, building the tower, training the staff. They liked me.

And so they would, every summer they would call me, hey, can you come back? And we, we did five more towers in Japan the next year. And then we did the big swing thing. It's called the sky Coaster.

It's all in all the amusement parks in the US and it's a big swing thing. And we took that one over there. Then we built our own one that we called the Kamikaze coaster.

And it was like a four passenger car that would go down a ramp and then jump off and it turned into a zip line and went across the lake. And so that's how my life started. And started in this, what I call the side hustle life that I've led. I have multiple streams of income.

Anything that crosses my path, good, bad or ugly, I always ask the question, how can I monetize it? And I don't monetize everything. But I always ask that question.

So I'm curious, looking back on that experience in Japan, how did that shape your approach to looking at other opportunities? Just in general,.

It allowed me to do what I wanted to do. So I would go to Japan for a few months, then I'd come back in the States. And I made enough money in Japan that I did what I wanted.

And I met a guy at the gym. It was kind of funny because I would go to this GYM and I'm six four, you know, 220. I'm a big guy for the Japanese population. Plus I'm.

I'm kind of white. I'm. I'm a gringo, as gringos can be. And so they're a little bit intimidated by me.

Plus they don't know if I speak Japanese, so nobody would speak to me. And. And finally this one, about two weeks of going to this gym, this guy comes up to me and he goes, hello.

And I said hello with the perfect hello, English.

And then I started speaking Japanese to him and he's like, I'm glad you speak Japanese, because I was done at Haro and we became friends, and he was a big rig driver in Japan.

And probably about six to eight months after that, he comes to me and he says, I want to quit driving big rig, and I want to start importing trailers and Ford and Dodge diesel pickups from America. Will you help me? I thought he knew how to do it, and I said yes. Turns out he didn't know how to do it, I didn't know how to do it. But we did it.

We still do it to this day. I still ship stuff over there, and it could be a camping trailer, a horse trailer. Right now we're doing bathroom trailers.

And so it's just I was able to jump at the opportunities that came my way even if I didn't know how to do it.

And if you're familiar with Richard Branson's quotes, he has that one quotation out there that is, if someone comes to you with an amazing opportunity and you don't know how to do it, say yes and figure it out as you go. And that's kind of what I've done all my life.

I don't know how to do these things, but if something crosses my path, I always ask that question, how Can I do it? It opens up the mind to try and figure it out. If I just asked, can I do it? That shuts it off to a yes or no answer. But if I say, how can I do it?

It allows my mind to think and figure it out. And if I don't figure it out, great. If I do, we move on to an income stream.

I love it. I meant to ask this question because it's still in my mind. I'm thinking about the Budgie jumping because I really don't like heights. But I'm curious.

What was that experience like? What was going through your mind as you're holding onto that rope jumping from that height? I'm just curious.

So this is one of those things where my dad probably rolls in. It rolls in his grave every time I tell this story. He's like, I don't, can't believe I raised such a stupid kid. There is a method to my madness.

So our bungee tower was about eight stories high. And in theory we had this Bungie, this stunt person airbag at the bottom just in case someone fell.

And you would, you know, it's one of those things that fans are blowing in it and you hit it and it goes poof and you're all good. And in theory, someone could jump from the top of the eight story tower without a bungee cord and hit the bag and be okay.

And so my, my on, on our busiest day in Japan, there wasn't time to think. You know, I, we, we did 783 people in one day, just bam, bam, bam. Pushing them off the tower, I mean, helping them off the tower.

On the slow days during the week, sometimes I'm stuck up at the top of that tower with me and just me and my brilliant mind. And my brilliant mind was asking me, huh? Do you think you could jump off this without a bungee cord?

And I walked to the edge and I look down and I says, no, I'm not that crazy. But my brilliant mind. And so this is brilliant. And this is crazy, brilliant, crazy.

For those who can't see me that aren't watching the video, if my hand is by the side of my head, my finger going forward, that's brilliant. If it's going backwards, that's crazy.

