Unlock Your Potential: 7 Keys to Overcoming Adversity in Life

Mike Hambright (00:00.974)
Hey guys, welcome back to the show. I’m here today with Linda McKissack. We’re gonna be talking about, she has an amazing career, but in her words she just said, I’m an average person. I just took a leap of faith and knew that life was about becoming something bigger than what I had at the time, and it’s this journey, right? And so we’re gonna talk about a lot of those things today, like how to scale your business, how to become something bigger than you are, how to have more impact than you’re having in your life today. And I guarantee that everyone listening to this, it’ll resonate that.

you can do all of these things. Neither one of us have any superpowers, but we’re gonna talk about how basically average people can have way above average results if you just kind of follow a proven process and honestly believe in yourself a little bit. So Linda, welcome to the show.

Linda Mckissack (00:42.83)
Yeah. I’m happy to be here. Good to see, be with you again, Mike.

Mike Hambright (00:47.31)
Yeah, it’s funny, like I said, I’ve been podcasting for 13 years now and you were on the show. I didn’t go look it up, but you were on a long time ago and excited to kind of have you back even though we’re damn near neighbors. We live about 20 minutes apart. So yeah. So you have a lot of things going on. Maybe rather than me try to explain those things, because I’m sure I’m going to miss the boat. Tell us a little bit about your rich background.

Linda Mckissack (00:57.326)
Okay.

Linda Mckissack (01:03.308)
Yeah, we are, we are.

Mike Hambright (01:16.544)
of how you got to where you are today.

Linda Mckissack (01:16.642)
Yeah. Yeah. Well, my rich background started out very poor, growing up poor, but also really honestly, I think the catalyst for us to kind of wake up, which is when most people wake up, honestly, Mike is when it gradually and suddenly happens in your life. And that’s what happened to us in the late eighties, early nineties. I always like to say I was in my mid twenties and honestly didn’t even know what the world economy meant, much less was it good or bad, but

Mike Hambright (01:21.315)
Yeah, me too.

Linda Mckissack (01:46.496)
I knew something was not right in our house because Jimmy, who was an entrepreneur who owned restaurants and nightclubs in Texas, had one of the worst crashes it’s ever had and never had since was happening at that time. And so we wound up having to sell a restaurant that he owned for $600,000 less than we owed against it. And so I always say the worst thing that happens to you in life can be the best thing that ever happens to you. I hope most people don’t.

get to that fork in the road to wake up though, but that was a wake up call for us that just because you may have cashflow, good money coming in, whether a job or a business, it doesn’t make you wealthy, it doesn’t create freedom and life will give you some challenges if you live long enough. And so how do you be prepared for those and turn them into where you are either the sort of the victim of it, but you’re actually the, there’s opportunity in it. And so.

That’s where we found ourselves. And I always say it was the greatest thing ever happened to us. Not at the time. It was very stressful. There was lots of tension, lots of fights about money and all those things. But when we woke up and thought, well, the only thing we can do is learn from this and figure out. And we found Robert Kiyosaki’s book, which I’m sure a lot of your listeners have found over the years, Cash Flow Quadrant. And that really explained to us why we went through the situation we went through is because all of our money was coming from the left side.

Mike Hambright (02:59.81)
Yep.

Linda Mckissack (03:07.766)
and that means you’re either an employee or self-employed person and we were both self-employed or he was self-employed and then we needed to figure out over the next 10, 20, 30 years how do we get money coming in from that right side which is businesses or investments making you money and so that was the catalyst that put me into the real estate sales business and to be honest with you I’d never made more than minimum wage up until that point unless I waitressed or bartended at my husband’s nightclubs and could get some tips.

Mike Hambright (03:07.77)
Yeah.

Linda Mckissack (03:36.532)
And so it was a, honestly, I had no idea. I’d never even lived in a home that you owned growing up. So I didn’t even know what realtors did, but you know, anything sounded good in that mess we were in. So jumped into real estate, started making some pretty decent cashflow and never forgot the pain of where we were because we were not building wealth. We were just building cashflow.

Mike Hambright (04:01.37)
Yep, yep.

