The Four Pillars That Turn Work Struggle Into Real Freedom Episode #73

Samuel: Hey world, welcome back to another episode of Be Inspire Podcast where we're inspiring you to live the abundant life you deserve. I have another awesome guest on the line, Ted Kopeko, and we're gonna dive into it. But before we do, what if the biggest thing standing between you and your life, the life you want, is you. Not your circumstances, not your past, not your age, not your bank account, just you. Somewhere along the line many of us become really good at surviving. We go to work, pay the bills, take care of everybody else. Repeat and then one day we look up and realize is this the real life is this really the life I was supposed to live? Today's conversation is about what happens when you stop simply existing and start intentionally creating your life. We're talking about purpose, we're talking about value, we're talking about freedom, and most importantly, we're talking about the journey of you. So let's get into it. Ted Capeko is the author of the number one international bestseller Find and Joy Journey of You and a commercial real estate broker with more than 30 years of experience in business. So, welcome Ted to the line.

Ted Kopecko: Hey Samuel, I gotta tell you thank you, thank you, thank you for the invite. I love your podcast. And I I gotta

Samuel: Thank you, thank you.

Ted Kopecko: tell you, audience, give Samuel a big shout out because what he does literally to put these podcasts on takes a lot of effort. Be Inspired is such a great podcast, especially for right now. Everyone, I also gotta tell you, my voice is a little stretched. So sorry. I got some allergies going on, so bear with me, but I think the message is more important than my voice. So, Samuel, thank thanks for having me on. I really appreciate it. it's it's a it's an amazing conversation because what we're about to talk about affects most of us. You know,

Samuel: Yeah.

Ted Kopecko: I always say, Samuel, we're all in the boat of humanity. We we were The one common denominator that we all have is we're all human. Right? Get out, get away from the politics, get away from the mess, get away from the toxicities. Understand one thing. God made us really special. He made each one of us absolutely special. And he made greatness inside of us.

Samuel: Yeah.

Ted Kopecko: Right? Wes Brown, one of my favorite mentors, always says this. We have greatness in us.

Samuel: Yeah. Yeah, that's the thing.

Ted Kopecko: Right? And so one of the through years of working in my life as a commercial architect, had my own practice, went into commercial brokeraging. I found the common the other common denominator is we all work our lives away. Right?

Samuel: Yeah. Mm-hmm.

Ted Kopecko: And how can you change that trajection? How can you change the trajection of I gotta keep working. I gotta put an orange apron on working at Home Depot until the day I die. Or a blue

Samuel: Yeah.

Ted Kopecko: vest working at Walmart. I know I was meant for more. What do I do? And about five years ago, Samuel, I I sat back, started looking at this, and started writing the book. And if this is a real book, everybody, it's not AI generated. It's four hundred pages. It's not a pamphlet. help you increase your value.

Samuel: So real quick Ted before you jump into it, about the book, you had a fascinating journey, right? as an art architecture, as a entrepreneur, broker, speaker, mentor, and author. When did you realize that your career wasn't the whole story of who you were?

Ted Kopecko: For my journey, it was a cumulative approach. There was a lot of little bits and pieces in that journey of mine that led me to where I'm at today, right? It I was successful. Right? And I'm I'm grateful to the Lord for that success. But I also worked my butt off for it. You know, success isn't free. It takes time and effort to get there, but it also takes your motivation to get there.

Samuel: Yeah.

Ted Kopecko: So in my life, I started out as a commercial architect right out of college. I instead of working for somebody, I'd have I had that entrepreneurial spirit. And I started my practice right out of college, hired architects, licensed architects, to come to work for me. You see, one of the things I didn't realize I had, down deep inside, I was really a marketer. I was an okay architect. I just hired better architects, but if my true purpose was marketing, I could market really well. I could bring the projects in and pay the pay the payroll every two weeks. That lasted about 16 years. I got burned out at a young age and I went, There's gotta be more. Yeah, I have success and all that, but I'm not fulfilled. I don't have freedom. I don't have where I want to be. I'm struggling still. And understand this, I don't care if you're a fork forklift operator at a in a warehouse or a doctor at a hospital. I have clients from all ranges, and I'll tell you, even the most successful people are struggling. You may not see that, but they are. So

Samuel: Hey.

