Surviving the Side Hustle

E104 - From $50M Success to Spiritual Burnout: One Entrepreneur's Journey to Clarity

• Coach Rob • Season 1 • Episode 104

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The journey from success to burnout and back to purpose is rarely discussed with complete honesty in entrepreneurial circles. Louis Kim breaks that silence, sharing his powerful story of building and selling businesses worth over $50 million, only to discover an emptiness that money couldn't fill.

Born to Korean immigrant parents who instilled a fierce work ethic, Louis achieved financial freedom early and seemed to have it all – wealth, status, relationships – the markers of success that most entrepreneurs chase. Yet there he was, unable to get out of bed, spending days in the bathtub watching Netflix while money sat untouched in his bank account. "What does it all mean?" became the haunting question that no business achievement could answer.

Louis takes us through his raw, unfiltered breakdown and the subsequent rebirth that transformed his approach to business and life. Through plant medicine journeys, somatic breath work, and deep personal growth, he discovered that clarity – knowing exactly who you are and where you're heading – is the entrepreneur's most valuable asset. "When you're clear in your direction, it's like that lighthouse in a dark sea. When you see it, it doesn't matter what's going on around you."

Today, Louis channels his experience into helping others find purpose through ownership. With $64 trillion in wealth transferring from baby boomers and 2.5 million small businesses needing succession plans, he's created "The Owner's Path" apprenticeship program to guide mid-career professionals toward entrepreneurship that aligns with their natural talents and deeper purpose.

Whether you're burning out, feeling lost despite success, or simply searching for more meaning in your entrepreneurial journey, this conversation offers practical wisdom on maintaining mental clarity through positive relationships, meditation, cold plunging, and the transformative power of genuine gratitude. Ready to reclaim your purpose and rebuild from the inside out? This episode shows you how.

Speaker 1:

What's up, guys, and welcome back to another episode of Surviving the Side Hustle. I'm super excited today because we've got Louis Kim on, and he is a builder, investor, spiritual entrepreneur who's redefining what it means to own and lead in the 21st century. He's the son of a Korean immigrant who gave him the gift of entrepreneurial spirit and he's built and sold over $50 million worth of businesses across industries. But after years of success, he hit a wall physically, emotionally and spiritually. That breakdown sparked a complete reinvention. He stepped away, rebuilt from the inside out and returned with a new mission, which is to help others reclaim purpose through ownership. Welcome to the show. I'm excited to have you on, man. How are you doing?

Speaker 2:

I'm good, I'm good. Thank you, rob, for having me on. I'm excited to.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, I'm excited to kind of dive in and hearing about your story, what you're up to now and a little bit about what you've gone through too. So I'll let you kind of take over and start us off wherever you may want to for your journey.

Speaker 2:

I appreciate it, I appreciate the carte blanche. So I, you know, as you had kind of said in the intro, I was fortunate enough to grow up in a family that was entrepreneurial, my parents being immigrants and you know, came here nothing classic story from the 70s of Korean immigrants coming with nothing other than hard work, sort of desire and a little bit of luck, and so that early on I kind of knew I wouldn't be getting a professional sort of job, and so I bought my first business in my early 20s, sold it in a couple of years, did really well, and it sort of set me on this path of entrepreneurship for myself. And along the way, you know, things came in hindsight Now things came pretty early and and success was you know everything, the trappings of success, everything that everyone thinks that they want. I had a woman that loved me, a great life in terms of experiences, you know, going out really good relationships and and having a little bit of of status, I guess, within the industries I was operating in.

Speaker 2:

But then I got to a point I was really unhappy and when I got there sold the businesses with money in the bank. You think everything's fine and then you start to realize that this unhappiness is something deeper. And so, a little bit over the last decade has all been about rebuilding myself, and I can say now that I was definitely suffering from burnout and it got into a point where I was just, I was miserable because I had no sense of purpose, I had no direction and really what I didn't have was clarity. And I think clarity is perhaps one of the greatest gifts that a person can have, because once you have that sense of purpose and direction, it's so easy to filter the noise, and especially the world we live in now, right, where there's just so much noise everywhere. Right, everything's fighting for your attention and in a world like that we just have to be more and more clear. And fortunately I've gone through a process that's allowed me to do it and completely rebuild where I'm going and what I'm doing.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, I mean, you're so true with that about today, with the immediate attention grabs left and right, everyone's fighting for your attention it's easy to kind of get lost in the sauce, I guess. And then, like I too I don't know how much of my story you know, but I too suffered through a pretty serious sprint season where I had burnt out pretty hard, my health fell apart, relationships, everything losing, ended up losing my father, and it took a while for me to kind of shift gears and decide that I needed to change something in my life and eventually that led to where I'm at now. But I'd love to kind of hear a little bit more about you and how that shift and change kind of was, because I know how much it kind of sucks when you're just kind of working, building, growing, creating things, but not really feeling any purpose or fulfillment behind it. So I want to hear your take on how that whole shift and journey began for you.

Speaker 2:

Well, I'm a little hardheaded, so it didn't come easy. I can tell you that it was you know, you think, and when you're in your 20s, right, you think you know everything and you've got all the energy in the world to do it and you do things and you succeed, sometimes in spite of yourself. But then when you get to a certain point and you look back at all the effort putting into play you start to, when you start to make the connections, that maybe not all of it was because I'm such a genius, right, there was some fortune and some other people really helped me actually get to where I was and I had started to. Just, I had started to feel this sense of you know, because it was the idea of I'll be happy when, right, I'll be happy if. And then you keep hitting those milestones and you look back and you go I'm still not happy. What's going on? Oh, maybe it's this thing now and I'll go pursue that and when you're?

Speaker 2:

You know, in that age the late 20s, early 30s you got so much drive. You just keep going, you just keep going, right, and you don't think about the cost and the toll, right? I mean, you know, as an entrepreneur, over time. There is a cost right. There's a physical, emotional, relationship, spiritual cost to being an entrepreneur. And if you don't keep those things in balance, it'll catch up to you. And that's what it did to me. And I got to a point where I was so depressed I couldn't get out of bed and I spent a good deal of time like just getting up and sitting in a bathtub watching netflix, and this is literally with like money in the bank that I could be going to do cool stuff. But you hit something and then now you've succeeded and you start to look at it and go well, what does it all mean? What am I going to do with my life?

Speaker 2:

And for me, I had to hit a fairly low point because my lifestyle had gotten to a place where I was in the need to search for that thing. Gotten to a place where I was in the need to search for that thing. I was finding myself no longer in the circles that I had been in and finding myself going deeper and deeper into places. And you know, there was a period of drinking too much, all of the things, all the vices you could think of. I probably indulged at some point, because this is how I process things. I told you I'm hard-headed, like I need to experience them, and so I needed to experience a little bit of pain, and eventually you get to a point where you just say this is ridiculous. My life is so much more, there's got to be so much more, and I hit a threshold, one point I just said this is not what I want. I'm tired of feeling this way. And it really started it.

Speaker 2:

And going down the path of the spiritual part of it is what really helped make me get clear and it helped me understand the bigger picture for myself, which has now completely changed how I do things. You know, when I said earlier, like when you're clear in your direction, you know it's like that lighthouse in, like a dark sea. When you see it, it doesn't matter what, anything else going on around you, right, you're just like that's where I'm going. And so that threshold really did it, and it changed everything. It's changed how I look at even just what I do in life. You know I'm no longer trying to have this unrealistic idea of work-life balance. It's about converging my life with my mission, you know, and letting my family, the people that love me, know this is important to me and this is where I'm going, and I want your support to get there, and so getting clear is perhaps one of the greatest things a person can do for themselves.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, and I knew for me my situation. I had just continued to like bury myself in my work until, because that became like a distraction from what was going on in my real life. And luckily enough, I was able to kind of continue and function with everything that I was going on at a relatively high level, where I was still successful or appeared successful on paper, until I was kind of denied that schedule. So like it was like a holiday weekend, everybody was away and I couldn't. I was like sit back and I had this moment to reflect. I was like what is going on? Like this is not how I used to spend my Friday nights. Like I'm sitting here like frantically trying to like fill my work schedule and then, and then I reflected on that and that was when I made a decision. Something needed to change.

