51吃瓜

in this lessons episode we're talking about why ai terri you it just proved what you do isn't as special as what you thought because now you're watching a machine do your job in seconds and you're feeling your entire professional identity crack apart gonna talk about what separates people ai will replace from people it can't touch and how to make sure you're in the right category before it's too late every single creative person that i know right now is having the exact same crisis they feel like ai is taking their creativity they open check gb they type in a prompt thirty seconds later it spits out something that took them three hours last week but the worst part isn't that ai can do your job it's that they can't explain why their version is better than ai version so artists are panicking writers are protesting designers are furious this narrative is everywhere right ai is stealing our creativity it's destroying our craft it's making us obsolete but here's what's actually happening ai isn't stealing anything it's holding up a mirror and most people don't like what they see because if a machine can replicate what you do in thirty seconds maybe what you're doing wasn't as creative as you thought maybe you were following a process that you absorbed from everyone else you just didn't realize it until something could do it faster now this isn't an attack because i spent many years of my creative life in the exact same position before i figure this out but if you're feeling defensive if you're feeling angry right never saying scott that's wrong maybe examine that reaction but let me explain what i mean let me describe your creative process tell me if i'm wrong you sit down to right you scroll twitter for inspiration you read three articles in your niche you notice what's trending you absorb the patterns jim and you start to rearrange those ideas and it's something that sounds like you and then you hit publish and if ai can replicate that in thirty seconds it's not because ai stole your creativity it's because what you were doing was pattern matching it wasn't creativity so this is what's actually happening right you see a hundred examples of good content in your space and your brain learns that structure the hooks that work the frameworks that everyone uses the talking points that get engagement and then you reproduce those patterns you add your unique voice which really just means you use slightly different words to say the same thing that everyone else is saying and that's not really creativity that's curation and i know this because i've done this for years before i realized what i was actually doing see the reason ai feels so threatening isn't because it's taking your job it's because that you just realized your entire creative identity is built on doing something that a machine can replicate which means that it was never that special to begin with me tell you a story about my friend sarah she's a graphic designer ten years of experience built a very solid freelance career and then mid journey came out so her first reaction was great right this is stealing from real artists this is not real creativity it's destroying the industry so i asked her to walk me through how she creates a brand identity for a client she said well i start by looking at competitors in their space i see what's working i create a mood board on pinterest i pull color palettes from brands that i look up to i'd admire i iterate on those patterns until something clicks and i didn't have to say anything she heard it she was doing exactly what ai does analyzing patterns holding from existing work rec combining it in slightly new ways the only difference is that ai does it faster oh here's where it gets interesting sarah didn't quit design she changed how she designs so she stopped starting with pinterest she started with conversations deep ones but the founder life story their actual vision what they care about beyond just looking professional and building a business right then she'd create three completely different directions not variations of the same approach three genuinely different ways to express that specific person's worldview view and her clients started paying her triple and it's not because she got better at design because she finally started doing something that ai can't do translating a human unique perspective individual form that's the shift and most people won't make that shift because they're too busy defending a process it was never theirs in the first place see the panic around ai isn't really about losing jobs or losing income that's a lagging indicator it's about identity collapse you spent years building a skill you got good at it people paid you for it your entire sense of self is tied up in this identity of being the designer or the writer or the creative and then ai shows up and does in thirty seconds what took you three hours and that hurts because you're losing money because you realize your entire identity was built on something a machine can replicate which unfortunately means it was never that special to begin with see if ai can do what you do you were never creating you were executing and execution is exactly what machines are built for and this is the mirror that ai holds up and most people don't like what they see now here's how you know if you want if you're saying scott no i have a real creative process trust me okay fine let's test that idea out sit down right now create something in your field piece of writing a design concept a video outline whatever you do but here's the rule no research no looking at what's trending no checking what others are doing no ai just you and a blank page is that a timer for thirty minutes and just start creating and if you finish with something worth sharing you have a real creative process you can generate ideas from your own synthesis of knowledge and experience and thinking if you stare at the page for thirty minutes and you produce nothing you don't have a creative process you have a copying process with enough steps that you didn't realize that it was copying and look this is not an insult most people are in this category including me when i first started creating content but the question is not am i upset about it it's what are you gonna do about it because ai isn't going away so let's talk about what a real creative process actually looks like and before i show you the specific methods that i use you need to understand what separates a real creative process from pattern matching gust is a success story partner now look i talked to business owners every single day you know what i hear constantly scott i love running my business but i hate dealing with payroll and i get it nobody starts a company because they're excited about calculating tax withholding and benefits administration that's exactly why use gust myself and the smartest business owners use it as well gust is online payroll and benefits software built for small business it's all in one remote friendly and incredibly easy to use so you can pay higher onboard and support your team from anywhere now here's what's sold me unlimited payroll runs for one monthly price no surprises no hidden fees when you need to run that extra payroll and when you hit a tough hr situation and trust me you will you get direct access to actual certified hr experts not a chat real people who know what they're talking about plus they're the number one payroll software according to g two for fall twenty twenty five and over four hundred thousand small businesses already trust them pride gust today at gust dot com slash success story and get three months free when you run your first payroll that's three months free payroll at gust dot com slash success story 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 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 i'm grabbing my morning coffee you're 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 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 so a real creative process isn't about following a formula it's about having a system for generating ideas that nobody else would generate because they don't have your exact combination of experience knowledge and obsessions here's what that system includes there's the real process of idea generation or you don't wait for inspiration or scroll for trending topics you have a method for surfacing ideas maybe you go on walks and you just voice note observations maybe you keep a running document of questions that bother you maybe you deliberately consume content outside your niche to create these unexpected connections whatever it is it's yours it's specific it's repeatable and it produces ideas that only you would have next you need a real process for connection so you don't just take idea a and pair it with idea b because they're obviously related you have a method for finding non obvious connections between concepts you maintain a knowledge system that allows you to pull from multiple domains simultaneously this is why reading widely matters not so you can reference books in your content but so you have more raw material to create connections than nobody else sees after connection you have a real process for synthesis so you don't just explain what others have said you have a framework for transforming input into output you have questions you ask yourself you have standards for what makes an idea worth sharing you have a filter that everything passes through before it becomes part of your work this is what makes your work yours about your style not your voice your filtering system and lastly you have a real process for iteration so you don't just publish and move on you have a method for improving you track what works you analyze why you experiment you evolve most people never get here because you're too busy trying to go viral with templates that copied from someone else now let me show you exactly how to build this system this is exactly what i do it's not theory it's the actual system that i use generate ideas and create work that can't be automated the first way i do this is something called the collision system so every sunday i spend about thirty minutes choosing three topics that i want to explore that week and they have to be from completely different domains so last week it was cognitive load theory ancient stoic philosophies and practices and how video game designers create addictive loops and throughout the week i consume content on these three ideas i'll read books i'll watch videos i'll listen to podcast but the key is that i'm not taking notes on what they say i'm writing down the questions that pop into my head so for example this is what i wrote down for this week and the questions and the assumptions don't have to be right or wrong you just write so one question i wrote down is why is reducing options make people more decisive in video games but not in real life i wrote down how did stoic handle information overload but all these modern systems and i also wrote what if cognitive load isn't about memory capacity but attention direction right so by friday i have fifteen to twenty questions from colliding these three topics and then i sit down to right i don't start with what should i write about i start with which of these questions is worth exploring this is how you generate ideas that ai can't generate and replicate it's not because you're smarter because you're connecting specific things that exist in your knowledge base in ways that require your questions the second method is a reverse engineering framework so most people study content in their niche that's the wrong move that just teaches you to copy what already exists instead find creators outside your space have qualities that you want to develop so if i wanna get better at explaining complex ideas i didn't study other writers i studied youtubers who teach technical skills so i pulled up ten videos from a creator who was explaining programming the beginners i didn't watch for content i watched for structure how do they introduce complexity when do they use examples versus definitions how do they handle objections how do they create these aha moments and then i started to document a specific pattern so start with the problem solves show one concrete example explain the principle behind it show two more examples with increasing complexity address the common confusion give a practice exercise that's a framework now i can apply that framework to any topic not because i copied their content but because i extracted their thought process again this is what ai can't do it can't execute a framework it can't reverse engineer one from a different domain and translate it to yours the third method the deliberate input so i keep four running documents just on my phone surprise facts that made me rethink something concepts i don't fully understand yet questions nobody seems to be asking and contradiction i've noticed between different thinkers and every piece of content i consume gets filtered through these four categories so if nothing from what i just read or watched fits into one of these four categories it wasn't worth consuming and this does two things first it forces me to actively process instead of passively consume i can't just binge content and call it research second it builds a database of raw materials that's already filtered for originality so when i sit down to create i'm not starting from zero i'm pulling from ideas that i've already identified as non obvious and interesting so here's what it looks like in practice so i just read an article how japanese companies approach failure different than western companies and from that one article i got three things surprising fact something i don't understand in the question so the surprising fact was that they document failures as thoroughly as successes which is a contradiction to move fast and break things the thing i didn't understand is how does this scale in fast moving industries than the question that i asked or that i thought should be asked was why do americans treat failure as a learning experience but then immediately move on without documenting the lesson so that is three potential angles for future content from one article because i'm not just consuming i'm deliberately extracting what's useful now what does this mean for you it means that building a real creative process is not a weekend project it's a complete restructuring of how you approach your craft and how you consume content and how you form ideas do you have to care more about developing genuine ideas than just performing well you have to read widely instead of staying in your lane you have to sit with concepts that you don't understand until you do you have to question your own thinking instead of defending and you have to document your process so you can improve it now most people won't do this not because it's hard because it's very uncomfortable requires admitting that what you've been calling your creative process was actually just pattern recognition and that's fine but ai will handle the pattern recognition it'll execute templates it'll optimize for what works workflow but it can't do what you can do if you actually develop the skill of thinking see the people panicking about ai right now are the ones who've never built that skill they learn to execute not create an execution is exactly what machines are built for see the people thriving with ai are the ones who generate ideas worth executing and now they have a tool that handles that execution while they focus on thinking remember ai didn't create this divide it just made it visible because there was always two types of creators two types of thinkers two types of knowledge workers there was people who generate ideas and there's is people who execute patterns people who think and people who copy people who create frameworks and people who follow them ai just revealed which category you're actually in and for most people that revelation is uncomfortable to say the least but here's the thing you can move categories you're not just stuck you just have to be willing to rebuild your entire approach from the ground up but it will make you a stronger person a stronger individual a stronger creator a stronger entrepreneur a stronger employee start with curiosity real curiosity about something specific not what's trending curiosity but what question would you explore even if nobody cared and build a system for capturing those questions connecting ideas and not just organizing them but connecting them creating new insights from this collision and develop standards for your work beyond performance what makes something worth creating even if it gets zero engagement now ironically when you create work worth creating is a very low chance it'll get zero engagement but i digress this is the work not using better prompts not learning new tools developing the capacity to think in ways that produce ideas worth sharing because ai is only gonna get better at execution the question is whether you'll get better at thinking either way mirror isn't going away claude is a success story partner now as a podcast my worst nightmare used to be going into an interview under prepared now claude has completely changed my prep game and if you don't know what claude is claude is the ai for mines that don't stop at good enough it is the collaborator that actually understands your entire workflow and thinks with you not for you whether or not you're debugging code at midnight or you're strat your next business move claude extends your thinking to tackle the problems that matter i feed claude my guest articles before i do a podcast i feed it their company updates past interviews and it helps me spot the angles that nobody else is talking about last week claude research capabilities pulled together insights from over thirty sources about my guests industry and it helped me ask questions that always make them say great question nobody's ever asked me that before claude is by far the most useful tool to grow any business any podcast and really just help you extend your thinking on whatever it is you're working on if you're ready to tackle bigger problem sign up for cloud today and get fifty percent off quad pro when you use my link cloud dot ai slash success

sports injuries test you your mind your body and spirit others transform you elevating you to a stronger bolder version of yourself at summit orthopedic our experts are prepared for both for every challenge for every comeback because you deserve nothing less than the best live life at your summit with summit orthopedic summit ortho dot com hustle hustle hustle when you consistently do that you increase your cortisol levels you decrease testosterone and also other performance indicators so we have to find this fine balance between success and also longevity on today's episode i'm joined by jc c white an entrepreneur innovator who knows what it means to build from the ground up from the early days of hustling to now creating ventures that challenge convention jc has proven that resilience and bold thinking can change entire industries body building is the greatest thing not just about like building muscles or the superficial stuff it is literally the mental and spiritual side that comes out of it because when you take those lessons and you apply it to business or you apply to other of your life you cannot lose he's not afraid to push boundaries test limits and bring ideas to life that most people wouldn't even attempt his story is about grit vision and the courage to on yourself when the odds are stacked against you the number one killer men america's heart disease million deaths happen every single year from heart disease the good thing is a lot of those things can be easily fixed which is nutrition and lifestyle and it's not like craziest people think some people can just have higher levels cholesterol just nap naturally and if that's the case then the ketogenic diet can actually be very dangerous for them so an attempt to get healthy sometimes that can actually cause you to get unhealthy and raise their risk of heart disease the fastest way to make better choices in the life is to make take more accountability over your previous choices have enough faith to begin the process and job will take care of the rest okay so jc what is modern success doing to our hormones absolutely tanking them because modern success is go go go hustle hustle hustle grind grind grind and when you consistently do that you increase your cortisol levels you decrease testosterone and also and also other performance indicators so we have to find this fine balance between success and also longevity i think that a lot of people that sort of identify as high performers listen to this podcast or looking at you or even looking at me and saying i wanna achieve success i wanna learn from scott's guess and i wanna achieve like even a little bit of fraction of what they've done i i do believe that they think that they have to sacrifice their health to get it i've heard this repeatedly like i cannot build anything significant and be in shape and go to the gym i think it's shorts sighted for sure what happens when you live your life like that because you see the guys and the world then everybody who lives their life like that what happens well typically what ends up happening is when they get into their forties and fifties their body catches up to all the years that they neglected it so that's when they'll see levels of high cholesterol they're gonna be more insulin resistant and then that's where their hormones is gonna have huge issues so cortisol issues testosterone issues and other things that come alongside it so when we start to have that type of image of success was compartment yeah you know in order to be successful in business you have to give up your health in order to be successful with your family you know you have to put work on the back burner that's when we start to be very short sighted in you know everything ends up catching itself in the end is it because people are are not good at balancing life is it because people's priorities are screwed up like why do people believe it's in the first place here fear of not making it a if fear of not being good enough fear of like well you know i don't feel like i can achieve x amount of income or x amount of business success without sacrificing something like it doesn't make sense to me doesn't make sense that i could have good body good health good relationships with my family good relationships spiritually mental health plus make money like it almost like doesn't compute yeah it's fear in its lack of patience if we set clear injectable goals and we give ourselves enough time in the yeah in the time period isn't something that is too shorten you know it's saying instead of a year we give ourselves five or ten years to actually achieve those goals in each area of life then it it almost loosen the reins a little bit so if you wanna be healthy but you also wanna build a very successful maybe multi a figure business you wanna be married and have kids and have good mental health well as opposed to just saying okay i wanna accomplish that the next year we'll just extrapolate time or and it takes the pressure off yeah but when we just started just i need to get rich tomorrow i need to get fit tomorrow yeah that's when people get into this you know they they don't get there to their goal and quicker time and they they quit you know that's what you always see in fitness right people start january one i wanna get fit this year the first time to go to the gym for people like going to the gym and worse time to go you know i actually i appreciate seeing them because i was once the person that started in that cycle too as well i just happen to stick to it but you know they get get into that cycle and then they you quitting you know a month or two later because they they they didn't see the results fast enough because it was as unrealistic i'm like bro you've been in that body for forty years do you expect to get out of it in three months that it doesn't work while when you frame it like that yeah that's the way it is it's like if you were broke for forty years you expect to be a multi millionaire in three months know working for we we gotta be more patient with the process what made you stick with it what made you stick with it that a lot of people lack because i think that something that all body builders and not just body bill they're think body builders is tough because it's like you against you there's no coach especially when you start out sort of pushing you on like if you're playing for a team you have teammates your peers your coach body building it's like such a solo sport so like the mental fort it takes to just continue on it's not easy so what made you successful at body building i think there's actually a lot of things that translate from body building and just being okay in inflict a certain amount of pain on yourself to business success but what made it like what made you successful at it have you ever like what that psychological thing was it allowed you to be successful when many people weren't i believe that i just had an innate desire to wanna be great and i felt like that was like the key in order to do that because like you just mentioned it's u verse virtue yeah there's no more excuses it's a massive amount of accountability and so with those two things in mind you can't point the finger at somebody else if you're not getting the results and as a young man that's the lesson that i needed to learn because the reason why i you know didn't do as well and other things in my life at the time times is because i lacked accountability is because i didn't look myself in the mirror and say okay this where really need to improve upon this is where your stream are this where your weaknesses are and then go to war with myself body building is is the greatest thing it's not just about like building muscles or the superficial stuff it is literally the mental and spiritual side that comes out of it and because when you take those lessons you apply it to business or you apply to the other of your life you cannot lose yeah that's the beauty in the game i mean you mean you take that mindset in the business you're not gonna win you'll crush yeah because you're not looking at your competition you're looking at you you say everything that my results that i'm producing is solely on me nobody else but a lot of people have a hard time with that a lot of people have a hard time with accountability and sort of looking inside and saying like the life that i'm living is a result of really just my choices mh whether or not whether or not you you like that or or you don't it doesn't matter it's like most people's lives is the sum of their choices and yeah there's bad luck for people for sure but still it's all on you to figure it out at day well i would just ask them and what kind of life do you wanna live at the end of the day yeah because at the end of your life it's gonna be dictated by the choices that you make and if the the the fastest way to make better choices in the life is to make better like take take more accountability over your previous choices so we are direct equation of the choices we've previously made in life you're at where you're at in life because you made good choices hopefully i didn't one you it seems like you've made pretty good choices i dude you know i'm at where i'm in life because i made good choices too as well you know i hadn't always made great choices in life but you know it's because you can take the moment to self reflect and say okay this is where i fall in short where i need to do in order to move life forward so i i just believe like that's that's one of the beauties in in body building and in fitness and you know and it's just a byproduct that you look better you feel better like that's just that's just the icing on the cake wherever were you at mentally when you were missing college basketball try you were depressed you weren't doing great how did you pull yourself out of that what like what happened yeah i was i was crushed i mean i was i was a decent high school athlete i had some d one looks you know had some recognition from you know local papers in in in statewide papers and then my college coach had set up a a try out with a like a one of the the college i went at the time which was western michigan before i transferred and i slept through it like like was it because of depression or was it you were just tired or what just irresponsible and i think a little bit of self sabotage a little bit a little bit and i woke up and i remember i just called up my max girlfriend at the time and she was like what's wrong i was had just slept to the trial it was the whole reason why i went to the school in the first place and she's was like you're gonna call your coach figure off if he can arrange another i was like nope so what are you gonna do other i don't know figure it out and that was like a very defining moment because i didn't really have a path at that point yeah i didn't know what i was gonna do i was kinda interested in law at the time but i was like i know if i really wanna go down there right i was just gonna go down there for the money but and then i just found my way into the gym later that week and i used to hate the gym dude it out was so fucking week i remember at one time i went in high school and we were bench pressing everybody was like throwing around two twenty five i only had thirty five pound place on there was like only like one fifteen barely hitting it i was like dude i hate this shit that's so fine but i went into the gym and then you know it it wasn't that i was strong when i went in there but it started to help me to feel a sense of accomplishment and relief because just doing one workout if you just knock out one you won yeah and then you do it again and you one again and so that start to stick with me and the results don't come fast yeah but as long as you stick with that and you start to learn the other skills that come with it about you know nutrition and lifestyle and sleep which we'll get into more about that then the win start to come compound and then that's where you start to see the transformation but you know to kinda to wrap that up you know it it it it it taught me like a lot of life skills doing that and enabled started to transform me from the inside out so talk to me about body building and sort of what you learned from body building that sort of shaped your view of nutrition health and wellness yeah nutrition is the most underutilized mechanism in order to transform the body people do not look at it as as how powerful it actually is when you dial it in to the degree of what your body needs not only based upon your blood chemistry but how you're training how you will you recover and then make adjustments based upon your bowel feedback that is a huge mover that's what help me don't me i was also very young too so like you're gonna have optimal hormones during that time period so i'm gonna take advantage of that but people need to really understand the power of nutrition and power of actually supplementing like intelligently not just randomly taking supplements because some a guy on the internet said take something right which a lot of people end up doing but when you take it based upon what your body actually truly needs i think when a lot of people start working out the obvious thing or the thing that feels right is to go to the best looking person on instagram and just listen to what they say yeah and a lot of the time some people are honest more than when i started working out people are more honest about if they if they take steroids or they take something but a lot of people aren't honest so a lot of people are listening to the advice of people that aren't natural and are on a whole bunch of shit and they're like why isn't you know my gym routine working compared to x influencer on social media so as somebody who's like truly natural and competed natural and sort of i would say you know figure out how to optimize yourself naturally where does somebody start like what is what is grow science versus optical science right yeah i i love this i love this so do one more quick thing for me to define be healthier what what does that mean because i can be so let's define it how do you define be healthier yeah so my definition of that would be high levels of energy optimal blood work and then you know you have you know if we were to track your sleep you have good hr and things like that is that the definition we wanna do for like okay kill and jim and be helpful what would other definitions be some people it may just be like okay i wanna have better cardiovascular endurance but i think that i think that all of that if i look at what are the the markers of of living a long life it that's different so looks like a spear right because like if you wanna go yeah you wanna kill it in gym and go muscle mass that is not optimal for longevity like if we're gonna go interesting yeah that's because that's a different path you gotta go down the macron nutrients are gonna be so like your protein carbohydrate fast for both of those yeah your recovery cycle is gonna be different like the whole game plan is gonna be different i would not be doing the same thing from now like ten years from now bro that do right now this is not good yeah this is gonna take me to eighty five ninety eighty five people wanna live to a hundred and twenty bro like yeah well yeah you know i mean right yeah like this is to just to look great you know do magazine stuff that that's it you know you know look good for women you know that's what it's most we wanna look good for women if you're if you're if you're trying to like go to the gym but i don't think many people think they wanna end up on the cover of like a a fitness magazine so there has to be a balance between both i wanna look good and then i also wanna live long okay alright so that clearly the defines what you mean by healthy so that's probably gonna put you around like thirteen percent to fifteen percent body had a true thirteen percent to fifteen percent body fat with that type of protocol then you wanna focus mainly on your cardiovascular like the most recent research shows that cardiovascular is more important in stream training i would i would say doing that three or five times per week for about thirty minutes to fifty minute sessions is gonna be most important in a zone two and then stream training is just gonna be to for bone density and that's also gonna help with some natural growth hormone release and keeping testosterone levels optimal too as well that you wanna need about three times per a week for about thirty to forty five minutes