Ted Kopecko: what I did was I changed out. I went to another profession, did really well in that profession, but at the end of the day. it was I still was lacking something in my life. So I started writing.

Samuel: feeling. Tell me a little bit about that.

Ted Kopecko: I didn't want to go the office anymore. I was I was done. I mean

Samuel: What was that like?

Ted Kopecko: all the problem when you run an architectural practice and we were doing this was heavy end commercial work. We were doing everything from interior of hospitals to to shopping centers and large end industrial buildings. Amazon wasn't around back then. well it was, but in its infancy. But we were doing work for General Electric, Honda Corporation, so forth. They're large end distribution centers. And it just got to a certain point that I was tired of going in the office. I was tired of facing the problems of the office every single day, trying to resolve them and then live it another another day. Who's up for that? All right. Aren't we all just living the next day? It's Groundhog Day every single day. For us. So what I did was about five years ago, I started assessing how much we are alike in nature. What were we taught early on to promote a work of life? Right? What was taught to us? And there's some really great similarities to this that I would love to get into because it's the basis of finding joy journey of you. You know everybody, just FYI. Finding joy is not about that momentary happiness. Finding joy is about finding your journey in life. And that's why the acronym for joy is journey of you. Right? That's our journeys in life. So our our purpose in life is to find that special purpose that's inside us. You see, God gave us all the dots, we just have to connect them. Right? Because here's the secret sauce of success, everybody. If you're if you're driving SOT, get a pen out, write this down. The secret sauce of success is this find a greater purpose, raise the value of your time to become valuable in a process, right? To help others raise their value to find abundant freedom. Every successful person I know, that is the thread that they live by.

Samuel: Right.

Ted Kopecko: Everybody else is in struggle. So what's struggle? Struggle is the loss of freedom. Isn't that true? When you're in

Samuel: Mm-hmm.

Ted Kopecko: struggle, you don't have freedom. You're too worried about paying the visa bill.

Samuel: Yeah.

Ted Kopecko: Right? And you're too worried about your job. You gotta get to the job the next day because you gotta have responsibilities at the end of the month. And you keep this

Samuel: So

Ted Kopecko: cycle over and over and over again. So

Samuel: So on that journey for you, right? The journey of you, right? You found your purpose and your book is finding that higher purpose, right? So what are some steps steps you took to f get on the journey for yourself that you could share with our audience?

Ted Kopecko: Well, it's all in the book. It truly is. Finding joy and finding joy journey of you is not about me. It's about all of us. Audience, I want you to hear this. 98% of us are in daily struggle. When there's $17 trillion in credit card debt, we're all in struggle. So let's also define struggle another way. Struggle chases money. Everybody understand this now. Struggle chases money. Success chases value. So the question here is, are you job led? And you know what the acronym for job is? Just over broke. Right? Or are you joy led? Is life leading you? Is life creating that destination for you? Or are you creating that destination for yourself? So what we did was I really dissected this and said, Okay, what's the four pillars of joy? Once these are aligned and then your life is aligned. And those four pillars are mindset, identity, time, and direction. When those four words are all together, Samuel, your life is in order. When they're not, then you're working against life. Or

Samuel: Yeah.

Ted Kopecko: life is working against you. Sorry everybody. So I talk about mindset for a minute. This is probably the most important aspect of it, because to be inspired in your life, I think this is the first hurdle you gotta get over. It truly is. One of the questions that we started off in finding Joy Journey of You is how did we get here? As adults, as working adults, how did we get in this position in our life? That we have to go work our life away away. Well, it all started out when we were young. Right? What was downloaded to our cerebral hard drives? What apps were we downloading during those first 16 18 years of life before we went out to the work world. Right?

