Success Story with Scott D. Clary

indeed is a success story partner now here's your tech hiring tip of the week from indeed seventy three percent of tech workers say flexibility is one of their top priorities so if your job posting doesn't mention flexible hours or remote options you're basically invisible to three at a four candidates keep that in mind look hiring tech talent right now it's tough you are competing for people with super specific skills everyone wants hybrid work and the salary expectations are through the roof it's a lot that's why indeed actually makes sense they're the number one place where tech people go to apply for jobs we're talking three million tech professionals in the us and eighty six percent of them have applied through indeed it's not just some job board where you post and pray they've got tools like smart searching and their tech network that uses ai to connect you with people who actually have the skills that you need companies using the tech network saw over four times more relevant applications that's huge more qualified people way less time wasted whenever i've needed tech talent in the past indeed is the only platform choosing if i needed to hire top tier tech talent today i'd still go with indeed post your first job and get seventy five dollars off at indeed dot com slash tech talent that's indeed dot com slash tech talent to claim this offer indeed build for what's now and what's next in tech hiring when i was a psychiatric resident people come in and talk and then we would give them pills i can't remember anyone ever recover and now was had the ring aren't we supposed to be able to cure people or bring them out of depression that's what i finally learned how to do after forty years of treating people he changed the way we understand our thoughts and how they shape our lives doctor david burns is the psychiatrist an author whose work broke the mold making cognitive behavioral therapy accessible to millions when you try to help people it kinda puts people on the defensive so i go on the opposite direction i try to persuade people not to change i become the voice of their subconscious mind that it really helps me empathize with people at a deeper level with fast selling books like feeling good the new mood therapy he didn't just publish research he sparked a movement he pioneered the turning therapy into measurable rapid recovery today his methods have helped tens of millions battle depression anxiety and the inner storms we rarely talk about i recently did an experiment with about two thousand people and proved for the first time negative thoughts do cause depression there's nothing better than recovering from depression take a piece of paper and write them down and see what you're telling yourself you may be surprised that's can be the first step on a journey to enlightenment if you had to describe what you do for a living how would you describe your work well i'm i'm trained as a clinical psychiatrist but what i do is very different from what most psychiatrists do i'm not anymore a a drug prescribe although for a while i was doing research on this chemical imbalance in the brain and giving out pills by the bucket full but what what i really like to do is bring about high speed change to people who were struggling often for years or decades with severe depression and anxiety and transform their pain into joy in a short period of time and by a short period i'm talk talking about usually in in a single therapy session lasting maybe two hours and i like to complete treatment in a single session if if i can and and usually that is possible but when i was a psychiatric resident we we just had just had people come in and talk and then we would give them pills and then they'd come in and talk some more and give them more pills and there'd never seemed to be any conclusion to the process i i can't remember anyone ever recovering when i was a psychiatric resident at stanford or university of pennsylvania medical school and i always had the ring you know or aren't we supposed to be able to cure people or bring them out of depression and into joy and that's what i finally learned how to do after you know forty years of treating people and doing a lot of research on people how people actually change yeah what you're describing i think is the way that most people are treated the the sitting in front of an individual for years talking about their problems getting some sort of prescription maybe maybe just help people understand where this system or where this style of help even came from i had first seen it when i was a medical student i i was i i went to stanford medical school and i i shouldn't have one of my college advisers said you should go to medical school i said well i'm not a pre medical student and i never wanted to be a doctor and and he said i said i think i'll be a psychologist because i'd like to do psychotherapy and you know help people change and he said oh no no you you have to go to medical school because drugs are gonna become so important and psychologists can't prescribe drugs so you should go to medical school i said well how could i get in i'm not a prem medical student i've never had a biology class and they they wouldn't want me east and he said oh you can talk your way anything they they won't even notice so i talk my way at this stanford medical school but i was like a a fish out of water i cut most of my classes i i didn't enjoy what i was was doing and i just wanted to get in a situation where i could you know work with people and and and free people but i i i i cut a lot of my medical school classes but i went to this thing in palo alto called the human institute and this crazy china named hussein chung was the head of it and he was kind of a guru type and they they would have these marathons forty eight hour marathons were they'd got maybe thirty five people in a house and they'd pay thirty five bucks for this two day experience and one by one they'd go in the center and be confronted and they'd kinda of crash and they rip away their their defenses you know kinda see through them how phony everyone was and then when they crashed and cried that all of a sudden you know they would throw them in the air and they'd go into a state of joy and you know it was like becoming vulnerable and becoming real and and i saw rapid change pretty much every time and that i would go back to the stanford medical school for my medical school classes and it was all this kind of pom psych psychiatrist and the department is psychiatry and and you just talk to people endlessly and you know the people weren't measuring anything that i didn't see anything changing for for for people and and and i i dropped out for a year on two different occasions and and then finally i ended up homeless with my now wife living down near carmel valley and and my wife was pregnant we would just i would just was counseling people for free and if i met them the coffee or on the beach or whatever whatever you know and but we didn't have any money and then it occurred to me wow if i went back and and did my internship and residency i still wouldn't know anything but people wouldn't know that and they think i know something so they would pay me to come and talk to me and then we could have a place to live and food and stuff like that so i i i went back and i did my internship in residency at a big county hospital in in in oakland california highland hospital and that was a fantastic experience for me and then ended up at at at pan now medical school and i started studying really hard and i won words for my research and had a tenure year track position on on the faculty but i i still wasn't seen anyone being cured of anything and and our research we i was doing research on this chemical imbalance theory of you know brain chemistry is the cause of depression and our our research proved it was a false theory and i published that in the top psychiatry journal in nineteen seventy five and it took the field thirty years to catch on to the fact that you know depression is not due to a deficiency of brain serotonin there's never been any proof of that there's never been any evidence of that it was just a stupid theory that someone made up to get grants and meanwhile what is that is that not what what is that not sorry that's a that's fascinating i mean do people still not believe i thought people still believe that in twenty twenty four well sure they believe it the drug companies promote that theory so they can sell these placebo that are called antidepressants which are nothing but chemicals with side effects but they're not through antidepressants and they don't really outperform placebo by any significant clinically meaningful effect but to to test it we did a simple experiment that i think a fourth grader could understand at the va hospital we had a depression research unit and i i i did a two year post doctor research fellowship in depression research after i finished my psychiatric residency and we we reason if if if depression is due to a deficiency of serotonin in the brain which the claim was then to raise brain serotonin will eliminate depression and so we divided the depressive veterans on the research it into two groups and and half of they both got milkshake each day but half of them the the milkshake released with massive doses of l which is an essential amino acid that the body can't produce you have to get it in your diet and it goes from the stomach into the blood and into the brain where it's instantly en systematically transformed into a serotonin in the so called happy molecule and and so we we had both groups for a number of weeks with half but it was double blind so no nobody knew who was getting the massive of doses of l and then we broke the code we measured their depression levels every day and after four or five weeks of this there was no difference neither group had shown any improvement and there was no difference in in the depression levels in in either group and so we published in the archives of general psychiatry serotonin precursor in the treatment of depression was the name of the article and we reported well that since massive influence increases in brain serotonin did nothing for depression how can it be the depression is due to a deficiency of it but people didn't care it was a correct conclusion but the drug companies make billions marketing in these things called anti antidepressants which aren't really anti antidepressants they're you know if you believe something's gonna help you if someone says this pill is an anti depress a third you've got a one third chance of improving and that's what you see with them but you also see that if you give them a sugar pill and say it's a powerful new anti depress and so i i said i don't want this job at the university that i got a big grant from the government to build a serotonin research laboratory because we were doing cutting edge research but but i told my adviser i said i don't wanna spend my life doing this be because at the theories is a fraudulent theory and no one's being helped you know we've been giving these veterans on our research and massive doses of antidepressants i've never seen one of them or recover we had prozac in the nineteen seventies before years before it came to market it was called lily eleven o fourteen o that we got all the new experimental antidepressants but i i i could see it was wrong and that that it just and and so i left the university they pressured me to stay on the faculty and they said this is stupid you're burning bridges you're doing all over the world for your expertise on on brain serotonin i said well that expertise isn't worth anything and i wanna find out how to cure people how to help people who are depressed so i started going to doctor aaron be cognitive therapy seminar just because the colleague said he he's got a new theory that depression caused by negative thoughts and they said well that that channel right all my depressed patients have negative thoughts but you can't cure depression by changing negative thoughts and he said well why don't you go to his seminar then and prove it to yourself get try it on some of your patience and then as part of your research fellowship and then you'll know that it doesn't work that it's a fraud because back looked like a fraud to me he was a fast talker guy were these goofy looking bow ties and and so i went to his his seminars and i started trying it on my patients just to prove to myself that it wouldn't work and the fir for the first time they started turning the corner on their depressions and i i couldn't believe it and i said maybe there's something to this thing after all and i treated it more and more more people and got really impressive results and the patients that keep going to that seminar or keep learning these techniques and then i that's when i left the university and said i'll just develop my private practice and help develop this what was then new cognitive therapy and i wrote my book feeling good and it just changed the whole trajectory of my my life and in those days we cut the treatment time down from maybe year or two for depression to maybe a month or two and that seemed like a fantastic acceleration but since then i've done further refinements over the last forty years and now can can do it for more most people in just a two hour period of time so the way that what you're saying is a way that most people understand depression it's it's it's a con it's it's not true exactly yeah that's right it's a con it's not true and it's worst false therapy because a false therapy theory is generally discarded by scientists but a false theory that supports economic gain people stick stick with so then help me understand if this if the traditional definition of of depression is not true what actually causes it outside like negative thoughts it's hard to put a finger on like how do you how do you describe how do you quantify a negative thought well the the the because i have a paper about to come out on that because you know two thousand years ago epic said people are disturbed not by things but by our views of them our thoughts our interpretations of of events and that's been debated for two thousand years and of course the cognitive therapists believe it's true and other therapists say arthur theory is fraud it's shabby it's not not true and so i i recently did an experiment with about two thousand people and proved for the first time that negative thoughts do cause depression and the way we measure that is that we ask people in therapy or in an experiment you know what what are some of your self critical thoughts like you know i'm i'm not as good as i should be that's a common one how much do you believe that i believe that a hundred percent or i'm i'm defective a lot of depressed people have that that thought i believe that a hundred percent and then with our app we we use a lot of techniques that i've developed or learned to help people challenge the distortion in these negative thoughts and and and to lower their belief in them and as they stop believing them we can measure negative moods with ninety six percent accuracy with new scales and and and and sure enough as there are negative thoughts go down the the negative feelings go down and when they stop believing those negative thoughts the negative feelings disappear completely is there is there anything that happens hormonal in this process or no we are organic beings and and so the the brain is constantly it it uses more energy than any other organ in the body even more than muscles and and so there is you know billions of nerves and billions of circuits firing all the time in the brain we're i'm gonna meet tomorrow with the group from utah who have a clinic who have some of these multi dollar functional mri brain imaging machines and we're going to do some studies of people using our app and and have their brains image simultaneously so we can see the very moment when the change in feelings comes exactly what's happening in the wiring in in in the brain it's an experiment i've been wanting to do for thirty five years and i finally talk someone into into doing it and we're very ex very excited about about that but in the therapy it's a very practical thing it's using a variety of techniques there's really over a hundred of them now to help people crush these these negative thoughts because the thing about the the the negative thoughts is they're really distorted they're they're not true and and the moment you you realize that your your feelings will change and i can give you an example of it if you want yeah they could clear sure one of the first patients that i tested this on when i was going to be clinic and i was still you know didn't know what i was doing really from a psychotherapy point of view but she was referred to me from the intensive care unit of university of pennsylvania hospital because she had tried to kill herself an elderly woman and i thought well this would be a good one to to test the this new what was new cognitive therapy in the in those days and i've been giving her pills and have her talk the way i was trained to do and nothing had changed i measured her depression every week and and she was stuck and i i said there's this new thing i'm learning would you mind if i present your case at the conference we have a weekly conference with about six or eight of us and make maybe get some tips on you know we could try this new cognitive therapy and she said sure you know i'd love it if you do that so i said doctor back here this elderly woman and she tried to kill herself and almost succeeded and what how would i treat her with this based on negative thinking and he says well that's easy just ask her what she was thinking the moment she tried to kill herself i said oh that makes sense that's easy enough so i went and i said told her i said doctor beck said i'm supposed to ask you what you were telling yourself the moment you tried to kill yourself and she said oh yeah well i was just telling myself i was a worthless human being because i've never accomplished anything in my life i've never done anything worthwhile and i said well what why is that what did what have you done in your life he says i've i've done nothing but you know clean people's floors and clean their houses and scrub their floors and i've done that my entire life with my children ever ever since i was a a young woman so i i don't i don't have any fancy accomplishments and so she said so what am i supposed to do and i said i don't know let me go back the class again and to find out what i'm supposed to do next so she said fine you know tell me next week and so i i i told doctor back he says well just ask her to use use a technique called examine the evidence tell her to make a list of three things she has accomplished and i said oh that makes perfect sense so i went back and she said what did doctor back say and and and and i said well he said that you're supposed to make a list of three things you have accomplished and she said well that's what i told you last week i've never accomplished anything so what am i supposed to do and then i i couldn't think of anything to say so i said well maybe you could take it as a homework assignment and see if you could think of something and you know you could give me your list next week so the next week i came back and i forgot about the homework assignment not and i did my things you need any more pills and how are your symptoms and and and that type of thing and halfway through the session she said aren't you gonna ask me about my homework and i said oh i've i i forgot but were able to think of anything and she gave me a piece of paper with about ten things on it and number one she said i i forgot that when i was a young woman you know my my husband and and all of our family died in the concentration camps but i managed to smuggle our our two boys out of out out of nazi germany and we made it back to the united states in new york and i got a job cleaning people's houses so so we we put a a roof over our heads and and i was able to put put food on the table and i thought well maybe that was an accomplishment of of of sorts and my son just graduated number one in his class at the harvard business school and i thought well maybe that that was a good thing too and then i i forgot about the fact that i speak four foreign languages fluently she had listed that and then she said and then number five was i was i'm a a gourmet chef and and she had all this stuff listed and i said well how how do you rocket reconcile this with your claim that that you're a worthless human being who never accomplished anything worthwhile and she says doctor burns i can't it doesn't make sense i have no idea how i got that idea in my head i don't believe it anymore and i said how are you feeling now she says i'm suddenly feeling a whole lot better she said do you have some more of these techniques and i said we have to wait another week that's the only one i've learned so far but that was kinda how it it went and it and it lifted my heart so much to finally after spending seven years really in medical school another seven years in residency and never learning one thing that would help people finally to have found ways of helping people and and connecting with people and seen people go from suicide or tears or or total belief that they're worthless to to joy and and laughter and that's kind of been the story of my life and the reason we've created the the app the feeling great app is because you know i've probably trained forty or fifty thousand therapists in in my life i've done workshops all over the united states and canada and and i've i've discovered it's very difficult for human therapists to learn what i've developed the techniques are great but there's only a handful of therapists who can really do it at a high level of skill and so i thought well i bet the computer would do it what i tell it to do and could learn how how to do this and so we've got ai doing it and the ai is doing it almost as well you know maybe even better than than than what i can do and and and that that's been my life my dream to develop a a scalable way of getting this out to everyone because i can't treat everyone by my by myself or you know that anyway that that that's kind of the story of my life quick question what's your go to when you got ten minutes before a meeting or a workout for it just used to be whatever i could grab which usually meant skipping meals entirely or just grabbing something that left me crashing an hour later because it was just full of garbage that's why partnering with fuel this black edition ready to drink is a complete meal so it has thirty five grams of protein six grams of fiber thirty five essential vitamins and minerals it is no sugar added gluten free under five bucks i always keep a few of these in my fridge and honestly it solved the whole back to back meetings go go go non nonstop no time to eat problem super well and this one's new for me it's fuels daily greens i had the blueberry this morning honestly first impression it was way better than i expected it's developed by registered nutritionists and diet pediatricians there are forty two vitamins minerals and super foods only twenty five calories four grams of fiber in just one gram of sugar i throw one back first thing before a morning calls every single morning look if you're running a business time is the most valuable asset she makes healthy eating simple and they also just launched the target source nationwide so you can get it everywhere try both products today with fifteen percent off your purchase for new customers with my exclusive code scott at hu dot com slash scott tried both products today with fifteen percent off your purchase for new customers with my exclusive code scott s c o t t at hu dot com slash scott use my code fill out the post checkout survey to help support the show that is fuel dot com slash scott they really make healthy living taste amazing even if you're on the go healthy eating healthy lifestyle doesn't have to taste bad it doesn't have to suck hubspot is a success story partner now think about listening to this podcast right now you're probably multitasking you're probably catching seventy to eighty percent of what we're talking about but let's flip that and imagine you're only catching twenty percent that'd be crazy right it's really not a good use of your time if you only remember twenty percent of what we're talking about but most businesses most entrepreneurs are only using twenty percent of their data all the most important details in call logs emails chat with their customers it's just left floating in digital space not being used hubspot it gives you the access to those insights to help you grow your business because when you know more you grow more visit hubspot dot com to get the full picture of your business today nets sweet is a success story partner now what is a future hold for business if you ask nine experts you'll get ten answers bull market bear market rates are up rates are down at the end of the day it'd just be easier somebody invented a crystal ball but until then over forty three thousand businesses a future proof themselves with nets sweet by oracle the number one ai cloud erp that brings accounting financial management inventory and hr into one unified platform here's what i love about it instead of juggling multiple systems you get one source of truth real time insights and forecasting that actually let you peer into the future with actionable data when you're closing your books in days instead of weeks you're spending less time looking backwards and more time focusing on what's next whether your companies earning millions for hundreds of millions nets tweet helps you tackle immediate challenges while seizing your biggest opportunities if i needed this product in my business this is what i'd use it's a game changer for business visibility and control if you wanna see how ai can transform your financial operations download the cfo guide to ai and machine learning for free that's nets sweet dot com slash scott cla that's nets sweet dot com slash scott cla nets sweet dot com slash scott cla indeed is a success story partner now say you just realized your business needed to hire someone fast how can you find amazing candidate fast it's easy just use indeed when it comes to hiring indeed is all you need stop struggling to get your job posting seen on other job sites indeed sponsor jobs helps you stand out and hire fast and with sponsor jobs your post jumps to the top of the page for your relevant candidates so you can reach the people you want faster and it makes a huge difference according to indeed data sponsored jobs posted directly on indeed have forty five percent more applications than non sponsor jobs plus with indeed sponsor jobs there's no monthly subscription no long term contracts you only pay for results there's no need to wait any longer speed up your hiring right now with indeed and listeners of this show will get a seventy five dollar sponsored job credit to get your jobs more visibility just go to indeed dot com slash cla right now and support our show by saying you heard about indeed on this podcast indeed dot com slash cla terms and conditions apply if you're hiring indeed is all you need have you thought about what she said when she when she sort of came to the realization that she didn't understand how all these negative thoughts creeped in because that was that moment when all these negative thoughts crept in when she felt worthless almost ended her life so have you thought about for people listening first of all how do they stop this feeling of worthless and hopelessness even start to creep in where does that come from well we don't know that you know it comes from negative thoughts but we don't know why some people have more negative thoughts than others and it's a genetic all the theories of causality are just pure speculation and we don't know the cause but we we we do know the negative thoughts in the hearing now are the cause and we do know now have you know over a hundred techniques to help people crush the negative thoughts but one way to think about it when i was a teenager i used to love magic and i go to magic stores and learn card tricks and it was really fun and once i saw this this book for it cost twenty five cents it was twenty five ways to h tires your france well that'd be blow so i bought this book and i took it home and i i i i read it and i did exactly what it said with one of my friends and long behold the guy went into a h not tran i found about a third of my friends were extremely h recognizable and we would do all these goofy things the kids do and it was a lot of fun it was probably irresponsible but it was funny and you know it was like endlessly entertaining but it i i've come to see depression and anxiety as well as like h tran you're giving yourself messages that are not true and believing them with all of your heart like i i'm a loser i'm not as good as i should be i shouldn't have screwed up i shouldn't have made this mistake when i was young i shouldn't have this social anxiety i must there's something wrong with me and they're you're relieving that with all of your heart and what you don't realize is that those thoughts are all fraud they're distorted they they've got what i put in my first book feeling good ten cognitive distortion like all or nothing thinking over general like a young woman a lovely young woman broke broke up with her boyfriend that they've been going together for two years and then then she says doctor doctor burns does this mean i'm un unbelievable and she was really devastated and that's like an over general going from this relationship broke up then myself must be worthless myself must be un unbelievable and i'll be alone forever and and and why human beings succumb to this kind of distorted thinking it's just it's totally weird and hard hard to understand you know i mean you might think about the the book of genesis in the old testament the hebrew scriptures how adam and eve were allowed to live in this garden of eden where everything was provided and then they had to screw up and get themselves banned from that garden of eden and into place where there's storms and and suffering and and to me it's always been about as as strange as that be because the thoughts that caused the depression are always totally off base that that's the weird thing about it if if a loved one dies or a pep dies and you you say i really love that person and you grieve but that's not depression that's a healthy healthy grief but when people are depressed you're telling yourself you're no good or when people are anxious they're telling themselves oh man if if i say something stupid in a group of people they'll all reject me the word spread and you know all of these things fortune tail and mind reading and emotional reasoning and hidden and should statements and self self blame and but i i i don't know all all the answers just enough of the answers to to be able to to have a lot of help available for people maybe who are listening to the show right now and who are struggling and and saying you know i i feel like what doctor burns saying i feel like i'm not good enough and i i'm unhappy a lot and i i i see myself as inferior and inadequate and and kind of screwed up or or i'm anxious all the time or i have all these pho and fears or or or whatever it is well i think a lot of people feel that and there's various degrees i think that's very important to highlight so you have people that are on the verge of of suicide and people that feel like they have no value on this earth but to a lesser degree i think almost everybody who i know has some version of imp syndrome oh yeah right yeah yeah we must hang out with the the same crowd unfortunately i think we do i never but it's true it's very true it doesn't have to be such an extreme yeah for example i teach a free counseling class for psycho therapist at stanford every week and we have a virtual now so therapists can come for free from all over the world and get training in these and these new techniques and you know did you ever foresee see those new yorker cartoons about how neuro psychiatrists are yes yeah well it's true and and i've asked this the people that are we do live therapy with them you know as part of their training and we i i i post a lot of them on my podcast the feeling good you can hear live you know examples of being people being treated and in two hours and going from tiers to joy but i would say over ninety percent of the therapists in our tuesday training group group are convinced that they're not good enough and they struggle with insecurity and depression and and anxiety and so like you i see it everywhere now i think there are some people who are immune my my mother law i don't think it's had an unhappy day in her life and she's one of those feelings was just born and happy and she's joyful and positive all all the time but i i to to me that's that's pretty rare i see people struggling and suffering so you've actually written feeling good which they sold over four million copies but there's been research that has shown that just reading your book alone to a degree can treat depression is that correct yeah that's that that's right and i didn't intend it to be a self help book i just wrote it when i was opening up my practice because the story like the woman who tried to commit suicide i had so many of those i just wanted to write a book to tell people there's a new approach and and share my excitement and i imagine patients could read it for homework when they're going to therapy and then the therapist wouldn't have to teach them all the stuff in the book they could just individual the therapy but the the book was published in nineteen eighty and and nineteen eighty eight somebody said if you seen the headline in the new york times and and i says no i don't read the new york times what's the headlines says well apparently they've been doing research on your book and they found out just by reading the book people overcome depression and this guy from the university of alabama named what was forest sk he was a research psychologist and he did experiments where when people would come to seeking treatment for depression he said i we're gonna have to put you on a waiting list for four weeks but in the meanwhile he gave half of them my book feeling good it was a random assignment type of study and and they said re read this this book while you're on the waiting list and then they he reported that after four weeks most of the people on the waiting list had improved so much that they said they no longer wanted or needed treatment and and and so then he submitted that and some people from the national institute to mental health at health said well this might have been a placebo effect you have to do another study and randomly assign them to some other book and and see if it's the same so he did a second study and he gave half of the patients my book feeling good and half of them that book by victor frank man's search for meaning which is some kind of classic book about to someone who survived the concentration camps and and then again for for four weeks and then after four weeks again about two thirds of the people who read feeling good had improved dramatically but none of the people who were the other book had improved so they approved it wasn't a a placebo effect and then he did eight more studies that were published in top psychology or medical journals peer reviewed and he could just confirm that over and over again but nobody too much cared because no one could make money off of that finding because the book no you you lose people money yeah you lose people money right because now if people are fixed they don't have to pay for a therapist they don't have to pay the drug companies people are just fixed right and then at the time you could buy the book feeling good for two dollars and forty sam's wholesale so and you can now too by the way i've heard that people are buying it use copies on amazon for about that amount of money and some of them are getting first edition hard covers for that and which are rare they found somebody found a load of undiscovered first edition hard cover feeling goods but but anyway that was part of what inspired me to create the feeling good app and and now we call it the feeling great app to to be able to get that effect out the same that was in my book feeling good but more powerfully and to make it available to more people because we can do so much more now with you know video and interactions with the patient and ai and and and things like that but it it was a shock to me that that because i never thought that people would be reading the book in the book itself would have such profound anti anti depress effects but it it it did you've worked with a lot of different systems and and strategies now to have to help people have this massive change in their life massive massive shift from depressed to feeling happy feeling good about themselves obviously in the book in the app there's lots of different things that people can explore and learn about but in your mind at least what are some of the most impactful or life changing strategies that you've thought through that you've tested on some of your patients that have worked exceptionally well well the original thing and feeling good is still very helpful to people and that's you and it seems so simple a lot of patients refused to do it because it doesn't seem fancy enough but you just write your negative thoughts down on a piece of paper and then you look at my list of ten distortion for my book feeling good or any of my books or the app and find out what what are the distortion in them and and it helps you see that the thought isn't really true in the way you thought it was and i can give you a personal example of of that when i was first you know working with doctor back and you know i i didn't know much and i would present cases to him and and one day he criticized the way i dealt with a patient who hadn't been paying his bill in the clinic and and and i can't remember what i did but i said the wrong thing or whatever and and then i got on the train going home and i i felt horribly depressed and and and and and i said well you know why why are you depressed i said well i'm i'm thinking that i'm a worthless human being they'll probably take away my medical license i i i i've have nothing to offer i've have no talent as a as a psychiatrist i'm a bad human