Malcolm Forbes, who founded Forbes magazine, said: The biggest mistake people make in life is not making a living at doing what they most enjoy. We’re going to interview my fellow co-founders of Healthy Wealthy nWise, Ric and Liz Thompson and Janet Attwood. All four of us are fortunate today to be making a living doing the things we absolutely most enjoy.

We look forward to sharing some of the adventures we’ve had along the journey, and our intention is to help you apply the lessons we’ve learned to creating your own passionate life. May 1st, when this interview is going to appear on the cover of the magazine, marks the third anniversary of Healthy Wealthy nWise, so we’ve invited all of you here to celebrate with us. Let’s celebrate!

Chris Attwood: I first met Ric and Liz about five years ago, soon after Janet and I launched The Enlightened Millionaire program with Mark Victor Hansen and Robert Allen. At that time, they owned an Internet service provider in West Virginia and Ric was deeply immersed in the business, so we didn’t get to talk to him a lot.

However, we did get to talk to Liz and she quickly became one of the leaders in The Enlightened Millionaire program. Both Liz and Ric had been entrepreneurs since college. They’ve owned and run a number of businesses and we connected with them almost immediately.

Liz has had the gift of being able to see a vision, map it out on paper so others can understand it, and then design the systems that allow that vision to become real. Ric, on the other hand, is a master of the technical aspect of creating and running websites as well as understanding where the bottlenecks and challenges in a process might exist.

Both Liz and Ric have become masterful in presenting opportunities to others in ways which are honest, clear and enticing at the same time. When they started the magazine three years ago, they started it with their son Chandler, who gave them some very serious support. Chandler is how old now?

Liz Thompson: He’s nine.

Chris Attwood: So from age six, Chandler was right in there with the magazine, but Stefan just joined us a year ago, and together, the four of them live on an 80-acre farm in West Virginia. Ric and Liz, it’s such a pleasure and honor to have you with us.

Janet , my longtime business partner, has been the top salesperson in almost every sales job she’s held over the past 25 years. She ran the marketing division of Books Are Fun, the third largest book buyer in the US. When it was sold to Reader’s Digest for $380 million, that happened the year after her division had performed at record levels.

Janet’s a master connector and she’s been primarily responsible for connecting with many of the great guests we have featured on the cover of Healthy Wealthy nWise. Over the past two years, she’s been actively pursuing her passion for spending time with the enlightened, traveling extensively throughout India and Nepal.

She’s been the one responsible for creating the Dialogues with the Masters monthly calls, interviewing enlightened sages every month-and as far as we know, this is the only place where that happens anywhere by teleconference. She joins us from Rishikesh in the Himalayan Mountains of India, where she has been one of the featured speakers at the International Conference on Yoga and Consciousness.

Together, Janet and I create the alliances which have allowed Healthy Wealthy nWise to reach thousands of people all over the world. Over the past three years, Healthy Wealthy nWise-starting from nothing, which was nothing more than an idea and almost no capital-has grown to being one of the leading resources for personal growth and development today, with over 100,000 subscribers.

When all of us were together in Puerto Vallarta, Mexico recently for our first annual corporate retreat, we were talking about it and realized that as far as we know, this Passions Series is the largest ongoing teleconference series in the world.

So we’re looking forward to sharing some of the stories and adventures that have happened since this has all taken place. I’m going to begin by asking Liz to tell us how the whole thing got started. Liz, Healthy Wealthy nWise was really your and Ric’s idea, originally. Will you tell us the story of how your passions, the things that are most important to you in your life, led to the creation of the magazine?

Liz Thompson: Sure. As you said, back before Healthy Wealthy nWise was born, Ric and I owned an Internet service provider and a tech consulting company. That happened to be right around 9/11, and when 9/11 hit, we lost about 40% of our business in one day. We spent the next year rebuilding, expanding and struggling our way back.

When the first-year anniversary of 9/11 came around, Ric and I were out at lunch and looking back over the past year. We had done all kinds of amazing things to bring the company back up, but we were both miserable.