Speaker 1:

But I had gone in another about three years trying to get clear on what it is that I wanted to do. I knew it was something different, but I was kind of in and out of a bunch of different projects and kind of 50, 50 here and there. So I want to know, I want to know what it was like. How did so? How did you gain that clarity? What and what was it like? And where are you moving now? Because I know your mission is to help others reclaim purpose, so fill me in a little bit.

Speaker 2:

So I laughed when you said that, because I was in the same boat, right, I think this is what you know, right, and if building things is what you know and it gave you some sense of identity and purpose at that point, you go back to it, right, and then you say, oh, I'm going to do this, but your soul, your spirit, already knows when you start it that it's not for you, right? And so it's like banging your head and you're like, why isn't it working this time? And then you try something different. And then I had gotten to a place, as I was coming out of this, where I was like, well, I'm going to stick to what I know and what I do, well. And then I got into a bunch of different partnerships, right, and that was its own just, just chaos, right. It was me not understanding that really, what I was trying to do was not face those things internally that I was shying away from. You know, I had fear behind. And so the idea of getting a partner is like, well, my partner is better at doing that. You know, that's what I didn't do, well, last time. Let me just put that person there and it solves everything. It's like, no, that that actually makes it more complicated. If you don't have perfect alignment with a partner, it's it's never going to work out.

Speaker 2:

But getting clear, really it it it came from a lot of personal work. I mean, I think you will say the same is that entrepreneurship? I think it is one of the greatest ways of improving who you are as a person. Right, because you constantly have to increase your skills and you've got to get better and better with interacting with people. Right, whether it's employees, customers, vendors and the idea you know, sometimes being the one that appears to be the softest but can continue to keep customers and vendors and people in place that help you create your vision, is actually the strongest place to be. You don't have to be the big gorilla that's hitting everybody over the head, right, sometimes, the approach of accepting what's going on and accepting people for who they are and understanding that there's a purpose for them helping, and so for me, I had to go through very deep personal growth in order to find that purpose and clarity, because my head was so busy and I think all entrepreneurs are, I'm sure both of us, while sitting here, have thought of business ideas, right, like so I had to get, I had to go inward, I had to go back and really work through things in my past right Work on forgiveness and these things and it opened the door and this world to me of this creative source and energy that comes with such beauty and care from reconciling all those feelings right, all those things, cause we all have them, we all have these chips, and the more you can chip away at them, I think, the greater an entrepreneur you can be, because you will find your true, true inner voice when all of that noise is stripped away from it.

Speaker 2:

And so I did that through somatic breath work, plant medicines. It's why I'm such a huge advocate for plant medicines. I'm on the board of a church that serves plant medicines and it opened the door. It really opened the door to let go a lot of those things from the past and that releasing of all of that starts to really make it easy to open up and sort of find your center there.

Speaker 1:

Awesome, I mean, that must have been pretty cool, getting into the plant medicines and doing that internal work and just kind of going through the whole journey itself. And I'm kind of interested to hear is that kind of, is that how you're helping individuals now kind of discover, reclaim their purpose? Or is there like a what does it like? Does it look like working with you? I guess I would say.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, so so my, my day job and what I've done is I've I've evolved from being a solo entrepreneur into being a small business owner to now running a private equity firm, and we do the exact same things that we did before, but as a team at a bigger scale, with investor money instead of just my own. Along that way, I started to realize, as my organization is pursuing larger deals, there's all of these small businesses that are available. It's something in the neighborhood of like $64 trillion. Of wealth is going to pass from the baby boomers to the younger generations, and there's two and a half million small businesses that are owned by baby boomers, and amongst those, something in like 60 to 70% of them, they don't have a plan for succession, meaning they don't have any idea what they're going to do when they retire or it's time to hang up the spur. It creates this enormous opportunity, and so for me, as I've gotten clear about what I want to do, there's only so much I can do as an individual, and so what I've taken on is I would love to be in a place where I can share the things of leadership that I've learned with other people, but I don't want to be in a place of you know I'm not going to become Tony Robbins or personal development coach, like that's just not my path. And I just started to understand, look, if I could help other entrepreneurs, people who are entrepreneurial, especially those who are roughly my age you know, like mid-career, you've probably done pretty well. Roughly my age, you know, like mid-career, you've probably done pretty well. And you know you're looking for that other thing now in life to help them buy their first business but really influence them in how they operate as business owners. Because if they're first-time owners, it gives me a chance to really impart the values that I've brought along and learned through the years and help them find that sense of purpose right.