And so my brilliant mind said, okay, if you connect a bungee cord to you and then you jump and wait for the bouncing to stop and then unhook yourself, then you're only falling from about six stories instead of eight. And in my mind that was doable. I could do that. And so I jumped with the bungee cord attached. I waited for the bouncing to stop.

And I mean, I'm connected to this giant rubber band and I couldn't unhook. And so I'm back up at the top and I'm thinking, okay. Well, I say I'm thinking.

My brilliant mind is thinking, okay, when you connect that bungee cord to your customer, you have about a foot long nylon strap that's about an inch wide, and it has a little carabiner on one end of it. You could take that and you could hook it on itself and you make a loop.

And if you put two of those at the end of the bungee cord, now you have handles. So I could jump just hanging onto the bungee cord with the handles, wait for the bouncing to stop, and then all I have to do is let go.

Now that is brilliant. I got the handles in my hands, I walked to the edge, I looked down, I said, three, two, one, bungee. And I jumped, just hanging on with my bare hands.

I waited for the bouncing to stop. And sometimes your brilliant mind doesn't think things all the way through. I let go. And that bungee cord, like I said, it's a giant rubber band.

It shot up to the tower with a loud bang. And I hit the mat with this loud slap. And it echoed throughout the park. And everyone came running to see who just died.

Yeah, and I'm crawling out of the mat. Oh, I'm okay. I'm okay. Nothing to see here. We're all good. And you may think that that's crazy, that's stupid.

And I, and I use this when I'm talking to people about business. You have to take risk, even if you don't know what the outcome is going to be. But not stupid risk.

And in your head you're saying, but that was stupid. But it wasn't. Because I had bungee jumped a thousand times or more before I did this. I knew the pressure. I was 99% sure that I could hang on.

In fact, I was 100% sure that I could hang on through the pressure. My fear was when I bounced back up and became weightless, my body freaks out and goes. And then I let go and follow the ground. But I didn't.

And so when you're in business and doing you want to be an entrepreneur, you have to be a little bit crazy and a little bit brilliant. And you got to take that first step. You got to take that first jump, even if you don't know what the outcome will Be.

And so that's how I use that story in my presentations. But I bet my dad probably is going, oh my gosh,.

Probably. So let's talk about your book. Cause I'm curious, I think you kind of laid a great groundwork for your book. Monetizing your mindset.

What does monetizing your mindset mean?

So it means anything that crosses your path. You always ask that question, how can I monetize it? Because in this world that we live in today, one income doesn't do it.

And it's not the safe, you know, we're talking about safe here because of bungee jumping and stuff. The new risky is having that one income and then having it disappear.

I mean, look, I look at all the people who, because of the invent of AI, they are losing sleep at night because they don't know if they're going to have a job tomorrow or two years from now. And they need to do something different. And they're not going to be able to do that same industry that they were in because AI can do it for them.

They're going to have to pivot, they're going to have to figure things out. And so having multiple streams of income is the new smart, is the new thing that you need to do so that you, you know, you, you.

I have that, that saying, what happens when what happens happens, when life happens, are you prepared financially, mentally, physically? And you have to have all of those, and financially is a huge part. Because when life happens, you have whatever's going to happen.

You know, because one of my, one of my side hustles, and probably one of the main side hustles is dog training. And it's going to be hard to train dogs on one leg and the other other leg is in pain, right?

So how long am I going to be without that stream of income coming in now? Because I have multiple. It was a little bit easier to digest, but it was still a fear there.

So when things go wrong, whether it's a health issue or a car, your car breaks down or whatever happens, yeah, you have the problem. But then right up there at the top is the issue of financial worries.

And so that's what I'm here to solve, is help people Solve that by monetizing their mindset and monetizing the stuff that they already know and do.

Because we all have those hidden traits that we have, life experiences that we can monetize that are right there on the table if you just open your eyes and you're aware of them.