being and those thoughts seem terribly valid and i was telling myself david you should just write them down like you have your patience right down the thoughts and and then look see if there's distortion in them and then i told myself oh no this is real my thoughts are true and it was so such a strange experience was like i had finally discovered that i was a terrible bad human being and it seemed like it it was like it was just a fact of of the universe and and i i was just felt terrible i had a six mile jogging trail over heels that i would run on so i i said david right down your negative thoughts i said no that's a waste of time i'll i'll go out and jog and get my brain endo up so went out and ran this six mile loop and the farther i ran the more depressed i became and it didn't do me a bit of good and i finally went home and and and and yeah i said yeah and i told myself to say david you're being stubborn like your patients just take a an effing piece of paper and write down your thoughts and see if there's any distortion in them so i said okay but i know it won't do any good so i wrote them down i'm a bad human being i'm gonna lose my medical license i have no aptitude in psychiatry i have no future in psychiatry you know things like that and then i looked at those thoughts and i said wait a minute is that true and isn't that an example of all or nothing thinking i said one wrong thing to one patient now i'm gonna lose that's one of the distortion that's what the distortion you all or nothing thinking and i said yeah david you've got a little all or nothing thinking going in here don't you and then how about emotional reasoning you know i feel worthless so i must be worthless my feelings must reflect reality and then fortune telling they're gonna take away my medical license david how many times do they take away a medical license for somebody who talks to a patient about not paying their bill that doesn't seem entirely realistic and then i said well what could you sell tell yourself instead write down positive thoughts on the right edge of the paper on the left i had written out my negative thoughts and i said well i could think about it like this i could say david you're a beginner and you're entitled to make mistakes and learn from your mistakes in fact it's impossible to learn anything worthwhile without making mistakes and it's maybe not even a bad deal because you can you're gonna see this patient tomorrow and you can talk it over with them and tell them that you felt ashamed and felt like you let him down and let's talk it over maybe he'll forgive you and and and and immediately my my heart just jumped i felt wonderful i thought my got it that really is a con i've been connie myself and the next day i saw the patient i said you know bill yesterday we talked about your bill and and my supervisor told me i didn't handle it sensitive or correctly at all and i've been feeling ashamed and and like i really let you down because i i like you and i'm i believe that i hurt you and i just wanted to tell you that and i'm you might be feeling really hurt and angry and disappointed and and i wanna hear what you have to say and he talked and opened up and at the end he says doctor burns this is by far the best session we ever had this is just you you're fantastic and i couldn't i couldn't believe my ears but that that was you know like one one powerful thing that's still true today is is if you you know when you're upset and you're beating up on yourself write down your thoughts on a piece of paper and and then take a look at the list of ten distortion all or nothing thinking over general metal filtering discounting the pod positive binder reading fortune telling magnification should statements on and on and that's that's a good first step now another thing that's that's really powerful that's kind of new with my book feeling great and the feeling great app is that i was taught as a doctor that negative feelings are bad they're mental disorders so if if if you been feeling down and guilty and shamed and an attic what worthless that means you have a mental disorder called major depressive disorder and i as an expert supposed to fix your broken disorder that's the whole way psychiatry is set up an clinical psychology as well and what i've discovered is that all of your negative feelings do not result from what's wrong with you but from from what's right with you and and so i've developed technique called positive framing where i have once i've had people record are all their negative thoughts and feelings i ask them what what are these negative thoughts and feeling sure about you that's positive and awesome how do these negative thoughts and feelings help you and that patients have never heard that before that's like some alien language or something and then we began to come up with this list we come up with ten or fifteen really beautiful things about them and and the gen genuine things and and then and then we say we'll say like you know i sure i've got techniques i could probably carry you in today's session i have no no doubt that would be possible probably is gonna happen but given all these positives i i i don't think we should do that and then people say well please please do that you know i i i i know that shows beautiful things about me but i'm but i'm hurting but that is called positive ref framing and and that it opens them up because they they suddenly become proud of their suffering rather than ashamed and that seems to open up the the door to rapid recovery because after i do the positive of reframe and it's usually usually just maybe fifteen minutes to the finish line then and and then i use a technique called external sterilization of voices that's they say i'm gonna become the negative view and i wanna see if you can defeat me and one of the things you're you're telling yourself is that you're you're new no good and you're not good enough and i'm gonna be your negative self and i've got the same name as you i'm just just like you but i'm this voice in your head and and then i start saying that you you know you're no good and and now see if you can defeat me and he try and then if they can't win a huge fix victory say let's do a role reverse i'll say i'll show you how to crush that thought and we do roll reversals back and forth for two or three minutes until they get it and they suddenly see through the thought and w their negative thoughts typically typically go to zero at that point and the the those are so so the those are three of the dimensions of how i work the hubspot podcast network is a success story partner now a quick podcast recommendation i've been listening to truth lies and work they're in the hubspot podcast network just like success story it's this husband and wife team a and lia elliott they break down why people actually do what they do at work so if you have a business if you manage people if you have to hire people at any point you have to listen to their show i just listened to an episode on why good employees suddenly quit that's an issue that we all have and it totally clicked for me one of the reasons i explained is why it's not usually about the money it's about all these little promises that we as founders entrepreneurs managers leaders we break without realizing it like when you tell someone you just hired that they're gonna learn all these new skills but you just keep giving them the same tasks over and over and over again it made me realize that i've probably lost a lot of good people for dumb reasons that i never noticed and hiring is one of the most important things you can figure out so if you manage people or if you just wanna understand what makes your coworkers workers tick it's worth checking out listen the truth lies and work wherever you get your podcast chip station is a success story partner you know what separates successful online businesses from literally everyone else it's not just having great products it's delivering an amazing shipping experience that keeps customers coming back all of my friends that run the biggest e commerce companies they use ships station and it has completely transformed how they handle orders they save thousands on shipping costs thanks to the rate chopper tool that finds the best discounts and when made ships station brilliant you never need to upgrade because it grows with your business no matter how big you get and they offer discounts up to eighty eight percent off ups d expressed and usps rates and up to ninety percent off fedex it integrates seamlessly with every selling channel you're already using and your customers get branded tracking updates to keep them happy and informed when shoppers choose your products you turn them into loyal customers with cheaper faster and better shipping no credit card required cancel anytime that's ships station dot com code success story hubspot is a success story partner now the future of business is happening right now and you don't wanna miss it that's why you have to be at inbound twenty twenty five they are bringing together the brightest minds in marketing sales business entrepreneurship ai for three incredible days in san francisco the global epicenter of innovation and technological disruption picture this you are learning directly from amy poe about creative leadership you're getting ai insights from da modi who's literally shaping the future of artificial intelligence here's what makes inbound special it's not just the great keynote you're gonna dive into breakout sessions where you can immediately implement what you learn and plus san francisco legendary startup ecosystem provides the perfect backdrop for networking with all these great entrepreneurs decision makers industry leaders peers who are actively shaping the future of business from september third to fifth at the mo center you're gonna be surrounded by forward thinking professionals who turn insights and ideas into breakthroughs don't just watch the future unfold be part of creating it visit inbound dot com slash register to get your ticket today if you look at sort of so obviously drugs i think everybody is i think generally people are comfortable with the idea that drugs are not the answer however a lot of people still default to i would say quote unquote traditional therapy so you probably have a a harder argument for people that are in traditional therapy for years at a time they're gonna have a hard time on but i think i i think that it's not a hard argument to say that i drugs are not good and drug companies are profiting but what would be in your mind the biggest difference outside of speed why does traditional therapy get it wrong well the one thing in traditional therapy is they they generally have this one thing that's supposed to be the answer and so they keep doing that over and over again it keeps not working whereas one of my philosophies as fail as fast as you can because the the technique that works for scott won't work for sarah and i've i've developed roughly a hundred and forty techniques for smashing negative thoughts and helping people change the way they think and feel and so if something doesn't work i just go on to the next thing another thing that traditional therapy has wrong is that they're they're trying to help people who are broken as i mentioned with the positive ref framing and and and that's the basic error of just about all of the so called schools of therapy that that you know when you try to help people it kinda puts people on on the defensive and so i go in the opposite direction i try to persuade people not to change i become the voice of their subconscious mind and and that that that really helps me empathize with people at a deeper level but i would say the main thing is when i when i was a resident we never measured anything we just talk to people endlessly and assume that in six months or eighteen months something good would happen and it was bullshit because not i never saw anything good happen but when i then i doing during my research years we had to measure depression and and i saw how important that was to have an objective scale and now i've developed really quick highly accurate scales to measure not only depression but suicidal urges anxiety anger and even happiness in the hearing now and i measure that at the start and end of every therapy session how depressed are you at this instant and these tests are ninety five ninety six percent accurate how suicidal are you how anxious are you how angry are you how happy are you and and so i measured at the start and end of every session and that makes me accountable for getting change in today's session and you know we're gonna measure it and we're gonna see right away did you do any good david or are you just bullshit with this with this patient and another thing is i also have them measure rate me on empathy how warm and caring was i did i understand how how they were feeling inside and the scale i've developed that they take at the end of the session is very very sensitive to the tiniest errors and most therapists when they use the scale initially they get failing rage from every patient at every session and they discover that their empathy skills really are not good and then that's what i do in my training group my free training groups teach them how to correct these these errors but it's it's data driven it's the it's science based based on research that i've done on how people change and data driven but three quarters of the therapist or more refused to use measurement scales and as the buddha said two thousand years ago they're screwed be because their human therapist do not know how how your patients feel they think they know i've done research in the stanford hospital to see how depressed does does your therapist think you are and then how depressed do you think you are and there's virtually no correlation they're they're they're the they're they're complete lack of knowledge but the therapist don't even know that their impressions aren't correct and so you have to start measuring and and it's it's like suppose i told you i wanna start a new emergency realm and i want you to invest but we're not gonna use any of the x rays or or blood pressure cuff for blood test or anything like that would you invest no i definitely would would not invest yeah and not the same thing would just spend money on a therapist who's not measuring anything i i wouldn't so all that i mean so then i mean you must have massive issue with all these like telemedicine companies offering therapy and whatnot because that can't yeah and and i've wanted to do a head to head comparison with our app but but i i don't think they would permit it but to to you know you can use our app for free and if anyone wants to try it it's not expensive and if you can't afford it you we'll give it to you for free but i'll link it in the i'll link it in the show notes too i'll link the app and the yeah yeah yeah great but the we were gonna go against the it's called better health i think because one of my colleagues checked it out and said it was just horrible and i think you pay three hundred a month or something and they assign a therapist and i said well we could randomly assign patients there or to our app and then publish the results but then i realized that the better help if they caught onto to what we were doing they would for forbid it and and i think to be ethical we'd have to tell the therapist there that we're doing research on them and i i kinda cooled off to that idea but but i i would love to do that kind of comparison because the the app we i recently did some research on the ai and the app is getting like a fifty to sixty percent reduction in seven negative feelings in new users the first time they sit down with the i ai chat and if you look at all the world's published outcome studies with psychotherapy or anti antidepressants they don't get that in six to twelve months or even two year studies so it's literally thousands of times more powerful do you do you have a a sense of when you do these rapid change strategies how will do they last what's the longevity of these of these strategies let someone has recovered i i tell them the good news since the next few days will be the happiest days of your life there's nothing better than recovering from depression and here's the even better news within three days or three minutes or three hours or three weeks all those negative thoughts and feelings are gonna come back and you're gonna crash horribly and that's what we're hoping for and then they say why should we hope for that i say because nobody's allowed to be happy all the time that's impossible but let's practice now what you're gonna do when those negative thoughts come back and i call it relapse prevention training and here's what you're gonna be telling yourself and here's your negative thoughts and then let's practice crushing those negative thoughts right now ahead of time and i tape record that so i i tell them all the things are gonna tell themselves when they have a relapse they'll say oh this proves that the app didn't work or this proves that the therapy didn't work and this proves that i'm hopeless after all and this proves i really am worthless and i knew this would happen and and i'm screwed and and and that type of thing and then we we just do roll role reversals blasting those thoughts out of the water and in my clinical practice when i was in private practice i did this with every patient before i discharged them and then i told them the last thing i and i said i i hope and pray that you will relapse and they said well why is that i said because if you don't i'm never gonna see you on and i've just gotten to know you and i really feel close to you and i'm proud of you but if you ever relapse and need my help you just you just call me and and i offer unlimited free tune ups for the rest of your life but that's how confident you are in the product how confident you are in the system but but relapse is an an issue and it's not to be underestimated in the buddha knew that twenty five hundred years ago and one of the things he said is we all drift in and out of enlightenment and when i first heard that it sounded nonsensical but now i know what it means because when you recover totally it is enlightenment it's just you feel close to people you have no territory to defend you have no self you just feel tremendous joy and then drifting out of enlightenment is when you go back into your own pattern of self self critical thinking so the the question that you raised is is is is vitally vitally important do you think there's i mean you've mentioned a few times there's all these different forms of negative self talk that people that people use is there one that is the most nefarious the most malicious that you wish people would be aware of that yeah that absolutely and by the way our ai guy just studied twenty seven thousand negative thoughts of app users and categorize them in in different categories and surprisingly the most common and we're gonna have a meeting on this tomorrow and probably do a podcast on it but the relationships is the most common one like i'm a bad father i'm a failure as a husband i'm a bad mother things like that or you know so so rejected me so i'll be alone forever but the most dangerous one of all is hopelessness and that's the the idea that things will never change and that that's a a hallmark of of of depression and a lot of anxious patients feel that way too and my manager aaron back used to say that we can put up with anything as long as we see hope at the other light at the end of the tunnel but when you think there's no escape from your suffering that's when people turn to suicide and and and and so when people start saying i'm i'm worthless and i'll always be worthless and i'm hopeless and there's no treatment no one's been able to help me and nothing will be able to help me that that that's the most dangerous one of all because that's when people turn to suicide and i've treated so many people who who were hopeless and if you hang in there and and work with these new techniques you can always transform the way you think and and feel the hopelessness is the worst but it's also the cruel fraud fraud of all but again you know i could tell you stories we're probably running out of time of hopeless people in the technique that that work for them but but there's always a there's always a way to to get people back to joy and self esteem i asked doctor beck about it early in my career i said doctor back you all my patients they come to me they tell me they're were worthless and hopeless and some of them i'm beginning to think maybe it's true what do you think yeah because they're so persuasive depressed people they they make a real case for well they believe it they believe it yeah and they get you believing it and doctor ba well david you'll have to make your own decision about that but i i have never bought into the idea that's anybody's hopeless and and nobody's worthless and that those that has really paid off for me but you'll have to make your own decision so i came to the same decision cell was paid off for for me too but it's a it's a great question because the these thoughts as i say the hip not h not tran of horror that we're in when you're depressed or panic you're anxious is is very very real and and people can't imagine that their thoughts are are not valid and when i was feeling down i thought my i've just made a discovery about myself how could it have taken me you know to be thirty years old before i realized i was a horrible human me it was like a discovery and it just seemed true but it was pure m it's fascinating than what we can convince ourselves though yeah yeah scary yeah very very scary oh yeah i'm gonna put a whole bunch of links in the show notes but where should people go and check out your work is there one website or yeah there's two websites they might be interested in well first you know i have my own feeling good podcasts and you can find them on my web page which is feeling good dot com and that's filled with free resources i've have a free depression class a free anxiety class a free relationship class of i've got four hundred and some free podcasts and and all kinds of free free resources in my books which are pretty inexpensive you know you can link to amazon pick them up the other thing would be the feeling great website which is the website for feeling great app and that's that's kind of a new exciting tool for anyone who's struggling with depression or anxiety and you can go it's just feeling great dot com it's easy to remember and you can check out the app in either of the app stores you can download it and take a get a a free ride for a week or two on it and see if you like it because it works really fast and if if you like it you can get a your subscription to it and you can use it you know whenever you're feeling down or if if if you really like it but can't afford it just email us contact me and we'll give it gladly give it to you for free and so though those are and then also i've got a lot of new things i'm posting on the internet on both on on the feeling great i'm also doing new videos now i'm and and we have a little video studios every week i go in and post cool little videos on different topics i know i saw i thought you they're good do very good think very good yes yeah so we're having fun without without too i'm just trying to do my legacy get as much stuff out there as i can in the time i've still got i always like to see how you've looked at your own life your own career your own success is because you've had an incredible career and if you're were gonna go back and you all the lessons that you've learned about success about mindset about happiness about depression but would be one lesson that you'd wanna leave your children with i i i think for anyone that to to look at your negative thoughts when you're feeling down and anxious and panic and and you know take a piece of peep paper and write them down and see what you're telling yourself you may be surprised that's can be the first step on a journey to enlightenment and then another thing that i've learned i used to think like that attorney that i had to be perfect to have anyone love me or care about me or impress people and what i found is that the the the world is far gentle and more loving than i had thought and that when you're just yourself and you're you're vulnerable and show people how how wonderful they are that that that that that's a greater and better path to to love and intimacy than trying to impress people with with yourself

indeed is a success story partner now here's your tech hiring tip of the week from indeed seventy three percent of tech workers say flexibility is one of their top priorities so if your job posting doesn't mention flexible hours or remote options you're basically invisible to three at a four candidates keep that in mind look hiring tech talent right now it's tough you are competing for people with super specific skills everyone wants hybrid work and the salary expectations are through the roof it's a lot that's why indeed actually makes sense they're the number one place where tech people go to apply for jobs we're talking three million tech professionals in the us and eighty six percent of them have applied through indeed it's not just some job board where you post and pray they've got tools like smart searching and their tech network that uses ai to connect you with people who actually have the skills that you need companies using the tech network saw over four times more relevant applications that's huge more qualified people way less time wasted whenever i've needed tech talent in the past indeed is the only platform choosing if i needed to hire top tier tech talent today i'd still go with indeed post your first job and get seventy five dollars off at indeed dot com slash tech talent that's indeed dot com slash tech talent to claim this offer indeed build for what's now and what's next in tech hiring in this lessons episode explore what makes marketplaces succeed and how platforms differ from traditional business models discover the key elements that drive engagement and trust understand how balancing supply and demand prevents negative network effects and uncover why focusing on one niche can outperform even the biggest competitors okay so we talked to okay so we spoke about okay so how you got your first first thousand customers growth after the acquisition with with voices dot com any other any other tips for how you scaled and marketed the business anything innovative or different that you tried failed that learn lessons from that you wanna talk about yeah i mean there there's you know maybe just kind of breaking apart some of the marketplace dynamics because you know i i often you know we'll speak about this and then even like get the questions like why i actually have an idea for a marketplace in like x category you know often they're like uber for excellence like okay well you need to understand how these things kinda work and what are those critical components and there's and there's four of them and the the i mean this is really inspired to give credit where it's due is from a great book called revolution i highly recommend it by a number of like boston college mit you know professors it's really well done and they describe the difference between kind of the old traditional world pipeline business where it's very much along a value chain and everyone's trying to take their piece of the pie and and control the information and who does what and what kind of moves through because they're incentivized to keep it a closed system and control their part of that value chain so to the the the complement to that or the modern day equivalent that is not a pipeline but a platform and a platform has four components you have the participants we talked about this the buyers and sellers the creators and the consumers so even on youtube or podcast there are people creating and then there are people listening and or on twitter it's like ninety nine point nine nine nine percent of the people are just consuming or reading content there versus the creators who are actually posting so who are the participants and then those participants need to actually second you know critical factor here would be sharing of information you know different than again that pipeline where you're kind of all those participants are holding and trying to you know control the information they actually want to you you wanna enable as a platform you know owner or entrepreneur you wanna enable the sharing of information hence you can go on and look at a profile of acc talent on voices and actually see all their historical information you know jobs that they've done there were ratings you know ratings you know what's in their studio all of that's you know there for the taking then there's the exchange of services and so it could be a product or a service it might be purely online like like an up upwork or a five it's a digital service or a voices or it might be what's sometimes called o to o online to offline i start online with with lyft i call from my ride and then it shows up offline right right start online for with gru or seamless and then the meal actually shows up offline and then the last one would be the exchange of currency and i use the term currency specific about not saying money although they could be that it's most people think of it as a true platform you actually have to enable commerce to happen and that might be capturing the payment upfront processing the payment and paying out that service provider or that you know that that supplier if you will on for work well done if it's one of these kinda of creative let's call it content platforms youtube or twitter even then the currency is actually more social currency and that would be gathering likes and and you know favorites and even kind of ratings and reviews and so it's these four components that make a platform successful and the absence of any one of those almost dev evolves into just purely directory you know you're not really facilitating interactions it's just to kinda go glean information but the actual transaction or interaction happens elsewhere it's like the platform covers all of that so you know again that that's that's a i think a great way to think about how to structure the key components of a business especially a lot of services businesses are trying to move into reinventing themselves as a platform that's how i would think about it and having kind of built it and stumbled upon those and then reading about in a book and over a weekend i'm like oh my goodness is that gonna see me a decade right there then what do you think is the what do you think is the number one thing when somebody's building a platform that people don't get right out of those four items is there one that stands out more than others you you probably you probably don't appreciate the need to have supply and demand all all marketplaces and i use that term platform marketplace a little interchangeably again they're going to be either supply constrained or demand constrained and if you don't know which one it is for you you're probably gonna be you know you know servicing and building up the wrong side for too long and so you know case in point you know actually i had a friend who was one of uber first fifty employees and i mean there's tens of thousands full time employees and all that that's early on yeah very early on and he his job was to actually go city to citi to get drivers and once they got enough driver he basically launched new cities and once they got just enough drivers that they immediately changed gears to he would place these cards it was almost like business cards in hotel keep like front desks and it would just say like your first ride free up to fifty bucks or whatever it was and that's just to get this flywheel going the flywheel of network effects and you know you have to know when when do you have enough supply in order to change and then you gotta go all in on the other side so knowing what sides constraint i couldn't it's not prescriptive it's different for every it's not to say oh well it's always the demand that's constrained sometimes it's the supply i mean airbnb for a long time had a hard time having enough people willing to open up their doors and welcome in strangers right welcome in new guests and so you know it will it will vary depending what businesses but if if you don't get the people in the marketplace using it and both supply and demand you actually can have negative network effects not where itself reinforcing upwards where you're getting more and more and more people you know an an example might be you know the installation of the first fax machine you know not useful the second fax machine useful and third and fourth and fifth but at some point people started throwing these fax machines out because like why do i need a fax machine so that's now negative network effects where you know every time someone gets rid of one the remaining people who have fax machines it's less valuable than it once was so you have to be constantly investing in that positive network effects where you're growing your base and doing so in that that kind of equilibrium fashion one last point i wanted to to bring out because this was an interesting an interesting point that i thought we should touch on you said that you can easily comp not easily you can compete with larger players by simplifying now this is not just platform specific but i mean this is a great lesson so talk to me about that well you know i mean the let's let's let's talk about you know the definition of of strategy right and which is this might sound incredibly academic i've had the great experience of doing some executive education as well over the last couple of years and this definition kinda stuck with me of strategy which is arguably one of the most you know used over overused terms and it's it's not a vision it's not your values it's it's it's not employing best practice because that's what everyone else is doing strategy in short is choice and it's the it's the interaction of the in you know the integrated choices that firm makes like a business is gonna make that differentiate it from other players in the industry to deliver long term financial results so the integrated set of choices what are the choices that you're gonna make is a business that are different than someone else and that can you know we talk we're talking about simplification if the you know big brand c in your space is really over complicated they serve the high end of the market well you go and carve out some other end of the market maybe it's a specific vertical maybe it's a sub segment of the customer base and so you know again for for for us at voices early on it was i mean upwork and or el and o dash two big freelance sites combined become up upwork this massive five billion dollar you know you know market cap you know business that's now publicly traded but they do every category right they you know you can hire hire and listen we totally admire they're doing that crushing it but you can hire a you know a a musician to an electrician to a graphic designer to a virtual assistant and a web developer and so on and so forth they have you know seventy eighty categories and like eight thousand skills that are all represented so huge breath so how do you look at that and go well what aren't they doing right or what isn't my big competitor doing that maybe i can take that slice and own it and for us that was that was voice you know and voice over now i you know at risk of sounded like it was completely calculated and so forth i think what we've discovered over time is that that's held up to be true we can you know i'd i would much prefer to go really deep on in one vertical area and own it as much as possible becoming the you know domain expert expert in this area again kind of like the thought leader again term probably overused but owning that space before you go like go deep before you go wide is is probably the simplest way to to describe it and so that's it's like you know do something different and then cut out all of the non value added x you know activities that if you talk to your customers like do you appreciate that we do this you know you have you run any surveys to understand what's working and what isn't and we do it it's like quite periodically both let's call them quantitative surveys to new customers long standing customers and then follow that up with the qualitative interviews we always ask at the end of survey do you want somebody to contact you that to quickly talk through and you probably get like five or ten percent of people are like yeah actually i'd like to talk to you about this and and share more more in feedback so and it's those kinda it's those kinda key findings that you can do that that differentiate figure out those places where you can get your business to be a little bit simpler thanks for tuning in if you found this valuable don't forget to hit that subscribe button so you never miss an episode and if you wanna dive deeper into this conversation check out the links in the description to watch the full episode see you in the next one