Samuel: Yeah.

Ted Kopecko: Well, what happened was this. And I when we got into mindset, I did a lot of study and research that I did from a professor over at Stanford University, named Carol DeWitt. Right? So I read a lot of her studies and stuff like that. And what she said is most of us have a fixed mindset. And some of us have a growth mindset. Most of us are center or left towards a fixed mindset. So what's a fixed mindset? It's looking at opportunities as hurdles. It's looking at opportunities like too afraid to get over, right?

Samuel: Yeah.

Ted Kopecko: We live in our living beliefs. Well, if you want to get inspired, living in that nature, that attitude is not going to get you there. Mm.

Samuel: So do you think people are actually searching for happiness or are they really searching for meaning?

Ted Kopecko: We're both interconnected. Lots them are interconnected. You see Let's go back to mindset for a second because it has to deal a lot with purpose. Mindset, when we were young, right? I think the very f first time we ever had a growth mindset, Samuel, is when we were born. Right? When we were born. One minute in to after we were born, the doctor probably lifted us up by our legs and slapped us in the butt. That was the root awakening of life. That was a great metaphor for the rest of our lives, getting slapped around for the rest of our lives, right? getting knocked down a little bit. But from that point forward, what happened? We were toddlers, our parents told us what to do, which was fine. Get up, sit down. Eat this, don't eat that, stop picking your nose. All the things to create a little conformity in our lives, right? Obedience. Then from there, what happened? We went to grade school. So, what did that classroom look like? Probably 20 to 30 chairs. We were sitting in one of those chairs. The teacher up in the front of the room was our future boss. Now there's videos out there that actually show this. It's they're great videos because what they show is like the 1960 classroom, right, to today's modern office. Now we were taught various subjects, right, throughout all these years, from from grade school, maybe high school, maybe college. But the common denominator of all those years was going to class, sitting down, listening to the boss, doing what the boss has. Right, doing what the teacher says, going back home, doing it the next day, over and over and over and over. So, what is the mindset when we graduated from high school or college? Go find a job,

Samuel: Get a job.

Ted Kopecko: do the same, get a job, do the same thing. And all of a sudden, that little high school job that we had, Samuel, turns into a full-time operation for the rest of our lives. Because

Samuel: Yeah.

Ted Kopecko: that little apartment we had maybe turns into a house. We have a mortgage payment, we have a rental payment, maybe some car payments, we have a couple dogs, maybe a family, right? All of a sudden the bills start mounting on us. And that little job that we first had, all of a sudden it's a necessity. It's not just something to have a a few of a a few bucks with. Now it becomes a necessity. Now we're chasing, we created a lifestyle of work and chasing money. To keep ourselves

Samuel: Yeah.

Ted Kopecko: ahead. But understand one thing, your job will never get you rich. Right? Your job

Samuel: So

Ted Kopecko: is there for one purpose to keep you moving to the next month. You know, Les Brown, I'm sure he's he's got it, he's one of my favorite mentors, and I know you know him. he

Samuel: Mm-hmm.

Ted Kopecko: says a great quote, and he he'll say something like, You only work hard enough so they don't fire you, right? And they only pay you enough so you don't quit.

Samuel: Yeah. Yeah.

Ted Kopecko: That is the rat race. That's what that's the society that we built right there. Les Brown was such a genius, or is such a genius. He's still around, right? Such a genius to encapsulate it in that fashion. Because that's what we built. So Finding Joy, Journey of You is that book that helps you say to yourself, I know there's greatness in this. I know that I have a greater purpose. I know I have greater value for my time. I just don't know how to do it. So find and joy, journey of you gives you those little life hacks to allow you to move your life forward.

Samuel: that person that just graduated from college and they have the world ahead of them, what are some questions they should be asking on their journey of themselves to figure out their purpose?

