Billion Dollar Productivity Secrets

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Written by Nat Schooler

September 29, 2025

Last updated on November 3, 2025

Introduction

In this compelling discussion, I sit down with business leader Steven J. Manning to share profound insights into achieving success, productivity, and personal growth.

His narrative goes beyond typical motivational advice, offering a raw, practical perspective on what it truly takes to excel in business and life. If you take the time to listen to this episode, you will increase your productivity dramatically—providing you take on board his sage advice!


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Key Insights from this Episode and the full shownotes can be found below.

In this interview, Steven J. Manning breaks down the non-negotiable mindset of a billion-dollar entrepreneur.

1. Outwork and Outthink Everyone

Success isn’t about waiting for a “good fortune” cookie to come true. It’s about creating a “wicked witch’s brew” of four key ingredients:

  1. Ability: The baseline skills you possess.
  2. Aggression: An aggressive, relentless drive to succeed.
  3. Work Ethic: A willingness to work harder and longer than anyone else.
  4. Risk: The willingness to take the calculated risk that others won’t.

Steven’s core philosophy is simple: “I just tried to outwork everyone else, and I tried very hard to outthink everyone else.”

2. Today is the Greatest Era of Opportunity in History

Steven argues there has never been a better time to achieve success, for two main reasons:

  1. Accessibility: You have unprecedented access to all of the world’s knowledge, data, and resources (like AI) from your phone.
  2. Complacency: Most people are “too busy making a living to make any money.” A “generation of victocrats” (people who believe they are owed) has created a landscape where most are simply unwilling to work hard enough to achieve greatness. This gives you an enormous advantage.

3. “Nine-to-Five is Your First Job”

For those serious about success, your 9-to-5 is just what pays the bills. The real opportunity lies in what you do with the other 14 hours in a day. You can have a family, go to the gym, and still work 80 hours a week, because “that’s what it takes.”

4. The Myth of “Work/Life Balance”

Steven tells a story about firing a senior VP who, on a Friday, celebrated that he “didn’t have to come back to this place for a couple of days.” Steven fired him, calling it a “career gift” to free him to find a job he didn’t loathe. The lesson: Don’t complain about “work/life balance” when you’re 25. You should work to a point where you can “afford a really cool life balance.”


Discussion Timestamps

  • (01:05) – The Sam Zell story: “Why am I telling smart people how to compete with me?”
  • (04:22) – Why today is the greatest opportunity in history to achieve success.
  • (06:48) – The 4 ingredients for a “wicked witch’s brew” of success.
  • (07:27) – “Nine-to-five is your first job. What do you do with the other 14 hours?”
  • (08:06) – The 2 reasons for this opportunity: 1) Access to data, 2) A “generation of victocrats.”
  • (12:46) – The key to success: “I just tried to outwork everyone else.”
  • (13:40) – The myth of “work/life balance” for a 25-year-old.
  • (17:03) – The “Pink Ladies Trucking” story: What it really takes to get the job done.
  • (19:18) – The final secret: “Outwork the next guy and do your damnedest to outthink them.”
  • (21:12) – The real reason people are distracted and unproductive.
  • (22:36) – Why people really hate Mondays (and the story of firing the guy who did).
  • (29:52) – Using AI (like Gemini or Grok) to build a business plan in one hour.

Full Episode Transcript

(Transcript)

Nat Schooler: …productivity secrets from building a Billion-dollar business. I am here with Steven J. Manning, and we are digging into some really cool stories from when Steven became super productive. And I’m, I’m, uh, I’m quite interested in that, Steve, because, you know, we’ve been digging into AI and how that’s made us all way more productive. I know you were involved with AI from the early days, and it, and it clearly made you more productive, but it’s more than that, right? It’s not just AI that made you productive. Am I right in saying that?