indeed is a success story partner now here's your tech hiring tip of the week from indeed seventy three percent of tech workers say flexibility is one of their top priorities so if your job posting doesn't mention flexible hours or remote options you're basically invisible to three at a four candidates keep that in mind look hiring tech talent right now it's tough you are competing for people with super specific skills everyone wants hybrid work and the salary expectations are through the roof it's a lot that's why indeed actually makes sense they're the number one place where tech people go to apply for jobs we're talking three million tech professionals in the us and eighty six percent of them have applied through indeed it's not just some job board where you post and pray they've got tools like smart searching and their tech network that use ai to connect you with people who actually have the skills that you need companies using the tech network saw over four times more relevant applications that's huge more qualified people way less time wasted whenever i've needed tech talent in the past indeed is the only platform choosing if i needed to hire top tier tech talent today i'd still go with indeed post your first job and get seventy five dollars off at indeed dot com slash tech talent that's indeed dot com slash tech talent to claim this offer indeed build for what's now and what's next in tech hiring in this lessons episode explore how the culture of venture capital shapes modern entrepreneurship and why it often limits sustainable growth discover why most startups fail under hyper growth expectations understand how alternative funding models can build profitable and lasting businesses and uncover how redefining success beyond hustle culture leads to balance equity and genuine fulfillment i think that the the the idea is that you champion around around entrepreneurship are very important because it paints a very pragmatic picture for people that want to start something and potentially are just just looking to go find vc money and think that that's the only path that they can take which it's it's not it's yeah well and even for people i one of the my big frustration scott is that even for people who don't raise venture they build their companies in the media ecosystem and the echo chamber that is dominated by venture right and so even if you are a startup that is you know an agency for example a consulting business the the concepts of blitz scaling and hyper growth and growth hacking and you know maximizing growth rate of hustle culture all of these things are weighing down on you regardless of whether you are actually you know in that in that funded structure so i i think this is this is one of my big challenges right is that even though many venture capitalists would say and they do say this all the time right they say vc is wrong for ninety nine percent of companies and if you're a tech entrepreneur it is marketed to a hundred percent of us right it's the it's the ocean that we're swimming in so i i i think it's really really wise to understand why does that asset class exist how does it function what's the goal behind it right the goal behind it is to avoid taxes and the goal behind that is essentially maximize growth at the expense of long term sur so you if you look at the small business administration rate in the us which which looks at tons of small businesses so people with whatever two to a hundred in employees the average survival rate over five years is like i think it's fifty five fifty eight percent it's down a little bit in the last few years because of covid and stuff but the average five year survival rate for a venture funded as soon as you raise that first venture round or the the pre seed or the seed round that would lead to a venture round your five year survival rate drops like fifteen percent that's a lot worse than a restaurant right see so so it is it is a it's a very strange strange world if you are an entrepreneur and i i don't think it's talked about enough that that these these high failure rates exist there there's also the culture of you know i think the the whole ecosystem around it creates this idea that you know scott let's say you you start something tomorrow what what you're essentially told is hey yes there's a high failure rate that's part of the game but you are special and if you are good enough if you are a true champion if you work hard enough if you sacrifice enough of the rest of the things in your life and you put your full energy and effort and you devote everything to this venture you may be able to prove yourself as one of the big success stories i hate that too like that does not work well my mental model and how how i want the world to be right i i want a world of far more equity and far more distribution of opportunity rather than maximizing inequality by saying for every you know five hundred entrepreneurs there will be two or three big winners and a few who do okay and the vast majority will fail entirely i i think that's what we have in society american society at least overall right now you know if you look at the wealth distribution income distribution it's basically a tiny few massive winners right a few you know maybe another ten percent who's doing pretty right and then kind of this oh man you do you know whereas when we were born you know maybe i don't know how old you are but thirty forty years ago you really didn't wanna be in the bottom forty percent of americans now you really don't wanna be in the bottom seventy percent and it feels like we're going to a place where you wouldn't wanna be in the bottom ninety percent you know in another twenty years that's ugly that's not the world i wanna live in that's not the world i wanna of capitalism it's an ugly version of capitalism in that gap yeah yeah super ugly version and look i you know i think extremely highly of a lot of people who are in that world right i have a bunch of investors who are venture der shaw der the cofounder outside yep maybe he was he was the lead investor in spark toro he's been my friend for forever i love that guy of pieces i think he's a wonderful human being i don't love the model of investing that he generally does and right and he's had obviously in incredible success with hubspot and and and with venture backing i know he thinks highly of hubspot venture investors from years ago and he'd invest in a lot of startups ups that go on to raise money but i don't i don't i don't love it and i i think i think in order for us to change that we have to have lots and lots of role models that are showing a different path and doing it well and that's that is the most fundamental thing that spark toro is trying to be is a role model for a different kind of path so we are doing our marketing differently we're doing our growth differently we're doing hiring differently we think about what we want the next quarter in the next year to be differently we technically we are growing at a rate that a venture investor would be excited about but we don't have to be it's almost unintentional right it's sort of like oh well look at this happy accident that is going along you know spark toro is going quite well especially at the moment i'm sure we'll have some down months in the future but yeah that's not our goal is not hyper growth my goal is to work thirty or thirty five hours in a week right i want french or italian hours i don't want american hours survey monkey is a success story partner now look we get it you can hardly go anywhere or do anything these days without hearing about ai this or ai that and if you're like most people when it comes to ai you're impressed but you have a few concerns but what if ai was used not as a tool to replace people but as a way to help understand people better ai from survey monkey is designed to do just that i'm crafting the perfect survey which is harder than you might think to analysis that digs deep binds patterns and services trends quickly survey monkey powerful suite of ai capabilities makes it faster and easier than ever before to get insight from real people helping you make confident decisions for your business try it today at survey monkey dot com slash scott square is a success story partner now there's this coffee my neighborhood that just started as this tiny little corner spot now they've got three locations they're selling online they've even added some food so what i love is that no matter which location i go to whether i'm grabbing my morning coffee or aren't picking up lunch everything just works smoothly be ordering the payments the loyalty points it all syncs up perfectly and that is the power of square and honestly it's why keep going back every business has different goals and square is the platform that supports them all whether you're opening new locations selling something new or expanding your reach i see it everywhere now the corner bagel shop that became the chain specialty markets managing thousands of items even my barber who takes appointments online square point of sale has the flexibility to run and grow your business exactly how you want so whether you're in retail running a restaurant offering services or you're just doing it all there's a square point of sale mode built specifically for what you need different settings for different parts of your business so you're always ready to make the sale go to square dot com slash go slash success story to learn more about how your business can grow with square that is sq u a r e dot com slash go slash success story uncommon goods is a success story partner now listen holiday shopping sucks who end up buying the same stuff everyone else is getting from amazon or target all the gifts are boring but uncommon goods is different they actually curate unique gifts from independent artists and small businesses it's all stuff that you've never seen before i was looking on their site and i found this cocktail smoking kit where you literally smoke your drinks with different wood chips i had to get it my brother who thinks he's a mix epidemiologist is gonna lose his mind that's the vibe of the whole site things that make you go wow i can't believe that exists see everything is handmade or it's made in small batches so the cool stuff sells out and they've got gifts for everyone your dad your weird cousin your friend that's impossible to shop for and here's the best part they give a dollar from every purchase to a non nonprofit you choose over three million donated so far get fifteen percent off your next gift at uncommon goods dot com slash success that is uncommon goods dot com slash success for fifteen percent off don't miss this limited time offer uncommon goods were all out of the ordinary hundred percent yeah alright it's last patrick it'll need like of course i know exactly what you're talking base if i remember last time last time i went to i i was i was last last european trip was vienna austria and the i was on my phone on a friday afternoon and everybody was looking at me like i had three heads like the fact that i was on my phone on a friday afternoon it was just a regular if it wasn't a holiday it's like what are you doing like what do it what what are you working on it's like zebra yeah yeah yeah get off your phone look at the beautiful sunset look at this incredible plate of pasta before you let's go to a vineyard let's go drink let's go eat let espresso get an ape ape that's so i i mean i i i don't think i don't think that at the you know at the end of my life i'm gonna look back and sync wish i'd made more money you know like i just can't see it i just cannot i wish i i wish i'd grind harder i wish i'd had hustle more like i don't i don't think those are the things i'm gonna be thinking about i think it's weird that there maybe there are people who will feel that way i don't know i don't think so i well i think that that's why you have to find a way okay so let's let's break down i wanna break down some some tactical device for entrepreneurs on on how they can build a company like spark toro because everybody like you said is marketed and they're they're in this ocean of vc investment or if not vc investment then okay i have to bootstrap but there's not a lot of bootstrap success there are some but i mean there's not a lot so how do you yeah do and these are not the only two options right there's a whole bunch of stuff in between that is poorly understood yep and not well marketed and and not it gets very little press gets very little media and and for obvious reasons right it's just there's not that much of it and also it is rarely the case that those people have power influence and wealth to impact media in the same in the same way right so so what i would what i would urge folks to think about is in the structure of your company you can raise money from investors private or crowd funded in ways that let you build the kind of company that you wanna build and there are supportive groups of investors who are like like myself right who are looking for opportunities to fund companies that have a hey we're gonna exist for a long time our first priority is sort of paying back our investors their initial some this is this is how the spark toro model works we raised one point three million dollars from thirty five thirty six angel investors they're mostly folks gosh from my personal network over the so you for our model you do need accredited investors but there are innovations on that model that'll let you crowd fund this this same sort of thing you can look at what saw hill len did s nhl on twitter and he you know he he basically built a fund structure that that's a little more crowd fund style but those thirty six investors put in between twenty five thousand and a hundred thousand dollars each and our goal at spark toro is essentially to become profitable which which we have been for a while now and then pay back that one point three million at which point everybody gets to participate pro rat meaning to their amount of shares in profit sharing so if we make you know a hundred thousand dollars in profit for ten years everybody you know all the investors get to split whatever it is thirty five percent of those profits and founders get to and and employees get to split the other part hopefully right our our hope is that spark towards a several million dollar a year business maybe even a ten million dollar year business and that our profits are seven figures right and that we can pay out that money every year annually and that compounded over time spark toro will actually be one of the best maybe the best performing investment in our investors portfolio and the only downside the only shitty thing for them ordinary income taxes right they'll have to pay ordinary income taxes on the money that spark toro makes them but if you can find you know sort of tax progressive investors right who who believe in this the the one nice thing is if and when spark toro ever does sell right if it if it if it's acquired by some other company in the future good news on that money our investors will get capital gains thanks for tuning in if you found this valuable don't forget to hit that subscribe button so you never miss an episode and if you wanna dive deeper into this conversation episode

indeed is a success story partner now here's your tech hiring tip of the week from indeed seventy three percent of tech workers say flexibility is one of their top priorities so if your job posting doesn't mention flexible hours or remote options you're basically invisible to three at a four candidates keep that in mind look hiring tech talent right now it's tough you are competing for people with super specific skills everyone wants hybrid work and the salary expectations are through the roof it's a lot that's why indeed actually makes sense they're the number one place where tech people go to apply for jobs we're talking three million tech professionals in the us and eighty six percent of them have applied through indeed it's not just some job board where you post and pray they've got tools like smart searching and their tech network that use ai to connect you with people who actually have the skills that you need companies using the tech network saw over four times more relevant applications that's huge more qualified people way less time wasted whenever i've needed tech talent in the past indeed is the only platform choosing if i needed to hire top tier tech talent today i'd still go with indeed post your first job and get seventy five dollars off at indeed dot com slash tech talent that's indeed dot com slash tech talent to claim this offer indeed build for what's now and what's next in tech hiring why is running the simplest sport it's the sport that you can do almost at any time at any moment just by yourself your success is our your own your failures are own i start running very seriously when i'm about fifteen and initially i do it for a love of competition and i do it because i'm good at it and it gives me status at high school and make me cool he's a storyteller who turned media into mission nicholas thompson is the ceo of the atlantic and under his leadership the magazine returned to profitability earned multiple pulitzer prizes and grew its digital subscription exponentially when you're running pain doesn't work the way we're taught most of your pain is actually just the brain sending signals because it's worried about homeostasis if you can reach that level of awareness of yourself you can actually go quite a bit faster because you can push your limits he also c founded the ata a multimedia publishing company acquired by wordpress and wrote the hawk and the dove he runs a daily video series dissect technology culture and power reaching millions and reshaping how we think about the few when your life is hard there's something about going to the track and just running to the point where you fall over that feels amazing we're all in instagram all the time we're all in twitter all the time we're all constantly distracted and we fill all those empty moments with screens social interactions mode but what's interesting is at the same time that that has happened the number of people who run marathons and the number of people who run ultra marathons to activities so nick why is running the simplest sport hey scott it's the sport that you can do almost at any time at any moment just by yourself you don't need a rack you don't need a ball you don't need someone else you just go out you don't even necessarily need shoes though they're useful particularly if you're on rocky terrain but you have the ability to just go out there and do it whenever you want and then because it's just you you're able to observe things about yourself and understand things about yourself as you do it your successes are your own and your failures are your own you understand aging and it creates mental space that other sports don't do so my the hypothesis of my book is that if you look closely at running and you look at what it does to people's lives and you look at what it did to my life you can actually understand really deep and really meaningful things do you think that people in general have a hard time being alone with their own thoughts some people do some people don't but we all have to spend a certain amount of time alone so we all should be comfortable and you know there's this interesting phenomenon in modern life where you know we're all in instagram all the time we're all twitter all the time we're all constantly distracted and we fill all those empty moments with screens social interactions notifications but what's interesting is that at the same time that that has happened the number of people who run marathons and the number of people who run ultra marathons to skyrocket and so there's almost an inverse relationship between how distracted we are by our phones and how much we seek sort of long distance long endurance competition that's very interesting yeah i i feel like as you describe running in such an el way and i haven't heard many people describe it that way but it's i've experienced it with a variety of different fitness things but none are as how do i describe it like when you run you get into a statement i guess it's flow state or something where you there is no distraction it is really just you and your thoughts which can be a good thing or a scary but it's really interesting that you notice that correlation between our thoughts being overwhelmed by social media being constantly stimulated be a constantly about bombarded with messaging and images and ideas and our need to find an outlet that gives us back our mental peace almost it gives us back our mental piece it can connects us to you know we were right we hunted ante envelopes on the you know savannah when we're you know many many you know centuries and generations ago i do think there's something very pure about running even when you do it like i do it in an industrial city you know most of my running is from brooklyn manhattan over a bridge with a train so it's not like i'm off running in the fields of wild flowers so i do think that even if you do it that way there's a way it connects you to our ancestors and a way it connects you to the sky i do think they're really beautiful things that happen through it where does this sort of i don't wanna say love for running but need for being okay with your own thoughts and per through difficult times where does this inflection point or this major theme come into your life when does it first present itself i mean i start running very seriously when i'm about fifteen and initially i do it for a love of competition and i do it because i'm good at it and it gives me status at high school it makes me cool but i also very quickly also learned that it's a way to be outside be in the woods think at a deeper level process complicated things and so it's probably pretty early in my relationship with running where i realized like i didn't just want to go out and try to beat people on the track i wanted to see if i could run to the top of kin mountain right i wanted to see if i could you know get to the next ridge line and you don't do that because you want to prove anything you now you might do it for a str segment but back then you didn't and so it was really about finding some kind of spiritual piece so i think that my my need the mental benefits that come from running started to make themselves present then but i think it was later in life when i mean the the the inspiration for the book came in a pretty important moment which was you know when i was twenty nine when at least when i was thirty i ran a a fast marathon i had this long struggle to run a fast marathon i just couldn't break three hours and i finally break it and i run two forty three and i feel amazing right and then shortly thereafter i'm diagnosed with cancer i recover me talk more about that that process that whole thing then for the next like thirteen years i keep running and i just run two forty threes over and over again just nonstop right and two forty three is fast it's cool it's great like do is a great time and objectively like it makes you the fastest person in your company right usually if you run two forty three you know fastest person on your block whatever then in my mid forties i get way after right and i run two twenty nine and now suddenly i'm like one of the best in the world in my age group and you start setting records and the inspiration for the book the moment i decided to write the book came when i was trying to think through like what the heck happened like how did i get so much faster and and more importantly clearly i have this late ability why didn't i realize it while i was training my butt off in my thirties like could couldn't i gotten faster than like makes no sense and then i had this realization oh wait it's because i had only cared about at some deep psychological level being as fast as i had been before i got sick like that was the only thing that mattered to me and so it was that realization oh wait like the things that make you fast things that slow you down the things that determine how well you can do at this sport are buried deep inside they're not just like your cardiovascular system your legs they're deep in your mind and it was that realization that led me to start writing this book that's very interesting so you discovered that the reason why the reason why you weren't getting better is really because of i mean to put it very very simply sort of a a limiting belief or not even like a like a a baseline or a benchmark that that you thought that was what you wanted to achieve i mean this is like obviously we're talking about running and and and and sport but this is something that transcend ends almost everything you do in life totally it like i it i don't like it's there's so many multi factors and lots of elements but yes it was essentially like i was not i just wouldn't let myself get faster because i didn't care because all i was trying to do was prove that i was still alive and that i was like similar to the person before he had gotten sick and that seems to have been what was going on inside my head what does that what does that teach you about sort of you know aging into your prime because i think that that's something that yeah well i mean like i don't think a lot of people at at you know forty five are trying to break records i don't think that a lot and i and i always tie listen i i i am a business guy in a sports gun i i do tie a lot of sports performance and sports lessons back to business because i think that some of the mindset hurdles that you overcome to succeed in sports and teamwork and all these different ideas they really do translate into into into business as well and just life success but i think that you're talking about somebody who's forty five i don't think they're looking to you know create incredibly new milestones in their career incredibly new milestones in their in their athletic life incredibly new milestones in their relationship even though i think they should be but i think that around that ages when people are thinking okay you know i've done it i figured it out i'm good let me coast into retirement or whatever that looks like yeah a couple of things so one i had a very good model my maternal grandfather he doesn't really play a role in the book he's mentioned a couple sentences you know worked until he was eighty three years old at the highest levels of us government right like and he just got fired all the time you know get fired by almost seven out of eleven us presidents and then just work his way back right so i had a pretty good role model that said you don't stop you don't give up you don't go like you don't say okay at fifty five i'm gonna retire or like forty me i'm gonna stop running you just keep going until until the end you know he was playing tennis with me when he was ninety years old put a little like chair out on the court and you would like sit down between points so that's you know that's one element of it another element is i think the lesson that i learned there are forces that slow you down as you age right it is inevitable and you know my i don't know less lean muscle mass than i had when i was twenty eight years old i have a you know lower maximal heart rate right i have they're all kinds of like i have a lower v two max there are all kinds of like physiological things that un unfortunately make me slower that said i also have wisdom right i've learned things about training that i didn't know before i have learned actually forms of endurance through my professional life that are useful for running so you have a bunch of forces pushing you backwards you have a few forces pushing you forward and so i'm never gonna even if i devoted my whole life to run and i'm not gonna run two twenty or two nineteen but i can you know keep i can keep pushing back against the decline to be better i had to conversation to my mother she was like oh my god my reflex are just getting worse and worse you know it's like every day and my reflex are i was like mom that doesn't have to be the case like let's go out on the porch and i'm gonna throw you tennis balls i'm like sort toss them to the right toss them to the left i'm gonna bounce them and you're gonna catch them and throw them back to me and like we went did that and she's like oh my reflex are getting better and you're like yeah you know you can like there are forces that push us in one you know towards decay and you can push back you know not at everything but at what you want you know we're not gonna live forever you know i'm probably gonna die at roughly the same measure is gonna die out if i didn't do all this running but i'm glad that i haven't like given in to the forces of the decline at least not yet monarch money is a success story partner now you know what's it's weird i'm doing well financially but i have this constant low level financial anxiety that i was missing something because i have crypto on all these different exchanges i have multiple investment accounts old four zero one k's saving scattered everywhere i knew the pieces were fine but i had no idea if the whole picture made sense i finally got monarch money to pull everything into one view and the first thing i noticed i had ten thousand dollars sitting in a temporary savings account for eight months ago when i sold some stock that's eight months ten thousand dollars it could have been workings that have just waiting for me to remember it existed also it showed me that i was spending tons monthly on all these subscription services that i couldn't even remember i signed up for every sunday morning it takes me five minutes to check everything all my financial stuff in one place no more wondering no more anxiety the wall street journal just named it the best budgeting app of twenty twenty five but honestly it's more about finally having control so don't let financial opportunity slip through the cracks use code success at monarch money dot com in your browser for half off your first year that's fifty percent off your first year at monarch money dot com with code success survey monkey is a success story partner now look we get it you can hardly go anywhere or do anything these days without hearing about ai this or ai that and if you're like most people when it comes to ai you're impressed but you have a few concerns but what if ai was used not as a tool to replace people but as a way to help understand people better ai from survey monkey is designed to do just that from crafting the perfect survey which is harder than you might think to analysis that digs deep binds patterns and services trends quickly survey monkey powerful suite of ai capabilities makes it faster and easier than ever before to get insight from real people helping you make confident decisions for your business try it today at survey monkey dot com slash scott square is a success story partner now there's this coffee shop in my neighborhood that just started as this tiny little corner spot now they've got three locations they're selling online they've even added some food so what i love is that no matter which location i go to whether i'm grabbing my morning coffee or picking up lunch everything just works smoothly the ordering the payments the loyalty points it all syncs up perfectly and that is the power of square and honestly it's why i keep going back every business has different goals and square the platform that supports them all whether you're opening new locations selling something new or expanding your reach i see it everywhere now the corner bagel shop that became the chain specialty markets managing thousands of items even my barber who takes appointments online square point of sale has the flexibility to run and grow your business exactly how you want so whether you're in retail running a restaurant offering services or you're just doing it all there's a square point of sale mode built specifically for what you need different settings for different parts of your business so you're always ready to make the sale go to square dot com slash go slash success story to learn more about how your business can grow with square that is s q u a r e dot com slash go slash success story you right about running with awareness not just discipline explain what that means what's the difference yeah so when you're running this is important it gets into like a little bit of it's almost spiritual stuff but you have to the trick one of the tricks in running fast one of the most important things this the lesson i think applies across life pain doesn't work the way we're taught or the way we think about it when we're young when i started running i thought that the reason i hurt when i ran was because my muscles were inflamed or you know something was going wrong with my nervous system or like i i used to think there's like there's lactic acid buildup right the lactic acid buildup is what makes you hurt boom no it's not there is lactic acid buildup but that's not what makes you hurt most of your pain is actually just the brain sending signals because it's worried about homeostasis and so your brain is you know sending signals through the rest of your body to try to get you to slow down because it think doesn't think it can maintain the pace you're running for the distance you wanna when i run a marathon or anyone runs a marathon you get all these weird pains right and you're like three miles in your shoulder will start to hurt right and on a regular day your shoulder not gonna hurt three miles in a run because there's nothing going on with your shoulder right like it's it's just there right it barely moves but your brain is like it's worried about running twenty six point two miles on this particular day and it's worried you've taken it out too fast but it's trying to get you a slow down and so it's looking for weak points and there all kinds of studies that show this and so your brain is running all these calculations of how hot is it like how long is this gonna take how heal is the course how hard are i work what is my part rate and it's measuring all these factors and it's like a thermostat and then if those factors kind of exceeded different level it like sends a pain signal out and so when you're running you're trying to understand this and you're trying to understand these different pain signals and you're trying to understand like is this just something i can ignore this is like this thing in my shoulder or is it an actual pain signal is it like i've actually injured my achilles right so i was running this past saturday and so let me started to go wrong on my ham right now i was like okay is this like a real thing or is he just worried that i'm trying to run a twenty mile run and that is like a really profound and deep body awareness that if you can reach and not that i've reached perfection but if i've am at a much deeper understanding in my body than i was twenty years ago ten years ago thirty years ago if you can reach that level of awareness of of yourself you can actually go quite a bit faster because you can push your limits in part by sort of like using your brain it i call it plain hide and seek with your brain right but the only thing i have to use your brain to play hide and see with your brain but you can kind of convince yourself to go faster they're obviously physical limits like it's not like the perfect buddhist can run a one minute mile but you know you can still do better you have a deeper understanding you actually set records for men forty five and up in a fifty k race like this is not just a casual i go for a run on a sunday morning was that done purposefully did you say i never want to be a hundred percent my work is that benefited your work what's the relationship between this sort of the two conflicting identities well it could be a it could be a strength it could be a weakness i mean i think that like my whole life and if you look at different moments and you look at people who've have evaluated me you know the people who like me and the people who are impressed by me i knew you think i'm doing a good job are always like you know nick does so many things right and the people who kinda think i'm a sc are like nick's distracted right and it's a theme that goes through like my academic life my twenties my thirties my forties and you know there there are there are trade offs when you have a life where you have a bunch of things you do there are moments where your goals end up tension with each other what i've tried to do is to make the life work and to make it so that nobody the atlantic ever i'm slack on the job because of my running right i run to and from the office takes about them out same amount of time as going on the subway i'm often listening to podcast i'm gonna work out obviously i'm trying to cultivate awareness right i'm using running as a way that can help my job they're things i learn from running that really help my job they're things are my job that help my running so i've been able to build it into my life so they don't think any i don't think anybody at the atlantic would ever say i shi on responsibilities you know i think they mostly think and they has this like hobby that he's able to keep contained and you know one of the things about running is that you can do it at an elite level without putting that much time in right you you know you spend i spend what eight hours a week running like it's a lot but like you could spend eight hours week watching netflix hubspot is a success story partner think about listening to this podcast right now you're probably multitasking you're probably catching seventy to eighty percent of what we're talking about but let's flip that and imagine you're only catching twenty that'd be crazy right it's really not a good use of your time if you only remember twenty percent of what we're talking about but most businesses most entrepreneurs are only using twenty percent of their data all the most important details in call logs emails chat with their customers it's just left floating in digital space not being used hubspot it gives you the access to those insights to help you grow your business because when you know more you grow more visit how hubspot dot com to get the full picture of your business today nets sweet is a success story partner now what is a future hold for business if you ask nine experts you'll get ten answers bull market bear market rates are up rates are down at the end of the day it'd just be easier somebody invented a crystal ball but until then over forty three thousand businesses of future proof themselves with nets suite by oracle the number one ai cloud erp that brings accounting financial management inventory and hr into one unified platform here's what i love about it instead of juggling multiple systems you get one source of truth real time insights and forecasting to actually let you peer into the future with actionable data when you're closing your books in days instead of weeks you're spending less time looking backwards and more time focusing on what's next whether your company earning millions or hundreds of millions nets helps you tackle immediate challenges while seizing your biggest opportunities if i needed this product in my business this is what i'd use it's a game changer for business visibility and control if you wanna see how ai can transform your financial operations download the cfo guide to ai and machine learning for free that's nets sweet dot com slash scott cla indeed is a success story partner now say you just realized your business needed to hire someone fast how can you find amazing candidate fast it's easy just use indeed when it comes to hiring indeed is all you need stops struggling to eat your job posting seen on other job sites indeed sponsor jobs helps you stand out and hire fast and with sponsor jobs your post jumps to the top of the page for your relevant candidates so you can reach the