Ted Kopecko: Well, first off, I'll tell everybody, college is not the end all. Sometimes we all think, my gosh, if I don't go to college or whatever, I'm not gonna make it or what no, that's that's that's BS. That's just an excuse. Most billionaires don't have college degrees. So understand that. Now does college help to a certain yeah, it just makes you more worldly. Maybe you have a few more subjects behind you, right? It gives you some tool sets, but it's not the end all. There's a lot of college graduates working at Starbucks. Right? Sometimes we use college. I don't have an educator, nobody's gonna believe me. No, that's BS. Stop giving yourself excuses like that. Because when you do, what you're actually doing is you're telling yourself a small lie, and that lie is there for one purpose. to keep you nice and comfortable back in your comfort cave because you're too afraid to go out and and journey out and attempt new things, right? Go for greater opportunity. So what would I say to a college graduate? Take the tools you have and find a greater purpose. Right.

Samuel: What do you what do you hope people will discover about themselves after going through the finding joy journey?

Ted Kopecko: A greater purpose, greater value. You see, the whole thing about and I look at life in this regard, the whole thing about life is when you think about and this is going way off the top subject here. We I don't care where you're from. I don't care how God made you. We're all human beings. One thing I always say, you know, we're all different flavors of ice cream, but at the end of the day, we're all just ice cream. Get over it. We're here to help each other move forward in life. Right? We're we're here to create value for each other. And I know that sounds idealistic, but it's highly possible, and you can do it because that's where success lies. What's so interesting is we look at ourselves and we say to ourselves, well, if I only just work harder, if I only just put more time in, it'll all be okay. No, it's not. We have to think in a different fashion. We have to put a different perspective in. So what we did was we put four pillars of joy together. You know, like I said, mindset, identity, time, and direction. So in terms of identity, that's hugely important, right? Who are you? Are you confident or are you doubtful? What how does the world treat you? How do you treat the world? Right? You know, one of the things about identity is major companies spend billions of dollars on product marketing. Right? I mean you look at Procter Gamble or you go to the store, you see all the products and they're all brightly colored. They're they're synchronized for that person to accept to know like and trust that product. But do you know how much money humans beings put in themselves, their own investment in themselves? Almost zero dollars. Right? So how can how do you you may be inspired, but if you're only putting zero dollars back into yourself to progress forward, you're not gonna progress forward that fast.

Samuel: Yeah.

Ted Kopecko: Right? So let me give everybody a nice little life hack that you can do. And that is, does everybody have 15 minutes? You're listening, you got 50? You know, we all we all we wake up in the morning. Right, and you go to the work, you come home, you're tired, turn on the TV, maybe watch reality programs. That's not feeding your brain. You see, that's just feeding your monthly bills. What you want to do is start feeding your you want to start re down or reprogramming, downloading a new app to your brain. So, how do you do that? You read. Right? So, what I'm gonna ask everybody to do. Make everybody listening, make a commitment to yourself right now. Non-negotiable. If you want to change, you want to be inspired in your life, you want to move forward to a greater purpose, greater freedom, abundance, then this is a way to do it.

Samuel: Yeah.

Ted Kopecko: And that is take 15 minutes out of non-negotiable, wherever you're at, you come home from work or before you go to bed, you pick up a book, and there's a lot of great thought leaders out there. From John Maxwell to Les Brown, Bob Proctor, Tony Robbins, Frank, all of these people out there, all they want to do is give you value through their books of what they learned in their life. What great teachers, right? If you took fifteen pages a day in the course of one year, you would have read five thousand four hundred and like seventy pages. That's eighteen books, Samuel. Now, if you could do that every single day, non negotiable, how much of a change in your life do you think you would you you would have? It would be great. It'd be awesome. Sure.

Samuel: I'd like to add something to that though. It's not just reading the fifteen pi pages a day, it's also applying what you learn from the fifteen pages a day

Ted Kopecko: Of course.