you wanna focus on like heavier compound lifts yeah and then far as nutrition now this is where it's gonna actually gonna be different we'll get more we'll get more on the weeds too i just want somebody like just starting out so yeah so go forward i i know that they're like it's so funny when you talk to somebody who's such a specialist there's like a a trillion different auctions in your head about okay well we have to measure this and your reaction to this and if you're you know genetically predisposed to this and my brain goes not where your brain goes but i i don't want people to start there because i think that they have to start somewhere and then the then once and we can talk about habit forming too i think that it's important to start at a spot where you can maintain the habit and once you maintain the habit then you can go a level deeper and a level deeper but i also believe that too many people online throw too much shit at people out of the gate and then they're like well fuck this i can't as way too much stuff right and then they just drop off and then there's they're the typical january jim go who signs up in january and then you pay the gym for the rest of the year and you never go okay yeah so the i would say just a a mix of of cardio and stream training primarily focusing on cardio then when it comes to the nutrition just to keep it like high level focus more on you know whole foods and like being the primary focus of your plate with the side of protein yeah lean more towards like lighter proteins not like you know steaks and stuff like that so like fishes and chickens and then get really good sleep that's gonna be the that is important yeah that goes against the hospital culture yeah yeah i got some stuff to say about that but yeah yeah yeah get getting really get really good sleep it's not just the the the quantity of the quality of the sleep there's tons of different ways you could track that with or ring we'll be use one in particular absolutely but i lost it in greece so going now so like trip yeah is okay so i've also heard this tell me if it's right or wrong the biggest indicators of longevity are strength training in v two max does that make sense yeah yeah there's there's also some other things too as well but yeah those are those are great indicators you said like the way that you eat and lift and live right now it's not for longevity no so is there a point in your life when you are gonna switch it up yeah absolutely and if you do switch it up you said like the way that body builders live which i agree it's not to live to ninety or a hundred or even eighty eighty five can you reverse a lifestyle at a certain point so for example if you switch your lifestyle in ten years can you live to a hundred it depends of how much damage to be brutally honest you know you know i i checked my boat probably about three to four times per year and it's usually very good but you know if i were to push in certain ways and do certain things you know you you always it's it's a fine tune i love body building i love screen training i love power that's why i've done all those things but it does come with the cost you know so you know it's just how far can i push it out how far do i wanna push it if somebody is actually really into body building and they've been body building say until like they're like you know mid to late thirties is there things that this is gonna be a smaller sample of the audience but are there things that you look for in your blood work that could indicate like oh shit i have to change my lifestyle sort of sooner than later yeah for sure i i would tell anybody who's into body to get more advanced cardiovascular panels done so like a l fourteen a like look at all those so look at particle size too as well that's very very important especially if they're using ana antibiotics because that typically drives up those inflammatory markers i'll look at c reactive protein too as well that's just a overall inflammatory marker of the body and then also don't just look at your glucose so go like your a a1c and your you know your insulin resistance or sensitivity that's really important and then also depending on upon how much testosterone when you're using if you are doing that type of game look at your red blood cell count because a lot of times i thicken your blood is there issues that you see with so many people jumping on t i think it's becoming more popular and people are i think men in general feel like they and i understand why they want to have sex drive they wanna feel like they have energy and they wanna feel like they did when they were twenty so i feel like everybody's jumping on t team now because it's not taboo okay fine but i don't think there's anybody that's really speaking about the potential negatives to sort of cruising on testosterone on your entire life yeah great question so t is the most well marketed supplement put the most highly over utilized for optimal performance we get guys that come to us every single day where we look at their blow work and it is still absolute trash yeah and they're not being monitored or supervised correctly by whoever put it on them and they'll t will drive up your ldl cholesterol which is typically thought like the bad one drive your hdl which is thought the go one thickens up the blood and it's crazy because like a lot of guys what they'll see they'll see an initial blu up at first when you get on t get a little energy back get a little beetle back they'll start to feel but then it goes right back the baseline you can't put a band aid over a bullet wound like you gotta go back down to the root cause it's just an amplifier like i started using t once i got into my thirties it a little bit more sometimes right but it it it it it only it only amplifies and helps if you're doing everything else correctly you don't have to be you know like a a crazy man with it and and track every single macro and eat out of tu where but you do need to have the like the fundamentals now i almost say like it's like it's like if you wanted to build a business and you get funding but you don't even have a business game plan yeah yeah it's like he's gonna run he's not gonna go anywhere anyway so it's like the same thing you have to have a smart strategy behind it and it's it's i don't want it to to run its course and then people just go on to the next fad because we just didn't utilize it correctly so there needs to be more education in the space like okay yes it's it's good to use if if your body is no longer producing and or producing it you know lower than especially with free test software lower than what your body actually needs but we do need to focus on the main things you need to get make sure you get good sleep and make sure you're eating correctly 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 amount and 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 to 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 in 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 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 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 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 sponsored jobs helps you stand out and hire faster and with sponsored 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 first of all i don't even think people know what a biomarker is so what is a biomarker you test seventy nine of them this is sort of like the basic rudimentary i'm gonna start working with jc this is what what i have to do right okay so talk to me about biomarkers why are they important what are they what do they tell you yeah so bob to simply put is just individual blood tests right so and then each one had like a panel will have like either twenty or thirty three or seven or five just depends on what you're actually looking at so we start off with at least seventy nine it could be way more just depends upon once we intake a new client if we need to do more but we look at advanced cardiovascular we look at like blood sugar we look at all hormones to like testosterone free testosterone sex hormone binding gl cortisol est other things too as well just to really get a full identification of what's going on on in the person inside because that determines the road map that determines the strategy because you know you we and i are the same age but we took our blood test to probably come up very different so therefore we need different supplements different training programs different arrest recovery protocol all those things that would be different so that's what we do in order to help get people to the from a to z as fast as possible and what do you see in like somebody who's like a high performer stressed out working hard what do you see typically i mean it's gonna to be the nuances but what do he typically in their blood yeah typically it's usually high cortisol also stress a lot of stress yeah stress is usually high than because of that testosterone is lower yeah and then estrogen rises to compensate for that normally so that's like estrogen is kinda like the female hormone for our viewers who don't understand it so that usually starts to compensate that's when the body starts to get soft in doughy you know all the water watery all that kind of stuff and then there's some usually some immune system disorders to as well that's just because of the elevated stress chronically so that's usually like the things that that we'll see but the good thing is a lot of that's o n cholesterol too as well the number i'm one killer men america's heart disease about a million deaths happen every single year from heart disease so so those things the good thing is a lot of those things can be easily fixed which is nutrition nutrition and lifestyle and and it's not like craziest as people think in order to like help with cholesterol it's just increasing fiber lowering saturated fats that's pretty much it for the most part and it's just making more conscious smarter choices when you go out to so instead of having like the rib eye for dinner have the fillet yeah and it have a little bit of oatmeal for breakfast like it's just conscious choices like that and then we custom formulate supplements too as well that can help people to are there any is there any genetic predisposition to certain diets to work well for some versus others do some just work well generally versus others is there any truth to that what's true what's not yeah so we do a genetic test and then you'll look at just anything things that you're genetically predisposed exposed to so hyper cholesterol anemia as one of them so some people can just have higher levels cholesterol just naturally and if that's the case then the ketogenic diet can actually be very dangerous for them because you good ketogenic diet is high in fats high and saturated fats which will drive your cholesterol even more so it would attempt to get healthy sometimes that can actually cost people to get unhealthy and then raise their risk of heart disease so we'll look at like your particle size as well to really see if a a good look at that and you know we've been able to save some flies by doing that i have no doubt because because i i've see i see people one of my friends has exactly what you're describing and like he's a very small person like he's not not fat he's not fat at he's like he's like tiny he's very skinny but like his cholesterol is just horrible like genetically horrible and his kid's cholesterol is horrible and his kid is like very young but it's like a highly elevated cholesterol on the kid is just a kid doesn't eat like shit they feed him healthy stuff so these so this genetic predisposition he tracks his blood work now but yeah it's very scary because you wouldn't look at him you you'd look at him and like the healthiest is dude exactly healthiest is silent killer yeah yeah and but i think that like when i think i think when people think silent kill it just think like well it's gonna sneak up on me i'm not gonna feel sort of any i'm not gonna feel anything wrong with me before it happens but i don't think that people that are really skinny think that they even have a chance of of for how is misconception but but tell me when you when you if you were gonna go into the mind of somebody who's like a man you know six feet a hundred ninety pounds two hundred pounds maybe is hundred and ninety sort of a small two hundred pounds whatever they're not thinking i should worry about my cholesterol i i really doubt they are because they're like well look at i'm skinny i you know i fit into like a you know thirty two thirty four or pant like i'm like i'm like a pretty slim guy i go for runs so i don't think people even think about the fact that you could be genetically predisposed to like heart disease not directly but through high cholesterol yeah the the data says otherwise just based upon the amount of americans that have high cholesterol and the amount of americans that are either pre diabetic or diabetic which eventually usually leads to higher levels cholesterol people so one in three americans are they're pre diabetic or diabetic because thirty three percent one and three one and three yeah and they don't all look at is what we're saying like they typically don't that's why that's just so important to look at these different biomarkers in your body to understand what's going on with you yeah because when you do then you can actually make intelligent choices with your food and with your supplementation as opposed to just taking like random things so for instance if you found out like you had high levels of cholesterol are you high levels of blood sugar be is a great effective supplement you can get over the counter take a gram per day and that has really good research showing that it can lower cholesterol and also lower blood sugar but if you don't know you don't yeah you don't know you just caused you know pop men's one day which yeah yeah i'm not a great what you hear you'll fuck that and i'll be good to go it's like you gotta look at you once you look at your blood work it really just tells like a like a full story like i didn't understand because i i have high levels cholesterol naturally and i remember i got done one time getting ready for a magazine shoot and i was in great shape i looked amazing and my cholesterol was at one zero three which is about three points above the top end of the meadow range optimal about seventy to eighty so have a little bit of work i was like i'm a heck is my cholesterol no five still five yeah was like i'm eating this really like clean eye and everything like that then i gotta genetic that i was like oh i have cholesterol on email makes sense okay so i have to play with that my whole life if i get out of out of pocket for a little bit for a four month time period i don't even wanna see the blower it goes to shit dude it it's awful i'm like my cholesterol will be through the roof i gotta to get back together again like gotta have really tighten up the diet what happens what happens to somebody's actual performance when like their hormones are out of whack their cortisol too high like what do you see sort of when people come to you as the before image what what is it like their decision making abilities comp from my like what is the thing that not paying attention to your health does with your business so belly fat was the person thing that came into my mind that's one the first thing that i can see the the the decision fatigue they're gonna gonna be able to make decisions as sharply also just the amount of decisions they can making today is gonna go down tremendously brain fog mh lack of clarity usually midday crashes is something that they experience and in confidence confidence is the biggest one they don't feel like the man that they used to be and that is directly correlated to their internal health so once that gets dialed back in those things reverse and they get that that that that brain going again there's no midday crashes and they had the confidence back but that that has to be to be fixed but yeah that's usually the things that they experienced and then also i guess the last thing everybody starts talking about testosterone and and like testosterone levels and that's why again i think executives before even jumping and you know before even getting their their blood test on they jump on t i think that's probably for men that's probably like i feel like shit that's where i go it talked to me about testosterone and like what levels are normal what range should they be in where t has a place where it doesn't i'm assuming it's after you figure out your blood work in your diet but just talk to me about testosterone because i that's something that a lot of people again just assume is the one thing that's wrong with them and there's like a million other things that are wrong with them yeah so the testosterone range is quite large it's about two fifty to eleven hundred okay and most physicians once you get down to around like the two fifty is when they'll start to look at t yeah but they don't always consider look at your free testosterone which is actually what your body is utilizing so i like in total testosterone to revenue and free testosterone to profit i like that that's good it's a good analogy so you know if you if you have high revenue but low profit you should still probably look into t so say if you had like a eight hundred total tests but your free tea was low and you that that's something that you want to look at or if you look at what's called sex inviting gl which is your expenses yeah you wanna make sure that that set off to arrange you as well so it's a fine balance between all those things to actually see if that's something that you to to get on what is the difference between bio feedback and biomarkers yeah so biomarkers is gonna be your blood work so it's that's gonna be your genetics bio feedback is gonna be both a qualitative measurement that you would actually rate yourself and then also some things that we would get from data to to to quantify that okay so some good bio bio feedback so five of them that that we look at that we want you to rate so you can get more in tune with your body would be sex drive energy mood appetite digestion okay and those things are actually directly correlate it with a lot of hormones in the body so it gives us an instant feedback loop understood and then we quantify that with like hr your sleep your stress throughout the day because that can actually be measured with a lot of different tracking now so those those sort of five main bio things that you look for how should actually well actually this is probably gonna be a really good test for somebody to go through to figure out if i mean they should always get blood work we're done but they should sort of go through a test to see how these five things are how how do i say it how these five things like impact them right now to see if they're healthy right so what what were the five things again and how do you measure them yeah sex drive energy mood appetite digestion so for example sex drive what would what would that be like waking up like with an interaction is it just like being like into somebody or like is that how you measure sex drive or is there other markers you should look for yeah so think about it like this so if we had to say zero being absolute dog shirt yeah yeah no lo yeah if the most beautiful person whatever you're in into walk by you would just not be interested okay that's a zero and the best time you're life being a five where you just you know felt like you could it could be the most ugliest person in your life you sell into it that's how you would just rate that skill yeah okay now where do you fall on that right now like you for instance i'd say a four okay say it yeah i'd say a four i'd say like i think that i think that i remember like when i was like fifteen sixteen like like any girl was like i oh my god yes now i'm like yeah i'm like like three and a half four i think i'm like pretty healthy but like i'm not like only thinking about sex all day so i think that's also useful did not be distracted by sex not stop but i do notice that there's times when when i like i work too much mh and i i i pay attention to it but i also pay potentially it because i used to be really into body building so i was always very aware of how my body felt and how my body responded to food training to everything i think more aware than like the average person just like walking down the street but yeah i there's sometimes when i'm traveling a lot or when i'm stressed about work where it's like you know i could not be bothered with sex like it's just like so far away from like what i care about because it's probably because like high cortisol and other things around my mind but i can tell like when i don't know if this is like a marker like when i wake up and i have like direction in the morning like that to me like okay i'm not stressed out or if i'm like you know with the with gina like we're like okay we want each other like now like yes that's great after a day of work that's good if i work too hard then after i'm done work i have like no interest in sex at all and that is like a signal to me that something's off see what you just said there yeah is the whole reason why it needs to be tracked yes true hundred percent a honestly see so that's what i want people to by giving your example that's the importance of why the the audience should track with inside of themselves because you mentioned cortisol yeah stress you also mentioned times when maybe life's is going a little bit too fast so you need to settle down a little bit more and those are all things directly rated back to your blood biomarkers yeah so that's the importance of keeping just in tune with your body and it's not just because like alright if you find out and and there's something else i wanna say about that too as well because if if you say if you like fall down to a too right and it's life's normal not too stressed out but you still don't like wanna hook up with anybody or sleep with your wife or sleep with your husband and here's like why yeah why like i'm i'm on vacation and i should be relaxed and we should be having sex but i just don't feel it mh now there's now there's potential supplementation we can look into to actually help to boost that back up so we could look into you know zinc if you take a good amount of like thirty milligrams of zinc per day make sure your vitamin d levels are okay there's also some naturally things like diet acid three point two grams of that day shown up to increase testosterone about forty two percent using untrained man but there can be some benefits in train too as well so that's the whole reason why you you want to measure that so that you can be more in tune with your body what's going on 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 the 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 probably 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 tick it's worth checking out listen to 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 what 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 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 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 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 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 what are so outside of so energy mood sex drive what are some other things that you can sort of pay attention to as you go through your day with these bio bio feedback markers that are sort of if this happens to me it's sort of a red flag that i should go get checked out or i should go do my blood work or i should fix something yeah midday energy crashes okay yeah if if you are not able to start your day go through it and crush it and then walk out and still have time with your family and do all those things that in and feel accomplished at the end there's something wrong you you your your body is engineered of millions of years to you know to be able to do these things so you know usually when people they you know they they wake up they're having multiple cups of coffee they still feel tired and so sluggish around noon and then they're dragging and everything like that and they're stressed out and their mood starts to tank there's something going on internally that needs to be looked at and it usually comes down at that point is that their body is more insulin resistant and they're not processing their food correctly so you've found a lot of gut issues hundred percent yeah and entrepreneurs executive ceo's high performing why is that that i would have thought like cortisol was like the obvious thing with the with somebody who's always on always working how do how does gut issues tie into that yeah because when you're when your body is stressed out one of the first places that it goes to is your gut there's more nerve innings endings inside of your gut there anywhere else in your body and that is where a lot of your mood comes from your energy your hormone regulation all these things are to come from your gut and a healthy microbiome yeah so when we put ourselves through chronic stress terrible sleep optimal hormones that is gonna massively disrupt your gut and that's what's gonna cause a lot of brain fog fatigue all those things that they're experiencing is usually trigger from the gut so that's why cleansers usually can be a good like short term cleanse not like the you know the the the market cleanse you know that those but things is to kinda help your gut to reset and to help it to kinda find its balance again along with some proper supplementation doing that we'll set them up for the right path to start to rebuild it properly because we're eating all this food or in america that is you know terrible it it it's such a a terrible i think a lot of people especially in like our circle people listen to the show they do folk so they focus on making money for sure and they just run towards that and then if they're lucky if they're lucky and they're fortunate then they realize that money's is not everything so then they don't sacrifice the relationships in pursuit but i i i i don't speak about it at lot but i i definitely don't think that people care about their spiritual health as much as they should at all i think there's that's i think that i think there's a whole bunch of issues with how secular a society has become whether or not it doesn't matter it to me which which god you pray to and believe in but just the way that i look at it is what god allows you what god really forces you to do it's probably a better word for it but you'll understand where i'm coming from it forces you to remove yourself from the center of the picture there's something bigger than you something more important than you and i think that when people don't have any version of god in their life they believe they're like the main character and i think that that doesn't always lead to the best decisions and i like i don't know if like people that work with you if you sort of help them re center themselves and sort of remove themselves is like the the main character and focus on things that are bigger than them and focus on maybe a north star that's bigger than money or career success maybe maybe that's like the psychological component they're like the mental component that people have to understand so that they actually you know focus on the relationships focus on their health focus on all these other things that are so important that are not just career money hundred percent and also comes down to while we're here in the first place i believe that we're here for contribution to each other yeah and when you're playing it from that lens then life becomes more meaningful it's almost like when you just you know air quotes just to make money it's almost like the most selfish thing you can do not because money's is bad but because you're it's if you sacrifice yourself in the pursuit of money like you're also like how how can you serve people with that money if you gotta know how exactly yeah exactly yep yeah i mean what what who cares if you're a billionaire but you're cro fifty five what what's gonna happen you should have another at least thirty forty years man yeah and then imagine what you can do and how that money can come compound and that how many more people that you can help and the impact that you can make it's it's a life changes to that point not just for you but for generations of people to come it's true how do you get people out of the like when somebody like running so fast like when i when i was twenty five and like running so fast how do you get somebody of that heads space like what do you tell somebody who's me ten years ago fifteen years ago mh one simple question what motivates you do people have an answer for that mh it's usually a long twenty minute answer and i just dissect what i need out of that and then reflects back to you what you said and then we just start putting the pieces together so if i was just like young super ambitious twenty twenty five year old and i said money motivates me which i think fair amount of people listening to this podcast will say yeah that makes sense to me what do you say to me to because you know what motivates me but you know that's also not the healthiest reason to wake up in the morning well i wouldn't judge so healthiest that's you don't seem very judge but i appreciate i wouldn't put judgment on that i would i would just ask okay well what about money motivates you particularly so let me go back to me at the time i would say i would say success freedom status sort of probably some probably some chip on the shoulder shit you should talk with therapist about because like you wanna achieve whatever the the house that you think is like the house you should have the the life that you feel like you should have like you're aiming for all these sort of material aspirations and i think you can make i think you can try and probably do some psychological work as to where those material aspirations actually come from but i think it's i think everything that you know your friends your instagram whatever it is it's showing you what your life should be and that's what you're running towards so it's yeah it's like status happiness whatever that is whatever that means to that twenty five year old version of scott do you think that that makes scott more valuable having those at the time i would've said yes for sure i would've said yes so scott only acquire half those things is he not still the same value i don't know i don't know valuable in different ways but i feel like i wouldn't be living to my full potential so you believe that you acquire those things the status the wealth the income is you maximizing your potential yes i would yes how would you want your life to look like once you acquire those things and who would you want around you so i don't think i ever did that exercise in my head because i don't even think i don't think i had an answer because i was i was sacrificing a relationship for work so i can't say like i can't say that i would have wanted that relationship mean there's a lot of things that are wrong with that relationship by the time that's whole different conversation but it like i i would i would say i want a family i would say i want a wife if i want kids i would say all these things but then the actions don't align with what i'm saying which is interesting and i don't really have an answer as to why because growing up i definitely wanted like family wife and kids and then at some point i was like fuck i gotta make a lot of money let me work hard and i don't really know when that point was but it's like my goal is growing up and the goals i saw have i still want like wife kids family those are like always been really important to me and i think that like money has actually mattered less to me now not that i don't think it's important to make it but i don't i don't i'm not the same person now is is when i was like early twenties so at some point something flipped in my head and i just thought i just have to work nonstop and make as much money as possible even though even though it didn't really help me achieve the goals that i had which were like my most important goals per family kids sort of that was my most important goal segment four it said were you either chasing pleasure or running away from pain which one do you think you were doing back then i think chasing pleasure because i don't think i was running away from pain because i didn't come from like a a tough childhood i didn't come from like poverty i didn't come from like some people are had very tough i didn't come from any of that so i like a pretty comfortable childhood like so i think it was probably chasing pleasure what do you believe the driver for status what that's where i think that i think that money in my mind was the driver for status it's interesting what you said it was it's kinda like the pee and the elephant if you ever heard that no i haven't so it's a reference to our brains our conscious brain where we make like our decisions is like the the this that's excuse me the flea the elephant is our subconscious yeah and you could just imagine the the difference in size or well the elephant is actually what drives a lot of our behavior and you seem like at one point you have friction between what you were saying and what you're actually doing so consciously you were saying you wanted some things so subconsciously it really wasn't i i agree but that's probably why it was so burnt out because now your brain's almost arguing with itself all the time and the stuff that you're living every single day is not in by the i don't think this is like bad abnormal i mean you you speak to a lot more people that are going through some shit than the average person because you're unpacking okay why are you even coming to me why are you coming to me like you you say you want health and wellness and you wanna feel better but like what are you doing in a day what does your day look like right and there's this this this lack of alignment between the two mh yeah alignment is the most important thing so i'll ask you this then who's the scott two point o somebody that likes the work that i do but doesn't sacrifice my life for my work i also do believe that being obsessed with what you do is important but obsessed doesn't always equate to hours i think that i understand leverage i understand delegation i understand focusing on my strengths much better than when i was twenty five where i just figured i could just out work everyone and do everything and that did not work for me like it just didn't work so now i i'm forcing myself to to be more strategic about my obsession i still am i'm obsessed with my