I think a lot of us don't recognize that. How do you help people recognize the value of the things that are just in front of their eyes? Cause, I mean, if you, like you just mentioned, it's.

We don't think that way. We think we need to focus on a career. And I mean, I grew up at a time, I'm probably, probably about the same age where your goal was.

You find that career, you work it for 50 years, you retire, and you get this nice pension from the place you dedicated your whole life to. That's not the case anymore. So life is different now. Like you said, whatever happens, happens, and it happens to you a lot of times.

So how do you help people begin to expand their mindset? We always called it the side hustle. How do you help people realize what their side hustle is?

And so for me, it comes naturally. So I have to get them to think like I do. And so we make lists. What do you like to do? What do you need to do? What are you already doing?

How can you monetize one, two, or three of those things? And, you know, what do you like to do is kind of easy because you like to do it.

The thing that people overlook is the things that they need to do, because we don't always like to do those things.

So when I found out I was going to get my leg amputated after the shock and awe was over, my twisted mind says, okay, I don't like this, but it's got to happen. How can I monetize it? 6 Months post op, I contracted with my prosthetist to help other people who are going through my same situation.

If I hadn't thought about it before, I wouldn't have jumped at the opportunity when it happened, because he didn't ask me. I was in a. In an appointment with my prosthetist taking a. You know, working on my leg. And I said, scott, you know, I entered three other prostitutes.

I interviewed three other prosthetists before I decided on you. One of them had a guy, a guy I could talk to. I could ask questions that had his leg cut off. And I could ask him, how bad is this going to hurt?

I could ask him about phantom pain. I could ask him, what Do I need to learn to accept.

He could come and look at my shower and say, do I need to make any changes for the time that I'm going to be without my prosthetic? I had someone I could talk to. I said, scott, you don't have a guy. I'm your guy. And that started it. And I said, scott, I don't want a real job.

I've never had a real job. I don't want to come to the office. I just want to be on retainer. You send me the numbers, I do whatever I need to do to. To help them.

And from that, we have a contract that I get paid every month to be on retainer. And I get the. He sends me phone numbers, I go talk to him, help him. I even do some outreach with some of the doctors. And that's a stream of.

A very decent stream of income to me, because I thought about it even before it happened. And so I. And that's not something that I wanted to do. It's just. It's something that I needed to do.

Now, for your audience members, don't go chopping off body parts to create a. To create an income stream. Right? But if it's going to happen, always ask the question, how can I monetize it?

So for the audience who's listening and they're going, that sounds like a great idea. But there's always still something that holds people back. What do you re.

What are the things that you've encountered with people that holds them back from even taking advantage of the opportunities once they know what they are?

Fear of failure. And it's not necessarily their own fear of failure and missing out on it. Their fear of failure and looking stupid for all the people around them.

They're worried about what the outside thinks, oh, you're doing that. And then they, you know, that's. That's stupid. And then they fell and then, see, I told you so. You know, they. That. See, I told you so. That's a scary.

That's a scary word to hear. I mean, when. So my wife told me that I was.

Like, I can't go where you can't go to Canada. What? It's a bad direction. I can't live my life on your feng shui. She protests a second.

She goes back in her office, she comes out and she said, no, it's a horrible direction. This could affect you for the rest of your life. Well, I went. I didn't listen to my wife. I was dropped from a ropes course on the last day.

I had two bus rides and a plane ride home the next day with two big suitcases and crutches for someone. 5, 10. They didn't have any ice up at this retreat. They just had those little bags that you pop. So I didn't get my.

I didn't get ice on my ankle for 24 hours. And when I finally did, I got home and my leg was swollen to my knee and I was running 102 degree fever.

When the pain got bad enough, I went to the doctor thinking I was going to schedule a fusion surgery. The radiologist, who's not supposed to say anything to you, he. He took the first picture for the doctor and from behind that partition. Damn.

You don't have an ankle bone. My ankle bone was gone. Nothing to fuse to. And so that's kind of a long story about how I got here, but.

And I don't even remember the point I was trying to make with telling you this story.

