Episode 312: Stop Selling with Brandon Steiner

Episode Summary

Brandon Steiner received his first lesson in entrepreneurship when he was 12; it was free and given by his own mother. He was after a prize of a candy bars box for whoever opened up the most accounts on a paper route. After days of not getting any new clients and seeing him devastated by his repeated failure, his mother gave him a piece of advice he would carry his entire life and make part of his core values as an entrepreneur. 

Rob Shallenberger: Welcome back to our Becoming Your Best podcast listeners. This is your host today, Rob Shallenberger. And we have a fun guest. We actually had him on the podcast several years ago, and probably with the most unique backgrounds because this is a guy – good friend – he would get dirt and sell the dirt, Yankee Stadium dirt. You get the seats and sell the seats. And just a total entrepreneur in the sense that if you could dream it, he could do it. His name is Brandon Steiner. So, if you’ve been listening to this podcast for a while, you will remember the podcast with him. It was just so cool, the things that he had bought and sold that you would never even think about. And since then he’s written a new book, Living on Purpose. He’s got a new company, and they’re working with women athletes. So just a classic entrepreneur in every sense of the word. And it’s exciting to have him back here today to talk about some new topics that we didn’t talk about last time. So, first of all, Brandon, welcome. And why don’t you share just briefly a little background on who you are for those that may not remember or weren’t around a couple of years ago when we visited last time? 

Brandon Steiner: Well, thanks, Rob. Appreciate it. I’ve been through like everybody else, a lot of changes. CollectibleXchange is my new company. It’s really just a modern version of eBay. It’s the ultimate marketplace, all kinds of different collectibles, particularly sports and entertainment collectibles. And also we have a whole thing around all the greatest women athletes, whether it’d be Sue Bird, Mia Hamm, Diana Taurasi. So if you have a daughter that you want to buy a really cool collectible for, we created a marketplace, it’s got all kinds of women’s stuff. There are over 100,000 items on there. And we have 80 athletes that you can buy from these athletes directly from them – that’s what Athlete Direct does. CollectibleXchange is really just a much better modern version of eBay, so you can buy and sell and put stuff up. If you have stuff you’re sitting with and you want to know what it’s worth, you want to get it authenticated – I’m your guy, I can help you. The real goal is, you’d mentioned the dirt and the seats and all that, but I just love bringing fans and customers closer to the game. I want to get them to meet their ultimate players they’ve always wanted to meet, have stuff of the players that they look up to, that they enjoy every Sunday or every week. And that’s what my new sites do; it just gets you close so you can buy stuff directly from the players, you can sell directly to each other. I’m really just taking what I was doing at my old company, Steiner. You probably heard of Steiner Sports. There is no more Steiner, I’m out of Steiner. Now, it’s CollectibleXchange and Athlete Direct. And I’ve been really blessed to get this kind of rebound and this re-fire, I’ve been dying to do this. You can get this book for free on my website. You can get this book, this is a little more popular there, You Gotta Have Balls – my mother’s favorite. 

Rob Shallenberger: Now, just to clarify, for those listening, he’s holding up two books there: Living on Purpose and You Gotta Have Balls. 

Brandon Steiner: So, you can pick those books up on CollectibleXchange. You’ll see there’s a skew there. You get the book for free, you just pay for the shipping. I’ve been blessed. I’ve written three books, and I’m half illiterate, so writing these books was not easy. But I think they’ve been really helpful to people that are into sales, into entrepreneurship. And then we cover a couple of other topics. So, Rob, thanks for the intro. And hopefully, that explains where I’m at. And listen, it’s not easy walking away from a company you built for 35 years in the industry I had a major part in, which was sports collectibles, and then rebounding and building something completely better, different, disruptive to what you’ve built and put your heart into. But I think that we all have it in us. And I bring that up because I think a lot of us are going through that now, you know, about the re-fire, about the restart that we’re kind of all facing because of maybe what’s happened over the last couple of years. And just the overall change that’s going on in the market. I mean, there’s a lot of stuff changing from the way we raise our kids to whether we’re going to work or whether we work from home. There’s a lot of change going on. So, I feel like I’m 20 again. I feel like that’s the only mindset I can go find. It’s like maybe you just graduated college, you don’t know what the hell you’re doing, and you’ve got to reset and remodel the way you’re going to go about things. And knowing that you have the confidence, you’re a good person, and you deserve good things – you’re going to figure it out. 