Speaker 2:

And so what we teach and that's where we launched the Owner's Path, which is an apprenticeship to buy your first business, and in that the biggest thing we talk about is fit right Is finding the right fit, the financial fit, the type of operation, all those things. Because it comes down to, we can get the person who's got sort of their native place, the things they're good at, the things that they're already oriented and wired towards, and we find them a good business that is already existing, what that person can do with that base over the next 20, 30 years of their life is build something phenomenal, right? Because if you already love it, right, if you're already inclined towards it or your personality is very suited for the dynamics of the business, it's not going to feel like work right, you're going to go in every day really driven to build this thing because it's so native to you, and that's that's become one of the big things that I am. I'm working on because I just want to share, I want to, I want to help people get to that point of getting clear.

Speaker 2:

The the church part of it is a whole different thing for anyone, right? And that's for anyone who's if you're not an entrepreneur, anyone who is seeking more, who is looking for fulfillment. You know, I mean I mentioned his name, but Tony Robbins says that the ultimate success without fulfillment is the ultimate failure, and for me myself, I definitely experienced that with my own burnout, and so I don't want to be largely successful without being completely fulfilled, and so my hope is to teach others how to do that.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, and I think you're like you said. You're in an opportune time because so many, so many baby boomer businesses are kind of like coming to market. I have a buddy of mine who started with a tree removal business and he was removing a tree from someone's yard who happened to own this decently successful fencing business. And he was removing a tree from someone's yard who happened to own this decently successful fencing business and he just made an offer right on the spot, bought the fencing business for like $15,000. Took the six employees, hired four new ones and then immediately, eight weeks later, the fencing business was doing 20 grand a week and then just scaled up and then scaled up and now he's got like eight different arms of his business and he's doing like 24 million a year. That's wild. So there's a lot of opportunity out there and a lot of people who are interested in that would be great.

Speaker 2:

You can't even put it like how do you even calculate the ROI on that? Right, like there's no way. Right, and your friend is such a perfect example of taking a risk on yourself. Right, you go into something that has existing customer base and cashflow. You understand how the business dynamics work. It is it's limitless where you can go with it, right, and I'm sure your friend, along the way, though, had to grow. Right, had to grow substantially, because operating the tree removal business and this small fencing company to operate in an eight figure operation, I mean those are, they're not even in the same league, right, they're not even the same sport, really. So so that's, that's awesome.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, yeah, and I think that's really important too. Later on, I have a friend of mine that I want to connect you with because a lot of people are interested in getting into the entrepreneurial world and looking for businesses and a lot of people a lot of listeners too, I know are very interested in where to go and where to get involved with all of that. If you've got people listening and they want to chime in towards the end of the episode, would they be able to reach out to you and connect with you?

Speaker 2:

Yeah, absolutely, absolutely. I mean it's just the ownerspathcom, it's got it the contact form. It comes directly to myself and my assistant. So even if someone hears something and they just have a question, I got no problems. I'm genuinely doing that because I want to help others, because I feel like I've learned so much from my family, from my folks in particular, about business and a lot of the knowledge. I mean before we did this call my assistant and I, when it comes to deal flow, I'm always on the front end of things and we're looking through it.

Speaker 2:

And I got all excited because I figured out, like why this guy's selling. And it was just from years of understanding that within the numbers there's a story, right, and very quickly I looked at something and my intuition was just like, oh yeah, he's choking to death on on the rent on all these locations that he's opened in his business. And then we started to do the math and in the industry that he's in, their rent should somewhere between 10 and 20%. But his gross revenue, you know he was at like 65% expense for his rent, you know, against his revenue. So of course he's trying to get out there and sell it.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, Um, but yeah, so I would. I'd love to kind of bring this back into hearing a little bit more on your story and and when you made, when you made that shift into now, really into your own mission and kind of making that change. And you were in that dark place before and into your own mission and kind of making that change. And you were in that dark place before and you started going down and making changes because you've obviously had a lot of success with a lot of things that you've been doing in your life to get up to that point there. But what were some of the things that needed to change for you to move into the next stage of your life?