Steven J. Manning: Oh, of course. Uh, thank you. Good morning, good day, good afternoon, good evening to all of you listening. It’s morning for me. It’s nighttime for Nathaniel, and some of my friends around the world are just about to have lunch. Uh, so, uh, eh, big topic, of course, uh, it’s there’s some overall concepts and there are some individual things that suit some people whereas they may not suit others. And in terms of, well, here is how, what you do exactly and this is how you build a billion-dollar business or this is how you become world leader, all that, I’m gonna take three minutes to tell you a very quick story.

Steven J. Manning: Uh, some of you may have heard the name Sam Zell. Uh, Sam passed away recently. Uh, was a real estate billionaire based in Chicago. Uh, just brilliant man. Uh, he actually created REITS, Real Estate Reinvestment Trust, among other things. Very philanthropic, and an enormously charismatic man. He’s a great guy. Uh, now, some of you have heard of him. I would think that there are a couple people listening to us, watching us, that know Sam, uh, certainly very much of him, if not personally. Uh, I know a couple of people listening to us that might have pat- crossed paths with Sam. Uh, uh, Mr. Zell, uh, which passed away in, uh, just about two years ago. Was just a really charismatic, brilliant guy. And again, he invented something called REITS, and he made billions at it, a billion or two, and then a lot of other smart people made billions too. So, uh, Sam, uh, uh, and, and I, I, I relay this because I learned this. Uh, Sam was on his way to do a, uh, luncheon thing at the Chica- at the Chicago business group. Very, very elite business people, the financial elites. Je- just the most elite luncheon crowd you’re going to get in, in the Midwest, even in New York. And they invited him to speak about REITS, and on his way in a car he was saying to this assistant, I have this on total authority, said, “Now why exactly am I doing this? I created this. I do this for a living. I made million, billion or two, why am I telling all these smart people how to compete with me?”

Steven J. Manning: So when he got out, he went ahead and told what I call the story of the chicken. Which is not something I can say in a public forum like this, because I repeated that same story three months later when those misguided people asked me to talk. And my topic was, what is marketing going to look like in the next 20 years and how are you going to exploit those opportunities? Absolutely, why don’t I tell 150 really smart people how to compete with me in the future? Uh, so I again repeat the story of the chicken, which anybody wants to hear it, call, call me and I will share. Uh, so, you know, we need to talk concept, because any one individual person’s, uh, path may not translate, but conceptually they do. So the question is, path to success. Uh, uh, what is it you do and all of that? Now, I’m gonna digress again, because I am the king of digression, you tell me. Uh, there has never been an opportunity to chase success as good as it is today. Now, people argue that endlessly because how can you say that? AI, everybody can do anything they want to do, all of that. You know, uh, money, availability, all of that stuff. So I say, look, the way it works is this. Uh, when you are up in the morning, you’re shaving, you’re putting makeup on, whatever you’re doing early morning and you have the immense eureka moment. Wow, you just figured out how to make a much better chocolate chip ice cream or glue or an AI application or something attendant to splitting the atom. You can be assured, given the amazing availability of data analytics and all that to every one of us, the kid down the street, you and me, there are a couple thousand people thinking the same exact thing. They’re having the same eureka moment. This is how I make my billion. Two things. I really need… This is… I just had a truly independent thought. Well, a couple thousand other people are having the same thought. And then when you get done doing that, you go to work at a table where that’s whatever you’re gonna do and you’re gonna find a stack of stuff there. I’m using stuff rather than the pejorative version of that. The same stuff that was there when you left it yesterday, and you need to address it and you’re gonna deal with it, and that’s what you’re going to do.And then, six months later, you read the- you read somewhere, you hear somewhere, some yay-ho Wichita Falls, Kansas, or in Bristol, or in, uh, Cairo, actually did that. The tremendous success. And so then you say, “Why didn’t I do it?” And you feel, uh, uh, failure. No. No, it’s not failure. Uh, for every one of us, there’s a time for everything. There’s a moment in time that makes sense to do that or not do that. Most of us go back to the same stuff we had ’cause it’s, it’s imminent, it’s emergent, we must deal with it. That dude had the same exact stack, might have had the same money you do, but said, “Hey, I’m gonna do this.” And then he does. So it’s creating a mindset that combines ability, combines just the aggressive nature to succeed, and three, the willingness to work that hard, and for to take that risk. M- very few people have all those four. They have ’em, in pieces, bits and pieces different times, but not together. There’s an amazing thing where you, you just know that’s, that, that is the billion-dollar thing. You go to work, you go to the office, whatever you gonna do. If you happen to be working a job that, “Well, I can’t quit my job.” Okay, but you’re only working, job plus, plus going back and forth is 10 hours. In my little world, that’s 14 more hours I can do something. Oh, carve out three or four to sleep, carve out a couple of meals, couple showers, that’s still a lot of hours. If you believe, take, just take a shot and do it. Or find somebody you can do it with you believe is quality doing it. So, but today, the opportunity lays in a couple places. It’s much more complicated than that, but I’d like to limit it to two. One, there has never in time been that much accessibility to knowledge, data, and resources that is today. Uh, God and a Steve Jobs gave us one of these. And then, uh, successor or son of Steve Jobs gave us the computer, the, the laptops and all of that. And then you have the brilliance of the Bezos folks and the brilliance of everyone else, you know, uh, Sergey Brin and so on, who can aggregate the, the, the amount of data that’s being … that’s, that’s available to you and me, available to anyone.