Samuel: in your life.

Ted Kopecko: Yeah, well that that happens, you see. When you start reading, what in the course of one year, what you're doing is you're downloading a new app, a new perspective. Everything in your life will change. Everything. From who you associate with, your friendship circle will drastically change. Because, in fact, let me say one thing about the friendship circle. Some of those friends shouldn't be in your circle. Just telling everybody, right? If that friendship is holding you back, if it's toxic, negative, whatever, get rid of it. It's not worth it. Your life is more important. You need to move forward in your life, right? But by reading 15 pages a day, just something simple as that. Everything changes. Your perspective of life. Your conversations you have with people will change. You will elevate yourself to a new area. of existence in your life. So I it goes back to identity, how you brand in yourself. Right? When you walk out the doors, how do you feel? How's the world treating you? The third pillar is time. And we talked about this a little bit. Time. Who are you spending your time with? Right? You know, every day, Samuel, when you wake up, you have a time bank. You go to the time bank every day, right? And you withdraw so much time. You spend that time on the cheap. Like you spend it to your job or you come home, spend it on TV. However, you spend it, you it's your choice. But one day you're gonna go to the time bank, and is that gonna be there's gonna be a limited amount of time in your time bank, right? So how you spend your time? Who are you spending it with? You know, Jim Rome will tell you, you're the sum of the five people you spend the most time with. Show me your friends and I'll show you your future. Right? So finding joy, journey of you is a complete overhaul of your life, not overnight, but over a period of time. Right? the other thing is we have a time store. Did you know that? We have a time store. So do you sell your time on the cheap to maybe

Samuel: Yeah.

Ted Kopecko: to a job? Or do you try to raise the value of your time? Right? So your your your time store is a neiman markets instead of a Dollar Tree.

Samuel: So Ted I wanna thank you for coming on. I got one final question for you, right? What is something that you thought I would ask, but I didn't quite ask you?

Ted Kopecko: Direction. Right?

Samuel: Tell me about that.

Ted Kopecko: Direction, where where are we going? Because when these four items are in line, Samuel, mindset, identity, time, and direction, then you're working with life versus against life. Direction is where do you want to end up in 20 years? Right? what's your life look like in 20 years? Everybody, just do me a big favor. Imagine 20 years from today. Where are you? What's your surroundings? Where are you living? What does it look like? Who's your friend? Right? Now go back twenty years to today. Okay, ask yourself one question. What would you do differently today to get to that future in twenty years from now? Right? So the question here, Samuel, is for the audience, are you job-led? Are you J O B led? Just over broke led? Is life leading you? Are you being reactive to life? Are you being intentional in life? Are you joy-led? Are you putting your journey first? Because you are the most important person in your life. You are the author of your own book. You are the director of your own play. How are you writing your script? So, everybody, if you want to get Finding Joy Journey of You, you can do that at Barnes and Noble, Amazon. or you can go to the website at

Samuel: Yeah.

Ted Kopecko: findingjoy.us, findingjoy.us, download the free workbook. Okay, that workbook is about 80 pages. You finish the workbook, show it to me, do a YouTube reel, right? Flip the pages, and we will send you a Finding Joy Journey of You diploma. That you can hang up on your wall. It's a serious diploma. And it's kind of fun, but it's really meaningful because you have graduated from your past life into your future abundance. So who's up for that, right? So let's do this. Get to findingjoy.us, you can get the book there. Download the free workbook, and we'll get you your free diploma once you can show us that you finished the workbook.

Samuel: Awesome. Ted, thank you so much for coming on the show. I really appreciate you sharing your knowledge, sharing your expertise and allowing my audience to find their joy by following their purpose. Alright? So

Ted Kopecko: You got it.

Samuel: thank you everybody for watching and we'll see you guys on the next episode of Be Inspired Podcast where we're inspiring you to live the abundant life you deserve.

Ted Kopecko: All right.