Linda Mckissack (04:01.976)
So that’s kind of put us in. So our first investment, quite honestly, we made a little plan to buy 20 houses, get them free and clear over a 20 year period and have about 250,000 coming in passively. We kind of called it our freedom number. We’ve kind of way surpassed that now, but that’s kind of was our first goal and found a property pretty quickly, which I think happens honestly, Mike, if people just get in the game. First, you can’t see the opportunities and then you can’t not see the opportunities.

once you’ve really committed and we were committed. And so, of course, the problem with our being committed as early as we were is we didn’t still didn’t have the money. We were still climbing out of the debt. So had to go to a builder friend of mine and ask him, would he partner with us? And he said, yes. And so we did that on the next three houses total, flipped the first one, kept the other two. The one we still have, we’ve since split up our partner and let him pick which one he wanted. But the one we kept now pays us more than Jimmy’s Social Security.

that he gets after working for 40 something years. So that kind of catapulted us into that. We did single family homes. We wrote the book Hold, How to Find, Buy and Rent Houses to Build Wealth and just kept building that single family portfolio. And then got an opportunity to get into the nightly rental business and got into that in Branson, Missouri, built up a big portfolio there. And then somewhere along the way we were also, you

Mike Hambright (05:02.352)
you

Linda Mckissack (05:28.556)
becoming top sales people. So that got someone’s attention to give me an opportunity inside Keller Williams, which was to own a region, which was not in the state I lived in. So I had to get on a plane to come to Ohio, Indiana, Kentucky and build that thing. But that was a great opportunity. And we just kept taking the money, Mike, from any cashflow business that we were making and putting it back into assets. we never lived off any of those investment properties money. We still don’t.

Mike Hambright (05:51.6)
Yeah, that’s great.

Linda Mckissack (05:58.878)
and we just kept multiplying them into more more assets. So we went into vacation rentals, some commercial buildings, and we wound up with a little property management company up in Branson because we needed to manage our own properties plus a few other people. And for the newest thing we’ve done actually recently is, and we own four KELOAMS franchises, we have wound up buying some of those. And then we actually just.

purchase our RV park, we know not a lot about, but we’re learning. Best way to learn is to get in action. You will learn real fast. Yeah, yeah. So that’s kind of it in a nutshell. There’s a few other things, but that’s the main thing as far as the message. Yeah.

Mike Hambright (06:31.258)
Jump in the fire. Yeah. Yeah.

Mike Hambright (06:37.658)
That’s the high level stuff. Linda, a couple of the things that, and know you see this too, that, I’m hoping that we can inspire some folks today. Cause two things that are common human nature, which I don’t like are that people fail and they quit, right? And you gotta fail forward. You gotta kind of get up and dust yourself off. And cause it’s amazing. Like everything we do, I’ll say that, I’ll say that probably nothing that I do now in my career, probably nothing that you do in your career has really gotten easier. It’s just your tolerance for pain maybe and the knowledge you learn for

Linda Mckissack (06:50.665)
yeah.

Linda Mckissack (07:06.275)
Yeah.

Mike Hambright (07:07.632)
how to navigate those waters. It’s still just as hard to do most of the stuff that we do now, but yeah.

Linda Mckissack (07:14.114)
Well, if it’s not hard, Mike, it’s the wrong thing. Because honestly, when I look back, I was interviewed in 10x is easier than 2x. the best thing you can ever do is look back on your progress. Because more than likely, you’ve already 10x’d somewhere else in your life, but you’ve forgotten it, right? So you can only see progress looking backwards. So having to do that to get ready for my section in that book, it was really beneficial to me to realize that I had actually already 10x’d so many times. But the problem is,

Mike Hambright (07:17.731)
Right.

Mike Hambright (07:24.378)
Yeah.

Linda Mckissack (07:43.638)
When you 10x, you have to make a commitment that’s so scary that it drops you into what Dan Sullivan would call the courage category and nobody likes to be there because it’s uncomfortable. And the reason it takes courage is because you really don’t know how you’re going to do what you just said you would do, right? If you keep committing to things that you already know how to do, you’re only going to 2x your life. You’re not going to 10x it, right? So once you understand that that’s a pattern you should be looking for, because if you don’t,

you go to a terrible place that we’re all, you know, have gone before and try to stay out of and it’s called complacency. And to be honest with you, because that is so uncomfortable when you make those commitments that are kind of scary and take courage, you want to get out of it as soon as possible, which is great. That’s why you go figure it out. But then when you go to complacency, it’s so warm and cozy. You just want to sit there. But really, you should go find that next big scary commitment immediately.

