Look For The Lesson, with Erik Weir – Episode 408 of The Action Catalyst Podcast

Erik Weir is a jack of many trades; principal of WCM Global Wealth LLC, author, movie producer, investor and real estate developer. Erik explains how he considers himself a “farmer of life experience”, why fear and gratitude cannot coexist, the 5 F’s that drive your life, the “rule of 72”, shares his experience with Chuck Norris and learning a hard karate lesson, and talks about why change is an inside job, and how a big shot is just a little shot that keeps shooting.

About Erik:

Erik Weir is the founder of WCM Global Wealth LLC, a financial wealth advisory firm that serves clients ranging from the biggest multi-Platinum & Grammy-winning recording artists, celebrities, sports icons and international clothing designers, to families listed on the Forbes billionaires list and other notable business owners.

As an investor, Weir has partnered in the development of five Topgolf locations in the US and 20 upcoming locations across Europe. Weir is also previous owner of WTA Media, a leader in film marketing, financing, and literary representation and has served as executive producer for films including Unbroken: Path to Redemption and Run the Race (produced by Tim Tebow).

An expert on entrepreneurism, goal setting, real estate investment, money management, marketing and promotion, Weir speaks to major corporations across the country each year. He is a life-long student who has earned degrees and certificates from Georgia State University and Harvard Extension School. He is a father of 5 sons and splits his time between Charleston and Greenville, South Carolina.

Learn more at ErikWeir.com.

The Action Catalyst is presented by the Southwestern Family of Companies. With each episode, the podcast features some of the nation’s top thought leaders and experts, sharing meaningful tips and advice. Learn more at TheActionCatalyst.com, subscribe below or wherever you listen to podcasts, and be sure to leave a rating and review!

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(Transcribed using A.I. / May include errors):

Intro: On today’s episode, host Dan Moore is joined by Eric Weir, Jack of many trades from speaker, author, and principal of Wcm Global Wealth LLC to movie producer, investor, and real estate developer. Eric is an expert on entrepreneurism, goal setting, marketing and promotion, and speaks to major corporations across the country each year. His book, who’s Eating Your Pie, is Available. We hope you enjoy.

Dan Moore: This is Dan Moore. Welcome to the Action Catalyst, where I’m very excited that we have our special guest today, Eric Weir. Among other things, he’s a specialist in overcoming adversity, and today he’s got a power outage where he is, which he’s already overcome that adversity to join us exactly on time.

So, Eric, great job. Welcome. It’s great to be here and thank you. We’re delighted. You know, as I was reviewing your background, it seems like you’re at least four or five people rolled into one human body.

Erik Weir: It’s been a lot to live.

Dan Moore: We’ve interviewed investment advisors, we’ve interviewed people in motion pictures. We’ve interviewed people that are entrepreneurs. We’ve interviewed speakers. Rarely it’s somebody that’s got all of it in one bucket. But one thing that’s always interesting when you look at somebody that has achieved the, the levels of success and service that you have is a pathway that it took ’em to get there.

So I wonder if you wouldn’t mind kind of going back into time machine for a second and, and recount some of the most important pivots in your life that you’re heading in a certain direction, something happened to move in another one, one, another one, and eventually here you are.

Erik Weir: I tell you what I look back at, somebody said, are you flexible? I said, I think I’m contort.

Dan Moore: I like it.

Erik Weir: So, uh, I guess the first major pivot happened at a very young age. I was five and my brother and mother and I were at a car driving through intersection. We got hit and we spun outta control and came to a stop. And for some reason, uh, I was convinced that the car would blow up and we needed to get out of it.

And that both the police and my mother sitting staying in the car. We were there for, I mean, it could have been an hour. It was a long time. And when I got home, my, uh, winter was speaking normally when I was asking my parents to pass the potatoes, I’m like, please pass the potatoes. I had a, a stutter that was proven to be debilitative and they weren’t sure if it would just last a few days or if it would last permanently, and it ended up being the latters.

We went to speech therapy in the, uh, 1972 in Georgia. They weren’t very PC or super encouraging. They kinda laid. Straight and, and uh, and and raw basically said, life’s gonna be hard for you. You’re either gonna be a very big success cuz you’re gonna have a fight for everything or you’ll be a very big failure cuz you’ll be a recluse and not want to engage with people and keep to yourself.

They talked to the therapist and said, well, you need to have a, a make eric communicate with people and talk you word to us so there’s some, some benefit for him for doing so. And it came up with a lemonade stand, not like a lot of kids do. So I sent, went up at the end of the, the driveway. They were near a school and the first day I, I was out there trying to sell lemonade.

