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Today’s episode features a dynamic conversation with 
Keala Kanae, a true testament to the power of mindset in achieving extraordinary success. Keala’s journey is as inspiring as it is educational—he went from working as a minimum-wage barista and struggling with 12 years of failed attempts, to building and exiting an eight-figure education company. Now, he dedicates his work to helping founders, investors, and high performers reach their next level through deep mindset transformation and personal development.
Dave dives in with Keala to unlock what really separates high achievers from everyone else. If you’ve ever felt “stuck” despite investing in books, courses, and skill-building, this episode is for you. Keala shares how most barriers to success aren’t about lacking skill or opportunity, but about being misaligned with our true values and purpose—a lesson rooted in the science of axiology, or the study of values.
Listeners will discover how to move from short-term motivation to lasting inspiration, align goals with personal values for effortless progress, and avoid the common pitfalls of self-sabotage and procrastination. This conversation is packed with actionable wisdom and science-backed strategies to help you unlock more purpose, fulfillment, and wealth.
In This Episode
- Keala’s personal journey from minimum wage to entrepreneurial success
- The difference between skill set and mindset—and why both are essential
- The science of values (axiology) and how to align your goals with your true values
- Practical strategies to replace motivation with durable inspiration for lasting achievement
Because you’re wired. You’re neurologically wired, biologically wired to wake yourself up when you venture away from your values. Because your values give your life purpose. Because what good is it to accomplish a goal if the price you pay is your soul?
Welcome to the Wealth Strategy Secrets of the Ultra Wealthy podcast, where we help entrepreneurs like you exponentially build wealth through passive income to live a life of freedom and prosperity. Are you tired of paying too much in taxes, gambling your future on the stock market, and want to learn about hidden strategies for making your money work for you?
And now your host, Dave Wolcott, serial entrepreneur and author of the bestselling book, The Holistic Wealth Strategy.
Hey, everyone. Welcome back to Wealth Strategy Secrets of the Ultra Wealthy. I’m your host, Dave Wolcott, and today we’re going deep on the number one lever that separates high performers from everyone else — mindset.
My guest is Keala Kanae, entrepreneur, peak performance coach, and a living case study in transformation. He went from a minimum wage barista and 12 straight years of failed starts to building an eight-figure education company and exiting at 140 million, then dedicating his work to helping founders and investors unlock their next level.
If you’ve ever felt stuck despite reading the books, hiring the coaches, and stacking skill sets, this conversation is for you. We unpack why skill set without mindset becomes a nightmare, why mindset without skill set is a fantasy, and how the science of values — axiology — quietly governs your time, energy, and money.
You’ll learn how to align vision, values, and goals so progress becomes inevitable instead of forced. And how to swap short-term motivation for durable inspiration.
And hey everyone, just a quick favor before we jump in — if this show has helped you think bigger or take action, please do us a favor and tap follow or leave a quick review on the show. It really helps us bring in world-class guests like Keala.
All right, let’s help you get congruent, inspired, and financially free. Here’s my conversation with Keala Kanae. Keala, welcome to the show.
Hey, brother, thank you so much for having me, man. I really appreciate the opportunity to be here, 100%.
Yeah. I’ve been looking forward to this discussion and it’s really interesting, right, because as you know, we think we’ve got — you know, we have many high performers in our audience. They’re wealth builders, they’re business builders, they’re overachievers and really have the pedal to the metal trying to take it next level.
And the one common denominator, right, that everybody is really looking for to level up in the game that we’re playing — is it really comes down to mindset.
And this is why in my book, The Holistic Wealth Strategy, it’s literally phase number one. Because if you don’t have your mindset right, I mean, you can’t really achieve anything. And conversely, the only thing that’s really holding you back from achieving your complete vision is you — yourself — and how you’re thinking and framing things.
So excited to talk to you today and really help people kind of unlock maybe some things that they might be sabotaging themselves in certain ways, not framing or thinking about things in the right way. And maybe you can give also some tools and hacks and everything on how we can leverage our mind to really get to that next level.
So let’s kick things off, Keala, and tell us how you got here.
I know you started with humble beginnings as a barista. We might need to talk about espresso, because that’s one of my favorite things in life as well. But, you know, tell us how you got here today. You’ve had quite an amazing journey.