Steven J. Manning: Let us quote ourselves, just to put it in perspective. Today is Monday, the 8th of September. Yesterday, the 7th of September, there was no more data and knowledge added to the body of knowledge and data in the world, in one day, than the aggregate history of mankind. That’s what AI does. That’s what Grok and, and, and ChatGPT and all that. That’s what they do. And if you don’t believe me, give it a shot. Come up with a good question, ask one of these great bots to, uh, ge- get it to get the levels of detail. Say, “Thank you,” because the machine regards you a friendly guy. That machine will give you more time because you’re friendly. Go back tomorrow, ask the same question и see the growth of the, of the information you get. So one, there’s more information available to you than ever before. More tools available to it- it- to you than anything before. “Tell me how to split an atom.” You got 28 pages. Okay. And two, and this is controversial, but we here, certainly in United States and, uh, Europe precedes us by, uh, uh, a generation. We have created a whole generation of what are called victocrats. Uh, these are people who are owed rather than generating their own action. Okay. “I’m owed. How come Scuola has more than I do? I am owed, and I want it,” thereby creating social upheaval, unhappiness, and a continually degrading willingness to work. Uh, I like to call this we’ve gotten really fat. Most people don’t want to work that hard. When I started working in my teens in the United States of America, we were recent immigrants here, the thing that blew my mind was that everybody wanted to work Saturdays and Sundays. Saturday, time and a half, Sunday double time. I want another shift on Sunday again. That’s how I buy my new TV and my new camper. When I became a boss years later, I under- I began to understand the nature of that, and I began to understand the nature of incentive. We cultivate incentive as a way of life. When I created our business in Europe, in Central Europe, in many countries, the former Eastern Bloc countries, nobody understood the whole notion of incentive because everybody’s used to working for subsistence. You worked the minimum, you didn’t go hungry, you got medical care, and that was that. You advanced nothing. When you have people like me walk in, they look at us as crazy American, gonna pay us twice as much if we do twice as much. That doesn’t work. In my little company where I started with, started an industry, it took me one year until my senior people came to me and said, “You actually meant the thing about paying us more if we got more done.” Have you looked at your bank account? It grows every week you meet your goals. Now, so the reason today is more opportunity to do well is, in my opinion, two, the available resources, knowledge, and all that, not just availability, ease of that and the breadth of that. And then most people are not willing to work hard enough to achieve what I like to call greatness.You know, I happened to walk into a hamburger joint last night. And there was a nice couple there, two kids, 17 and 16. And Dad was lecturing the 17-year-old. I was happen to be sitting there on, on life and doing this or doing that. And the guy looked at him and says, “What do you think?” And I said, “Well, at his age, I was penniless in LA. Not quite homeless, but penniless. And I hustled for lunch money.” “How’d you get out of it?” I said, “It’s very simple. Uh, I tried to outwork everyone else, and I tried very hard to outthink everyone else. And I can’t think of a better way to do it.” And then I added my mantra about passion, you know, uh, life without passion is not a life worth living. Uh, and this is not dress rehearsal. You want to become successful, that’s not something you’ll do some day. “Some day, somehow, some time, I want to do this, I should do this. I want to do that, but you know, well, I…” All of that, Steve Manning says, “Is Swiss cheese without the cheese.” So you go back to success, you have those four ingredients I gave you, mix those up, that’s a really wicked witch’s brew towards success, because you are one of very, very, very few who will actually do that. Most people just don’t have that, uh, a- a- and they’re not that forward-looking. Uh, most people are too busy making a living to make any money. Okay, so what are you gonna do, give up your job and not feed your kids? I don’t know how to tell you… Oh, I must throw this in, then I’ll stop, stop for now.