Speaker 2:

Yeah, the our thoughts. Right, Our thoughts are. They are the number one thing that are going to drive where we go, but our thoughts are also driven by our focus, you know, and our focus, though, is also it's like this we've got this interconnected system that exists, and the first thing I had to learn to shift was, I used to think, focusing on, because, as an entrepreneur like you're super optimistic, right, but you're also constantly preparing for the world falling apart, right, because you want to be ready to pivot and go, and sometimes that can take you in a place where you focus too much on that, right, and I was starting, and I'd gotten to a place where that's all I saw was that and it was the less positive side of things and really I had to learn how. I really had to learn how to have sovereignty over my emotions, and that was the biggest thing, and I can now say, had I had a more centered place with my own personal emotions, the burnout would have never happened, because I would have started to get to a place where my threshold starts to feel that way, and I would have been able to be mature and sort of centered and adult enough to say, okay, I'm going to take some time off. I'm going to let all this decompress and then let it. Let myself get back to how I feel.

Speaker 2:

But in that moment, when I was in the place of burnout, you just you're like everything's awful, everything's awful. And then I kept telling myself, look, it's the business I'm unhappy because the business I got to sell, I got to sell, I got to sell and that's where we went. And so it took me a couple of years afterwards to really learn how to um, to get centered and change my focus on what I'm focusing on, so that I started to feel more optimistic and positive towards things again. And so that was uh, that was the number one thing is is being in trouble, being in charge and sort of feeling like feeling things, but really embracing all of that and then shifting the focus towards things that were going to serve me as opposed to bring me down.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, I love where you were bringing that, because for me and my coaching and everything that I kind of basically lived through the through line really starts with awareness and how like Such a great word and how like such a great word that's so it's so difficult to teach awareness to people or individuals who aren't even ready to learn about it, because we get, like we talked earlier, like it's so easy to just lose our attention and just get lost in everything.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, and it's hard to kind of build up that skill to pay attention to things. So, for yourself, how do you keep yourself in the right mindset currently so that you don't fall back into maybe some of those distractions or other things going on?

Speaker 2:

So there's three big things. The first thing, just anecdotally I know I'm on the right path here is I'd spoken to someone recently who's 84. Guy's got 400 employees, four companies, 10 divisions, and he said to me because I'd asked him how he keeps up this energy and this positivity and this 84 guys out there doing bodybuilding still, and wants to meet new people. He wants to talk to young people all the time because he wants to just see what's happening. And he just said I have built my life around constantly keeping very positive people in my life, right, and so people that give me energy, and so people that are excited, people that are doing interesting things, and he says I don't care what they do, but as if they're passionate and they love what they do and they're interesting and they're positive, it's like I want to get to know them.

Speaker 2:

And so for me that's something that I've definitely learned is is having that circle of friends and people around you that are positive right Cause not everyone's going to get it. I mean, you know, entrepreneurship can feel very lonely, right, and to be surrounded by those types of people I think are super important. The other thing I do is I do things such as breathing, cold plunging and meditation, which I think are all driven towards getting myself into the calm, centered state. Cold plunging isn't directly like that, because when you get in you're like oh my God.

Speaker 2:

But I don't know if you cold plunge, but over the course of the day you start to like, you start really hype, and then you start to come back to the center and you're just super clear.

Speaker 2:

Right, there's that.

Speaker 2:

And then the third thing is really trying to be present with the people that I love and if I can appreciate those moments with the people that I care about and close friends, my wife, my parents, my siblings just when I'm there, I want to feel and be there for every moment so that those little things, that little bit of joy and happiness that comes up in those interactions with the people you care about, so that when I am struggling or I am going through a difficult period of time with work or anything else, there's little things that are like, you know, it's like, well, let me take a second and remember what it felt like when I, you know, was at Thanksgiving with my mom, or, you know, like doing this with my wife or whatever it is, and that has really helped me also stay there, because you know, the brain doesn't know, right, the brain lives in, like the brain lives in a made up world, right, everything in the brain is fed to it with sensations and nerves, and so if you can relive those moments, the brain thinks it's happening right now and so it will release all the same chemicals.