people you want faster and it makes a huge difference according to indeed data sponsored jobs posted directly on indeed have forty five percent more applications than non sponsor jobs plus with indeed sponsor jobs there's no monthly subscription no long term contracts you only pay for results there's no need to wait any longer speed up your hiring right now with indeed and listeners of this show get a seventy five dollar sponsored job credit to get your jobs more visibility just go to indeed dot com slash cla right now and support our show by saying you heard about indeed on this podcast indeed dot com slash clarity terms and conditions apply if you're hiring indeed is all you need when you think about the idea of obsession is obsession useful helpful to you a good thing a bad thing i just because i feel like i love i i love obsession to be quite honest i think that it i and i look at what you've accomplished over your life and i feel like a portion of you not a hundred percent but a portion of you is obsessed and that's what allowed that's what's allowed you to get to where you are what is your thoughts on obsession with running with performance with work with everything you've done i'm like that's a good question because obsession is you know i'm it's hard to be obsessive about it's hard to be like a obsessive p right and so my whole life i've never really focused in on one thing to the exclusion of others but i am very driven and very focused and i care a ton about doing well in my job i care a ton about running fast and i care a ton about being a good father to my three boys and a good husband to my wife i think obsession i think sort of like a modulate obsession where you like really care passionately and you like you it's just whatever the goal is right so the most important goal in my life right besides being a good father good husband the most important goal is figuring out a business model so this amazing publication founded by ralph w emerson and harriet features s can thrive for generations to come and play a role in helping american democracy in helping america like existence nation right that's my objective right i don't write the stories i don't edit the stories my job is to find the business model and i am obsessed by that i think about it all the time right and it's in the back of my head should we do or are we doing this are we doing this well or enough can we hit this metric right so in a way i am like profoundly obsessed about that but not to the extent that it prevents me from spending a bunch of time running no i think i i like that strategically obsessed yeah strategically obsessed there you go that that's that there go i'm strategically obsessed when you get cancer at a young age you i mean to a degree you're facing mortality how does that change your relationship with running your hobbies your past times your family work like what does this do what what is the thoughts that go through your head when you do get cancer at a young age well so one of the thoughts so i got it when i was thirty you do suddenly you just you question who you are and what you are because you're like wait if i die what have i have i done anything have i left anything have i you know the world would be identical without me or at least if if you're thirty and you're like i was at thirty right i mean if you're maybe some super accomplished twenty nine olds maybe different but it it makes you wonder your place in the world it makes you think more about the people who truly love you you go through this moment and you also you get to see how people react and you get a better sense of who truly loves you and who truly matters in your life and then if you're lucky and you get through it as i did you take life more seriously and you you have you have post traumatic growth you know you have this thing you can hold on to right you've been to the pre but you've survived and you you care more about certain things and you care less about other things and so right you may care more about trying to figure out your place in the world to journalism i mean you can maybe care less about whether the red sox when the a east right and so you just sort of like your your shift of priorities and your way you spend your time i think changes there have been studies that have shown that people who get cancer and survive it end up with big they they end up becoming more religious they end becoming closer to their family members they and becoming closer to their deep friends they end up probably having fewer weak social connections and they end up more focused right like there's a kind of they do a whole bunch of things that are very solitary for the mental health and they i think they also spend more time you know outside like thinking about important things like you kind of like remove trivia and add important stuff into your mind and you know there have been lots of states that show that it's not true for everybody and you do have to obviously survive it and come out the other side completely intact right and you can come out with all kinds of different outcomes but you know when i look at my life there a lot of things that didn't go right in my twenties as that went right in my thirties i you know running it's a very obvious one but they're all kinds of them and part of it was having had this really dark and scary experience with you know thyroid cancer which is you know if you're gonna get cancer it's the the cancer you wanna get a very high survival rate i was very young there wasn't you know i was terrified and thought i was gonna die but there was no moment where like a rational doctor thought i was gonna die but you come to the other side and you're a you're a different more serious more focused person there was one line in your book it it was along the lines of when were teenagers were pulled by instinct now my emotions were those of an older man a steady rain that formed a river pushing relentlessly forward so this sort of it's is very well very well written and beautifully worded sort of evolution of a person and was that cancer that brought you through that evolution it was a couple i mean that line in the book i was comparing two different races and they're both like very emotional races so the first was when i was eighteen years old we're seventeen years old and it was the new england championships and it was the three thousand meter race and it was for the new england title and it was both for the individual and for the team title and my race the three thousand was the last race and so it's me against my arch arrival if i win we have a good shot i winning in the title if i lose we have no shot so i have to win and i go out like fall behind i get depressed he gets ahead and then i catch him right and then it's just this manic sprint and so you know what i love about those memories is is that you can just like when you're running a sprints on a track you can just let your emotions out you can you can channel every element of energy you have into like forward propulsion and i don't think i've ever felt quite like i felt you know those last two hundred meters were neck and neck were just you know we're going back and forth you know like i really like i hated the guy he had insulted me on the track like three weeks before was the only person to beat me all season it was like unfair he was a post graduate you know like just didn't i was like i wanted to beat the guy and so we're going at it i passed him i catch him which is amazing he and then i lose and he wins and so i was describing the emotions of that race and what it feels like to give it all to like be a young man and be like screaming inside yourself and moving on in the lane two which amazingly in track is called the lane of high hopes which is so cool so that was the first race and then the second race is the fifty k in oregon where i set the american record where you know in that first race i crossed the finish line and then blackout like i don't even know i've lost when i crossed the finish line it's so close i think i might have lost but who knows and then it's like then in the fifty k it's like i remember the end where i can see the finish line and know i'm gonna break the american record and they've pulled out the tape and i run through and the video is kind of amazing right and you watch and i go through and i break the tape and i look i look good and then and i remember feeling good and then i like toppled over you know i've like i've clearly like completely maxed myself to the exact you know it's like you know i don't know if you prone to the gas station and there's like one drop of gas in the tank and that was like what i had done in that race but i had done it like in sort of a steady smooth way as opposed to that first race where i'd lost by the way i will say that the the guy who beat me in that race when i was at seventeen he read an article i wrote about running and sent me an email and said it he loved it was feel great to read about it and like it inspire him to get out and play more squash and i now i'm i'm now friends with him that's so far the arch nemesis no but i think that that so yes you're right it wasn't just cancer but it was like this it was just life just turning i mean it's a it's a lot of things right there's a lot of changes happen so i think i really like you there there's sort of four things that happened at that time period there's you know one i overcome my cancer too i start having children right so i have three boys and there they appear in the years after i get healthy third i write a book and i write a book about my maternal grandfather who i mentioned who is this just you know phenomenal diplomat but i'll just a force of nature in a model i read a book the history of the cold war based on his rivalry in george cannons and then the fourth is that i have this very intense relationship with my father and i watch is very driven man you know so kind of fall off into alcoholism and despair and bankruptcy and i have a counter example right like if you let things slip this is what happens right and that sort of you know i start to really process that so all of those things are happening at the same time in my life that's a lot that's a lot a lot one last thought on this because i think it's a useful idea and i think can help people that are going through difficult things god forbid hopefully nobody although probability dictates people who are listening this are going through cancer some sort of cancer care but just negative negative moments of people's lives in general you found a lot of relief in running to really take your mind away from the cancer or but the the the point is running physical activity it gave you something that would take your mind away from anything negative like i'm i'm assuming you've used it to escape a lot of you know really mentally exhausting and stressful situations over your life talk to me about what people should what people should know about running just when they're going through something hopefully not cancer but if it's cancer or anything else like what's the what's the thing that running gives you that nothing else really does you know i know i mean for i don't know if for other people it gives you something that nothing else can give you but there there are a couple of things that can happen with running so one it allows you you know sometimes when you're running what you're doing is you're actually seeking the pain right you're like you're going out there and because things are hard in your life you're just like you want the opportunity to kinda get into ultra runners called the pain cave but you wanna get into like just a point of there's something when your life is hard there's something about going to the track and just run into the point where you fall over that feels amazing alright so that's one use right i don't use it that much that's more kinda like the young person's thing you know but that that that was kind of like what you know if i like broke up with a girl when i was young i would like just golden run hard right and like you know sometimes like bringing pain on can process the other pain what i use running for now is kind of the opposite it's almost like spiritual escape it's like okay i'm gonna go and i'm gonna run and i'm gonna feel this different thing and i'm gonna be out in the universe and it's gonna be closer to meditation right and i'm gonna go make something hard happens in my life now i just go out and i go run in the woods right and i don't run hard i don't necessarily run long but i go and it's a way of like releasing my mind and freeing myself and so i think people can reach that mental state you know that kind of dis association you can reach it through multiple ways now you can go for a walk right you can you know go bird watching right like are different ways of kind of escaping and going maybe you can meditate maybe you can quietly in a chair but for me it's running that gets me to that state that's you know really helpful the hubspot podcast network is a success story partner now a quick podcast recommendation i've been listening to truth lies and work they're in the hubspot podcast network work just like success story it's this husband and wife team a and lia elliott they break down why people actually do what they do at work so if you have a business if you manage people if you have to hire people at any point you have to listen to the show i just listened to an episode on why good employees suddenly quit that's an issue that we all have and it totally clicked for me one of the reasons they i explained is why it's not usually about the money it's about all these little promise is that we as founders entrepreneurs managers leaders we break without realizing it like when you tell someone you just hired that they're gonna learn all these new skills but you just keep giving them the same tasks over and over and over again it made me realize that i've probably lost a lot of good people for dumb reasons that i never noticed and hiring is one of the most important things you can figure out so if you manage people or if you just wanna understand what makes your coworkers workers tick it's worth checking out listen the truth lies and work wherever you get your podcast chip station is a success story partner you know what separates successful online businesses from literally everyone else it's not just having great products it's delivering an amazing shipping experience that keeps customers coming back all of my friends that run the biggest e commerce companies they use ships station and it has completely transformed how they handle orders they save thousands on shipping costs thanks to their rate chopper tool that finds the best discounts and when makes ships station brilliant you never need to upgrade because it grows with your business no matter how big you get and they offer discounts up to eighty eight percent off ups d express and usps rates and up to ninety percent off fedex it integrates seamlessly with every selling channel you're already using and your customers get branded tracking updates to keep them happy and informed when shoppers choose your product you turn them into loyal customers with cheaper faster and better shipping no credit card required cancel anytime that's ships station dot com code success story hubspot is a success story partner now the future of business is happening right now and you don't wanna miss it that's why you have to be at inbound twenty twenty five they are bringing together the brightest minds in marketing sales business entrepreneurship ai for three incredible days in san francisco the global epi epicenter of innovation and technological disruption picture this you are learning directly from amy poe about creative leadership you're getting ai insights from da modi who's literally shaping the future of artificial intelligence here's what makes inbound special it's not just the great keynote you're gonna dive into breakout sessions where you can immediately implement what you learn and plus san francisco legendary startup up ecosystem provides the perfect backdrop for networking with aldi these great entrepreneurs decision makers industry leaders peers who are actively shaping the future of business from september third to fifth at the mo center you're gonna be surrounded by forward thinking professionals who turn insights and ideas into breakthroughs don't just watch the future unfold be part of creating it visit inbound dot com slash register to get your ticket today talk to me about your relationship with your father because obviously he's in the title of your book so that was something that was very important it shaped a part of your life a big portion of your life what was your relationship like with him he's a very complicated guy but my relationship with him was always we had a very strong relationship we emailed you know more or less every day throughout his life he passed away seven years ago but he's a very complicated guy where he grows up and he grows up in kind of a tough family where he's afraid of his father he goes up in oklahoma and his father they're on a native american reservation his father's president of the university there and my dad just doesn't fit in doesn't have any self confidence and so he kind of escapes he like learns about the school called andover applies gets a scholarship and then it's this just like rockets ship trajectory for the next ten years right where he goes to andover is an out cast figures it out goes to stanford wins a rhodes scholarship you know dean students you know i find these recommendation letters where they're like scott thompson the best student we've had since herbert hoover right john f kennedy says this guy is gonna be president runs every political organization he's just a d goes to oxford you know with his rhodes scholarship comes back with his fill mar my mother who is the you know glamorous daughter of this important political figure and so my dad's like just you know the guy gonna be certainly he's gonna be senator right but then he doesn't really like it never gets on track professionally and you know from the time he mar my mother where he would have been me to twenty six years old twenty seven years old until he's forty he's in kind of a rut he starts to drink too much becomes alcoholic he then you know if he can't really get himself going professionally can't really write an important book gets stuck in all these sort of political battles inside the faculty where he's wears a professor he then finally like starts to make it in the late seventies and he becomes kind of a well known public intellectual ronald reagan gets elected and he's a top choice to run the policy planning staff which is a great job he doesn't get it but it's right then that he realized realizes he's gay and you know it's something he'd thought about we you know he as it's unclear exactly when he realized that he had tendencies he's clearly bisexual the some degree but that where he was his male tendencies were stronger and so then he leaves my mother he you know moves to dc and then he just unravel and he you know he starts to he would he would there'd would be hundreds of men who he would you know would come to our house and he would you know i said he didn't spend a night alone for twenty years and he is you know there many of them are completely inappropriate right some of them are like violent some of them are feed some of them are you know yeah i don't know just kind of like em souls right like they're not the people that scott thompson should be with there's some them like but mostly like they're not really the right people for to be with and so then he like the next thirty years of his life he's a loving father he's fully supportive of me fully devoted to me he's an amazing man to talk to right guy is always so smart and interesting and well read and he's like he's a great person to have a parties but it's just chaos right and he like falls behind on his taxes he makes a he's bad real estate deals he ends something like thousands of court cases and gonna be hundreds of court cases eventually leads to asia you can't handle in america anymore and then by the end he's he running this hotel in bali that is it really a hotel or is it just like people come and sleep with the male gardeners and you know it's a pretty it's a pretty dramatic story of rise and fall from like this little kid in oklahoma the you know halls to washington to the rice pad you know and then eventually dies in bat tonga philippines so it's a it's a it's a the other reason i wrote this book is because my dad dad's it's life story whether there's the lesson in and or not a lesson and it's interesting right like if i tell people but like they're like what is your dad do and they sort of assume your my dad has a kind of a different story than what he does so you know it's he's a interesting guy but what's important what's most important is that he was completely deb devoted to me he loved me and even though he like threatened to kill himself to like get a couple hundred bucks from me or you know all kinds of like blackmail and craziness you know order prostitutes to like into my apartment there's like there's and there's even worse things that i don't put in the book despite all that like we maintain our relationship and you know we stay in touch and we have a loving father on relationships till the very end is there is there a lesson is there a lesson to me one of the lessons was don't get knocked off track and if you do get knocked off top track and you do start to like lose your yourself confidence and you do find yourself you know sort of letting slip the things you care about get it back like it seems like what happened with my father was the way he cope with his drinking problem was to drink more and the way he cope with having drunk more was to drink more and what you wanna do is the opposite you wanna like you sort of cultivate a little bit of self awareness he was a very interesting man and that he had you know such incredible ability to view the strengths and weaknesses of other people and could see through you and could you know i he wrote me a letter when i was twenty one that you know fore saw a huge portion of my life it's my most inc letters that i've ever received and how well did he know me like i spent two weeks a year with him sometime time with him on weekends i read it that just recently i was like oh my god this man he was but he did his own self awareness yeah i mean he you know what he would say is you know that like his sexuality that he came of age the wrong time that it was really hard to be have been born gay in nineteen forty two right if you're born gay in nineteen eighty two you can come out of the closet if you're born gay in nineteen twenty two you to stay in it and so he was born gay in nineteen forty two and then came out you know in during the middle of the aids crisis he was as you mentioned he was diagnosed as hiv positive that turned out to be an incorrect diagnosis he would say that he you know just life life gave him life gave him a a dna dna imposed limit and because of his sexuality he couldn't have succeeded professionally the way he wanted to like washington would not have allowed and openly gay man to succeed and once he realized he was gay he could not you know control and because he hadn't been able to like be a young man exploring his sexuality when he's was a teenager he had to compensate by you know dating this endless parade of you know nineteen year old guys he met on man jam like that's what he would say which is not i think you know fully persuasive but that was his argument no i i think that there's a lot of turmoil there for obviously but i wonder if and and you probably know you you probably thought of this at least once or twice before if even though it was a it was a good relationship and there was a certain degree of chaos in the relationship but even though it was a good relationship you're saying it was a good relationship did it you you you kind of ended up being complete one eighty like a complete opposite like you when when things don't go right you make sure that you don't lean into the wrong you find a way to correct it like i see you was actually a very disciplined person as somebody who like leans into the hard things as opposed to sort of giving way to the easier things i i think that i don't know if that's part of what shaped who you are i think for sure that there's something that comes from our parents that definitely at least imprint on us to a degree but you seem to be a complete opposite of that well to the extent i am it's deliberate right it's like you're my sister i have two sisters oldest sister just a younger system we've all talked about like our fear of becoming like him and the what we do to try to not become like him but on the other hand like i am quite similar to him in other ways you know i you know he was this like bundle of energy who was always doing lots of stuff you know people like people his old friends always say i remind i remind them of him hubspot as a success story partner now success story is part of the hubspot podcast network they have tons of other great shows one of my personal favorites is the hustle daily show it's hosted by juliet bennett r rob ben berkeley and mark dent now the hustle daily show brings you this healthy dose of irr off beat and informative takes on business and tech and news it's fun it's topical it's relevant it's every single day and it's news you'll actually enjoy and things that actually matter to you the hustle daily show is part of the hubspot podcast network listen to the hustle daily show wherever you get your podcast square is a success story partner now there's this coffee shop in my neighborhood that just started as this tiny little corner spot now they've got three locations they're selling online they've even added some food so what i love is that no matter which location i go to whether i'm grabbing my morning coffee you're i'm picking up lunch everything just works smoothly the ordering the payments the loyalty points it all syncs up perfectly and that is the power of square and honestly it's why keep going back every business has different goals and square is the platform that supports them all whether you're opening new locations selling something new or expanding your reach i see it everywhere now the corner bagel shop that became the chain specialty markets managing thousands of items even my barber who takes appointments online square point of sale has a flexibility to run and grow your business exactly how you want whether you're in retail running a restaurant offering services or you're just doing it all there's a square point of sale mode built specifically for what you need different settings for different parts of your business so you're always ready to make the sale go to square dot com slash go slash success story to learn more about how your business can grow with square that is s q u a r e dot com slash go slash success story incognito is a success story partner now have you ever wondered how all those scammers get your phone numbers all those tele marketers how you're always drowning and all these spam calls its data brokers right now hundreds of companies are collecting and selling your personal information without your consent your address your phone number even your family members names to anyone who's willing to pay and this puts you at risk of identity theft scams and harassment and that's where cog comes in they contact over two hundred and thirty data brokers on your behalf and legally force them to delete your personal information no more spending hundreds of hours doing it yourself and cognitive handles all the paperwork follows up on objections and keep your data off the market with repeated removal i've actually been using incognito myself it's scary and also incredible to see how much of my data was out there but they get rid of it they've got a thirty day money back guarantee so you can try at risk free use my code success adding cog dot com slash success to get an exclusive sixty percent off their annual plans you have to take back control of your privacy today what what makes something so simple and we we did touch on this but go go a a level deeper please what makes something so simple become so profound and and such a benefit to your life yeah i think it just it opens up levels of thought and it opens up levels of experience that you know are pretty hard to open up one of the things i did in the book is i you know both tell my story and what running is done for me but i was told the stories of five other people who have struggled with really hard things in life and use running to cope with them and you know the first maybe just tell her story maybe they'll tell two of them the first is this woman named bobby gibbs and they're all people who've have intersect with my life you she's the mother of a friend of mine and she you know grows up and she's just she's wired differently and she really doesn't she just can't stand the role that women are supposed to play in you know nineteen fifties nineteen sixties america like when you can't have a credit card you can't have a job you just gotta be a wife just can't stand it and the way she cope with it is she's like you know what i'm gonna do my own and so she goes off and she runs across the country you know not directly across her country she she's in a van but she like gets in the van and she'll drive starts in boston and drives to the you know berkshire shares and goes and every night she'll go and run like i don't know for four or five hours you know and then sleep in the ground and like look at the stars and look at the sky and she goes across the entire country and goes to you know it goes to san francisco and then she's like you know i kinda love this running thing and that she goes enters this hundred mile race in vermont and she you know was able to run with the horses here in sixty six miles in two days and she's just like running gives her this way of being a spiritual being out in the world then nothing else does and helps her like escape these feelings and so then she's like you know what i'm gonna run the boston marathon and so thought she grew up so she sends a letter and the organized organizers were like sorry women are incapable of running the boston marathon it was this like belief right the women weren't able to run i camera i don't nineteen sixty six really yeah it's crazy well women like women didn't run distance races at the olympics until i don't the seventies eighties like it's it's oops right absurd wow i i didn't know that that's insane yeah it's wild and so bobby gets this letter back and it's like women are incapable sorry you can't run the boston marathon she said we well i just ran sixty sixty miles with horses and so she runs it she like puts on her brother's sweatshirt and like sneaks in the bushes and then just goes out and runs a box of marathon and she runs it in like three hours and twenty minutes or something and it's this she's the first woman to run it and so it's a wonderful story about running helping this person you know find her role and civil rights find her role and you know bringing freedom bringing a equality and it's just a beautiful story there you know of the other five characters i mentioned one of those guy michael west and so he lives on this tiny island thirty people out in off the coast of maine and there's nothing to do because it's a tiny island you know eating your powdered milk and you staying inside and so everybody on the island becomes a runner right and there's one two mile road and he'll run like a hundred miles a week back and forth in two mile road and they end up having like participation of thirty seven of them runs sub three over marathons at one point and so he becomes this great runner and the he runs this road race in northeast harbor which is a town on the mainland and he wins it he year one year my father runs it so nineteen eighty one i think then thirty years later my son runs the race so i'm running the race my son runs the race and i'm watching my son and he's coming you know my left and i've i've finished i've gone back to go find my kid and there's this guy right with him who's like arms are fl all over the track and i'm running with his buddy mine as a cop i'm like that it's like okay it's like hey it's michael west and so what happened what had happened to west is he'd got parkinson's and so he had gotten parkinson's in his like forties this like runner carpenter strong guy had built up all the houses on the island and he'd had to learn how to run with it like he loved running it was the thing he did and at first he was embarrassed and then he learns how to like tie his hands behind his back so that they don't fl too much when he runs and he runs he's like qualifies as boston marathon times with parkinson's he said it's a world record for fast marathon park he's incredible and and so i spent a lot of time interviewing him about how he cope with like using running as a way to deal with you know i had to deal with decline i had to do with cancer i had to do a fear he he gets a disease from which there's no return it's you know and he gets it at forty nine and he knows that the rest of his life it's just gonna get you know harder and harder but he wants to keep running because he loves it and it's a story about what he learned about competition what he learned about running so i tell those two stories there's others in the books that are like it but the point is there's something about this sport and the fact that you can do it like you can't play tennis a few have parkinson's right you can't like you can just go out and train and do it you know you can sneak through the bushes and get into the boston marathon course right because it's just you and it's just your shoes there's something about the freedom and the self determination that come from the support that allow you to really reach deep places and do important things for somebody who is like a high performing individual what from work helps them with the running what from what what from running excuse me helps them with their work yeah i think that concentration is really it's something that really trends i mean you mentioned earlier that there a bunch of habits right like you eat well you sleep well you know you learn how to like modulate your energy levels like there's a bunch of like you develop this kinda stoic right i'm gonna go run today i'm gonna work today i'm gonna run i'm gonna work today right like you develop this confidence in like building up your skill step by step by brick run by run right you learn like the power of consistent effort you learn that through both but i also think that concentration really does come you know i've learned through running how to focus and i've learned through work how to focus and i think the two feed each other one last question about running you've run through times square at midnight you've been chased by cows and le you've dissipate like a thousand no trespassing signs just what was the most insane running story that you have not somebody else but something that you've dealt with you mean like the weirdest run or like the most oh that's a good quote you take it at however you want it give me the weirdest and give me the best whatever this one one of the points i'm making in that chapter is like just fine time to run night and you just run wherever you are actually i'll say that i say like this is actually an important one and this is this is something and i didn't even know this it happened until i was writing the book there was a time where i went to my my then girlfriend's house and she you knows she'd become my wife but it's the first time like meeting her parents and i go over there and we have a big dinner i think they're out may living in berkeley and i don't know maybe i'd drink some wine we have a good time maybe i'll watch a movie together who knows and then it's like eleven o'clock and i'm like okay i'm going running and because i hadn't gone running that day and i leave and my future mother law says to my future wife like wait what's wrong with that guy and my wife is like what you don't get is that he enjoys it and so there been a lot of situations like that where i just go and run in places you know i run i like what's coming to mind as i remember once for some reason like i came out all these roads i remember running like a ten mile run a a small parking lot in las vegas i can't remember why i had to do it but it was like the only place i could run that particular day you know and you just there's actually i remember i was i ran out during there is a time when i was up in the cats skills and i couldn't leave my kids but i had to do it run so i just like ran around the house which is like pretty small i ran like ten miles like i a little like tiny loops around the house you just figure out what to do i had another time running in vegas i know why i always was happens in vegas where i was like giving a speech and it was one of those things where i like show up and actually i guess i i have a whole bunch of vegas stories once i met a friend's back party like he's going up the elevator with a bunch of people he's met at the you know at the club i'm coming down to go running it's like the rest of the bachelor party going up and i'm going out then there's another time where i'm in vegas and i've like forgotten to bring a t shirt and i'm only there for like three hours and i like fifteen minutes when i can run between meetings and so i had like a winter coat because i've been in new york and so it's like eighty degrees and i'm in shorts and a winter coat running in las vegas anyway so the the point being like i just love to run and we'll do it wherever i can what do you want what do you want if you're gonna pass on a lesson about running to your to your three boys what would that lesson be the lesson that i hope i've passed and i don't know is that they see they can't really understand my work right and they can't i mean now they can they're seventeen fifteen and eleven but like when they were little they couldn't and they didn't like quite know what i did they get some sense of it they don't really know what it means but they can see the effort right and they can see the discipline and they can see the consistency and they can see that it's like they can learn some of the lessons from running about resilience perseverance dedication building things up steadily and that's what i hope they get and i you know the in a way i like my eldest son doesn't run but he works so hard right he works so hard at to school working and he works so hard as debate tournaments right and he you know i he's clearly whether he's learned it from watching me run or watching me work or watching my wife who knows but like you pick it up the other two boys like they both run and they do it really well you know i this one last thought i think it's like a lesson that i'm picking up from you like running you i mean like you you say running connected you to your father but you also use it as an escape when things are difficult you can use it to focus on something or you can use it for meditation to get your head out of work like it's just it's like this tool really that's that's how i see it it's this tool that you can apply it in different ways just to improve your life and it's such like a multifaceted diverse tool yeah yeah it's definitely that that's a very good way to put it because you can do you know there's no one thing i do when i run i seek different things when i run i seek meditation i see so an intense focus i sent sometimes seek associations sometimes i'm running like away from things sometimes we're running toward things there's a lot you can do with it and i think it's beautiful because i think that we keep trying to add more complexity into our lives with routines and all these different things and all these different fitness things and health things and and they're all good to a degree but i think that sometimes simple just wins and that's that's really what it is so the book the running ground of father a son in the simplest of sports that is available october twenty eighth so we'll make sure this podcast goes up around the exact same time when this is live and you can get that book anywhere you get your if people were going to just take it home if somebody wanted to pick up this book what do you hope they would get from it what's the one lesson or the one idea that you really wanna drive home i mean the best thing that happens is when people who don't run read it and then say they went running and i happened a couple times just as i would send out drafts to friends i really love that and they're like you know i like i now can think more deeply about the sport and i wanna go do it and i love that response i love that i think it's just like a leading indicator to a picking running like a leading indicator to a better happier healthier life last question i ask everybody you kind of already you're you already told me what lesson you wanna pass over to your kids through running but just a lesson that after going through everything in your life you would like to tell your younger self your twenty year old self what's that one lesson that was really important to you that you think would helped that younger version keep at it you know i think i spent too much time i didn't understand then this thing i'm i really believe that if you do your best every day good things happen right and like you don't see it right you don't see yourself getting better you don't see it improving nothing's linear in life but if you keep at it you'll get there and one of the problems i had psychologically in my twenties is that i sort of wanted of the world in a minute you know and i like i just sort of assumed that things would happen really quickly and like whatever success i saw or whatever accomplishments or whatever like i thought i'd be able to like write really great stories as a journalist really and you can't like you you have to learn so much and it takes a long time and i didn't quite appreciate the benefits of like compound interest the compound interest of daily work and it took me a while to realize that and because of that i sort of would stop and start and i made a like a bunch of sort of dumb professional mistakes in my twenties and pretty off track and i think it's because i didn't understand that i didn't have the confidence i didn't understand that if you keep at it and if you do your best and if you treat people well and you know your kind and generous and thoughtful and work hard like it will stuff will like not always and there's all kinds of biases and injustices in the world but you know things will work out better