I made a sign to Lemonade, 50 cents. And when you stutter, Fs are really hard to say. They would always ask, how much is lemonade? And I thought it was smart. So I’d point to the sign where it said 50 cents, and they’d always ask a second time. They never left it at that. They always ask, Then I would go 50 cents.

And from that point forward, I, I realized I never once sold lemonade for 50 cents. He’d have got a dollar or $5. always say like, Hey, keep it up, kid. Keep trying. Won’t encourage me. I’m like, no, this. This stuttering thing is not so good in school getting picked on, but it sure is great for tipping. And, uh, think I made 70 or 80 bucks my first day and I, I, I was, how did you do?

And I was like, I make $80. He’s like, I don’t, I’m not sure. I made $80 today. 1972.

Dan Moore: How old were you when you went to see this, uh, this therapist that told you it was either gonna be feast or famine through your life?

Erik Weir: I was five. I was five. Then I gave you word drills and how to say Fs e I didn’t make any progress for, for years.

It was horrible, you know, into my late thirties. I still stuttered, tear, I, so it really wasn’t until I became grateful I was under the pivot to be grateful for your, uh, challenges in life and be grateful for your obstacle. I’m afraid to thank God for making me who I am the way I am. The sitter didn’t stop that day, but over two or three years it, it went away.

Dan Moore: I’ll tell you, unpacking some of what you just said, for a five year old to get that kind of news, that direct straight talking as you say today, probably wouldn’t happen quite in that way. It’d be filtered through all kinds of different resources and people and videos and everything else, but he just told it to you straight in words you could understand, and somehow you took that to heart and decided to make it something you could really grow from and learn.

Erik Weir: It was a tough meeting. It was probably one of the best meetings, just, just to know what’s gonna be hard. And that’s just my life. You can whine about it. It’s not gonna change anything. You just need to live with it. And the piece I didn’t get was gratitude, being grateful for it. And then I got that, you know, 35 years later and that made all the difference in the world.

So the first half really helped pushing through obstacles and the second half really helped on the SEP and some gratitude.

Dan Moore: Wow. I think that’s amazing. Now, one thing I’m always curious about with people that are highly successful, especially in multiple areas, what do you do to keep yourself from getting complacent and kind of flattening out and just riding the wave?

Erik Weir: Yeah. I guess for me, I, I, I view myself as a lifetime learner and I’m just naturally curious and, you know, opportunities present themselves from, from time to time. So I think that, you know, it’s, it’s really your mindset. It’s not so much necessarily what you do. I don’t have, I mean, I’ve done movies, we’ve done real estate, we’ve done lots of different things.

And the principles are really all the same. The principles of the harvest, you, you sew in your reap, you sew in your reap. And people say, how did you get successful? And it’s really, you’re successful before you start to have your reward. You know, you plant the seed, you’re a successful farmer. He plants the seeds first, right?

And then waters him and does all that. And then over time he has a harvest. And people really see the harvest, but they don’t really see the. And the, the thing to do is remember that you’re, you’re in the firming business and things take time or you’re gonna have setbacks, uh, or you’re gonna have recalculations and miscalculations and expect those and then learn from ’em, uh, and be, you know, very resolute on where you want to end up, but be more flexible on the steps you take to get there.

Dan Moore: You know, you’ve mentioned a couple of things that are very scriptural, so obviously your faith is extremely important to you. What would you say is, is sort of your ongoing mission in life? If you could capsule that?

Erik Weir: It, it’s really changed over time. When I was younger, I wanted to prove that I could do things right, that I could stutter and accomplish things.

I’ve gotten older, I became grateful for that and, and, and actually humbled. And today it’s, it’s pivoted more toward. Recognizing the laws of the harvest and recognizing that people are victim to really limiting thoughts or believing lies about themselves that they can’t do, or you can’t overcome or you can’t make change, or you can’t quit that addiction or you can’t improve your relationship, or you can’t get that job or go back to school at 60 years old.

And so whatever somebody’s objectives happen to be, uh, our biggest limiting, limiting factors are oftentimes ourselves that’ll be shoes and believe about ourselves. So if I can help someone to begin to. Themselves in a different light. Get clarity on who they want to become and then seek to live their life, to be that person each day.

And when you have setbacks, just start over again the next day to seek to live, to be the person you want to become.

Dan Moore: Tell me a little bit, Eric, about some, some brick walls you encountered. Obviously you hit one at five years old after that horrible accident. But as you’ve developed in, in your business life in motion pictures with top golf, what would you say over the years have been some, some items for a toolkit when somebody’s trucking along and all of a sudden they just hit that unexpected obstacle that they just don’t see around it, under it over anything.

