The Grit Factor Podcast w/ Karl Jacobi

Griffy Kesler started selling on Amazon at twelve years old, he made forty million dollars in sales over fifteen years, built multiple businesses including online retail and a hybrid storefront and he's currently building a new brand called HR Approved. Impressive numbers. Clean story. Easy to scroll past.

Here is what the highlight does not say, at nineteen years old, after a traumatic long-term breakup cracked open everything he had never dealt with about his own identity. Griffy spent close to three years mixing Xanax with alcohol every single day. He drove away almost every friendship he had. He racked up forty-five thousand dollars in credit card debt with nothing to show for it. He dropped from two hundred and sixty pounds to a hundred and fifty. His parents found him passed out on their couch one day, shallow breathing, low pulse, unable to wake him. He admitted that on the nights he was mixing benzos and alcohol, he had accepted either outcome. He was not trying to die. He had just stopped caring whether he did or not.

That couch moment and his father's words, look in the mirror and decide what kind of man you want to be, started the turn. Six months of daily outpatient work in a program called Enthusiastic Sobriety, three or four relapses before earning a year sober, thousands of small daily decisions, and a counselor who told him early on that if he got through this, he would be able to use every terrible experience to help other people the same way that counselor was helping him. That sentence has never left him. It is why he is on this podcast.

Today Griffy is seven plus years sober, building scalable systems into businesses he loves, operating with written core values he reads every morning, and showing up with the kind of openness that makes people in the room feel safe enough to share things they have never told anyone. 
This episode is for anyone who is using something to turn their brain off right now and wondering if there is another way through.