Chris Attwood: I want to stop you there for a second, Liz. Remember that point. One of the things that struck Janet and I when we first talked to you was what you and Ric did at 9/11. You told about the effect that 9/11 had on the business, but what effect did it have when it was happening? What did you do? Would you share that, because I think that really spoke to your passions.

Liz Thompson: Of course, we were ticked off just like everyone else was when it happened. We were actually taking Chandler to daycare and had the radio on when the plane crashed into the Pentagon. The Pentagon’s not far from us-we live in Harper’s Ferry, West Virginia-so one of the reporters from that radio station was standing right there as the plane hit behind her. You could hear it crash.

We were like, Oh my God, what is going on? I immediately had to do something. I can’t just sit still when something like this is happening. We called the Red Cross headquarters for our area and they were like, Well, we don’t know what’s going on, so I said, Okay, well I’ll call National Red Cross. I ended up talking to the director there and he said, We have no idea what to do in a situation like this.

We’ve never planned for anything this big. I said, Who should I talk to? He said, Well, try FEMA. So I called FEMA and they had a big list of things they needed that they weren’t getting in New York and at the Pentagon. I called the different local areas to see what was going on as far as collections.

Nothing was happening, so I was getting really irritated and said, We’re going to have to do something ourselves. We got out our little Rolodex, ended up getting a truck, calling the radio stations, having all these announcements made all over the tri-state area where we live and people brought tons and tons of stuff. We had thousands of hard hats and buckets and tons of stuff that was donated.

People were coming out of the woodwork and so happy that there was a place where they could help because everybody felt so helpless after that. It made us feel better to be able to take that truck up to Staten Island and drop it off there for the workers who were clearing out Ground Zero.

There was another group that ended up taking a bunch of stuff down to the Pentagon and it mushroomed. We basically shut our business down for a week so we could handle doing this. We didn’t really think twice about it, it was just something we had to do.

Chris Attwood: It’s such an expression of the quality of your characters and the passion you both exude in everything you do. Thank you for sharing that story. It was a whole semi-full of stuff, right?

Liz Thompson: Yes. We couldn’t take it all with us-the truck couldn’t hold it all.

Chris Attwood: As you said, that event did have a pretty devastating effect on your business, so let’s come back to that point where a year later, you were feeling pretty down.

Liz Thompson: Yes, over that year, we had managed to pick the business back up. It wasn’t where it had been before, but we had expanded internationally and we’d done all kinds of neat stuff. Looking back on it, we should have been happy at how far we’d come, but 9/11 made us see deeper.

It made us realize that we can’t waste our time doing things that are not our passions, that we are not excited about, and we just weren’t excited about that business anymore. That put me into a funk and I had to put all that aside. I started going through this process that I developed that eventually came to be what we now have as The Science of Creating Your Dreams.

The biggest part of going through that process was putting aside where we were right then. I had to be able to stop and look at how I wanted the future to be. Once I could get out of where I was and get clear about what the vision for my life was, then I could see it. I mapped out this big plan and as I’m looking at it-the ISP, the tech company-none of that was in that picture!

Okay, now what do I do? We have this business and it’s not in the picture anymore. What do we do to get rid of it? I just sat with it. I wasn’t sure what I was going to do, but it was the silliest thing, because within 30 days, we had an offer to buy the company. It wasn’t on the market.

I hadn’t told anybody that we wanted to get rid of it, but an ex-employee of ours came back and decided that he wanted to buy it. To make a long story a little bit less long, less than 120 days after I sat down and did that plan, we had sold the tech company and had the resources to start Healthy Wealthy nWise. So getting clear helped us.

Chris Attwood: Ric, we know that you have a huge passion for creating wealth while making a major, positive impact on the world. When you were in that situation, how did the idea of the magazine align with your passions, and how did you figure out how to get started with the whole thing?

Ric Thompson: We’ve probably all heard the phrase that you can have anything you want in life as long as you help enough other people get what they want out of life. No matter what your goal is, financial freedom or what have you, you still have to do it in a method that’s going to bring the most benefit to the most people.

With what we’re doing with Healthy Wealthy nWise, we feel it really helps a lot of people-opening doors for people, exposing them to new types of information that maybe they wouldn’t have seen before and stretching people’s boundaries. We’re seeing where we can go with it and we’re having a lot of fun with it.

