Hugh Zaretsky’s wake-up call came on 911, realizing how short life can be, and how important it is to do something you really care about. He set out to pursue his greatest dream and launch his own business. Today, he’s built multiple businesses, and real estate companies, and trained more than 12,000 people to make their way through the stages of launching a successful business. 

Welcome back to the Author Hour Podcast. I’m your host, Hussein Al-Baiaty. I’m super excited to be joined by author, Hugh Zaretsky to celebrate and talk about his new book, The Launch Button. Let’s get into it.

All right, everyone. I’m here with my man, Hugh, and we’re about to get into this amazing conversation filled with gems and golden nuggets. Hugh, please share with our audience a little bit about sort of who you are, your background, your personal background. Getting to know you a little bit prerecording was just great, so I want to share with the audience, they’re in a treat. So tell us a little bit about who you are, and what you do, and all those good things.

Impact of 9/11

Hugh Zaretsky: Awesome. Well, thank you guys very much for having me here. Number one, I appreciate this. It’s been an honor to work with you guys as we go through this process, and I went through the process. I realized at a very young age that I didn’t want to go down the path of my parents. I believed the lie, and I think a lot of people do, which is study hard, and get a good job, and that will lead to your financial freedom. But what I realized as I was going through that journey was that it wasn’t true. Growing up, both my parents were teachers, my grandfather was a teacher, my sister is a teacher. I watched them struggle financially, even though they were doing amazing work, even though they were helping hundreds and thousands of people, they were struggling financially. So I wanted to go on a different path. I just happen to be good with math, and my dad pushed me into computers. They were all the rage, got into computers, got into IT, so I was a complete geek. 

Then, I was sitting in my office one day and two planes—it’s a beautiful sunny day and two planes went flying right past my window directly into the Twin Towers, and that’s the day that changed my life. And made me—not that day, but I did lots of stupid things that day. I lay out some of them in the book. But I did lots of stupid things that day just to get to a job, and then I realized I wasn’t happy. I really wasn’t happy. A lot of people are sort of like a log on a river just get pushed through life, and they end up in a certain spot, and they realize, “Oh. I’m not happy.” Usually, it takes some sort of trauma. For me, it was 9/11. It could be a divorce, it could be a death, it could be the birth of a child to just be you hit the glass ceiling or whatever it happens to be. 

I sort of had to sit back and be like, what do I really want to do? I mean, otherwise, the only difference between me and the people in Twin Towers that day was that—my company signed a lease on a smaller building. I did take some of the first pictures that went out to every major newspaper that day. Like I said, [I] did lots of things. But after sitting back and reflecting on it, that’s really the only difference. Otherwise, that could have been me with the choice of jumping or burn. I was like, all right, and that’s where I fell backwards into real estate investing, found my passion, teaching adults, and investing in real estate, and been able to do that ever since. It took me two years to fire my boss, and now I get to do what I want when I want. So that’s a little background.

Hussein Al-Baiaty: Man, that is powerful. I mean, you crunched a lot in those like 30 seconds. Man, what a powerful story. I mean, where to start this off with an airplane flying by your window? That must have been just almost out of this world. Things you would sort of imagine in video games or movies. Here we are, it’s 9/11. For me, personally, growing up an Arab kid, in high school, that for me changed my trajectory into things, I think. Whether I knew it at the moment or not, it changed a lot for me. I definitely relate to you, when you talk about that moment in time. Then you went as far as taking the first few photos of this insane incident. You sort of captured the moment, and then you internalized it by asking yourself, “What do I do?” which is really profound.

Hugh Zaretsky: I think it’s one of those things and it’s definitely profound for you. We want to thank all of our military members, all of our first responders during COVID, like all of the people that have kept us safe. Sometimes you don’t realize it, and one blessing in disguise that day was it was a Tuesday. Because my guys had already come into the office that went through the bottom of the Twin Towers. You don’t think about those things till way later. Of course, nobody believed that at that time could happen here in the US. I had one guy right away, say, “Yep, that’s a terrorist attack.” And we got to work with our news team, because Getty is one of the largest producers of stock footage, news footage, sports photos, and get all that stuff out to the newspaper. We just went into firefighter mode, which was just getting stuff done, and all of that. But I made sure my team got home safe, and then I had to sneak down past the National Guard with M16s, like lots of stupid things. 