I got lost in this story myself, so I'm not sure what point you were going to be.

You got me a function I know now. So my wife is Japanese. She didn't know the phrase I told you. So I didn't tell her until it was time to get my leg cut off.

I'm driving home from the doctor's office and I walk in and I say, hon, I've been hiding something from you for 12 years and I need to come clean. And she's like, what? There's this phrase in English that's I told you so. You can use it now because she told me that I shouldn't go to that trip.

And anyway, so those words, I told you so, they hurt.

And when you're doing it in a business sense, everybody looking at you, and it's always from the people that are closest to you that mean the most to you, that they see you possibly fell, and they're like, oh, you need to be careful, or, oh, you need to. Why are you doing that? And we're worried about that. And that keeps us from moving forward and taking those first steps.

So with that in mind, what are for the audience listening at home going, okay, I want to take that leap. I want to jump off this, the platform with my bungee cord, holding on with my two hands. But I'm not quite sure where to start.

What are one or two simple things that people who are listening today can do to begin to monetize their knowledge?

So one would be make the lists. That's your first step. You gotta know what you're dealing with.

And all you do is you make those three lists that I told you, and then you're gonna go back to each one of those and you're gonna say, how could I monetize this? How could I monetize this?

And I have a process that's a little bit, you know, I have you take those two lists and put them into those three lists and put them into one list of what do you like to do the most? And then another list of what do you think you could turn into a stream of income the quickest?

And so the what do you like to do most is easy because you can put those in in order. Then with this one, you got to do the research. You got to figure out, okay, what is it going to take? What am I going to give up to get this?

You hear people all the time, oh, I wish I was Bezos, or I wish I was Musk, or I wish I was Cuban or whatever, billionaire. And I always ask, really, do you? Because Cuban slept on people's couches for a long time. Musk lives in his office even to this day.

And so do you really want to do that? Is that the lifestyle you want? If it is, great, go for it. But if it's not, then you need to maybe put that one away to the side.

And as you're building these two lists, something is going to boil to the top where you're going to have a handful of ideas. And those are the ones you need to focus on, because they're the ones that are going to be the lowest hanging fruit.

And then you're going to do your research even further because you still want to understand, okay, I'm giving up this. This is what I potentially will get in exchange. Do I still want to make that exchange? Give You a quick example.

In Japan, there is this restaurant that I love. It's Japanese curry. It's the first place I hit when I go into Japan, and it's the last place I hit when I leave. It's called Coco Ichiban curry.

Oh, it is. It is the best.

And if you go to where the bases are in Japan, like Okinawa and Tokyo on a Friday or Saturday night, you think you're in America, because that's where all the GIs are at. They love it. So I know this would hit. It would have been a hit. And I said, I need to take this to America.

I had a guy in Japan, a friend that had money that would lend me the money to get started, and he literally said this. I had to check with my other Japanese friends because I wasn't sure if it was correct, but he said, if you succeed and we make money, we split it.

If you don't succeed and you fail, don't worry about it. So it was free money.

I got back to America, I started doing my research, talked to different restaurateurs, went and looked at things and just kind of, you know, what am I going to need? What's it going to cost? You know, I. I had my costs figured out.

I had my business plan kind of figured out, and I just said, I don't want to work that hard because restaurants are hard work. I may like to eat that curry, but I don't know that I want to oversee it every day. And so I. I turned down free money.

I said, no, I can't do this because my heart wouldn't be in it. And I don't think that I want to lose your money. And so I turned it down. And that's the stuff you need to analyze in this critical part.

You've got your three or four or five ideas that boiled up to the top. Now you got to do your research and say, okay, do I really want to give up this to get that?

And you have to be willing to let it go, or you have to be willing to try it and then say uncle and be okay with failure. Gary Vaynerchuk, he says it all the time.

I would rather succeed 7 out of 10 times than 10 out of 10 times because I learned so much from the failures. And so failure is okay because you're going to learn a lot, and then you just get up again and start and continue and continue. All of my life isn't.

