You can have it all, happiness, health, wealth, and wisdom. You do not have to compromise any of these for the other, even the life of abundance. For over three decades, Anthony tested guidance from countless seminars, books, and life coaches to discover the best methods for success. Through their teachings, Anthony identified two vital traits, tenacious habits, and a mindset of abundance. What’s up, everybody? Welcome back to the Author Hour Podcast. I’m Hussein Al-Baiaty. Today, I’m very excited to be joined by Anthony to talk about his experiences, share wisdom that we can all learn from.

All right, everybody. I’m here with Anthony (author of Tenacious Abundance: Simple Habits & Hacks for Being Happy, Healthy, Wealthy & Wise), and I’m super excited to share with you this man’s remarkable work. His ideology is beautiful. I’ve been studying him for the last few days, getting to know him through his work, his books. You guys are all in for a treat. Welcome, Anthony. Thank you for joining me today. I really appreciate your time.

Anthony R. Trupiano: Thank you very much. I appreciate you interviewing me. 

Hussein Al-Baiaty: Yeah, absolutely, Anthony. Let’s start real quick, briefly, in a couple moments, if you can give our listeners an idea of your personal background.

Anthony R. Trupiano: My journey started when I lost my dad. My twin brother and I lost our dad when he was only 45 years old. We had just like a month before we turn 16 years old. My dad had a seventh-grade education. My grandfather was sick, so my dad had to leave school in the seventh grade. He’s probably one of the most common-sense people we ever met in our entire lifetime. He taught us very well about common sense isn’t always common practice. Losing him, we didn’t have any life insurance. He didn’t have any retirement. We went from being, maybe upper middle-class family, middle class family to being completely broke. My mom had never worked a day in her life. 

So we obviously had two paths. We could fatherless losers or fatherless winners. My brother and I both chose the path of bettering ourselves. My whole journey really started at 16 there, because it spurred me to do a lot of things to make sure it never happened to my family, what happened to ours. Not having insurance, retirement. Making sure we stay healthy. So yeah, that’s where it all started for me.

Process of Writing the Book

Hussein Al-Baiaty: Wow. What an impactful story. First, I’m sorry for the loss of your father, especially at such a young age. Those are formidable years, but what stuck around is his tenacity, it sounds like. It sounds like he was working hard, providing for his family, working through the things. You and your brother, it sounds like, took a lot of those lessons early on, paving a path for yourself that later defines who you ultimately want to become, right, and leading you into writing, leading you into this idea of tenacious abundance, which I just love. Tell me about the story that inspired you to write your new book, because I know you mentioned you had written two other ones, which congratulations, what a huge feat. But tell me about what inspired the writing of this new book?

Anthony R. Trupiano: Well, one thing my dad always mentioned is to be a person that adds value. He always said there’s two types of people, people that add value and take away value. He was always an add value person. He was a great role model in that way, that since we were six years old, we worked at his gas stations. I mean, that’s back in the day, where you check the pressure and the tires, you open the hood, you check the oil, the transmission fluid. I mean, my dad taught us customer service. So it was amazing. 

I would say, over about 32 years ago, I met my wife, Sally, and we just always wanted to better ourselves. We started out in in low-income apartment. I always had this burning desire to do well. I started listening to Anthony Robbins cassettes, which a lot of successful people will probably link back to Anthony Robbins. He’s been around for almost thirty years doing what he’s doing. I just always wanted to improve. So with writing this book, I told my wife about in 2000, about 22 years ago. I said, “You know. I want to write a book one day for our daughters, or grandchildren, future grandchildren. I just want them to know like the simple habits, the hacks, the timeless wisdom, things that we’ve used to just be in such a great position.” I mean, we’ve just had just a wonderful life. It’s been a happy marriage, our kids are great. We’ve stayed healthy. We’ve stayed within five, 10 pounds of our marriage weight for over 30 years now. 

I wanted to share in last year that I said, “Look, let me just start working on this.” She walked into my office one day, and she goes, “Why don’t you write it for everybody?” I said, “Well, if I’m going to write it for everybody, it can’t be on my Word document that I started writing it on.” I said, “Let me get a serious publisher.” We looked. We found Scribe. The process has taken a year. It’s been an exhausting year. There’s way more involved writing a book than most people think.

Hussein Al-Baiaty: Yes. So share on that a little bit, because you and I have both worked with Scribe, and I’ve published my book through them. Obviously, so have you. But you’re right, writing a book and really committing to the ideologies, it’s very intense. I guess people don’t realize sometimes how much of an internal project it is, right? Like the work with your ego, the work with yourself, the work with how you want to say something, to who it impacts. So there’s a lot going on in that mind of yours, as you’re trying to dissect the content that you want to impart with, that wisdom, they want to impart with, how to lay it out, how to weave story. So tell me about that year, what did it reveal to you?