And you’re right, it doesn’t necessarily get easier in the fact that it takes courage, but you do get smarter and you do learn from every success and mostly from every failure that you make along the way. So you don’t do so much of that as you go along. But know it. mean, honestly, even doing like this, I just told you we just did this RV park. We don’t have a clue what we’re doing. We’re learning real fast because we got our money on the line.

And see, that’s what takes courage is a commitment that says, got my money online. I got to figure this out real fast. And you talked about people failing and quitting. When people are afraid of failing, they will not start. Or they’ll start one time and they’ll quit if they fail. Whereas if they’re afraid of failure, they know themselves well enough that if I make that commitment, I’m going to be so afraid of failure, I’m going to figure this out.

Mike Hambright (09:06.02)
right?

Linda Mckissack (09:31.308)
And you want to move to that place where you’re just, I’m more afraid of the failure than I am of failing. Because failing keeps me from starting, failure keeps me in the game, keeps me until I figure it out.

Mike Hambright (09:41.572)
Yeah, failure does not have to be final. It’s only final if you quit. Yeah. Yeah.

Linda Mckissack (09:44.302)
Yeah, yeah, and yeah, for sure.

Mike Hambright (09:48.078)
So I know they profiled you in 10X is easier than 2X, which is a great book by the way. Kind of obviously taken, caught fire a little bit over the past couple of years in the entrepreneurial space for sure. And so let’s talk about this idea that bigger is easier. Because you kind of mentioned the cashflow quadrant as well with Robert Kiyosaki and I talk about this all the time. There’s a ton of people that get stuck in that self-employed box, that lower left box. And they might have a good job.

Linda Mckissack (10:05.71)
Yeah.

Linda Mckissack (10:15.758)
Mm-hmm.

Mike Hambright (10:18.002)
They’re not really a business owner, the business owns them, right? But they might be making more income than they made when they had a W-2 job, if they ever had one, but you’re limited by your own capacity, right? And so a lot of people get stuck there and then they just get kind of complacent. And so, you know, to really be a business owner and have the freedoms and all the things you want, you’ve got to scale yourself out of that. there’s, know, you’re kind of like here and you want to get here and it’s just how do you bridge that gap, right? A lot of people just get stuck. But let’s talk

about why bigger is easier ultimately.

Linda Mckissack (10:50.926)
Well, I think bigger number one forces you to look for answers that smaller doesn’t force you to look for, right? If I make a big commitment, well, just the RV park is a perfect example. That’s a pretty big commitment, you know, a couple million dollar investment in something we’ve never done before, right? But I know this pattern so well that I know how to go find the who’s that do know the how, right?

And I think that’s the other thing. So I think when you make big commitments to the courage forces you to look for answers that you wouldn’t normally look for. Number two, who’s usually have to be involved, whether it’s even just to who that you go find that’s already done this. You wouldn’t believe the phone calls I’ve already made to people that I’ve heard through the grapevine that they do RV parks. They’re on my dial, speed dial for an appointment, right? We’re gonna be talking to those people. Because I’ve learned that’s the shortcut. That’s a form of leverage. And if I want leverage, I gotta find the…

answers the ideas, the people that know those. So who’s have to be involved. Sometimes it’s a who that helps you and some definitely and then sometimes it’s a who that knows the answers, right? And I can get to that person. And then I think it forces you to let go. I think what keeps us in the small that we tend to be in or stay in at any point in our life is not letting go of something.

and you have to let go. I always say when your future is bright enough, you’ll let go of where you are and go to that brighter future. But if, you know, I think Ben Hardy says it in a couple of his things, but he says the system is designed to protect the system. Meaning, you’re gonna, it’s gonna be, we were just coaching a mega team earlier and you you’re saying, you know, now that I made this decision, it’s like the.

I’m getting so busy I don’t have time to do it. It’s like, yeah, that’s the system protecting the system, right? So you have to, when you make a bigger commitment or you commit to things, have to, you can’t keep doing the same daily things that you’re doing right now. They won’t get you there. So you have to let go of some things that might be comfortable for you or that you might feel secure in, but they’re not gonna get you to the bigger dreams and the bigger goals and the bigger life that you say you want, right? So.