work i absolutely love it i live and breathe it but not at the expense of like my life and i've made more money living that way and i've had you know i were talking about like what level am i at in terms of like my sexual health and my mood and my energy like so when i'm obsessed with something but obsessed with it to the point where i can do it without sacrificing my life because i have a longer time horizon that i wanna be successful with than all those other markers increase and i'm like okay this is like i like this yeah i enjoy this now i could be better i could still everyone could always be better right like there's still times when i should probably like you know take some time and go travel or you know make sure that i don't skip like a date night that week because i i'm working but it's still not as bad so i like moving in listen life is like you just have i have to always move in the right direction right so that's i guess that's got two point o here we go here we go beautiful man yeah i try i try i because i don't like listen it's been like a journey for sure i feel like you're interviewing me now it's been like a journey for sure but i don't want to i don't want to i don't wanna just work and i don't wanna just to make money and i think that also being on this podcast and interview people that have just again like just made money like made a lot a lot of money where their families are broken or their health is shit i'm like when you get a front row seat to these people it's not so attractive when somebody is worth like over a hundred million dollars and their wife hates them the kids hate them like they look like they're literally like one sandwich away from dying yeah because they are so morbid but obese and it's just that's not attractive like you can keep your money i'll just take you know happiness balance however you wanna describe it a family who loves me and my health and ability to live to hopefully older than eighty i'll take that every day right i think that that's something that i wish more people could experience when they're on these like sort of self destructive paths so what you just described there was also the beginning of creating your own masterpiece of a life it's just start write these things down sometimes i'd be sometimes it's it's like guiding north star have you figured out have you have you gone through like a similar journey yeah in your life yeah like like to yours where i was like the like i mean have you had moments of imbalance or have you had moments where that radically woke you up and rely and and you had to take a step back and say the path that i'm on is really not the path that i should be on and if i continue down this path like i'm not gonna live long i'm not gonna have the life that i want i have you gone out through this as well yeah yeah i one time i push my i was working so hard i push myself in the hospital got robbed yeah i was seriously yeah it was a the process of me starting t three i was also transitioning out of personal training at the time and i was training for a body living conversation so was in the gym about two hours per day so i was literally working from five am to about nine or ten o'clock every single night like just go go plus push my body really hard and i'm ross in the gym and i was training and my left it was warm set i was doing a hammer shrink press you know and my left side just started going out and i was like that's weird i was like maybe i'm not warmed up enough what was happening like my left side was going out yeah and then i did like another set and it literally just lost it i stand up and i go talk to my friend with a trainer i was like hey can you just stand by me for a little bit i was like i just feel kinda funny today yeah and then lily my whole left side started to go numb but i thought i was having a stroke i was so scared i was alright i'm not i'm not gonna train it today i'm gonna go home you know drink some water rest like the the intensity i was going at for that that many weeks was like insane like how hard i was pushing my body in the gym how hard i was working how hard i was like trying to put together everything that i needed to to start this company i was going insanely hard and so i go home i started drinks some water and everything like that i call my girlfriend the time she say what's wrong she was like you was just it's a gym my left sorry so i going on i think i'm fine i'm we get some rest literally i i'm drinking water i lose feeling in my hand dropped the water cut i i gotta go to hospital right now they do they do like some blood test my cr levels like the top end of that range is eight hundred yeah my was at eight thousand so my my basically my body cannot not keep up in recover what was going on between lack of sleep training hard pushing mentally all these things and that's what i really learned like okay like success is very rhythm progression is very rhythm you cannot like swim up the current you have to flow with the current yeah and so like at that point i trying to like brute force everything everybody i was like i'm gonna i'm gonna jacked his heck i'm a start this company i'm doing what i was yeah like different but not so different yeah and and i learned like okay no now you gotta ask me more strategic you have to think bigger think longer yeah and like pace yourself and be smart with it so understanding that that rhythm now it allows me to understand and i also help help to coach other people like don't try to get it all done in one month two months three months even a year sometimes like just expand it because you'll be very satisfied and probably even overwhelmed with the amount of success you'll having in five or ten years if you just give yourself more time it's interesting when people like slow down they really do speed up mh yes if somebody is going on this health journey i don't want them to be susceptible to like clickbait social content you mentioned a lot about where they should start and what they should look at but like what are the resources actually that you trust great question i think examine dot com is really good for like learning and yeah yeah it's it's boring because this is gonna give you the literature but what it does do is it really consolidate it down and it erase the actual the effectiveness of the study and it makes it super easy for you to to understand it and you can actually go to actually reference it and and take a look at like the full document if you like but that's a that's a great tool to look at i love that and then that sort of like cuts through all the social media bullshit yeah run everything through there like everything that people's with supplements diets like can run everything through there because you'll see like ninety nine percent of these influences are full of shit yeah you'll see it like right away they don't know what they're like they just they're just doing stuff to just collect dollars to the average person who has that definition of success that i had say ten years ago i know that they have to go on their own journey but what's the first step that they should take towards re evaluating what their definition of success looks like yeah the first thing i would say is ask himself like truly figure out what motivates them like really think deeply about that and it has to be an answer that you feel pulled towards not pushed towards and make sure it's not coming from fear but coming from inspiration what happens if you feel pushed towards it by your family your friends what instagram says sis like success looks like your your wife your husband is that where men midlife crisis comes from sometimes yeah you're doing it for other people you're not doing it for yourself so you're gonna have a a feeling of emptiness and you're not gonna be fulfilled by that process yeah and then when no one's looking you're not gonna wanna do the work like the true inspiration comes when nobody's looking that you're still willing to do whatever it takes to get the outcome what about what about mental health we didn't really touch on that too much but health wellness working out i think you believe a lot of the same things as i believe when it comes to like treating depression and anxiety with like lifting and busting your ass in the gym which i don't even think i don't know if that's a controversial opinion i think i'm sure it is to some people but talk to me about sort of mental health working out and how that how does that tie together yeah every good therapist i know always has that part of their protocol is getting people into the gym because it it it naturally releases hormones that help with happiness with help with mood and then once you start to take care of yourself it just raises yourself esteem so you feel better about yourself what you're gonna help with depression and all those different things but yeah i i believe the picture of health is is way more holistic like if we just look at blood biomarkers and and and all that kind of stuff and we just go directly there but we're not fixing the actual computer that's supposed to put in the solutions and follow the protocols it's all gonna be missed so we have to really like tie this stuff altogether the mind the body of the spirit because like that is what true optimal health is it you can't just look at one or the other that's it's true optimal health it's true optimal success it's it's true optimal happiness it's like not one thing right it's like mental health physical health spiritual health physical health all of it all of it and find a way like whatever that you know you mentioned like the motivation that like you're not being pushed towards but pulls you i i believe that that motivation should include sort of all these different boxes that you should check yes it will if it's correct for you you know what i'm saying if you really figure out what you're motivated towards yeah it'll it'll check every box it's not gonna be hard to find gotta just listen and that that usually takes people having to be still which is hard in today's society because there's so much noise but you when we're still then we connect with god and that's what we can get really clear on where we're supposed to be so i think that to close this out first of all where can people connect with you like what are your socials and website so drop them and i'll put them in the show on us but what are they yeah instagram it's coach jc c white and then the website is t three body training dot com why do you call t three body training it actually stands for tele soma which means become your highest self it's just a greek translation and a couple things that we turn around and make it i love that that's beautiful when people connect with you spoken a little bit about the protocols that you put people through but just so they can understand exactly what they're sort of signing up for so to speak they contact you what is the journey that they're gonna go on mh yeah it's a twelve month transformation process so it's not a ninety day just you know get beach body in out we're really in it to help you win for the long haul so first we saw off get blow work and dna test done and we do that every three to four months but we surround you with a team of experts so medical doctor functional nutrition and health coaches in a mindset coach you as well because that's a huge important part of this whole journey we gotta get this right in order to get the body to move and then we provide you with custom formula supplements based upon your labs in your dna so it's literally a one of one formula nothing stock nothing's inventory is based upon what your individual body needs and then potentially peptides and other things like that if that's what your protocols and we need to help you elevate to the next level and then yeah that's that's the whole entire journey within three to three to six months usually we we see the huge body composition change yeah so you lose the body fat that you want to lose you you gain the muscle mass you're looking for in the last six months is about putting you back into i have more of a maintenance getting your body to really just acc there and then and then setting you up for long term success so that's like what's call like reverse dieting and walking the calories back up and i think that that's something that two points on that first of all i love that you do the mindset piece of it because i think that that's what i think that that's probably the one thing that's gonna let somebody achieve success if they get in the right mindset and like we've we've spoken about this and we've been like gone through some exercises and stuff about how to focus on what actually matters in your life but that's that is the precursor right because if not they're gonna fall off and drop off but also i think a lot of people have a really hard time reverse dieting i only know that term because of body building but i don't think a lot of people understand how hard it is to make a radical life change and to achieve whatever body you wanna achieve and then actually keep it for the long term i think that this is what people are gonna have a hard time with with those epic and all and all these peptides and tries appetite and all these other ones like or even just go forget forget forget peptides and like oz epic just like even a very strict diet people rebound so hard because they don't know how to come back so i think that that's probably mindset plus reverse dieting so that this can be like just part of like a lifestyle that will indicate success better than anything i think that everybody can like stop eating for like a couple months very easy but that why don't they lose weight right why don't they keep it off yeah why do they always rebound yeah oh yeah about ninety percent of people rebound from their diet and they gain the weight back yeah it's staggering statistics so people don't actually keep the weight off when you reverse diet properly you can your body to a healthier caloric intake while maintaining the same about body fat percentage is that you have is this what set point means yeah that is yeah where you where you adjust your set point now it's it's gonna be it's it's challenging because like a lot of people wanna go full re restart once they get to yeah so you have to kind of pace yourself a little bit and just slowly walk your calories back up so usually like not to get too much of the weeds of it but you wanna put yourself back up to maintenance so you could feel you know great again is it depends how lean you get to as well and then just slowly walk up the calories over time but it's usually not a stressful process at all i've seen guys eat like more calories than they were when they were fat but now they're thirty forty fifty pounds leaner yeah and that's just such yeah it's like an amazing thing because now you can go out and live life and you look amazing and you eat way more food than what you used to that's a secret and like diet success being able to just like go back to your like quote unquote regular life and this is why this is why i actually appreciate your approach so much like not just the diet not just to working out not just the peptides not just supplements not just my like it's all of it like it is truly all of it that's why i can't stand like thirty second reels on how this particular doesn't change your life because there's so much more it than that but listen like to your point you know you spent thirty years twenty years getting yourself into this shit you're not gonna take twenty years to get out of it but like you gotta change some stuff you gotta change habits last question i like to ask about everything that you've learned in your life it could be die advice could just be life advice you have to pick the most important thing that say you could only pass this one lesson onto your kids because it is the most important okay the most important it could be the thing that you know just radically change your life it could be the best piece of advice you ever got from a mentor or whatever it is but you can only take this one thing and pass it on to your kids what would that thing be and why have enough faith to begin the process and god would take care of the rest claude is a success story partner now as a podcast my worst nightmare used to be going into an interview under prepared now claude has completely changed my prep game and if you don't know what claude is claude is the ai for mines that don't stop at good enough it is the collaborator that actually understands your entire workflow and thinks with you not for you whether or not you're debugging code at midnight or you're strat your next business move claude extends your thinking to tackle the problems that matter i feed claude my guest articles before i do a podcast i feed it their company updates past interviews and it helps me spot the angles that nobody else is talking about last week claude research capabilities pulled together insights from over thirty sources about my guests industry and it helped me ask questions that always make them say great question nobody's ever asked me that before claude is by far the most useful tool to grow any business any podcast and really just help you extend your thinking on whatever it is you're working on if you're ready to tackle bigger problem sign up for claude today and get fifty percent off quad pro when you use my link claude dot ai slash success oh the car from car von here well well you'll look at that it's exactly what i ordered like precisely it would be crazy if there were any catches but there aren't right right because that's how car buying should be with car you get the car you want choose delivery or pickup and a week to love it or return it buy your car today with car deliver your pickup these may apply limitations and exclusions may apply cr r seven day return policy at curve dot com

you just realized your business needed to hire someone yesterday how can you find amazing candidates fast easy just use indeed stop struggling to get your job post seen on other job sites with indeed sponsor jobs your post jumps to the top of the page for your relevant candidates so you can reach the people you want faster according to indeed data sponsored jobs posted directly on indeed have forty five percent more applications than non sponsor jobs don't 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 at indeed dot com slash p o k a t z thirteen just go to indeed dot com slash pod k a t z thirteen right now and support our show by saying you heard about indeed on this podcast terms and conditions apply hiring indeed is all you need my name is katie i am a spectrum customer for mobile and internet and i grew up on a farm and ranch in nebraska so always cal grill a cowboy culture you you never wanna pay more than you have to because there are so many expenses that go farming and ranch to have any efficiency on the floor you need extreme connection and and reception i bet we save about a hundred and eighty dollars a month of spectrum and that's twenty one hundred dollars for the whole year real customers real savings visit spectrum dot com slash save real customer testimonial compensated not scripted they i just don't have the motivation working for someone i can't find the life to do it and to do it well and if i don't do it well i prefer not to do it when you have an idea when you start building you slowly slowly or sometimes quickly fall in love with what you're building instead of falling love with the of you're moving away from the tooth which is the only important thing that you need to chase as a found them and this is the most dangerous thing that can happen u he left jerusalem with a suitcase full of ideas built a travel start up in italy lee ran the innovation lab for one of the world's fastest growing tech hubs and then he went broke burned through years of savings all to chase one problem why does solo entrepreneurs struggled to control their own money that obsession led to sequence a finance virtual operating system for creators freelancers and anyone with more than one bank account it sounds simple but what they're building it could rewrite the rules of money management and what he shares in this episode might just change how you manage your money forever if you're focused on the right metrics opinions doesn't play part anymore you need to know what you're are tracking you need to know our success looks like you don't have to net from day zero sometimes it takes time i have all my life try to build communities and my take is that community product fit is much harder and product market fit and if you have a community and you see like your early signs of community being created you have to do whatever you can in order to cultivate and that's what we've done very successful the most important resource that we have is our time you have an limited at the time here make sure that you're putting your effort and your energy in a place that makes sense glad i'm very excited to chat this is gonna be a really honest and brutal startup story and i just wanna frame it for the listeners so we're gonna be mostly speaking about sequence today but your last company lance so you raised eight million you grew to thirty thousand users you realized you were essentially lighting money on fire with every customer due to fraud and instead of sugar coding it you spoke to your investors and there's a story there a really important story for entrepreneurs so explain to me the good and the bad of entrepreneurship because i think we speak about the good too often but you've experienced some not so great experiences yeah i mean everybody celebrates you know the huge successes the massive exit the ipo and and somebody look like you know just watching from the sidelines it seems like everything is smooth and but the truth is that it's a mess for all people that i know and i assume most entrepreneurs does there's a lot of pain involved in the all along the journey sometimes as founders we start we sometimes founders are very lonely and and she hits the fan you know and when the sheet hits the fan you know you are left many times alone i'm just trying to figure stuff out you have employees you have partners and c cofounder you have investors you have clients people that are actually using something that maybe you've built so it's a very hard a place to be i think that we over entrepreneurship and we make it seem like it's all fun and all good and it's hard work but i don't think we really dive into what happens if it goes wrong and also to your point it's very lonely so if it does go wrong which everybody who i know who's built something significant there's been a point where it's gone very wrong how do you deal with it because a lot of people don't understand what you're going through so let's even back up because i wanna understand why you chose to be an entrepreneur what kind of delusion made you want to go build something because that's also interesting and i don't believe that ninety nine percent of people on this planet should be entrepreneurs because it does take a certain way of thinking and it takes somebody who maybe is a little bit delusional but back me way up was lance your first company ever no no no i've i'm almost forty five now and i have like a w two for maybe two years of my life i've always built stuff and not necessarily startups ups i've started actually in my first steps as a as an entrepreneur pan as an as an adult we're in the we've built a two operator we've done mister ways we've done a feel like cool stuff there but i just i to be honest i don't have the amortization working for someone else and i can't i can't find the drive to to do to do it and to do it well and if i don't do it well i prefer not to do it so this startup story with with lance so why was this store so lance wasn't your first company it wasn't your land your last excuse me i mean like now you're building sequence but with lance what was what was the thing that went wrong i think this is like a great lesson for people well a few things went wrong but i think that the core problem with lance for the fact that we we've made a few core assumptions that were just wrong so so the basis of the business were not built for success and in our specific case what we've done we've we've tried to build a a finance company or a financial company using embedded finance tools and what happens is when i say you're gonna say embedded finance tool so banking as a service site so you're not actually the bank but you're acting as a bank and so if you are like if if you if you started really the early or have a lot of resources so companies like china right they did obviously very well but for somebody you came in the second cell or even fore found of new banking the economics never read it up because you you can't you open operate like a bank you can't land against your balance sheet and you can't really make money like banks and on the other side yeah you get all the downside of fraud charge banks disputes and by far the biggest problem for us was fraud right so at a certain point in time we've just looked to the numbers and we've understood that with every customer that you bring on your best basically shortening the life of your company because what happened is that you you would get like a cohort like a passcode and you thought that you your customer acquisition cost was like hundred dollars or whatever and then as time goes by you start you start to understand that you know plan to thirty forty percent of those customers are the accounts that you actually have to close so the cap is not one hundred anymore and you know it goes up and sometimes for certain cost even doubled itself so you're sitting here ka is going up the the payment period or the t keeps getting like longer and longer and and you basically understand that the trajectory the you know that you're that you're you're driving to you off a cliff basically so this is something that makes sense to me but for somebody who's first starting out this a little bit scary because i think the lesson here is that it doesn't matter how many times you do this it's not like the next time is guaranteed success and i think that sometimes i think that sometimes investors even think that we can talk about that as well of the other side of entrepreneurs entrepreneurship they always bet on people that have had past successes or serial entrepreneurs as opposed to the first time entrepreneurs because they think we'll have done it before then they can do it again but explain to me how does a serial entrepreneur who's done this many times how do you get some of these core business assumptions wrong like what was the blind that stopped you from seeing this when you started at lance well i think that you know when you when you have an ideal and you start building you slowly slowly or sometimes quickly fall in love with what you're are building instead of falling in love with the problem right you've build something you and you start telling yourself stories you start you start basically lying to yourself right you say if only we've build this and this is the only thing that is missing and something maybe one parent looks really good because we go fast we've opened a lot of accounts like we are like tens of thousands of accounts and so you say this is working and then you you start to ignore the the the bad stuff and you start lying yourself and i mean like it's like your baby right and everyone thinks that his baby they're the most beautiful perfect thing in the world but there are babies that are not perfect right and then you start lying yourself you're moving away from the tooth which is the only important thing that you need to chase as as a as a found them and it's something very natural alright it's like it's a diff difference mechanism that we all have and this is the most dangerous thing that can happen it can happen to anyone we'll talk about how you navigated because this i mean this is something that you have to deal with you brought you raise investors but how do you how do you remove yourself and remove your emotion and ego and attachment to the company so that you can make objectively good decisions and it's what's what's difficult about lance is because you had like unit economics and and economic issues and fraud it's not about like a pivot sometimes i think it's the kevin o'leary line right where you have to take it out behind the barn and shoot it and i think that that's a very difficult thing for entrepreneurs to do especially when they've raised the money so how do you how did it do lance sort of say okay this is really not working i need to find a way to have really hard conversations and kill this business what was the thing that woke you up just the numbers just the numbers if if you're focused on the right metrics it doesn't it doesn't opinions doesn't play play part anymore alright you need to know what you are tracking you need to know what you are measuring you need to know how success looks like sometimes you will take a little bit longer and and sometimes you and and you just need to see that you are you don't have to you don't have to minutes it from day zero right sometimes it takes time usually it takes time but you need to see that you are tracking towards what the important things and we've we've lance the problem that we should we should have killed it a before we before we have that's that's the truth was there i mean just curious i mean like hindsight twenty twenty but technically do you think that if you had found a way to mitigate the fraud and explain to me like what fraud is in like the banking sense for people that are listening what fraud is not fraud is not like somebody on your team committing fraud fraud is like the customers are committing fraud but was there if you hadn't found a way to mitigate that would it would it have been a successful business model or is that just a hypothetical there's no point in even figuring that piece so so so so that that's first of all fear figuring that out would have been huge and could have created a huge company that has nothing to do with with the neo bank because for this problem us across the board so to your first question the the the the ford came from customers not from employees at all and and it was anything that you can can imagine anything from money laundering to people you know topping up their account it went k going to vegas for crazy weekend and calling on man saying that that their car was stolen and my wallet was stolen it wasn't me so even if you can prove that it that it was them you still have to pay like heavy heavy fees to visa design and the other providers people that are just using your platform to get like you know like like you know like federal fees and stuff like that which is not actually fault but that's not why we you've build the product and they are just the customers out you can't make money of those kind of customers so it was accountable we were call to the sheriff office in new york okay like or anything from like crazy money laundering chains to just like people trying to to you know to steal five scale or something okay so it's not working you raised money for this company so you raised did you raise eight million or how much would you raise for this the stand the right meeting yeah you raise a million okay so then what happens when you realize that the company is not working so it's to be honest it's very stressful like we remember me my c founder was going into a room and saying like we don't we don't know we don't know how to save this we have obviously fiduciary responsibility to our to our investors and we understood that with with every new client we are basically you know like it's it's you know it's like you it we we had to stop and it wasn't it wasn't responsible of our on our side to continue and we said okay first let's stop bringing on new customers we still had thousands of people using the product so it's like you know it's a banking app you can't you can't just disclose it one day right so we continued supporting them we off boarded them and installed the custom that we you know that that that other companies were interested in and went back and and then we said okay what are we doing now like we either give money back to other investors or we think of a pivot and at this point i'm not i'm still not talking to my to my investors it was like you know was it was a few days later you're just having a conversation with your c cofounder for thinking like what the hell are we doing yes yes we we we understood that we had to stop to so to not to not to to stop onboarding new customers and and we did that and then we we went into a room and said okay what can we do you we either closed or pivot and we decided to try and pivot to save the company that was that that that's what we wanted to do when we started you know like slowing ideas around but then after like a few days we said okay guys we've just proved that our ideas are not that great that's was you it was just proven and so instead instead of thinking about about ideas let's let's think about cope and support that we'll guide our pivot and it came down to two things really one we were all all over forty and we want to make sure that we have investing the next ten fifteen even twenty years of our life is something meaningful with chances of succeeding and for that we wanted to get to conviction so the first important thing was get to to high high high conviction that was the first thing and the second thing was that after trying to build the bank and and and competing with bank of america chase you know all like huge players we said normal more red oceans we are looking for a replace for a blue ocean low low competition because for like and and that's and that's very very important and that's when we started working with a fare that i actually really lie because it's very simple and it's like and like you need to look for stuff that are non consensus and right and and basically it's very simple like consensus non consensus right and wrong if you're are wrong you're are wrong nothing you can do about it if you are right and consensus that lance right everyone that i talked to told me yes of course freelancers and the self employed needs a better banking experience but that you need the banks of america right there are also daryl on a bank right and when and when you find something that is non consensus side that's when you have like like a vision into the future right that's where you can build something that is truly unique and it's very hard because then when you go to talk to people mary will tell you do i don't understand what you're even talking about why would the anyone use it it's you you you are stupid