How we started and got going-I’ll be honest with you-I’ll summarize what Liz said, after 9/11, literally within one week, we had achieved pretty much the impossible. One week after September 11th, we were in New York, looking at the smoking rubble, with an 18-wheeler semi full of stuff that had been collected from the three states around us and hundreds of volunteers.

We had radio station and TV coverage-you name it. Literally, we jumped in with both feet and went after it. What Liz forgot to mention was that pretty much the day before we left, we didn’t even really know who was going to be able to handle what we were bringing.

Liz Thompson: That’s right! I forgot about that.

Chris Attwood: You told them you were bringing the semi full and hoping that someone would be there to unload it when you got there.

Ric Thompson: You got it, literally! We were making calls left and right and people were saying, No, we can’t handle this, or, That’s too much, and one of our volunteers said, Did you check out this? Literally, it was the night before, so we made some last-minute phone calls and they said, Absolutely-bring it up, so off we went. It was magic-you just jump in and do it. You have no idea what the universe is going to do to wrap itself around that momentum and energy and support you.

Chris Attwood: You mean you can’t just take action by sitting at home and thinking about it?

Ric Thompson: Sitting on the couch, watching TV and eating bon-bons is probably not going to get you your passion, right?

Chris Attwood: That’s not going to do it-darn! I was hoping.

Ric Thompson: The theme is that this was a really big changing point for us because we moved mountains very quickly by leveraging-having people step up and help out. It’s amazing what a team can accomplish and what that huge energy push can accomplish.

Chris Attwood: Good. Well, Janet, you’ve cultivated friendships with some of the most successful people in the world. At that time, you had just completed a major project with the number-one, best-selling authors, Mark Victor Hansen and Robert Allen. What made you want to get involved with a fledgling start up like Healthy Wealthy nWise?

Janet Attwood: I have no idea…no, just kidding. Liz, I think it was Orlando, wasn’t it, where we first met?

Liz Thompson: Yes.

Janet Attwood: Actually, I had been in charge of what we call The Ambassador Program with Mark and Bob, and I don’t know if Ric was on those calls too much-I think you were-but after working at Books Are Fun and being on the phone forever, it’s like I have an ability to know people through their voices. Every time Liz would get on the phone, I was just at ease and happy and I knew that whatever she said, she would take charge of-I knew it would happen.

Then, when Chris and I both met Liz and Ric in Orlando when we were with Mark and Bob, we sat down with them and I remember, we were having lunch. They were telling us the story of 9/11, and I just sat there and cried. I thought, These are the type of people I’d want to be connected with and play with and grow old with, because they have so much love and integrity.

They’re doers-as you heard from their story, they weren’t thinking, What’s in it for me, they were thinking, How can I help? How can I serve? To me, that’s everything, so my first attraction was truly for the love and respect that I had for both of them; also that they looked like they’d be a lot of fun.

When they asked us, Will you find our covers for us? I thought, What a blast! What more fun would it be than for me to go out and give the gift to all of my mentors and legends whom I knew, to have them be on the cover of such a wonderful magazine called Healthy Wealthy nWise, where all you read in it is everything positive.

Where in the world do you find that-where everything is always positive? I also thought it was an incredible opportunity. Here’s where I’m a little bit less like Liz. This would be a lot of fun for me because I can get the people I really admire and respect-my mentors-to be able to talk about their passions, and then I can hear my favorite subjects from those I knew would really inspire, not only me, but everyone else. That was my impetus.

The number-one principle is to get clear on what you love to do. I knew that I loved to go out and find people, and as you said earlier, I’m a connector. Then choose in favor of those things whenever you’re offered an opportunity. I love to say, as we do in our book, that if the opportunity isn’t aligned with what you love to do, don’t take it on.

Follow your bliss-in other words, what do you love to do? Don’t worry about the how, just know the what. This is what we say in our book. If you clearly know what turns you on, lights your fire and brings you passion-and you’ve heard this month after month if you’ve been on our Passion calls-all of our mentors say the same thing.