Linda Mckissack (13:07.404)
I think it kind of works in a fashion that forces you to let go of things that you should be letting go of. It forces you to find who’s that are bigger who’s that know more or that can help you. And that courage forces you to ask questions and get answers that you wouldn’t normally be asking or try to get.

Mike Hambright (13:26.414)
Right, right. You said something before we started recording here that I can’t get out of my head here, and you just kind of alluded to it, is that life is about becoming something bigger than you are today.

Linda Mckissack (13:35.394)
Mm.

Well, know, Mike, you and I talked about this earlier. The reason we enjoy talking to each other is because we feel like we’re talking to each other. Right. And because we’re so odd to the rest of the world, we kind of all gravitate together, either at your mastermind or, you know, some things that we do and stuff. I think that what was happening is one day I was having a really rough time because on one side I was getting my family members who, not my immediate family, but…

Mike Hambright (13:43.819)
Right.

Linda Mckissack (14:05.206)
you know, my sister actually, who is total opposite of me. She wants the same schedule every day, no extra risk, all those things, right? She was not understanding why do you always have to go try to achieve more? You know, why can’t you just, you know, be happy where you are, which is what everybody loves to say, which is the phrase I hate, right? I’m happy where I’m at while I’m going where I wanna go, right?

Mike Hambright (14:26.724)
Why don’t she be boring, more boring like me? That’s what we hear. Right.

Linda Mckissack (14:28.782)
Yeah, whatever. mean, thank God though, because now we make a great team because she does all the things that I don’t like to do. But I understand to her, it was not understandable, right? If you’ve ever read Jeff Wilkinson’s book, Dream Giver, it explains that, you know, a guy living in the land of ordinary who wanted to be somebody, but there was all these naysayers. And sometimes the naysayers are the people that you’re closest to. I find sometimes it’s a spouse. One of them wants to invest and the other doesn’t want to. So they’re, you know, they’re

coming from their own fears. And so, I was getting that on one side and then on the other side as I was trying to recruit people to want more for their life, they were saying, well, I’m happy where I’m at, right? And I was so stuck. And so, I always have a coach and so I reached out to my coach and it was actually Gary Keller. And I said to him, I said, help me, I know there’s an answer to this, but I can’t see the forest for the trees. I’m just wired this way, so help me understand.

why everybody’s not wired this way, first of all. And he said something that was so profound to me that I’ve just, I’ve used it now kind of as wind beneath my wings because he said, Linda, life is about becoming. And the way that you become is you get up every day and you go back out in the world and you see what else it is you can achieve. Sports teams don’t win one Superbowl and go back and do nothing. They go back out on the field and they see who else they can become. And when you think about it like that,

When you stop thinking about life in 80 years or 90 years or 100 years and you think about it in the form of distance and who I can become, changes everything. See, I’m a different person today than the person that was scared to death when we were $600,000 in debt. Totally different. That is more valuable than all the money in the world. Don’t get me wrong, the money’s been nice and I’ve had no money and lots of money and I like lots of money because it gives you options.

Mike Hambright (16:25.625)
All right.

Linda Mckissack (16:26.794)
And John Maxwell says, you can’t be outrageously generous if you’re broke. And I totally agree with that. So, but I think, you know, when you change your whole paradigm that we’re more spiritual beings here having a human experience. I think it’s our ego, Mike, that talks people out of stuff. It’s my, I know it’s my ego that does. If I listen to my intuition and I’m a faith-based person. So I think mine comes from the spirit. That’s where it to me, intuition comes from. But if I listen to that.

I am great. It’s the minute my head starts talking from ego, like, why do you think you should do that? You don’t even know how to do that. What are all the things are that come in our head? That’s why I think Mel Robbins 5, 4, 3, 2, 1 thing works, because it allows people to take action before they can let that thinking, which is the ego, start talking to them. So it helped me to understand that I wasn’t totally abnormal like most people thought, and I thought most of the time, right?

that really that’s the way life should be. We should go out there. I don’t wanna skid into the pearly gates and go, good Lord, Linda, you could have became this, this, and this, or you could have served this many more people by what you tried and learned and all those things. And so I think when we change our mindset around it, then we stop being attached to outcomes and we look for the journey that’s gonna get us to become who all we can become.