Speaker 2:

And that's the kind of thing that I've done to really help keep myself in that positive place.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, you just shared a whole lot of things that I'd love to kind of touch on the whole concept of the brain not understanding what's real and what's not real. I don't remember the exact study but for those who haven't heard of it, go look it up, but there's some. It was involved basketball shooters and they had a bunch. They had one group shooting shots every day after school. They had one group visualizing that they'd shoot shots after school and they had group that totally not do anything and then the group that like shot or visualize shooting ended up testing or retesting just as well as the team that actually did go out and shoot.

Speaker 1:

So that's like crazy, right? Isn't that insane how like your brain can trick you into that. But also, you mentioned a little bit about gratitude and mindfulness, and I'm a huge, huge fan of those because that really keeps me grounded and allows me to like stay present as much as possible. That little whether it's just a short little meditation just to kind of pause my brain for a few minutes and then all the way to like journaling practices, helps me keep my memory fresh and keep up to date on different things that have been happening and really allows me to kind of create like a scorecard of all the great successful things that have been going on. And then the last thing I want to ask you here, just piggybacking off of what you were sharing before, is the circles of positive people around you.

Speaker 1:

You had mentioned, when you were going through the dark times and you kind of stepped away from the business and you were still trying to decide and figure things out. You said that you were finding yourself in different circles, or not in the same circles that you previously were, and to get into the newer circles now that you're surrounding yourself with. What was that journey like and how did you start that process? Because I know myself. When I first started out it was like all right, well, how do I get around other people? I don't know where to look or anything.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, it's a great question, but I want to touch on something you just said, because you said such a golden thing about gratitude. It is, it's a word that we all know and we've heard, but I think you and I and I and you clearly understand it, when you truly understand what a great like medicine it is for our soul, like it, it will shift so much, you know, because you can't be grateful and angry, right, and you can't be grateful and sad, and so it's such a. I'm so glad you said it, it's, it's so spot on.

Speaker 1:

When I, when I'm on my like streak of being so consistent with my gratitude, it's like magic, it's like random things just happen for me all the time and I'm like well, this is a great.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, that's that's, it's awesome, right? Because all of a sudden you're like I'm super lucky now, right, yeah, yeah, yeah. So the circles I mean I found. So I'll kind of just take you through the whole arc and so here I am, selling the business. There's all this money, I think everything is going to be great.

Speaker 2:

I start looking at other things but I have no sense of purpose and I think that's what started to make me feel less inclined to want to like continue the path. Right, because I would, I would you've got this money, and it's like, okay, I'm going to go put it into something, right and and kind of like you said, I started trying these different things and I would look at opportunities and go there, and just nothing felt right and I never went for it and that started this downward spiral, right, and it's like what I had said earlier about the focus and where your attention's going, and you start behaviors that start pushing away those people that are good in your life, and then you find yourself connecting to people that aren't necessarily they've got their own problems right, because you start to become just like that and it's not to be a judgment, but just where people are. And so if you find yourself you know, more consistently going out late at night drinking or smoking pot, doing whatever, you're going to find yourself with a particular type of person who's living a certain lifestyle. And that's what took me there, and when I was at the bottom and starting to come out, I really had to gravitate and put myself in front of people that I cared about first because I knew that they had love for me, but over time the evolution was just taking my curiosity and I think genuine curiosity when it comes to talking to people really endears yourself to that person. I teach this because I do it all the time.

Speaker 2:

It's like even in the business world, right, if you go, if you're interested in getting into a particular type of business, right, and you go find someone who's been at it for 20, 30 years and you just go talk to them, and you don't go to them, like you know, you don't have to go pump their ego up, but you just say, hey, look, I've respect what you've done, I've seen you've done this, I've. I mean, is it possible if I could buy you coffee or just talk to you? And most of those people who've done those things, if they see that you're genuinely curious and you got a little bit of a spark, they'll spend time with you right, and then the more you connect with them, it's crazy what people are willing to reveal, because everyone who's succeeded has been helped somewhere along the way, and when they have the opportunity to help somebody else right, they'll always do it, you know, and so that, to me, is how I really started to rebuild my circle was just this curiosity of talking to people, and it wasn't even necessarily about business in the beginning. It was just being interested in what people do, because at that point, when I was coming out of it, I was so unfocused and point, when I was coming out of it, I was so unfocused and unclear that I was telling myself I need to go to rehab so someone can tell me to take a toothbrush and clean a toilet, right, because that's how just disoriented and disconnected I was. But as I started to change my focus and shift and come back out of there, I started to get curious about everything, because it was almost like I was being reborn. So people that were teachers, dog trainer it didn't matter If someone was doing something that I thought was at a high level or something interesting. I just took my time and I would seek them out, I would go talk to them, I'd have coffee and just sit there and learn as much as I can. And that really started to shift my entire paradigm of how I saw the world and took me in a place where, from that, naturally, I started to develop these relationships and connections, that sort of spiraled upward into kind of where it is. Yeah, I mean, you've had quite a journey and it sounds like you're on the track to even create more impact and change.

