From Pain to Purpose: Evan Carmichael’s Path to Fulfillment

In this insightful podcast episode, Neal interviews Evan Carmichael about the interplay between personal pain and discovering one's purpose. Evan shares his belief that the most fulfilling purpose comes from helping others through the struggles you’ve overcome. They discuss the importance of sharing your story with vulnerability to genuinely connect and inspire others. Evan also highlights his transition from a promising investment banking career to pursuing his passion with a startup despite initial challenges. Furthermore, the conversation delves into the significance of continuous learning, embracing various resources for personal and professional growth, and keeping a mindset open to solutions. They emphasize the vital role of self-belief and contribution, encouraging listeners to find and follow mentors online, and be inspired daily. Finally, Evan shares poignant listener stories and solidifies the message that overcoming personal battles and serving others is the bedrock of meaningful success.

https://www.youtube.com/@EvanCarmichael/

https://believe.evancarmichael.com/homepage

https://www.linkedin.com/in/evancarmichael/

https://www.instagram.com/evancarmichael/

Transcript

Happy Wealthy Show_Evan Carmichael
===

Evan Carmichael: I think ultimately your purpose comes from your pain I think whatever you struggle the most in life with is what you want to help other people through And when people say what's my purpose? Well It needs to be serving others like doing something just for yourself Is never going to be a long term sustainable way to fulfillment. 

Neal Neo Phalora: Evan, so wonderful to have you on the podcast today. I appreciate you being here. I know our time is precious and yours always precious as well, but thank you. 

Evan Carmichael: Thanks for having me, neal. Great to be here. 

Neal Neo Phalora: Absolutely. I'd be easy for me, Evan, to talk to you about speaking and talk to you about your four books, talk to you about YouTube channel and so forth.

But I really want to dive into the mindset side of where you came from. One of the things I find is really unique is for most people, their passion comes from a deeply personal place you talk about finding your voice. Why is that particular passion of yours so personal to you and why should people find their voice?

Evan Carmichael: I think ultimately your purpose comes from your pain I think whatever you struggle the most in life with is what you want to help other people through And when people say what's my purpose? Well It needs to be serving others like doing something just for yourself Is never going to be a long term sustainable way to fulfillment.

We want to serve. We're wired to serve We want to help but whom do we help and how do we help? The people we love helping the most is the people who we see suffering with the same things we suffered with ourselves. We'll love holding the door for people or buying a cup of coffee for the person behind you in line and that's all good but when you see somebody who currently is struggling with the exact same thing that you used to struggle with, or maybe still are struggling with, but just, you've grown beyond where they're at, and you help them and you give them some advice, you give them some ideas, you give them some hope. That's just the feeling that you want to get addicted to.

So in order to be able to help people in terms of finding your voice, you need to share. If I don't know what you've been through, why would I listen to you? You sharing your story, what you've been through allows me to connect with you, because if I'm giving somebody advice and they don't know my story, they're less likely to listen to the advice.

You're just like another guy giving advice. But if I know your story, I'm much more likely to listen to you because you're like me, you've been through this. And so I will listen to you where I won't listen to other people. 

Neal Neo Phalora: Now, that's so good. And knowing what somebody's been through does connect us emotionally.

I find so many entrepreneurs are afraid to put themselves out there. I really believe vulnerability is the permission slip, but it feels like that we Struggle with this line where to be a wound rather than where to be a witness. How do you draw those lines by sharing your story, but maybe not oversharing and turning people off?

Evan Carmichael: I'm introverted. I'm shy. And so I'll never overshare. I think if you're worrying about it, you're not an overshare. You need to share more. And so for people like me, it's just a reminder that not sharing is selfish. That's probably the biggest fight that I would get into with my agent is he would always tell me, you need to be famous, people need to know your story and like, Steve I don't care about being famous.

It's not about me and then finally, after a couple of years of him beating it into me, or maybe I just finally was able to listen. He said, you don't get it. The more people who know you, the more people you can help. If you want to spread the message, the mission, people have to know what you've been through.

That got me out of the, my usual like, Oh, I don't need to share anything about me. I'm just going to share stories of other people and get my message out to the world as well. I think if you're worried about oversharing, you're probably not sharing enough. One of the stories that really helped me with this is a guy named Michael Edwards.

Evan Carmichael: When I was on my tour in 2019, we did 23 cities in 90 days across the U. S. Wow. And I met him on my stop in Indianapolis. He had driven a couple hours to come and meet me. He told me he had been through four concussions. And he wants to help other people heal through concussions. It's like, wow, that's crazy.