Rob Shallenberger: I love it. We’re going to focus on two different things. I was talking with Brandon before we started the podcast and asked, “Hey, where do you want to go with this, Brandon?” And he’s like, “Man, anything’s on the table.” Parenting, entrepreneurship, talking about employees, they have a coaching program. And so with that kind of open slate, I decided to go in two directions with this. And so we’re going to take the first few minutes focusing on entrepreneurship. And then we’re going to take the last half of this and focus on parenting. And between those two, this should touch a lot of people. 

Brandon Steiner: Parenting is just like managing your own employees. There’s a lot of similarities into that. Even though, obviously, there’s nothing more important than parenting and it’s the hardest job on the planet. So, I don’t want to be disrespectful to the process; there is nothing more important than parenting. 

Rob Shallenberger: Amen. So, that’s why I want to take this podcast and divide it into two sections. So, if you don’t feel like you’re in the entrepreneur category, listen in any way because there’ll be some good nuggets here, I guarantee, and stay tuned for the parenting – and vice versa. So, let’s jump into this. Let’s talk entrepreneurship, Brandon. Big picture – where would you start with entrepreneurship? I mean, you’ve got people listening to this that have built very successful businesses, there are other people who are in the process of a startup, and then there are some people that just have the idea at this point. 

Brandon Steiner: Let’s start with leadership. First, we just need a lot more leadership in this country from top to bottom. And I think we overplay entrepreneurship and leadership almost too much. We all have the ability to have some entrepreneurship in us and some leadership. So, leadership is just taking what’s broken, making it better, fixing it, and then take what you have that you’re doing really well, and do it even more better. That’s leadership. Any act of kindness, anything you could do to help someone else, help a teammate is leadership. And I think we all need to push on the leadership. But entrepreneurship, and where I think a lot of people get confused, they think it is risky out there, crazy mindset proposition. And it is to some degree, that is true. But I’ll give you a quick story about entrepreneurship that will make sense, and why I think we all can really show some entrepreneurship skills. I was really young and I opened up a paper route. I was about 12. It was a sign on the window, “Whoever opened up the most accounts would win a box of candy bars.” So, at the time, I’d already been working a couple of years. I started working when I was 10. I lived at Kings Highway 539, Brooklyn. It was a very, very heavily dense neighborhood with a lot of people. So, I figured that was a no-brainer. 29 dailies, 34 Sundays, I figured I could easily double that. Because here are all these apartment buildings, and within three or four blocks could be a couple of thousand people. This is not Salt Lake City, like, literally on one big old block, it could be five buildings of six or seven stories with the very kids that grew up in my neighborhood, two or three blocks away that I’d never met. So, if you haven’t lived in an urban city, it’s dense. 

Brandon Steiner: So, I’m knocking on doors, and I got nothing. Finally, I get to this older woman, she’s probably about 80, I said, “Ma’am, would you like to get the paper delivered? She’s like, “Absolutely not.” I said, “Yeah, but it looks like you get the paper delivered. And it looks like you get the paper at least.” She goes, “Yeah, but I get it from the corner store.” I said, “Ma’am, it’s eight cents from me, eight cents from the corner store. I’ll be here every morning.” She says, “Yeah, but then I gotta tip you.” I go home and I tell my mom, “We’ve got to move out of this neighborhood.” And by the way, excuses are the common denominator of all failure. So, really, I got no excuses at 12. Now, my mother would never want to hear it, and she never put up with any of my excuses. She says, “Sit down. Let me tell you something. Once I tell you something, once only. Stop selling. You can’t expect to sell a product that other people have and expect people just to buy it. You’ve got to differentiate yourself. You’ve got to be a solution-based business person. You’ve got to solve and you’ve got to serve. You’ve got to stop selling. How are you helping this person?” And I was trying to get my arms wrapped around it. So I go back out because I really want to win this box of candy bars. “Whoever opens up the most accounts for the month would win a box of candy bars” has now been a big deal for me; to bring home a box of candy bars. And I knock on the doors, I got nothing.  