Yeah, thanks, Dave. I appreciate it, man. And before I dive in, if you don’t mind, I’d just like to encourage your audience to leave a review wherever they’re listening to the podcast. I’ve listened to several of your episodes—you obviously put a lot of time in here. You get some really good quality people on here, and I don’t know if your average listener realizes how important reviews are for the success of the podcast. It’s a lot of work.
I mean, they hear the 35 or 40 minutes of recording, but they don’t see all the hours and hours that go into it behind the scenes. So, wherever you’re listening, drop a review. As you mentioned, we work with high performers, entrepreneurs, and high achievers—people who want to unlock that next threshold of performance for themselves. And for whatever reason, they’ve usually done quite a bit of personal development, but they still struggle at times with procrastination, self-sabotage, and self-defeating behavior. But that is obviously not where I started. I grew up in Honolulu, Hawaii.
A lot of times, when people think about Honolulu, Hawaii, they think of palm trees and beaches. That’s not where I grew up. I grew up right down the street from the housing projects in Kalihi Valley, which is not necessarily the nicest neighborhood. My mom was smart enough as a child—she used her friend’s address to get us an exception so I could go to a school in a better neighborhood. So I wasn’t getting beat up every day at school. She kept me out of the drugs and gangs that were in our neighborhood.
So yeah, I grew up with humble beginnings. Not that long ago, I was working in a coffee shop.
I went to college, got the degree, studied hard, and got good grades. To be fair, I did go to college for six years because they said the average was four, and I figured I’m above average, so I’ll go for six. Eventually, I got out of school and found that I could make more serving tables in a restaurant than I could with my college degree, so that’s what I did for a while.
I started several businesses. I actually started my first business the first year that I entered college and failed for 12 years. Twelve years later, after trying dozens of things, I found myself working in a coffee shop for minimum wage, living in my mom’s spare bedroom.
There was this kind of moment where I came home from a barbecue one day. I walked into this room—I was living with some roommates at the time—and there was a stack of photographs on the bed. I approached the bed like, “What is this?” I picked up the stack of photographs, and it was a bunch of photographs ripped in half. I was sorting through the stack—probably about a dozen of them—and at the bottom of the stack was a note. It said, “Picture me out of your life.” And that’s how my girlfriend of four and a half years broke up with me.
Fast forward about two weeks later—I had moved in with my mom because I couldn’t afford the rent where I was. She hadn’t answered any of my text messages, emails, or phone calls—nothing. I was just left on read, so to speak. There was this moment where I was strolling up and down the hallway of my mom’s little thousand-square-foot apartment, taking an inventory of everything going on in my life, and it finally just hit me. It was a life-changing question.
The question was: What if it’s me?
What if it’s not the Republicans, the Democrats, the politicians, my upline, coworkers, boss, teacher, family, or upbringing? What if it’s just me? I’m the only common denominator. I looked at every area in my life where I was failing—including that relationship—and the only thing all those things had in common was me.
That’s what got me into the world of personal development. That’s when I really started to take myself on and learn more about our psychology, human behavior, neurology, biology, physiology, and how all those things wire together to help us unlock different thresholds of performance. I learned a few things there.
I can share some of them here. I went from working in a coffee shop for minimum wage to making my first million dollars as an affiliate marketer. Then I launched my own courses and coaching business—this was long before everyone and their brother, dog, and neighbor became course creators and coaches. We took that to over 140 million in sales, and I exited that company last year.
Now, I just do the personal development material with our clientele. Even when I was teaching and coaching affiliate marketing—and I’m sure you can relate—the people who were successful were never successful because they mastered the exact right skill. They were successful because they went through our mindset curriculum and changed the way they thought, behaved, and acted in their life.
As a result, they used the skill. So when it comes to our philosophy, success is the marriage of skill set and mindset. Skill set without mindset is a nightmare—you wake up every day and someone else who’s less talented than you has the life you want. And mindset without skill set is a fantasy—you can sing kumbaya, light candles, visualize, make affirmations and vision boards, but if you don’t have a high-value skill that you deliver to the marketplace, you’re not going to build the wealth you’re visualizing.
These two things really come hand in hand.
Yeah, that’s great. What do you really think is holding most people back? I mean, obviously, you had to go through this transformational moment in your life to really get clarity and move through it. Sadly, for a lot of people, that could be the loss of a loved one or a significant health issue that holds them back—where all of a sudden, there’s enough gravity that they say, “I’ve got to change something. Something has got to change here.” So that precipitates the change.