I didn't hit home runs all the time.

Right.

I've lost money several times, and I've learned from each one of those expensive life lessons.

That's good. So I'm gonna ask you some lightning round questions now.

Okay.

Risk or security?

You know the answer to that. But, but here's the. Here's the. Here's the caveat. I risk so that I can have security.

Makes sense. First dollar we ever made was how.

On the pig farm as a little kid, like, before I could drive, I was. I was scraping pig poop. From a young age, I bet I started at five years old, going and helping my dad on the farm.

That's so cool. One word that defines entrepreneurship.

Freedom. And it's not what you think, because it's not freedom. I still have to work, but because I've never had a real job, I control my time.

I probably work more hours than someone in a real job, but it's what I like to do. There's.

Sometimes I have to force myself to go to bed because I get involved in something and I'm working on something and I'm seeing the progress and I'm like, oh, this is awesome. This is like, oh, it's two o' clock in the morning. I got a podcast I gotta be on at 7. I better go to bed.

Right.

You know, and so it's. It's not freedom as in you're free to not do anything. It's freedom as in I control my time and I'm doing the things I love.

Yeah, I like that.

Or have to do.

Or have to do. Right. Book that changed your thinking.

Had to be Rich Dad, Poor dad growing up. I mean, and my dad was kind of. My dad was kind of the millionaire next door. But the book of Rich Dad, Poor dad and then his.

You know, my dad always encouraged me when I wanted to try something. And so.

But that book is what started it, you know, started my way of thinking about how a rich person, rich dad thought versus how the poor dad thought in that book.

Good. Best business lesson learned the hard way.

You go out and you buy a brand new Ford F350 for $40,000. And so overcoming that and taking that risk. So once again, I took a risk. And so what I was going to do to keep me from going into bankruptcy.

I was going to go pull camping trailers from manufacturer to dealer nationwide. But I couldn't get the contract until I had the truck.

And so I bought the truck without a contract, drove out to Indiana, got the contract, and then, you know, saved myself. I did that for four years before I decided, you know, I think I want to sleep in my own bed. But, you know, so being willing to take that risk is key.

That is the. That's what I learned from that experience.

Interesting.

And it worked.

It worked, and it worked. Yeah. Morning routine or wing it?

Mixture of both. I mean, I have a routine of things. I, you know, so I'm going to say routine. It's just not a, it's not a.

It's not what I think of when I hear morning routine.

Right.

You know, I have these things I need to get done. So I'm a dog trainer. I do dog training in my house. The dogs come and live with me. We got to get up, we got to take care of dogs in the morning.

Then I can relax, look at what's on my schedule. But I don't. It's not what you hear about the miracle morning.

Right. Opportunity you almost missed.

You know, I, I thought about this one there. I can, I have several opportunities that I did miss. I, I don't know that there's an opportunity that I can think of that I almost missed.

So can we go to one that I missed?

Sure.

Oh, my.

And I went in there and you buy this card, this little card that you stick in a machine with, you know, 50 balls, 100 balls, 500, 1,000, however many you want to pay for. You stick it in the machine and this ball comes up out of the ground on the tee. You hit the ball, it sinks down and it comes back up on the.

A new one comes up and I'm going through. I mean, I'm just like, bam, bam. You don't bend down. If you want to go to an iron, you knock it off the tee and you have the fake grass there.

You hit it with an iron and the next ball is there waiting for you. And I'm just like, within minutes, I've ran through the 50 balls that I bought. I'm like, man, this is a money making machine.

I need to take this to America. And I started doing my research, and I'm a young kid.

I'm.

What am I, 24? And the Zeros after the two big numbers were just too many. I mean, it was several million dollars, you know, in the teens to take this to America.

I could be the top golf guy.

Yeah.

And I mean, saying that, I think about it, but it's not because I don't like my life. It would be different, and it could be better. It could be worse. I don't know. It would just be different.

You might not have gone to Canada.