indeed is a success story partner now here's your tech hiring tip of the week from indeed seventy three percent of tech workers say flexibility is one of their top priorities so if your job posting doesn't mention flexible hours or remote options you're basically invisible to three at a four candidates keep that in mind look hiring tech talent right now it's tough you are competing for people with super specific skills everyone wants hybrid work and the salary expectations are through the roof it's a lot that's why indeed actually makes sense they're the number one place where tech people go to apply for jobs we're talking three million tech professionals in the us and eighty six percent of them have applied through indeed it's not just some job board where you post and pray they've got tools like smart searching and their tech network that use ai to connect you with people who actually have the skills that you need companies using the tech network saw over four times more relevant applications that's huge more qualified people way less time wasted whenever i've needed tech talent in the past indeed is the only platform choosing if i needed to hire top tier tech talent today i'd still go with indeed post your first job and get seventy five dollars off at indeed dot com slash tech talent that's indeed dot com slash tech talent to claim this offer indeed build for what's now and what's next in tech hiring in this lessons episode we're gonna talk about why you're tired all the time it's not from working too much it's from carrying dozens of unfinished things in your head every unanswered text every void decision every half done project it drains your mental energy without you noticing we'll speak about why unfinished tasks destroy your energy more than actual work and how closing them gives you your energy back immediately i wanna talk about why you're tired why all these unfinished tasks in your life are draining you more than actual work and not tired in the sense of all i went to the gym or i went for a run or i didn't get sleep say you sleep eight hours a night you eat well your diets on point do you have a pretty normal work schedule but you're still exhausted all the time not physically tired but mentally tired you kinda feel like you're running on thirty percent battery by two pm even though you really haven't done anything particularly demanding and you assume it's the workload could be too many meetings too many emails maybe it's just too much on your plate you try and optimize right time blocking better morning routine earlier bedtime productivity apps but nothing changes you're still exhausted here's what's actually happening you are not tired from the work you're doing you're tired from the work you're not finishing it could be the text that you saw three days ago and you still haven't responded to it could be the apology that you know you have to make it could be a decision that you've been avoiding for two weeks a conversation that you keep postponing the project that's ninety percent done but you still haven't shipped see all of these tasks they run in the background of your mind all day every single one of these tasks is this open process that consumes your mental resources to your brain treats unfinished business like a computer treats open applications each one takes up ram and if you leave enough of these applications running your whole system's gonna slow down so you are not burnt out from work you are burnt out i'm cognitive overhead now why can't your brain let go of all these things that you haven't finished yet well let's look at psychology in the nineteen twenties psychologist named blu z nick notice something very strange waiters could remember complex orders perfectly while customers were still eating but the moment the bill was paid and the customers left the waiters forgot everything about that table and she tested this formally and she discovered what is now called the z nick effect right your brain is wired to hold onto unfinished tasks and let go of completed ones immediately now this was useful when our tasks in our life were simple and immediate right hunt animal eat the animal done but now life is a little bit more complex tasks are a little bit more abstract and a lot of them are endless meaning they don't just and after the hunt and dinner is over and your brain is still trying to hold onto all of these tasks simultaneously and this creates all these open loops all these open applications in your brain in your in your mental computer in your cognitive computer right and each of these open loops is a background process and every unfinished thing is a tab that your brain keeps open just in case and this is why you're tired see i've gone down this rabbit hole because two years ago i was more exhausted than i'd ever been i was sleeping nine hours i was waking up tired i couldn't focus i couldn't think clearly at all this brain fog i just felt like i was moving at fifty to seventy five percent of my normal speed i was i wasn't working more hours usual i'd actually scaled back so fewer calls fewer commitments more time off but i felt worse not better and one day i was complaining to a friend about it and asked how many things are you in the middle of right now and i started listing everything out so there was an article that i'd had half written i wanted to finish that there were three emails that i'd drafted but not sent yet there was a conversation that i'd been meaning to have with my business partner for two weeks there was a decision about moving cities that i've been avoiding for a month there was a dentist appointment that i needed to schedule there was a friend's text that i'd read and forgotten to respond to there was a contract that was sitting in my inbox waiting for review so i counted about twelve or thirteen fourteen different things twelve open loops just off the top of my head and he said every one of those things is costing you energy all day even when you're not thinking about them and i didn't believe them until i spent one weekend closing every loop i could find sent the emails had the conversation made the decision scheduled the appointment responded to the text either finished or explicitly abandoned all those half done projects and monday morning i woke up with more energy than i've had in months and it's not because i'd slept longer or arrested more it's because i finally stopped carrying cognitive debt see there is a hidden cost to i'll do it later see people don't understand open loops they don't understand that open loops cost more to keep them open than they cost to close so you think that you are saving time by not responding to the text right now but you're not you're spending cognitive resources on it every single time you see their name every time you unlock your phone every time you think oh yeah i need to respond to that that is three seconds of mental load dozens of times a day for potentially weeks right and compare that the two minutes that it would have taken you just to respond so the math is obvious but you don't do the math you just keep carrying this burden you keep carrying this process just running in the background of your brain same thing with difficult conversations you're avoiding you think that you are saving yourself the stress by not having that difficult conversation but you're not really because you're having it in your head over and over imagining how it will go rehearsing what you'll say worrying about the outcome and you are spending hours of mental energy avoiding a conversation that would take twenty minutes max and this is what open loops do they disguise themselves as i'll handle this later while actually costing you more than handling them now ever would and there's three main types of loops that drain you the most because not all open loops cost the same some are background noise some are true battery killer so here are the three the cost the most first you have the relationship that so the text you haven't answered the call you haven't returned the apology you owe the gratitude you have it expressed the conflict you're avoiding these cost the most because they involve other people and your brain treats social obligations as high priority threats so every time you see that person's name your brain flags it every time you think about them there's this small spike of guilt or anxiety and this runs constantly all day for weeks or even months if you let it i had a friend i'd cancel plans with three times each time for legitimate reasons but i never properly apologized or reschedule and for two months every time i opened up instagram and i saw as his post i felt this small hit of guilt every time i thought about reaching out to anyone my brain reminded me that i still owed him a message two months of that costing me energy multiple times per day finally sent him a message hey i've been a terrible friend i canceled three times i never properly reschedule that's on me can we lock in a time this week he responded in five minutes obviously he didn't even remember or care we met for coffee conversation lasted at thirty minutes two minutes to write the message thirty minutes for coffee two months of cognitive drain eliminated that math is insane when you actually calculate it uncommon goods is a success story partner now listen holiday shopping sucks who end up buying the same stuff everyone else is getting from amazon or target all the gifts are boring but uncommon goods is different they actually curate unique gifts from independent artists and small businesses it's all stuff that you've never seen before i was looking on their site and i found this cocktail smoking kit where you literally smoke your drinks with different wood chips i had to get it my brother thinks he's a mix all is gonna lose his mind that's the vibe of the whole site things that make you go wow i can't believe that exists see everything is handmade or it's made in small batches so the cool stuff sells out and they've got gifts for everyone your dad your weird cousin your friend that's impossible to shop for and here's the best part they give a dollar from every purchase to a nonprofit you choose over three million donated so far get fifteen percent off your next gift at uncommon goods dot com slash success that is uncommon goods dot com slash success for fifteen percent off don't miss this limited time offer uncommon goods we're all out of the ordinary square is a success story partner now there's this coffee shop in my neighborhood that just started as this tiny little corner spot now they've got three locations they're selling online they've even added some food so what i love is that no matter which location i go to whether i'm grabbing my morning coffee or aren't picking up lunch everything just works smoothly the ordering the payments the loyalty points it all syncs up perfectly and that is the power of square and honestly it's why i keep going back every business has different goals and square the platform that supports them all whether you're opening new locations selling something new or expanding your reach i see it everywhere now the corner bagel shop that became the chain specialty markets managing thousands of items even my barber who takes appointments online square point of sale has a flexibility to run and grow your business exactly how you want so whether you're in retail running a restaurant offering services or you're just doing it all there's a square point of sale mode built specifically for what you need different settings for different parts of your business so you're always ready to make the sale go to square dot com slash go slash success story to learn more about how your business can grow with square that is s q u a r e dot com slash go slash success story the second type of open loop is the decision deck so it could be the choice that you have it made the option that you're still considering or the path you haven't fully committed to because your brain hates uncertainty it will keep running simulations until you make a decision should you take the job should you move should you end the relationship should you start the project every single day you don't decide your brain is processing both options running scenarios weighing pros and cons and imagining all these potential futures and this is exhausting not because the decision is hard because in indecision forces your brain to hold multiple realities simultaneously i spent three months deciding whether or not to shut down a project i've been running for two years three months of maybe i should wind it down but what i'm giving up too soon but it's straining me but i put so much time into it right sunk cause fallacy but the mental energy that i spent going back and forth for three months was ten times more exhausting than the decision itself and when i finally decided to shut it down i felt lighter immediately not because it was the right decision but because i stopped forcing my brain to stimulate two different futures and the third kind of open loop that really hurts is completion debt so this could be the project that's ninety percent done but it's not shipped yet it could be the email that's drafted but not sent could be anything that you started but basically haven't finished now these are the worst because they are so close to closure and your brain knows it your brain knows you could finish this which means it keeps them flagged as this high priority thing even though you're ignoring them i'll give you an example i had an articles a while back that i'd written as about ninety five percent complete but i really wanted this article to hit and i really needed maybe one final edit and then i could publish it and i let it sit for six weeks not because i didn't have time because i kept telling myself i'll finish it this weekend for six weeks every time i thought about writing my brain reminded me about that unfinished article every time i saw my drafts folder i remembered it every time someone asked me what i was working on i remembered it six weeks of cognitive overhead for what ended up being maybe forty five minutes of work to finish and publish in the moment i published it i felt this mental weight lift not because publishing was satisfying but because i'd finally closed the loop so what actually changes when you start to close some of these loops especially the three that i mentioned which are the ones that sort of have the most draw on your cognitive horsepower and sit with you and they just feel the heaviest so when you start aggressively closing loops in your life three things happen very fast first your baseline energy increases not because you're resting more but because you are carrying less cognitive overhead you wake up with mental clarity you can focus without effort you don't feel drained by two pm for no reason not motivation it's just reduced cognitive load second you stop procrastinating on new things because usually procrastination is not about laziness it's about cognitive capacity so when your working memory is full of all these open loops starting something new feels overwhelming your brain doesn't have space for it when you close loops aggressively you have mental bandwidth for new things starting projects feels easy again and third you realize how much energy you've been wasting because once you experience a difference you can't un how expensive open loops are you start noticing every time you say i'll do this later and you feel the cost immediately you become ruthless about closing things quickly or explicitly deciding not to do them it's not about productivity it's about not carrying unnecessary weight so here's what i do now in my life to close some of my loops hopefully this will help you every sunday i spend thirty minutes doing a loop audit i go through five categories and i write down every open loop i can think of so communication text emails calls need to make decisions choices i haven't made yet completion so projects at seventy percent or greater than need finishing repairs things broken or needed so it could be appointments maintenance errands whatever and then social so conversations i'm avoiding gratitude haven't expressed apologies i owe whatever so communications decisions completion repairs socials then i close as many as possible immediately and the ones that i can't close i will schedule time to do or i will explicitly decide not to do most loops in your life can be closed in less than five minutes text the person make the decision schedule the thing have the conversation the ones that can't be closed quickly put it on a calendar for a specific day and time and then you can stop thinking about them until that time and the ones that i'm not going to do write down not doing this and delete them from your mental space this takes thirty minutes once a week it saves me hours of cognitive overhead every single day so what you should do right now stop listening to this podcast or it's almost done but you can finish it but then take out a piece of paper or open a note on your phone write down every open loop you can think of everything you're in the middle of every decision you're avoiding every conversation you're postponing every unfinished thing you're probably gonna find ten within two minutes and keep going you're likely gonna have like twenty or thirty now look at the list and start to ask yourself which of these could i close in the next twenty four hours not all of them just the ones that would take less than thirty minutes each pick three close them today send the text make the decision have the conversation finish a thing schedule the appointment and then notice how you feel tomorrow morning you're not gonna feel more motivated or more inspired you're just gonna feel lighter like you're running on eighty percent battery instead of thirty like you can think clearly again and it's not because you rested it's because you stopped carrying cognitive debt now what this actually means is that you have to understand you are not tired in most cases because you work too hard most people don't work as hard as they i think could do you are tired because you are carrying dozens of open loops each one is consuming mental resources each one is running in the background all day every day so your exhaustion in life isn't physical it's cognitive overhead from unfinished business to the solution is not better sleep more vacation it is closing your loops aggressively respond to the text immediately or decide not to respond make the decision or decide not to decide finish the thing or explicitly abandon it stop letting things sit in limbo limbo is expensive your energy isn't gone it's just being spent on keeping loops open instead of doing the actual work close the loops watch your energy return

indeed is a success story partner now here's your tech hiring tip of the week from indeed seventy three percent of tech workers say flexibility is one of their top priorities so if your job posting doesn't mention flexible hours or remote options you're basically invisible to three at a four candidates keep that in mind look hiring tech talent right now it's tough you are competing for people with super specific skills everyone wants hybrid work and the salary expectations are through the roof it's a lot that's why indeed actually makes sense they're the number one place where tech people go to apply for jobs we're talking three million tech professionals in the us and eighty six percent of them have applied through indeed it's not just some job board where you post and pray they've got tools like smart searching and their tech network that uses ai to connect you with people who actually have the skills that you need companies using the tech network saw over four times more relevant applications that's huge more qualified people way less time wasted whenever i've needed tech talent in the past indeed is the only platform choosing if i needed to hire top tier tech talent today i'd still go with indeed post your first job and get seventy five dollars off at indeed dot com slash tech talent that's indeed dot com slash tech talent to claim this offer indeed build for what's now and what's next in tech hiring in this lessons episode explore how unconventional thinking transforms ambition into achievement through steven spielberg rise as hollywood's youngest director discover how persistence and creativity open doors others cannot understand why mentorship and real connection often define success and uncover how shifting beliefs about possibility turn potential into lasting impact tell a story of of anyone and and walk me through what their third door experience was like to put some context around it something really out there that ended up with that it could have been bill gates anyone anyone just so people can get an idea of how they got i'll tell you wanna i'll tell you one of my favorites and it actually goes back to what we're were just talking about a few minutes ago with regards to the child interviews and whatnot this is the story of how steven spielberg became the youngest director in hollywood history the youngest major studio director so yeah know spielberg since he's a kid always wanted to be a director so you know when he was a teenager and he was finishing high school of course he applied to film school and naturally he got rejected but you know no worries he's a persistent guy he applied a second time got rejected again now that's where most people would sort of back up and say maybe i just find a different career spielberg instead decided to take his education into his own hands and one day he goes to universal studios theme park in los angeles and i'm sure many people know but for those who don't this theme park in los angeles has a ride that takes you it's called the you know the tram right it takes you on a little tram bus on the back of the universal studios film studio and it shows you the sound stages where they make all the movies so one day when spielberg was about nineteen he goes on this tram ride and it's driving around the studio a lot and when the bus stops for a moment he jumps off the bus hide behind the corner and the bus keeps going and to be over ends up just wandering around the lot by himself and about an hour later he bumps into this older gentleman who sees this sort of pi face nineteen year old this is what are you doing here and spielberg you know admitted the truth he said look i'm a kid i know i'm not supposed to be here but i always wanted to be a director i jumped off the tram i you know so sorry and the guy ends up talking to this young kid and sees his passion and at the end of this hour long talk says how would you like to come back onto the lot for the next few days silver goes because that would a drink so this man introduces himself his name as chuck silver and he's the head of the universal television library the archives so he writes to be over three day pass passes so be goes back to the first day in and a second day and the third but on the fourth day he like comes dressed in a suit carrying his father's great briefcase and walks right up to the security entrance waves his hand in the air and goes hey scotty and the guard waves back be over box right and now he's doing this day after day after day he's getting kicked up by security he's sneaking into sound stages going into editing booths ask actors and directors out to lunch and he's essentially creating his own film school from scratch and over time the older gentleman chuck silver becomes a mentor just be over after you know about a few months of this chuck silver sits spielberg down and says listen can i need to give you some hard advice and he essentially gives them the advice that there has to be a time in your life where you stop sc and you create something of value and in order to show people what you can do so you told you over don't come back onto the lot until you have a short film of quality that you're proud of to show me spielberg took that hard advice to heart and he ended up spending months filming and editing a short film called am it's about twenty two minutes long and when i was finally ready he goes back to chuck silver to show him the film and it was so good that when it was done a single tier came down chuck silver versus space and chuck silver reach reaches for the phone immediately and calls the vice president of universal television his name sid shine and chuck silver goes sit i have something you gotta see it and the vice president like look there's a lot of things people tell me i have to see it chuck just says no if you don't launch this tonight someone as well and vice president thinks says you think it's that and important talk goes it's that damn important sure enough the vice president i watching that night a nineteen year old spill gets a call the next morning saying he needs to be in the vice president's office immediately before you know runs out of class rushes over his car shows it to the office on the desk as a contract making the youngest director in hollywood history i love that's a good story that's a really good that's a good damn example of of not even thinking outside the box just pretending the box doesn't even exist when it comes to architect your own career in your own life yeah and you know wow there's first of all the story isn't we aren't to acknowledge story isn't impossible without tremendous talent no he's a bad director you know if he's a bad director if he's bad in his art form this doesn't work but it makes you wonder i'm pretty confident he wasn't the only person with talent in the whole city of los angeles you know you look at singers there's a reason some make it even though there's lots of people with voices that sort of blow you away survey monkey is a success story partner now look we get it you can hardly go anywhere or do anything these days without hearing about ai this or ai that and if you're like most people when it comes to ai you're impressed but you have a few concerns but what if ai was used not as a tool to replace people but as a way to help understand people better ai from survey monkey is designed to do just that from crafting the perfect survey which is harder than you might think to analysis that digs deep finds patterns and services trends quickly survey powerful suite of ai capabilities makes it faster and easier than ever before to get insight from real people helping you make confident decisions for your business try it today at survey dot com slash scott ru is a success story partner now look mental health is something i take very seriously and not just for myself but for my team and everyone who's building something meaningful it's hard and the reality is finding quality therapy shouldn't take months or cost of fortune but that's exactly what happens for most people trying to get help that's why i want to tell you about ru ru is a healthcare care company making quality therapy actually accessible now here's what matters rule of patients typically pay just fifteen dollars per session when using insurance you connect with therapist who specialize in exactly what you need anxiety burnout relationships whatever it is you're dealing with no waiting list no endless searching through directories so if you've been putting off taken care of your mental health because it felt too complicated or too expensive check out ruler go to w w w dot ruler dot com slash success that is r u l a dot com slash success to get started today uncommon goods is a success story partner now listen holiday shopping sucks you end up buying the same stuff everyone else is getting from amazon or target all the gifts are boring but uncommon goods is different they actually curate unique gifts from independent artists and small businesses it's all stuff that you've never seen before i was looking on their site and i found this cocktail smoking kit where you literally smoke your drinks with different wood chips i had to get it my brother who thinks he's a mix all is gonna lose his mind that's the vibe of the whole site things that make you go wow i can't believe that exists see everything is handmade or it's made in small batches so the cool stuff sells out and they've got gifts for everyone your dad your weird cousin your friend that's impossible to shop for and here's the best part they give a dollar from every purchase to a non nonprofit you choose over three million donated so far get fifteen percent off your next gift at uncommon goods dot com slash success that is uncommon goods dot com slash success for fifteen percent off don't miss this limited time offer uncommon goods were all out of the ordinary you hear that spielberg all the time and they're like how how how are they not famous all the time yeah yeah and it makes you look at that spielberg story and say like what and you know once you like can enter the game paying paying the price of talent and skill and hard work what makes the difference and when i look at the story yes he had the courage to jump off that bus yes he had the honesty to tell the truth when he met chuck silver you know all yes he had you know all these different things but to me it was his ability to make that relationship with chuck silver at inside man because without chuck silver we never would have had the three day pass never would have gotten that good advice that he needed to hear they also never would have had someone put the reputation on the line to get him into the vice president's office and every single third door store i don't care if it was warren buffett early career and finance you know whatever story you look at yeah jane good all with science every single one of these stories there was always an inside person an inside man an inside woman someone who was within the world you wanna break into who believed in you enough that they're were willing to put the reputation on the line to help you get in and you can have all the ingredients but it doesn't work without that inside person every single time so is that is that the takeaway is it to find the mentor is that the first step in the third door playbook i wouldn't say was a first step because if you actually look at you know the spielberg story you know this guy's making home movies for years yeah he's studying his favorite films you know if he sort of just showed up to you know chuck silver office and said oh i just decided last week i really wanna get into like scott if someone comes up to you and says i i i'll said this morning i want a podcast do you do you have any advice you'd be like sure you wouldn't really be like well this this young woman this young man is my pro shape right no you know you wouldn't you wouldn't you don't but you right but if you're walking around town and you at had a grocery store bump into somebody of who's like scott i have been dreaming of being a podcast for years i've actually listened to every episode of your show like i hope not fan boeing right now that was trying to let you know that episode you had on this person really that follow question you asked blew me away and i've been reading every book on podcasting do you have any recommendations of how to how to break in you'd be like yeah you wanna just gonna walk it through my car and yeah here's my email if you have any more questions know you might not take them under your wing immediately but you'd be like yeah here's where email address you you seem like you got a a good head on your shoulders so the inside man is critical but it's a piece to the larger puzzle so if somebody wants to think this all comes down to thinking differently i think a lot has has to do with thinking differently as to what's possible and what is not possible so what would be your advice for somebody to get themselves in the right mindset so that they start approaching life with this mentality that they can do things outside the norm i i guess i'm trying to get somebody on the right the what i'm trying to pull out of you is how do i get somebody listening to this show to start looking at life differently what i've learned after ten years of studying success is that you can give someone all the best tools and knowledge in the world and their life can still feel stuck but if you change what someone believes is possible they'll never be the same and you see it all the time you can go to harvard where they have all the resources and all the information and there kids who come out of there who still have no idea what to do and wanna to sit on a couch and then you can go to some places where there's no resources and you see in someone's eyes they're willing to do whatever it takes and they believe it's possible and they actually make it possible of course it's easier if you have the willing desire at harvard but what i i i am saying no is you can have the tools in the resources and it still doesn't work but as soon as you change what you believe is possible and again it doesn't make it easy it doesn't make it automatic and it doesn't make guaranteed but when you can change what you believe is possible nothing is the same another oh go ahead sorry finish finish your point seven another i wanna touch on that but go ahead i mean need to cut you off yeah well i i would just see the biggest thing about you know how you change what someone of believes as possible it's really about what you what you're surrounded with and yes there's like you know the cliche you know you're the average of the five people spend to sign with yes of course i guarantee you you take any anyone and you take them and surround them with like five motivated successful kind people it just rubs off on them eventually it might take a week it might take a year you're gonna change but it's also the things you can consume i remember when i was nineteen starting off on my journey in the third door you know i wasn't hanging out with bill gates but i was reading you know the four workweek week i was you know listening to talks about gary advantage chan out you know i was just i was reading out god well and i was just sort of changing my world and again i wasn't doing it on purpose but in hindsight i was seeing that my world was changing because i was changing what i was bringing in and people listen in this podcast i'm sure already on that path if they're were already listening to your show thanks for tuning in if you found this valuable don't forget to hit that subscribe button so you never miss an episode and if you wanna dive deeper into this conversation check out the links in the description to watch the full episode see you in the next one