Brandon Steiner: Finally, on a Thursday night at 10 o’clock at night, I go back because I’ve got nothing and I’m starting to get really upset because I’m one of these relentless kids that would not stop. And I’m knocking on these doors and I go back to knock on the older woman’s door at 10 o’clock on a Thursday night, you can imagine, did not go over well. She’s like, “What’s up? What’s wrong?” She thought maybe there’s a fire. I said, “Ma’am, just a minute.” “I told you I don’t want to get the paper delivered.” I said, “Ma’am, just a minute. If there’s a torrential downpour, snowstorm, ice on the ground, heatwave, a woman such as yourself shouldn’t be out in that kind of weather. If I bring you milk and bagels on Wednesday and Sunday, and I’ll bring you the paper every morning by 07:30, in case there’s a really, really bad weather, I’ll help get whatever you need.” “You would do that for me?” I said, “I was concerned.” And sure enough, the lady got the newspaper, talked her into it. I was delivering a ton of milk and bagels every Wednesday and Sunday to all different people. Here’s what I didn’t realize, this lady was the mayor of the neighborhood. She knew everyone. I went from 29 dailies, 34 Sundays to 199 dailies and 250 Sundays. Now, I don’t know if that story relates to everyone there, it’s like, are you really listening to your customers? And are you a solution-based salesperson? Are you really thinking about how you can actually come up with a solution to a problem that maybe a customer has? And I think it’s pretty apparent. I think as a salesperson or as an entrepreneur, you can understand how that story can be very fitting. And really, at 12 years old I set the tone for my career.  

Brandon Steiner: I never walked into any situation with any potential business without thinking about being a solution-based person trying to figure out what problem this customer had and how I could solve it, whether it had to do with my product or not. Because the milk and bagels had nothing to do with the daily news. But what’s interesting is that I’ve told that story for probably 10 years and I’ve made a lot of money off that story, and speak all over the country. But you know what’s interesting about the story, Rob? And this is what I really want to impress upon to the people that are listening is that it’s not really that complex. I think anybody that’s selling knows they got to just be a problem-based, solution-based salesperson. But how do you get in the mindset? And what’s amazing for me as a 12-year-old, that I was able to get into a high level of empathy and a high level of compassion. As a 12-year-old, I was able to get into an 80-year-old woman’s mindset and try to feel what it’s like to be her. And that’s when I found the whitespace.  

Brandon Steiner: So, if you want to increase your entrepreneurism, or you want to just be a better leader, what I would say is increase your empathy and your compassion. Because, Rob, the definition of empathy is “put yourself in someone else’s shoes.” Most people are so wrapped up in their own heads. And why I bring this story up in today’s conversations is because when you’re going through the virus, and all the things that are going on politically, the problems we’re having, it’s very hard to get out of your own head about how you’re feeling, about your problems, the change that you’re incurring, and the worries that we all have. But if you want to increase your entrepreneurism, you have to increase your empathy and compassion. In order to do that, you’ve got to increase the amount of thinking you’re doing about other people. You’ve got to get into what other people are feeling, other people are thinking, and what their emotional responses are and not what just yours are.  

Brandon Steiner: And if you’re able to increase your common sense – the common person increases your common sense. The only way you increase your common sense is by getting out of your head and get into other people’s heads. And when I think about it’s like, as a 12-year-old to get into an 80-year-old woman’s head. I have a 12-year-old, and getting them to just think about even the common stuff that they’re supposed to be doing for themselves, completely selfishly speaking, is impossible. But the thing is a 12-year-old that I was able to get into that kind of thinking, increasing my common sense, increasing my empathy and compassion for an older woman who would be struggling in a torrential downpour, who would be struggling to go get their coffee and milk on a snowstorm day, and now had to go-to person. Now, for a small price of a tip, using me to get the paper, she turned me on to everyone in the neighborhood. And that’s what’s been going on for the last 50 years for me, as I’m 62. So, I would say to you is where do you start with entrepreneurism is where you end and where you must go, which is, increase your empathy, increase your compassion, increase your common sense, get out of your freaking head and get into other people’s heads, stop worrying about what you’re thinking and start being really concerned about what other people are thinking, and be genuine or authentic about it. And you’ll find the whitespace. And when you start finding that whitespace — those are problems that people have, and you’re able to come up with smart, intelligent solutions – it’s off to the races. And you can do that with any part of your relationships. You can take an entrepreneurial approach with your employees. You can take an entrepreneur approach with your kids. You can take an entrepreneurial approach by just increasing your compassion and empathy. It’s everything, man! 