Some of the stories of how he got the concussions is nuts. That's a, that's a cool story, but I don't know anything about concussion. So it didn't resonate on an emotional level apart from what he had been through. About a month later, I faint in doing some biohacking and pass out, hit my head on the wall and break my neck in two spots and get a concussion.

Oh, wow. And I don't know if you can see, I've got a neck brace up here on the background that was from that incident. I'd never had a concussion before, I didn't know how to react and I couldn't look at anything, it's like bright lights are super painful. Everybody's now bombarding me with DMs and messages, in a very loving way, like, hey, how can I help?

But I couldn't spend more than five minutes on my phone before just wanting to pass out. But the one message I paid attention to first was Michael Edwards. Why? Because he had been through concussions and healed himself four times through this. Of all the people messaging me, Michael just now became like the most important person in my life.

Yeah. Yeah, yeah. But if I didn't know that he had been through four concussions, I would have completely ignored his message. It's like, okay, another guy who's just trying to send me advice, cool, thank you, I appreciate it. The fact that I knew he had been through those four concussions, meant that I needed to pay attention to this guy now.

And so the same thing happens with us all the time, where you could be given advice to somebody and it might be the right, perfect advice, but unless they know that you've been through what they are going through, they're not going to listen to you. So we often feel as entrepreneurs at sharing our story, like, I don't want to share my story.

It looks too egotistical. Nobody cares about, I just want to help. It's like, well, unless you tell your story, people won't listen to the advice. And not sharing your story is actually selfish. 

Neal Neo Phalora: Yeah, I hear this. I think it dovetails into a lot of what people are not going to care about what you do, right?

Until they understand how, until they understand that you understand them, right? And that's a way in which we share our story. One of the things about your story that I really love is that you went under a lot of healing. You started out life as a slow learner with nervous tics and so forth.

I've had a deep healing journey myself through some chronic things as well. People under who undergo healing, I think understand life a little bit differently. What did you learn in that process? And what do you still maybe like applying to your business now as somebody who's undergone some healing in your life?

Evan Carmichael: I think the first one is to realize that anything is solvable and so, as much as I love traditional medicine and it's, has helped me many times, you know, when I broke my neck is like, okay, get me in a cast, and I wore that cast for 60 days and it could only take it off for 10 minutes a day.

So I listened to traditional medicine and doctors, and they've been really helpful. Sometimes they're not as helpful, and just to not accept it's not possible as the default answer. And this applies in any industry, we just happen to be talking about health right now. Right. The fact that you get a no, the fact that you get a prognosis, doesn't mean that is the final, like that's one person's opinion off of a set of limited data.

Neal Neo Phalora: Right. 

Evan Carmichael: If you talk about healing, how many healing modalities are there? I don't know what the number is, but it's more than one, hundreds, thousands. Yeah. Right. So how many of you tried, whatever the thing is that you're trying to solve, has anybody ever solved this before? And probably it's a yes.

Maybe it's not the person that you're talking to right now. Maybe there's another answer. Maybe there's another way. This is more a message to myself. Maybe it doesn't have to be prescriptive, but for me, it would be okay. This person cannot solve my problem. I want to at least go off and try to find somebody else who can, before just accepting my fate that I'm stuck with this thing now forever.

And the beauty about the internet now is all these people are online. They're making content. They're starting podcasts. They're sharing their wisdom. They come on shows like yours and it's like, wow, I never knew that existed. Where, you know, I'm 43 years old. If I look at my parents when they were 43 years old, the options weren't there.

Like, who do you talk to? It's like, there's the textbook, and there's the doctor, and that's it. Where now, it's a completely different world. So just not accepting the first answer that comes back as gospel. Even talking about healing, I've done a bunch of tests over the years. I've got my DNA tested. I do my annual physical. I've done tests for insurance. I have all my blood work and all these results. I created a GPT for myself that has all of my information uploaded into it. Anytime I ask a health question, I ask it to reference all of my data and give me some answers. So if I'm asking the question about my sleep, it's looking at my DNA work.

It's looking at everything I've ever done. Then it comes back with some customized answers. And even that I don't accept as gospel like that's the only way. But, your family doctor doesn't know all these things. Your family doctor is not going out and studying the most recent research on whatever condition that you might have.

I think there's lots of tools and lots of strategies and lots of things that you can do, but it just starts with the mindset of, you know Somebody's figured this out. I'm going to find a way to. 