indeed is a success story partner now here's your tech hiring tip of the week from indeed seventy three percent of tech workers say flexibility is one of their top priorities so if your job posting doesn't mention flexible hours or remote options you're basically invisible to three at a four candidates keep that in mind look hiring tech talent right now it's tough you are competing for people with super specific skills everyone wants hybrid work and the salary expectations are through the roof it's a lot that's why indeed actually makes sense they're the number one place where tech people go to apply for jobs we're talking three million tech professionals in the us and eighty six percent of them have applied through indeed it's not just some job board where you post and pray they've got tools like smart searching and their tech network that uses ai to connect you with people who actually have the skills that you need companies using the tech network saw over four times more relevant applications that's huge more qualified people way less time wasted whenever i've needed tech talent in the past indeed is the only platform choosing if i needed to hire top tier tech talent today i'd still go with indeed post your first job and get seventy five dollars off at indeed dot com slash tech talent that's indeed dot com slash tech talent to claim this offer indeed build for what's now and what's next in tech hiring in this lessons episode explore what it truly means to live un unwanted in the face of fear uncertainty and rejection discover how taking relentless action transforms curiosity into momentum understand why self belief and persistence create the foundation for lasting success and uncover how embracing failure as part of the journey leads to genuine growth and resilience it's a very important story i think i i i'm gonna i'm gonna ask a couple questions out of that but the one thing that i noticed that really really is such as such a great trait that you have is you mentioned a curiosity but also just taking massive action like every single thing that you said you did in your life it was a new job it was figuring out how to get hint into whole food it's just you just you're curious and you just do stuff you you just do a whole bunch of shit like that's it and you're and eventually like not everything's gonna work but if you if you take enough action if you do enough activities towards the thing that you wanna do start things start to fall into place things start to start to come together right and that's really that's i think that of course you know being successful there's a lot of different things that contribute to that but i think that that's probably one of the main things that i pulled out that you just do continuously that probably got you a lot of the things that you are you have right now just taking that action again and again and again as opposed to just rum on it thinking on it in whole foods you know like you'd instead of like worrying about the process you just went up to some guy who's dock shelves and you're like hey how do you do this versus trying to like cold email you know maybe trying to figure out like filling out forms or like i don't even know what the process would be if i even had to start but just like that why not why not ask the guy talking in the shelves right like why not do that i love that funny i think even writing a book i think you start to think through a lot of these you know yeah these things too and you know people had asked me for years just in interviews for hint like you know how how were you fearless how are you you know so brave and i think early on like my parents were forty back when they had me the last kid and that was old i mean that was like nobody had parents that were as old as my parents and and i think they always let they gave me a lot of rope right they they basically said you can do stuff but you you know you have to think about it you have to explain it you have to go and and kick start it in some way like i remember even signing up for gymnastics classes i would figure out like i there was nobody who was gonna sit there and say okay well here's your choice you have money wednesday i'd be like i need your checkbook like now because i just i need this i need to get in this class now and i was always used to advocating for myself that i could make it happen but i didn't have the helicopter you know parent for me saying to me here it is instead i i just i would always look at life as you know i can probably figure it out it wasn't that my parents weren't there that if i needed help figuring stuff out but i also got a lot of pride and actually going and figuring stuff out when other people waited and i think that you know it's something that i think about today when when things just seem a little you know tough or hard and in in some way i my my next step i guess is to go and talk to people go and figure it out like how do i make it happen i am constantly i do not allow the minute i start watching that wall and it still happens to this day in various you know situations but when i see the wall starting to build and it starts to get higher and it starts to get scarier i stop it i try and figure out how do i in a knock it down how do i d it in some way yeah i i wanna ask you i wanna this is a good this is a good spot to just ask about un undo about that word that you chose mh because you describe all these other emotions you describe fear you just like a little bit of impostor syndrome mixed in there confidence ten per like all these things that have allowed you to be and anybody to be successful really but what what is what does un undo mean to you why did you choose that word for your book versus something like fear maybe it fear is already a book i don't know yet to choose something else okay well mean even when i turned in my manuscript i didn't have a word for i i didn't have a title for the book i mean i had been you know tossing around fearless relentless i mean think the words that people had called me over the years and had called me who or who had sort of shared what i do that is different than what they can't do and i would always have these you know one or two liners that i would say to people you know whenever i'd hear people say oh i i i could never do that i think back on things like yeah i thought about that too like you know getting over a fear of heights you know i i'll go and hike the grand canyon and people are like whoa you're you're afraid of heights why why would you choose to do that because i don't wanna live in fear i don't want to not understand finance so i go and take classes i'm constantly looking for those things that i fear and i think over time what those things do when when you take on situations when you take on things that scare you and you go achieve those things they don't necessarily always turn out the way that you thought but what they do do is allow you to know that it wasn't as bad and it wasn't as scary as you thought it was right and so i think over time people people would say to me but but how do you do that and and that's what i really thought about you have to be un undo right you have to sort of like purposely push yourself into that position because no one else is gonna push you to do it right you don't push somebody who is afraid of heights to go and hike the grand canyon it has to start with you and it has and you have to do it because it's something that you you know wanna get over right and i think it's the same thing about people are like how did you decide to be an entrepreneur like i think for me i saw it as i'd seen other people do it which i think was helpful but i also it it just it didn't seem as scary to me because i had watched these other people but i thought every single day i'm waking up and thinking about doing this and i'm making progress you know i i go to whole foods i barely start talking to the guy talking the shelves and then he hooks me up with this guy that you know is talking to me about their local program and i thought and then i it was fairly easy to connect with that in and then i i get like the next steps and then every day i started on the steps and i find that like two weeks before i didn't know what i was doing and then i just got in and i started moving it forward so again if you don't choose to live and onto you're not going to hike the grand canyon you're not going to start a company i have a lot of entrepreneurs especially female entrepreneurs who say to me like i can't raise money and i'm like it starts with you right i i'm a female entrepreneur i've raised a ton of money has it been easy do i meet with twice as many people that a guy meets i don't know because i've never been a guy i don't i but you're saying but you're saying you know what if you do you just do it you're doing it anyway it may not be it may not be the it may not be perfect it may not be the best but you're doing it you're getting it done your next step you know one of the other don't believe that you can actually achieve anything then it then it it doesn't get done right if it starts with you and people can read it bacon can if you don't believe if you walk in to go raise money and you believe like oh you know expert a very low percentage of women you know are able to raise money and whatever it is if you have that in your head it's never gonna happen i can guarantee you it will not happen my daughter is in is in college now she'll kill me for talking about this but she's she's majoring in storytelling she's at brown she's an incredible writer and she's tried out for a few things and hasn't gotten them and you know she's she's chosen to live un picked a profession of storytelling and theater and and wants to do this it's a choice and it's it's hard because rejection is really hard but i think that what i'm sharing with her to is you have a choice you can actually it's a numbers game you gotta just keep going or you can just decide i'm not gonna do it anymore i'm not gonna try out for any more plays i'm not gonna submit my manuscripts to festivals anymore to try and you know get money and i i she was really bummed out at me by the way what i she was talking to me about this last night i said you know what you'll get exactly what you want you'll get the play where you'll act in you'll you'll get your script picked up but then you know what will happen and she said what and i said you'll be happy for a week and then somebody will somebody will review it and they'll say it was terrible right and i said and and this is the world right and and if you let these things take you instead of appreciating the journey that that you're on and continuing to figure out how do i keep going how do i keep moving forward then you won't live the life that you'll be totally happy with instead go figure it out go figure out what you wanna do try it and if nothing else i always said to people when people people would say to me when i was launching a beverage company you don't stay out of tech for very long because you'll never get back in you'll never you'll be you know people think you're you know not focused you you don't have experience whatever i'm like ten minutes ago you were telling me i'm awesome and you were recruiting me for a job like all of a sudden you've decided you know based on me telling you that i'm gonna go and start a company all the skills all the things that i learned along the way if it doesn't work out and they're were like well i don't know i mean those stay out for more than six months i'm like why six months i don't know like i'm like have you are there statistics about six months maybe it's a year i'm like you have no idea what you're talking about at the at the end of the day and i anyway i just think like that the challenges of of you know building a start up some of these stories that i'm sharing now i are things that i really wanted to write out and in my book too because i think no matter what you think about it's way harder than you ever are setting out to to think about yeah and you know there's there's plenty of unicorns out there but there's way more way more failures and the journey even if you're a failure it it could mean that you had a product that didn't do well during the pandemic you could have supply chain issues that you know you relied too much on asia which whose factories shut down for whatever it is could sync your company but i think that that's another thing that i talk about too it's just it's not it's not black and white it's not that you've got the unicorns or you've got the failures it's the people that get back up again are really the ones that you have to watch thanks for tuning in if you found this valuable don't forget to hit that subscribe button so you never miss an episode and if you wanna dive deeper into this conversation check out the links in the description to watch the full episode see you in the next one

indeed is a success story partner now here's your tech hiring tip of the week from indeed seventy three percent of tech workers say flexibility is one of their top priorities so if your job posting doesn't mention flexible hours or remote options you're basically invisible to three at a four candidates keep that in mind look hiring tech talent right now it's tough you are competing for people with super specific skills everyone wants hybrid work and the salary expectations are through the roof it's a lot that's why indeed actually makes sense they're the number one place where tech people go to apply for jobs we're talking three million tech professionals in the us and eighty six percent of them have applied through indeed it's not just some job board where you post and pray they've got tools like smart searching and their tech network that uses ai to connect you with people who actually have the skills that you need companies using the tech network saw over four times more relevant applications that's huge more qualified people way less time wasted whenever i've needed tech talent in the past indeed is the only platform choosing if i needed to hire top tier tech talent today i'd still go with indeed post your first job and get seventy five dollars off at indeed dot com slash tech talent that's indeed dot com slash tech talent to claim this offer indeed build for what's now and what's next in tech hiring why are you failing at retirement i ain't thought life was gonna be so simple and so quiet seemed to be involved in so many things this feels very good all those people who say that retirement is difficult nonsense it's just choose the things you wanna do and do he was handed the wheel of a modest cruise line and transformed it into a global travel empire with fleets that dare to dream bigger than the horizon richard fe the man who reimagine what a cruise could be was the most important thing i had was good luck i was in the right place at the right time when i had good luck and was in the right place at the right time i worked hard to take advantage of if all you do is what you did then you're not gonna get anything different a vision is almost like saying i have a hope the vision is important but it also needs how am i going to get there and what am i going to do to make that happen introducing mega ships pioneering experiences and building a culture obsessed with good enough isn't good enough for over three decades he steered through storms innovation and entire industry revolutions particularly if you're on a longer term course keep in mind the longer term and accept that there are going to be bad things that happen along the way and don't look back accept them but it isn't gonna take me off of my path it will make your life both more fun and more a why are you failing at retirement that's my wife's i don't know i thought i was life was gonna be so simple and so quiet and yet i seem to be involved in so many things that i'm having trouble doing all that i wanna be doing but i must say this is this is this feels very good i'm feeling i get to do things i like to do i get to choose when to do them so i'm busier than i wanna be but i'm enjoying what i'm doing i love that so i think that by the way for all people that are super bitch i think it is very hard to actually retire and to actually turn off no it isn't no that's you know i've heard that from so many people and it's nonsense this is the best thing i've done it's just it's so much fun i get to spend more time with my family but i also get to do the things that i love to do so i had the best job in the world i worked with the most wonderful people in the world and i enjoyed every day i went into work but now i'm enjoying a different kind of life and no all those people who say that retirement is difficult and that you don't you haven't don't have enough to do nonsense it's just choose the things you wanna do and do them it's great so you spent thirty three years correct thirty three years as ceo and that is one of the longest tenure years in public companies very fortunate it doesn't happen often no it doesn't and i you know i kept pinching myself and one of the things is interesting is i would go through you know over that time we completely turned over our board a number of times and somehow they still put up with me over the period so i was very fortunate to have it for thirty three years and i i also think it allows you to complete more so you actually see the results of your work you see what you did right what you did wrong and you keep building on it so i have to say it was not only did i love what i did but it also gave me a chance to do it and to see success when we had it and fairly when we didn't it's interesting because i think a lot of i actually agree with you obviously completely i think it's smart to have this long term vision but especially in public companies a lot of companies have very short term so they're focusing on the next quarter and they're focusing on what does that next quarter look like was now like looking back you understood that longevity has a huge advantage but is that mindset of long term thinking is that something that you've always had in your career across everything you've done well i've been fortunate that i've been in businesses that encourage that and that i've had mentors and and associates who support that so that's actually is lucky because there is so much pressure from so many sides to focus only on next month next year it it really is strong and i think that's one of the advantages of having been in the position so long because i actually was able to point to some successes and so when i argued we should do something that may not pay off for five years or seven years people are willing to put up with that and see oh yeah well that's in the approach and it's worked so far so they're willing to continue it so i was very fortunate to be able to do that but i think it's essential for success yeah i i agree i just i wish more people thought like that i mean we're talking about a very specific sort of circumstance when you're running a public traded company but the thought of long term towards anything is one of my favorite ideas i think that it i think that of course it plays out in in companies of the size of of what you were running but i also think that it plays out if you're starting a company if you're at any point in your career like just playing the long game is something that i feel like we're getting worse ad as a professional society i think we are getting worse at thinking long term because the pressures are overwhelming and but choosing who you work with choose and being able to actually talk it out i think one of the things that helped me was and people say i talk too much but one of the things that helped me was we actually dialogue about these things people almost take it well you can't do that because my god next year is really gonna be a problem when we talk it through and say well yeah next year is gonna be a problem but two years from now four years from now we really see where that's gonna lead us and being able to actually have the discussion and and really look at it from different angles and eventually even people who started out thinking short term come around and say you know if this really works and it has before then that'll be fantastic so i think it's a question of not accepting and just saying oh okay i agree with you we'll go we'll worry about next year but no let's have a discussion so this is i mean when you when you first started working at royal caribbean obviously it was a very different company than and then it's evolved to today so walk me through a little bit so people just know your origin story because again thirty three years in one company is a very very long time was that something that you had set your mind to that you wanted to work in like in the travel hospitality cruise business or where did you start that sort of pushed you down this path inflection point that eventually got you to to ceo well of course the most important thing i had was good luck you know i was in the right place at the right time i worked with people i had mentors who was supportive and knowledgeable and and really inspiring i also when i had good luck and was in the right place at the right time i worked hard to take advantage of it but the main thing i had was look in having happens stamps into an industry i didn't expect to go into this industry but i was working with a company that had a small interest in the cruise line so i started to get a little involved in the cruise line and what i saw there blew me away so i was just locked into that never expected this to be that long period the founder of the company who was then the president was a terrific guy who had created something very special created a culture you could already see the importance of that culture and so i was able to take what he had built and just build on it but i started really standing on the shoulders of others who had come before me and done well what in your opinion because you mentioned words i wanna go through some of these words that you you mentioned before but you mentioned what you mentioned culture is a catalyst that's interesting like how does culture translate into actual like business metrics kpis revenues right you know net promoter score whatever you wanna measure for your customers but also intentional intentional is a word that comes up repeatedly so there's something that you're doing specifically that's driving that and letting everybody believe it and buy into it not just have like words on a website and i i think you i think you put your finger on something because the intentional of going after something is critical as as we both said people say oh yeah ethics that's that's one ethics or culture it's in our dna but it isn't and that almost implies that it's it's inherent it's we've hired people who have this in their dna and they make it happen intentional means no it doesn't happen by itself it's not a natural evolution of things it is something that you work at every day and so if you want a culture of innovation if you want a culture of integrity if you want a culture of long term thinking you actually have to talk about it you can't just take it for oh your supports everybody is a as is a of person of integrity no you have to think about it you have to talk about it you have to discuss it have to say how does this advance if it's integrity how do i make sure how do i talk about it how do i make sure my people understand that i feel this way not just assume that that's the case if i'm talking about excellence how do i communicate that so you actually have to discuss it you actually have to focus on it you actually have to do things that demonstrate it so part of it is by leading by example and so when you're making a decision and other people see it then then that that's they learn from that so royal caribbean which day is more than a hundred thousand employees versus a couple thousand just a few years ago we actually talk about these things and it it perm through the organization and by the way that also goes up to the board the board the management the executives the officers all the people throughout the organization have to be aligned on these things and the way you do that is by discussing them in general and by discussing them in the context of specific decisions and then that's what allows an organization of a hundred thousand plus employees which is a wild amount of employees that's how they all start to move towards the same north star and they understand not just how to move towards the same north star but the way that they move towards that north star yeah you know and i don't care what organization you i don't care how careful you measure everything and how care for you are about articulating what the things are there's still a lot of unspoken expectations and everybody knows in any organization but especially in a large organization costs are important to keep under control but what does that mean it's very easy to be i'll just pick this example very easy to be the cheapest operation around because you just do the minimum the you to do and it's relatively easy to define if you wanna be i don't care about cost i just wanna be at the best it's but to find and and i always love the comparison if i say i want the best car in the world for the price is that a lad which is piece of junk or is that a rolls royce both meet the criteria because but because one can be the best in the world i don't care about the pro for the price and that's true it's a very high price or a very low price but having a clear understanding so that each decision you make fits in with a long term goal that's the key because that's the other question too you want to be intentional about every decision you make you want to make sure that there's a framework or a lens i don't know if that's the right word that each decision passes through when it's made but that has to be the whole organization that sees the decision framework the same way because it's hard to be intentional when not only yourself is making thousands of decisions every single week but every single person is making thousands of decisions is that is there a framework or because you mentioned you speak about it and you talk about it but when people are pressured they're only human so how do you make sure that even in high pressure situations things like culture is maintained when you're making endless amounts of decisions across a hundred thousand people well that's that's basically you've put your finger on exactly what i wanted to write the book about how do you do that how do you communicate that how do you end up getting alignments so that you're all understand what you're trying to do you know one of the famous stories that i love was when jfk went to nasa and was visiting at nasa and he saw a a jan and he said to the jan what's your job what do you do and the jan response was i'm helping get a man on the moon that that purpose is what you want every organization to have and you can have it you talk about it it's a culture perm it's not one person saying i want a culture of this that or the other thing it's it you all bleed it you all understand it and it's by example i don't make thousands of decisions a day i make some decisions but actually there are thousands hundreds of thousands of people making individual decisions and so you do it by example when it when an issue comes up how do you respond to it and one of the example what i given in the book was when we decided we were discussing whether or not to put a ice skating rink on a ship and the simple answer was to do it on teflon on artificial ice but it was a compromise it wasn't very good a ice skater on artificial doesn't have that amazing graceful that frictionless move that you see when you see them skating unrealized so we made that decision and it was a very tough decision because it was staggering expensive i've have no doubt i no doubt and it's only expensive to do but it's expensive to operate because now you have to maintain the ice and you you need to world class skater and we've been able to do that but everybody sees oh they didn't compromise here they made the choice if we're providing an excellent vacation every aspect of it has to be excellent another buzz word is vision and you point out that vision is very different than intentional what does vision mean why is it not the thing that people should be trying to achieve a achieve a vision i have a vision for the company whatever that is what's the difference well i i do think vision is important i didn't intend to minimize minimize it it is important that you have a vision and you know where you're trying to go it's not enough but it's not enough a vision is almost like saying i have a hope every organization i see including ones that i don't think are successful or likely to be successful say oh we're going to be the best in the world at this but if they don't go at it with intentional it's not enough just to say that people aren't going to say oh the boss says that so that's what we're going to do if it contradicts all the other aspects of the culture and the organization you really need somebody to say that's the vision and here's all the things we're going to do to make that vision a reality it's it's the vision is important but it also needs how am i going to get there and what am i going to do to make that happen and if everybody is working to make that happen that's where you get success not just the vision one of my favorite quotes it sort of sums up what we were just talking about true intentional requires unwavering focus on the long term objective and not being distracted by easy compromises it's beautiful it it makes a ton of sense now i'm gonna not challenge but i guess play a little bit of devil's advocate so how do you have because that's i love playing devil's advocate so absolutely that that by the way that's the way you create culture because if nobody is playing devil's advocate you just have group think that's what i was gonna ask i was gonna say so how do you have that but also encourage an organization in a company that has how i to describe like the psychological safety for somebody to put up their hand and when they don't think what is going on it should be what's going on well that is the culture and you know i wish i knew there was some great secrets out there you do this that and the other and you create a great culture but it's it's what you do and what what we do is we keep trying things we have a dope dialogue and again it's by example so if somebody comes up and says wait a minute you said you were going to do this but is that really what you wanna do is that really going to achieve your objective and maybe they're playing devil's advocate maybe they they just really feel you're wrong and you have that discussion that's what creates confidence that you've come to the right answer when you think about the people that you work with because people will make or break an organization and for any any successful company they have to have people that are independent thinkers that challenge the status quo how do you find those people how do you get them aligned with the culture but not sort of dim maybe the the experience or the or the devil's advocate that they can bring to the table because somebody who is i've always thought about this like how does somebody who is an entrepreneurial minded person who can be very beneficial to an organization work within the con of a public company that has structure an order and this is the mandate how do they how do you find and and retain and help those people thrive without killing their spark well that's our challenge every day and that's one of the things that i think has made us so successful we have been successful in attracting unbelievable people i mean it is the people it's the people it's the people it's the people but then when we're together we we gin each other up we we we encourage each other i still remember one of the examples that thrilled me at the time was we had an architect make a presentation and she was she had a very difficult area and she made a presentation and it was transformational it was just so different than everything else and everybody when she was finished applauded it and that never happens and then she was followed by another architect who was used to going into presentations and having everybody said oh yeah that's very nice because an architect presentation is always very nice hers was extraordinary his was about to be very nice and so he stood up and said i'm giving i'm about to give you my presentation but it's not at the level that's going to attract your applause but i'm gonna leave this meeting and at our next meeting i will learn that applause and so it becomes a competition you you understand that people are looking for and willing to listen to new and different ideas and we do that internally and so we get we everybody loves to play devil's ever i i enjoy it and it's interesting and you learn from it eventually you have to reach a decision yeah but but you are rewarded by either promotion or just by kudos for innovative thinking and people begin to learn that and then everybody feels empowered one other thing that i thought was interesting because another really good quote is alignment is not synonymous with consensus and consensus often leads to the least objection outcome rather than the best possible outcome so how do you how do you know when it's alignment versus i guess consensus would be somebody saying it's like fake agreement like oh fine right like oh fine i guess we'll move in that direction or o fine i guess i'll buy into this project even though sub car you know i don't actually believe in it so how do you actually get alignment and not just this sort of this watered down consensus so i think the the consensus often is just a constant series of compromises and it's a little like somebody taking something that is clear because clarity is important but somebody's thinking clear direction and then saying well okay but we don't have to do quite this and consensus of when i've seen it organizations work towards it well okay i need i need your support so i'm going to accept your change and i had one person i've worked with him many years who used to call that creeping cr so you take a really clear une unequivocally un uncompromising direction and you say well okay but i'll i'll make a compromise here which by itself isn't terrible and i'll make a compromise here which but that compromise gets you to buy in and in the end we all sit around the table and say we like where we've ended up but where we've ended up is a compromise it's watered down a little bit yeah it's exactly it's watered down it's if i may use the term half asked it is it's it's it's not consistent as opposed to okay let's talk about these things but let's understand exactly what it is and let's look at whether your suggestion really makes this substantive to you better and if we don't think it does let's be honest about it i'm not gonna say yes just because either group just because i want you to sign on to this we're gonna look at this together and what we find is everybody has their voice everybody is heard their their opinions are respected but at the end we need to move forward with clarity with intentional and without without ambiguity quick question what's your go to when you got ten minutes before a meeting or a workout for me it just used to be whatever i could grab which usually meant skipping meals entirely or just grabbing something that left me crashing an hour later because it was just full of garbage that's why i'm partnering with fuel this black edition ready to drink is a complete meal so it has thirty five grams of protein six grams of fiber thirty five essential vitamins and minerals it is no sugar added gluten free under five bucks i always keep a few of these in my fridge and honestly it solved the whole back to back meetings go go go non nonstop no time to eat problem super well and this one's new for me it's fuels daily greens i had the blueberry this morning honestly first impression it was way better than i expected it's developed by registered nutritionists and diet dishes or forty two vitamins minerals and super foods only twenty five calories four grams of fiber and just one gram hook or i throw one back first thing perform a morning calls every single morning look if you're running a business time is the most valuable asset she makes healthy eating simple and they also just launched the target source nationwide so you can get it everywhere try both products today with fifteen percent off your purchase for new customers with my exclusive code scott at hu dot com slash scott tried both products today with fifteen percent off your purchase for new customers with my exclusive code scott s c o t t at hu dot com slash scott use my code fill out the post checkout survey to help support the show that is fuel dot com slash scott they really make healthy living taste amazing even if you're on the go healthy eating healthy lifestyle doesn't have to taste bad it doesn't have to suck hubspot is a success story partner now think about listening to this podcast right now you're probably multitasking and you're probably catching seventy to eighty percent of what we're talking about but let's flip that and imagine you're only catching twenty percent that'd be crazy right it's really not a good use of your time bad you only remember twenty percent of what we're talking about but most businesses most entrepreneurs are only using twenty percent of their data all the most important details in call logs emails chat with their customers it's just left floating in digital space not being used hubspot it gives you the app if access of those insights to help you grow your business because when you know more you grow more visit hubspot dot com to get the full picture of your business today nets sweet is a success story partner now what is a future hold for business if you ask nine experts so get ten answers bull market bear market rates are up rates are down at the end of the day it'd just be easier somebody invented a crystal ball but until then over forty three thousand businesses a future proof themselves with nets sweet by oracle the number one ai cloud erp that brings accounting financial management inventory and hr into one unified platform here's what i love about it instead of juggling multiple systems you get one source of truth real time insights