Rob Shallenberger: So, I love what you’re saying, Brandon. In other words, it’s not about what we want, it’s about what the other person wants. And it’s about having that empathy and compassion to be able to get inside their mind and understand what that is. I’ll give you a case in point of this, actually. A funny story came to my mind. So, I was up at my in-laws with all of our family. We were there for a family reunion. And I really wanted to take my daughter on a daddy-daughter date and go on a four-wheeler ride. And I’m like, “Hey, Bella, why don’t we go on a four-wheeler ride together? It’ll be so fun.” And she’s like, “Nah, I really don’t want to.” I’m like, “Come on, let’s go!” “No, I don’t want to.” And then my brother-in-law leaned over and he says, “You’ve got to think about what motivates her.” 

Brandon Steiner: This is what you want to be doing with most of your day. I always say to people, I’m always into the winning and losing thing, but when was the last time you asked yourself or asked your spouse what’s winning for them? Ask your kids what’s winning for them? What’s the best thing that can happen to you? Even if it’s a 10-year-old, “What’s winning for you?” “Dad, it’s getting these trains,” or “Dad, it’s getting a new bicycle,” or it’s “You getting off my butt and leave me alone for a whole day,” or “Me just being able to play games all day.” Once you find out what’s important to somebody that’s important to you, you can do what’s important if it was important. And once you start thinking that way, entrepreneurism is easy. People think you’ve got to be born with entrepreneurism, I mean, sometimes entrepreneurism comes because your back is against the wall, which, by the way, is a good thing.  

Brandon Steiner: So, another point I’d like to bring up to people that are listening is, how do you get your back against the wall? Because the last great thing you did is because you were under a lot of pressure, you were under a lot of anxiety, your back was against the wall. And what great happens when your back is not against the wall? I mean, what great thing is happening when you’re taking a nice, leisurely walk around the beach? But when you think about when you gotta get into that college, when you’ve got to get to the school, when you have to go get a job, when you’re really trying to make extra money because you want to send your kids to a private school. It’s only when you get into your back against the wall, and you get into a hostile mindset, where it’s not about what you want to do, it’s what you have to do, it’s what you need to do. You’ve got to create that environment for yourself. It’s the game within the game. And that’s another big part of entrepreneurialism is how do you go get in that mindset so that you’re constantly the underdog, you’re constantly thinking about what else you need to do that’s more than what’s comfortable that you’re doing already. Once you get at the comfort, you’re into mediocracy, which we all know. So, entrepreneurism is broken out into three categories. One is, understand the landscape, that’s back to empathy and compassion. In order to understand the landscape — that is assuming you’re good at what you do and you have a really solid foundation of a particular industry, a particular job or a business. Product knowledge is so important – I can’t emphasize it enough – and being really, really solid about what it is you do, how it gets done. I ask people all the time, “What do you do for a living?” And it’s amazing the answers I get and they’re just unacceptable. When you think about what your industry really does, what your business really does. It’s so important, like, “Rob, what do you do for a living?”  

Rob Shallenberger: Are you asking me what I do?  

Brandon Steiner: Yeah. 

Rob Shallenberger: So, run Become Your Best Global Leadership. In other words, we’re empowering organizations to increase their productivity by 30% to 50% – changing lives. Our vision is to reach a billion people. 