Neal Neo Phalora: I love it. And somebody who's come from a medical background who was in med school once upon a time and the things that I do for my own personal health now would seem very woo woo to me at that time.

But you're right. I think to some degree, what I also hear you saying is treat your life like a little bit of experiment. Don't get married to one thing, explore your options, see what's out there. Evan, One of the things I know you use the hashtag believe a lot, but one of the things as I read through your story is I think the person that believed in you the most, you know, was Mrs. Farr was one person and your parents. Your parents believe in that. But brother, so many people, when I coach too, so many people are struggling with this idea of how to find belief. They either weren't given it, they weren't modeled it, they didn't have people in their lives. Recently Adam Sandler got a huge award and he said belief was the most important thing.

If somebody's struggling out there with belief right now, what advice do you have for them?

Evan Carmichael: Well, thank you for the Adam Sandler note. I'll have to go look at that speech and see what he said. That might get inspired too. Again, I think we're growing up in a different world. I'm old enough that when I was growing up, I didn't have internet. There was no internet. Same. You had to do a study project? You went to the library. So, I was fortunate to have my parents who were cheering me on, and I was fortunate to have Madame Pharr, my French teacher in high school to give me extra belief. But now, you have all the resources in the world through the internet.

So, it's much more about what are you consistently exposing yourself to. If people love your show, Neal, like how many episodes have you done? Go back and watch Neal. If watching Neal and his guests make you feel different, more hopeful, more optimistic, more bold, more belief. Cool. How many episodes have you done, Neal?

How many shows do you have? Um, about 10. Perfect. So go back and watch the other nine and Neal's going to keep making more. Right? So, every time you watch Neal, and his guests, you get a little bit of how Neal thinks into you. And that success leaves clues. You may never meet Neal. I mean, I hope you do, and I hope you leave some comments, and I hope you tell him how much of an impact But you may never meet him!

I've had people come up to me and say, You're the only person who's ever believed in me. I don't even know who you are. They just watch my content. In watching the content every day, it makes them believe in themselves just a little bit more. It's why I do what I do. Like, every day there's new content.

Cause I need it for myself because every day I want Steve Jobs in my ear or Oprah in my ear or whoever in my ear because it makes me want to do something bigger for my life as well. Most people are waking up like an accident and just accepting the environment around them. Wow. And here you have a chance to make a difference.

Start to audit what you feed into yourself. You can't change your parents. You were born into this situation. You're going to change your brothers and your sisters, but you can change what you feed yourself. You can change what you put into your mind and audit the channels you subscribe to.

Audit the YouTube channels that you are subscribed to right now. Do they make you feel better about yourself or worse? Audit your people you follow on Instagram or TikTok. Do they make you feel better about yourself or worse? People talk about loading their phones and going on Instagram first thing in the morning like doom scrolling for two hours.

Yeah. That's not in my feed. I'm not doom scrolling. I have entrepreneurs. I have wisdom. I have motivation in my Instagram feed that sets me up for a great day. And that's just choice. You get to choose who you're following. Most people just never do an audit, just accept what is. And if you accept what is, then you stay where you are.

Your environment has been perfectly designed to keep you where you are. If you want to change it, you need to change what you're feeding into your mind. 

Neal Neo Phalora: Yeah, I like that. So many people complain about the algorithm, but often Evan, I say to them, who is the original algorithm?

We are, we're the people deciding what we point on, what we click. We're self programming and the things that we'd go after then come back to us. So it's, and I think a lot of people with the age of information are more confused than ever, but they're Tapping into too many resources. But what I hear in your story, which is something I like to model and do myself is find a handful of mentors that you want and follow them.

I've taken notes and written out questions that I thought they would ask me and have, you know, maybe they're not, I can't afford a million dollar mentor right now. But I can watch their content and I can dream up like, what would they ask me to do based on their content and so forth and take that actionably forward.

I completely agree with you. Your story seems to be very much of an underdog kind of story. Coming from an underdog, how have you used that to your advantage and leverage that? Because I think a lot of people, they struggle with what they think is privilege. My parents came to this country with nothing from dirt floor farm, and they managed to get a very selective advantage. And so people sometimes hold back their opportunities because they're like, I just don't have the things that evan Carmichael has because he has millions of subs and , is all over the world speaking, but that wasn't always the case.

Evan Carmichael: I think everybody's an underdog. I think whatever the thing is if you're not an underdog and the thing you're doing, you're not thinking big enough. If you don't have a goal that you look at and it seems scary, then you're not thinking big enough and that ends up being somebody who hates their life.