When you follow what you love-God’s will for you and what you love are one in the same-then all the people, places and things will magically show up. I’m sure that’s exactly what happened for Liz and Ric when you got that truck and had too much stuff to deliver. It was what you love to do, am I correct, Liz and Ric? You love to serve the planet, right?

Ric Thompson: Right.

Liz Thompson: Yes.

Janet Attwood: I could answer that for you, but thank you. Then in 2004, I realized that my number-one passion-and this was a huge aha, Chris, and I know it was shocking to you-was to spend time with the enlightened. I thought, Oh, wonderful. Let’s see, how am I going to do this one? I’m now a co-partner of an online magazine that’s just taking off.

Chris and I have a company called Enlightened Alliances, I have a speaking and coaching program that we like to do, and now I want to leave everything, go to India, Nepal and other parts of the world and spend time with the enlightened. I thought, How am I going to be able to walk my talk, which is in the online book I wrote about following your passions, and still have my business partners not throw me out with the bath water?

Luckily-and I am so blessed and this is another principle-with Liz, Ric and Chris, when I told them what my passion was, they went, Go for it. We’re right behind you. Of course, out of my adventures came the story which makes the upcoming print edition of The Passion Test book so interesting.

Our Healthy Wealthy nWise magazine now has the Dialogues with the Masters, which Chris was talking about, which is our monthly interview series. Ultimately what came out of it and is coming is a book and a documentary film. I like to think that I add some color and excitement to our team.

I know sometimes when I come up with some ideas, I’m the one where everybody’s neck has to go What? What? and gets a little bit of a twitch in it, but the principle that I want to share, even though I might surprise everyone, is to choose a team that supports your values and will support you on choosing in favor of your passions. I’m really lucky and blessed because Liz, Ric and Chris are always 100% supportive of me.

Chris Attwood: Thanks, Janet. Liz and Ric, I want you both to answer this question. When our readers are thinking about following their passions and beginning to get aligned with their destinies, you have learned some key things, isn’t that true? It wasn’t like everything went right along the way, all at once.

What are some of the key lessons you’ve learned and what would you advise someone who’s just starting out or may be stuck along the path of living their dreams?

Liz Thompson: Actually, this has kind of been a refrain for the interview so far, but the number-one thing is that you don’t have to have all the answers to move forward-just move. That’s one of the biggest things I’ve learned in all my business fits and starts, was getting clear with the fact that I couldn’t move forward keeping the ISP and the tech company, we just couldn’t.

I didn’t know how that was gong to happen, but I made the plan anyway; we moved and the pieces fell together, just like Ric was saying with getting the truck together. I had completely forgotten, that was another time we didn’t have the answer, but we were doing it anyway and we knew the answers would come when they were needed.

Chris Attwood: In regard to this, one of the things you did in moving was to approach Janet and I. We’ve never actually talked about this. What was it that made you say, One of the things we need to do in taking action is talk to Chris and Janet?

Liz Thompson: I honestly don’t know. That was just such a natural thing to approach you with. You were in the perfect place and that’s something you loved to do and I knew it. We needed somebody to help.

Ric Thompson: Yes, it’s a great concept for everybody, but as a matter of leverage, we knew that if we were going to launch this magazine big, we had to have big authors-speakers, authors or mentors-that people are used to listening to or reading about, and would read the magazine because of that. That was a fantastic role we felt that you and Janet filled as awesome connectors.

Liz Thompson: Plus, you’re awesome to work with.

Chris Attwood: Thank you for that. Would you say that one of the key things you were doing was looking for points of leverage, ways you could leverage yourselves and things you had to offer, in other ways? Maybe you saw that Janet and I could bring some of the bigger names to the cover of the magazine that would attract others?

Liz Thompson: Yes; at the time, I didn’t know that’s what we were doing, but that’s what we were doing. Sometimes we do these things subconsciously and then realize what we were doing right later.

Chris Attwood: So that’s a great thing in and of itself-sometimes it’s a matter of taking steps and seeing where things go?

Liz Thompson: Yes, absolutely, which segues into the next point I wanted to make. Remember, there are no failures, they’re all learning experiences. I like to call it my lemon tree principle. My first company was a gift basket company. I screwed up just about everything you could possibly screw up in that business. I figured out how to make it work, I made it a successful business, and then I realized that I didn’t like that business.