But, you know, how can we help people see things now and move proactively toward the right side — where you’re actually making the change progressively in your life, without waiting for that big event?
Yeah. I’m going to say some things in this podcast that will likely contradict the common narratives out there — and hopefully your audience appreciates that. Hopefully, they didn’t tune in just to hear the same thing they’ve already heard a hundred times that hasn’t worked.
At the end of the day, of everything that I’ve studied, the single most powerful field of study I’ve found over time is a field known as axiology. We’ll dig into it here, but first off, when you ask what holds people back — or what is the single most powerful tool to help someone reach their potential — at the end of the day, we get in life exactly what we value.
No more, no less. And if you can understand just one simple secret — that secret is: you will only ever get in life what you value.
Axiology is the science of values. And when I say values, I want to be clear — I’m not talking about what most people think of when they hear the word. People often say, “I know my values — faith, family, fitness, fun, integrity, justice, fairness.” Those are aspirational slogans, social ideals at best. From an axiological perspective, what we’re talking about are meta-values.
Meta-values are the hidden underlying psychological phenomena happening in the unconscious mind — quietly governing all actions and inactions. Through the lens of axiology, every human being is driven by an unconscious set of values that not only filter their world, and determine who they like or dislike, but also dictate how they manage their resources — primarily time, energy, and money.
I’m sure you’d agree that wherever we invest our time, energy, and money will become our destiny. So, if we want to predict our future, we need to discover what values are driving our behaviors.
I’ll give you a simple example — we’ll zoom out on a macro level first, then zoom in on the micro level. I would argue that no person lacks discipline — and that procrastination is actually a good thing. That might sound odd.
Let’s take a hypothetical example of a husband and wife. Now, I’m not saying what a husband should be or what a wife should be, or even that the husband has to be male or the wife female. But let’s take a stereotypical example of a husband and wife in Western society.
The husband wakes up every day — first thing on his mind is his business: projects, people, what’s happening in the company. If he’s not thinking about that, he’s thinking about being a better leader — going to seminars, coaching programs, consultants, reading books, listening to podcasts. If he’s not doing that, he’s focused on family wealth — you’ll find him in the evenings reviewing their portfolio, reading about potential investments.
If he’s not doing that, he plays golf. If he’s not doing that, he finally makes time for the kids. If he’s not doing that, he spends time with his wife. And if he’s not doing that, he keeps saying he wants to go to the gym — because his belly’s hanging over his belt buckle from years behind a computer — but for whatever reason, he starts and stops and never follows through.
The wife, on the other hand, wakes up in the morning — first thing on her mind is the kids: after-school programs, education, sports, tutoring, their health, and well-being. It feels like her whole life revolves around the kids.
If she’s not with them, she makes time for art. She keeps saying she wants to have a successful business — but for the last decade, she’s started and stopped a hundred things and nothing takes root.
If you take those two people to the mall, holding hands and walking together, they can be in the exact same environment, pass the exact same stores, see the exact same people, under the same sun at the same temperature — but they’ll have wildly different experiences.
The husband notices investment opportunities — empty retail spaces that might make good franchise locations. He sees when business books are on sale. The wife notices her daughter’s favorite clothing store has a sale, school supplies are half off, and soccer sign-ups are open.
We filter our entire existence through the lens of our unconscious values.
Now, she says she wants to build a business, but she’s been starting and stopping for years. You might think, “Oh, she doesn’t have discipline.” But she gets up every morning on time, feeds the kids, takes them to school, meets teachers, gets them to soccer, arranges tutoring, thinks about their education — and she remembers everything without writing it down.
That’s discipline. She’s disciplined when it comes to her kids.
That husband — when it comes to his business — he’s highly disciplined, always on time, reliable, dependable. But tell him to go to the gym, and he’ll buy the shakes, sign up, hire a trainer, and after the third leg day when he can’t get off the toilet — he quits.
So neither of them lack discipline. We’re all disciplined. I’ve worked with tens of thousands of people — every single one is disciplined. They’re just disciplined in direct relationship to their values.
When we pursue something in contradiction to our values — which is what most of our struggling goals are — we create symptoms.
Those symptoms include procrastination, hesitation, frustration, self-sabotage, and imposter syndrome. These are not flaws — they’re signals designed to wake us up to the fact that we’re pursuing something incongruent with our values.
What we value most is where we find fulfillment. Fulfillment comes from filling full our values. Alignment comes from living aligned with our values.