How do you advise that we react and respond when we hit those brick walls?

Erik Weir: Just kind of pause for a second, and I think that’s important and try to resist, uh, anger or at least process it quickly. If you can. Look for the lesson and just look to where you, you want to end up and just rebuild your plan. So there’s a poem if by Kipling.

Mm-hmm. , which talks about hanging on when there’s nothing in you to hang on except the will to hang on and persevere. And I’m paraphrased and, you know, in pushing through when you see everything you work through in life, you know, torn down and you stoop. Worn out tools and rebuild it. But the idea is to, you know, don’t expect things to go easy as they just don’t.

Life is difficult, but that gives you opportunity and there are opportunities even now with people seeing fear in financials or fear in the stock markets or real estate. Fear always creates opportunity, but fear, fear and gratitude cannot coexist. So I try to people get the gratitude as soon as you can.

So no matter how bad life is, Things are, and I’ve been through, you know, quite a few things in life and my book, you know, spells out things that I’ve been through, I’ve seen family go through and a lot of people, it’s not that I’m unique in having difficult times, but it’s that how do you get to be, I’m grateful for my health.

I’m grateful there’s something you can be grateful for today that matter where you are. And, and then build on that, and then use that gratitude to help change your attitude that can allow you to begin the plant. And you ask the question like, one another setback I had, and I was in the Chuck Norris super system in the karate, in the, uh, in the seventies and early eighties where Chuck Norris owned the studios and would come by and get karate test for black belts.

Anyway. And there were three of us testing for black belt and three of us failed and we’re kind of shocked cuz we were three of the better students and didn’t know why we’d failed. And they just said, your, your forms weren’t good enough. So we’re, geez, that seemed odd. We were very good. We’re actually teaching other people.

How is this possible? And they did. They made us wait six more months to test and one of the three black belt candidates quit and outrage and never came back and said, this is unfair. I’m out of here. Two of us stuck around down instead of whining about it, which we did for a day or. Then we came to our senses and we worked with our instructor and started working out, you know, four hours a day instead of two or three.

And six hours on the weekends we improved so much over six months. It was unbelieved. We retook the test and camp two would flying colors and we asked, you know, why did we fail? I said, we didn’t tell you cuz until now, but you had succeeded at all your tests and succeeded at everything in life. So we wanna see how you’d handle failure.

Failed us just to see how we’d handle a failure . That was like, wow, thanks for that. You know, but that was a good lesson because sometimes, you know, things just don’t work out and it’s no fault of your own and, and sometimes you just don’t plan on what happens to you.

Dan Moore: Almost every check of Norris movie had a big surprise in it.

Erik Weir: That’s right.

Dan Moore: I love what you just said. Gratitude and fear cannot coexist. That’s terrific. Now, you mentioned your book, I believe the book is called Who’s Eating Your Pie, essential Financial Advice That Will Transform Your Life. Is that the one you’re referring to? What would be some, uh, quick summary lessons from that particular book? Not necessarily about financial advice, but attitudes toward living more success.

Erik Weir: I think two things really. I look at life as a wheel where your faith really drives all of your decisions, whether it’s a religious faith or faith in materialism or personal health or wellbeing or whatever it happens to be.

It’s your faith or your value system that drives everything out of that. Center comes your, your, your who you choose to associate with your friends comes your, your finances. It impacts your family, it impacts your fitness. So it’s faith, family, fitness, finances, friends. And when I tell people there’s never balance, perfect balance in all the years at the same time, there’s just not.

But it needs to be an awareness that when you’re outta the balance that you need to circle back to when I learned and observed over time is that the areas that you ignore in the end, consume you. So if you ignore. Your family or your fitness for long periods of time. You’ll spend whatever wealth you created trying to restore health and relationship.

And if you ignore your finances to the pursuit of friends and fun things, you’ll spend your whole life trying to restore your finances. You know, you need to kind of be aware that you’re never gonna be perfectly balanced. But also kind of be aware of where you are. And I envision like a spoke where two is terrible and 10 is perfect, uh, and you really ever have a 10 in your life.

And, and, but sometimes you’ll have a two , you know, so how do you, how do you get a wheel that’s more rounded? And, and really the second thing I would recommend people thinking about is most of us really overestimate the amount of change we can make in a short period of time. Um, but the good news is we really under.