Everybody does that in their own way for their job, whether it’s sacrifice kid’s soccer games, whether it’s sacrifice family events, whether it’s be a road warrior for so many years, and then you sort of wake up and be like, “Man, this is not where I want to be.” Then, the trap is, you’re stuck financially, you’re just feeling stuck, let your ego, you’re not going to be able to leave if I got to start over in my 30s, or 40s, or 50s, or even late 20s. Am I able to do that? Then, the other thing is, what are you really passionate about? That’s a crazy question that I asked a lot of people and most people go, “I don’t know.” They’ll say like, “I want to make more money, I want to travel more. I want more time.” I’m like, “Why?”

Hussein Al-Baiaty: Right. It sometimes—yeah, you’re 100% asking what would it mean to cut you off, but I love that, because that’s just what we see. It’s not what you’re passionate about. It’s what you see other people being passionate about that you say, “I like seeing that” or “I enjoy that, but how do I get there?” It’s the idea that that’s not necessarily your passion. I think for me, it was just like that awakening, going through high school, going through college was that, I’m not going to allow this particular incident to define my character. My whole life, my father taught me the most beautiful things, and we were refugees, man. We came to America in ’94. It’s crazy how an incident like that can go on and just kind of change who you want to become. It really makes you question. Kind of like what a lot of people I feel like went through recently with COVID.

I’m sure your line of work in teaching adults in sort of directing those questions that I believe at one point we direct to ourselves, and then you obviously go through a journey of unraveling that. Which in your case, you went from 9/11, until a couple years later, you ended up what you say is firing your boss. Walk me through that. What happened in those two years that led you to go on this path of building your dream, and then educating adults, and then into real estate? Talk me through that little bit of a journey.

Launching Into Your Passion

Hugh Zaretsky: It’s funny, I just ran a training today for some of my team members on this. It was just one of those things. It’s like, okay, I didn’t know what I was passionate about, right? I was like, “Let’s go make the money. Let’s go do the things and then I’ll be happy.” And realized, I’m going down that path and I’m not happy. I was high on life. I was making more money than my parents combined. I had the apartment in a building with a swimming pool on the roof. Here in New York City, you’re living the good life, but all sudden, it’s like, “Okay, but what’s behind it? Is that really what you want to do?” I didn’t know. 

What’s cool about the book is, I lay out exercises in the book to help people find their passions as part of it, also their thoughts on money and all that. Because that’s the process that I went through. I, in essence, walk people through the process that I went through, which was then, all right, I started looking for opportunities, started looking for things, started talking with people. A friend of ours that worked in that company went off and started a very successful steak restaurant in New York City, and then we all made fun of him. Then I looked back on that like, in horror of my own self, but at that time, I didn’t know any better. He ended up having a steak restaurant in Yankee Stadium, it grew that fast. We were all like, “That’s never going to work. That’s never going to work” and there it goes.

So people said the same thing when I was like, “All right, I’m going to leave IT.” But here’s what I say to people, if it’s 70% to 80%, this is my golden rule. If you’re like, “Hey, I want to start doing this thing,” you’re never going to find the perfect opportunity. But if it’s 70% to 80% of what you want, say yes to it. Because you may not be ready for the 100% of what you want, but it’s 70%, 80%. I ended up just—funny story is, I ended up going to a college friend’s wedding. We stayed at this hotel that was very unique, and every room was different, and I didn’t understand it. You go to hotels, especially in the Northeast here, it’s like everybody has a queen-sized bed or everybody has a king-sized bed and they’re all decorated the same. This one, everything was decorated differently. It was the precursor to Airbnb, which I didn’t even know about right back then. So then, we started investigating it, college buddy of mine and I decided to start investing. We started doing that just before the hay day, and then I was like, “Okay. I need to learn how to raise capital.” I’d spoken for Wall Street analysts for Getty and show them why we need data centers and millions of dollars for that. But I’ve never said, “Hey, somebody give me a million dollars.”

