THE PATH TO SUCCESS IS PAVED WITH OBSTACLES WITH TOMMIE LARK JR

Christina: Hello everyone and welcome to another episode of I Am Christina DiArcangelo And with me I have my guest, Tommie Lark who joined me to talk about all the amazing things he's been doing over the past few years. And I was recently on his show, so I thought it would be a good idea to have Tommie on my show. Welcome, Tommie.

Tommie: Well, thank you so much, Christina for having me. It's a pleasure. Thanks so much. It was great to be on your show. I had a lot of fun, so I thought perhaps we could talk about you and what you've been doing. Why don't you tell everyone a little bit about yourself? Yeah, no problem. Again, I appreciate you having me on the show. It was fun a few weeks ago or months ago at this point when we last spoke, but, yeah I am an entrepreneur. I've always been an entrepreneur at heart. Since growing up, I could just remember doing small odd jobs and handyman things around the house and going with my grandfather, working different jobs and things. And then as I got older, I thought that I was going to become a dentist. So I ended up going to college and becoming a premed major and psychology major. And after that, I was working with a dentist. I thought that I was going to go to dental school and become a dentist and own my own practice. So, again, entrepreneurship. But while in college, I actually started my first business in the hemp space, so I started a hemp apparel brand. After graduating college, I came to a crossroads. Am I going to go to dental school and pursue dentistry, or am I going to pursue this clothing brand that I started with some friends in college? And to be honest, the clothing brand sounded a little bit better to me. And so I kind of put all my eggs into this entrepreneurship basket, and there were some bumps, some bruises. I fell on my face a few times, and I learned a lot of things about business. And so fast forward, now I'm in the health and wealth space while also doing a little bit of real estate investing.

Christina: That's awesome. Well, I appreciate you sharing your journey with everyone and being an entrepreneur, it's never easy, and you said, sometimes I fall in. I had some bruises and scrapes, but I just kept going. And I think that's important for people to notate and pay attention to, because on the outside it looks like it's so much fun being an entrepreneur, but it's not that fun sometimes. We're challenged. A lot of times we come up with ideas that because other people haven't done that, it's odd maybe, and they can't always get behind it. So you kind of stick out as an outlier from a support standpoint sometimes. Yeah, that's so true. And I talk about this with a lot of my friends that are entrepreneurs. We talk about it pretty much across the board every day, because there's always something that's going on that while, again, on the outside, you're meeting your goals, you're hitting things, you're doing whatever you're doing from a press standpoint, what's being said about you. But people don't understand the criticality that's behind many of our success as an entrepreneur and the fact that sometimes we suffer from more amounts of anxiety, say, and stress, because in a sense, people would say it was self inflicted. We chose to be an entrepreneur thereby we chose this path we went down. We choose that. But we don't always choose what happens in that process. It just happens.

Tommie: Yes, correct. Some things are just out of your control

Christina: And you got to learn to just kind of let it roll off your back, because otherwise you'll end up cycling. That's what I always say. I'm cycling in my brain about something that I'm trying to solve or something I'm trying to do. And we have to be a little bit more brave, I think, right, because we are kind of getting behind this design or this concept or this business model that we want to proceed with. And sometimes we're starting from scratch.

Tommie: Yeah. And it's a vision that sometimes, like you said, other people don't see. So it's hard to articulate or to show people to get them behind that to support you. But just keep going. Just keep going.

Christina: Yeah. I mean, you can't give up, right? I see a lot of your positive posts, and a lot of your posts talk about having the drive. What is leadership? What does it mean to you? What are some of the things that you can hang your hat on, so to speak, as far as concepts and how to keep yourself motivated. A lot of times I get questions, and I'm sure you do. How do you stay on track? So how do you stay on track, Tommie?