The change we can make over a longer period of time. What I mean by that is imagine that I want to join a health club, and I’ve been putting it off for 15 years. I wanted to start a dive program and work out and get healthy, but I’ve never really gotten around to doing it. What I say, just take a 1% change a day.

And so we give an example. So if that’s my goal, then the first day all I do is turn on my computer and I’ve done for the day. The second day I’ll go and I’ll, I’ll type in Google and the search and open my search line, but I’m done. I can’t do too much cuz now I’m starting to go too fast. The next day I will do health club near me.

Stop. Next day I send, and then I, I make a phone call, but I hang up on the health club because I’m moving too fast. The next day I talk to them. The next day I go see them the next day I. And the next day I actually exercise. The next day I’m there, go there. Here I can get, usually get one free dietician visit, then the next day, you know, so you do 1% changes here in 6, 7, 8, 9 days, depend how you paste it out.

You’ve gone from 15 years of never doing that to being a member of a health club, having a trainer and having a dietician. And you did that by very small changes each day. But what’s interest? Just happened. In finance, they call the rule of 72. So any number divided to 72 is how long it takes earning that rate of return to del your money.

And that’s because you’re growing the base each year. So it’s using 10. If I take 10% change a year and 7.2 years, I’d double my productivity. But if I make 1% change a day in 72 days of my productivity in 144 days, I doubled a. And you see what I’m doing, you double the double, double the double, double the double the double.

And pretty soon you’re like, you’re 1400% more effective in a little over a year just by making small changes a day. But we overestimate the amount of change we can make. We try to do ’em very quickly and we can discourage and give up, but just make small changes. We’ll take you there.

Dan Moore: Hmm. I think that makes total sense. So do you observe that a lot of people do a lot of stop and start as they try to get on a path to something rather than just slow, continuous.

Erik Weir: Everybody does. And you know, I know this stuff and I still battle sometimes, you know, trying to do too much too fast. So I’ve have to sit back and realize that it’s progressive change on top of progressive change, top of progressive change that makes massive change.

And it’s like we said, what’s a big shot’s? Just a little shot that keeps shooting. Right. If you recognize these principles that, that it. You know, if you look at the spread of anything, the spread of a virus starts from one person affected another who affects two others, who affects four others, and it’s slow, but you’d get enough, uh, cycles.

You, you know, you would impact the whole world. And it was an epitaph that I was made aware of. And I think I rented somewhere when I was young. I wanted to change the world when I was a little older. I wanted to change my country. Older still, I recognize the difficulty. Someone change my state than my county, than my city.

And then my family, uh, and then myself. As I begin to get much later in life, I realized I should change, try to change myself by changing myself. I change family. I changed in my family. I changed my city than my county, than my state, than my country, than the world. So change starts. Change is an inside job, and impact and legacy is what most of us think about as we go through life at an increasing rate.

And all of us will have a legacy and all of us will leave an impact. The idea is, have we taken time to think about what that should look like?

Dan Moore: Is it ever too late for somebody to make major changes in their life?

Erik Weir: It’s never too late. Look, look at McDonald’s was founded by Ray Crock in his sixties, or, or bought by the, from the Crock Brothers.

Kentucky Fried Chicken, I think Gentle was in his early seventies, Colonel Sanders. Those are outstanding examples, but there have been many people who have made, made changes and made or focused efforts late in life. That’s amazing how, how quickly things can happen, uh, when we have clarity of thought and purpose.

Dan Moore: You know, Eric, everybody starts their day. I’m wondering if you have a normal routine for how you start your day to help get things off to a good track.

Erik Weir: Yeah. I start, I start my day, uh, you know, uh, with, with prayer, uh, reading of scripture. And then I, uh, exercise and I plan, usually plan the night before.

That’s how I start in the morning. I haven’t always done that, but start your day without, uh, influence of news, media, electronics. Um, and I try to end my day the same way absence of news, media and electronics. And, uh, I prefer to have my plan set before I go to sleep because it allows me to be very focused.

However, um, there’s from time to time I’ll plan in the morning if I’m up later than I wanna be, but I don’t wanna start the day without a plan. Even if it takes me longer than I want or I feel like I’m getting behind, it’s never the case because I can prioritize what I hope to get accomplished that day and, and do the essentials.

And you’ll often find if you accomplished the one or two important things, you’ve had a successful. And without a plan, it would sometimes focus on the easy to do things like get the dry cleaning, pick up the groceries, or go by cvs. Really, the most important thing was to call and start this relationship or have this important lunch or make this important call, and if we prioritize the important things, oftentimes some of the less important things can wait a little bit.