When we pursue what we truly value, we have inspiration.
The etymology of the word inspiration means “from the spirit within.” Some might even call that the soul. When we’re inspired, we’re called from within to act — nobody has to tell that mom to take her kids to school, or that husband to work on his business. They just do it — because they’re inspired.
When we lack inspiration, we try to rely on motivation — an external force that pushes us to act. But motivation doesn’t last, and we all know it. That’s why Zig Ziglar said, “Motivation is like taking a bath — you’ve got to do it daily.”
The people who are ultimately successful don’t rely on motivation; they rely on inspiration. Because inspiration is timeless, while motivation is time-full — it drains us.
So, when you ask what’s the single most powerful thing anyone can learn — it’s discovering their values and aligning their goals with them.
In our advanced curriculum, we help people rewire that alignment between the goals they want to achieve and the values they already hold. This broke things wide open for me. Once I was unconsciously wired to achieve the things I truly wanted and that aligned with my values, success felt effortless — natural.
Something important for your audience to realize is that if we don’t have a high value on money, financial independence, investing, or saving — we will never have it. Because we’ll trade money for what we do value.
I’ll give you an example. Not to brag or boast — I’ve had three Lamborghinis and a Rolls-Royce. I’ve spent my money on some dumb stuff, Dave — you’d slap me if we were in person.
But Warren Buffett — thousands of times wealthier than I am — doesn’t have those things. He drives a ten-year-old (probably older now) used Cadillac. I valued having those cars more than I valued keeping the money it took to buy them — about $2 million worth of cars. He values the money far more than the stuff.
That’s why he’s way richer than me. Because we always trade our resources for what we value most.
The challenge is that most people — 99.9999% — are judging themselves and trying to live up to an external set of values imposed since childhood by parents, teachers, media, social media, and institutions.
Then they beat themselves up for not being who they think they should be — instead of loving who they were born to be.
Most people spend their entire lives chasing who they think they’re supposed to be — at the expense of who they’re meant to be.
Said differently: most people spend their entire life living a lie.
Inspiration comes from within and is timeless. Motivation is external and always runs out.
So where would you tie vision into that in terms of values, goals? Where does vision fit into that for you and your framework?
Beautiful question. So when we adhere to our values, when we operate from our values, we automatically unlock vision.
So as an example, if I were to ask that wife, what’s your vision for your business? She wouldn’t be able to think more than maybe a day or a week or a month out, right? Because she’s relying on the portion of her brain. So there’s brain science to this that I’ll dive into for just a moment because it locks into what you’re saying.
When something is high in our values, we bring online the prefrontal cortex. The prefrontal cortex is the thing that separates us from every other species on Earth. This is where all of our focus, all of our attention, most of our creative thinking, and our problem solving come from. This is the reason that we ask ourselves, “Who am I? Why am I here? What am I here to do in life? Is there a God?”
Sometimes people say, well, you know, higher self and lower self. Well, higher self is a portion of the brain. It’s called the prefrontal cortex.
Now, when something is low in our values, we stimulate the subcortical brain—the amygdala, the survival portion of the brain. That has a false bias. In other words, it’s designed to assume that something is bad or a predator. That’s because it’s the survival mechanism of the brain. It’s designed to assume the worst in advance because that’s how you survive.
If you’re a hunter-gatherer and you’re out gathering food and you hear a rustle in the bushes, your brain is wired to assume that the rustle in the bushes is a predator so that you run away and maybe miss a meal. Because if you were wired to assume that it was prey in the bushes, then you would approach it—and if it were a predator, you would become the meal.
So when something is low on our values, the subcortical brain comes online—the amygdala comes online. And when the amygdala is online, it is very absolute. It separates the world into good/bad, right/wrong.
The prefrontal cortex, when we think from our higher brain, allows us to see that nothing is purely good or bad—it’s a bit of both. The biggest challenges we’ve gone through in our life also helped us become who we are today.
So when something is low in our values, we stimulate the amygdala. The amygdala wants only pleasure, no pain. It wants the benefit without the drawback.
In the example of your audience, it would want the wealth without the sacrifice of immediate gratification that it takes to get it. Amygdala thinking is not long-term thinking—it is instantaneous, in-the-moment thinking.
The prefrontal cortex, when we’re operating by our highest values, will endure pain and pleasure in equal proportion in order to make manifest the thing.