I might still have my leg. That's a good point. I might have listened to my wife a little better.

You might listen to your wife a little better.

I love it.

So, Bart, I'd like to ask my guest this question to you. What do you want your legacy to be?

That I didn't leave anything on the table, That I put it all out there. That I wasn't afraid of what other people think.

And I'm still working on that because I am susceptible to that as anybody else is, because we don't like people to make fun of us.

But it's one of those things where I continue to evolve and continue to do more and be more so that people can look at me and say, I like what he did. I want him to help me do what he did.

That's awesome. So on the show, we have something new, too. It's called a surprise question. Pick a number between one and ten. For your surprise question.

How many people pick seven.

A lot of people pick seven. You want seven?

Let's go three.

Let's go three. Okay. If you had to teach a class on one thing, what would you teach?

Oh, that's easy. That's an easy question.

It'd be how to identify your ideal side hustle and create financial security by monetizing those things that you already know and do.

That was too easy. I should have gotten you a different question.

I know. You might want to pick another question, because. Another question. That's what I do. You know, I help people. I do. Okay, let's go to seven.

Oh, here we go. What would be your best day ever?

That is a harder question. My best day ever, man, that's hard to pick it because I already do what I want to do, and so that's why it's hard for me. My best day ever.

I helped someone identify the side hustle that is just going to take off and really hit for them, and they can start to live life on their own terms like I do. And so finding that is amazing. And then seeing them grow and seeing them actually take it and do something with it, that's cool.

Now I got to go find my side hustle that you concur to me. I love that. So, Bart, where can people find you? Where can they find your book, Monetize.

Your mind so they can find me. I'm most active on Facebook. I do have a YouTube channel that is Bart Merrill, the side hustle Samurai.

You know, it was on the horizon, but it was very distant. And now I've integrated a chapter of AI Also, before I monetized my mutt, I talked about.

In my first one, I talked about monetizing my mutt and how I'm looking forward to doing that now that I am a dog trainer. And the reason I'm a dog trainer is because I adopted a puppy Rottweiler that was eight months old, £90, and didn't know the word no.

I kept calling a buddy of mine, Sean. I was like, sean, Rex is doing this. And his full name is T. Rex because he was Malvi, but we shortened it to Rex. Rex is doing this. What do I do?

About the third time I called him, maybe the fourth time, he's like, bart, if you're not going to pay me to train your dog, you need to come to our train the trainer program and learn how to train him yourself. And so I. It was a month, every day, all day, every day, going and working with their dogs on their facility.

And I did that and learned how to become a dog trainer for my dog. If I'm going to train someone else's dog or my dog, I'm going to get paid to train other people's dogs. And that's how that came about.

And so, once again, I lost why I even told that story.

You're talking about your. Oh, your website and. Yeah, we're talking about your website.

It can be found at your idealsidehustle.com take you about 30 minutes to do it honestly and it's going to show you the things you're good at and it's going to pick out the one or two blind spots that you may be overlooking that's holding you back from making your first thousand dollars in a side hustle.

Wow.

Cool.

I'll make sure I put that link in the show notes well, Bart, thanks so much for this wonderful conversation. This has been a powerful conversation. Your message is both practical and empowering.

That we already possess the knowledge and ability to create opportunity, stability and growth if we're willing to just act on it to the listeners. If you take away anything from this show that's inspired you, don't wait for the perfect moment or the perfect conditions.

Start with what you know and start where you are.

Because life will happen, challenges will come, and the question is, will you be prepared if today's episode has inspired you, Pick up a copy of Monetize youe Mindset. Share this episode with someone who ready to take control of their financial future.

Subscribe, follow and leave a review to help us reach more trailblazers and titans like you. I AM your host, Dr. Keith Haney and we thank Bart for his time and his energy and his risk management skills.

The courage he has to do the things that God has placed on his heart. We're so thankful that he shared those with us today. Bart, thanks again.

Thanks for having me. I appreciate being here and having the conversation.

Thank you.