Making It – Episode 150
From Gifted to a Gift (Giovanni Marsico)
Giovanni Marsico: I’m Giovanni Marsico, and you’re listening to Making It. And I run a business called Archangel, where our mission is to help a million people become millionaires. And my definition of that word is someone who impacts a million people. I grew up in a very loving household. My parents are still not only together, they still go on dates. And I had awesome role models for love, and they also weren’t entrepreneurial at all.
I was in high school when I started my first quote unquote company. I would get so excited and come home. And then the messaging was often something like, stop dreaming. And they were immigrants from Italy, so I was first generation Canadian. And their whole paradigm was go to university, be one of the first people in our family to do that. Get a degree, get a safe job at a big company, and get your benefits. And that path. And that path was never for me. So it created tension and conflict with me wanting to respect the teachers and my parents and all of them, but that went against my inner knowing of who I am and what my path actually is.
So I would still do these events, and then the messaging was always, don’t do them. And then by the time I was 21, there was so much tension that I just stopped doing events, and I went to university. And that’s actually when I started experiencing depression and anxiety. And I thought something was wrong with me. I thought, I need help. I need therapy. I need maybe medication. Now, looking back, I realized it was more of my inner knowing or intuition or inner GPS or compass saying, this is not the aligned path. And that’s what that anxiety feeling actually was for me. And when I started Archangel, it felt like the compass going back in the right direction. And it took decades.
When I was in fifth grade, the entire school board did IQ testing, and I scored super high with respect to IQ testing. So they labeled me as gifted, and they said, once a week, we’re going to bus you to a different school for gifted class and programming with a bunch of other gifted kids, which was awesome. Problem was, when I went back to my regular school and I would be bullied for being too smart, which was weird, because it didn’t make sense for that to be the reason of being bullied and painful. And one day, I went home crying to my parents, wondering, what the hell’s going on.
And I developed almost a hatred for the word gifted because it was the thing that made me stand out, and it was the thing I was being bullied for and picked on and made fun of. A few years later, in high school, I fell in love with comic books. And this is the early nineties, when it wasn’t cool to like superheroes before the movies and all of the fanfare, so you almost had to read the stuff in secret. But I was a hardcore comic nerd and loved Spiderman and Iron Man, a lot of the Marvel books. But the first time I opened an X Men comic, the very first page I saw said, Xavier’s school for gifted youngsters. And it was part of the X Men storyline to have this school for gifted kids.
And it changed my life, because now there was that word again, but it meant superpower. And in those stories, for people not familiar with the X Men, it’s about these people who are different, and they have something about them that stands out, that they feel like it’s a curse, because they want to blend in with humanity, and they are a mutant, and they don’t until Professor X, who’s the leader of the X Men, comes in and says, hey, the thing that makes you stand out isn’t a curse. It’s a gift. And you can harness that gift and make it a superpower and change the lives of others. And that changed my life in high school to the point where I would tell people, when I grow up, I want to lead a team of superheroes. I’m going to create a real-life X Men. This is what I would tell all my friends in high school, and they thought it was ridiculous.
People know me as the founder of Archangel, which is a membership organization for entrepreneurs that want to make a big impact in the world. And our community is global, where there’s thousands of us. And I am also known as an experienced designer, event producer, film producer, and community builder. And those are what I believe to be my superpowers. I’m also a comic book nerd, but I love the idea of bringing people together who have a desire to serve others and a desire to make the world better, and a desire to change the lives of as many people as possible.
When I was 17, I started producing events, and these were like dance parties for teenagers. And we had a thousand people at the first one. So my entrepreneurial career started with event production with 1,000 people at our first event, and then that grew to two, 3,000. By the time I was 20 years old, we were doing three to 5,000 people a week at a nightclub, a safe space for kids to party without drugs, without alcohol. And it was the most lit up I have ever been because I felt like I found my thing early on. And it’s been 30 years. Just had my 30-year anniversary for events calculated that I’ve had somewhere between 250,000 to 350,000 people attend my events since then. So that’s been in my DNA and genetics, and it’s what I love doing. I love bringing people together.
I have a weird relationship, but I think a good relationship with the word failure, because I no longer see it as a negative. So I don’t know if I would label things as mistakes or instead, I label them more as market research and learning. But as an example, we do this event called Archangel Summit, where we’ve had thousands of people in a theater or a really big venue like the Toronto Convention Center. And it’s one of my favorite things to do to have that energy in a room. And in 2018, we thought we should probably find partnerships or sponsorships for this event that’s established. And it’s an amazing asset.
So we hired an agency to sell sponsorships for us, and they said, we have 250,000 confirmed in funds coming in for the event. So we planned around that. And then at the event, the final number was 10,000. So basically taking a giant hit on the event, which was frustrating. And then the year after, thinking, okay, let me find someone better to do this for us. And literally, it was almost the exact same. So 250,000 promised, and then it was 7,000 that actually showed up.
And it was like having PTSD around sponsorships to the point where I was like, okay, this is something we’re going to take internal and build our own internal team and do it right, because I don’t want to deal with agencies where we can actually create our own internal team to do this kind of thing, which we’re now doing. And it’s 10,000 times better. So it was a very expensive lesson in team building and not exactly fun.
