S2E8: John Lee Dumas - 'The Golden Palace'

What is the key to success? For John Lee Dumas, the one aspect of success that all entrepreneurs share is setting a good, specific goal for themselves. He shares tips and tricks, as well as advice in just getting out there and getting to work. John Lee Dumas, host of Entrepreneur on Fire and author of The Freedom Journal, calls in from Puerto Rico to talk with Hayden. He shares his unique step-by-step process that he details in the Freedom Journal, a guide that helps you to accomplish goals in a set time frame of one hundred days. He also discusses his podcast, Entrepreneur on Fire, sharing his mantra with us: “Do what you can’t not do.” It was this mantra that led him to creating a daily podcast in 2012, and it is this ideal that led him to doing his job well, providing his audience with free, valuable, consistent content, and seeing how the road has unfolded before him ever since. John also recounts a story, fondly titled “The Golden Palace,” detailing his journey from law school to India, where he spent four months traversing the country. 

His story takes place in Amritsar, in northern India, where he visited the Golden Palace, an awe-inspiring holy and sacred place, filled with religious shrines and shining with gold. Join John as he accompanies a couple of locals to a flag-lowering ceremony at the border of Pakistan and India, and views the unbelievably intricate ceremony, with about forty soldiers on both sides of the border gates where they lower the flags of their respective countries. “When I look back on India,” John shares, “there was a lot of highs, were definitely some lows, as anybody will experience traveling/backpacking for four months in a third world country. But when I do look back, that is definitely the memory that stands out most in my mind, and something that I will always treasure.” John also shares tales of being in a Bollywood movie (search for John Lee Dumas Bollywood on YouTube - you can see the trailer for the movie), of breaking free of his scripted life, and of making the transition into the life he knew he wanted to live. He advises to start planning your trips now, and to start knocking them out as soon as possible. “So many of us think that we have an endless amount of time to travel the world,” John says, “but we don’t.” 

4:22 - John discusses the Freedom Journal and tells us the one factor that all successful entrepreneurs share. 

6:25 - John begins to share his story, called “The Golden Palace”. Years ago, John was in law school, and he was miserable. So, he did the most courageous thing in his life up until that point - he quit law school.John then traveled to India, and spent the next four months traversing the country. 

This story takes place specifically in Amritsar, at the Golden Palace, a holy and sacred place which rendered John speechless when he visited it. He then journeyed on with a couple of Indian guys who studied at a local university and who invited him to part of a famous flag-raising and flag-lowering ceremony. 

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