Steven J. Manning: Well, you know, we hear this, you and me, all day long, and we get asked this question all day long, and you have massive companies, you know, Fortune 20, who are really immersed in creating the proper work/life balance for their people. I don’t want to hear one more 24-year-old, 25-year-old, 28-year-old, telling me about work/life balance. Okay. I talk about not doing, I don’t want to lose some excess, but how about you develop a real work/life balance when you can afford a really cool life balance? Until that, you know, like I s- like I told this family last night in what ended up a four-minute chat, uh, “How did you get out of that?” I said, “I just tried to outwork everyone else. I tried to outthink ’em, which is a hard thing to do.” Bottom line is, tell me about uh, nine-to-five. Nine-to-five is your first job. You just gotta pay the bills. And then what do you do after that? You know what? Yeah, you can, you can have a successful marriage, you can raise your kids, you can go on a ski trip, you can play ball, you can work out, and still work 80 freaking hours a day, because that’s what it takes. You know? Not, not often does… You know, the wonderful thing on Chinese fortune cookies, uh, open it up. I love fortune, fortune cookies. The little things in there. Confucius say… Confucius never said that. Uh, those things, as I told you, those beautiful sayings are made up by the sales guys who sell paper for the printing company that prints ’em. They make that up. It’s fun. The one that I love the most is, “Good fortune is right around the corner.” I turn it over ’cause I’m looking for which corner? Tell me wh- wh-… Don’t look a gor-… Never look, uh, never look a gift horse in the mouth. Steve Manning says, “Always look a gift horse in the mouth.” Where’d that come from? What is it? Okay. Okay, horse, let’s do that. Always look a gift horse in the mouth, because you just never know. Now, if you’re waiting for divine intervention, if you’re waiting for the stroke of good luck, keep buying lottery tickets. In business, when you see an opportunity, there are people who will tell you that they see it, and they see it with clarity, and willing to do the work to find out if they, that works or doesn’t work. Uh, I, I don’t want to get real personal, but when the entire company was having the annual huge Christmas party, which was my boss, my chairman’s number one day of the year, he got to get up and hold a speech for 5,000 people, and all this food and all the wonderful clothing, so on, and it’s command performance, everyone has to be there. You have to show up, show your face and all that. Well, hell, most of those people knew my face ’cause we’d walk through. I walked through those facilities two, three times a day for months on end. It’s six in the morning, at 3:00 in the afternoon, at two in the morning, because the workforce likes to see the boss who wants to work as hard as they, they do. And my boss and I had very, very, very nasty words, because I didn’t show up. “How could you do that to me?” The man said. You know, and I know what he’s thinking. Uh, uh, you drive, you drive one of those, “H- how could you do that to me?” The answer is, there was a massive snow storm in Chicago, and I had $3.5 million worth of printed paper sitting somewhere sh- other hair, snowed in, in trucks. We needed them out in LA. Where was I? I was in Chicago bribing truckers to pull my stuff out of there and take it to Wisconsin.Why? ‘Cause a friend of mine, you know, is a senior guy at FedEx, told me there was a plane, he could put it on. That’s what I was doing. I wasn’t eating and drinking and dancing and making merry and all that, but I was on an airplane for what ended up being 10 hours, to be able to just get from LA to Chicago. That is not, I’m not being laudatory, but I’m saying is that that’s what it takes. And by the way-That paper somehow, and I hope you read my book, my latest book, there’s a story there called Pink Ladies Trucking. I found the two ladies who had what it took to drive that truck from Chicago O’Hare, the 54-foot thing, from Chicago to Milwaukee in the worst snowstorm of the year, when the airport was closed for two days, and truck it there, and then my friend, Tom Komade, put it on a 727, it was- happened to be empty out of the west. Uh, I will someday share with you what it costs to charter a 727 freighter to take this stuff from Milwaukee to LA. Unless you’re a really big successful company, that just ain’t gonna happen. And I will tell you something, you can read, read this story in my book, about the stacks of $100 bills you pass out to the two nice ladies before they don’t think their insurance is a big deal in the snowstorm. Yeah. But the point being is are you willing to outwork the next guy? You want a key, key to success? Outwork the next guy and do your damnedest outthinking. Yeah. That’s why you pay us, by the way. The reason, the reason you pay us is, as we talk about this endlessly, you go into a company, and we do work humbly with some really big businesses. Think we have, have a Fortune 500 client, there’s Fortune 20, Fortune 100 and so on. And it’s astounding with the power, power, power they have to sit in a room and say, “I need to outthink these people.” And yes, you have the opportunity, because most people are linear. Uh, this is cyc- silo I live in. No, connect the dots. Uh, I’m an ordinary guy, but I look at dots, I look at connecting, and then I say, “You know what? I can try to outthink these people. I can try. Damned if I won’t.” And by the way, when you try to do that, amazing how you create a constituency of people who want to follow, people who want to participate. And of course, I mean, you’re in a consulting world, you get to a point where feed that and it becomes their idea, then it’s doable. Anyway, I think I’ve answered your question more than at length.