If you're waking up and you're not growing, you're not going to be happy for very long. You might want to go on vacation and lie on a beach for a couple weeks. Cool. But. You don't want to do that for the rest of your life. You will hate your life. Humans want growth, and humans want contribution and service.

We want to feel like we're helping other people and we're learning things. So, everybody's an underdog to themselves. You look at somebody else like, Oh, well, they had it easy. Okay, but ask that person who's had success. They're going to think that they were an underdog. What I love doing is, whoever you think had it made, look at your heroes, chances are they started with less than what you already have right now.

If you're looking at me and say, oh, Evan's already had all this growth, you can go to my homepage, it's off my name, Evan Carmichael. And I posted my year over year growth of my YouTube channel. And it shows it was definitely not an overnight success. Year one was 25 subscribers. By year five, I was still under 10, 000 subscribers.

I remember what the number was two or seven, but five years of doing this, you still not hitting 10, 000 subscribers that most people would say is a total failure. I just kept going. So look at your heroes and look at where they started from. You have more opportunities in front of you right now than they had when they got started.

If you don't believe me, just go look at their stories. It's easy to see how Insert whoever your hero is, how they make an extra million dollars now. But how did they go from zero to one? That's what I care about the most. They probably had less resources than you have. And so if they could do it, what's yours?

You look at Oprah, right? Oprah became the most successful female entrepreneur of all time. Her story of being raped and not having her parents and being raised by her grandparents and being super poor. Her, her family, her grandmother was so poor that she couldn't buy Oprah clothes.

Neal Neo Phalora: Right. 

Evan Carmichael: So she bought potatoes and took the potato sack and sewed it into a dress. And Oprah went to school in a potato sack that was sewn as a dress. It's like, could you imagine going to school in a potato sack? No, no, no. And so for her to go from that to where she is, what are you complaining about?

And that's what I'll tell myself. It's like I'm an underdog for what I want to accomplish. What I want to accomplish hasn't been done before. And I have all these reasons why I could tell myself I'm too introverted and too shy and too scared and all these things. We all have our own battles that we're fighting a lot of mental battles and a lot of health battles.

We're all fighting the war constantly., but other people have done it with less than what you have. So the more you're around that mindset and that thinking. The more it's going to allow you to go and achieve whatever it holds up. 

Neal Neo Phalora: Yeah. I think that's really the key is being around it more.

One of the things I like to say to people is that when you choose you in the face of extreme opportunity costs, you know, your value. And where I see that really for reflected in your story, Evan is when you were a university student and you chose this 300 a month lifestyle, right. To leave investment banking behind.

What did you learn from doing that because that's a huge spiritual leap at such a young age?

Evan Carmichael: Yeah. So for people listening, , I had a chance to be an investment banker and make six figures out of university and instead decided to join a startup company on 30 percent of it and have 300 a month.

And that was, looking back, I was like, oh, that was the right thing to do. But in the moment, I had no idea, Neal. It was like, it was, I was not brave, I was not courageous, I was not a visionary that like, I know this is what's gonna work out. And in 20 years, I'm gonna be on Neal's show talking about it.

Like, I had no idea. There were two things that really helped me. The first was, I didn't want to live with regret. And this is something that I've read from Jeff Bezos. I don't know Jeff, but he inspired me to make one of the biggest changes in my life, where he talked about having to regret minimization framework.

Basically don't live with regrets. And what would you regret more later in life? And as I thought about that as a 19 year old university student, I thought if I don't do the investment banking, I don't know that I would regret that, but if I don't take a shot on this business, I feel like I would regret it. So I decided that I would go and do this because I didn't want to I figured 40 was really old, and so I thought when I'm 40, and I'm, and like life is over, and like I'm falling apart, I'm gonna look back on this moment and regret it. Yeah, like when you're 19, you think 40 is ancient. Of course. And when I'm an old man and it's all over, I'm gonna regret that I didn't take a shot on this.

Neal Neo Phalora: For all of us, for all of you that are not watching the YouTube Evan. I just want to clarify, Evan does not have a walk or anything in front of him. He's 40, but he's not hung up yet. So 

Evan Carmichael: yeah, no, there's still a lot, a long life ahead. But that's what I thought, in 19, you don't, you're not thinking, how do you even imagine 83?

