My doctor told me I was diagnosed with multiple autoimmune diseases and it's unknown if we can figure it out. I was extremely ill. I was 19 years old. I was 107 pounds and I looked as sickly as anybody's ever looked. In 2018, I had a liver biopsy and after seeing multiple specialists, nobody knew what was going on. Still, I ended up at Cedar Sinai Hospital and the doctor sat me down. I sat right next to my mom and he said, are you sure that you want him in here when I tell you this? And my heart, my heart sunk. My mom's heart sunk and she started crying. The doctor diagnosed me with a disease called primary biliary cirrhosis. He told me not to Google it. So the first thing that I did was Google it. The average lifespan of somebody with primary biliary cirrhosis after they're diagnosed is 10 years to 17 years. So imagine being 19 years old and being told that you have 10 to 17 years to live. At this point in my life, I only saw three options. Number one, take the 20 plus medications that all the doctors were telling me to take. Number two, go the natural route and try and heal my body naturally. Or number three, drink and drug myself to death and just expedite the process. I chose route number three for a year. I just drank every single day, found myself doing drugs and I did not want to be here because I could not deal with the idea of mortality. I could not deal with the fact that I knew basically when I was going to die. By July of 2019, I was at an all-time low, mentally, physically, spiritually broken. I just recently started dating my ex-girlfriend and we planned a trip to Pismo Beach, California. We showed up at this hotel. I didn't have any money at the time, so we got this dingy hotel that was nowhere near the water and the TV barely worked. There was no the channels weren't working and they had a DVD player in there. So I walked downstairs in the evening and I asked them if they had any DVDs for rent. They only had one DVD for rent. This DVD was The Secret Life of Walter Mitty, 2013 movie starring Ben Stiller. Little did I know that at this little dingy hotel with this movie at this time of my life, this was going to be the day that completely changed the trajectory of my life forever. So I grabbed the movie, I run back upstairs, plug it in, and before the credits can even start rolling, my girlfriend's already asleep. So I'm up watching this movie alone. Now, if you don't know anything about this movie, The Secret Life of Walter Mitty, it's about a guy named Walter Mitty. He works at Life Magazine. He is this guy that lives a very shitty, boring, mundane life. Life Magazine has a new management team that comes in and they say, no more physical copies, we're only going digital. So we're going to make one more issue of this magazine and we need the cover photo. They receive a roll of seven photos or 12 photos, something like that, from their best photographer ever and he makes a note and says, photo number 12 is the most important and best photo I've ever taken. This needs to be the cover photo. So Walter can't find this photo. Everybody's freaking out and one other part that I forgot to mention is during this really mundane boring life, Walter Mitty has this amazing imagination. Every time he sees like a photo of like Mount Everest, he can see himself hiking Mount Everest. Every time he's in an elevator, he turns into some ninja fight. It's kind of this like cheesy childish thing. But what happens is this, he goes on this long adventure, long story short, goes on this adventure trying to track down this photo and he finally finds the photo in his wallet at the end of the movie, spoiler alert. What he learns along this journey as he goes to Iceland and tracks him down and jumps out of a helicopter and goes down a volcano and goes skateboarding and meets these new people and finds the love of his life is he's reconnected with purpose. He found his fucking purpose in life, which is to travel the world, experience things, build relationships. All this work he was doing for all these years was for nothing. It was a life with no purpose. Why did I just tell you this story about The Secret Life of Walter Mitty and about me being sick for all of those years? That night, I sat in that bed and I balled until midnight. I probably cried for two hours. Some of it was tears of sadness and what the fuck am I doing with my life? And then it turned into tears of joy because I knew that that movie related with me. I knew that Ben Stiller playing that character triggered something in me to remember who I am as a person. Can I look at this situation that I'm in and say, this is the worst situation that's ever happening happened to me? Or can I look at it and say, this is the best thing that's ever happened to me? Me being sick, me not knowing how long I'm going to live, me me hitting rock bottom. You know what's amazing about it is the next couple of years after that day, I became the healthiest person the healthiest that I've ever been. Naturally, no drugs, completely changed my body, my health, my mental health. I did neurofeedback therapy, trained my brain, completely changed my diet to a whole food diet, no processed foods. I was able to eliminate all these issues with my autoimmune diseases. Even better, I got a second lease on life. I found out that I didn't have this primary biliary cirrhosis. It was a misdiagnosis. I still have a liver disease, but it's not PBC. I'm not going to die. I have a second fucking lease on life. So when you see me on here talking and building and going for everything because I want it so fucking bad, I want I wanted to build a seven-figure business and I did it. By 2020, 2021, I was a millionaire. Two years after that, I was I'd made tens of millions of dollars. I bought a hotel. I built and bought the Airbnbs. I built these e-learning companies, these education companies that have made millions of dollars. I want it all and not in a negative way, in a very you don't need to feel embarrassed about wanting all of it. I want health, I want real relationships, I want friends, I want family, I want experiences, I want money. I'm not embarrassed to say it. I want to fucking build businesses in public. I want to create, I want to inspire you guys. I want abundance and I got a second opportunity at life and I hit my rock bottom and that one movie, that one movie with Ben Stiller, The Secret Life of Walter Mitty, was the catalyst that I needed to dramatically change the trajectory of my life forever.