I took a course and they were like, “Hey, you want to teach people around the country this?” I was like, “You can even make money doing that?” So they put me in front of more investors, and it just sort of grew from there. I always say it’s a journey. It took me two to three years to fire my boss, to go from learning nothing about real estate to being able to do that, to teaching people. Eventually, I became a continuing education instructor, which is for real estate agents, mortgage brokers, and attorneys how to think like real estate investors, because they don’t teach that in real estate agent school.

Hussein Al-Baiaty: Right, or just have the continuity to it, because there’s always something new that comes up. There’s also a sense of like accountability, motivation, inspiration, that you got to in a way. No matter what industry you’re in, you just happen to start focusing and growing the real estate aspect of your knowledge, which is profound. Then not only did you sort of master, you started teaching, and educating people, which keeps you sort of up-to-date, and practicing what you’re teaching, which I find very powerful.

Hugh Zaretsky: That’s totally true. When you’re in front of people, and you’re working with people, it continues. When it’s your passion, though, you don’t care if you’re putting in the 40, 50, 60 hours. It’s no longer like work. It’s like fun. People get up—I just got back from DC, people are like, “How can you travel all over the place and do this?” I was like, “It’s really just fun. I’m just having fun talking with people. I’m learning things. They’re learning things.” Like you say, I learned as much from my audience as they do for me. We pick up those little things.

Hussein Al-Baiaty: I love that, man. I mean, when I graduated college, I got into speaking. A friend of mine asked me to come out to their high school class, which I just love, man. There’s something about that, like giving back in a way and educating. For me, growing up, I didn’t see a whole lot of people that look like me, get up in front of the class, and teach something. Anything, really. So in my mind, I was like, “Oh, what an opportunity to be that.” My speaking skills were okay, I was just comfortable with people. But over time, like you said, I started maybe like at 30%. Then over time, I grew about 50% in the last 10 years, on how to speak, and how to develop those things. You just kind of fall in love with this thing that you start doing, and that falling in love is action. It’s action-oriented, you’re excited, which drives you to the next sort of—I call it, to the next island of knowledge, if you will, or the next oasis. That’s how you learn to grow. 

You’re right. To some people, it seems daunting that you would get up, fly, go over there, come back over here. It’s like, “How do you do this?” I don’t think it’s about “how”. Obviously, I learn this over time. I don’t think it’s about “how”. It’s your “why” intermixed with who you are. I feel like, the more you get uncomfortable, you discover more of who you are and who you want to become. So you work towards that, which I love because I feel like throughout your journey, that’s been true.

Hugh Zaretsky: I love seeing the light bulbs go off in people like, especially adults. With this, what happens is, we can go—we do one thing, and we can change generational wealth. We affect one person in their classroom. They go tell their family. They go change the way they think. It has that ripple effect all the way through, and you go from one person to millions of people being affected by it because they learned one new thing from you, they applied one new thing, or they got inspired to do one new thing.

Hussein Al-Baiaty: Yeah, man. It’s so powerful. In your new book, you talk about these sorts of stages, right? There’s the stage zero, stage one, and stage two to “push the button to launch,” right? For me, right now, a young person, I’m 36. I’m seeking ways to continue—I had a business for like 10 years, I ended up selling it. Now, I’m sort of rebuilding my personal brand. What would you say to someone like me, who’s kind of entrepreneurship, kind of looking at real estate, and thinking about it for future investments, of course. What would you say to someone like me or someone out in the audience that is thinking about sort of setting that stage, and you call it stage zero? What does that look like?

Stage Zero

Hugh Zaretsky: We saw a little bit of this from the space shuttle launches, and all of that, where the hardest thing to do is to get off the ground. That is the hardest thing. Number one, it’s the plan, and then number two—stage one is liftoff, but stage zero is your planning. Because you’re working a job, you got good income coming in, you got a family, you got all these things, you can’t just be like, “That’s it. I’m out.” And like, “I’m running off in the world.” So we got to have some steps and some planning in there. The thing that we see with a lot of people is, vision boards are great. People do a lot of, “Here’s my goal,” but what are their steps to get there? We break it down into those bite-sized steps of doing that. 