Anthony Trupiano: Well, what was interesting is on the interview — so you know the process. I’m being interviewed for like two hours every week for, I think it was almost two months, maybe three months, it lasted. That was really just to get the bulk of the material, but it’s interesting how all of my tenacious habits, as I’ll call them, because, look, the most successful people that I’ve seen in over three decades, they have two things in common. They have tenacious habits, and they have an abundance mindset. It’s true. I even wanted to make the book like Think And Grow Rich, but it was using tenacious habits and abundance mindset. 

Going through the process, I realized, there’s things that I do that are actually a system that I never even realize I was running. I just took it for granted, because I’ve been doing it so long. I wake up, and that’s the person I am, but the Scribe publisher would say, “Well, why do you do it that way? What exactly are you thinking when you do it?” So they extrapolate all this information out of my head, and it’s really more of a system than I thought it was. The reader really gets to benefit from really understanding not just that I do it, why am I doing it? How am I doing it? Yeah, it was amazing. Yeah, it is exhausting. You get done with the interviews and you go, “Holy smokes. That was like two hours of just going pretty deep.”

Hussein Al-Baiaty: Yeah, exactly. I love that. You’re 100%, right, but it is exhausting, right? To like really break down, because preaching is different than teaching, right? We always talk about—sometimes what comes easy and natural to us is extremely difficult to someone else. That’s the idea. I think the book is the bridge between us and the people we want to help in those regards, right? Whatever we are good at, gifted with, talented with, and what have we worked hard at building. Sometimes you’ve ingrained such a system, a habitual system within yourself that you don’t realize like teaching it will have to break that down into steps. That’s the beauty of, I think for me, it was writing the book, but it was so cathartic, and learning about those things, and unraveling them in a way that made sense, that made more sense to me than I ever realized. It’s like, you’re right, there’s so much power in that.

Anthony  R. Trupiano: Yeah. You know, one of the things you mentioned was ego. There’s a lot of people who write a book out there, because they weren’t heard. Everybody — I think there’s a lot of people out there that don’t think they’re enough and when they write a book, they want to tell you their life story, but at the end of the day, the benefit needs to be to the reader. The person reading the book, it’s what’s in it for them, and how are they going to benefit. It’s not gearing it towards let me talk about Anthony Trupiano stories. 

My entire book, we put in a few stories that were impactful about my dad passing under health and meeting the legendary coach, wooden basketball coach under a chapter. We put a few things in, but it wasn’t, let the book be about Anthony Trupiano. It was how can the reader benefit from using these simple hacks, habits, timeless wisdoms? Scribe was really great. The publisher was amazing at making sure it was worded properly for the reader and what’s in it for them.

Hussein Al-Baiaty: I love that so much. Talking about books, talking about how we come to them, how to write them, and obviously getting necessary help to push it forward, what’s a book that you have read that shifted the way you see the world, or shifted away to see your business, or yourself, or perhaps a relationship? Is there a book in mind that you think helped guide you in a certain way?

Anthony R. Trupiano: I don’t count how many books I read a year, but I would estimate, it’s probably like 10 or 15. I just sit them on my nightstand. If a client tells me about a book or anyone mentions a book, that sounds interesting, I get it. I just tried to be a reader. I just tried to read a few pages a night, so I just — I mean the habit of reading. I’ve always liked Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand. I love Think And Grow Rich. I mean, oh, my gosh. I’ve read every Anthony Robbins book. I’ve read Dewey and Duncan. 

When Amazon first started, they were great at finding used books. They wrote a book called Cycles. That was just amazing. It made me look at the world totally different. I mean, there’s another book on Seasons, there’s a book on Health and Fitness. I mean, Dave Asprey. He’s got some great books on Biohacking. I would say Think And Grow Rich was definitely a foundation. I mean, I think that’s a book everyone should read. It’s dated back to I think 1937. It’s got some great basic things in there.

Hussein Al-Baiaty: Yeah. That’s really profound. Mine was not Think and Grow Rich. It was, How to Win Friends and Influence People, right? Which led me to Think And Grow Rich—

Anthony R. Trupiano: Yeah. Dale Carnegie. 

Hussein Al-Baiaty: Right, right. Then just that whole world of how to just see things differently, I just appreciate that, you’re right. I mean, I think it’s not about what book you read, or whatever. I think it is a habit, right. It’s about the — you’re continually reading. A lot of those ideas, mesh and mold together. They’re shared from one book to another, just from a different perspective, a different experience, which I love.