So that husband will endure pain and pleasure to make manifest his business. That wife will endure pain and pleasure in raising children.
You have four kids—would you agree that raising children is both painful and pleasureful?
Absolutely.
But you do it because you value them.
Yeah.
And somebody listening might think, well, of course he values them, he’s a parent. Well, there are parents that give up their kids, there are parents that abandon their kids, there are parents that have, you know, taken their children’s lives. So it’s not true that just parents do that. What’s true is that you do it for whatever reason because you value it.
So when you ask the question, where does vision come in—if we are pursuing something that’s in conflict with our values, we won’t have vision because we’re stimulating the lower portion of the brain that operates from day to day, week to week, month to month, moment to moment.
When we’re pursuing something that we truly value, we unlock vision.
He has a vision for his company. That mom has a vision for her children. When you ask her about those children, she can already start to see what she thinks Jenny’s going to be when she grows up. She knows what Johnny’s favorite things are in life and she has an idea of what roles might be successful or good for him in society when he becomes an adult.
She has a vision for her family, but she’ll not have one for her business—not until she shifts her values around. He can have a vision for his business, but he’ll never have a vision about getting into the gym. He’ll have a fantasy about having a six-pack and being in shape, but he lacks vision for actually going to the gym and doing the hard work.
Because the subcortical brain wants the benefit—it wants the six-pack, it wants to look in the mirror and feel good, but without the sacrifice of actually eating right and exercising. That’s why most people will pay tens of thousands of dollars for surgery rather than just eating right and exercising.
So if you were to put together vision, values, goals, right? And someone is then kind of working through resources in the day-to-day, right?
So we talked about time, energy, and money—and oftentimes I find that those can be in conflict with one another. So let’s say, for example, you have a significant health issue or something you’re actually trying to work through—maybe it’s even an elective surgery to help optimize your health.
So you’re going to go through a short-term amount of loss or pain, you’re going to probably have some loss of focus, you might lose some energy, and you’re going to spend some money to kind of go through that. But at the end of 90 days, let’s say, you’re hoping to come out on the other side.
Or another example could be, you know, oftentimes people at work—you’re working towards a deadline for a particular project, you’re exiting your business, right? You’re working kind of round the clock. So therefore, you can’t give to those things that you do value, like maybe your family and your health kind of take a hit during that period.
So how do you recommend people really have clarity around how to balance some of these competing interests around the things that you value the most?
Yeah. So, beautiful question. The assumption hidden inside of the question is that values are conscious. So your question is essentially, how do you balance competing values or competing interests?
And one of the examples you mentioned was, when I’m exiting the business, I’m working round the clock, right? I still work round the clock. Today, for instance—we’re working on a project right now—today will be day 17 of me putting in probably a 15 to 16-hour day, easily, outside of this podcast.
The reality is that when it comes to values, we actually measure what our values are based on where we spend our time, energy, and money—not based on what we say is most important to us.
That’s the conflict that most people live inside of. They say, “Well, this is what I really value in my life,” but if I go and look at where they spend their time, energy, and money, it’s not reflective of what they say they value.
And that’s the inherent contradiction. That’s where we hang ourselves on the cross, right? We undermine ourselves, or we beat ourselves up because we judge ourselves for who we think we’re supposed to be rather than who we are.
So, authentic living—as an example, I work like a madman, to be honest. I love what I do. I love building businesses.
If you were to pull me out of my life and say, “Keala, here’s $50 million. You can retire. You can go on vacation for the rest of your life. You’ve got more than enough money to live out your days beautifully—but you can never build a business again.” That would be my definition of hell.
Yeah, that’s retirement.
Exactly. And that’s why so many people who do retire end up hating it—or expiring early. Right? Or they go back to work.
Yeah, it’s because you lose purpose. And I also think that what’s deeper—what a lot of people are really looking for, especially high performers—is creating freedom in our lives.
What you just talked about is really freedom of purpose, right? You want to wake up every day and be fascinated and motivated about the work you’re doing. That’s why a 15-hour day doesn’t even seem like work. It’s like a hobby. It’s fun, right?
You’re totally engrossed in it because you have purpose. But other times, there are folks out there who’ve been in a job for 20 years and can’t seem to get out because of the golden handcuffs: “I’ve got the 401(k), I’ve got the paycheck, I’ve got to pay the mortgage and rent.”