Tommie: I mean, I'm a little crazy, people would say, but people would say that because I'm an entrepreneur. Anyways, I start my day super early, and people say, why do you wake up so early? Well, I like my time. I like to have my self love, my self development, quiet time before the external distractions start to play a factor in my mental and everything else before I start to get the work calls and have to look at the emails. The first thing I do now started this year is going to yoga first thing in the morning. So I go to hot yoga to start my day. And I feel great because it's a moving meditation. I sweat a lot. I feel like I'm detoxing my body. I feel like I'm awake and alert when I leave and I come home, I like to meditate a little bit more and read. I have my breakfast and I get my day started. So I think the way you get your day started plays a huge part in how it snowballs into the rest of the day. And even if you have a tough moment today I woke up and I'm like, oh, can't believe it's already time to wake up. But I did, and I feel great, and I have a lot of energy. And so even if you have those moments of doubt or you have the small moments during the day that kind of bring you down a little bit, just remember, just one moment in the day and there's more moments to come, so don't let it keep you down, in a sense. But yeah, there's always a lot of things going on. It's a high stress environment at times, like you said, the anxiety, the stress, the depression, sometimes those things are real. That stuff kicks in when you're not meeting goals or you're really busting your butt and losing sleep sometimes to hit goals and make targets and stuff. But I think taking care of your health, what you eat, the sleep that you do get, the books you read or listen to, the people you surround yourself with, they all play a part in how you're going to think and how you're going to maneuver through life.

Christina: I agree with you. I think a lot of that. I wrote a quote one time your friends really define who you are as an individual. You could tell a lot about someone by their friends, right, because they can appear to be a certain way when you see them or if they have an online presence or interview or whatever. But when you see their friends, then you really know the type of person they are. And I think another thing that happens to us as entrepreneurs is sometimes we're let down by people in our organization or people outside of our organization that are doing things or saying things that you don't always necessarily align with. And I think sometimes because being an entrepreneur, our business is our family, it's even more upsetting when things like this happen because it's a lack of loyalty that was displayed and we're very loyal people to a default. Right? We were loyal to the concept of whatever it was that we were trying to do and we're loyal to ourselves because we continue to go forward on this trajectory of entrepreneurship not knowing whether or not there is going to be a payout at the end that we think might happen.

Tommie: Right, and it's tough. I mean, how do you feel about that? Yeah, it's sometimes the people that are closest to you that do let you down at times and where you need the support the most, it's not there. But it just comes back to just being like believing in yourself, having that self belief that even though you have this crazy idea that a lot of people can't comprehend, eventually the pieces of the puzzle will come together and they'll see the masterpiece. I like to say, right? I know for me, my health and wealth business. My mother, for instance, an example, is a business partner of mine now, but in the beginning, she didn't want to hear about anything I had to share with her. It was a lot of resistance. A lot of resistance, a lot of resistance. And even at the time, my girlfriend wasn't very supportive of the business. But fast forward, I am no longer with a girlfriend because she wasn't very supportive. She's an Ex for a reason. And my mother is a business partner and thriving in the business together. And so sometimes you just have to keep going because it's not their time in their life to see it. They don't see it through your lens yet. So that's all I say, just keep going. And eventually I just keep the faith, I guess. I just keep the faith. I keep pushing and I keep believing in myself. I will always bet on myself, always.