Anthony R. Trupiano: Yeah. One other thing I will mention. So I kept that in mind for the reader. I’ve been reading a ton of books for over three decades. I know what type of books I like to read, why I like to read them. I mean, I love books that are very simple. I don’t like books that have a chapter that’s 25, 30 pages, and it’s research studies or there are thoughts the whole time. What I did with Tenacious Abundance is I made the chapters have a lot of sub chapters, in how I’ve been reading books for over 20 years, because I took an Evelyn Woods Speed Reading [class] and I’d like to read the introduction. Then I’d like to read if they have anything to say at the end of the book, and then what chapters interest me. I’ll go and read the beginning of that chapter, the end of that chapter. 

I made my book in that fashion, it was very easy to read. The author copies are out. I’ve gotten some feedback. The feedback has been, it’s amazing how it’s just so, there’s so much information, but it’s so easy to read. At the end of every chapter, I put the power of three. So even if someone wanted to start and just go to the end of every chapter, get three beliefs, three actions and three questions to ask themselves. It’s really that easy.

Hussein Al-Baiaty: Right. I love that so much. I think it’s very important, especially today in our modern world, right? Where we’re just actively doing things, we’re busy people. So we want to pick up material and digest it as smoothly as we can and making something easy to read is very difficult, of course, going through the process, right? With that, I’d like to ask you a question about, maybe like, what’s the biggest problem you’ve ever faced? What value from your book that helped you overcome that problem, whether it be in your business, or relationships?

Overcoming Problems

Anthony R. Trupiano: Wow. What problem? I mean, first of all, I love problems. Let that be on the recording like, problems are a blessing, because it means if you’re curious and you don’t have an ego, it means you’re going to learn something. I love problems. I immediately flip a problem to an opportunity and think what can I learn? How can I use this? Gosh, I mean, I’ve had so many over the years. I mean, obviously losing my dad. One thing my dad gave me was such a work ethic. I’ve always had a motor on me. My dad’s also amazing for seventh grade education. My dad was one of the most intelligent people to this day that I’ve ever had the privilege of being around. 

I think, I get upset when I talk about my dad. Sorry, but I know my voice—there, but what’s great is my dad was not an ego guy. He wasn’t a know-it-all. I think due to his lack of education, leaving school in seventh grade, he was very curious all the time. It made us curious, he asked great questions. If he didn’t understand something, he wouldn’t act like he knew about it. He had no problem going up to the person and saying like, “How does that work? I’m curious how that works.” We’ve instilled that in our daughters. I always tell them, it cost nothing to ask your question. The worst-case scenario when you’re going to get a no. You already know the downside.

Hussein Al-Baiaty: I love that. I love that so much. I also love an idea that you’ve shared around happiness, which is that it’s an inside job. Can you share more on that?

Anthony R. Trupiano: There is a lady Marisa Peer, she is the Anthony Robbins equivalent over in England. Maybe a lot of people here in America won’t know her as well as Anthony Robbins. She has really brought the quote out there that, “I am enough.” I don’t think most people think they are enough. It’s funny at a young age. It may sound a little embarrassing for me to say this, but after I lost my dad, I had a lot of kids say, “Oh, you’re a loser. You’re going to be a loser.” We were new kids, we had just moved to this school. My twin brother and I, the girls liked us, because it was the cute twins. The guys, of course, hated us, because here’s the new twins that the girls were giving attention to, but when we lost our dad, we had a lot of kids just not thinking we were going to go anywhere. 

I remember looking in the mirror, always just being so positive about myself, like, you’re going to be great. I think a lot of people go every day, looking in the mirror to get ready. They’re brushing their teeth, they’re doing their hair, ladies putting makeup on or people are blow drying and getting ready, but they never really take the time to just stop for a second and look at themselves and say, “Hey, you’re doing a great job.” I mean, there’s not a restroom I leave, whether it’s at my house, or at a restaurant, or on the road when I’m ready to see a client and I’m at a rest area using a bathroom, but I always wash my hands and I look in the mirror and I smile, and I give myself a thumbs up and I’m saying you’re doing great. 

I think that person in the mirror is someone that’s with us the rest of our lives should be our best friend. Sadly, I don’t think a lot of people look at the person in the mirror as their best friend. I think they need to accept that person that they’re enough with who they are. Don’t try to be somebody else. Don’t use someone else’s definition of success as yours. What’s your definition of success? Be happy with that.