They’re looking for that freedom. And with money, we can create freedom of money by creating passive income—by investing in passive assets that provide us with that mailbox-type money that’s coming in while we sleep. That way, we can start to live our life and not always have to be working for it.
So I think the freedom component is a really big one. And as I think about that in the context of what you’re saying, to me, I value freedom really high. And I would suspect that a lot of our audience and high performers out there also really value freedom.
Yeah—and it shows. That’s why you invest for passive income, right? So that you have that freedom.
You mentioned something, and I literally got chicken skin as you said it. You mentioned purpose, and you mentioned—I don’t remember your exact words—but essentially that freedom is doing the thing that you love to do. There’s a quote—I might butcher it a bit—but it goes something like this:
“The master in the art of living makes little distinction between his work and his play, his labor and his leisure, his mind and his body. He hardly knows which is which.” That’s from James Michener.
Yeah.
And when we are living congruent with our values, that’s what we unlock.
See, our values are a window into our soul—and into our purpose for life. When we’re pursuing the thing that we feel is most valuable, that’s actually where we feel the most purposeful.
So that mom, when she’s taking care of her kids—when she’s being there for Johnny when he’s being bullied in school—she might be frustrated or angered by it. She’ll have all these different emotions around it. But she feels like she’s living her purpose, whether she realizes it or not.
That’s why she’ll do it when it’s painful, she’ll do it when it’s pleasurable, she’ll do it when it’s raining, she’ll do it when it’s hard, she’ll do it when she doesn’t want to—because it gives her life purpose. If you were to take those kids away and give her a massively successful business, she would want the kids back, not the business.
Yeah, that’s really spot on, Keala. And let me just unpack this for folks, because I think this is such an important distinction.
Again, you have to look at some of these societal norms that we have. And we talked about that R-word—retirement. Retirement literally means putting something out to pasture because it doesn’t work anymore.
We live under this construct of accumulation theory, which suggests that you build a large quantity of money, wait until you’re 60 to access it, and then live off of it—and stop doing what you’re doing. But I think that’s one of the worst ideas.
It actually comes from the manufacturing era, when people were working in factories. They didn’t really have long lifespans, and their bodies were ailing. They just wanted to get out. That’s where it comes from. It doesn’t apply in the information age anymore. We want to be living today.
I want to live today the same way I’ll live at 65—or 85, quite frankly. I want to be totally fired up about my purpose and have that drive. I don’t want to stop doing what I’m doing at 65. And the other thing is, in terms of having money—which is the energy or resource to do that—I don’t want to wait until I’m 65 to travel, or spend time with my family and kids, or see the world.
I want to do that today, because you never know. Every day is a gift. You never know what’s going to happen. And later on, as you said, there are so many people—like my parents—who stopped working, and then their life just got super small. All they could talk about was what was on the news or what was happening in the neighborhood. Their life got so small.
Meanwhile, other people are still building, contributing, growing—they’re still locked into their values. So I think it’s really key—when you’re incongruent with your values, that’s what happens. We’re under these social norms that try to make us conform. But when you break out of that and start to live an intentional life, then you can be congruent with your values.
Yeah, we are inundated from a very young age about who we’re supposed to be, ought to be, should be, need to be, have to be in order to be successful, worthy, or enlightened, or whatever, you know, the verb of the day is—or the adjective of the day is, I should say. And so when the voices on the inside become clearer and louder than the voices on the outside, that’s when we become a master of our lives. And you’re exactly right. What you said is like, most people have fallen for the narrative that if I check all these boxes, I’m going to be fulfilled at the end. And so they check all the boxes, they go to school, they get good grades, they get a good job. We’re seeing it in our previous generations.
And now the younger generations today are not quite falling for it the way that we used to, right? They’re not wanting to go to college, they’re not wanting to get cars, they’re not necessarily having kids at a young age. And it’s not because those things are bad—it’s just they’re learning from their predecessors and saying, “Well, I’m going to do it a little bit differently because it didn’t work for them.” But yeah, you know, we go to school, we get good grades, we get a good job, we work 40 years, then you retire, and then you’re going to live out your years and be happy. And it’s like, well, when people finally do that, as you mentioned—you know, I watched my grandparents do it—and they get all the way to the end, and it’s like, like you said, their whole world just shrinks down. And now it’s like when you talk to them, they just complain about things, because that’s what they have to talk about.