Brandon Steiner: Exactly. But when you think about that first answer about what you do is you help people get out and basically stand up. You help people get from today to tomorrow. You help people reach their dreams. You help people actually get out of their old mindset of what they were thinking, and to think about what could be as opposed to what was. And I could go on and on. I asked a plumber what he does; you enable people to be able to get water. Imagine you don’t exist, I’ll be out of water today because my pipes are broken. I mean, there’s so much more than what you do. So, understanding the landscape and understanding the industry you’re in, the product knowledge, and having a constant knowledge about what you do and the effect that it has on people.  

Brandon Steiner: The second thing is risk. You have to understand the risk that’s involved; when you’re getting into something that no one else has done, you’re in someone else’s mindset, you’re trying to be a solution-based business person – remember, there’s going to be some risk involved. You’re the only one who started this idea. No one else has thought of it. You’re coming up with a new idea. There’s a risk involved. There’s a possibility your idea may suck. And leadership – can you sell it? It’s not a story. Telling a story is selling. Can you create a compelling story? Can you figure out a concept that connects with the person you’re trying to come up with this product for that’s compelling enough to make them want to buy it? You need leadership skills. You need to be able to be a pathfinder, someone who’d get ahead of it. That’s what a pathfinder is, Rob. A pathfinder is someone who gets ahead of it and can direct people to where they’ve never been before, and those people know that way you’re directing is a safe place. So, you have to have leadership skills. You have to understand the market. You’ve got to have incredible amounts of empathy and compassion. You’ve got to be able to tolerate risk. You have to be able to know that this is where a lot of people jump off. And then most importantly, you’ve got to have leadership skills. You’ve got to be able to tell it and sell it. And you’ve got to make sure you have a compelling story around what you’re trying to do, so people buy-in. Because no one else is doing it, and you’re trying to get them to do something they haven’t done before. 

Rob Shallenberger: Awesome, I like it. So, let’s shift gears here. I want to shift over to the parenting side. We have about seven or eight minutes left.  

Brandon Steiner: Did I cover the entrepreneurship pretty good though? 

Rob Shallenberger: Oh, man. That was great on the entrepreneurship. And just to illustrate that point to finish my story with Bella. It wasn’t until I asked her what she wanted. And she said, “Well, I want to go get some ice cream.” So, then we jumped on the four-wheeler and we went together to get some ice cream. But to your point, I was trying to sell her on the four-wheeler ride. That’s not what she wanted. She wanted the ice cream. And once we started focusing on what she wanted, the four-wheeler was a no-brainer. And the same exact thing is what you’re saying applies to business. So, I love the thought there. Let’s shift to parenting. We have seven minutes left. Share some thoughts on parenting. Like you said, it’s probably one of the most exciting, rewarding, challenging roles. You can fire an employee, you can’t fire a son or daughter. It encompasses so much emotion. Talk about parenting. 

Brandon Steiner: Come back to Bella for a minute here. Maybe Bella really didn’t want the ice cream or to go, maybe what she wanted to do is get to a safe place to have a discussion with you and talk about something. 

Rob Shallenberger: In this case, I can tell you she wanted the ice cream. 

Brandon Steiner: It’s possible but the ice cream is what sometimes leads to the real conversation in finding out what’s really going on. And maybe she just needed to be in a safe place to be able to express that. Well, I’m just saying that’s a possibility. I’m not saying that was the same. And I think finding out what your kids are thinking about, and not being too biased about it is critical. But when I think about parenting, in my Living on Purpose book, I think I nailed that because I took a whole bunch of great business leaders’ advice on parenting. I didn’t come up with this myself. I’m not a parenting guru by any stretch. But what I would tell you, sometimes you’ve got to love your kids a little less. And sometimes you’ve got to make sure it’s okay to let your kids scrape their knees. And sometimes it’s really important to let your kids have to figure it out on their own. And the problem is sometimes helping your kids a little less, or sometimes the best help you can give your kids is not helping them at all. And most of the parents that I know, which is really hard, it’s hard to do that; “No, I’m not helping you.” But this is the same thing with your employees. They come in your office, they know you can give them all the answers. And you keep giving it to them and then they don’t start thinking on their own. Are you really helping them?  