basically explain to me because you spoke about sort of first principles thinking but you also spoke about non consensus but correct so how can you figure out which first principles apply to a non consensus but correct idea because this is what you've really done with sequence so so we've used that framework to to hit what was important for us and that's a blue ocean understood that that's that's that's how we looked at it and then to find the non consensus and right idea my my best suggestion is be lucky that's that's you know that's that's the most important thing gust is a success story partner now look i talked to business owners every single day and you know what i hear constantly scott i love running my business but i hate dealing with payroll and i get it nobody starts a company because they're excited about calculating tax withholding and benefits administration that's exactly why i use gust myself and the smartest business owners use it as well gust is online payroll and benefits software built for small business it's all in one remote friendly and incredibly easy to use so you can pay higher onboard and support your team from anywhere now here's what sold me unlimited payroll runs for one monthly price no surprises no hidden fees when you need to run that extra payroll and when you hit a tough hr situation and trust me you will you get direct access actual certified hr experts not a chat real people who know what they're talking about plus through the number one payroll software according to g two for fall at twenty twenty five and over four hundred thousand small businesses already trust them pride gust today at gust dot com slash success story and get three months free when you run your first payroll that's three months free payroll at gust dot com slash success story 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 a 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 instead 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 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 if you think about if you think about the most important narrative or principle that you had to change when you started lance i mean there's probably many but what was the main one that allowed sequence to be successful when lance wasn't and you've danced around it with with again non consensus but still correct but there was there was one main idea that you would have had to have changed and i think that a few things i think that first and maybe the most important one is that we've really shifted from talking to our customers or our potential customers to listen it to them and there's a huge difference there right so before actually starting lance if we were not just talking to customers but also listening to them we maybe have built sequence i don't know four years ago because before lance we've built a bunch of like just tools for for the for for freelancers and self employed to just see all the money under the tax you know status and everything and they told us well this is great i love this dashboard and that was like a kind of like a mint experience or mono money experience and they said i really like it i i wanna touch the screen and move money around and and then if we were sm back then or we will just actually like digging in and understanding what those people want maybe it would have built sequence again and not lance but then we said okay they want to move the money we need to be a bank and and the value saying by being gates who said the world doesn't need more banks it needs better banking you know so listen to be guys that's another you know knows what he's talking about so dealing with investors is not easy i know that you had how many investors total because you raised eight million but it wasn't from just a a small group there was eighty three total investors yeah what we had to collect eighty three signatures from anyone who employees accelerate those programs we went through and and then everyone who have a lot a check into sequence and we've raised a bunch of money for my offerings friends and families or small checks and those guys those guys will never the problem so it's not like it it kinda sounds like to be honest like start up health like going through because this is so now okay so just to frame it for people if if lance isn't working you have hard conversation with your cofounder okay we gotta go in a different direction you gotta get eighty three signatures it took you eight months to get eighty three signatures i know that there was some people that were problems or at least they gave you a hard time so during that time i mean you're stressed out i don't think that you're really you're not making a ton of money yourself personally and life still goes on as well so you have to figure out what you're gonna do in terms of like you know i don't know your whole financial situation but when this is happening you're not drawing massive salaries while you're telling your investors that there's a chance that they've lost their money and you have to renegotiate exactly what you're gonna build so talk to me about this restructure because dealing with investors i even sometimes recommend that if founders there's reasons for raising money and there's reasons for not raising money obviously if you want to grow fast you can raise equity you can also raise debt doesn't have to be equity to different ways to raise money but what you went through is probably one of the most difficult things that somebody would ever have to go through if they are raising money outside of literally just telling your investors i'm sorry we've you know we've lit your money on fire you're not getting it back so you have this episode tell the story you had this conversation with your cofounder what's the next step we we we went into it if i i didn't know what i was working into i didn't know how painful it's gonna be and what we did was we we were we were in the room and said okay let's save the company like we we still think that we have something that we can do let's let's try and with the two the core principles of pivoting we went and started talking to lance good users and and we asked them guys what are you doing here and it was very like i don't wanna say unanimous but it was very common for them to tell us i really love this mini zapier experience for my money i wish i could connect my and then everybody like my my my husband account my wife account my business partner my four zero one k my student loan my my credit cards my mortgage so they wanted like a bunch of stuff and then oh and my c founder and the cto came back and said like a i think that what these guys are actually looking for is actually a router for their money they need a better way to out the money between all those different accounts and then we start with the okay that's interesting but again we just took a massive beating so we wanted to to optimize for conviction and so then we went and start talking to people who never help about plans not necessarily freelancers anyone who was willing to talk to us and we came them and said hey we're gonna build this out of for money it's exactly for money and then out of every ten people that we talk to six seven would go like you guys idiots i don't understand what you're even talking about and three four i would go where have you been on my life look at what i've built check out my excel sheet you know so it was this is this this is non consensus right wrong we don't know yet but it was definitely non consensus and very confusing right you don't know what to think and then we said okay optimizing for conviction let's be brave let's build a landing page and let's charge and let's charge a relatively high amount for just for the concept and we've built a bunch of landing pages and we've built actually one landing page and a bunch of ads and just describing the product we call it money out or out money which like a shitty name and and we told people if you want to get a lifetime access for this product take two hundred dollars today and i told my c founders you guys are crazy nobody gonna give you that that amount of money and so so but but we launched it and and i was extremely happy to be wrong because in five days hundred people pay the two hundred dollars for the lifetime access for for you we didn't have the product obviously and started talking about it all over the internet so they opened the discord server for us they started talking about it on reddit and people came knocking on the door and then you already said okay like the the two hundred dollars is off the table this offer is off the table but if i still remember exactly the wording we told them if you want you can lock in a discounted subscription for life and we actually had people paying subscription for a product that not only wasn't ready we haven't even started building and that's conviction right and then with that we've and we've started things like amazingly so it like it we we had like a very very initial and we've actually like already like you know got like an around twenty k or even more before even writing one line of code and this is very rare many people can say that that's what they want to do but they actually do it's much harder and you know it's like start it's like lean startup one zero one and but it's much easier said than done and and at this stage i went back to to to lance investors we had the kia think two million dollars in the in the bank and i told them there's something here there's something here let's give us some more money at this stage we've done one by round and two saves one on top of the other which is also a huge mistake and we can we can you know talk about it if you want and and it was just it was like twenty twenty two and nobody was doing anything just after covid it was the shit market and all my investors told me yeah we are not investing and so i went and started pitching to everyone was willing to talk to me anyone from this is to angels to work who like anyone i've pitched i counted i think it's one hundred and sixty investors which is crazy it's not it's not a smart to do but i was like you know i had nothing nothing else to do most of them told me know some of them took be the time to explain to me why what i'm building doesn't make sense and a few looked at it seriously but then through the cap table and like we're like i'm not touching this it's too too much and i got two term sheets and and when you're building sandwiches is non consensus side or non consensus stressed it's it's how to find vessels because all of them like most investors with like we are we are investing in the outliers we are looking for something different but actually very few do that and and i was lucky to get term sheets from lf which is one of the top is israeli vcs and email which is another like awesome great vc and and they they eventually all fled around and emerged participated and they did around but before the round happened there was seven to eight months of restructuring because the term sheet the term sheet which was you know at the end the good thing but again i was i i had no idea what i was walking into and they require us to collect ninety five percent of the signatures in order to start a new company that to buy assets on the old company for equity in the new company nets sweet is a success story partner now what does a future hold for business if you ask nine experts you're gonna get ten answers bull market bear market rates are rising rates are falling honestly sometimes you just need a crystal ball but until we get one over forty two thousand businesses have future proof themselves with nets suite by oracle the number one ai cloud erp bringing accounting financial management inventory and hr into one fluid platform with one unified business management suite is one source of truth giving you the visibility and control that you need to make quick decisions with real time insights and forecasting you're peer into the future of your business with actionable data and when you're closing the books in days not weeks you're spending less time looking backwards and more time on what's next look if i needed this kind of business management system nets tweet is exactly what i use whether your company's earning millions or even hundreds of millions nets tweet helps you respond to immediate challenges and sees your biggest business opportunities in speaking of opportunity download the cfo guide to ai and machine learning the guide is free to you 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 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 terms and conditions apply if you're hiring indeed is all you unique what would be the advice that you'd tell a founder or who's going through something similar right now like how did you okay so this is obviously on the on the on the very opposite end of the spectrum but like i know founders that go through really bad business situations and something like i mean there's been stories that founders like committing suicide and like just it very very depressed or you know getting sick or destroying their relationships or like a variety of different things because of business stress so what's the advice on how to navigate something like this and keep your head and keep your relationships and keep your help so now gonna you know like do as i say not as i do because i i i did a pretty like lousy job in managing my own mental health at at that point when i think that if i had someone that i could talk to and either professional or maybe like sometimes the people don't understand you the most of founders that are you know like two of these steps ahead of you in the journey and so i have this net and so and now now i'm and now i'm even like building it even further and deeper and but my personal feeling some i'm not sure how how really it was i but that was my feeling i felt alone and and you know i i having an like an amazing wife and and a lot of friends and i have great team and c cofounder and but i think that they put myself in a situation in with i i could've have done a better job i didn't take care of myself and and and i'm still i'm still i'm still paying the price even though it it finished like i know eighteen months ago and and by the way i i i if if somebody is going through this kind like paid to player restructuring i'm happy to talk to i i always have time to talk to people who are going through that and this is the kind of difficulty that i felt so i'm happy to share my experience and so somebody like like people can feel free to like you know to we can leave my email yeah yeah nice try appreciate because i think that these are so tough conversations you know it's so cliche but it's very true like everything you want is on the other side of a tough conversation and these are all these are all pretty standard motivational ideas and if you listen to enough podcast or read enough books you're gonna hear these but when you're actually going through it it doesn't matter what you know or what you've read or what you've heard or even what you've been advised to do by your friend or your peer or your mentor it's just very difficult like sometimes it's it's just and you have to you have to build the courage to have difficult conversations now you were somewhat forced to but i think that you know even to your point you probably could have had these conversations earlier and it probably would have made things a little bit easier you probably could have had a tough conversation with your c cofounder founder and i'm just making assumptions but you probably could have a tough conversation with the c cofounder founder which would led a tough conversations with your investors even earlier which would have ironically made it a little bit easier but the longer you dried out the more difficult it's gonna get yeah i think i think this is this is a good advice almost anything don't don't sit on things and for for me that the the conversation with my c cofounder wasn't tough the situation was tough for us and the and and i mean our our first reaction was like let's save the company so the the lance investors were are like not willing to continue to do their own in venture building i which is to invest yeah so that lead to a lot of friction and a lot of pain and for everybody i i also understand how they felt going through this experience what would be the advice that you give when it comes to how how to raise money that maybe you would have done differently knowing that say this is a potential not ideal but potential outcome so this is a this is a again a place where you know like it's much easier said than none and people tell you find the right investor for you it's like finding like your wife or husband or whatever like you know you need you need to you need to see the world in the same way but when when things aren't amazing and and you're still believe in what you're doing and you're like you know you have like this conviction you'll take money from whoever is willing to give it to you and i think that think i think that going back we we've raised money from all kinds of people some of them turn out to be amazing like the best and and sometimes will be not that amazing but if you take me back if i wouldn't take that money i wouldn't be able to find the the the opportunity and to learn about the you know the the the the amazing opportunity that we have with with with sequence so if you can take the best investors you know but sometimes you can't you know it's like and so my my my my real advice here is to talk to people who waste money for those people and the companies didn't succeed and then maybe you will be able to learn would you take a different decision i to be honest i don't know because you said said okay i just need this five hundred k and then i can start building move forward so it's really easy to say and very hard to do i was more curious to take it a step deeper even more technically because you mentioned you raised two safe why was that a bad idea like from a from a a raising perspective because when when you have to do a down or when you have to do when there's like a pay to play or when you have to do restructuring then the people with the safe have much better terms than no other investors that's create inequality between the investors and also towards the founders because basically with the safe over the convertible note they they are they you owe them right they are they are like debit of the company so i'm not saying don't do safe at all but try to avoid them as much as much as you can especially if you already done one price round because then you're basically you're basically putting the new vessels in a much better conditions or or a much more favorable down in position when when the down comes and and you really need a great experienced patience and smart loyal yeah of course they've been through a couple of those don't use your friends cousin or your neighbors dot find somebody find somebody you who's done that and be ready to pay but it's worth because without our lawyer i don't think that we could have done that those people that made that were making your life miserable because they didn't want to accept the new terms what was the the final strategy you you mentioned you're not a good negotiator but you got the deal done so what eventually moved them over the finish line i think that they they they got to point in which understood that this is the best outcome there is no better outcome you they almost killed the deal they made the the lead investor very anxious and nervous and and even even even i talked about it before in previous podcast but he pulled the term sheet i woke up one day and and the investor who's like super smart and and and amazing investor i wake up i see like hey i'm sorry but i see that your current investors are not not seeing of the best best interest of the company and i'm putting the township sheet and i was like that's it real fucked the point invest nobody is doing me anything but he actually did it because he wanted to help me and unfortunately didn't tell me oh i understand so he was saying that if we if if if he pulls the term sheet then that means that those investors are shit out of luck they have nothing going forward and they're gonna lose their money but he didn't tell you this but he knew in his head this was like a psychological negotiating strategy he a he said i'm pulling the township sheet the don't is pulled and and then i went i obviously like you know i just remember like waking up in the morning seeing the this email and they're like fuck what i'm gonna tell my call that was the first thing that i was like that i was like but then we went back to the i i just took a screenshot sent to the investors and told them i think that i can still save this but you have to play along or else we are always we are all all getting zero that's smart smart on his part it's smart me in the process but it so things move forward you have this non consensus but correct idea with sequence so talk to me about just frame the problem but how did you validate how did you how did you get what was the word like radical conviction that sequence was a correct non consensus problem that actually could turn into a business i mean the we we try to come to this and it's something that is some sometimes very hard for men to do but we try to come as a humble as possible we came with like one of the important things that we told ourselves we know nothing let's see how people are how how people are actually reacting to to what we are building so it started with the landing page and the ads and ended up with hundred or a hundred and and and a few more that were we that paid only one only once we got to that point we started building because we've had a lot of experience with lance we started building fairly quickly we knew exactly what we were doing in terms of you know they infrastructure and everything very quickly very quickly we've launched you can't really call it call it an mvp because the like in in in when you move money around it can't you can't have something not working and you also need to get a put on the bank so you have to have the fdic in place you know so everybody needs to give you like the stamp so it you can't call an mvp people it was our first product to the market and it was closed just for the people who paid two hundred dollars and that was mid oh yeah like maybe q three q four of twenty twenty three when when when we launched the very first version version then we said okay we know nothing so let's so once we felt ready that the product was stable enough we said let's open to anyone who was willing to pay and then we moved from optimizing to conviction to optimizing to learning and also optimizing for learning it means that you need to increase friction so we said no free tier no free try no free nothing you want to use sequence you pay and it's still the case today taking a few steps back in lands when when we when we ask people to pay for what we for what we were doing nobody was willing to and said okay let's drop let's give it for free and that's because i you know it's like a bank nobody's is willing to pay for bank so let's let's give it for free which is always the wrong thing to do because basically what they told us is we don't see value in what you've built so we are not willing to pay so we've learned the lesson time and for seconds we said you have to pay and we opened as wide as we could we got anyone from you know pow tools all the way to like small but like you know like medium sized businesses and anything in between startups ups micro businesses freelancers gig worker side hustle and anyone that was willing to pay we've spent q and q just like you know getting people on boarded and once we read like around five or six hundred paying customers which was yeah exactly mid the twenty twenty four we we we started looking at the data and it was very very clear that the by far best users are are small business owners when i say small i mean like one to ten employees and we still didn't really understand why but we saw we saw the data and then if we shifted our marketing and really zoomed in on those on those people and then we went from like two hundred thousand dollars in arr we've seven that in like eight or nine months in the market mint is that is that the main competitor or i guess like sort of like a comparable because it meant they have millions of users but they've never figured out how to really make money move automatically and that's what sequence is doing so it's interesting the what is the actual problem that people have that you're solving debt for example mint doesn't solve because mint again like millions and millions so that would be like the incumbent that you're trying to displace to a degree well well no there are a bunch of like p right personal finance management tools they rocket money wine ne means is obviously the the the biggest and most famous one which does the like i mean they they closed it and but we actually start where they finish i am not into financial planning and into execution we see people take those tools bring them to sequence and execute right so i'm actually not competing with them because budgeting is again i don't know how to ten x anything down we've we've built something that is that is different and and sits in a different place we are we are an execution tool ma'am i like to think of sequences like a fitness app that goes to the gym for you right you set it up and and and and and we do the execution we we we we always put you in control you know what's going on you know where the money is going you see how you build what whatever it is that you wanna build either you know how to rep repay debts start saving stop investing yeah so explain i guess explain just is explain in super layman's terms like how the automations actually work because i was i was listening to some of your past content and you said that the average american has fifteen different financial accounts so like super fragmented so what is the actual problem like what is the workflow that i mean obviously different customers different workflows but when somebody the average pick the average pick the the the the the most common customer what are they actually doing with this but so maybe maybe just a just a the the the opportunity is a great question i mean what what what what we came to understand for working with our audience is that our financial stack both as consumers and smaller micro business owners went through a massive un bundling right the average american holds fifteen different holds money in fifteen different places and if you're a small business it's even more than that and it's very hard to follow where all that money is it's even harder to manage and it's almost impossible to make smart financial decisions in context and the the the and it's and it's getting worse the gap between the consumers and small business tunnels and all the different places in which managers keeps going because of open banking banking the service in embedded finance all of that there are more and more services more and more products more and more apps which are all great and what we do our strategy is to lean into the fragmentation we don't bundle and we don't un bundle we just make sense of at all we bring everything into one place we help our users harness all those amazing offerings i mean you can really build wealth through that and but we also bring everything to one place and we put them in control and the combination of just a little bit of intent some guidance and a lot of automation can change the trajectory of your life seriously we are seeing that i think that i think this is very useful because i even noticed like sometimes i'll find and i don't no this is like the perfect example but i'll find like a a paypal account over here that has a couple thousand dollars that i forgot even existed or is other i mean you know like maybe i'm also canadian too so i i have a canadian accounts and have american accounts and i have investment accounts in canada and i'm investment accounts in the us and i have a canadian crypto account in the us crypto account and i have two canadian or two canadian banks to america it's like it's all over the place it's actually chaotic it's absolutely chaotic so this is this is the solution for all of this absolutely it's not it's not it's not it's not only the solution to not lose two k on paypal but it's actually a way for you to make sure that every dollar that you have is put to the best use right and it helps you achieve your goals on autopilot and i mean we are seeing people that are i mean one one of the thing that i'm really passionate about is helping people get out of that and something that many many of our users do that doesn't mean that you are you know that you are aware i don't know if you don't have money at all some people that are that are high earners will still have student loans and a bunch of things like that so or credit card of stuff like that we we help them to automate and optimize the debt repayment which means that very quickly they are moving from repay debt into saving what's important for them or investing and making sure that they're making sure that they are you know that they are taking care of on their kids future of whatever whatever whatever is important for them their their older parents you know the or just living a life the the life that they want to live and that is very our company is very mission driven something that we really really really like believe that we can as i said before we are changing the chapter of people's lives chip station is a success story partner now last month i was looking for a new office chair online and there's tons of options but one review stuck out someone said they've been using it for two years working from home and their back pain was completely gone and that's what convinced me to buy it see if you run an online business you know customer reviews are everything and nothing gets you better reviews than fast accurate shipping i started using ship station thinking it was just for printing labels but it does so much more everything's in one place super easy to manage it automatically finds the cheapest shipping option across over two hundred carriers and saves you up to ninety percent on shipping costs the automation alone saves me ass hours every week there's a reason why successful businesses use ship station in fact ninety eight percent of companies that stick with ship station for a year become customers for life wow your customers and get great reviews with cheaper faster and better ship upgraded to ships station today to get a sixty day free trial there's no credit card or contract required and you can cancel time that's ships station dot com code success story hubspot is a success story partner now the future of business is happening right now 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 and 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 immediate implement what you learn and plus san francisco legendary startup 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 walk me through give me tell me a story about a customer and what sequence or automation they set as a people start to realize like how this could actually impact somebody's life so i think a good example would be we have a i think that maybe the best example will start with this describing our ic cp or our ideal customer and so our our ideal customer is a small business owner right and i say small business owners are not a small business because those people men they were many hats outside they manage both their business finances and or personal finances on sequence we have a guy that has the an amazing business of short term rentals and you as a family three kids and that's and that is business that's that's say you know that's that's say family like family business his wife is working with him as well they manage between thirty and forty apartments and they register the apartments on all platforms from booking airbnb those apartments are not there right most departments belong to other people and they're the ones are just it yeah yeah there's a lot of money movement is coming from different platforms for different departments for different owners that's the cleaners the security deposits they need to make sure that they are saving enough money putting stuff into marketing and paying themselves and taking care of their kids future and and saving other the vacation so it's not rocket science right but there's a lot of money moving and you need to be you can't you know you can't not pay an owner right so before sequence they used excel sheets and i i think that the guy told us that he was spending between three to five days a month just making sure that all the money is moving into the right place the right owners coming from the right for from the right platform putting aside for security deposits paying back the security deposits you know the so it's a mess right and with with sequence we bought it down to like an another and which is which which is which is amazing because it gives him our time to take on more apartments gross business he's taking care off you know all of his like you know it's like like the five twenty ninth for his kids we he started investing and we're actually now working on a series of of case studies that we're gonna that we're gonna share soon but it's pretty amazing to hear the stories and what people are actually achieving yeah no it bring it gives your life back and as a as an entrepreneur myself finances is one of the most annoying parts of a business it's it's just i mean i'm not like a everybody's a numbers person to some extent but not a most people don't enjoy it i think there's a certain kind of great person who enjoys numbers and they all become accountants but the rest of the world hates it it's boring it's tedious it's not fun right and and there's a lot that people feel nervous about it you know and it it makes you nervous and yeah well i just the other guy spoke with a guy who has was like a he has like a like a franchise business and he he has like a few like a a smooth stalls like we like i like six or seven and he said like like you guys have so much time and and and give me so much peace of mind because i know that i'm always back my employees on time that i have enough money in each sub account and it's just for me as as a as some as a one of the people who build this product it just makes you happy you know you wake up in the morning and you're you're you're are saying i'm building something that has a positive impact on the world and that's and that's that's that's what i always wanted to be build all my life now the very obvious question