Nat Schooler: It’s interesting, that theme of, the theme of outworking people. It’s, it’s that relentless focus to do what is absolutely necessary to, to get the job done, right? Like, that’s, that’s basically what it is. And productivity is, is a key element for that, right? But if you’re, but if you’re not focused on achieving what you have to achieve, that productivity is just not gonna happen, because you’re basically distracted. ‘Cause most people are distracted. They are permanently distracted. There, there are these devices that we carry around with us that continually distract us. There are, uh, what do you call it, Slack messages, there are phone calls, uh, WhatsApp messages, all these, all these social media networks that distract people are the enemy of productivity, right? And until we learn how to actually deal with those and do the focused work that needs to get done, we’re, we’re never actually gonna become as successful as we could have been if, uh, you know, we don’t do those things, right? So yeah, it’s, um, I, I agree with you also. It’s a very exciting time right now. The opportunities to achieve, uh, greatness in terms of our careers w- rest with us, right? And e- either, either we take that challenge or we, we basically just trust that the universe or God or whatever is gonna provide for us. And you, that only takes you so far. If you’re not willing to actually put the effort in, the road is no surprise to you, because it’s, it’s just not exciting. It just, it doesn’t, it doesn’t do anything for you, basically. And I, I get kind of, I get kind of, I get become quite sad when I, when I hear about people hating Mondays, right? People dreading Mondays, yeah? I mean, it’s funny, because I was talking to my friend about it, and he’s, he’s also my, my motorcycle mechanic, and he was saying, “People just hate Mondays.” And then I found a book my daughter was reading in the other room after she’d left, and it’s something about dreading Mondays. And it’s, and it’s like, actually people do dread Mondays, and that’s not gonna help you be, be more productive i- i- if you hate, if you hate the very beginning of the week that you’re supposed to be productive in, you know?

