Why you are your most valuable asset
Michael Isom opens with a question most financial conversations never ask: what actually belongs on your balance sheet? The standard answer is property, cash, real estate, business equity. But Michael argues that answer is incomplete and, for entrepreneurs, quietly dangerous. "People are the true assets, things are not," he tells Ben. "Human life value is the source and creator of all property value." If you want more property value, you have to increase your mental capital first. That reordering of priorities is the core of his book What We're Worth and the lens through which this entire conversation runs.
Losing $4.8 million and what it actually cost
In 2007, Michael was a successful financial services professional with millions under management, including over $10 million placed with an investment partner who turned out to be running a Ponzi scheme. When the FBI called, the money was already gone. Michael spent the next three years drinking, shutting his business down, and watching his sense of self collapse alongside his net worth. "When my net worth went from millions and millions of dollars to negative, I felt worthless." That equation, net worth equals self-worth, is the trap he now spends his career helping others avoid. The night his wife and kids left with her family, he loaded a Ruger P89 and pressed it to the roof of his mouth. A physical rush stopped him. He set the gun down and made a commitment: extract every lesson, apply them, and share them with as many people as possible.
The human life value balance sheet explained
The property value balance sheet most entrepreneurs know looks like this: assets minus liabilities equals equity. Michael's human life value balance sheet works the same way, but the line items are different. Assets include knowledge, experiences, education, and relationships. Liabilities include limiting beliefs, scarcity thinking, fear, doubt, and the stories we tell ourselves and choose to believe. "I wasn't even thinking about my human life value balance sheet," Michael says of his darkest period. "I had forgotten all of that." Rebuilding started when he began listing what was actually on that second balance sheet, starting with the most basic asset of all: being alive.
What is your most valuable asset to an organization or a family?
The question sounds like a corporate HR talking point, but Michael grounds it in something more personal. When he rebuilt his life, he did it by recognizing that his knowledge, his relationships, and his capacity to create value were still intact even when his bank account read negative. His business partner Garrett Gunderson put it plainly: "Michael, you can choose to leverage your past to create moving forward." That leverage, turning a catastrophic failure into a body of work, a book, and a practice that serves clients, is only possible when a person sees themselves as the primary asset. For a family, that means the parent who does the inner work has more to pour out. For an organization, it means the leader who invests in their own human life value creates more property value for everyone around them.
Three questions that cut through the noise
Michael draws heavily on Byron Katie's work from Loving What Is and thework.com. The three questions he returns to most often: Is it true? Can I absolutely know that it's true? Is there any evidence from my past where that wasn't true? "99.9% of the time it's not true," he says. "But we tell ourselves that story and then we believe it, and all of our actions and results in our life are affected as a result." He pairs this with morning journaling, thinking time before the house wakes up, and the Wake Up Warrior app from Garrett White, all practices designed to slow the noise down enough to hear what's actually signal.
The five and three listening practice
After his wife Wendy left with her family for 45 days, Michael and Wendy rebuilt their marriage using a structure a trusted friend shared with them: five minutes of uninterrupted sharing, followed by three minutes of restating exactly what you heard, no fixing, no responding, just reflecting. "That started building trust between us," Michael says. They did it nightly in 2010. They still do it weekly. The depth it created in their relationship, he says, is the direct result of him first making a commitment to himself. "I had to take care of myself. I had to do this work on myself before I could then bring it into our relationship."
Real, raw, and relevant: what your kids already know
One of the most striking moments in this conversation comes when Michael describes standing in a lake in Southern California at a Wake Up Warrior event, his then-18-year-old son Kaden wading in to face him with tears running down his face, asking: "Why did you leave us?" Michael had assumed his kids were too young to understand what happened in 2010. They weren't. "Our kids are always watching. They know." The framework he now teaches his own family, and pours into his son-in-law as a new parent, is three words: real, raw, and relevant. Tell the truth. Share the emotion. Make it matter to the person in front of you. The body keeps the score, and so do children.