i think that if somebody listen do this important that you answer this because you're you're moving people's money around based on an algorithm so what's the safeguard so that something doesn't go off or something doesn't get transferred because then if it's all automatic it's if if somebody is using this properly that means that they're trusting sort of their financial management completely and that's stressful i mean i'm sure you you have these conversations all the time yes so first of all the for many years people talked about the the self driving money and and i can tell you that people like with hundred percent confidence people don't want self driving money they want help they want some automation but they really are not yeah they are not ready to hand you everything and say i'm not i'm not gonna look at it and i was the famous saying that the three most important things for for people is the their health their family and their money but it's not necessarily in that all anyway we are saying that people even when everything moves one hundred percent without them having to do anything they come back two three times a week to see what's going on right so you can you can fit you can configure the system in a way that some things you'd have to do manually so it won't go like automated just been to pass a button until you get more and more confident besides that again we are we have a custodial bank that is fdic insured and regulated we are regulated by proxy right so everything is like one hundred percent legit the way that it works is the we as a sequence we are not a bank so we can't touch the money the money is in in in thread bank our our our partner or australian bank that they have they you know heavily regulated like like any other bank so money can't get lost and then when when people are building the rules there are a lot of ways to make sure that that stuff like want like that you there's nothing that you don't want will happen you can build the guard in the in the software so you can say i want to always pay the full outstanding credit card the balance but never pay more than a thousand dollars or ten thousand order alright so you can always build those those guard and we have if somebody is interested and seeing how sequence works so obviously youtube but we have a crazy active community of amazing people on discord and any question some some people in the community knows the product better the night to be honest some of them are extremely smart and like just great people that we feel lucky to build with and for that's a smart play as a founder too building a community that's very smart that's such an underrated that's such an underrated asset that you've built i think the more founder should try to do that and i mean like we always talk about audience we talk about audience build audience not build community i can go on and on and on about it it's one of the things that i'm most passionate about i have all my life tried to build communities around things i was like we had some few like minor successes here with sequence that was the very first thing that i come that i immediately understood that can be like like can become like a can become like a moat around the business and and my take is that community product fit is much hard and product market fit and if and if you have a community and you see like early signs of community being created you have to do whatever you can in order to cultivate it and that and that's what we've done very successfully the hubspot podcast network is a success story partner now the house hubspot podcast network has great podcast like the ops authority if you are constantly putting out fires in your business instead of focusing on growth and innovation listen to the ops authority hosted by natalie gin and brought to you by the house hubspot podcast network natalie speaks about actionable strategies that actually move your business forward so every week natalie shares some transformational stories from real business owners who've mastered their backend end systems so they can focus on what really matters so get your all ups in order get your business running smoothly so you can scale and you can really build something meaningful stop letting all this chaos steal all of your energy and listen to the ops authority wherever you get your podcasts gust is a success story part now look i talked to business owners every single day you know what i hear constantly scott i love running my business but i hate dealing with payroll and i get it nobody starts a company because they're excited about calculating tax withholding and benefits administration that's exactly why you use gust myself and the smartest business owners use it as well gust is online payroll and benefits software built for small business it's all in one remote friendly and incredibly easy to use so you can pay higher onboard and support your team from anywhere now here's what's sold me unlimited payroll runs for one monthly price no surprises no hidden fees when you need to run that extra payroll and when you hit a tough hr situation and trust me you will you get direct access to actual sort fight hr experts not a chatbot real people who know what they're talking about plus they're the number one payroll software according to g two for fall twenty twenty five and over four hundred thousand small businesses already trust them gust today at gust dot com slash success story and get three months free when you run your first payroll that's three months free payroll at gust dot com slash success story 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 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 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 if we look at if we look at sequence and already what it's enabling but we look at the future of bookkeeping and finance i'm assuming that you're already understanding how ai is gonna impact this and how ai is gonna so like realistically how far are we away from bookkeeper not being relevant anymore cfo i mean cfo is to a certain degree i mean cfo can play a bigger role if you're like going public or at that later stage maybe you want the experience but say like a very tactical cfo or very tactical bookkeeper or an accountant with sequence plus i'm assuming ai that you'll eventually roll out what is a future of finance bookkeeping small business finance look like so bookkeeping i think is i mean the the the the the the more like hand like you know like tedious swap that you need to do the the easier it is to to to replace you right so bookkeeper would definitely be worried and i think that it's the matter of like it's it's we are not far from there and cpa is and accountants and cfo can become strategic alright so that's a different story depends what kind of of an accountant or or cfo url and because those those people can become very strategic and that's far from replacing them but they will be able to do way more with much smaller teams right because all the like you know like putting numbers in and making sure that that you that you reconcile stuff that's gonna that's gonna be solved very you've already you've actually already almost solved it even without ai to a degree yes yes the the the problem that is we're there with the long day right so you need ai you need good ai to understand what what was that payment where that money went we i have to categorize it we are no it's got it's very close but it's not one it's not bullet bulletproof yet but again if i know ten years ago you needed temp a team of ten people and now one person can do it right so yeah so so so that's that and i think that our place in the wall world or sequences place in the world is to become the connective issue of of all those things we don't want to replace no player and we don't want we don't want to give loans we don't want to give credit cards we don't want to compete on interest rates we we have the connective tissue we are connecting our users to the best offer for them and we are using ai already now to analyze the customers to be able to give them the best offer specifically for them i can tell you hey scott i say that you have this aim am card if you move to discover you can you will be able to pay less of vice versa say and so really always on our mission to improve people's life through the financial well being and there's a lot to be done there and there's also a lot of money that you can make of course well because okay so i was gonna say like so we have open banking and better finance banking as a service there's all this un you're doing the re bundling you're doing you're you're being the connected network of all of these so i i but i'm not bundling right sorry not the connecting different yes correct those the famous like you can either bundle or hand bundle and we disagree we think that there's now or at least where we play and we are leaning into the fermentation we are leaning into the hand but we make sense of at all i don't want banding means that i will give you the cards i will give you the the loan i will give you the insurance i don't want to give you anything i want to make sure that you are getting the best offer out there because for me to compete against i don't know again we're like we know chase fargo it doesn't make sense you said that starbucks is one of the biggest banks in america because of stored value cards so what does this really tell us about where the future of banking is heading and i think that bank accounts as as a as an infrastructure is already a commodity and we are building on top of that that's where all the come in so i think that it will be i mean again like people have their money in starbucks right it's a bank by definition and we and and that's just one example i mean they're are like so many more and and uber is giving loans and like you know so so we are starting to see more and more and more companies that their core offering isn't financial services offering financial services and it's something that that that we don't not only that we that we can't stop we don't want to stop right it's great people have way more opportunities more options competition is good right and but there needs to be connective tissue and that's what we are willing if you look ten years out what do you think what do you think the future holds for finance and banking traditional banks all these other sort of un bundle products where you are in all of this i think that the big banks are not going anywhere they they have they they have a brand and and brand is there you know they're kind of the strongest things that you can have i think that they will need to find ways to to make to to give better service i think that the small and medium banks should be more worried and then we need to think of the strategies in order to stay relevant into the future yeah and i think that i think that the the the the problem of this massive fermentation is gonna go and it's it's again it's opportunity but also it also it also has its challenges and so so that that's why i think that there's huge opportunity we are very well positioned to to take advantage of it but maybe there will be other players that we come in if people wanna connect with you if they wanna learn more about sequence where should they go so my my most active on linkedin somebody linkedin perfect is fairly active and get sequence dot io o perfect that's our website you can see everything there i'm happy also to share our link to our this discord community which is again very active if you wanna ask questions about sequence talk to people that are using it at you are more than welcome so we can share the link to that too so just a couple questions because again so your entrepreneur you've failed publicly and then you succeeded but what is your framework or how do you think through extracting the maximum amount of learning from your failure so really thinking about what went wrong without letting it para you that's a that's actually a great question for me the more pressure the more feel and the more anxiety makes me do stuff i feel best when i have a plan and and i know what i'm going to do so for me being paradise was never an option and and i think that just get out there and do stuff try stuff build stuff and even if you even if you think that you know if you've been even if you all really trust and and in in a bad place with yourself just get out and do stuff do stuff that's the that's the best thing that that that that you can do a lot of startup culture it celebrates a lot of optimism which i don't hate but you really advocate for brutal honesty and truth and almost like removing a lot of the delusion about how successful you really are because that's what led to all the stressful times you had with lance so how do you maintain even your teams in morale when this world of brutal honesty and truth and not optimism well no i don't think that you can that it's one or the other right i mean you need to be you need to you need to get close to the tool as much as possible sometimes the that you're doing good and sometimes that things are you know i'm going all like down the drain right and the the important thing the the the most important resource that we have obviously is our time and if you are lying to yourself or faking stuff then you you you know you're like to yourself you're wasting your most important resource so try to think about it not like a sugar coating and order just like you have a limited time here make sure that you're putting your efforts and and your energy in a place that makes sense fake it you make it is one of the things that i hate the most why why do you hate it so much why is that wrong because it takes people into a journey in which they are ninety percent of the time faking it there's a mental toll that the that they are paying and and when i say faking it and i i i don't mean like if a cla customer you do you have that feature and then you say yes and you're go and build it and ship it next week that's not it that's making it that's true and but they wanna ask you all things are going and really we are crushing it it's amazing when you are when when you're obviously not or when you and when you are just like you say i have five thousand customers but you actually are five and that's very dangerous and and that's where things can become it so don't don't fake it right and i think that also for an entrepreneur i hate i i also don't like fake it till you make it but for some reason that seems to be a prevalent idea in entrepreneurship and and i think that having that lack of alignment between where you are what you publicly state you are like how well you're doing publicly versus how well you're you know you're doing in your head i think that just destroys people especially if you do it for a long time i agree i agree i agree that that's why i don't like it and and also like you i mean if you're gonna tell bullshit at the end people will know it right you can't hide everything all the time right if you think about some of the best advice because i'm sure you've had many mentors and and just friends over the course of your career and many of your companies what would be some of the best advice that you've ever received take money charge if if now is paying you're you're not getting something valuable i think this is this is key and then i would say that the last thing that i i love to ask because you have two daughters and obviously you wanna leave them with the best possible advice and set them up for success in the future so if you could take all the life lessons and wisdom that you've experienced over your life and you could only pass on one lesson to them what would that lesson be don't be afraid don't be afraid even even ever even if you think that something something happened at the end of the world it's not it's not it's a it's it's gonna be lay way less worse than you can get the take imagine so don't be afraid go for it it's claude is a success story partner now as a podcast my worst nightmare used to be going into an interview under prepared now claude has completely changed my prep game and if you don't know what claude is claude is the ai for mines that don't stop at good enough it is the collaborator that actually understands your entire workflow and thinks with you not for you whether or not you're debugging code at midnight or you're strat your next business move claude extends your thinking to tackle the problems that matter i feed claude my guest articles before i do a podcast i feed it their company updates past interviews and it helps me spot the angles that nobody else is talking about last week claude research capabilities pulled together insights from over thirty sources about my guests industry and it helped me ask questions that always make them say great question nobody's ever asked me that before claude is by far the most useful tool to grow any business any podcast and really just help you extend your thinking on whatever it is you're working on if you're ready to tackle bigger problems sign up for claude today and get fifty percent off quad pro when you use my link cloud dot ai slash success think big bi small is a success story partner now if you love hearing from bold entrepreneurs and leaders who carve their own path you'll definitely wanna check out think big bi small it's back for a brand new season it's one of my favorite shows think big by small is the chart topping entrepreneurship podcast from harvard business school the show explores an innovative approach to business leadership it's called acquisition entrepreneurship that's where you buy a profitable small business and then you become the ceo rather than trying to start a business from scratch if you need somewhere to start check at their season three debut episode with ensemble performing our ceo and harvard jeff hoe in the conversation you're gonna follow jeff's journey through the search process all the way through to building up a sizable business which is interesting because this all began as a passion project for him to don't miss out follow thing big by small and apple podcasts spotify or wherever you're listening now

in this lesson episode explore how cultivating habits and mental models can serve as powerful tools for success discover why iteration often outperform the pursuit of pure originality understand how adopting an apprentice mentality foster growth and resilience and uncover how endurance and mindset shape the ability to navigate setbacks and achieve lasting results and let's break down some of the lessons that you've learned over your career that you speak about in this book and there's there's a few like there's i can't remember there's a what there's fifteen different chapters and there's a whole and there's like a lesson per chapter so let's you know for the value of people listening pick your favorite ones that you wanna that you wanna speak on i don't know which ones you'd like to touch on but i'm sure there's a few favorites that you love and we can go into those and unpack what those are and how those can help you succeed yeah totally so there's fifteen power ups in the book and power ups to me are again like i mentioned there either habits that you cultivate or mental models such as understanding things like second order consequences and things like that are different tools that you can go around collecting just like you would in the gaming world now i talk about fifteen in the book it's it's just the very beginning there's a lot more than fifteen power ups in the world and you have to there's positive power ups and there's negative power ups right you eat too much fast food than you know you you end up you know your body goes in a different direction right and so what one of the chapters is titled theory and i i think there's a cog there's a lot of cognitive dissonance around it because us as human beings who like to think i'm original right we we hold this thing to be very sacred and i think it's important to understand that even apple the most valuable company in the world you know when steve jobs came out with the mouse and the graphical user interface gets we stole it from stole it from xerox right and so he even him he said in life everything is just remix and when you think about spacex and and elon musk's rockets coming back back to earth the the the rocket design is still fundamentally the the same foundational design as from the the fifties or to sixties right the big difference is they come back to to to to earth and so you know picasso himself and said that you know everything in life back i mean great artist steal right and so it's like oh my god i don't wanna steal i don't wanna be a thief but like reality is those you listening to this podcast right now you're trying to get at least one nugget from it and you're trying to apply it to your life and so you life is just you're you're going around collecting all these nuggets and then maybe you're making a ten to thirty percent iteration right like that iteration for bringing the rocket back to earth that's a massive iteration right it's not easy to do by any means but he had to combine you know elon and his entire team had to think about okay you know how what are all the dynamics that are at play and how can we make this work right so there's a game within itself there so my point is you know i think the the sooner people let go of the pressure of having it be completely original the easier it's going to be for people to kind of move on and make make the the best version of themselves which is in itself you know very original we're all original we're all kind of one of one yeah and i would say that to constantly think that the things that we have to do in life or take to market or like let's let's look at it from an entrepreneurship blend if you want to if you wanna do something that's slightly outside of whatever your nine to five is or if you already are trying to take a product to market there's there's sort of two ways you can go about it right you can you can go for that that blue ocean where you're taking something to market that's never ever been done before or you can just iterate in an existing market and and be wildly successful so there's something to be said for not making life harder than it has to be for you either right and you'll still be successful you'll still be revered and you'll still be like you're not you're not like you said not fe in a bad way but just iterating all what people have already done and i think that's something that also probably lends a little bit of insight to your apprentice mentality learning from others as well it's not obviously in the same context it's not t but it's not like just learning and iterating but it's also making sure that you don't have to go through all the failures and that other people have already learned from right yep totally i i mean so it's you know the apprentice mentality is really just you know understanding that you're never gonna be too high on yourself or they're not never gonna be too low on yourself it's it's understanding that you know you can have strong views but you should just hold them very weekly and if you're presented it with new data new information to be be ready to adjust on the fly because the more ego that you that you develop the more the more you're gonna be stuck in your ways but the world's evolving so quickly especially with all the stuff we see with with technology 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 from eight months ago when i sold some stock that's eight months ten thousand dollars it could have been workings instead 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 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 today at survey monkey dot com slash scott 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 in all these spam calls it's 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 is 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 in cog 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 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 so it's so friend it's apprentice meant apprentice mentality i don't wanna get a twisted so it's not it's not just you going out towards and going finding mentors and getting people to help you out it's truly i understand what you're saying now so it's it's just having this this humble this humble persona that allows you to accept learnings from other people right it's more than just defining mentors okay okay i mean like you know when i so for example i've been hanging a lot in club house but when i when i go into the rooms you know i i try to listen and i try to be the the the idiot in the room right so when i approached things from an idiot kind of a or apprentice i'm not gonna say you know apprentice or idiots but like i'll i'll take it even further right i'll use an extreme word and say oh look i i'm not so smart i have a lot to learn but you know sometimes i'll see people join the room and there's a lot of bra there's a lot of eco and you can tell they're closed off to listening they're closed off to learning it's it's my way or the highway in some cases they might be large influencers and you know but you know they haven't learned to kind of maybe they might have had the apprentice mentality at one point but they haven't dialed it back and and and kept that habit going right they haven't cultivated or or more so refreshed that habit over and over yeah and and that i think that the most successful people at least the people that i found in my life that are the most successful that could be worth multi millions or billion dollar plus in total net worth those are the people like when you do speak to them when they constantly have successes and wins you can see that the second they they implant themselves into into a group they they immediately just like they just want as much information as possible and i think the people you're speaking about think it's probably a little bit more for prolific on club house just because if if club house in some of the rooms not all of them on on some of them and i know you're like i watch all your stuff i follow you on social you're always on club always speaking about club i think that there's a lot of people that kinda flex on club a little bit more than they should and that doesn't help anybody right you know it's not gonna it's not gonna help but i think they put a ceiling on their success a hundred percent because i mean yeah i love sharing the numbers right you know when when i in club but i don't do it to flex and i always try to preface like this is not to brag this is just saying hey this is what's possible but it also takes this amount of time to get there so i i come from a position of trying to be transparent but teaching as well but i think to your point when you're just flexing about oh you have you know you bought this company this this public brand over here and then you you you took this company public or whatever you know how helpful is that really or are you just is that more ego than anything like how helpful is that generally yeah not gonna help many people who who wanna do something more with their life or you know start side hustle so like they're not most people are not trying to take a company public most people are just trying to do better at what they're doing right they you know maybe ipo is a plan for some but i think the majority of people would learn more from a chat with than somebody who just lists off the companies taking public or you know the the success they've achieved is great it provides credibility but it doesn't actually offer tactical or tangible insight or lessen if somebody can take away right like you mentioned that nugget people listen to they wanna a nugget want them they can take away and they can do tomorrow really if you just keep flexing it's not gonna help anybody and i think that that's something that those are you know it's almost like those are the people even if they have had success i i prefer not to learn from them just because i know that where their heads at where their minds at is not in the place where they're going to accept other points of view accept other opinions and actually it's funny because you see people that were a wildly wildly successful you know the monet momentarily successful what otherwise and over the past twenty years they become irrelevant right those are the people that just they they had success and they became completely irrelevant because i think they never had this i've never heard of frame this way but apprentice mentality or that's a very very very smart point now these are these these level ups these these power ups are these mindset or are some of them like actual behavioral items or like daily routine items that you can that you can do to sort of accomplish that one percent day over day yeah some of it is is mindset so we have one on endurance right so that's really you know how much pain can you take because any level of six you're hoping to achieve you know pain is a prerequisite right i i think people tend to run away from the pain but framing your mind into running towards it and getting through it right you know there's a lot of people like when you're thinking about starting the new business or or or whatever that's you know you go through impostor syndrome that's part of you have to endure that there's the start up the the startup kind of you know that that one or two or three years that it takes to get things going right just things don't work out the right way initially things don't go as planned maybe some type of pandemic hits like just things don't work out right but it's you have to learn to endure and so i i learned a lot of that from from poker having to endure like sometimes you have swings where you lose for could be three six twelve months at a time and you just have to learn to deal with it and then be patient and and choose how you how you react to that right so some of its mindset some of it would be you know habits but you know it's what they say the the the cliche you hear over and over is you know oh it's all about mindset at the end of the day you hear from a lot of kind of self development april and it's it's actually true it's it's it's how you're programmed at the end of the day that's how i like to think of it you know what type of information are you are you consuming and that's really gonna program you that's gonna guide you who you hanging out with right that is your programming and that's gonna say how you take you decide to do things in the future 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 claude is a success story partner now as a podcast my worst nightmare used to be going into an interview under prepared now claude has completely changed my prep game and if you don't know what claude is claude is the ai for mines that don't stop at good enough it is the collaborator that actually understands your entire workflow and thinks with you not for you whether or not you're debugging code at midnight or you're strat your next business move claude extends your thinking to tackle the problems that matter i feed claude my guest articles before i do a podcast i feed it their company updates past interviews and it helps me spot the angles that nobody else is talking about last week claude research capabilities pulled together insights from over thirty sources about my guests industry and it helped me ask questions that always make them say great question nobody's ever asked me that before claude is by far the most useful tool to grow any business any podcast and really just help you extend your thinking on whatever it is you're working on if you're ready to tackle bigger problems sign up for claude today and get fifty percent off quad pro when you use my link claude dot ai slash success sports injuries test you your mind your body and spirit others transform you elevating you to a stronger bull or version of yourself at summit orthopedic our experts are prepared for both for every challenge for every comeback because you deserve nothing less than the best live life at your summit with summit orthopedic summit ortho dot com