Speaker 2:

In Maui and I just I was so awe inspired by the sunrise and I had this moment and it was. It was so simple. But I said I have a definition for myself about what a good life is and I was sitting there, going. If I can find myself in my 80s and 90s, waking up every single morning to this type of awe-inspiring just nature, right, mountains, ocean, whatever it is then I will know that I led a good life right.

Speaker 2:

And so that putting this definition of where I want to be right, that longevity of living that long to be inspired and to be able to sit there and just enjoy life in that way, has me very focused on the intention of the impact of what I want to do, because I felt like if I can achieve that, I will have done enough in the world that there's like all this grace coming back to me, right.

Speaker 2:

It's like what you said with the gratitude you just start to get lucky right. Very much so. I also believe that the more you do for others and the more you impact the world in a better way. I think that karma, or the energy of that, comes back to you financially, spiritually and in a multitude of ways. And so for me, my biggest goal is, if I can help shape and have people see me as an example of leadership, right, and I can have others sort of follow along in that path of whatever their chosen field is and where they're welcome to follow me through the path of entrepreneurship, then I will know I was doing the right thing, you know. And so it's getting to that point of having those people inspired enough to kind of take that path of leading from the heart.

Speaker 1:

That is some powerful pictures you're portraying there and I'm sure anybody listening would obviously want to get to a stage where they can do that or see that and just really experience some of that kind of success as you're sharing there. And if somebody is listening or they're interested in kind of diving in a little bit more, where so? Where where do they go to kind of get in contact with you and the team?

Speaker 2:

Yes, so it's just it's the the owners pathcom. You come there, there's a, there's a form you can reach out. There's also on on Instagram. It's just the owner. I think we've got 14 followers, so you can be one of the new ones. Nice, but you can reach me directly there and, like I said, even if you're not interested in the coaching, I'm more than happy to respond to questions and even just pointing people in the right direction.

Speaker 1:

So checking out the website and then social media is the second best place to kind of get in contact with you if they have questions or any kind of things. Cool, awesome. Well, mr Kim, this was an incredible episode. I really appreciate you sharing a lot of the experience and things that you've gone through and where you're kind of changing and spinning and creating a lot more impact and fulfillment in the world. And I know super busy guy and so I really appreciate you taking the time to kind of sit in and chat with us. But before I let you go, I want to ask you kind of like the cliche question if you were to boil everything down that you've learned through the years, through all the different challenges and struggles that you've overcome and the new obstacles that you're kind of working through now you're talking to super young version of yourself, that early stage entrepreneur, and they're just looking for a little bit of advice to kind of get them moving and create some of that momentum. What would be your piece of advice to them.

Speaker 2:

I'll preface the advice with just this idea, because I think it's important to the advice is that I think everybody in this world is given a gift of something where every person has some level of greatness within them, right? An individual greatness that's just theirs, and I think the world and the noise of the world makes it very hard for us to hear that. You know this inner voice, this intuition that's within there, and so, in order to cultivate that, the advice would be is to get as clear as you can, and however you find your path to clarity, there will be a lot of inner work. For some people it'll probably be doing one thing over and over for a long time. Others might be trying a thousand things, but if you continue to work on yourself to get clear, your entire life now becomes so much smoother, right? I don't want to say it's easier because there's just difficulties in life, but that clarity will get you to where you want to go with a lot less friction, because you won't be slowed down by all the noise for sure, powerful stuff.

Speaker 1:

Thank you again so much for this episode. This is really powerful. I really appreciate it too, and I know a lot of listeners are going to enjoy this and listen back multiple times. So thank you again and hope to connect with you again soon. Thank you very much for having me.