and forecasting it actually let you peer into the future with actionable data when you're closing your books in days instead of weeks you're spending less time looking backwards and more time focusing on what's next whether your company's earning millions for hundreds of millions nets tweet helps you tackle immediate challenges while seizing your biggest opportunities if i needed this product in my business this is what i'd use it's a game changer for business visibility and control if you wanna see how ai can transform your financial operations download the cfo guide to ai and machine learning for free that's nets sweet dot com slash scott cla that's nets sweet dot com slash scott cla nets sweet dot com slash scott cla indeed is a success story partner now if you're hiring indeed is all you need let me give you an example if i needed to hire a new editor for this show i'd go to indeed and be super specific not just can you edit audio i'd say i need someone who's edited a conversational podcast for at least three years gets our style and knows our software someone who's done this before and here's the thing with indeed sponsored jobs i'd get people who fit that description i'm not digging through resumes from people who've edited one youtube video i'm getting actual podcast editors who know what they're doing people who've worked on shows like ours and can prove it that's what makes a difference you get people who actually are what you're looking for according to indeed data sponsored jobs posted directly on indeed are ninety percent more likely to report a higher than non sponsored jobs and people are finding quality hires right now in the minute that i've speaking to you companies like yours have made twenty seven hires on indeed according to indeed data worldwide spend more time interviewing candidates to check all the boxes less stress less time and more results now with indeed sponsor jobs and listeners of this show will get a seventy five dollar sponsored job credit to help you get your job premium status it deserves at indeed dot com slash just go to indeed dot com slash clarity right now and support our show by saying you've heard about indeed on this podcast indeed dot com slash terms and conditions apply hiring do it the right way with indeed and where does i mean i well i think eagle is probably one of the worst things across the board ego ego kills ideas eagle kills projects ego kills alignment ego kills a lot of different things but when you have very high performing people that have been successful for the majority of the career they do sometimes come with ego so how do you get rid of ego while still maintaining alignment i don't i don't think we ever get rid of ego and i don't frankly i don't know anybody that isn't that that doesn't have a little bit of ego ego or ego views and frankly the we've had very successful people in royal caribbean and they are rightly proud of their success so i don't say we should eliminate ego i'd say we should build on it and give them more to be proud about so when you come with an idea and it's successful terrific and you should be proud about it and maybe that will also encourage you to come up with another good idea next year and so i i don't think in our case ego is necessarily now if ego can go too far and then if something is a good idea something because it's mine that's that's a that's really destructive in exactly the way you said but generally i i think one of our attitudes at royal caribbean has been passion and passion also can discourage alignment because i'm passionate about my idea but if i understand that if we're all together on this we end up in a better place that works and that's where the north star really does matter that's where the north start because you also have this idea this philosophy of of continuous improvement never being satisfied constantly so seeking better which i think is that's a very important idea to have continuous improvement like it really it means that you're not happy with your know it's not that you're not happy you're not satisfied how do you make sure as as a as a leader of an organization you strive towards what's next the next thing the next innovation the next milestone but how do you constantly do that without sort of tiring out the people that you're working with because that means that there's always this moving target right you're always moving the goal post which is it can be a good thing but it can also be it can be very it can be tiring for people that are always trying to do the next thing it can be tiring but the thrill of improvement the thrill of seeing it overcomes all that i i i don't think i was ever tired at royal caribbean yeah i was never tired i it was so exciting and it was always something new it was whether it's a food or a ship or a ad campaign or employee benefits program these were exciting things and everybody throughout the organization had the satisfaction i think satisfaction overcomes fatigue any day of the week so i don't see that as a problem i saw that as an opportunity is perfectionism a good thing or a bad thing well i think it there are pros and cons i'm not sure that ins is the same thing as perfectionism and in fact continuous improvement helps because i don't have to reinvent the needle or the fire or whatever it is i just need to know that i've made it better and that i can continue to make it better and one of the advantages of continuous improvement is and i think this is very important is it's not looking back it's looking forward so i say here's the way i can improve this doesn't mean that i've been doing it badly it just means that i can do it better and by the way now that i've gotten it better i hope to do better still so it can be tiring but it can also be en enter en energize because it creates the energy of i can do even better and i'm being applauded because giving credit is a good part of this i'm applauded for the changes i've made whoever i am and and i again that's whether that is a cabin steward or a head of marketing whatever your position you can do that job better i like that i think that that's probably where if i was gonna think of how perfectionism could be toxic it's striving poor striving towards perfectionism without actually saying that the work that you've done is good and perfectionism also kind of implies criticizing because there's no such thing as perfect and actually one of the iron is the continuous improvement really says there is no such thing as perfect i can do better and i'm not it's not because what i did was bad it's because we can always do better and and perfectionism is there is a perfect answer and i think there's never a perfect answer royal caribbean is better today than it was a year ago or four years ago when i stepped down as ceo or ten years before that we're continuously improving not try not striving for perfection but striving for excellence that's so important i see i feel i see this a lot with with founders obviously that are just starting their business for the first time and they feel like it's never enough like what they're doing is never enough or what they've accomplished is never enough and i think that it's a little bit this is more of an entrepreneur discussion but it's very isolating when you're when you're alone and you're building and you don't have a team or a group or a board that's saying no we were we were incredible ten years ago but now we're even better if i may yeah scott yeah just to build on your point i i've often used the word north star because i think north star is what you're going at but one of the things remember about the north star the north star is a great navigation tool you you there's the north star i know where north is that gives me a direction to go in but nobody thinks they're gonna get to the north star you the north star is is is beyond your ability to reach it is a direction and it's you never get there and so that's why i would argue continuous improvement is not seeking perfection it's seeking improvement and when we look at and ps or when we look at employee satisfaction or engagement or guest satisfaction we're we're actually we're not looking to get to a hundred that's that's an impossible goal and not even a particularly good one but we're looking to constantly do better and to have a continual upward trend and that's that's what's been successful for us and i think that's the difference between what we do and perfection who influences the decisions the most is it something that the people to speak with the guests sort of they have that in boots on the ground they can understand what actually gonna make the experience better is that is there some sort of framework for filtering ideas up from the people that work with the guests i'm assuming that's probably a smart idea because they're the ones that experience it but also how do you make decisions on what to actually focus on and spend time and energy and money onto to again move closer to that north star when you do have a million different options well that that of course is well the biggest challenge of any leader and as i have and you've quoted me before saying the the first job of leader is to lead and it is to make sure that you're hearing all the input from the people that have it and the key part of that is the people who are on the ground who are dealing every day with with the guest who of course have a great deal of insight and we we look at that all the time that's a key part of driver but it's also important to look outside of that i i very focused on the quote which i ended up using a lot that was attributed to and ford don't know whether he actually said it or not but it's too good a quotes so i'll use it which was if i asked people what they wanted they would have said they wanted a faster horse and so part of it is to understand what people want but part of it is also to understand what they might not yet have imagined and i think that's part of the success at royal caribbean is that we have people who can bring both to the table and fight it out i mean our one of the one of the best things that royal caribbean is the passion that people bring one of the worst things that royal caribbean is the passion that people bring because they don't give up yeah this is the right thing and there's this is the answer and this is what we should go with how how how could you not go this way but we get to hear all of that and then we get to work it together and reach alignment on a clear and una path and it's reaching that alignment so the process of reaching the alignment is key to our success and then the determination to stick to that alignment with intentional what is the that's a very i love this idea of like going outside and finding things that people have never even thought of before because the obvious the obvious thing is to speak to the gas you figure out what they want more of or want done differently that's a great signal but when you think about true innovation it's again doing things that had never been done before so how do you go outside and find things and new ideas like what's is there a a strategy or a framework or something so first of all that is a constant challenge and so what one of the things we have done is we have again with intentional so we don't wanna just ignore what people want and say well you don't know what you want we know and and this new thing so we set a framework for ourselves for example on a new ship that every new ship will have one third traditional one third innovative one third revolutionary one third evolutionary one third revolutionary and so it allows us to try totally new things the ice skating rink happen to be one of them rock climbing wall flow rider skydiving simulator north star we can through all these things that nobody ever said to us i'd like to see an ice skating rink on a ship i'd like to see a flow rider where i can go surfing simulator i'd like to go skydiving on a ship nobody ever said that to us but we put them on knowing that if they didn't like it we've given them everything else so we make sure that we cover the traditional we make sure that we put in the evolutionary so this is traditional but better and then we put in these revolutionary things which we think they're going to love and so far we've been extraordinarily lucky and successful with that but there are exceptions to that and we try it but we we we constantly are moving but without without giving up what we know works so it's it's a bet but it's a safe calculated bet that's a good way to put it why that's the way i wish i had known that language when i was writing the board that's a bet but it's a calculated bet if you think about the stakes with the with the company with the with the not the company with them with the product that you have the product you have is a multi million dollar product so the implementation of a bet is expensive it's not like changing an ad set on facebook and seeing if it converts at a higher ro as than what we're doing last week it's sometimes tens probably a lot more tens of millions if not more for some of these bets right so it does have to be safe it does have to be calculated and it can be expensive if it doesn't work out well first of all in some cases it's not an m it's a b that's very true it's not millions it's billions because remember our new ships they're costing couple billion dollars each and we're ordering multiples of them so it's a big bet it's it's one we do carefully calculate and we have enough experience to be able to understand but yeah we do need to make sure that we are learning from what we've seen in the past but also you know it's a bet not to do these things i think that's the other thing i would just emphasize if all you do is what you did then you're not gonna get anything different and if you want to with our north star has been to provide such an amazing vacation that we became that we become not the best cruise line but the best vacation provider jason my successor has coined the term i love it he said we don't want to be the vacation of a lifetime we wanna be a lifetime of vacations and i think it says it's so well so our north star was always to provide something so wonderful that we would expand our horizon and not just be a great cruise line but be a great vacation provider the result is we've gone from a company that was worth in nineteen eighty eight five hundred and fifty million dollars to now overall we're worth a little more than ninety billion so it's been it it's worked and it's worked because we have focused on not just taking some risks but carefully gauge risks one thing i wanted to discuss you speak about a culture of wow now i guess that started as an acronym wow but explain what that is because i a lot of the ideas that we're discussing feed into this culture of wow but did this first idea come from because this is i mean it's a title of the book so obviously it's important but what does this culture of wow really mean well as you say we had started out we wanted we we wanted to provide certain guidelines to our employees what is it that they should be doing and we came up we wanted an acronym we wanted to call it gold anchor standards and so we had a g and we had no and have a d an l rather and we hadn't yet figured out well we couldn't come up with a d that fit in and we were actually agonizing over because we liked the gold but we wanted a d and somebody then said deliver the wow and i mean it was the room just went silent i mean i do remember this very vividly and she just said deliver the wow that's a d word i mean it was really the w word but she got it into a d and everybody said my god that's what we do and a wow is is something special and we do so many special things and it is the cabin steward that makes this fancy towel image for you it is the waiter that provides an extra dessert because they know you like mer or what have you but it's also the the supply chain the logistics person who one year says you know we've got people queuing up the trucks queuing up at the pier because we have a lot of trucks supplying the ship on a saturday morning we can spread that out and do it this way so one year she makes it so that that's more effective and then here later she comes back and said well we'd slashed year we saw the truck queuing problem but now we have so that the stuff is stored on board in a way that makes it harder for the crew member to get to so we solve the truck problem now let's reorganize the way we store the food or not food or whatever the supplies are so that it makes it easier for the crew on board to get to it and therefore provide a better service to the client to the guest and and so it's that's delivering the wow it's just going above and beyond working on a problem agonizing over it and coming up with a new and better way and when do you when do you teach that to the person that you're hiring and bringing them in is it from the interview is it from the first time you ever speak to them well it's it's it's that's what culture is all about yes we try and search for that and find that when we're looking for new people but the best education doesn't come from the top it comes from your coworkers peer pressure is the best way of so people talk about bleeding royal caribbean blue this is the way we do things it isn't necessarily work harder longer but smarter and with more focus on what you're trying to do and it becomes frankly a self fulfilling prophecy we want to be the employer of choice people here that working at royal caribbean is inspirational so we get a better set of resumes to start with and one thing least is to another the hotspot hubspot podcast network is this success story partner now a quick podcast recommendation i've been listening to truth lies and work they're in the hubspot podcast network just like success story it's this husband and wife team a and lia elliott they break down why people actually do what they do at work so if you have a business if you manage people if you have to hire people at any point you have to listen to their show i just listened to an episode on why good employees suddenly quit that's an issue that we all have and it totally clicked for me one of the reasons i explained is why it's not usually about the money about all these little promises that we as founders entrepreneurs managers leaders we break without realizing it like when you tell someone you just hired that they're gonna learn all these new skills but you just keep giving them the same tasks over and over and over again it made me realize that i probably lost a lot of people for dumb reasons that i never noticed and hiring is one of the most important things you can figure out so if you manage people for if you just wanna understand what makes your coworkers tick it's worth checking out listen to truth lies and work wherever you get your podcast chip station is a success story partner do you know what separates successful online businesses from literally everyone else it's not just having great products it's delivering an amazing shipping experience that keeps customers coming back all of my friends that run the biggest e commerce companies they use ships station and it has completely transformed how they handle orders they save thousands on shipping costs thanks to their rate chopper tool that finds the best discounts and what makes ships station brilliant you never need to upgrade because it grows with your business no matter how big you get they offer discounts up to eighty eight percent off ups d express and usps rates and up to ninety percent off fedex it integrates seamlessly with every selling channel you're already using and your customers get branded tracking updates to keep them happy and informed when shoppers choose your products you turn them into loyal customers with cheaper faster and better shipping no credit card required cancel anytime that's ships station dot com code success story hubspot is success story partner now the future of business is happening right now and you don't wanna miss it that's why you have to be at inbound twenty twenty five they are bringing together the brightest minds in marketing sales business entrepreneurship ai for three incredible days in san francisco the global epi epicenter of innovation and technological disruption picture this you are learning directly from amy poe about creative leadership you're getting ai insights from da modi who's literally shaping the future of artificial intelligence here's what makes inbound special it's not just the great keynote you're gonna dive into breakout sessions where you can immediately implement what you learn and plus san francisco legendary startup up ecosystem provides the perfect backdrop for networking with all these great entrepreneurs decision makers industry leaders peers who are actively shaping the future of business from september third to fifth at the mo center you're gonna be surrounded by forward thinking professionals who turn insights and ideas into breakthroughs don't just watch the future unfold be part of creating it visit inbound dot com slash register to get your ticket today you wrote about even the fact that like angry guest letters on the when people had a negative experience they still they still mentioned like and praised individual crew members is that something that like surprised you is that i i feel like that's not normal i feel like when somebody i'm just thinking my bad experiences is when i have a bad experience maybe i should think about the good and the bad experience but usually it's just the bad experience sort of blankets everything that's exactly right you know of course i my wife and i have never argued but when what i hear is that when couples argue you know you did this wrong and then you did this wrong and then you did this wrong and everything is wrong and you just get angry and i remember many years ago i got a particular letter and it really did sort out dear mister fe you are an idiot and your your company is terrible and everything about you is awful and you know it's it's you kind of expect this and then they said but wait a second i have to tell you that these crew members were extraordinary and that's when i knew i mean that really brought home to me it's the people that make this special and they are so marvelous at that that it even overcome this incredibly angry person and even they had to balance their complaint with complementing our extraordinary crew members just because that person or that crew member or crew members they delivered this well they delivered the wow and by the way it doesn't have to be exceptional they delivered the wow they were friendly they had a smile they went that extra mile instead of saying oh you wanna know where that shop is it's down the corridor to your left and then take your first right no they take them there let me show you and just let me walk you to it that takes thirty seconds of your time but that that's a wow it's but by the way our crew members don't think that's a wow they think that's what they do and they do it every time and that's what gets people to come back and that's what makes our culture so successful and our people just so extraordinary so wonderful for somebody who's listening to the to this who that resonates with obviously it's not just one thing that has to happen to move a company in the right direction but where should that person start that ceo of a company where people do kinda do mediocre half ass if somebody asks for help they do the bare minimum but the company is okay it's working however you define working but they wanna move it more towards people going the extra mile and taking the extra step how do they start moving towards that well you know this isn't something that happens overnight and one of the advantages that i've had is a i i came to a company that already had a very excellent driven culture b i worked with some really extraordinary people and we also had alignment and i can't overstate how important it was that there was an alignment between the board the top management the executives etcetera that this was important and it's years and years and years to accomplish that but it has paid off nicely i know that you look at ships as sort of this physical manifestation of the culture as well so it's not just the people but it's the product it's the thing that you deliver to the customer so explain that concept explain how you take the product and you turn that into a physical manifestation of this wow culture that all all the employees they're all they're all living and breathing this and they're all going the extra mile for the guest but how do you actually turn the actual product into a manifestation of this you know again once you once you start out and articulate this is what we're trying to accomplish the the ships for example are tools just like just like a carpenter has certain tools we have certain tools and if you're going to give people a vacation then the ship has to be consistent with that and if you say to yourself one of the things that people want today is more choice it it and the choice isn't good or bad or good or better but maybe i wanna go to an italian restaurant tonight and the french restaurant tomorrow italian food isn't better than french food or french food better than italian but they're different and at different times i want different things and different people want different things and so you start out and say how do i meet my guests needs what better and what are those needs what is it they want and if what they want is more more choice they also want beauty i think people enjoy beauty so we put a lot of effort into the artwork on a ship not because i think our guests or our people think our guests are arc con and nobody takes a royal caribbean cruise because it has better art but when you're on board the art enrich reaches you it makes you feel good beauty is something we all care about and so basically you just break down what is it that people are looking for and then you create a passion around everybody seeking that objective and i'm i'm very fortunate royal caribbean we have people who are really passionate about figuring out what we'll make people happier and we keep getting better at it we you know we learn we build a ship and everybody says that's extraordinary but the first question we ask is what can make it better first question that's we and and we've been extraordinary fortunate with the ships we built we are widely regarded as as designing some wonderful ships but when it comes out we say now what could make it even better and what would be what's the next step of that and we've we've just come out with a number of ships and now we're already saying the team is now saying what are we gonna do next and i know that they're gonna come out with something that's even better and and again part of continuous improvement is not saying why didn't they come up that five years ago the continuous improvement is that's terrific and ten years from now will we'll obsolete those ships one story that i find incredible is your your covid story because i don't think that many industries were sidelined as much as the cruise industry was right so you had zero revenue for eighteen months you had forty thousand crew trap at c thirty six billion in financing just as a as a human being as as like listen people i think sometimes forget that ceos are just people at the end of the day how do you navigate that we can talk about like you know the strategy of about how you navigate it but how do you as a human being like navigate that and you still have some hair or two and but that's not easy oh yeah certainly one of the more traumatic parts of my life but i i think i would actually say simple solution is the people the people in this case would include the people i worked with who were as passionate i about making sure that we come out of this properly and successfully but the people in this case also includes my family who put up with me and and my the you know one of the problems with the pandemic was all the things you talked about took an amazing amount of time and so i was immersed from early morning to late at night and my wife my children my extraordinary grandchildren my eight extraordinary grandchildren if you'd like i have pictures but my extraordinary grandchildren we're all very supportive i think the fact this is something else which is not given enough respect in today's corporate world which is the value of experience and longevity the team at royal caribbean we had worked together for a long time the average senior officer at royal caribbean has been there for fifteen years or more so we we shared the culture the other thing which i think was very helpful for us was we articulated early on a north star and it was a north star which i think was somewhat unusual because most companies that went through trauma and very few went through zero revenue yeah turns out that's a hard way to make money a little bit right but we started out saying our issue isn't and how we're gonna get through this our issue is how we're going to emerge from this because there was never a doubt we would emerge weren't sure when but the issue was how are we going to emerge from this strong vibrant and with a amazing future and by the way we also recognize that we can't be alone in this how are we gonna come through with this strong how our our travel agent partner gonna come through are strong how our employees the suffering was unbelievable and so how we all gonna come through this so that was that was part of now you asked about me personally one of the problems is which all of us in the senior management shared was we had to demonstrate confidence throughout you you know very well that if you walk around saying oh what was me what what am i gonna do and isn't this terrible that this is happening to us the one thing i rejected very early was victim would why is the cruise industry of victim here well everybody was a victim of covid the enemy here was covid the enemy here wasn't the government or the this or that it was covid and as long as we work together we knew we're gonna overcome it and but one of our jobs all of us in the management team was to do was to express and to show confidence so one of the things i did to make sure that i was confident was i ate a lot i really i had more chocolate in that in that two year period than any other time in my history i had to let my belt out i mean i and so that that helped me but i had learned by the way again experience i had been through other crises in the cruise industry and learned that if you're going to lead you also have to evidence the kind of confidence and leadership that you hope that all your people share so this is not a time to complain woe with me this is a time to say there's is opportunities here how we gonna take advantage of those opportunities one thing that you speak about is that fear makes people stupid which i maybe shouldn't have said that but okay yes i did i don't disagree i don't disagree i think it i think it does not in a negative way in a very practical way when people are stressed out they just make bad decisions well and and and they become afraid and so what they fear is you you fear what's close you don't feel so you nobody fears what's gonna happen five years from now three years from now so that fear focus their attention so much on the short term that they they lose the opportunity to see the longer term so i do believe acting out of fear probably shouldn't said it but acting out of fear makes people stupid one thing i thought was interesting you mentioned that unlike after nine eleven we stuck to our guns so obviously nine eleven another major crisis period and you you said we understood that you cannot over communicate the north star so explain to me because what that's alluding to and i don't wanna put words in your mouth so correct me if a moment what you're alluding to there is the way that you reacted to another catastrophe was not as ideal as how you reacted to covid which covid actually for the cruise industry specifically seems like it would actually be a much harder hit than nine eleven was considering that the the just the time that covid lasted so if you're gonna look at lessons learnt from nine eleven versus what you did with covid what was the major difference in how you sort of navigated both of those incidents well scott i think your points a a good one covid was multiples of of seriousness compared to nine eleven nine eleven was very serious but it was very clear to to me into others that nine eleven was a fairly temporary kind of interruption and it wasn't a terrible interruption i mean it was a terrible interruption but it wasn't existential it was this is really gonna hurt and we knew that and coming back to where i said i don't just say in the book i don't think we did as well as we could have is we knew it but we didn't communicated as well and so people outside of the inner circle who were reading the newspapers and hearing that nobody's ever gonna travel again believe that and we didn't do enough to give them the confidence that those papers were wrong and so they succumb to the fear and then the thousands of decisions that they made weren't as good as they should have been in covid we became hyper active in communicating to our people to our our travel agent or travel advisors to our suppliers to unto to our employees what we knew and and also we we to the public and so we really worked hard harder and did i think a better job of making sure that they knew what we knew about what the likely outcomes we're going to be and so i think that's one of the lessons from nine eleven was that importance of over communicating i think that's a very important lesson because i think that too often sometimes we sometimes you make the incorrect assumption just because we believe something everyone else is gonna believe it and i have never hurt a company or or been worse off for over communicating something and then you start to realize like oh maybe not everybody's on the same page as me so let's find a way to get on the same page what's obvious to me may not be obvious to other people and it's possible i'm wrong in which case over communicating just helps because now that we're gonna get the feedback and maybe i'll realize i'm wrong but if i'm right then making sure they see it overcomes this issue that fear makes people stupid and by the way not having the full information makes people afraid so i think in covid that was a key part of our success in getting through that one more thing i thought was an interesting period of your life and your career and obviously this was huge for royal caribbean was your transition out of the ceo position after thirty three years so this is not this is not something that everybody will go through in their life being in a management leadership position for thirty three years and trying to find succession but some people i think have a hard time after thirty three years finding somebody to take the reins how do you how do you how do you pass the reins on to the next person how do you i don't wanna say give up control but ultimately you you do control giving up control and like what are the lessons that a leader a ceo who's listening to this a founder even because i know listen you weren't the founder but you you had to take over control from the founder and then you passed on control to jason liberty but what are the lessons that you've learned from succession how do you make it work properly and not turn into chaos because from what i understand your ceo transition and it sounds like actually the founder transition to you and then you to jason both went like relatively well so what did you do right what do many people do wrong first of all i think the most important part of the success of my transition to jason was that jason is an extraordinary leader he is inspirational he is knowledgeable he is methodical he is passionate he's all the things that you would want in a leader and so the most important thing is to have a good leader i think and he and i worked together for over twenty years and i think again the most important part of the transition was the new team that took over under jason's leadership were just wonderful people jason the team working for jason the culture and the organization were fantastic so i think that was a part of it the other was of realization that i care about royal caribbean i care about the company that i was involved in and participating in in the development of it and if you wanted to do well the best way is to have a good people in place and let them do it it's it's i think i have a little bit this is i would actually draw a very strong conclusion to my own experience with our four children once once they go off they are on their own and they will make their own mistakes and they make they they do some things which i just say oh my god how could they do that they do other things where i say oh my god how come i never thought to do that and so but the one thing that you know and i mean obviously i studied this before making the transition the one thing that you know that doesn't work is second guessing and there's no such thing as a clone jason liberty is is a very different person than i am but he's terrific at what he does and so i think that's that's the part that has made it all successful and i look at that the other thing was the other thing i would say is and this is an important part of it i look at it with pride his success is my success yeah you know he is building just as my children's success even when they make all the mistakes they make and and if they're listening i want my children to know that they've made lots and lots of mistakes and i'm i am prepared if they ask me to point out every single one of those mistakes but but their success and my children you know each of my children has been successful in their own rights and each of is very different than me and now that i see my extraordinary grandchildren growing i'm thrilled every one of them is just better than the other and again if you want i i can tell you more about the them but they're doing it their way and what work for me doesn't necessarily work for them but they have to do it and i can't be prouder to see how the team at royal caribbean is doing and how the company continues to go from strength of strength i love it i mean why does it feel to to let the go after thirty three years you know it's it's an interesting thing the one hand i missed aspects of it i loved going to work every single day literally even even in the the worst of the times it was thrilling to go to work because of the people i worked with and and to deal with problems like that but now i deal with different things and that's just as thrilling and i and so actually now i'm getting the best of both worlds i get to see royal caribbean thrive and i get to do other things that i love doing the book delivering the wow culture as a catalyst for lasting success that's available this october and it'll be available whenever this drops because i think that when this is going live you can get that book anywhere you get books amazon etcetera yes so and the pre orders are available today is there anywhere else that you want to send people or is it just go look at that book find it on amazon go get it just go wherever you go there it's it's any bookstore will have it you can pre order it and i do point out that all any of the proceeds for for the for me go to a scholarship fund for the children of royal caribbean employees i have to give that a plug because you know i i think education is so important and to be able to give a little back to the families of the people that have made royal caribbean so successful to me is very important if people read this book we've gone through a whole bunch of ideas that that have really helped grow caribbean grow over your tenure and we'll continue to help it grow but if you wanted them to read this book and just take one key lesson in away what would that one key lesson beer the most important idea that you want to leave them with so i probably will refuse to come up with one because i'm not sure i can do that but i think it i think the the two things are the focus on people the the you know people people are what makes the difference people or women they use successful how do you get the the most out of people without damaging anything and the importance of long term thinking i think we are so calibrated these days to focus on next month next year and i certainly know as a ceo i often said that nothing i was going to do would make any difference for the next twenty twelve to twenty four months at any point in time and you've just it's hard to think of that long term future because our society has moved much more short term the last thing i wanted to ask you you've given over lots of wisdom but if you could go back and tell your twenty year old self one piece of advice what would that piece of advice be ash calling for hand in marriage earlier that's your advice but say you only wanted to pass on one piece of wisdom to your kids or your grandkids what would that piece of advice be that's helped you the most it could be business or it could just be something that's really helped you in your life don't let short term things bother you as much don't look back particularly if you're on a longer term course keep in mind the longer term and accept that there are going to be bad things that happen along the way and don't look back accept them this happened but it isn't gonna take me off of my path i think even when people try and think long term something bad happens and it always does always but don't let that bother you say okay that was a distraction that's not that's not the substance that's not gonna change where i'm trying to be three years from now five years from now and if you can do that and it's not easy but train yourself to do that and it will it will it will make your life both more fun and more successful