in this lessons episode explore how hidden motive shape behavior more than most realized discover why subconscious bias block accurate self assessment understand how patterns in laughter conversation and politics revealed deeper truths and uncover how exposing these forces challenges assumptions and reshape views on human motives so under understanding that understanding that we we are wrong a lot in the actions that we take or the presumption that the that we internalize how is it even possible to model model different outputs or or different ideas if the if the the test group is is flawed how do we ever predict anything how do we ever right improve anything well so you're designed not to see real motives you're designed to see the motives you wanna say so if you just try to look at yourself and try to see real motives that's not gonna go very well your so subconscious is ready to you from that what you'll have more successful doing is looking at just humans in general looking at their average behavior and trying to come up with average typical motives to explain average typical behavior your constant subconscious mind is not very well set to defend against that it doesn't care so much against that as long as it's not directed at you so what we do in our book is to go through ten different areas of life and in each area we say what's the usual stated motive and then what are a bunch of things that don't make sense that don't fit very well with that story and then offer an alternative motive that fits better with a bunch of the puzzles that we describe and that's our method of analysis to say here's a motives that makes more sense of these various puzzles and most of these puzzles might not even be things you you have noticed or if you noticed thought were very interesting or important and so usually they didn't interfere with your usual story about what's your motive foot now after hearing by this podcast or reading our book you will be more in a tougher situation pretending to have views load so we'll have to warn you right up front we're going to interfere with your ability to pretend to have the motives so that might put you at a disadvantage in the usual evolutionary faking it games because usually your your subconscious mind just does a great job of pretending to have a certain motive and getting away with making you think that's blah because you haven't noticed these contradiction so sorry about that no no no no no i mean serious and not i know the question is why i read rock what why we're in this stuff because it might not be in your just to another so so we do think say social scientist and policy makers have more of an interest and perhaps even an obligation to learn this stuff but ordinary people may not really wanna know it might not be an to know what would what would so let's let's again let's bring it down to to layman's terms when you start to understand so the the ten areas you cover body language laughter conversation a consumption are charity education medicine religion politics those are the the ten areas that you touch on in in the book correct just wanna make sure there work yes those are them man we could have done another ten or twenty areas it heavily i had a longer book but these are the ones we chose we think this is enough to make the point clear there's a lot of of good mode and you're like so walk walk me through when somebody does understand something like that let's let's pick an example whatever one is is top of mind for you what would what would be brought to light when somebody understands hidden motives in any of these topics perhaps politics is is too easy for most people i don't know if they early in the list so that things later in the lift are some often harder to swallow because people aren't passionate about them but let's start right out with say laughter okay one of the earliest chapters so you have other people laugh we're or a laugh lot and if you ask why do people laugh or what are we laughing you might say because it was funny if you think about it as not much of an explanation and you might they will that's what say you look at the literature and say well what are the theories people have and they say well inc or it was a it's sort of benign violation or other sorts of things like that and these work a little bit but not that well and so the first order of businesses to collect these puzzles what are they sort of features and data points that we know about after at especially birthday ones that are puzzling well one thing that's puzzling is that speakers laugh more in the listener and people laugh a lot more when it's social than when it's a social enormous range of times more and we'd laugh about a lot of things that would be actually pretty embarrassing to say straight out loud without laughing also for example we might laugh at the joker don't drop the soap in the prison shower now if you think about it it literally laughing at prison rate which in most people's conscious mind isn't the sort of thing you should be making a lot of fun of because it's a terribly serious sad thing so why would we laugh at that joke our standard theory that we're just taking from literature is that laughter is a play signal you do many things for real and then you also do things in play so children and play in small animals will play fight play run play chase play climb and in those play modes they don't quite do the real thing that don't have the clause out for example but they'll try to go to emotions in order to practice what they would need to do they are for real humans are very social so we do a lot of play a lot of our play and social and since we have these norms and they're very important a lot of our place centers around violating norms or not violating norms or enforcing them or not so laughter among humans is often about doing something that would seem the violate norm but doesn't really hurt us and so the key thing is that when we're playing the thing that can go wrong is that somebody actually gets hurt so even when small animals are play fighting one of them might actually get bit one of them might start bleeding and at that moment they need to stop playing so playing animals and humans all need to be watching out for whether anybody's really getting hurt and checking to see whether we're still playing and so they need a way to say oh stop if we we need or stop playing on also way to say we're fine let's keep playing and laughter is basically a we're still playing signal you are doing something that looks like it might hurt but it doesn't hurt and you're saying it doesn't hurt and so similarly in the prison shower joke not you and the other person are not in prison you're not in the prison shower you don't know anybody in prison it doesn't have threaten you personally you feel safe so even though you're you're acting like you're violating this norm you're not actually getting hurt and you nobody around you expect to get hurt nobody expects to get called on for this violation of an norm and so you're safe and so we're doing this all the time with laughter we are playing violating norms going up to the edge of things and checking that we all feel safe we're okay and it feels very good because it bonds you to people you realize well they could call me on this and they could you know wrap wrap me out and report me for this violation but they won't because they're my associates and we're all having good fun here 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 in all these spam calls it's 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 is 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 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 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 the hubspot podcast network is a success story partner now the hubspot podcast network has great podcast like the ops authority if you are constantly putting out fires in your business instead of focusing on growth and innovation listen to the ops authority hosted by natalie gin and brought to you by the house hubspot podcast network natalie speaks about actionable strategies that actually move your business forward so every week natalie shares some transformational stories from real business owners who've mastered their backend end systems they can focus on what really matters so get your ops in order get your business running smoothly so you can scale and you can really build something meaningful stop letting all this chaos steal all of your energy and listen to the ops authority wherever you get your podcasts i was i was just reading a point that you mentioned as well about also in line with laughter you mentioned that babies laugh more with their mothers how does that and i'm just curious as to why you indicated that piece in particular well i was probably just lifting a lot of little correlate that we know of wow i mean but but the key point there is you know it's a signal of feeling comfortable and so you do it with people you're are comfortable with and so for example people often say i fell in love with him or her because we laughed or he he or she made me laugh right what is that saying it's saying you're if somebody who you are comfortable with right yeah who who you can violate norms who you can break rules or pretend to break rules and they will be okay with that and they will protect you and they will not you know you could do play fighting with them and they won't really hurt you now now the when you're when you engage with that and you start to laugh does it mean that you're coming from a place of feeling uncomfortable and then the laugh brings that brings you together or or allows you to feel psychologically safe it has to be a plausible violation that might hurt you right it's it's not have to have a bit of a tooth so you know you can see this from standard comics or something if they if they're jokes or we're all about cereal boxes or putting on socks it wouldn't have much of an edge they call it yeah and so it wouldn't be as funny right so they have to go to an edge where there seemed to be some risk of somebody getting hurt yeah otherwise it's not edgy and then it's not funny it's funny it's reassuring funny when you go to that edge and then you say u aha i'm still safe mean unfortunately like even being on an amusement park ride right you go on a roller coaster or something else like that what's the fun it's because it seals dangerous but you're not hurt if you actually got hurt on the roller coaster with that wouldn't see fought funny anymore no and not fun right no but if you just sat in a park bench that's not fun either you have to go to the edge of danger but not go past the edge of danger and then it's fun similarly for humor and and enjoying comic we have to go to the edge of seeing that we in fact could have been hurt and see that we aren't and then we are knowing that the other person have our back that they're protecting us we are safe with them because they could have hurt us i i'm also curious about your point on conversation and i don't mean to just go through the entire list but and i've got title but i i i was reading a segment on the piece of conversation about how conversation does not usually involve the exchange of useful information right it's more meant to show off our mental ability which i thought was interesting you see now are laughing because it's uncomfortable or or maybe it is comfortable we're we're trying to make it comfortable but it's it's an awkward topic it's not a fun thing to think of we are now home because this topic is applicable to what we're doing right now and so we're vulnerable to the accusation that we are showing off right now which is a no you're not supposed to shaw and so we laughed because we are somewhat confident that we each won't actually attack the other person on this ground yeah we feel safe enough there but if we feel enough at risk so to make it funny i like that now now now after i i can i can see how that could be an eye opener for someone but i don't think that's going to you know change their entire world whereas conversation right conversation is something we do every single day right you ask with someone yeah so the structure of our book is first the first third we try to make it plausible that people could have hidden motives and we actually have examples of animals and other things with humans and we just try to make it really powerful that in general people could not know about motors and then we have some relatively easy thoughtful chapters where we have descriptions of hidden motives that people will mostly be able to accept body language laughter and things like that and then we sort of move up the scale the things that people will get more upset about and be more resistant to concluding that their motives aren't what they think there and by that time hopefully we've commit you look there's a lot of hidden motors it's plausible there could be a motive here you might that might not be enough to convince you that there is in fact juan but it means it's not crazy and so that's sort of the structure here is is to first tell you it's not crazy to have in notice not crazy to believe people do not know why they do things mh and we can go through some of those other examples if if you want oh and then we're moving to things of our center so out of these ten chapters most people have like an area that's more sacred for them and they will be resistant to believing hidden motive in their sacred area but in the other areas they'll be fine with that so for example if you're really into art you'll find it hard to accept our story and art if you're an ana a art you're a stem ground or something you'll find it quite easily to accept that those artists have hidden motive because that's not they worry for religion or politics you know a fast central to your life you will find it harder to buy our story thanks for tuning in if you found this valuable don't forget to hit that subscribe button so you never miss episode and if you wanna dive deeper into this conversation check out the links in the description to watch full episode see you in the next one claude is a success story partner now as a podcast my worst nightmare used to be going into an interview under unprepared now claude has completely changed my prep game and if you don't know what claude is claude is the ai for mines that don't stop at good enough it is the collaborator that actually understands your entire workflow and thinks with you not for you whether or not you're debugging code at midnight or you're strat your next business move claude extends your thinking to tackle the problems that matter i feed claude my guest articles before i do a podcast i feed it their company updates past interviews and it helps me spot the angles that nobody else is talking about last week claude research capabilities pulled together insights from over thirty sources but my guests industry and it helped me ask questions that always make them say great question nobody's ever asked me that before claude is by far the most useful tool to grow any business any podcast and really just help you extend your thinking on whatever it is you're working on if you're ready to tackle bigger problem sign up for cloud today and get fifty percent off quad pro when you use my link cloud dot ai slash success

this is the story of the one as a custodial supervisor at a high school he knows that during cold and flu season germs spread fast it's why he partners with granger to stay fully stocked on the products and supplies he needs from tissues to disinfectant to floor scrubber also that he can help students staff and teachers stay healthy and focused call one eight hundred granger click granger dot com or just stop by granger for the ones who get it done in today's lessons episode i want to expose a relatively painful truth that is destroying millions of lives the dreams that you're chasing aren't even yours if you're working towards goals at look impressive but they leave you feeling empty inside if you've been copying other people's of success they're asking what actually makes you happy when you secretly where you're living someone else's version of a good life you have to listen i'll show you why most people spend decades pursuing these borrowed dreams they absorbed social media and society and how to stop copying everyone else's desires and start choosing your own before you waste your entire life living the wrong life and building towards the wrong thing today i'm gonna show you why the dreams that you're living aren't yours but first a story grace was dying after sixty seven years of marriage three children and a life that looked perfect from the outside she lay in the hospital bed with tears streaming down her face i wanted to travel the world she whispered to her palette of care i wanted to write stories i wanted to live alone a small apartment in paris and eat songs every morning she paused struggling to breathe but everyone expected me to be the perfect wife the perfect mother i lived the life they wanted me to live not the one i dreamed about and sadly grace died three days later and her nurse ronnie ware would later write that this was the most common deathbed regret she heard i wish i had the courage to live a life true to myself not the life others expected of me but here's is what ware didn't realize and what you need to understand grace story isn't about lacking courage it's about something far more disturbing that i really want you to understand as soon as possible grace never had her own dreams to begin with she was living a lie a lot of us are living a lie french philosopher renee gerard he spent his life studying something that he called meme desire the idea that human beings don't actually know what they want instead we copy the desire of others we see someone driving a tesla and suddenly we want tesla not because we've analyzed our transportation needs but because someone we admire or envy made that choice seem desirable could watch someone building a startup getting married moving to new york buying a house having kids and we start wanting those things too and gerard gerard called this the romantic lie the belief that our desires spring from some deep authentic place inside us but the truth is more un unsettling we are constantly borrowing other people's dreams and mist them for our own think about it why do you want the relationship that you want the career you're building the lifestyle that you're currently pursuing is it because you sat quietly with yourself and carefully considered what would bring you joy and meaning or is it because you've seen others live that way and you decided that it looked appealing now most people if they're honest will realize that their desires are borrowed and copied and mimic and they are living someone else's vision of a good life now social media has turned meme desire into this precision weapon every single day you're exposed to thousands of curated versions of other people's successful lives the entrepreneur with the beach side laptop the couple with the perfect wedding the friend with the dream job each image plants a seed maybe i should want this too so you start following people whose lives you wanna copy you bookmark their posts you screenshot their quotes you study their life and their strategies for living that life and without realizing it you start to replace your own inner compass with someone else's gps and then what's the result well you end up spending years and maybe decades chasing goals that were never really yours to begin with you build the business you saw someone else built you move to the city everyone else thinks is cool you optimize for the metrics that make others impressed and then one day you wake up feeling empty and it's because you achieved someone else's dream not your own that is a tragedy of an un lived life there is a special kind of suffering reserved for people who reach the end of their lives and realize they never actually live and palliative care workers report the same story over and over people on their death beds don't regret the chances they took are the mistakes that they made they regret the chances they didn't take because they were too busy living up to other people's expectations they regret working jobs they hated to buy things they didn't need who impress people they didn't like they regret staying in relationships it felt safe but empty they regret playing too small because big dreams seemed too selfish is too risky too different from what everyone else was doing and most heartbreaking many of them regret never figuring out what they actually wanted in the first place carl jung wrote about this phenomenon the tragedy of the un lived life the parts of ourselves that we never explore because we're too busy being who others expect us to be the dreams they never pursue because they don't fit the template of success that we've absorbed from our parents or friends or culture it could be the path that we never walked because they seem too weird too risky or too far from what others would understand or approve of them and this is the deepest source of human suffering not living your own life this brings us to the word authenticity as everybody says just be authentic right but what if you don't know who you authentically are what if you spend so long copying others that you've lost touch with your own desires your own values your own vision of what a meaningful life looks like and this is the trap that most people fall into they hear advice about following their passion or being true themselves and then they panic because they realize they don't actually know what that means so their passion feels borrowed and their values feel inherited and their dreams feel like hand me downs from people that they've admired so the solution isn't to live authentically the solution isn't to dig deeper to find some buried authentic self because that self might not exist at least not in the way that we imagine the solution is to consciously choose what to want now here's what ge gerard understood but not many people teach since all desire is learned you can learn to desire consciously instead of unconsciously you can choose your models instead of letting random influences on social media choose them for you you can ask better questions instead of what do i want you can ask who am i copying and do i want to become like them instead of what should i do should start to ask yourself what would i regret not trying and instead of what will make me successful just start to ask yourself what would make me feel alive this is the difference between meme desire and conscious desire meme phonetic desire it copies what other people have already chosen you conscious desire chooses based on who you wanna become and if you wanna know if your dreams are really yours you just start to ask yourself some really tough questions you gonna ask yourself if no one else would ever know about your accomplishments would you still want them because most people want recognition more than they want the actual thing they're working towards and if you strip away the audience you're gonna start to discover what actually matters to you and you can ask yourself if you could live five completely different lives what would they be and this question bypass the either or thinking that keeps people trapped right you don't have to choose just one path but you do need to know what paths actually appeal to you you should ask yourself what did you love doing before you cared about what people thought so childhood interest before they got filtered through social expectations that could also point to authentic desire you should ask yourself what would you do if you knew you die in exactly ten years and this removes it pressure to build something that lasts forever and focuses attention on what feels meaningful right now today and then the last question you should ask yourself is what are you afraid people will think if you pursue what you actually want and more often than not the thing that you're most afraid of and what you're most afraid to want is the thing you most authentically want now this brings us back to authentic living when you go through this exercise you are getting closer to being in line with who you actually are having dreams that are actually yours to living authentically but when no one tells you about living authentically is it can be very lonely because when you stop copying other people's dreams and you start pursuing your own especially at the beginning you start to leave the crowd behind you stop getting likes for the content that resonates with everyone else you stop fitting into neat categories that people can understand and approve of you stop being able to explain your choices in ways that make immediate sense to others and this is the price of true dreams the price of authenticity you have to be willing to be misunderstood but what you gain is that you get to live your own life you get to die knowing you at least tried to figure out what you act she wanted and gave it your best shot you get to experience the rare satisfaction of pursuing goals that feel genuinely yours even if they don't make sense anyone else remember your life is not a dress rehearsal grace died with tears on her face she because she realized too late that she live someone else's version of a good life and you don't have to you can start right now asking yourself the hard questions what am i doing because i think i should what am i avoiding because it doesn't fit a template what would i try if i knew i couldn't fail what would i try if i knew i probably would fail but it would be worth attempting anyways your life is not a dress rehearsal this is the only shot you get and the worst thing that can happen isn't that you'll fail at pursuing your authentic dreams the worst thing that can happen is that you'll succeed at pursuing someone else's you'll build the perfect replica of a life you never actually wanted it you'll reach the end having never asked yourself what you truly desired and you'll die like grace there's no need to sugar coat it with tears on your face with spring about the life you never had the courage to live for most of us the dreams that we are living are not ours but the dreams that you could choose to live are the question is will you make that choice claude is a success story partner now as a podcast my worst nightmare used to be going into an interview under prepared now claude has completely changed my prep game and if you don't know what claude is claude is the ai for mines that don't stop at good enough it is the collaborator that actually understands your entire workflow and thinks with you not for you whether or not you're debugging code at midnight or you're strat your next business move claude extends your thinking to tackle the problems that matter i feed claude my guest articles before i do a podcast i feed it their company updates past interviews and it helps me spot the angles that nobody else is talking about last week claude research capabilities pulled together insights from over thirty sources about my guests industry and it helped me ask questions that always make them say great question nobody's ever asked me that before claude is by far the most useful tool to grow any business any podcast and really just help you extend your thinking on whatever it is you're working on if you're ready to tackle bigger problem sign up for cloud today and get fifty percent off quad pro when you use my link cloud dot ai slash success think big bi small is a success story partner now if you love hearing from bold entrepreneurs and leaders who carve their own paths you'll definitely wanna check out think big bi small it's back for a brand new season it's one of my favorite shows think big bi small is the chart topping entrepreneurship podcast from harvard business school the show explores an innovative approach to business leadership it's called acquisition entrepreneurship that's where you buy a profitable small business and then you become the ceo rather than trying to start a business from scratch you need somewhere to start check at their season three debut episode with ensemble performing arts ceo and harvard lo jeff homer in the conversation you're gonna follow jeff's journey through the search process all the way through to building up a sizable business which is interesting because this all began as a passion project for him to don't miss out follow thing big buy small and apple podcasts spotify or wherever you're listening now the michigan achievement scholarship is funding every grad every path and odds are your high school senior or recent grad will qualify for free money for community college public or private university or career training no matter their gpa and the scholarship is less income base than you might expect wherever your child is headed there's free money to get them where they wanna go learn more at mi dot gov slash achievement

success story is a square partner now your favorite neighborhood spots run on square you know i was just at panther coffee here in miami last week and beyond the incredible cor potato what struck me was watching them seamlessly handle the morning rush the barista mentioned they've been using square to manage everything from inventory to building their loyal customer base it's so much more than just that little white card reader that we all recognize square knows that local businesses can be big businesses and as things get more complex square meets you at every opportunity so whether or not you're expanding to new locations building a loyal following even covering cash flow gaps squares powering all the behind the scenes stuff that matters they knock out today's to do's and they unlock tomorrow's what ifs if you're ready to see how square can transform your business go to square dot com slash go slash success to learn more that's square dot com slash go slash success square me there i was feeling very very disconnected in my life i was lost i thought i had a lot of friends but when the chips were down i didn't for me and for a lot of people not feeling a chronic sense of disconnection is a trauma income today's episode features someone who turned disruption into her calling anna ron is a visionary strategist whose leadership has reshaped the landscape in insert her field e g education slash wellness slash innovation people who grew up with trauma when they were very young like abuse is bad but neglect is worse it's going to lead to a life that's empty emotionally and emotionally so much of our personal growth depends on being able to interact with other people and what happens if that's stressful we go into hiding we were told that if we would go talk about it enough we would feel better but i was one of the people and i'm not alone and i don't speak for everybody am i some kind of a freak because i'm going to the therapist and i just feel terrible she doesn't follow trends she sets them from building initiatives that uplift communities to driving change in how we think about impact and purpose her work isn't just about success it's about significance this is anna rum once i had that experience of so quickly popping out of it when i had better tools to deal with the thoughts and the feelings without talking about them writing about them and then following it with meditation it worked like a charm don't give up do not get discouraged because this is hard and i'm super happy that you're here today just to kick things off so that everybody's on the same page help me define ability it's a word that i made up when i was feeling very very disconnected in my life i was lost i just realized i didn't really have people who were there for me i thought i had a lot of friends but when the chips were down i didn't and i thought to myself some people have this thing and i just my word for it was connect ability they have this air about them that they they find people easy they're easy to be around people like to have them as friends and they easily get into a conversation where they hear the real point and people feel heard and all this stuff used to feel very elusive to me until i taught myself how to do it why do you think i mean this is obviously something that i think a lot of people feel and deal with i mean you wrote this whole book about connect ability i think that and you studied this for a living so tell me if my if my uneducated guess is correct but it feels like it's just gotten worse since covid and it just keeps getting worse and worse and people feel increasingly isolated so what's going on just in terms of what's happening since covid but also just happening socially culturally when people feel like they lack connect ability what was happening with you there's two layers that i'll talk about here and one of them is what happened during covid which made everything worse and i think everybody since that there are those few people who are like i loved covid lockdown was my dream i didn't have to deal with anybody i wasn't one of those people but a lot of people whatever was odd about them whatever they struggled with got str or you know by the time those years were up so for me and for a lot of people not feeling a chronic sense of disconnection is a trauma symptom now it's not the only way you get to feel that way some for some people it's baked into their personality they're introverted they're on the autism spectrum they just are socially awkward that that's not uncommon but people who grew up with trauma when they were very young especially neglect like abuse is bad but neglect is worse there's some kind of neurological development that maybe got disrupted through that neglect through not having that interaction with their parents as much as a baby needs and we walk around life feeling just like there's a membrane around us like somehow everybody got the memo on and there's some sort of i've heard somebody describe it as the wifi where everybody's kind of talking this nonverbal language and they understand each other and just feeling like a little bit like i don't know what's going on i easily put my foot in my mouth it's harder for me to feel close to people i feel like i have to hide who i am so that's the kind of disconnection and when i started my work as crappy childhood ferry which i backed into over years of just being somebody who taught people my techniques for healing trauma symptoms when i got online and started you know hearing from thousands of people through their letters and their youtube comments i realized anecdotally i'm not a researcher formally but i have this huge sample that talks to me about what it's like to have this problem they all said me too i feel really disconnected and so i i do find that it's a nearly universal symptom a feeling of disconnection i see three one three things neurological regulation disconnection and self defeating behavior like those are the three things that really need healing when you're walking around like the walking wounded from a bad childhood so this all stems from from early childhood does it does it all stem from early childhood no i mean we all know we everybody struggles with this a little bit but early childhood trauma has a it just has a unique opportunity to alter your nervous system development and so if you if you had a perfectly normal childhood and then you went through a lot of trauma as an adult sure it would affect you and it might make you feel alienate from people but when it happens in childhood you're actually in development your nervous system is forming itself and that just as a little example i'm not a neurologist but most of us have heard of mirror neurons there these neurons that develop and wire up because you're getting interaction from your mom or dad and so literally neglect can cause these neurological deficits or disruptions and i don't think we ever get a perfectly good lens on we don't have the technology to do it but we know it's true and you can sense it in yourself and it's helpful to just assume i assume i'm neuro i have neuro on this one i'm going to work on it and most things can be improved and who even knows what your perfect condition would have been it's a hypothetical you know how connected would you have been if your life had been different who knows people are different but for traumatized people this has been an invisible symptom all along you know people really focus on other things that are quite obvious to others like depression anxiety terrible relationships that kind of thing but but it's just like it's this very sort of quiet humming in the background of your life and you don't quite know and put and you can't put a finger on exactly what's wrong but you feel like something's off because you see in others they're optimized to a degree compared to your baseline yeah and the way they relate to others in their family and the way they can just participate in groups you just think how do they even do that like it takes this tremendous effort and what's the toll what's the toll of that it's it's terrible it couldn't be worse it it's it leads to you know if a person can't learn to connect with other people it's going to lead to a life that's empty emotionally and emotionally i mean that's so much of our personal growth depends on being able to interact with other people and what happens if that's stressful for a person we go