How did a man with one arm and no legs go from broke and living in his parent’s basement…to becoming a world-renowned speaker, bodybuilder, model, coach and 8 figure superhuman coach?
By the end of this article, you’ll see how Nick Santonastasso – born with Hanhart Syndrome – defied the odds and became a world-renowned superstar.
You’ll also see the secrets he discovered during his journey on how to actually achieve superhuman feats…
No matter what limitations you can think of.
I literally got goosebumps after the wisdom that nick shared so I’m excited for you to read into his story.
As Nick said during the interview, “If you have ten fingers, you should be able to do a lot more than what you’re doing”.
Most of your thoughts are not your own
Growing up, Nick didn’t realise he was different from everyone else until he got into middle school.
And considering that school environments are usually the most judgemental, it’s no surprise that many people tend to get bullied.
It’s also where people form long-term beliefs about themselves based on what their peers have told them.
For Nick, he recalled one incident where he was verbally bullied by a girl on a school bus…
Getting called names like “disgusting” and that “girls don’t like him”.
That incident had shattered his self-esteem and deterred him from going to his junior or senior prom…
Eventually leading to a dark place mentally as he saw the other school kids have boyfriends and girlfriends.
However, what liberated him from the mean things said about him was the understanding of the thoughts and beliefs formed about himself…
“The majority of your thoughts that you’re thinking aren’t your own. They were picked up along the way.
That girl told you you were disgusting and you believed her.
Someone told you you couldn’t lose weight because your whole family is big-boned and you believed that shit”.
As painful as these moments were for Nick, it’s these exact moments that have been pivotal to his superhuman growth.
In psychology, there are two reasons why people change; pain or pleasure.
Humans will always run away from pain faster than they run towards pleasure.
“People have to experience enough pain to change. They don’t start taking care of their body until they have diabetes. They don’t start going to the gym until they get broken up with it.
They don’t start getting into business until they go broke…I challenge people, ‘why do you have to wait for the pain? Why not change now?”
Where does confidence really come from?
At one point, Nick wondered whether you were actually born with confidence.
This is an important topic because you will never make more than what you think you’re worth.
You might be on the path to making more money but if you don’t believe you deserve it…
You’ll find ways to blow that money away.
You might get into a relationship with a hot girl but if you don’t believe you deserve her…
You’ll find a way to sabotage the relationship.
And when he amputated 5 inches of his arm just to become a wrestler – due to the fact that his bone was growing faster than his skin – he learned that confidence first comes from “self-integrity”.
Self-integrity is all about following through on the very things you say you were going to do.
It’s a NON-NEGOTIABLE quality when it comes to superhuman success in business…
“If you can’t commit to a healthy lifestyle or going to the gym 5 out of the 7 days, then good luck in business.
If you can’t do the simple shit, don’t expect to do the complex stuff”.
What most people get wrong about mindset
Confidence is a mindset.
And the mindset is what dictates your superhuman success.
But “mindset is not motivation”, contrary to what so many people believe.
“Mindset is training your body and your mind with enough consistency, repetition and intensity to change the chemistry of your body”.
You’re essentially training yourself from the inside.
The latest studies on Neuroplasticity shows that with the right exercises…
We can unwire our brain from whatever is sabotaging our success…
And rewire it towards behaviours and beliefs that propel us towards the life we want to have.
Nick dedicates himself to coaching entrepreneurs to rewire their brains, eliminate traumas, beliefs, stories and install new things like certainty, confidence.
If having the right psychology was enough for a man with one arm and no legs to become a world-renowned celebrity coach and 8 figure entrepreneur…
Then at the very least, it will accelerate YOU towards the life that you desire.
How a superhuman deals with failure
Think of the last time you failed at something. How did you feel?
Does the word failure scare you? Is it something you want to avoid?
See, most people have a negative relationship with failure.
They wonder, “what are people going to think of me if I fail?”
But to A-players like Nick, he has failed more times than most people ever would in their lifetime.
Failure to him is “feedback”, not something to avoid on your path to superhuman success.
During our interview, Nick described one of his biggest failures where instead of going to college, he had moved to LA to be part of a TV show.
They were filming a pilot episode and he thought it was an amazing opportunity.
Two weeks after he signed a lease, however, the TV producer called him and said, “the show didn’t get picked up”.
At the time, Nick didn’t know anything about business so this came as a huge shock to him.