Steven J. Manning: Well, here’s, here’s, here’s the twist, uh, uh, and then I want to tease on something you said before as well. Hating Monday, uh, there’s nothing trick about Monday. I mean, it’s a Monday, Wednesday, Friday. It’s just flips of the calendar, the days is kind of, theoretically it’s irrelevant. But it’s relevant, uh, for a different reason. I don’t think people hate Monday. People hate having to go back to work because they didn’t work Saturday and/or Sunday. “Oh, I have to go back to work. I hate Mondays ’cause it’s not Sunday, ’cause I can’t sleep in and eat too much and hang out and do nothing. So I hate Monday ’cause I have to go back to work.” Guess what? Uh, and I don’t want to repeat this, because I’ve said tell- told it too many times. I did fire a senior guy in a big company on a Friday afternoon, and it’s, maybe I’ll repeat this, but I happened to walk through the bullpen-I was… This is a Friday afternoon in LA. I was in New York already for a breakfast meeting that Tuesday. The red-eye out on Monday, breakfast at the airport, back in the office midday next day. I was about to, there in the evening, get on the red-eye Friday night and go back to New York for another meeting on Saturday. A gaggle of people standing around outside the office of a, of this senior person, a, a VP kind of person, and they’re just having a lovely chat about the weekend, the weekend. “What are you doing this… What are you doing?” “I’m doing this on…” “What are you doing this weekend?” Just a lovely chat. So wanting to be people person, I cruise by and say, “Hi, guys, how you doing?” And that’s when this man said, “Man, I, I can’t wait for tomorrow. Uh, I just… I, I, I’m so glad I don’t have to come back to this place for a couple of days.” And I thought to myself, “I’m a little confused.” He said that in front of the guy who already took a red-eye once this week to New York, and it’s Friday evening. “I’m about to get on a flight at 10 o’clock on, in the evening, have a meeting at 7:30 in the morning at Kennedy Airport, gonna be back for lunch with my wife. And you can’t… You, you, you’re, you’re happy not to have to come back to this place.” And, uh, God, God and people forgive me, the spirits forgive me, I said, uh, “Would you mind meeting in my office in about an hour?” And I called our CFO, I said, “Bob, I want you to prepare a final check for the guy. We owe him, what, uh, we owe him a couple weeks of vacation. It’s his vacation time.” “Why, he’s been dismissed. Uh, what kind of severance?” I said, “No severance. I’m giving him a much bigger gift.” The guy comes in. I said, “Uh, I will make this easy for you. You don’t have to come to the… If it’s that… If your issue is coming back to this place, we can all use a weekend. We all need to charge our batteries and all that.” “So glad I don’t have to work Saturday and Sunday. It’s cool.” “Have to come back to this place Saturday and Sunday?” So you’re telling that to a guy who’s about to take the second trip that week to New York and back. Well, I, I, should… I tell you what. I’m now going to do you a very big favor, very big career booster.” He goes, “Said you’re dismissed. Here’s your final check. Go find a job or something to do where you don’t loathe the idea of a weekend or Monday.” “Well, wait, wait a minute,” I said. “And here’s another… Uh, I’m giving you a career gift. And too, by the way, please return the company car, the fancy company car, by Tuesday.” Now, the point being, uh, you… It, it… It takes… You know, people don’t hate Mondays. They hate having to go back to work. I submit that if that’s your… If you feel that… And I think hate’s a tough word. Uh, I reserve hate for child molesters and murderers. I don’t, I don’t hate broccoli. I like broccoli, and I, I certainly don’t hate Mondays, and I… The, the, the problem sometimes I have with the weekend… And thank the… Thank you for the United States Postal Service a couple years ago, when they made the mistake of annou- not announcing that they have a express mail service that delivers on Sunday. Oh, that solved a big problem for me. I could get a piece of paper in the hands early in morn- Sunday morning instead of Monday, ’cause I’ve had a lot of bad Sundays where I couldn’t get anything done because nobody’s working except us. So you know what? To make that commitment… And you know, it’s a funny thing. There’s always someone that you know that has something you don’t have. Somebody who’s bigger, better, taller, richer, whatever it is. “Oh, look at the cool thing those people are doing. I should do that. I want to do that.” Uh, okay. “I have a job. Uh, that guy’s doing something that… I could do that a lot better.” Okay, so what? Uh, 20 years from now you’ll be saying, “I should have…” This is not a dress rehearsal, man. You want to be successful? The time to act is now. But you don’t ever jump off a bridge with, uh, expectations of surviving it having a parachute or dying and leaving behind a will. Uh, you just don’t do that. But if that’s a tall bridge, I can jump off that bridge because when I make that splash, I can sell life preservers. On bridges. Dumb idea, huh? I don’t know. Maybe it’s a really dumb idea. But don’t be jumping off the bridge without understanding where, where you are and what you’re doing. Oh, yeah. Thank the good Lord for brilliant people who had this whole AI idea. Oh. Uh, uh, Sergey and his partner, this whole Google thing. Think about a life without Google. That’s being totally unsighted and hearing-deprived. But the opportunity for enormous success lays in your willingness to jump in that pool and swim, but you can’t jump in the pool and swim unless you know how to swim. You gotta do the work. It’s astounding. You can… In a matter of one hour, you can just go from a dumb idea of how to keep this cup hot without putting it in the warmer to a business plan you can do in one hour with the help of one of these great bots. Go to Gemini, go to, go to Grok, go to, uh, Copilot and say, “I want a business plan for manufacturing a coffee cup, like the Starbucks cup, that will stay hot for three and a half hours without heating it.” You can have a business plan that you can read and highli- Don’t ever read those things with a highlighter. Don’t read on screen. Put it in the Word doc. Get your highlighter out. In there, you will find the five dos and the five don’ts-And then you can make a decision, “Yeah, I think I want to pursue that.” Oh, by the way, uh, I just made up the thing about the cup that said … My wife introduced me to an amazing product. It’s a bottle. She carries that around everywhere. She bought me one twice as big, ’cause I’m twice as big as she is. And you put water in the thing, and you put it in the refrigerator, and that thing stays absolutely ice-cold for 10 hours.