into hiding we we use isolation as a way to manage our own symptoms and i can't really talk about this without without defining dis discoloration the nervous system becomes dis regulated everybody gets dis regulated sometimes it's when you feel disco disoriented or out of sorts or you're wake up on the wrong side of the bed a little newborn baby cries and you know is is inc uncontrollable and then finally through you know love holding feeding the baby calms down and becomes alert again that's regulation so we all know how to do it virtually everybody can do it but people who were traumatized are dis regulated more of the time they they struggle to get re regulated and it happens so easily and the only part of dis regulation that's obvious to other people is the emotional part of it where we lash out or have a panic attack or be romantically impulsive or something it's too much emotion but that's just one little piece of the dis regulation pie there's so much else going on there there's disruption of hormones an an immune system part and blood flow and learning and cognition and memory and so people who were traumatized as kids have this way out of proportion probability of having almost every chronic health condition there is heart disease cancer diabetes obesity reproductive disorders dementia the the list is very very broad and it's hard to think of anything that isn't exacerbated by early trauma so not everybody who has cancer had early trauma but your risk goes way up if you were traumatized as a kid the solving i mean like now this sort of like puts your bodies of work in perspective so this is why the solving of your dis regulation is a prerequisite it's required if you if you understand that you cannot be connected to people if you understand that something's off okay we gotta go to the root cause first and i'm curious if you see just in terms of people that you know consume your content and reach out to you do you see a lot of people seeking out help finding band aid solutions as opposed to dealing with the root cause yeah you know some of them are obvious band aids there's there's different things for different people like the big thing about me that made it necessary for me to figure out what was going on is therapy didn't work for me talk therapy made me very dis regulated and that's not on uncommon made it worse yeah made it worse so i would go to try to talk about problems in my life and and it seemed like therapist were always very interested to hear how hard my childhood was it was you know it's like it's like cat you know for therapist when they hear it's like a you know you my mother was a drug addict and an alcoholic and she left me outside a casino in the snow and you could talk about this your whole life and i'm glad i got a chance to tell what happened and to get validated but talking about that stuff would always just make me feel very der regulated i couldn't focus couldn't feel my hands i would just feel really shaky and forget what where i was or who i was talking to not like unconscious but just very spaced out and it turns out that's really normal and in in the past i don't know ten years finally they're starting to recognize that but not the whole not everybody but there are some some therapists who are they're working with dis regulation first nobody can really process information unless they're regulated it it accounts for a lot of difficulties in school too of course and everybody knows the kids who had a rough home life they struggle in school but this is a lot why the left front cortex will start to go dim under stress like let's say you're taking a math test or something left front cortex where reasoning is starts to work less well it's it it goes dim on a on a on a scan the right front cortex which is a motion starts lighting up so it's like panic panic can't think can't think and then it it registers as a inability to learn there may not be an inability to learn there's just discrimination between you know the person and what they're trying to learn and if you can learn to re regulate that's the only real level playing field i've ever found in my life is people who can regulate success story is a square partner now your favorite neighborhood spots run on square you know i was just a panther coffee here in miami last week and beyond the incredible cor what struck me was watching them seamlessly handle the morning rush the barista mentioned they've been using square to manage everything from inventory to building their loyal customer base it's so much more than just that little white card reader that we all recognize square knows that local businesses can be big businesses and as things get more complex square meets you at every opportunity so whether or not you're expanding to new locations building a loyal following even covering cash flow gaps squares powering all the behind the scenes stuff that matters they knock out today's to do's and they unlock tomorrow's what ifs if you're ready to see how square can transform your business go to square dot com slash go slash success to learn more that's square dot com slash go slash success square meet you there the hubspot podcast network is a success story partner now the house hubspot podcast network has great podcast like the ops authority if you are constantly putting out fires in your business instead of focusing on growth and innovation listen to the ops authority hosted by natalie gin and brought to you by the hubspot podcast network natalie speaks about actionable strategies that actually move your business forward so every week natalie shares some transformational stories from real business owners who've mastered their backend end systems so they can focus on what really matters so get your off in order get your business running smoothly so you can scale and you can really build something meaningful stop letting all this chaos steal all of your energy and listen to the op authority wherever you get your podcasts 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 dot com slash scott when you so i guess you know i i i love people that think you can apply sort of entrepreneurship ideology to everything right like you have a problem and before we press the quarter talking about how entrepreneurs have a high level of agency and they wanna solve their own problems and i think this is actually the perfect example of what you did because you realize okay the the fact though sort of playbook for making me feel correct however you define that it's not working the therapy that's supposed to be helping is making me feel worse so obviously something isn't working out here so let me figure out how to actually solve it which is how you you sort of started to understand about regulation and der regulation i'm curious for somebody who's in your position like when you were first starting therapy who's was going through all these same things that you were going through is experiencing all the same things that you are what was that first step towards regulation that you took that was actually helpful well i wish i could claim it was like i i decided to do it i i was really like it the like i was in therapy three times a week and things came to a head when i was attacked on the street once randomly i got just beat up by a gang and they broke my jaw on my teeth and i was unconscious at in concussion and it triggered a lot of it triggered ptsd and in the hospital and later when i talked to the doctor they never said the word ptsd they just said oh are you you know you're upset you should go talk to a therapist about this well i was already in therapy i live in california there's a pot of money for victims of violent crime to go to therapy so i had this big pot of money and i started going three times a week as recommended in every session we would sit and talk about this assault and there were other things going on my mother died during this period too there was just stuff going on and so i was sort of weakened i was in a bad place already but i could not put my thoughts together once i had you know was it the brain injury i don't think it was a official brain injury but it it was a post concussion you know something but getting attacked randomly on the street is a trauma where you know it it messes you up and i my work wouldn't give me time off work i had to go to work and i was saying incredibly inappropriate things and i would burst into tears all the time and i felt desperate for people to talk to me and like help me through this but i was being very annoying i think is what people said and they couldn't really deal with it i was constantly asking for help but i was very much like i had been raised with the site not raised but through therapy i had this idea i should be talk about this people should listen to me this will help me never knowing that that's like the worst thing a person with my with complex ptsd that's like the worst thing is going and talking about what just happened there's a lot of things you can do like with movement there are some treatments like em somatic therapies there are a variety of things it just happened that right when i thought i couldn't go on i mean i was so dysfunctional and i had alienate everybody and i was about to get fired for saying something inappropriate that i couldn't you know i i only knew by looking at people's face and i'm just like nice girl you know what this was so out of character for me but they did not know what was wrong and what it was was classic signs of ptsd from childhood brought on and led out of the bag by an adult onset trauma like it's a really known pattern now but it wasn't then and i might have died i did not feel like i could keep going with the problems that i had and then magically this somebody i was in some improv group at the time and this woman said i happened to con convey in her how bad i was feeling and she said dad do you wanna come in and try this technique that i learned and she had been a homeless person in the tenderloin district of san francisco in her teens and she had sober up and went to aa i'm not an alcoholic but she had had this marvelous recovery and she was so miserable though even when she stopped drinking she was so unhappy and so somebody in aa a woman there named sylvia walked told her do you wanna try these techniques and what it was is and is for me i've still done it i do it twice a day still it's a specific technique to write fearful and resent thoughts and feelings whatever's is up you know whatever's is bothering you and because i learned it from somebody who had learned it in a twelve step context now i mind you most people in twelve step don't do this it's it's considered sort of arc cane or too much or you know some people look down on it even but damn if it didn't save my life what she showed me how to do this writing and then she said now you gotta go learn meditation because if you're doing this you're not gonna be able to sustain it unless you're able to go into deep rest afterwards each time she said do it twice a day call me when you like you can read me what you wrote you can get help from me if you want advice but i was thirty at this time she was twenty three and she was like this street kid covered with tattoos she's not she's a she's a beautiful woman you know but i still know her a long time ago but i was i couldn't believe i was taking like life and death advice from this person she said the f word every other word and then she was talking about god and i was like this berkeley girl who was like people who talk about god are stupid i don't but i i she just had credibility with me she knew about the life and death moments and so i did what she said and like that night i started to feel relief and within two weeks i really if if i can diagnose myself as having ptsd i'll diagnose myself as having completely popped out of it and i was able to focus my mind better than ever before so i had a job at this nonprofit i was the marketing person at the time and once i had this head injury i had a terrible time focusing i probably wasn't a one at before that either but i really i could not sit in a business meeting and really track what was happening my mind was just all over the place when i started using these techniques i would sit in a business meeting and i would hear every single thing that was said and so my career rocket forward because i would listen to the whole hour and at the end i would say well i'll tell you what i think blah blah blah blah i was able to s what i just heard and i realized that very few people can do that almost everybody's mind was popping around like popcorn and you know the i found it very annoying once you're once you're able to really track with attention the way that people talk can be very frustrating they're all over the place somebody goes off in an anecdote you're like wait we were just about to like name that next bullet point what is it or they're making some chart on this used to drive me crazy when people are on the flip chart you know being like let's talk about stuff but it's like they're not matching things they're talking about like a phenomenon a person an idea and my mind was so organized that i was just like no no it's like so then i rewrite it and then i'd show it to and they would be like oh my god she's like a genius now yeah i was just i could pay attention you know what i okay so when you're saying this i have i have a thesis and you can tell me if i'm i'm right or wrong so a couple ideas first i have heard that truly truly traumatic experience like early childhood experiences they get implanted in your subconscious and there they're always like running in the background and this is why it causes so many other problems in your life because it's almost like a broken operating system impacts everything and this is what you're mentioning about all these potential health issues and cognitive issues and memory issues now that's something that somebody can pinpoint is wrong where at least say i feel like their life is completely der regulated and that could be right or wrong i don't know i'm spout from somebody else that i've heard now i think most adults they don't maybe not all of them have true trauma but they are der regulated to the point where their thoughts aren't clear as clear as they could be like to your point like in those meetings they don't see anything is super wrong because nothing really happened but they've never put the work into organizing their thoughts or clarifying how they think and then they can't communicate or they can't reiterate what that hour long meeting was about or they speak in circles or they're not so off base but you can tell they're not a hundred percent there so there's like levels to this now i think what happened with you is that traumatic experience what it was like pouring fuel on the fire to the point where you're like okay something is definitely wrong like i i'm aware that something's wrong i can't even function anymore not just function poorly i can't function at all so this was you know it was a horrible event but it was kind of like a the silver lining was okay now i gotta do the work to get myself back on track and i think that a lot of people just me through life without having this traumatic event that forces them to do the work to get back on track so they actually live in the sort of sub par sub optimal conditions cognitive because there isn't any work done towards reorganizing their or fixing the way they think and the way they sort of sort of just mean or through life i don't know if any of this is correct but this is just my takeaway from just listening to how how your life has played out yeah i i probably use different words for some of it but yeah it's like that yeah that's so most people don't even realize that they're not that they're der regulated yeah it's just regulated der regulation is what we to happen in california oh fair seriously is like the it's the you know disruption of normal flow of nervous system operations and your nervous system governs everything in your body you're thinking your digestion your your hormones you know what age you go into puberty and to a large degree how you think you know with there i i do think there's something there there is something inside of ourselves that's beyond the scope of the nervous system but i couldn't define it that clearly i just sense that there's more to it it governs just virtually everything and so when it's not working properly literally your blood can't get this is i had a when i was going through a a very traumatic period i i had a surgery and it it just failed and they did another surgery to fix it and it failed even worse and soon i had fourteen surgeries and later we were able to sort of diagnose backwards i was going through a lot of trauma my my my circulatory system couldn't adequately carry blood and oxygen to the damaged tissue so whatever they fixed wouldn't heal and it would just fall apart like that's how much the the presence of of those that's whatever the substance of trauma is is affecting body functioning but people disagree about what is the substance of trauma i think some of the way people talk about it is metaphor they think it's literal but when they say traumas carried in the body i sort of questioned that a little bit is that literal or metaphor i know what they mean 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 does the future hold for business if you ask nine experts you're gonna get ten answers bull market bear market interest rates are rising they're falling honestly at the end of the day we just need a crystal ball but until then over forty two thousand businesses have trusted and future proof themselves with nets suite by oracle the number one cloud erp bringing accounting financial management inventory in hr into one cohesive platform with one unified business management suite there's one source of truth giving you the visibility and control that you need to make quick decisions with real time insights and forecasting you're pairing into the future with actionable data and when you're closing the books in days not weeks you're spending less time looking backwards and more time on what's next if i needed this kind of business management system nets sweet is exactly what i do so whether or not your company is earning millions or even hundreds of millions nets tweet helps your respond to immediate challenges in your business and sees your biggest opportunities and speaking of opportunity you have to download the cfo guide to ai and machine learning the guide is free for all listeners 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 stop struggling to eat your job posting seen on other job sites indeed sponsor jobs helps you stand out and hire faster and with sponsored 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 pod cast indeed dot com slash clarity terms and conditions apply if you're hiring indeed is all you need when you go through the work to to sort of fix the d regulation and and bring yourself back in so that is not removing the trauma completely is it well i think you know just a first semantics i think of trauma as what happened and just regulation is the thing that's happening in you right now that you have some control over you can't do anything about the trauma so when you when you go through these exercises is this a i guess to just frame for the audience is it something that you have to do once or is this like a constant practice well i think it's kinda like brushing your teeth it helps to do it once but it's better to do it twice a day people will say well i'm having a good day and it's like well are you having a good enough day that you're not gonna brush your teeth today like just do it just be be consistent and be steady it's like training i i didn't think of it like this way you know the science of this regulation did not come out until i was twenty years to using the daily practice simply to feel better and function better than the science came out and i was like wow i now i know what it is that we're we're dealing with here and why this works and that's the last you know it's like twelve years or something since i learned that it's just been like the greatest thing in my life to find out it's a thing it has a name it's normal it's it happens to a lot of people and going out on youtube to talk about what it's like has been this great experience where thousands of people go i have that too i've never heard anybody describe it before and so i get to witness all these people having that moment like you're kidding it's a thing i thought i was crazy well not yeah because you can put a finger on it now now not now it's something that's actually fixable or at least treat right that's what that's what stresses people out when they feel a certain way and they can't put a finger on it that's what's horrifying well yeah and we were told that if we would go talk about it enough we would feel better but i was one of the people and i'm not alone and i don't speak for everybody but a lot of us were like am some kind of a freak because i'm going to the therapist and i just feel terrible and that's a really scary feeling when you think well then this must be the last house on the block i'm out of i'm getting worse i must be really damaged and so it was just you know once i had that experience of so quickly popping out of it when i had better tools to deal with the thoughts and the feelings without talking about them writing about them and and then following it with meditation it just it worked like a charm and it's so simple that's the hardest thing when it i i've taught like a million people now how to do it and sometimes that's the hardest hurdle for them to grasp it is like no really it's this simple and i'm not saying it will solve all life problems but it puts you in a place where you can solve life problems it's you start to what what the benefits of having a clear mind are is you start to have discernment you go well this is interesting when i talk in this manner people get very offended why don't i ask them a question like did that offend you and then you have information and you can use it you start to you know suddenly the world is your oyster you can figure things out and it used to just be this like tumbled this big like beaver dam of mess you'd who even knows why people feel the way they feel i better go hide and so it becomes sol and so i'm always encouraging people like use the daily practice to keep rinsing off your dress about trying new things and making your life a little bigger every day and then leave your life and bump into the wall make some mistakes are there daily practices or habits or even like i don't know how deep this goes is drinking caffeine and and not sleeping enough like are there any things that really really hurt that people have to be aware of that they have to like nip in the bud right now well sleep is really important and sleep is really hard to do properly when you're dis regulated so it's kind of a it's a vicious circle or a virtuous cycle so you start working on one until you get better at the other and you keep going caffeine i i drink caffeine some people find it kind of dis regulating i find it helpful there's a lot of things that are regulating but they don't work long term like for me oh cigarettes did they help me yes they helped me so much i smoked two packs a day for sixteen years it had it came with so many problems it couldn't laugh and that was before i had any idea about any of this stuff when i learned the daily practice my friend said i was like i feel so bad i just can't stop smoking i know it's killing me and my mom just died of lung cancer and and she said don't worry about it just keep going with this daily practice it'll fall away i was like you don't know this addiction does not fall away from me i've tried everything again and again but it would took about three years and it fell away and i just one time i was doing some patches and that time it just worked i just didn't relapse and it was easy and for some reason that time that was like twenty eight years ago i've never crave a cigarette again it just it literally just like pop it just was gone so that was that's one thing that i would have to say is one of the miracles of my life that i would say that was a miracle so if people don't understand what's happening to them of course if they if there's a substance or an activity or something that isn't actually long term healthy but short term helps them see life better or operate better of course you're gonna jump on it and you don't and and even if it's harmful well it's okay let me let me be human and realize that yeah it could be harmful in thirty years but for the next thirty minute meeting it's gonna be helpful so not worried about the the long term implications i can only process a short term pain that i'm trying to get rid of yeah and and so anything that sort of gives a boost like anything that gives you a little bit of dopamine or adrenaline starts to be like so precious not and hence enter all the addiction problems you know for everything from screens to food i mean sugar oh sugar you know that's like that'll give you a little temporary lift and then you crash and then you're very dis regulated and you know needless to say drugs and alcohol that's a lot how people manage it and for some reason like if i if i'm feeling kind of bad and i drink i feel worse so drinking his i just don't have the gene or something for that but a lot of people in my family did and they're not here to tell at the tail that's a that one will take you out pretty fast so so so a lot of people are really just trying to regulate and so my my second book connect ability is about one of the biggest ways people do that it's tied into everything and it's the urge to isolate as a way to cope with the dis regulation you feel really uncomfortable in your body disco your feelings come out too strong you don't dare it's express what you really think to somebody because the way it comes out tends to damage relationships like almost every traumatized people when i talk about this is they're like oh yeah the damage relationships i lashed out i i you know later i was really sorry but it was too late and that that caused people a lot and so learning to connect and to be able to hang out be present with people listen to them be yourself this is rocket science for a lot of us so the issue is that to connect with people you have to regulate but as part of the as part of the dis regulation you want to avoid people so again it's almost one of these cycles of where where one thing is feeding into the other thing and basically your whole life is is getting worse so i think the pandemic played a big role in giving us a lot of outs where we were not forced to deal with people and it's kinda like a lot of bad habits kinda got bigger for people during that time but the isolation i noticed in myself because i was already like pretty good at connecting when the when the whole thing started but when it was over and i started being fully social again i noticed that i was very rusty and i would just blur out weird things and i was having trouble like reading other people like are you annoyed with me are you happy about what i just said like i i i i was losing my abilities without like you need regular contact with people to be good at dealing with people and certainly in work this is incredibly important to be able to read the room and to be able to know when to hold your tongue about something and instead have it as a private conversation like when i had was dis regulated that was one of my big blenders again and again here's a story i would i was at a conference for this nonprofit i worked for and everybody was sharing cab to go to restaurants after the day had ended and you know i was just some like mid level marketing person i wasn't like a big shot or anything and the ceo of one of the things it was getting into the cab with somebody i said you guys wanna share cab they said sure and she was with some older woman i found out later well what i did is i just ended up talking i was thinking maybe the ceo is gonna give me a little like promotion you know maybe i can negotiate something for myself here so was just like bla about myself later i found out that the woman she was with with susie buffett and and they were discussing a big grant and i just completely wrapped it up for her you know with and hopefully they salvage it later but i just made a complete fool of myself and i had no idea i couldn't read the room i wasn't sensitive at all i wasn't like sort of going would it be appropriate if from i the under underlying said something right now and probably not just but you know they were just letting me share the cab so that was the sort of thing i did all the time and it blocked me i never got promoted i was pretty smart i i knew how to regulate but it was like life lessons that i did not have yet on how to act my parents were just like marxist hippie they thought money was evil you know and people people who dress nicely obviously we're had a bad agenda you know and so i didn't know i didn't know how you're supposed to act so the whole experience of healing for me has been like going to charm school like how are you supposed to be a person and i find it really fun actually it's it's a a it's it's a delight to me now but it was very hard at first well i think that this is why covid again to your point it's such an impact because people forgot how to be people and how to communicate and how to be social for whatever three three and a half four years and now work has accommodated not being social right with zoom and virtual and everything so i haven't noticed listen i i chat with people for a living and if i go week or two without leaving the house and i'll go to dinner i feel awkward i feel i feel this regular like for a second can we go home now because i just wanna watch tv yeah i know and that's not how the world works i mean if you want to be successful at anything you have to figure out how to interact with other human beings not just transactional like you have to build relation to relationship with other people yeah and it's not just like saying things it's like being aware of how it's landing with them and then being able to sort of hypo what would be important to this person you know if i want something from them if i'm trying to like negotiate something or have a favor given or anything to to be able to anticipate like what do they care about this regulation is like wearing headphones with ac ac blasting in your ears so loud you don't you don't actually hear anything you're just sitting there pretending oh yeah u m mh and you're it's it just des you and we all know people who seem to be blu through social situations and a lot of times that's what's going on they're they can't tune in and it's it's not necessarily a permanent state they you can learn to re regulate and be able to feel i call this feeling other people's nervous system there's we have all these phrases for it like tuning in reading the room being sensitive but actually our nervous system is very good at reading other people's nervous systems if you do go through these sort of steps these daily practice to regulate and you still feel like you have i mean you've you've coined a few terms like covert avoidance that's one of the ideas that i think just the way when you say it it just hits it's like you don't want you don't want anybody to know that you like being at home you don't want anybody to know that you don't like social situations it's almost like a shame that you feel but you feel it i think a lot of people feel it explain what that is but also explain okay so i have regulated i've gone through these daily practices but i still feel that i still feel like i'm not comfortable in these social situations like what's what's the the the thing that i have to do because this is hurting my career it's hurting my business it's hurting everything i can't date whatever it is well in my book i i list eight big ways that big obstacles that are in the way to being able to develop connect ability with other people and they're the they're the common ones you could probably name hundreds of them but these are the common ones and the first one is avoidance and people talk about this a lot in the context of romantic relationships like i'm dating an avoid guy he won't really commit you know he blows hot and cold that's like a pattern so that's avoidance but a lot of us are covert to avoidance we actually we make the commitment but we don't really put our heart in it we say yes to the rs you know request to the party and we come late and leave early or we just sit there and say empty things to people and never really connect or we just find ourselves too busy and too tired to really pay attention to what's going on you could have a family that you know needs your attention very much if you're a parent you you gotta be present and it'll be just like oh i'm just so i'm just exhausted and it's like that every day and maybe you are exhausted and maybe the way your life is set up that's the outcome of the whole thing and maybe a few people really can't control that right now but most of us can it's like a setting that we turn our dial up to so that we don't have to deal with people how could i be i was a single mom for nine years and all the time they put out these memos of you know come help with the bake sale or something and i i worked full time and being working full time and dealing with my kids was a lot to deal with and then i have all surgeries and it was a lot to deal with but i kind of like permanently adopted this how can i be expected to contribute to the school i'm unlike a special person who can't possibly do that and then i felt left out because i wasn't really friends with the other parents they were all going on camping trips i'm like why weren't we invited it's like maybe because i never hang out with them and they have no idea who i am and that was that was my distorted thinking of thinking that they were sort of per me i think that's incredibly common but actually we're avoiding truly connecting with people who we still we wish we'd connect with them but we're magically expecting them to like reach out and save us from our isolation and we've gotta come out and meet people at least part way to have any kind of a relationship with them but i think screens have been a huge obvious problem for connection and it's a it's a form of covert avoidance i don't know about you but i have to force myself to put my phone away when i'm eating dinner with other people the hubspot podcast network is a success story partner now a quick podcast recommendation i've been listening 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 