He recalled sitting there in his apartment, reflecting upon the pricey rent prices in LA and having $8000-9000 to his name at the time.
On top of that, his roommate never got a job and preferred to be a “bum”.
The last thing Nick wanted to hear was his dad telling him, “I told you son. LA is where people go broke and they live on the street”.
So he felt compelled to not tell his parents about his situation.
This failure had put him in a situation where he had to learn to live with barely anything…
Sleeping in his laundry without a bed, eating ramen noodles, going to sleep hungry for the first time in his life.
Nick recalled a moment where he looked up at the ceiling and thought, “man, success to me is having enough money for rent and a little extra for food so I could breathe”.
“What happens in these situations is we tend to misdiagnose ourselves…
We have an experience and based on that experience, we then develop a specific belief about ourselves that just isn’t true…
You can join a sales job and if the person tells you ‘no’ then you might develop a belief that ‘I’m shitty at sales’.
The truth is, you just weren’t persistent enough to get the experience you wanted that’s going to develop the right belief…
You’re not shitty. You’re not broken. It was just an experience that didn’t go your way.
The question or the challenge is, will you be persistent enough to get the first ‘yes’? Nothing is wrong with you. You just gotta keep eating shit for longer”.
Remember this.
The two things standing in the way of the person you want to become is:
- Time
- The willingness to fail (NOTE: successful people have failed way more than you have
What to do when you fail: the superhuman pivot strategy
When you fail at something, there’s really only one thing you can do to move forward.
And for Nick, after his disappointing stay in LA, there was a moment where he realised that he couldn’t play the “victim” card anymore…
That he needed to take matters into his own hands once and for all.
So the first thing that he did was to move back home and change his approach.
He asked himself, “what’s bigger, what’s better? How can I shift? What do I really want to do?”
At that moment, Nick made the pivot and decided that he wanted to be a bodybuilder for three reasons.
Firstly a bodybuilder with no arms and legs would definitely catch people’s eye.
Second, because of the fact that he has no arms and legs, no one would be able to underestimate his success.
If a man with one arm and no legs can succeed at this level…
Then someone with ten fingers and two legs can’t make the excuse that he only succeeded because he was “lucky” or he had “advantages that I didn’t”.
The third reason was that he realised he could monetize it.
Over time he had gained traction, paying Instagram pages to post him so he could get subscribers.
That led to him moving to Tampa.
And when he moved to Tampa, someone reached out to him and said, “Hey I want to mentor you. I’m very successful in this industry”.
Who do you hang out with? (No really, WHO?)
The mentor who had reached out to him in Tampa was no joke at all.
He had a Lambo and he was a highly successful CEO.
First, he told Nick to write his goals down and read a specific set of books.
To Nick, this was the first time he had never done anything like this.
He had never gone the entrepreneurship route before.
But it was those sets of actions that proved as the foundation to his major success.
Eventually, he met his business partner and from there, his speaking company was born.
You may have heard that “you are the average of the 5 people you hang out with”.
As Nick said, “If you evaluate your circle, probably 80% of the people around you are holding you back whether you know it or not”.
Now, if your closest family and friends do not understand your vision, then this can be challenging.
You might feel frustrated, wondering how you can make them understand your vision.
But know that your parent’s best interests are not YOUR best interests.
Not everyone has to understand your vision…
“We’re the crazies that take the risks…we do things out of the norm. And that’s why we get the reward. Because we can do things that not many people are willing to do”.
Overall, you get what you tolerate in life…
“If you tolerate low standards in your peer group, then it’s only a matter of time before you start lowering your own standards.
Get in the room with the life and results that you want.
There’s too many people giving you advice that don’t even have results.
Your mom is giving you advice on how to start a business when she’s still working a 9-5”.
Activate your Goal-Getting System for unstoppable beliefs
The truth is: “If you think making money is hard, you will make it hard”.
But what if making money gets to be easy?
Sounds unbelievable, right?
But this is not as far fetched when you understand that you have a GOAL-GETTING system inside your brain – scientifically known as the Reticular Activating System.
This goal-getting system influences your brain to see what is most important to you.
It’s the filter that you see life through.
For example, if you look for red cars, you’ll start to find red cars all around you.
If you focus on how hard it is to make money, you will continue to find evidence on how hard it is to make money.
But if you open yourself up to the possibility that it is in fact, EASY to make money…
Then you might be surprised by the evidence that you see in the “real world”.
Try it out for a while and see what happens.