Right. It’s like what’s not going well in their life. And human beings find fulfillment in pursuing purpose. You know, I was watching a documentary recently—it was a Bill Gates documentary. I know Bill Gates seems to be some kind of a controversial issue for some reason recently, but it was a Bill Gates documentary and he was talking about AI, and he was meeting with—I forget who he was meeting with, might have been Peter Thiel or something.
This was about six months ago or so, I forget, but he was meeting with somebody and talking about, as AI takes jobs away, what does that mean for human beings and their sense of purpose in life? You know, when you really dig into what we’re talking about and understand it from a neurological perspective, the brain is a purpose-seeking organ, right? It is looking to help you—that’s why you experience procrastination, hesitation, frustration, and self-sabotage when you venture away from your values. And that’s why you awaken inspiration, poise, precision, power, vision, alignment, determination, discipline, and fulfillment when you pursue your values. Because you’re neurologically and biologically wired to wake yourself up when you venture away from your values. Your values give your life purpose. Because what good is it to accomplish a goal if the price you pay is your soul? And that’s what most people end up doing.
So just to add to that real quickly, money is such a great example of that—where people view money and it’s not aligned to their values, and they’re absolutely unfulfilled. I know so many people who make or have a ton of money, but they’re absolutely not fulfilled in what they’re doing. So it can actually become very destructive. And then you also see this in future generations as well, right? If kids come up with some entitlement or the legacy was not passed down properly—including values—it gets spent, it gets squandered, it creates problems.
Exactly. And you know, to your point, typically when people do make a lot of money and it’s in conflict with their values, that’s usually when you see some form of self-sabotage that destroys it somewhere along the way. Because it’s their own mind looking for that purpose, and it won’t find it in an empty place. Now, you can have both—just so we’re clear for your listeners. The goal is to have both: lots of money and fulfillment. You can have both. It’s just that if you haven’t wired it that way in your unconscious mind, then yeah, you end up at war with yourself somewhere along the way.
But I mean, for me, just being transparent with you—in direct relationship to values—I have a decent multi–six-figure passive income that I’ve had for a while from me just pushing money off to my financial management team and letting them manage it for me. That’s not inspiring work for me—to watch markets and figure out where to invest the money and stuff. That’s not inspiring work for me.
Not to say that’s not important to me—that’s why I hand it off to somebody and let them do it. What’s inspiring for me is to go build things—like build things from the ground up, come up with an idea, and make it something in the marketplace. That’s what’s inspiring work for me and helps me feel most purposeful. But you know, I’d imagine for you it’s a bit different, like from listening to your podcast and the things you talk about, because you have a higher value on freedom and I have a higher value on work. I find meaning in work, you find meaning in having the freedom and flexibility to enjoy your life, as you mentioned, at the age that you’re at.
Which, by the way, did you ever read the book Die with Zero?
Yes, good one.
Great book. Man, that really changed my thinking.
Yeah.
About how I was managing my money because I kept shoving all my money, all of my extra cash, over to my team, and I literally had in my mind the thought of like, well, you know, when I’m older and closer to retirement age—which I’ll probably honestly never retire. And something interesting: my mom was a housekeeper growing up, and her clientele were the wealthy clientele in Hawaii. One of the most interesting things—and I couldn’t understand it as a kid—was that her clients would be in their 80s and they would still work. She had a guy that was in his late 80s, and he would still go into his office every day and work. And he was really wealthy, I mean, net worth over nine figures, right?
And I would ask her, like, “Mom, why do they work? I don’t get it. They’re super rich, they could just retire.” And she was like, “Oh, they just work because they have nothing better to do.” That was her thinking. I get it now, though. They work because that’s where they find purpose. And what’s interesting is, the more that I’ve learned about values—meta values, just for a clear distinction—the more that you find that the people who live by their highest values tend to also live longer. That inspiration… I’m not going to say that that’s—I’m making no medical claims here, obviously.
Yeah, no, I’ve heard that as well. But yeah, I think you’re spot on with that. And to unpack it, right—I am an innovation entrepreneur, so that is my purpose. I also love building things. I never worked in corporate America because the system, the bureaucracy of things, and managing things became absolutely no fun. So I absolutely love to build and I love to problem-solve and things like that. So that is my purpose that I love. But I also don’t want to throw 100% of myself at that and compromise my family, compromise my health. Those other things are part of it.