Mike Hambright (17:51.086)
Yeah, that’s great. I say a very similar thing all the time. Like, I don’t want to be on my deathbed and lay there thinking about all the regrets I have or the things that I could have done, but I didn’t do, right?

Linda Mckissack (18:00.142)
Yeah, so true. You know, they say in Bonnie Wears Five Regrets of the Dying, that is their number one regret is not living a life true to themselves. And I don’t think you can know what life, a true life is to yourself is without going out and learning and growing and failing and succeeding and all of those things. So I think that, and there is a great story by Bruce Wilkinson called The Warehouse. I botched it up for years, but it technically just basically says the guy goes to heaven and

He’s being shown around by St. Peter and as they round the corner there’s always this huge warehouse that has something in it and nobody, it’s so big everywhere they go there it is and he finally talks St. Peter into letting him into the warehouse and when he gets in there there’s nothing but unopened boxes and he goes what in the world are all of these unopened boxes and he said these are all the blessings that were meant for people but they never opened the gift and I always think about that.

Mike Hambright (18:55.844)
That one.

Linda Mckissack (18:55.98)
I don’t want to get to the end and have all the, I want no boxes if at all possible. I want to open them all.

Mike Hambright (19:00.056)
Right, yeah. Talk a little bit about living a life of focusing on impact and impacting others and leaving a legacy and things like that because I have a feeling like, I say this all the time, like I’m the easiest, I’m the worst at letting myself down. But when I tie my goals to impacting other people, when I tie my goals to impacting things, like I’ll lay in bed all night long thinking about how I might’ve let somebody, if I worrying about letting somebody else down. But.

Linda Mckissack (19:07.554)
Yeah.

Linda Mckissack (19:18.154)
Absolutely. Yeah.

Mike Hambright (19:29.52)
because it’s easy to get content, right? But if it’s other people, the last thing I’m gonna do is ever disappoint somebody else, right? Talk about kind of tying your goals to that.

Linda Mckissack (19:39.096)
Yeah. Well, I have a saying that says if I was gonna do it, I would have already. So the minute I say that, that’s my clue that I need to find a system or something that gets me to do it, right? I’m like you, I’m super high responsible on strength finders. So one of the things that I know that works for me is to commit to another person. If I commit to you, Mike, I’m gonna make sure it gets done, right?

So I think all of us have to stop thinking that you or I or anybody else has more willpower or more anything. We really don’t. What we’ve been able to do is tie it to something that’s a motivator for us to get it done, right? And so I’ve just learned to do that. I just say to myself, Linda, if you were gonna do that, you would have already, how could you, if it’s super important, how do I get myself to do it? Or how do I get it done, one or the other? And I think you talked about serving other people.

I truly believe that we’re all here to go on a journey and we get to decide how big or whatever that journey looks like. But we’re there, we’re here to go on it so that we can go back and get other people who want to go on it or destined to go on it. So I think all of us are here to serve people, right? I don’t think I’ve given, been given all my weird things that happened to me in my life just for me. I think they’re there for me to serve and help other people.

And so once you kind of think about it like that also, it kind of gives you little higher obligation to learn and try and grow as much as you can so that you can go back and serve others with it.

Mike Hambright (21:15.696)
Yeah.

That’s great. And I know that, you know, you, you, you do a lot of coaching and mentoring people. do a lot of coaching and mentoring people. We hire coaches to mentor us. Like you kind of are constantly trying to climb that ladder of life. Right. So talk about, you know, for folks that are out there that, you know, on some level, you just need to kind of have like one way to know what’s possible is to surround yourself with other people that are already doing it or that have done it or that if sometimes they’re even a step behind you, but they failed.

Linda Mckissack (21:26.114)
Yeah.

Linda Mckissack (21:43.342)
Uh huh. Uh huh.

Mike Hambright (21:48.414)
and they’ve kind of climbed the learning curve in certain, I mean life is not all about business success, it’s about health success, relationships, there’s a lot of things that would make you a success, it’s not just all business success, right? But just talk about the, I guess kind of this courage to believe what’s possible by surrounding yourself with others that have proven that it’s possible.