Christina: That's awesome. And I agree with that wholeheartedly because there's been things that I've done business wise, like even coming out of traditional pharma, so to speak, in 2016 and moving into the cannabinoid space and some of the other nutraceuticals that are now being studied more extensively In 2016, it wasn't as popular. And I remember when I made that decision, like, that's it, I've had enough. I'm doing this. I don't care what people say. I don't care what the traditional pharma people will say about me, because at that point, I had been in the industry, I don't know, almost 20 years, and I've put my time in, and I have shown that the skills I have are transferable over to the cannabinoid, psilocybin, et cetera, right, space. But people in my old sandbox, if you will, I was criticized by family members, criticized me because they thought it was crazy because I was a very straight lace corporate person. I didn't do the things that other people do in our industry as far as criminal activities, because it does exist in traditional no different than any other industry, right? But I remember I took a big pay cut, too, because a lot of the things I did were free because I wanted to be able to show the cannabis space and the cannabinoid space that I had these transferable skills, that I get it. It doesn't matter that I'm new, so to speak, to cannabinoids. I understand science and research and all these things and regulations. So it was interesting to see, and it just kind of motivated me to push even more because the non believers, it's kind of just the way I am as a human. I like to prove that I can do this right once I put my mind to it. And so that's what I did. And that's what you're doing. And the fact that you were able to turn your mom around is pretty amazing because it stigmatized what we do, right? In a sense, some of the businesses that we hold. Yeah. Right? And so the fact that she could get around it and she could see, oh, yes, this is legit. Like, this is helping people. People are happier, she's happier. She sees the connection between health, meaning wealth. That's huge. And the fact that you decided that this person that wasn't willing to help you not so much do anything, but just be supportive. Just be supportive. Yeah, 100%. Yeah. You didn't expect her to roll up her sleeves and start getting in there and digging in, but when you wanted to talk about things, sometimes it's nice to have someone that's willing to listen to you and maybe perhaps give you some feedback that's not stigmatized in return. Yeah, 100%. I completely get it. I mean, even my ex husband, I remember him being very upset because not because so much about cannabis, just because I was taking a chance, and I was taking out of the income stream right? Because I was the supporter of the family. So I made a decision, and it's my decision. It's my career. I had enough money to still do what I needed to do, but I needed to take this chance. And I'm so glad I did, because I look back, like when I was on your show, we're talking about some of the stuff. I look back and I see all the improvements that have been made in patients from an advocacy standpoint or studies that I've worked on that have been successful or studies that we learned from. And we kind of were able to redirect ourselves to a better structure as it was for that therapeutic area. I think that we're doing things that are against the grid, and sometimes it makes people uncomfortable.

Tommie: That's very true. You have to make people uncomfortable sometimes. That's the only way to grow.

Christina: Yeah. Well, and a true leader does that. Right? Not uncomfortable in the sense that they're mean to somebody, but in the sense that we're doing something that's groundbreaking, that's not everyday courses of business, which makes people automatically uncomfortable.

Tommie: Yeah. And just challenging the way that people think.

Christina: Yeah. And providing feedback. Right? Like, if we know something and we feel like there's value add for us to comment on something or talk about something, it's because we're coming from a good place rather than a know it all place, because that's another thing that happens. People think you pretend that you know it all. No, we don't know. We just know what we know. And we're happy to share this piece or pieces with people so that they can understand things that perhaps they don't.

Tommie: Yeah. And I tell people all the time, I'm always willing to learn. I'm an open book. I can never know too much. So please enlighten me because I would love to learn from you.

Christina: Yup. I purposely hire people that have skills that I don't have because I know that there's things I'm going to learn in this relationship. It's not just me teaching. It's also receiving things, gifts in return. And also when you're trying to make an impact on things, it's really nice to be able to have different people involved in your businesses so that they can give you proper feedback.

Tommie: Right.

Christina: Because how are you going to grow?

Tommie: If you're the smartest person in the room, then you're in the wrong room.

Christina: That's right. You better go next door and try and find somebody else who can teach you something. I mean, all the way down to interns, we learn stuff from everybody because we're all different generations. We've come from different backgrounds. It's just exclusivity. I think that one of our assets as entrepreneurs is the fact that we are exclusive because we know what it's like to be an outlier.

Tommie: Yes, very true.

Christina: Okay, well, we could obviously talk about this for a very long time. I am going to end us with this. I'm sure that we'll be talking again in the future. As you're doing more and more things with your business and excelling, it's nice to watch where you're going, because I see things and I'm like, yeah, he's going somewhere. So I feel positive with where you're going.

Tommie: Thank you so much. I appreciate you having me on today. It's been a blast.

Christina: I'm glad you enjoyed it, and I'm really appreciative that you joined us today. So, as we always say, thank you so much. Remember, we are the same. I am Christina DiArcangelo.