Who doesn’t want to be a billionaire, right? Have you ever wondered how to negotiate billions of dollars in contracts? It’s your lucky day, as the one and only Dave Meltzer talks about this in this week’s podcast.

For those of you who don’t know Dave, he is the CEO of Sports 1 Marketing, Executive Producer and Host of Entrepreneur’s Elevator Pitch and The Playbook. Dave is also a two-time number one bestselling author and has been named a top ten keynote speaker by Forbes. During my chat with Dave, we touched on a lot of important things from learning, to economic downturns, to relationship building, and to negotiation.

Here’s something interesting about Dave. Ever since he was young, he was already determined to be rich. He wanted to be able to buy his mom a car; when he was eight years old, his dream was to have a million dollars. Fast forward, and Dave had already become a millionaire nine months after law school when he chose sales over oil and gas litigation as a career. Dave eventually sold his company to Thompson-Reuters for $3.4 billion dollars, and that was just the beginning.

It was one success after everything–and then he just lost everything. Now, he describes it as probably the best thing that’s happened to him because he was able to bounce back.

Very impressive indeed is Dave’s ability to bounce back. So I asked Dave for some practical advice for going through an economic downturn, because I feel like there might be one coming. There were two things he talked about:

1. Study history to understand human nature. Human nature never changes, and by going back and studying it and the other recessions and depressions we had, we get to understand where, if, and when we will fall.
2. Just because a market goes down doesn’t mean you can’t make money. You can invest in other assets during the recession such as find a mentor who has made money in the down market.

The big idea here is not just surviving a downturn, but to thrive and be more profitable.

In fact, another one of the value bombs dropped during the episode was that being abundant and open allows us to be open to tremendous success. Dave also shares his negotiation secret—the 120 Rule in which he asks himself if he can provide $100 worth of value while only asking for $20 back.

Aside from his negotiation secret, Dave also talked about how we need to always be in the pursuit of our potential and continuously learn. In relation to that, Dave also discussed three types of learners:

1. The Interrupter who will never learn a struggle until it happens to them; They are too busy telling the universe what they think without even taking into consideration the things that they learned in the past
2. The Waiter pretends that they are listening and paying attention to lessons. They keep pretending to ask for help and mentorship but in fact they are just waiting for the chance to do what they want to do without any consideration of others or the past
3. The True Learner, meanwhile, can accelerate their learning curve without having to personally experience it themselves. They are able to process experiences of others.

During the negotiations for Elevator Pitch, which is now a top TV show, Dave recalls how he went in with an abundant attitude to provide value, share the commonality, connect with people emotionally,  and gave up his ownership for other interested parties. Due to this, he ended up with tremendous success and a long-term career.

Basically, here’s the bottom line: Dave attributes his success to networking and relationship building. He was born with a single mom, he went to a big college, and didn’t have any politicians in his family. But he asked for help, learned and executed on the watch,  and was able to make name for himself.

Lastly, in order to succeed, Dave shares the four most important skills that we should focus on developing. These are gratitude, forgiveness, accountability, and effective communication.

The amount of value and learnings from Dave Meltzer absolutely blew my mind, and It’s sure to blow yours too. So listen to the full episode here and drop a comment on Instagram—let’s discuss!