Nat Schooler: Wow, very cool. What a product.

Steven J. Manning: It’s an insulated bottle that will absolutely stay cold for 10 hours.

Nat Schooler: That’s very cool.

Steven J. Manning: And- Okay, so, somebody had the idea of saying, “Geez, I hate warm water, and I always gets warm, you know? Well, why not come up with a bottle that stays cold?” And, you know, somebody did. Oh, it’s popular as heck. I can see it all over LA, wherever. I see it on airplanes. People walk around there, white- Oh. You can buy the white one, you can buy the blue one, you can buy the black one, you can buy small, medium, large. And it’s a phenomenal product born out of some guy or some woman said, “Uh, it’s ridiculous. I’d, I’d like to have cold water all day long.” Okay, I’m gonna create a … And, and you know what? I promise you there are a million people out there who have said that every day. “Oh, geez, the water turns warm.” Well, that water don’t turn warm. I, I promise you. Yeah, it’s one of the best gifts my wife bought for me in some time.

Nat Schooler: Yeah, and that person went and did it because they were productive and focused on what they were doing. And, uh, I’ve … Greatly appreciate, uh, your time. Thank you, everyone, for listening.

Steven J. Manning: Thank you.

Nat Schooler: And, uh, don’t forget to subscribe to this channel and go and check out Monday Influencer. The links are around the place. Thanks very much for listening to Influential Visions. Please make sure you share this episode with your friends and business connections. And don’t forget to drop us a review wherever you listen. Thanks.


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Nathaniel Schooler is a Podcast Host, Amazon Best Selling Author, and Entrepreneur. He is Co-Founder International Imposter Syndrome Awareness Day, Co-Founder of MONDAY INFLUENCER®.