The first thing is, do you want active or passive income? I talked about for what I’ve seen is that we need both a business income or job, dependent on—somebody will just want to keep their jobs, which are perfectly fine. Your business income or job, and then you have the passive income from real estate. Because, we’ve seen it during COVID, real estate took off during COVID. But yet, some people lost their jobs, there was income coming down on the business side. In my opinion, just my humble opinion, having a business and having the real estate investing allows you to survive the ups and downs of the crashes. We know that real estate is going to crash, we know bitcoin is going to crash, we know the stock market is going to crash eventually, but nobody’s psychic, so they happen.

Laying out that plan of my active income and my passive income, and going, “Okay. Let’s design your life. Let’s design your outcome. Do you want to be able to travel?” So I break it down into steps of all right, let’s set the design. And the biggest thing in the beginning, before you leave your job or before you do the things is to make sure you line up as much funding as possible. Because one of the things that people forget is that once you go entrepreneur, you don’t have a W-2 paycheck anymore. Banks don’t want to lend to you. So you’ve got to have built everything up, that if you want to do these things, you’ve got to have these things in place. There’s lots of things. That’s why we call it stage zero, is getting lots of things in place to prepare.

First, we find your passion. What do you want to do about it? Two, we design, where’s our active income, where’s our passive income coming through, and then we prepare to test it. Some people want to go full nomad at the end, be able to travel around the world. Some people want to be snowbirds, some people want just be able to travel two weeks a month, whatever it happens to be for you the desired outcome. We got to lay out the steps, and that’s why we broke it down into the stages. Stage zero, our planning. Stage one is to get you off the ground because that’s the hardest part.

Hussein Al-Baiaty: Then finally, as you got to get off the ground—I love what you say in the book, “Once you’re in space, it only takes very small movements and adjustments to stay the course”, which I love so much because you’re 100% right. Once you’re actually out in the stratosphere, once you’re free, once your wings are flapping, you’re going. At that point, you can really start seeing things more in the future, and then you can start making those minor adjustments as you grow. I think that’s the waking up feeling excited, ready to go into the grind, or whatever you’re doing, and making it something that’s working for others and also working for you. 

I love this idea of passive and active income, of course. You want to plan, set the stage, get as ready as you can. But at some point, you have to hit that launch button. You could be 70%, 80% there like you said earlier, but you might be ready to launch then. Writing a book is incredible, so tell me more.

Photo by Pixabay from Pexels: https://www.pexels.com/photo/sea-flight-sky-earth-2163/

Ready to Launch

Hugh Zaretsky: Sometimes it happens for you, right? Like all of a sudden, something happens at your job, and you’re like you’re preparing, you’re preparing, and we had this with a couple of my students. I’ve trained over 12,000 people on this, but they were like, “All right, I’m getting ready to launch. I’m getting ready to launch,” and then something happened at their job and they’re like, “Well, I don’t want to do that.” There was either like a buyout coming or something like that. They’re like, “Sure, it just accelerates it.” Because if you didn’t build up your income part-time, which is where I have a lot of people start is, I don’t want you to fire your boss tomorrow. I want you to make sure you have financial security, you’re building yourself up the right way. But when you do, if you’re doing this four, six, eight hours a day, or four, six, eight hours a week. Then all of a sudden, you got 24 hours, you got 16 hours, like you can accelerate so much faster.

But the biggest thing is that last-minute fear that you said of actually hitting the launch button, of actually being like, “Yes, this is my decision day,” because you’re giving up that security. People are going to call you crazy for leaving what you’re doing.

Hussein Al-Baiaty: I love that, because you more or less start the book off with the idea that—I love this quote. Everything you ever wanted in life is just on the other side of fear. I really appreciate that, because in a way—I’m writing a new book around creative fears. In a way, you’re 100% right. The things that we want, the enlightenment, whatever we’re seeking, is usually surrounded by this force. Whatever we call it. Some call it fear. Some call it resistance. Some call it people’s perspectives on you. Whatever it is, but it’s there. It’s a hurdle that you have to understand and overcome. A lot of times—you can correct me if I’m wrong. A lot of times, it’s just us in our way. If you’re working with a coach, if you’re working with someone like you, where you can help me—sort of the idea is, once you can help me understand that, look, what you’re feeling right now is a fear, you’re ready, you’re set-up, you put the work in, you did the two years of preparation, you did all those things. But sometimes we just need that sort of words of courage, words of momentum to get that push. Sometimes it comes from within, and I feel like sometimes it comes from people like yourself. Mentors, coaches, the people that we love. That little bit of encouragement goes a long way. I know it did for me, but how did it happen for you? What was that moment of like, “All right. I feel like I can overcome this fear or hurdle.” 