Hussein Al-Baiaty: Yeah. I love that so much. You bring that into your book, right, through the ideas of Tenacious Abundance. These are the simple habits you’re talking about, right? Those moments in time, where you can pause and reflect and just say something positive in that moment, celebrate the day, celebrate your journey so far. It’s those moments that start to make you believe that you are more than enough that you’ve done enough, and that you’re going to continue to do more, but that’s not who you are. Who you are so much deeper than that. It’s not just what you do. It’s who you become from.

Power of Tenacious Habits and Abundance Mindset

Anthony R. Trupiano: When you’re operating from the premise that you are enough, your life changes. I’ll tell every person out there who gets my book, there’s so much information in there that so simple that you could do every day. Most people may even read it and go, “Oh. Well, that’s common sense.” Well common sense isn’t common practice. Maybe like you’re standing in a Superman pose in front of the mirror may seem absolutely ridiculous, but there’s Harvard studies behind it. It lowers cortisol, lowers blood pressure, raise his confidence levels. It may seem ridiculous and some of the things may seem silly, because nobody thinks to do these things. 

We have these crappy beliefs that we walk around our whole life with like, how many people have heard from their parents or some peer in their life when they were a kid that “hey, money doesn’t grow on trees.” I’m like, “Yeah, money doesn’t grow on trees. It grows in my bank account.” Just change the belief. It’s really that simple, but people go, “Oh. You know. I’ve had this belief for 20 years.” I know. It’s not working for you. Call it out, change it. Get a new belief. 

If you can doing that every day. I mean, what’s one pushup a day, it’s 365 at the end of the year. What would 365 push-ups do to improve your health? Then make it 10 push-ups a day, and it’s 3,650 push-ups a year. Now you’re talking 10 push-ups a day. 

The whole book is based on doing little simple things every day. Things that are fun, and they’re simple. Once you get used to them then give it a year, you’re a different person, because these habits don’t take place, you’re not going to get a new habit in 21 to 30 days like the self-help industry touts over all these decades. I mean, you got to wire it into your system. I mean, if you were eating Twinkies as a kid and used to a cake every birthday, I mean, you’re not going to stop eating sweets in 21 days. That’s why most people fail at New Year’s resolutions.

Hussein Al-Baiaty: Sure, it’s so powerful. You’re right. It all comes down to those small habits that you talk about, all throughout your book around health, happiness, building wealth, all those good things. I love it all, man. It’s been such a pleasure speaking with you and getting to know you and the book. The book is called Tenacious Abundance: Simple Habits and Hacks for Being Happy, Healthy, Wise. If there was one key, short, simple takeaway that you want your readers to take away from the book, what would that be?

Anthony R. Trupiano: You know, I don’t care the age. I don’t care what occupation they have. I don’t care what their background is, every successful person that I have met, trained with, read about, learned from, in the last over 30 years, understands the power of creating tenacious habits, and an abundance mindset. It’s that simple. There’s no secret sauce. 

I mean, most of the top performers wake up at 5:00 a.m. in the morning. I have in my book, I call it the three anchor system. It’s how you begin your day, how you end your day, and going after three priorities to get done in a day. Now, there’s people out there going to say, “Oh, great, Anthony. You work from home, you’re an empty nester, it’s easy for you.” I’ve been doing this when I had kids, and dogs, and traveling, and being on the road and everyone could wake up a little bit earlier and have a routine, which is in my book, how to start your day. Write down the priorities, just three things. I mean, when you start listing 10, 20 things that you have to get done in a day, it becomes a, to do list. It’s not a priority list. There’s one, two, maybe three things the most that are true priorities that if you get them done, your day will be successful and then how you end your day. I’m very routine, I put my daily schedule in the book. People can — you know it’s funny, because anyone who’s gotten an author copy reads my book, they’re like, “Oh, now we know what you’re doing all day and every second of the day.” I also have some flexibility built in, but the three anchors, they never change.

Hussein Al-Baiaty: I love that so much. Well, thank you so much today, Anthony. You’ve been an amazing guest on our show. I think there’s so much to be learning from you, personally, but also this is why you put all that wisdom in a book for your kids, for the community, for people listening. So you can get that book right now on Amazon. It will be available for you on Kindle version as well as hard copy, all that good stuff. Again, Anthony, thank you so much for joining us.

Anthony R.Trupiano: The book launch is October 18th. I know people can pre-order it. It really helps if they go there on October 18^th, so I can make a best-seller list.

Hussein Al-Baiaty: Sounds good. I’m sure we’ll be able to do that. Yeah, for sure. Well, thanks again, Anthony for joining us.

Anthony R. Trupiano: Yes. Thank you very much. Have a great day.