But a more fun story, we had Akon, the singer, perform at Archangel Summit, and it was incredible. He did a 30 minutes set, all of his hit songs. So we had 3,000 people in the theater and 300 people that he called on stage to dance with them. And it was so fun. And the next morning, one of my team members calls me and says, Gio, I am so sorry. That’s how she started the call. The day after a very successful event. I’m like, okay, what happened? She said, I don’t know how to tell you this, but Akon and his crew kept his limo. And I was like, what do you mean?
So part of the contract was transportation to and from the venue back to the hotel with like a stretch limo because he comes with friends. They decided to not go back to the hotel and party 24 hours with our limo. Who knows where they went? So there was like an additional $3,000 limo bill that wasn’t expected. I’m like, okay, so we learned something new, but as long as you learn from them, you can adopt and make things better.
Making it is such an incredible phrase. And it’s interesting because I think people have weird relationships with words like success or wealth. I recently meditated even on the word wealth and success, all these words, because I think when people think of wealth, they think of an accumulation of things. Real estate and money and cars and toys. For me, making it is a collection of memories. It’s a collection of novel experiences, and I love having memories and I love creating memories for other people. So making it is living life full of stories to tell later.
When I launched in 2014, I had a lot of big dreams and big goals that I share with people that I thought were almost impossible. And all of them have happened to the point where I actually felt a little frustrated a year ago thinking, oh shoot, now what do I do? So I’ve come up with a lot more bigger ones for the next ten years. And I like thinking in long time frames. I call this type of thinking destiny goals. So I’ve achieved all of my original goals. So yeah, I feel like I’ve made it. And I feel it’s an infinite game where as long as I’m breathing, there will always be another destiny or destination to get to.
And thinking at the same time to focus on what I call odyssey goals, meaning focusing on the journey itself and how I can have incremental change and improvements and a collection of stories along the way. My life feels like a dream right now. If I think back ten years to who I was and what his dreams were, he’d be very happy with stuff right now. One person that has been particularly helpful for me is my wife, Dr. Stephanie Estema. 2016 was the year that my whole life changed in so many ways.
It was the year I quit real estate because my Archangel project, which launched in 2014 almost as a side thing, just producing some events a couple times a year, it was gaining a lot of momentum and I thought, this is my opportunity now to go all in. And that’s when we did our first big summit. That year I met my now wife, and that year I shed 70 pounds. I think I was so depressed and anxious from the real estate stuff that I also had a lot of bad habits, like going into drive throughs every day was not healthy. And there was such a pivotal year in terms of my own transformation, and that was the first big pivot with respect to focusing on health, focusing on alignment across the board.
And my wife, she’s a genius when it comes to health as well. So that’s very useful. And fast forward to today, for example, we align our calendars completely together so that we’re in a gym every day together, and we haven’t missed a session in, I think, 450 days in a row. It’s like having a mini date every day, which is so fun, and we both love fitness.
The best piece of advice I’ve ever received is from a coach named Joanne Delcourt. And in 2011, when I was in the real estate thing and feeling depressed, I needed someone to talk to because it was painful and impossible to speak to people around me at the time, simply because I was, quote unquote, successful in that space. It was very challenging to tell people that you are winning awards and you’re being featured in magazines and you hate it. And Joanne is a coach, especially with respect to mindset and psychology. And I hired her, and I was at her office. She’s not a therapist, I don’t believe, but it felt like an amazing therapy kind of session.
And she taught me this technique, and this is the advice that changed my life, which was how to communicate with your future self. And she asked me to name him something different than me. Now, this is in 2011, so I’d be thinking, ten years into the future, I named him Johnny angel. It was my DJ name when I was producing all these dance parties and stuff. So she said, whenever you have a major decision or really any decision to make that you’re conscious of, ask yourself, what would Johnny Angel do? What would your highest self-future version of you do in this circumstance?
And I think the magic was that it wasn’t what would I do, what would Giovanni do; it’s what would the best version of me in the future, dude. And a year later, I attended an event called Genius Network that changed my life. And the ticket was $10,000 US for that event, and it was the most I would have ever invested in myself at all. And it was a scary decision back then. And I would have said no because I would have had too much imposter syndrome or fear that it was too big a number. Johnny Angel said yes. That’s how I had the courage to say, okay, I need to be at this event. And that event changed my life.
And when I got the positive feedback loop of, oh, this future self is a smart dude, I should pay more attention to him. I started doing that on a regular basis and I still do. So when I need advice, I ask my future self what would Johnny Angel do? And it feels like having a coach or a mentor or a guide on this journey. So if I could go back in time, if I could time travel and meet myself when I was, let’s say, 18, the advice I would give to him is that anything you desire with respect to outcomes, you can become the person that can make that dream a reality.
You are not limited by your current circumstance. You’re not limited by your and personality, by your fears, by your current experiences, by your economics at the time. All of those so-called limitations are the attention your story requires to be an amazing story. And you are not only the hero of the story or main character, you’re also the script writer and the narrator and the director and the producer and the set designer. And you have a lot more control over all of it than you think.
This is Giovanni Marsico and you’ve been listening to Making It. You can find me at Archangel.cc. A-R-C-H-A-N-G-E-L dot C-C.
Cassandra Topperwein: Making it is part of the Mirasee FM podcast network, which also includes such shows as Just Between Coaches and Once Upon a Business. To catch the great episodes that are coming up on Making It, please follow us on YouTube or your favorite podcast player. And if you enjoyed the show, please leave us a comment or a starred review. It’s the best way to help us get these ideas to more people. Thank you and we’ll see you next time.