A lot of people would view that as a failure. I built this thing and then I was really unhappy running it, but the experience taught me a lot about business and it enabled me to start my next company, which was closer to what my passions were in teaching people how to start and run a successful business.

I would help them avoid some of the pitfalls that I’d fallen into, and move forward that way. Don’t take things as failures. When life gives you lemons, just learn how to make the lemonade.

There’s a reason that you have the dream you do and it was given to you to bring into this world. It was given to you to make that dream a reality and the only way you can do that is by becoming the person who lives in that dream. It all starts with you. I would really like to read a poem that I have in The Science of Creating Your Dreams called Changing the World.

When I was a young man, I wanted to change the world. I found it was difficult to change the world, so I tried to change my nation. When I found I couldn’t change the nation, I began to focus on my town. I couldn’t change the town and as an older man, I tried to change my family.

Now as an old man, I realize the only thing I can change is myself. And suddenly I realized that if long ago I had changed myself, I could have made an impact on my family. My family and I could have made an impact on our town. Their impact could have changed the nation, and I could indeed have changed the world.

Start with yourself and become that person who lives in your dreams. Take that first step and get really, really clear because the story of your life does depend on it.

Chris Attwood: Ric, what are some of the lessons you learned? I would love it if you would share the story of when you were getting started, some of the things you took action on, and the lessons that came out of that.

Ric Thompson: That covers a lot of ground. There are always lots of things to learn when you’re first starting out on a project. The first one, just to paraphrase Winston Churchill: never give up, never give up, never give up! We just moved and said, This is what we want to do and this is what we want it to look like, and got it in place.

Of course, we were fortunate enough in doing the website that I did have a tech background, so I was able to do the web pages with very little capital investment. The capital we did have, we could use for other purposes and live off of it, so we really leveraged our resources and went for it.

What we have today, three years later, is very different from what we pictured when we first started. Like any project or business, it has a life of its own and it will evolve. A fantastic example of that is Janet’s passion of hanging out with the enlightened. The whole Passions Series itself was not something we started off with.

It naturally evolved as a way that we could support each other, have a lot of fun, and yet there’s a valid market there where money can be made. As we all know, from when we were hanging out in Mexico, we’ve been running this series for quite a while and it’s done phenomenally well.

As a casual comment-I think by you, Chris-that just kicked our conversation off is that we’re pretty well plugged in in this arena and we don’t know of anybody with a teleseminar series even close to being as popular. It’s not like we were aimed at doing that, it naturally evolved because we were focusing on our passions, delivering great value, and having a lot of fun.

Chris Attwood: I have to make a comment about this because you and Liz were so great at the point when Janet had written the original ebook version of The Passion Test. We were about to bring that out and we talked with you about it. The first thing Liz said when she heard about it is, Why don’t we make that the theme of the cover story for our magazine?

It was really out of that thought that the whole Passions Series came to be. It wasn’t until that point that we decided to do our interviews live on teleconference calls and then put them in the magazine a couple months later. To me, that is such a great example of the power and value of a team that’s willing to support each other’s ideas.

What’s come out of that has been something none of us could have imagined, yet it all came from the openness you had to taking a new idea, something we were working on and figuring out how we could make it better and bigger.

Ric Thompson: Buried in that is another great point, Chris. We take for granted the power that our team brings to the table. For people who are starting out on projects, you have to have a team-they’re your lifesaver.

Mark Victor Hansen says, One plus one equals 11. If one plus one equals 11, what does one plus one plus one plus one equal? That’s really how the results from the four of us have been summed up. For anyone out there starting a new project or trying to get one to the next level, you have to have your team.

I don’t care if it’s a very typical team of a lawyer, an accountant advisor, or maybe some other entrepreneurs, but you can’t do it alone. Liz and I were a team for many businesses before this one. Just the support and the enjoyment you get working with that team will get you through a lot of things that you just couldn’t do yourself.

To hear the full hour long interview for FREE –> Click Here

Subscribe to our HW&W List

You’re about to get ‘Insider Access’ most people will never have, to bring more Health, Wealth, and Love into your Life!…

You have Successfully Subscribed!