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Editor:
I’m excited today because this time around, we’re chatting with a best selling author and speaker. He’s also the founder of FUNancial Freedom and The ReThink Academy, two groundbreaking initiatives that have seen in feature in Forbes Magazine and achieved global recognition. I think this is going to be fun and informative. Paul O’Mahony, it’s great to meet you. Welcome along.
Paul O’Mahony:
Thank you. Thank you very much.
Editor:
For anyone who’s not discovered you before and also the great work that you do, maybe we could just start with a brief background.
Paul O’Mahony:
Sure, absolutely. I am the son of two teachers. My entire young life was based around academia, getting a permanent job, which meant going to school, doing well in exams, going to college. My background was actually a degree in industrial biochemistry of all things. Then I did a year in chemical engineering to get my graduate diploma and then I worked in a corporation for nine years where I was in a position as a director, as a medical device company, got an MBA, became a project management professional, and I was the youngest ever director in that company at the age of 30, all set to scale the heights of the corporate ladder.
And it was at that time that I realised I was over half a million euros in debt from purchasing two houses in the middle of the Celtic Tiger in Ireland in the mid-2000s. And while from the outside looking in, everybody would’ve said, “Oh, look at this. Amazing. You’re doing a successful career. You’re doing well. You’ve got yourself a car, a house, an investment property, and a good job.”
But the absolute reality was I was completely riddled with debt, 500,000 of negative equity of money that wasn’t mine in the first place. And now, suddenly, this was a reality of somehow at 30 years of age, having done everything to the book of how to succeed in life according to the educational system. I was in a massive, massive dilemma.
Paul O’Mahony:
And I ended up going to a conference out of pure desperation in Ireland in Dublin in 2009, which was basically, I think it was called Life Lasting Success and it was a kind of an event about motivation and there was hints of how to maybe set up an internet business, which wasn’t too keen on. I had a complete shutdown perspective on all of that, but long story short, went to that event, ended up investing in three of the products. A month later, went to a Tony Robbins conference, quit my job that night and three months after that, lost all my money that I’d saved on the stock market.
And actually, so in July 2009, I was still in the negative equity, but now I had no job. I had kind of burnt my bridges at work and I had no source of income. I lost all savings on the stock market. And that was when I realized, okay, this internet stuff has to work for me. And the reason why I turned to it, even though I’d done the three courses, hasn’t really done much with them, it was a cost, literally nothing, but my time to get started.
And within four months I was generating $10,000 monthly from Twitter actually originally. Within a year, I’d made my first million dollars with my business partner. And you can imagine, it took quite the while for even my mindset to catch up with the money, because it was so far beyond any of my wildest dreams. And it’s been a crazy ride ever since to… because I had no history of entrepreneurship or anything like that in my family, so it was very much a case of going from the complete sceptic, completely, completely dismissing what I heard from those original speakers in that day in 2009 until literally one, and sorry for the long story, but this is the compelling moment for me was when they were trying to get each other to high five each other and say, we’re awesome and that does not work with an Irish audience, but one speaker really spotted what was going on.
And he basically called us out and said, “Look, here’s the problem. You think we’re here to brainwash you,” but he said, “Ironically, you guys are so brainwashed, you actually don’t see the wood from the trees.” And he said, “Let me explain.” He said, “The vast majority of you in this room today are between age 20 and 65, which means the vast majority of you are in debt. You owe more than you own. In fact, if you were a child, you would be better off financially than how you are today.”
Paul O’Mahony:
And it was kind of this very sobering moment. And then he said, “Let me explain why.” He said, “Because the belief system you have is that wealth is connected to qualifications, to letters achieved after your name.” He said, “I found as a high school dropout that wealth is not connected to letters. It’s connected to numbers in your bank account.” And I’ll never forget when he said it because as a 30-year-old with my MBA, a corporate director, felt that I knew how the world worked, the world was completely pulled from under me because he was 100% correct. I was totally broke. I was massively in debt. There was no way out of it with the career that I was pursuing.
And it just suddenly woke me up to you can be so certain in something that’s completely wrong and just because you’re certain in many cases, doesn’t mean you’re right. And your environment is just very much, and if you are surrounded by people who think the same way as you, who don’t challenge you, who very much are brought up to believe in the way we live to follow the path of education designed hundreds of years ago, it can be a very unforgiving place when you’re looking for opportunities outside of that.
It’s been an incredibly interesting journey, not just from a financial perspective or career perspective, but from a personal perspective to go from really feeling that you are on the crux of having reached the apex of what you could achieve in corporate world to realising you had now reached the bottom of a mountain from a financial perspective and to work your way back up that mountain with a whole new set of skills and tools that I’d never used in school. Sorry for the long answer, but it kind of will lead into a lot of why I got into what I did at a later stage then.
Editor:
It’s a well-known phrase that everything happens for a reason. In order to achieve something, you have to sometimes hit rock bottom. Is that what you found, Paul, in your experience?
Paul O’Mahony:
I mean, I think relatively speaking, my rock bottom was a dream for 80% of the world, living in a developed country, having a house over my head, a car that I could drive, but in that sense, it’s certainly not rock bottom having a broader perspective.
But at the time, it was a very insular view about me being the most important thing in the world. Of course, it felt from a very selfish perspective that I hit rock bottom after pursuing, I guess, a dream for 30 years that turned out to be a complete nightmare.
Editor:
Absolutely. With all that happening in your life, you then decided to take the leap of faith into working online. What was the first thing that you did?
Paul O’Mahony:
Note from the Editor:
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