And I’ve actually developed a way to make it my creative process, right. So, like, cycling is my thing. And a lot of people will say, “Well, how do you spend all that time doing that?” But I mean, you want to talk about neurological connection of mind and body, right? It’s no better than when you’re exercising. You’re in a peak state, and the things that you come up with, that you can do—you’re in a powerful state, a state of confidence, of problem-solving, innovating, and everything. So that’s actually part of my creative process that I think fuels all the other things I do in my life—those other dimensions. And we like to call that really holistic wealth, right.
When you’re working out—like, when you’re cycling, as an example—do you kind of enter into a meditative state?
Completely.
Where you’re just unconsciously cycling, but you’re…
Yeah, I have no idea. A lot of people complain about the roads and the route and everything. I’m like, we could go over the same route all the time because I’m completely focused on what I’m doing.
Yeah. I find the same thing when I go to the gym. Some of my best thinking happens either in the shower—which I’m sure you’ve experienced before—or in the gym, because my body is fully immersed in what I’m doing and I can give my mind the freedom to just roam and ideate. So I’m with you on that. What is an innovation entrepreneur, if you don’t mind me asking, to clarify?
Yeah, there’s actually a study by one of the universities or something that’s out there, and they talk about basically four different types of entrepreneurs. So an innovation entrepreneur would be someone who is really solving problems—creating value, creating new solutions in the marketplace—which is essentially the way I’ve approached business. Our business is trying to help people solve problems of wealth. Part of the issue is psychological, right? You’re holding yourself back, you’re self-sabotaging because of maybe how you grew up in a certain environment. So if we can educate and help people educate properly, then you’re not making these big inflection points in how you invest—by winning or losing or timing the market, all those kinds of things. We’re also trying to provide education to help people access alternative assets that most thought were not even available to them before.
Right. Or how to do advanced tax strategies to really minimize your taxes, which most people thought, “Hey, I didn’t really know that was possible. I just have to pay my taxes.” But once you understand it, you can do that. And we have all kinds of software we’re building that will help people measure and manage their finances. Because just like when you get on a scale, you have to start somewhere if you’re trying to lose weight or increase your body composition—but if you’re not measuring it every day, how are you going to improve that? Well, if you can now look at a dashboard of KPIs, including all your alternative assets, your real estate, your passive income numbers, and you’ve got 15 different assets bringing in passive income, now you can forecast and model that. You can know exactly where you’re going to be and create certainty and clarity.
So yeah, I think innovating—that’s what I love to do. That’s what gives me juice. And there are a couple of other categories, but it’s been a phenomenal conversation, Keala. I could definitely spend all day going into this. This is one of my favorite topics as well, because I really believe that 80% of this—whether you’re a business builder, building wealth, or raising kids—it’s all about mindset. The only thing holding you back is yourself. It’s absolutely true.
So the more we can all learn and focus on this, the more incredibly valuable it becomes. So I really appreciate your time today. And if you could give the audience just one piece of advice about how they could maybe reset their mindset or a strategy to get to the next level, what would it be?
The only thing holding you back from achieving your complete vision is you – yourself, and how you’re thinking.
Yeah, there’s a lot of things we can talk about on the topic of mindset. We didn’t even scratch the surface on traumas and all these things. But the number one thing we do with our clients is help them get crystal clear about what their meta values are and then tie those meta values to the goals that they find most inspiring in their life. When that happens, the pursuit of those goals becomes largely unconscious—they’re subconsciously wired to achieve that. We give away a free assessment at thepowercode.com. When you align your goals and your values, we call that the Power Code. We have a free assessment at thepowercode.com that someone can take to help crystallize their meta values.
Awesome. Really appreciate that. Anywhere else people can follow you on social or connect with you besides that?
Yeah, I’ll send you over my links so you have them in the description. But yeah—Keala Kanae on Instagram, Keala Kanae on Facebook, Real Keala Kanae on YouTube. We’re really just now making a push for more social content along these lines, so lots of content there for sure, for free.
Okay, awesome. We’ll make sure we get that in the show notes for everyone. Keala, thanks so much for your time today—super insightful, and I look forward to digging into more of your content.
Thanks, Dave. Appreciate you, man. Great time.
Thanks for listening to this episode of Wealth Strategy Secrets. If you’d like to get a free copy of the book, go to holisticwealthstrategy.com. That’s holisticwealthstrategy.com. If you’d like to learn more about upcoming opportunities at Pantheon, please visit pantheoninvest.com. That’s pantheoninvest.com.