Dan Moore: Do you have a a standard first thought in the morning? As soon as you become conscious, you trained yourself to think?

Erik Weir: I like to start today, uh, in gratitude, being grateful. Uh, but I think for, for anybody, just having a point of gratitude and just an awareness that, you know, you could identify a purpose for your life and, uh, and clarity, the amount of joy you could have while you work and do things, uh, really goes up substantially.

And just really believing that, uh, whatever that happens to be. And then really thinking about giving back and trying to think how, as you mature in life, there might be somebody younger who you can mentor or help along the. And, and kind of paying it forward. And all of us have something that someone else can learn from.

I’ve learned from, I’ve learned from so many people. It’s hardly anyone I ever meet. I don’t learn something Trump. So, you know, how can we be observant to learn, be grateful for where we are? Even it’s a bad spot. Well, can we learn from this bad situation? And then if we’re in a great spot, you know, don’t, please don’t take us for granted.

You have it cuz things change. You have high mountaintops and valley for a reason. We see the bolt with some regular. So, so, and maintaining gratitude through the valley can be done, but it, it’s, it’s taking the time to be, uh, to learn from the unpleasant things in life as well as those that are pleasant, either.

Dan Moore: Eric, your attitude of gratitude is, is outstanding and I do appreciate that. Some of our listeners already practice that. They’re in a great place in their life. Things are just rolling on super well. We got some other listeners though, that are faced with some pretty monumental challenges right now. What advice would you give to somebody that is just completely stuck and not sure where to turn?

Erik Weir: I would just say, I’ll just make an example. Somebody who has cancer, some terrible situation, they’re going through divorce and maybe they’re going through, uh, bankruptcy for natural, just to really throw it out there and maybe they’re estranged from their family, all that at the same time that that could happen.

That could be a collar today. It’s just like, be grateful for the lung, the air in your lungs. Be grateful for the potential of reconciliation. I’ll be grateful for the potential of a future smile in a future laugh. I could tell people. Still arise it again, believe your best days are ahead of you and believe that there’s, uh, tears that are shared.

There’s often purpose in them, and oftentimes we don’t know what they are for many years. But oftentimes we’ll look back at the low times like my car wreck that I was so mad at resemble hate for, for 35 years. Actually was something that that spooled me up to give me a lot of strength and perseverance I wouldn’t have had otherwise.

And I’ve seen, you know, growing up I’ve seen my parents’ cars repossessed, washer dryers taken out, repossessed, and be down to nothing than sharing a broad vehicle and just living on the family sofa and yet finding gratitude and hey, we have stuff to eat and food. At that point, you, you can risk it all cause you got nothing to lose.

Right. Just gratitude by saying, Hey, we’re on the bottom, so now I can get butter from here. So there’s always something to be grateful for. Hey, dang it much worse. You know? Yeah. Don’t take yourself too seriously. Uh, at the end of the day, that’s so hard to think about and, and, but it’s like life is short and try to find gratitude and purpose in life, even in the pain.

And it’s so much easier said than done, and I’m aware of that, but just like, but seeking to say, Hey, what can I, what can I be grateful for today? I’m inside or I have a meal, or I’m able to breathe, or I, I met a new friend or there, there’s always something to be grateful for. And build on that and then build on, you know, not limiting what can I be accomplished in your life over a period of time with, with concert.

Dan Moore: Isn’t that fantastic? Well, I appreciate that so much, Eric. Those words of encouragement. Luckily you said the reminder, the sun has gonna rise again tomorrow, no matter how bad things look. We can’t stop the sun from rising and it’s new opportunity a new day if we could be grateful for that. But one of the most encouraging things I heard you say is that everybody goes through pain, total misunderstanding, to look at people that are doing really well and say, well, they never had to deal with what I had to deal with. It’s true. They had to deal with something else. Might have been.

Erik Weir: I had an Aunt Ruby that told me that as a young kid, she goes, honey, if you knew their problems, you’d gladly keep your around.

Dan Moore: What one of my earliest profound mentors used to say, out of mind hearing the troubles you’ve seen. Because after I hear the troubles that you’ve seen, I’m gonna tell you the troubles I’ve seen and you’re gonna be sorry you opened your big fat mouth.

Erik Weir: That’s it, isn’t it?

Dan Moore: Eric time with you goes really, really fast, my friend. This has been wonderful. Good for my heart, good for my soul. Good for my brain. Thank you so much for sharing with our guests today and for being here on the Action Catalyst.

Erik Weir: Absolutely. Well, thank you for your time. I, I really enjoyed it.