Linda Mckissack (22:07.788)
Yeah, well that’s always been a big motivator for me because I think sometimes we can only see what we can see. So I need to get around people who see farther. If they see farther and I stand on their shoulders, I’m going to see farther, right? So I think that’s a secret weapon that probably most of us have is to get around other people that might give me an idea or something they say might give me an idea of something.

I’ve never even entertained before at all. And then that’s kind of exciting, because I think as an entrepreneur, you like new interests, you like new ideas, you like striving and achieving for things. So I think I kind of have to have those kind of people around me so that I keep stretching my believing and my thinking. that’s what kind of fills my soul up, is the learning and the growing.

And I need to surround myself with other people who are like that because I think we feed off of each other and give each other ideas.

Mike Hambright (23:14.116)
Yeah, and it’s really.

There’s a level of getting uncomfortable, right? Like you have to kind of get uncomfortable. And sometimes that’s accountability. It’s like, gosh, I signed up for this and now somebody’s gonna hold me accountable. Because as an entrepreneur, especially, if you don’t have a quote boss, it’s real easy to dodge accountability. But whether it’s a mastermind or a coaching program or whatever, it doesn’t even have to be that formal. But it’s really kind of putting you

Linda Mckissack (23:25.73)
Yeah.

Linda Mckissack (23:29.454)
Yeah.

Mike Hambright (23:46.098)
yourself in an uncomfortable situation knowing that the other side you’ll be a better person or have a better skill or whatever,

Linda Mckissack (23:54.03)
Yeah. And I think, you know, once you know something, you can’t pretend you don’t. And when you really look at the statistics, 80 % of whether someone accomplishes their goals or not is whether they put some accountability behind it. So once you kind of know that truth, it’s like, okay, do I want an 80 % extra opportunity to accomplish this? Then maybe I should find some form of accountability. I always say, you know, I don’t love working out with a trainer, but I pay them because that’s accountability for me to show up and do the weights.

Mike Hambright (24:20.378)
Yeah.

Linda Mckissack (24:22.53)
that I want to do. I don’t have to do that for cardio, but I have to do that for weights because I’ve read enough and studied enough that weights are super important for health and longevity and all those things. So any of the areas that you really look at that are important to you, you should find some form of accountability to put behind it.

Mike Hambright (24:40.548)
Yeah, yeah, awesome. Linda, if folks want to learn more about you, you’ve got a lot of amazing things going on, and I know you inspire a lot of folks. Like, how do they connect with you, or where could they go to learn more about you?

Linda Mckissack (24:51.61)
That’s so good you asked that because I have no idea. I have to ask my assistant Instagram is at McKissack Linda, which is MCK I SS a CK. Everybody wants to put an eye with it and then and it’s just Linda McKissack on Facebook and then we have made for more teams that we that’s Facebook and also at made for more teams on Instagram and that’s kind of just our newest project. I don’t really do a lot of actually I don’t do. Very little one on one coaching at all just because it’s.

I’m all about freedom. My highest value is freedom. And so we’ll do group things or things like that, but I just don’t tie myself down one-on-one if I can keep from it.

Mike Hambright (25:29.474)
I get it, I get it. Well, thanks so much for spending some time with us today. Great to see you again. Yeah.

Linda Mckissack (25:32.834)
My pleasure. My pleasure. Good to see you again, Mike, too. We have to come back on Zoom because 20 minutes apparently is too far away from each other.

Mike Hambright (25:40.528)
It’s funny, I’ve got a lot of friends in the real estate space that we both live somewhere in DFW and the only time I see them is when we fly across the country to go to an event somewhere and we both happen to be there, but it’s kind of funny how that works out.

Linda Mckissack (25:51.628)
Yes, so too. We’ll keep doing your great work, Mike. You’re helping people.

Mike Hambright (25:56.312)
You too, I appreciate you. Everybody, I think this kind of, this phrase of life is about becoming something more than you are today really kind of sums us up. There’s so much opportunity out there and when you help others, you’re able to kind of win as well. There’s a way to structure it where you can work with people and obviously it just feels good to lay in bed at night and know that you’ve kind of helped other people. So hope you got some great value from today. I encourage you to go learn more about Linda and amazing things that she’s doing and just the kind of line of thought is really inspiring. So appreciate you guys a bunch. We’ll see you on the next

show.