Hugh Zaretsky: You nailed it. That’s like one of the biggest things. People get right there, and then it’s like, “Ugh!” I’ll always say, “You got to get out of your head and into your body. Because we just think about it, think about it, think about it. But if we just start taking some action, like it changes the chemicals in our body, it changes our thought process, just because we took an action towards something. Also, those fears sort of dissipate. But for me, the reality was, I had that fear. The crazy thing is, I’ve always worked two jobs, I’ve always had that hustle in me. I was working my IT job during the day, and then I had so much PTO. I take like Fridays off, I’d fly around the country, and I trained for three days, and I’d fly right back to work.

I finally did the math, and I was like, “I’m making more money on the weekends than I am during the week, and I can free that up to start investing in real estate.” The thing that’s usually when we hit that launch button, then all of a sudden, like life really test you. Because they’re like, “Are you serious about this? Are you really serious? Are you really going to do this?” I gave my notice at my job, and I wanted to really make sure my team was taken care of. I actually did a four weeks’ notice, because I ran all of North America. We had LA, Seattle, New York. I was like, “All right, this will give them time. I’ll help find a good boss for my team, all of the things.” Then the next day, my appendix went and I’ve never had issues, but like I never did—knock on wood—I never got sick. I never had any of those things. But all of a sudden, it was just like, I got an excruciating pain in the morning. By that evening, at 2:00 AM, they removed my appendix and it was just my body being like, “You run us too hard, working your job, and doing this, no breaks.” Now, since you said it, everything tends to relax a little bit, and it was like, “Oh!” Now you’re going to do that, right? It was like, “All right. Can I really go make it happen now?” That just gave me the extra driving force.

Hussein Al-Baiaty: Yeah, it’s so interesting. Resilience, right? I feel like my whole life was built on two things, art and the ideas of resilience, that I feel like my father and my brothers like in a way showed me. The idea is—

Hugh Zaretsky: Coming through the refugee camp, right? I mean, you had to have resilience to do that, right?

Hussein Al-Baiaty: Yeah. Oh, man. Looking back, and that’s when I go and share my story around. I love that you’re like, “I take the Friday, Saturday, Sunday, and I travel.” It’s funny because that’s literally what I do. In a lot of ways, I’ve had to really balance myself out, because I love this work with Scribe, and I also love what I’m doing. But I’m kind of building up the momentum to one day in the future when I have enough X, Y, and Z, kind of like what you’re saying, right? Get your things in a row, make sure you have enough funding, all these beautiful things, and then go off and launch. I just love that because it really fits my narrative. To me, I feel like I’m one of your audience members if you will. So, I love that, man. We talked about, writing a book, that’s fear.

Anything that happens to you physically, mentally, it’s like, now, it’s those moments. When you’re met with those moments, you’re also met with a version of yourself, I feel like, an elevated version of yourself. In that specific moment, it may not feel like it. But in a weird way, when you look back, and I’m sure you can relate to this. When you look back, there are points in time in that timeline where you’re like, “Oh man, I can point to that moment right there, where a new version of me was birthed.” I’m sure you can point to those.

Hugh Zaretsky: I did that with this book. Yeah. Like we all have stories in our head, and we all label ourselves. I even joked about this in the book. Some people think they’re good at math, or some people think they’re bad at math, or they’re good at English, and not good at English. I always had this story in my head, like “I should have written this book 16 years ago.” But I had a story in my head that I can’t spell, and I can’t do grammar. 

Hussein Al-Baiaty: Yes, me too.