Brandon Steiner: So, my kid comes in one morning, he says, “Dad, wake up.” I said, “What’s going on? What’s wrong?” “Mom had to leave early. Can you give me a ride to school?” I said, “Crosby, are you crazy? Are you out of your mind waking me up? Do I look like an Uber driver? Am I a cab driver, a limousine driver? You got your mother wrapped around your finger to take you to school every day. But are you nuts? You’ve got all these kids you’ve got playdates with, call their parents up, get that bicycle out of the garage, walk. God gave you two feet, it’s only a couple of miles to school. Get on the school bus. I give you 15 solutions, you’re waking me up? And worse come to worse, you didn’t even come up with a compelling offer like, ‘Dad, maybe I can help you out in the office after school if you gave me a ride, which would be very helpful to me. Maybe I’d do something back by coming and help you out in the warehouse today.’” He says, “Dad, I’m nine.” I said, “That’s right. My mother never took me to school ever. Ever.” I said, “And the reality is that I’m not always going to be here for you to wake up to figure out how to get to school, or whatever problem you have.” Life isn’t just about going to school, although it’s important, but life is also about figuring it out.  

Brandon Steiner: So, at the end of the day, it’s a valuable lesson. And listen, I love taking my kid to school, I don’t want to underplay it or overplay it. But I think the moral is that when your kids keep coming to you with situations, you don’t always have to give them all the answers. I think it’s really important. And I think that also everything’s negotiable. I think there’s such thing as ethical bribes. And I’ll tell you another quick story about parenting is, I go to bed one night and my wife says, “Ah, God, ugh, ugh, ugh.” I said, “Honey, what’s wrong?” “You know how hard it is to get your daughter to wake up in the morning?” I said, “How hard could it be? She’s 11 years old. How tough could it be?” She said, “Well, why don’t you do it?” So I go into Nicole’s room, and I said, “Nicole, listen. Tomorrow morning, I’m going to wake you up at 10 to eight. I’m going to give you another wake-up call at five to eight. If you’re dressed and ready at five after eight, downstairs, having brushed your teeth, eating breakfast by 15 after eight – I’m going to give you $5. You take that $5, you spend it on anything you want. Yours to spend. No problem. Deal?” “Deal.”  

Brandon Steiner: I wake up the next morning, I go see her, she’s already up. And as a matter of fact, brushing her teeth. I go back five minutes later because I did promise her the second call, she’s ready downstairs to eat breakfast, dressed, everything ready to go by 10 after eight instead of 15 after eight. I go downstairs and say, “Nicole, I just gotta tell you I’m really proud of you. Thank you. I didn’t think it was gonna be this easy.” She says, “Dad, it’s the easiest five bucks I ever made. And I want my money now.” I said, “Nicole, it’s the easiest five bucks I ever made. I bet your mom 10 that I’ll have you down here ready to go, it wouldn’t be a problem.” And the moral of that story, I hope it grips you, is that everything’s a little bit negotiable. Can you figure out what’s important? Can you figure out who’s important? Can you have fun with it? Because even our 11-year-old, you’d be surprised when you start having fun with some of the more important things you want your kids to do, you’d be surprised that they can achieve and grow when you actually put it on them a little bit as opposed to just assuming that they can’t do anything, assuming that they don’t have the answers, and assuming you have to protect them on everything. 

Rob Shallenberger: It’s an interesting thing that you brought up, Brandon, and that is, anybody who’s a parent out there, I think, has experienced this to a degree. And I can relate, I have four kids, my oldest is 19 down to 11. It’s almost like we want to protect them from adversity. And yet if we look into our own lives, it’s many times, like you said, the back up against the wall, the way you said earlier. It’s that adversity that has made us stronger. And yet we want to shield them from anything challenging and hard. And in the end, I wonder how much more that is crippling than it is enabling? 

Brandon Steiner: Well, you’re certainly not helping them grow, and it’s not putting them in a good position when they grow up to be able to deal with adversity, because life is hard, Rob, and you’re gonna deal with a lot of trials and tribulations. And I think if we can all agree that life is difficult and life is gonna throw us a lot of curveballs, your job as a leader, as a parent, is to prepare your kids, prepare your employees for the potential difficulties that they will face down the road. So when they run into those difficulties, they’re prepared to deal with them and weather the storm. You’re not helping them by helping them do this and helping them do that. Because then when they get into the storm, they don’t even know where to get an umbrella and a raincoat because you’ve done it for them every time. 