Like 43 and 83 are basically the same thing for me at least. So that was one, like I didn't want to live with regret. The second thing was I thought I could get another job in a year. Some of my friends were taking a year off to go backpack or find themselves or whatever. So I said, you know what, I'm going to give this business a year and if it doesn't work, I'm going to go back and get that investment banking job.

It may not be the same one, it may not be for as much money, it may not be what I have right now, but I could probably get another job in this field in a year if this thing doesn't work out. So that was how I minimized my risk. I wasn't just throwing everything away, do up and do it.

Those are the things I didn't want to look for the regret and then I minimized the downside risk and that just gave me the courage. I guess I didn't feel very courageous at the moment, but to just say yes and give it a shot. And, it didn't work out super well in the first year and it eventually, you know, took off. We had a good exit. 

Neal Neo Phalora: Awesome. Awesome. I'd be remiss brother if I didn't ask you something about social media in this podcast. With YouTube and social media strategies, one of the things that I find is that people really come up against their own image and the way that I kind of see it, at least my version of it is that it's a lot to do with safety.

Besides love on this earth, our number one need is safety and people just don't execute. So what advice would you give for somebody if they're like really struggling to show up online, and to find their voice? How should they perceive? 

Evan Carmichael: Think about who you're helping. Like, stop making it about you.

What are you worried about? You're worried about the pimple on your nose, or you're worried about your microphone not being perfect. You're worried about whatever it is that you're worried about. Meanwhile, Somebody might die today because you didn't make your peace of conduct, like literally.

Neal Neo Phalora: Oof. 

Evan Carmichael: Like people, if you think back to you from X years ago, 10 years ago, whatever it is, think about you in your lowest moments. There's lots of people who are currently who you used to be. Millions of people right now are who you used to be and they need help. In a lot of cases, it is actually life and death.

Your video could be the thing that lets them go one more day, one more week, one more month, that gives them hope. Have you ever been inspired by a video that changed your life? You could be that for other people. People will listen to you, where they won't listen to me. And they won't listen to Tony Robbins, and they won't listen to whoever because we haven't been through the same thing that you're going through. But to listen to you and you're worried about your pimple, right. It's like, and, it gets heavy, but that's what I would tell myself. Cause I never wanted to be, even now I'm introverted, man. I'm happy to just never be on camera and I've done like 15, 000 videos or whatever.

Because it's a service. It's like, who am I trying to help? The longer you stay in the game, the more stories of people come up and tell you how much of an impact you've had. I've had people come and tell me, I was about to, I was going to kill myself. I was getting in my car and I was going to go drive off a bridge and kill myself.

And your video came on, like it just auto played, and from listening to it, I turned around and went back home, I just wanted to tell you.

There was a woman who was going through cancer treatment and it was getting really hard for her and she wanted to give up and just stop all the treatment and just like, I'm done with the pain. I'm done with the suffering. She told her mom, I just, I don't want to do this anymore. I'm done.

Her mom told her who's that person again you follow on the YouTube, on your iPad? What's that person? We're going to watch a video right now from that person. And so her mom got the iPad and played one of the videos and it got her through, it was my channel. And like it got her through that moment.

She didn't tell me that until four years after that moment. We were at an event together and she told me this story. And I didn't know, she never left a comment. She never told me. We assume that what we're doing has no value and no impact and that 50 people saw our video. So then it must suck.

Well, maybe for two of those 50 people that was a life changing message. So for me, it was always the focus on who I was serving, instead of who I wasn't. The fact that 50 people watch this video, maybe for two, that was a life changing moment and that me being shy or introverted or having a pimple or having a bad hair day or whatever, you know, glad you have hair, uh, is, is not a good enough reason.

Because people are waiting on your message that you're sitting on. 

Neal Neo Phalora: Yeah. Yeah. Impact. There is a weight to that. We'll wrap up on this, Evan. Thank you for your time. what is the piece of life changing advice that you got for you? That, that piece of advice that just keeps rattling around in your head.

We all have that one to three things that somebody said to us that stay with us for a long time. 

Evan Carmichael: The message from my mom, who would tell me you're Evan Costrilli Carmichael, you can do anything that you believe that you can. Ugh. Uh, and that's from my mom. If you want a more generic version, you can go to Henry Ford, who is, uh, whether you believe you can or you can't.

Neal Neo Phalora: Yes. A thousand percent. Appreciate you so much, brother. So much wisdom, Evan. Nice to get to know you. Thank you for being here today. 

Evan Carmichael: Thank you, Neal. Appreciate you, man. 

Neal Neo Phalora: Take care.