The secret to world-class networking
When Nick Santonastasso focuses on networking, he focuses on this one question…
How can you put yourself in a situation where you can talk to people who have 10x the results that you have?
Because in order to get to where you want to go, you must connect with people who have already achieved what you want in life.
Now, it’s not enough to just go to someone’s DMs and say, “hey, can you mentor me?”
The people you want to learn from are not just going to mentor you right off the bat.
Their time is precious. They want to make sure they’re getting a return on investment…always.
So the best way to go about it is to figure out how you can add value to their lives.
For instance, one of Nick’s 1-1 clients bought him a domain name for him just to “make sure no one else had them”.
No one had ever done that for Nick before so he was blown away.
The key is to give without expectation and to trust that the value you give is going to lead to a strong relationship…
Which then opens up a whole series of opportunities for you.
“If you can’t go through the door, go through the window”.
The mistake that destroys Any chances of superhuman success
Before Covid hit, Nick was on the road 80% of the year, doing keynote speaking gigs and being a “professional storyteller”.
To his excitement, he had moved to Las Vegas.
But within 3-4 weeks after signing his lease…
Covid hit and all the events he was planning to speak at were cancelled.
Just like that, hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of opportunity…gone.
Most people in this situation would choose to wait.
They would say to themselves…”I’ll just wait till it gets back to normal”.
In Nick’s case, if he had that exact mentality, he would’ve waited for 18 months and to this day, he would STILL be waiting.
Often on your path to superhuman success, there will be times where you feel as if you need to wait for the “right moment” to do what you need to do.
The truth is there is NEVER a right moment.
“Your success is directly correlated to how much shit you can eat. How much you can withstand”.
It’s about doing what you desire to do even if it’s not the right moment.
In Nick’s case, he needed to change his approach and keep moving.
So the first thing he did was look at what Tony Robbins was doing.
He saw that the major speakers were going online and doing personal development and business “challenges”.
At first, Nick resisted the online space…“eh I don’t need that digital stuff, we’ll just be road warriors”.
But when Covid came along, it pressured him to actually sit down and learn funnels, landing pages, email marketing, etc.
From there, his online education company was born.
Today, he hosts a series of coaching masterminds, digital courses, in-person retreats, virtual events and group coaching with experts, which helps you to become superhuman.
And being superhuman is all about having the right psychology – installing a “superhuman mindset”…
The right psychology to improving your relationships, health, wealth, spirituality, etc.
“You have to think differently to get new results”.
Because if a man with no arms and no legs can reach the level of superhuman success that he has…
Then there’s no reason why you can’t at least have a superhuman mindset that you can use to elevate all areas of your life.
“I had every reason to be hooked on drugs, to be hooked on alcohol, to be obese, sit around and collect the government.
But because of the specific psychology that I was able to install and learn from all these masters…
Tony Robbins, Ed Mylett, Joe Dispenza…now I can help people save light-years.
I want to be the baby Yoda that says, ‘hey don’t go left, go right. hey, there’s a pothole there, don’t go there’.
And so for those who want to level up faster, you gotta get in the right room”.
Becoming superhuman
In Nick’s program, he lays out the entire process for how he and the thousands of students already inside have built out their life.
“What holds most humans back is unconscious. We have blinders on. Ever had a problem in business and a mentor was just like, ‘hey, do this instead’? You’re in your business so you don’t see everything”.
If you’re struggling with procrastination or any self-sabotaging behaviours…
Or if you feel like you don’t have much clarity in your life and business…
Then good news – one of Nick’s specialties is being able to catch language patterns and sabotaging behaviours that his students didn’t even realise was holding them back and then rewire those behaviours…
Essentially turning your behaviours into your biggest ally.
“The very belief that you’ve mastered something is the very belief that is holding you back from the next level of life.
A lot of the time, your ego and your conscious mind will say ‘I know psychology. I know wealth, relationships’. Bullshit.
There’s always that next level of life. It’s that belief holding you back because you’re not open to learning a little bit more.
25 years old, I have success because of the rooms I’m in but most importantly, I’m a student of the game. I’m always learning. I’m always front row. I’m always implementing.
So it’s time to trickle that down to the rest of the world so they can not let a man with no legs and no arm outwork them”.
On top of that, Nick has built a powerful community of supportive entrepreneurs who are willing to be “crazy”.
Interview by Wade Foxx
If you like to be interviewed for millmentor.com email wade@millmentor.com