Hugh Zaretsky: I always joke because I send out these emails to my team, there’s thousands of them across the country, and it will always be like, “Oh, you spelled this wrong. Oh, you do this.” I’m like, “Ah! You could figure it out. Like it’s close enough, you’d figured out the word.” That was my big joke with my team. In fun, my mom was an English teacher. My dad was a math and social studies teacher, my mom’s an English teacher. I was like, “Well, I follow my dad where I can run numbers, and that really helps in real estate.” But all you need to be able to do is add, subtract, multiply, and division. It’s not like huge calculations. You don’t need calculus or anything. But on the English side, me and the Oxford comma, don’t get along. Even [as] I wrote the book, and then I was holding back. Three people told me I had to go write the book, so I wrote the book. Then once I gave myself permission to write, I wrote like 90,000 words, and you guys only want 50,000 or 60,000 words, and I’m at 90,000. So now I have to go trim it back, and then fear came in again when it was to editing.

I was like, “All right. I edited it down. But oh, is it still right or these words?” I had my mom, I had you guys at Scribe. I had like four different editors review it because I was so fearful it was wrong, all of those things. This changed me to where I have to even coach myself and say, “I’m learning how to spell better, and my grammar is getting better” and it has, a thousand percent better. Now, I only get one or two spelling words, and people are like, “Oh, it was great this time, no misspellings.” I’m like, “Awesome”. Like, three years ago, I wasn’t there, but we all grow, and we all have those fears and those stories in our head. So we just had to suck it up and change.

Hussein Al-Baiaty: And change, you’re 100% right. I think that, for me personally, what I’ve realized in myself and other people is, the biggest change we initially have to make right is as one, is our thought process. The first and most important thing that we have to change our thought process, which obviously changes our actions, our habits, and all those kinds, and it image changes the people around us, our environments, and sort of that ripple effect really begins with just this urge to want to change. But change is met with probably your biggest fear, and your biggest fear in this scenario, writing a book, which was the same thing for me, bro. I’ve been an artist my whole life, so forget English, forget math man. I’ve been drawing and painting. You know what I mean? 

So like learning those things was crucial to my growth. But every time I said, “You know what?” I walked into Scribe, just like you I’m like, “Oh my God.” My biggest fear is misspellings, and—people are going to make fun of me because this is ridiculous. The most powerful thing that Emily, my coach at the time, she said, “It’s not about that. Everything about that, we can help you with. It’s, can you write your story? Just write your story. You’ve been telling it for 10, 15 years. Can you write it out?” That just in a way helped remove the weight of that fear or move around it. I can navigate it. I can understand it now. Once you sit with yourself and just try to understand what that fear is, you’ll learn that it has a weakness, or two, or three and that you overcome those weaknesses. That’s what—

Hugh Zaretsky: Guess what, there’s software, and stuff like that, and programming.

Hussein Al-Baiaty: Yeah, right. Now, there’s—

Hugh Zaretsky: You don’t have to do that. You can dictate, you could type, like all these things that yes, we didn’t have in the past. But now—because I had the same thing from Emily and Howell, they were like, “Hey, just get it out there, and we can fix all that stuff. That’s all fixable. We can’t fix what’s in your head if you can’t get it out.” I had to give myself permission to write. It’s so funny, once I did, I gave myself permission to write, some I did it. Every time I was on an airplane flying around the country, all I wanted to do is write. I didn’t want to work on any of my real estate deals. I didn’t want to do anything, I’ve given myself permission, and I wrote out every story, everything, and they were like, “This is too much.”

Hussein Al-Baiaty: Yeah, right? It gets so addicting. 

Hugh Zaretsky: I was like, “Well, that’s what you told me to do.”

Hussein Al-Baiaty: Yeah. You’re 100% right. In a way, it sucked you in. It’s like a vortex. Because a person like you who’s gone through so many things, you realize that the spelling—and you told yourself a story as to why you shouldn’t do this. But you know, deep down inside, especially when everybody else is telling you, you should do it, they usually do it. They usually take that chance, right. But the idea of you giving yourself permission is so—it sucks the air out of the room, to where you can refresh it and be like, “Okay, I’m going to do this.” And you did it, and you tackled it.

Congratulations on your first book. I’m sure there’s going to be many more down the line. I feel like you have such an amazing story, and your urge, that drive to really help others align with themselves, their purpose, who they want to become. Passive income, active income, all that good stuff that helps you—gives you that sense of freedom to help yourself, your children, whatever it may be to build wealth. It’s so powerful, but it all originates with how you want to see yourself and where you want to go. You highlight the stages for us in your amazing new book. With all that being said, if there’s one thing that you would want someone reading your book to take away, to walk away with, what would that thing be?