indeed is a success story partner now here's your tech hiring tip of the week from indeed seventy three percent of tech workers say flexibility is one of their top priorities so if your job posting doesn't mention flexible hours or remote options you're basically invisible to three at a four candidates keep that in mind look hiring tech talent right now it's tough you are competing for people with super specific skills everyone wants hybrid work and the salary expectations are through the roof it's a lot that's why indeed actually makes sense they're the number one place where tech people go to apply for jobs we're talking three million tech professionals in the us and eighty six percent of them have applied through indeed it's not just some job board where you post and pray they've got tools like smart searching and their tech network that use ai to connect you with people who actually have the skills that you need companies using the tech network saw over four times more relevant applications that's huge more qualified people way less time wasted whenever i've needed tech talent in the past indeed is the only platform choosing if i needed to hire top tier tech talent today i'd still go with indeed post your first job and get seventy five dollars off at indeed dot com slash tech talent that's indeed dot com slash tech talent to claim this offer indeed build for what's now and what's next in tech hiring in this lessons episode explore how freelancing platforms launch a inspiring entrepreneurs before they scale into independent businesses discover how marketplace experience builds discipline and client management skills understand how communication and time management ensure stability and uncover how smart pricing and delegation turn a solo hustle into a thriving agency and when you decided to do this like this is something that somebody could totally side hustle and not just go all in on but when you're starting to sell a service or a product do you think that it makes more sense to use a marketplace like a five or even like an an upwork or a any top towel or any other or is it more it makes more sense to figure out a website market yourself so i think in the beginning a freelancing platform like a fiber is definitely the best way to go because they handle so much of it for you right like you don't need to set a website you don't need to do your own marketing you don't need to worry about client disputes they'll you know they'll they'll handle all of it and i think starting out if you try and just be your own independent freelancer with your own website everything right out of the gates you're gonna be so overwhelmed i think it's gonna be too much so i think a freelancing platform ideal in people's first few years because you get to learn you know time management you have to start to understand discipline not procrastinating you know customer service that's a lot to learn you gotta give yourself a couple years for that once you feel like you totally got that unlocked you know how to sell people and all that stuff then i think taking it off of there where you own one hundred percent of your business is obviously the end goal you know that's how you get the age see go that's how you hire help you start growing it into something huge you can make you seven figures if you want but i think a freelancing platform is perfectly fine in the meantime because you can make six figures on a freelancing platform which is like crazy and you can do it by yourself and how much time did you actually have to put in to to hit that to hit and any any significant amount of revenue that would replace your your p job was it months eighty hours a week yes like in only two months i knew it was gonna work yeah i mean i was working a lot in the beginning like i was working fifty sixty hour never eighty hour weeks i've never been someone who's like not gonna sleep at night for i i've always thought that's like stupid and kyle and people are like pulling an all night and i'm like well that's dumb because you're gonna be exhausted tomorrow like i've never like gotten that but i would hover around the like fifty sixty hour mark no days off and i say to people you don't have to do with that like i'm just being honest about what i did i'm not saying you have to do it that way but i think yeah did working sixty hours a week in the beginning and get me to six figures faster probably if six figures is not your goal then don't work sixty hours a week don't worry about it very okay and then just i'm curious as to because you mentioned a few other things like when you jump into entrepreneurship there's other stuff that crops there's customer success there's i'm you mentioned a few things actually i yeah blanking on some of the other stuff but what are some of those what are some of those things that you don't think about when you're starting because you have you have your skill that you wanna sell to the world what are the other things that you have to be aware of that you generally don't realize until you're in it yeah oh man so many things market and not marketing sales right like when you're messaging customers how do you get them to book more with you customer service like customer satisfaction they need to leave five star reviews you have to offer revisions you have to be professional in your communication with them if they lash out at you you have to still be professional back to them time management if somebody places eight orders with you one day you cannot procrastinate that's the you know because if you we're already procrastinating another huge order due tomorrow you now have a situation so you know very like what is that soft skills or or like real world common sense stuff is a huge part of this that you know you didn't need to have to do well in college or anything or you sometimes don't even really need to do well in a nine to five because your boss your managers taking care of it for you so it's took all those things you gotta give yourself time to learn those things but those things once you learn them i think you're infallible i think once you you know conquer procrastination you know how to sell things to people you know how to take criticism and not take it personally i think you can go do anything then that it doesn't have to be freelancing like i think you're set for life when you like get it through that monarch money is a success story partner now you know what's weird i'm doing well financially but i have this constant low level financial anxiety that i was missing something because i have crypto on all these different exchanges i have multiple investment accounts old four zero one k's savings scattered everywhere i knew the pieces were fine but i had no idea if the whole picture made sense i finally got monarch money to pull everything into one view and the first thing i noticed i had ten thousand dollars sitting in a temporary savings account from eight months ago when i sold some stock that's eight months ten thousand dollars it could have been workings that have just waiting for me to remember it existed also it showed me that i was spending tons monthly on all these subscription services that i couldn't even remember i signed up for every sunday morning it takes me five minutes to check everything all my financial stuff in one place no more wondering no more anxiety the wall street journal just named it the best budgeting app of twenty twenty five but honestly it's more about finally having control so don't let financial opportunity slip through the cracks use code success at monarch money dot com in your browser for half off your first year that's fifty percent off your first year at monarch money dot com with code success square is a success story partner now there's this coffee shop in my neighborhood that just started as this tiny little corner spot now they've got three locations they're selling online they've even added some food so what i love is that no matter which location i go to whether i'm grabbing my morning coffee you aren't picking up lunch everything just works smoothly be ordering the payments the loyalty points it all syncs up perfectly and that is the power of square and honestly it's why keep going back every business has different goals and square is the platform that supports them all whether you're opening new locations selling something new or expanding your reach i see it everywhere now the corner bagel shop that became the chain specialty markets managing thousands of items even my barber who takes appointments online square point of sale has the flexibility to run and grow your business exactly how you want whether you're in retail running a restaurant offering services or you're just doing it all there's a square point of sale mode built specifically for what you need different settings for different parts of your business so you're always ready to make the sale go to square dot com slash go slash success story to learn more about how your business can grow with square that is s q u a r e dot com slash go slash success story a hundred percent now this this is something i'm curious about do you think that i i always preach that you shouldn't jump right in but i think there could be a benefit because when you jump right into entrepreneurship you force yourself to ramp like there's like no looking back like you you could have a little bit of a nest egg but i mean chances are you have to have to make rent in a couple months and that's gonna be an issue if you don't make money so do you think that by maybe not jumping into if you jump into a side hustle just part time do you think maybe the drive isn't there and that may give a false a false response to whether or not you could be successful versus if you jump right in and you're like forced like sync or swim yeah i think being forced into it ensures success more and and that you're gonna make it work but i have seen a lot of people segue into it half and half where they start at part time while they're at their nine to five and if they hate their nine to five enough they make it work part time so it's almost i just see it always works if you are so miserable at whatever it is you're doing like that's when it works because if you like kinda like your nine to five still i don't think you're gonna make it works makes a lot of work but for the people i know who are just like make it stop i hate this with every fiber of my being i cannot go on another day i see them make it work so it's really like a will thing yeah and okay so now so now you're in it you're doing it and and the one thing that i always was curious about with someone who offers a service in freelancing environment where the customers are always different industries different niches how do you stay how do you be effective across so many different issues because of course copywriting is you definitely have to but i'm i i think there's other things like if you are doing any sort of product specific work you have to find a way to execute whatever service it is that you offer against that product in like record time at a very high caliber so what's the is it just research is it mindset is it is there a strategy to find the best information in a short period of time even though you've never learned about that thing before in your life again that's that's why the questionnaires are so important in freelancing because if you have a proper questionnaire set up the client will essentially give you everything you already need so you'll say you know what page do you want done what's the topic do you have a title in mind do you have a blog that you really like that you want this to sound like and by the time they're done with your questionnaire you they've kinda of given you like everything you needed then just write it for at that oh okay so this is like the this is like the customer onboarding piece like this is like what this is when you're first bringing them on like that is like integral to being successful basically and the the questionnaire is everything it could it also minimizes miscommunication because like in the beginning my questionnaire would have like two questions in them and the client would i wouldn't know what the client wanted and then the client would get pissed at me and i'd get pissed the client you know all this stuff that when you have the ten questions by the end when they answer all ten questions like they can't get mad at you because you literally followed like everything they told you so it's like they don't have a case against you at that point because you listen on yeah because like i'm occasionally you get a crazy person who you will follow everything they ask of you and they're like bipolar or something and they'll they'll say like that's not what i want and i'm like okay or they could or they could be they could be they could be you know doing that on purpose because they want or they think they know the game right they think if they if they complain it's like the person who like like got after they ate the meal at the restaurant they're like this was shit like they think like they're gonna get a free free something out of you if they just complain enough exactly and if you you know have your questionnaire set up like that fiber will see that and be like okay we see the spire an asshole this person is trying to get free work basically alright okay cool alright so you so now you are growing your business on fiber the next the next step in entrepreneurship or solo entrepreneurship is pricing and and making your business more viable of course so what are some of the because this is something that i i've been in consulting before not copywriting but it's something that i struggled with personally i know a lot of people struggle with pricing their stuff how do you price your stuff and how do you know when to increase the price on on your stuff so on a fiber it's really easy because everyone's prices are public so you just go find your competitors and just copy it that's what i did yep two times i raised my prices on fiber when you advance a level raise prices when you have more work than you can humanly do in a ten hour workday day raise your prices it's all very like we're you know just fluid like just pay attention type of stuff put you raise your prices even more than those two triggers probably i always tend to operate on the lower end of the pricing spectrum that's a me problem but i i say to people you know those are the two instances don't be shy k very good so walk me through the like the current version of your business so obviously started on five you grew some additional products i just wanna get it like a holistic and maybe i'll think of some questions to go into or some strengths to going into then i wanna just keep going down your story in cnbc and some of the things that have come out of that as well so what's the current iteration of your business all the product services that you're doing right now yeah so my business has now officially made the jump from just being on fiber to being its own agency essentially so i have a person below me my best friend is actually the manager now of three different writers so i am no longer the girl alone on five or writing every day i've always been transparent about that which all the trolls are like she knows telling the truth i'm like you guys what like i i'm always i don't understand why my business can't grow like how how is that a sin like i've done talk about they'll talk about some of that stuff in a second dude well so i've done this for seven years i would be an idiot at this point if i didn't have people helping me like why would i just keep doing this alone so i have my best friend for the last two months now it's very it's very new is building out an agency essentially below me so i'm helping with the hiring of people looking over their work before it's delivered making sure it's up to par and she's basically doing the rest because i'm looking to now you know move more into almost a coaching like informational realm what this my my season of my podcast is starting next week i wanna get more into almost freelance reporting no one else is doing that i wanna feature different people's stories talk to other people in freelancing really like create this community of it that is just so lack online today that's where i'm heading with it right now so i am the most removed from it i have ever been but i think i deserve that it's been seven years thanks for tuning in if you found this valuable don't forget to hit that subscribe so you never episode and if you wanna dive deeper into this conversation out in the description to episode see you in the next one

indeed is a success story partner now here's your tech hiring tip of the week from indeed seventy three percent of tech workers say flexibility is one of their top priorities so if your job posting doesn't mention flexible hours or remote options you're basically invisible to three at a four candidates keep that in mind look hiring tech talent right now it's tough you are competing for people with super specific skills everyone wants hybrid work and the salary expectations are through the roof it's a lot that's why indeed actually makes sense they're the number one place where tech people go to apply for jobs we're talking three million tech professionals in the us and eighty six percent of them have applied through indeed it's not just some job board where you post and pray they've got tools like smart searching and their tech network that use ai to connect you with people who actually have the skills that you need companies using the tech network saw over four times more relevant applications that's huge more qualified people way less time wasted whenever i've needed tech talent in the past indeed is the only platform choosing if i needed to hire top tier tech talent today i'd still go with indeed post your first job and get seventy five dollars off at indeed dot com slash tech talent that's indeed dot com slash tech talent to claim this offer indeed build for what's now and what's next in tech hiring in this lessons episode explore how authenticity and persistence shape lasting personal brands in the digital age discover why embracing individuality builds stronger audience trust and impact understand how repeated failure fuels creativity and resilience in entrepreneurship and uncover why surrounding yourself with ambitious like minded people transforms both mindset and opportunity so walk walk me through even just like building out your your own quote unquote personal brand so the brand is is a culmination of of things that are i i don't even know how to best describe it like things that a man would want to figure out or or learn about or like how did you come to what alpha m is today what was the what was the concept yeah so alpha m when it first started was just style i was just talking about like how to dress because of the time back in two thousand eight the only resource for for guys was really like g q and esquire and you know it wasn't my reality and wasn't the reality of of my friends and family and people that i knew so i was like maybe there's just a a space for a regular guy to talk about style in a more regular way and then from there it kinda went into grooming and because i've always been interested in grooming i cut my own hair you know and so it was these little things that that i started you know talking about like butt hair like know i was the first person talking about like landscaping online really and it was just because i was i was comfortable talking about it and and it's something that i had questions about so i was like maybe there are other people that are interested in this kind of stuff and and maybe i can just be that resource and then it transitioned into you know pretty much anything that a guy might be interested in and then relationships and dating and and you know pretty much just lifestyle stuff and then i i fortunate enough to be able to give because i am a bit older than a lot of my audience give some just just real world lifestyle or life advice on on things that i've struggled with in my past or things that i've dealt with it i feel i can just share a a perspective and so so i think you do something really really well and and i've watched you know i've watched a couple of your videos obviously and one thing that how you teach is like you just mentioned you're just telling stories you're telling stories about stuff that you've gone through you talk about x's you talk about your personal choices for style for hair for grooming all that stuff did it take a certain was that something that you were comfortable with putting yourself out there authentic was that something that you had to struggle with for a while or was that like you mentioned the first few videos they weren't authentic what were they if they weren't authentic it was me trying to put be something that i wasn't and trying to you know i i was trying to be something that i thought i needed to be in order to get people to like me honestly and actually it never works no it never works and so it's very very easy to see through that and so yeah i mean that was just something it wasn't hard i mean that's the thing like the hard thing was was trying to be something and put up a facade and so you know the the easy thing is just to kinda let let your your true self you know shine through and just just do you and and be authentically you know open authentically you yeah yeah be authentically you exactly lots cliches and this there's so many clip van cl awesome there for reason and i love it okay let's okay what's the what's the shark tank play what's the shark tank you were two acts on shark tank right you were there twice i was on what happened there try to get on a third time they wouldn't take me back they're like aaron done with you what's the story now like shit yeah so so shark tags like my favorite show and for any entrepreneur if you're thinking about you know we're interested in business watch shark tank you know the cool thing is that you can go you know they're they're they're syndicated now on on you know television so every night of the week can go and watch like episode after episode after episode and so i came up with this e product it was my first stab at like an info product i should say not an e product because it was actually physically dvds that i was trying to sell it was an info product i thought that you know a lot of the people that i i'm i'm friends with in the space of internet you know business and sales a lot of guys are like oh the e product the e product and so i came up with this style system and so my dad was like well how we gonna try and sell it i'm like i don't know he goes you should try and go on shark tank i'm like yeah sure and so literally i remembered it was a friday night i went home i went to abc abc's website and i applied and on monday i got a call and and their asked for information and it was three months later i was pitching in front of the sharks in terms of of the the alpha m style system they hated the idea and and i was like oh no big deal you know it's okay i'm on tv so it's gonna be great i'm gonna sell you know thousands of these things i'm gonna be rich well the night shark tag aired i had like this big party everybody was around and i was sitting with like my my computer and i was like ready for the sales to come rolling in i literally right nine million people watching the show i sold one style system get out girl you sold one know people that are on shark tank and they they get like thousands as sales game from it depends on what it is apparently apparently i that was a real wake up call like hey stupid this is not this is not right and and so yeah it was it was a bummer so size i was bummed out for a little bit but then you know kinda got over it and and i am i just realized that i'm not really an e product hype kinda guy and at least not like physical dvd like i said i'm a dinosaur yeah like you can't even play a dvd on your computer anymore like it doesn't even have that ability and so if it was an app or if it was like a web based like program that was less expensive i think it would have been successful and i still think it's a good idea it's just it wasn't the right application and i wasn't the right guy to do it and then i i started a hair product company pete and pedro back in two thousand and twelve thirteen somewhere in two thousand thirteen i believe i started pete pedro which was a hair product company and i went to my stylist that i was friends with steven and i said hey do you have any connections at at any of these like labs that make hair product i think i i wanna come out with a hair product line and he's like yeah so he he gave me a number i i called them up they sent me samples i called a few other labs i got samples i i chose my products i i started pete pager white labeling products and my opening order i believe it was i started pete pedro for three thousand dollars and so no well that includes everything that includes my website that includes my my little stamps dot com like printing station boxes inventory i had five products b hair products that was selling and i got ninety six units of each and and it took me like five months to sell through that inventory and yeah that was that was an amazing business my first kind of business selling physical products other than i i played around i had a website also that i tried doing for a while a membership website where i was selling like hands strung like beaded bracelets the problem was that i was sitting there at night hand string these bracelets and so not a not a scalable mods it's not fun no and so i've tried a ton of shit man i have tried a lot of things and you know a lot of things some things have worked most things haven't you know and and you just keep you know trying and throwing stuff against the wall and just scratching the the curious itch and that's kind of the takeaway know i'm not scared to fail once you fail as big as i failed in terms of the fitness center and bankruptcy and all that you know failure it's not as scary and once you kinda get it out of the way and you realize that okay well that sucks it's stings and and and a lot of it not only one of the worst parts about when you when you when you fail in business it's not necessarily the burden that it places on you it's the embarrassment of having to acknowledge that something that you tried didn't work to other people and so when you get over at least it was for me you know i can only speak for myself but once you kinda get over the the ego of yep you know what i tried it at least and and you realize that most people aren't even willing to do that you know and and it's funny because the most people that are the most critical or the nay or the people that you know say oh you shouldn't do that or you're wrong they never done shit and they never will they're just going it basically they're more comfortable staying comfortable and would rather you know sit on the sidelines and point figures and and say how you you didn't do something right or you should have done this way it's like you know what you know f you you know i'm i'm out here trying i'm gonna i'm gonna try i may not i may not be successful but at least i i don't have regret and i'm not doing something i don't wanna do monarch money is a success story partner now you know what's it's weird i'm doing well financially but i have this constant low level financial anxiety that i was missing something because i have crypto on all these different exchanges i have multiple investment accounts old four zero one k's savings scattered everywhere i knew the pieces were fine but i had no idea if the whole picture made sense i finally got monarch money to pull everything into one view and the first thing i noticed i had ten thousand dollars sitting in a temporary savings account from eight months ago when i sold some stock that's eight months ten thousand dollars it could have been workings that have just waiting for me to remember it existed also it showed me that i was spending tons monthly on all these subscription services that i couldn't even remember i signed up for every sunday morning it takes me five minutes to check everything all my financial stuff in one place no more wondering no more anxiety the wall street journal just named it the best budgeting app of twenty twenty five but honestly it's more about finally having control so don't let financial opportunity slip through the cracks use code success at monarch money dot com in your browser for half off your first year that's fifty percent off your first year at monarch money dot com with code success hubspot as a success story partner now success story is part of the hubspot podcast network they have tons of other great shows one of my personal favorites is the hustle daily show it's hosted by juliet bennett r rob ben berkeley and mark dent now the hustle daily show brings you this healthy dose of irr off beat and informative takes on business and tech and news it's fun it's topical it's relevant it's every single day and it's news you'll actually enjoy and things that actually matter to you hustle daily show is part of the hubspot podcast network listen to the hustle daily show wherever you get your podcasts indeed is a success story partner now here's your tech hiring tip of the week from indeed seventy three percent of tech workers say flexibility is one of their top priorities so if your job posting doesn't mention flexible hours or remote options you're basically invisible to three at of four candidates keep that in mind look hiring tech talent right now it's tough you are competing for people with super specific skills everyone wants hybrid work and the salary expectations are through the roof it's a lot that's why indeed actually makes sense they're the number one place where tech people go to apply for jobs we're talking three million tech professionals in the us and eighty six percent of them have applied through indeed it's not just some job board where you post and pray they've got tools like smart searching and their tech network that uses ai to connect you with people who actually have the skills that you need companies using the tech network saw over four times more relevant applications that's huge more qualified people way less time wasted whenever i've needed tech talent in the past indeed is the only platform my choosing and if i needed to hire top tier tech talent today i'd still go with indeed post your first job and get seventy five dollars off at indeed dot com slash tech talent that's indeed dot com slash tech talent to claim this offer indeed built for what's now and what's next in tech hiring that's a damn good attitude to have just just jumping into stuff in life and i think that that's what you have to it's hard but you know what you gotta do you gotta find you gotta find your tribe that just supports and and then and then you double down on that tribe and you force yourself to be accountable by telling them what you are doing so you're so you know that if you fail they're there to support you because you don't want you know and that's a tough thing because like sometimes it's family sometimes as friends you've had for a long time that are just really shitty to towards what you're trying to do and that's a tough pill for a lot of people to swallow but when you find your tribe people to support you that are also trying shit and entrepreneurial not even entrepreneurial just like super ambitious if you put it out into the world like for this podcast for example like i purposefully tell every single person i meet now and now my identity has become more of the podcast when it was first starting it was the other stuff i was doing oh i work at this job and i have a podcast on the site versus is i lead with the podcast because that's holding me accountable man like they're gonna look me up and they're gonna see and like i don't i don't wanna fail so i don't you know i'm just like making myself do it all the time but i think that's the tribe you have to build people that are cool with that and that was yeah and and that was you know there was a gentleman that i that i met that was on youtube antonio antenna he is a youtube channel real men real style he reached out to me and and i knew about them him just because i saw it was it was me i started the youtube thing first talking about style and then he came in a few years later and and i and i hated him i'm like this son of a bitch is doing trying to you know steal my something whatever and so he actually reached out to me and he said hey let's get together and and meet up and why don't we have kinda like a a get together or meetup up for some of these other people that kind of are inner our space and i was very resistant to doing it but it was one of the best decisions i ever made was kinda stepping out of my comfort zone because i did not understand the importance of surrounding yourself with people that are sort of moving in the same direction and you know and that was one of the like i said the things that changed my life all of a sudden i was around people that i had i had needed to be around that were all like you know inspiring like people that were trying that were just going after their dreams and doing something different you know and and that was it was amazing because once you do get around those people that are that are trying that are striving that are just doing things outside of the box it is amazing how it inspires you number one but it also will give you ideas and then if you ever need help you know it's they're always you know just a phone caller a text away and my my friend jordan harbinger likes to say you your network is your your network worth or your network is your network i'm sure he stole that yeah somebody else anyway but at the damn good quote i know george yeah so jordan he has a great podcast that yeah that's what i'm trying to go to yeah they got that spot he's he's rockstar star right and so yeah yeah jordan you know he said and and jordan had kind of like a tumultuous i can't even say that we're tumultuous tumultuous sort of relationship break up with his former business partner and you know and and it was hard i mean jordan literally almost started like from ground zero he had his podcast but you know they had a very big you know and successful coaching business and and you know and and jordan he was like you know what i'm just gonna reach out to these people that i know that are friends and and he does he every day like sits down and sends text messages to people just to say hey and just to keep that connection going and yeah you know i think that's something so incredibly you know powerful because we get so caught up in our own lives and our own shit a lot of times that you know just taken a few seconds out of the day just to connect with people you never know when you're going to need them or they may need thanks for tuning in if you found this valuable don't forget to hit that subscribe button so you never miss an episode and if you wanna dive deeper into this conversation out the links in the description to watch the full episode see you in the next one check