Rob Shallenberger: I was just at lunch with someone talking about this very point, Brandon, that is, so much of our society these days, especially within our youth, doesn’t have this resiliency. And the first time they’re facing adversity or challenges is 21, 22, 23. And they’re not mentally, emotionally equipped to handle challenges. So, when you said, love someone a little less, as hard as that is as a parent, sometimes letting them figure things out on their own, “Hey, do you have a problem with a teacher? Go figure it out. You have a problem with your coach, work it out.”  

Brandon Steiner: My kid was in an argument. He was a straight-A student, my son, and he got his first B+. And he had an argument because he came home and we said, “Wow! A B+ plus. Is everything okay? Oh my God.” My wife was much more on the academics than I was, but he said, “Well, these two questions, I disagree with how he graded me on these questions.” Now, normally, most parents would go up and talk to the teacher, argue like, “Hey, you know where the teacher is? You want to argue that point, go on.” My kid argued those points, he gave it on one of them and didn’t give it on the other, well, he was steamed. But hey, life isn’t always fair. And that’s what I said to him, he goes, “It’s not right. He gave it on one of them, he should have given on both of them. That would have been straight A.” I’m like, “Hey, life’s not always fair. When you’re going for your interviews for college, you tell them why you’re not a straight-A because life wasn’t fair with this one teacher in this one particular test. But now you earned a more valuable lesson than getting the straight-A, you got the A-minus. But hey, life wasn’t fair, but that’s because sometimes those are the cards you’re gonna be dealt with.”  

Brandon Steiner: And I think it’s really important to have these kinds of conversations with your kids. Well, there’s a lot more into Living on Purpose, though. There’s a lot more good stuff in the book. But I appreciate you having me on. Hopefully, this was helpful. Lead with compassion and empathy. These times are really difficult. It’s hard to really even understand some of the things that are going on with people’s heads because their whole world has been turned upside down in so many ways. Hopefully, it comes out for the better because every time we’ve been pushed against the wall, we’ve come back stronger, we’ve come back better. There’s no point to think that would happen differently this time. 

Rob Shallenberger: That’s the hope, isn’t it? Well, Brandon, where can people find you? You mentioned the website. And just in case people don’t remember this or didn’t hear it in passing, the new book is Living on Purpose by Brandon Steiner, CollectibleXchange.com, AthleteDirect.com. Any other ways that people can find you?  

Brandon Steiner: I’m a big LinkedIn guy so you can always message me. I’m over the limit but you can always message me and follow me. I put a lot of content on my Facebook, on my fan page. If you like this kind of content that I’m coming up with these videos and these kinds of things, this is what I use for my coaching – I’m more than glad for you to come in and jump and share it. All my content is free. I’m not coaching and doing all these things. When I speak it’s all for charity, and I’m able to raise hundreds of thousands of dollars for my charity, I’m very grateful to be able to do that sort of thing. So, LinkedIn is great. A lot of people message me on LinkedIn, it’s a little easier for them. And hopefully, if you’ve got stuff you want to sell, collectibles you want evaluated or authenticated, I can help you. Go to CollectibleXchange and message me there, and I’m more than glad to help you and resolve. Maybe for some of you guys, your wife is on you because you collected a little too much like my wife was on me, which is how I came up with this idea. So, hopefully, I hear from you soon. 

Rob Shallenberger: Awesome. And it’s Brandon Steiner. Find him on LinkedIn. Living on Purpose is his book. And CollectibleXchange.com, a good place to start on the website. So, Brandon, thank you so much for being here. All of our listeners, thank you for tuning in again. We appreciate what you do, and you sharing this with others. These are valuable insights. They’re only valuable once we hear them and apply them. And so, we appreciate you, number one, listening, and number two, sharing this. So, I hope you have a wonderful rest of your day and a great week.