Hugh Zaretsky: Well, first, like you and I had with writing, people have that with real estate, or math, or whatever it is. We talk about that, or being an entrepreneur, or whatever that story is in their head, and just given them the permission to change and the permission to suck. One of the things is, whenever we try something new, we’re going to be bad at it. We’re going to be bad at it. But as adults, we want to be great at everything, and you’re not going to be. I always say, “Give yourself permission to suck and then you’ll get better.” Everybody knows the 1% rule, 1% better every day, all those things happen. But most people are like the elephant tied to the pole. They could pull that pole out of the ground, but they’ve built that story up so big in their head, they won’t. 

Walking you through the path, and that’s why I actually put lots of exercises in the book because I want you guys to actually do the exercise. When you do the exercises, in the process, it almost creates a blueprint plan for success for you. Because it asks you all the questions that you really should be asking yourselves, but most people don’t know what to ask themselves. Or they take a surface level what I call a BS answer. It’s a surface level BS. I want more money. I want more time. I want more freedom. Awesome. Everybody in the world wants that. But how are you going to do it, and what’s going to keep you going when it’s not. 

There is a blue print plan for success in the book. At the end of every chapter, there’s questions. If you do the exercises—and we even have it on a website where you guys can go in, enter the information, and then at the end of it, you better like print out a report, so you can see all your answers, and you could see your plan. So it really starts to lay that out for you. That is the biggest thing, in my opinion, is to actually do the plan, create the plan, run that through, and be able to see what you’re really passionate about, if you don’t already know. If you know, it’s awesome, you just jump right in and do it as well.

Hussein Al-Baiaty: I love that so much. I mean, I think all of us can learn the idea and can always do this one thing, which is make a plan and work the plan, rearrange it, move it around, whatever it is. But the idea is, it all starts with changing your thoughts, which is what your book is all about, shifting those ideas, and then taking actionable steps on how to do that, which I love so much. Hugh, I learned so much today. Thank you for your stories, your experiences. I’m sure, I know I learned a lot. I know our audience hopefully learned a few things. The Launch Button: Start Here to Fire Your Boss, Pursue Your Passions Full-Time, and Build the Life of Your Dreams. The book is out now. Go get it. Besides checking out the book, where can people find you, Hugh?

Hugh Zaretsky: Sure. There are a couple of different places, hughzaretsky.com. My first name, last name .com. Right there, you’ll see some of the live events we do around the country. Depending on when you guys get this, when we travel around doing some live events, you can hook up there. We do also online events for people to further this training. Then, just the steps that you need, and the exercises in the book are going to lay that out for you, and you always have the ability to—there are a couple of things I do in there. One of the things you talked about, is we give you the ability to have what we call an ‘I’m ready to quit call.’ I actually call it something else in the book, but I don’t know if we didn’t say it on here. But it’s that, give me a call when you’re ready to quit. I’ve turned so many people around because we all hit that frustration point, but sometimes, you just need that coach, or that mentor, or that person to be like, “Hey! Why are you really doing this? Yeah, it sucks now, but will the future be better?” Just for purchasing the book, you’ll get access to that for free.

Hussein Al-Baiaty: Wow! love that so much. It’s very powerful. Are you on LinkedIn by any chance?

Hugh Zaretsky: I’m on LinkedIn, you can find me on Instagram @hughzwealth. Same on Facebook for the speaker page and the training page. We got LinkedIn, we’ve got that, and all the different things. I appreciate the time here today.

Hussein Al-Baiaty: Yeah, and thank you so much. 

Hugh Zaretsky: The exercises will be at www.thelaunchbutton.net, and you’ll be able to get that, and as well as some additional information.

Hussein Al-Baiaty: Love it. Hey, perfect. Thank you so much for coming on the show today, literally dropping gold and gems everywhere. Like I said, I learned so much. Thanks for coming on today.

Hugh Zaretsky: No problem. Thank you for having me, and I appreciate learning more about you. and your story, and I can’t wait to hear about your next book coming out.

Hussein Al-Baiaty: Thank you.