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 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 to truth lies and work wherever you get your podcast chip station is a success 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 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 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 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 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 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 moscow 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 as i'm looking through some of the things that you've uncovered some of the some of the some of the things that are not going right in our life are a self sa but we're not even aware that we're self sa ourself so of course if if again just this one particular example of of covert avoidance if i don't even realize that i'm doing it to myself of course i'm gonna argue with you about it i'm gonna say it's not my fault that you know the people at the party for example they're well we're not on the same page or you know they're not my friend group or i don't feel comfortable like they should be more accommodating to me or the the narcissist plan attracting all the wrong people i'm going on the dates with the wrong guys well i'm just unlucky like how my how is it my fault that i'm attracting these assholes like into my life but there's there's subconscious sabotage advertise that you're doing to yourself it's it is subconscious and you know the word grooming it sort of means you get somebody used to something that's illogical and harmful and you get them so used to it i call it crap fit you fit yourself to crap sabotage you fit yourself to unacceptable people and situations you were very good at it it's not your fault that you got groomed like this to be so good at it but literally no one is coming to save you now so once you can recognize it and it's very hard because it feels like a criticize a criticism to to realize that you've kind of been making the same mistake over and over again and it was you and you could have not done that it's it feels like an existential threat to a person who's been traumatized like they've already been like put down so much that they're holding on to their ego in the good sense of the word by a thread so it can feel like like it can feel life threatening to accept criticism even though it's actually the most empowering thing you can point to somebody like that person is such to me you married the guy that was empowering even though i i did feel slapped but things turned around after that and i was able to completely drop my aerial relationship with him i just realized this isn't in my best interest it doesn't help the kids he may start a fight but if i don't fight back it'll be fine and within like two days we weren't fighting ever again not ever again but a lot less fighting like we have so much agency and and and i'm not somebody who you know we get i'm a youtube channel i get people like oh grow up you're just a bunch of pans you know everybody has trauma stop whining and the thing is what we're talking about the trauma we're talking about is some people have been sexually abused by a parent they have been hit over and over and over again they've even told they're worthless they've you know it we're not talking about imagined injuries these are grave injuries to the spirit to the body and it does affect people and it can have lifelong effects but what we're trying to do is detach that downstream effect of that of of that damage so that the damage can heal when you if you don't learn to regulate and you remain isolated you know if you think about it you can probably think of people you've know in your life you know like some angry guy down at the end of the block who hates kids and won't let them ride their bikes past the house or something and they're always yelling at them and you're like what's what's wrong with that guy well he's probably been isolated when his dis regulation got the better of him and he really believes that he's the victim of the children riding their bikes we get weird like that have you you've heard the concepts of lo of control yeah yeah and i think that that ties into agency and just a brief explanation is really external versus internal lo of control and if you believe sort of in a very simple definition does the world happen to you or do you happen to the world right do have agency and control over your own life basically but my question and i think it's a beautiful way to sort of just show how some people believe they happen to the world and people believe the world happens to them and that shift and i'm gonna ask you like if you have an idea of how to make that shift from the world happening to me to me having agency and me happening to the world because that seems as we're going through we're we're going through you know dis regulation we're going through all the different things that you have to heal sort of the leading indicator of success and everything we're talking about is having agency and feeling like you can actually make a difference in your own life as opposed to just being the victim of whatever's happened to you in the past as horrible and horrific as it may be have you ever thought about how to actually gain agency if you'd feel like you don't have any well yeah i mean that's kinda how i make mah whole living is helping people do that but i think there's well two things i wanna add i wanna sort of like append there is one is trauma is real the trauma injury is real and if you if you kick a dog and you neglect it enough you you've we've all met dogs where you approach them and they they're sort of wag their tail but then they're shiver and they pee on the floor they're not trying to get attention they're not playing vic the victim card or anything they have trauma injuries and so it's a real thing to have to overcome so so it's not just like you flip a switch and go oh i agency over this but it's part of it i i think the part that conventional treatments have done well is be able to like say okay come talk about it you know have a witness here what happened to you but i think for people who don't have this you know complex ptsd this is the kind that comes from chronic ongoing and exposure to stress or symptoms similar to it i don't think everybody's been diagnosed but childhood ptsd i call it i think we instinctively know yeah the set of the cluster of symptoms that are common for people for people who don't have it it must look like they say the weirdest things we joke about it on my channel but they say stuff like you just need to love yourself that's like the craziest psycho ba thing you could say like well how would why would i do that how why why would i do that like oh you're kidding i just need to love myself and it's kind of funny and and i i could i didn't love myself at all i despise myself i was quite angry with myself and i've ended up sort of by extension loving myself because i did a lot of loving acts i cleaned up a lot of problems where i was hurting other people i didn't feel ashamed to myself i a lot of work went into me feeling better about myself to where i'm like yeah i feel good about myself and so i just think when people are like girl you just need to love yourself i'm like you don't have what i have it's not that easy or they say yeah your picker is broken it's true the picker is broken but like and so what do you do what do you do about that and so again like learning to make better choices about who you let into your life is a combination of sen through regulation you have to become sensitive and then you have to blu her along and let a few jerks into your life and go oh i see we had that conversation they actually told me the red flag at the beginning but i overlooked it because i felt really impatient to get together with this person and then when i realized they they were not a fit or they were dangerous i didn't wanna leave because i was afraid of being alone like you have to develop a lot of self awareness before you can start to like unpack why did you make self destructive choices and it the why of it isn't even the most important thing the guard rails are the most important thing so i teach people for dating for example because dating is probably the most potentially poisonous area for traumatized people to lose their bearings big consequences come this is how trauma goes into the next generation and and so i teach a lot about how to go very slowly a traumatized person who struggles to detect red flags who attaches too quickly who is scared to leave a relationship benefits immensely from going slowly so you can let information come to you and then you hang out with like minded friends and you go what do you think you know i i was gonna call because he didn't call and they go no don't call you have friends who help you kinda make sense of reality and don't go off into you know a trauma driven rev of crazy behavior that will drive people away and so with tools to start re regulating and friends to help you stay on stay grounded in reality you can kinda reason things out and start making your mistakes honestly and as soon as you realize you're dating a jerk you get out and if you have friends you can do that if you have nobody in your life and you don't connect with anybody few people feel they can afford to leave a relationship and they'll stay and put up with anything because they've gotten stuck in the belief there will never be anything else so we we have to keep ourselves with guard rails of how to how to handle life friends to keep reminding us and tools that help us keep processing the information keeping in mind we struggle to process the house hubspot podcast network is a success story partner now the hubspot podcast network has great podcast like the ops authority if you are constantly putting out fires in your business instead of focusing on growth and innovation listen to the ops authority hosted by natalie gin and brought to you by the hubspot podcast network natalie speaks about actionable strategies that actually move your business forward so every week natalie shares some transformational stories from real business owners who've mastered their backend end systems so they can focus on what really matters so get your ops in order get your business running smoothly so you can scale and you can really build something meaningful stop letting all this chaos steal all of your energy and listen to the op authority wherever you get your podcasts success story is a square partner now your favorite neighborhood spots run on square you know i was just a panther coffee here in miami last week and beyond the incredible cor what struck me was watching them seamlessly handle the morning rush the barista mentioned they've been using square to manage everything from inventory to building their loyal customer base it's so much more than just that little white card reader that we all recognize square knows that local businesses can be big businesses and as things get more complex square meets you at every opportunity so whether or not you're expanding to new locations building a loyal following even covering cash flow gaps squares powering all the behind the scenes stuff that matters they knock out today's to do's and they unlock tomorrow's what ifs if you're ready to see how square can transform your business go to square dot com slash go slash success to learn more that's square dot com slash go slash success square meet you there 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 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 dot com slash scott how do we how do we so we're talking about people that i have trouble making connection but also boundaries are important as well so not over connecting and not depending too much on people boundaries key if you don't have good boundaries you can't be close to people explain that so let's say i i i'm thinking of going to a party and i'm a little worried it's gonna be a weird party and i won't wanna be there so my boundary is if if if everybody's like doing drugs or something i'm i'll just leave that's the boundary and if you don't have that boundary you go to the party and then you just stay and you think i better somehow crap fit to this party even though i'm getting weird it out or i should just do the drugs with everybody so they don't think worse of me boundaries are just like you know you know what your limit is and you observe it most people who say boundary they've confused it with an attempt to control other people don't you guys do drugs i'm not comfortable with it my boundary is you don't do this that's not a boundary that's a that's a request and is that the only way to to set up a relationship so that there isn't some sort of c dependence or something that is a little bit too engaged i wish it were that simple well the eight obstacles i told you one of them is you you we have wobbly boundaries you got you have to have good boundaries and you need to understand the difference between what you won't put up with and things that you would like to quest of other people that you're not really likely to get their compliance so that's that's one of them one of them is other centered ness a lot of people adapt to trauma by being excessively good at locating their being inside somebody else you know maybe starts in child trying to get a parent keep a parent from becoming too high or too abusive but it then turns into there are a lot of forms it takes of c dependence people pleasing obsessive love where you just think i can't be happy unless this person who's not interested in me will come around so it's all about some other person and you lose your agency there you've done it again and so as so the boundary thing you've lost your agency you guys don't do drugs or i'm not gonna feel okay you've lost your agency and if somebody who's really tried to make other people change i can just tell you just abandon all hope it doesn't work you can ask in in a perfect world what should somebody be striving for like what would that perfect level of connection and relationship actually look like well i think that each of us might have two or three people in our lives who really really get us and if we find those two or three people were very lucky hopefully it would be a part it would be the spouse one of them and the other two would probably be friends maybe a relative but somebody really getting you means they they know who you are they understand the nuance of what you say and they they don't really judge you for being the way you are and that's a tall order if you're still in a state of trauma where you're acting out getting emotionally just regulated unreliable friend saying cruel things sometimes so character development goes hand in hand with being able to form these true connections with people and so two or three very close people and then the rest of it is being like as a parent to be totally present for kids and as a person who works for a company or for clients whoever you're there are customers they're accountable to like i have customers really i'm accountable to them and to be able to keep my head on straight about like what that relationship means at what point like in my line of business because i'm dealing with people who are traumatized occasionally i get people who are abusive and so that means i cut off the relationship with them but other times i have to really get up on my toes and provide the customer service they deserve even though it's inconvenient even though who knows you know what happened so that takes a high level of functioning is to have professional relationships with people and then to be able to just to be able to go out on the street without looking out the window first and making sure that your neighbors aren't there to feel confident to bump into people you sort of know and people who are a little irritating and strangers and feel confident like i'm gonna kinda know how to handle this situation in a friendly way i'm not gonna add conflict to our relationship right now i know and then to know how to undo a conflict how to give a proper apology how to bring the temperature down when people are getting things are getting heated with people all this stuff you're supposed to learn growing up in a you know in a healthy family a lot of people didn't get that i didn't my parents fought all the time so i had to learn and now that i learned it's just i love the skill i love it so much i feel so free i i just i just got back from traveling i was in london i was you know meeting up with all these people i would just chat with people anywhere it's like a new life for me where i'm free i and then i gave you know i did a large workshop for hundreds of people and people come up and talk to me afterwards and i just it's a certain kind of like ease and confidence that's what connect ability is a sense of ease that i can i can pretty much be myself i trust myself to filter things that are not appropriate in this context i trust myself i know what to do if i make a mistake i know how to fix it too and then i don't know the whole world instead of living small you get to live as big as you please for somebody that's listening to this it recognizes signs of this regulation and their spouse or their partner or their family member and there's somebody who they want to help and they wanna fix like what do you do is because is these are not people that hopefully you can you don't wanna just cut them out of your life you these are people that you wanna put work into and you wanna help them go through their own is there is there something that you can do or is this have to be something that they have to take on on their own well it's not always easy to make other people change or to fix them but when you've have found something that you think might be of interest to them a lot of people will find my work because a partner or a friend or a therapist said hey i think you should check this out a lot of therapists use my videos on youtube to ask their clients to look at between visits so they can talk productively about something and the education piece happened offline you know before they met so it's okay to suggest things to people what i think is not okay is to try is to get angry at them because they didn't go for it it's a very personal decision to to decide that you're ready to take a step also you know one method of healing isn't right for everybody and so it's sort of like i don't know like religious fan genetics coming to your front door you know if you just like insist like i know what you need that's a in fact that's a sign of deep code dependence and i get this sometimes it's like i i people write me a letter like well i i i bought my girlfriend ten books about healing and she won't read them and i'm just like time the time to just like read the books yourself or like oh you know like read them yourself but when we hang on to somebody who we don't find acceptable which is what's happening there it's possible we're being avoid and and sometimes it just helps to be honest like i wanna fix them because i don't actually accept how they are and we've asked them to change we've shown them what we think might be helpful but i think if it gets to where you've asked somebody three times it's you that's it that's gotta be the line you just have to like accept this is not something they're interested in and if somebody is abusive i don't think it's acceptable if they're not willing to work on being abusive but i really i just thank god for the people in my life who put up with me when i didn't know how to fix this and you know except for when i got really really bad they they they were my friends and some of them are still my friends sometimes people left me at that time and they see me again now or they see me on youtube and they're like damn and girl what is this you've changed and i'm like yeah i changed yeah but you put the work in i mean like but not everybody that's the thing not everybody wants to put the work so there has to be there has to be a point where yes if if you're if you're with that person they're a spouse or partner like you wanna give them the tools and the resources to to regulate themselves if you notice if you listen to this and you're like i'm seeing signs that a little bit of this wisdom could help them out so maybe you tell them to go you know watch your youtube or or read a book or something like that or read a resource but there also is a point where i think that you know you shouldn't you shouldn't date or marry on potential you shouldn't go into business with somebody who's a business partner based on potential either i think that you have to be healed the healthy people going into this and i i consider business relationships just as difficult as marriages in some cases and sometimes there's more money on the line too right so yeah you have to go into these things healed yeah it's gonna be it's gonna be difficult i would sort but then you also have to know how a little asterisk on the word healed because there's not really any such thing you know there's no island where these are the people who are all the way there and everybody else's is at sea you know everybody's just kind of like dog pad around right now and we're like we can kind of manage things or we can manage things pretty well or we can't manage things at all and so it's really you gotta go in with open eyes and just decide can i accept this person when you when you realize that you do eventually have to end a relationship with someone what is the best way to do it i'm a con oh my goodness well i've had it done to me enough but i've also i've had to do it and i i learned this is what i believe is the best way is if you're clear that you wanna do it you do not try to be friends and i'm talking about romantic relationships here but when things have gone that bad leave in a business relationship is you leave with goodwill but you don't say okay now we're just gonna be friends i don't know about you but i spent a long time trying to cool in some situation where i was dying of heartbreak and jealousy trying be like no no i'm cool with this and i did it to other people too and then you know kind of criticize them for taking it hard and that's ridiculous i'm old enough to know now that's ridiculous and the mature and loving thing to do is to just cut it off the way the victorian did and perhaps in some time when things have literally cooled off and neither of you happens to be in another relationship there can be a friendship or really enough time has passed that it's it's there's no spark there or anything like that one of the things i did to heal was i stopped having friendships with men who one of us kinda had you know a little a little thing there you know where nobody would ever admit it and i just ended it i ended it whether it was me or them and i told them frankly and kindly you've been a great friend there's this thing in our relationship where you know i i always feel like maybe you like me or conversely i've always had this little attraction but i know this is not going anywhere and i need to end it and i wish you the best can't be friends and and in this culture that was like a astonishing they they would just be like what you know i but i didn't and i go no you did nothing wrong it's okay we were just doing what people do but i'm trying to make a big change in my life and for me that's how i became emotionally available for the real thing is i stopped f away all my romantic energy on little things true connect ability and and true healthy relationships and i get i get the healthy there's no end to this game it's you're constantly trying to move in the right direction but something that is not negative and not d distracting from you and not toxic it's your own self work it's work with you know strengthening connects with other people it's also making sure they're even the right people that you should be connecting and strength like strengthening those relationships with so it's not just like a one it's not just like a one and done solution it's all of it it's it's it's sort of this three sixty about how you first of all heal yourself put work into other people make sure they're even the right people yeah and and shedding the people who are not the right people as a whole chapter of my book about releasing the people who are mean and troubling you know just troubled all the time they just bring trouble into your life and some there's some people you have to hard hard quit or you know boot them out but sometimes it's just releasing you don't just keep them around you don't keep filling your weekends just because there's somebody to hang out with it does take up space and it keeps draining your batteries and it keeps dimming your light for those people who you could have that great affinity that's inspiring and positive and well matched for who you are today you know not to put people down who are not there right now like we're all just like working on it but we do tend up and we tend to connect with people who we match who we feel you know get us and aren't judging us too much and so when we make when we take a big step up people are gonna fall away you'll get a lot of criticism people will think you're acting too big for your riches you think you're better than me you get a lot of that and that you have to release it just be like okay well best of best of luck to you and allow there to be an emptiness in your life and that's how the good stuff comes in what would be the one thing out of out of all sort of strategy or idea around connect ability and connecting with other people that people have the hardest time with i i think it's human nature to have a really hard time getting out of ourselves to stop taking the temperature of how do i feel what does everybody think about me what do i look like where is all you know where is all this going and to be able when they approve when the situation calls for it when it's time to be present with somebody to give them your full attention and to be able to hear them like we all know how good it feels when somebody really listens and i don't mean active listening how do you feel how's that but just like just in the funny moment moments just to laugh at your jokes just to remember you know something you liked at the restaurant and be like should we go to that restaurant because i know you like that thing to attend to who that person is and what's special about them and to be able to like turn your radar to appreciating that person because people are so beautiful and amazing and we completely miss out on what a great experience it is to be in the company of another person when we're so self centered and how it's affecting us and it's a i think it's a you know it's a developmental delay and trauma definitely keeps us stuck in our feelings and our heads but i think that's also part of the culture and part of the downside of therapy culture it has many upsides but one of them is so much of that like inward focus that that that can sabotage the the outer the right balance of outer attention don't wanna be all the way of focused on other people but to really be able to hear them and and appreciate them and that's those are the people we love i'm i i was thinking i was talking to my son the other day i'm like aren't you know why is it that everybody loves their grandma virtually everyone your grandma must nice your grandma is just so happy to see you all the time it's like i said well then i'll be a grandma one day i i think that sounds like a really good role where i'm just so happy to see you i thought about you when you weren't here and i got you some presents i would just feel like this is the best place ever you know somebody cares about me and so the connect ability happens when we can develop that capacity and not lose ourselves and others i love that if you had if you had one wish for people who are reading this book to take away and just to take the heart not the hardest part of of this whole process sort of just focusing outside of yourself but just the one takeaway that you hope would change somebody's life what would that take away be don't give up do not get discouraged because this is hard go slowly disconnected people need to go slowly persevere it's worth it the the disconnection will start to be at this loop that tells you people suck you shouldn't deal with them you be much better off by yourself but just fight it fight it and no your dog is not your child and you know and your books are not your friends and the books and dogs are wonderful but so are people you'd before we wrap up just let everybody know so the book is connect ability heal the hidden ways you isolate find your people and feel at last like you belong and this podcast will be dropping the same week that it's out so you can get the book anywhere you get books amazon and is there any other places you wanted to send people website social youtube website and i have like a i have a couple of freebie b's you can use if this isn't too many things okay one is a quiz of signs that you might have complex ptsd or another one that might be more relevant you can decide i'll give them both to you one is signs that trauma is affecting your ability to connect it's very popular just a like a little one sheet and the other thing is it's a free course the techniques the daily practice techniques if anybody wants to take it and give you a link it's free it's a free short course give all of these and i'll put them all in the show notes cognate 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 in all these spam calls it's 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 is 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 broker on your behalf and legally force them to delete your personal information no more spending hundreds of hours doing it yourself and cog handles all the paperwork follows up on objections and keep your data off the market with repeated removal i've actually been using con 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 monarch money is a success story partner now you know what 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 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 from eight months ago when i sold some stock that's eight months ten thousand dollars that could have been working instead 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 your

success story is a square partner now your favorite neighborhood spots run on square you know i was just at panther coffee here in miami last week and beyond the incredible cor potato what struck me was watching them seamlessly handle the morning rush the barista mentioned they've been using square to manage everything from inventory to building their loyal customer base it's so much more than just that little white card reader that we all recognize square knows that local businesses can be big businesses and as things get more complex square meets you at every opportunity so whether or not you're expanding to new locations building a loyal following even covering cash flow gaps squares powering all the behind the scenes stuff that matters they knock out today's to do's and they unlock tomorrow's what ifs if you're ready to see how square can transform your business go to square dot com slash go slash success to learn more that's square dot com slash go slash success square me there shop the asu in william super sale and get forty percent off paints and stain september nineteen through the twenty fourth with prices starting at twenty nine thirty nine it's the perfect time to transform your space with color whether you're looking to revamp your interior or exterior we have you covered with bolt hue soothing neutral and everything in between visit your neighborhood she williams store or shop the sale online delivery available on qualifying orders click the banner to learn more retail sales only some exclusion apply c store for details in this lessons episode explore how moral psychology and cognitive science are redefining models of decision making discover why instinct patterns reveal more than demographics understand how life experiences and core instincts shape worldview and uncover how these profiles can predict behavior influence choices and guide strategy and after you align with these data scientists then you then obviously this this it's starting to manifest yeah yeah so when it when i guess my i'll i'll ask you when does this turn into i guess path sites or or is this like when does this actually turn into something tangible that you can build a model out of and what does that model start to look like yeah so six six years ago we we we found that there was this smelting of of of disciplines and i became controlled with the area of moral psychology i i i and that's a long story but suffice it to say that if we believe that if the brain allows you to work or help helps us figure out how you how you can create a moral point of view in terms of your dis decision making values and things like that and if in fact you you used all that brain power to create your your moral point of view mh don't you think there was a an a aha for me that if that is consuming a lot of what your brain does don't you think it would have ubiquitous use beyond moral judgments and that was the premise that was the the that was the premise so why why take something and use it for esoteric choices when it could be front and center in how you decide what you like how you vote mh were to join who you love all those things are really moral decisions so i really felt there was a a great mel of those things with our with the models that we we talked about and so we took some basic decision making models and merged them with an applied model of cognitive psychology to to look at what we knew about how people make those decisions and then we found that these moral decisions were were tied to these deeply embedded instincts that were showing signs of of of of being significant all the way back to the the stone age so you may maybe have heard of a lot of the work of jonathan hayden and moral foundations those those were the the the instincts that i felt wow finally we have a scorecard to be able to take some of these points of view quantify them and look for ways that they can influence decision making and and behavior change so we put all that together and started to look at what does the data tell us about what we could reasonably expect success story is a square partner now your favorite neighborhood spots run on square you know i was just at panther coffee here in my miami last week and beyond the incredible cor what struck me was watching them seamlessly handle the morning rush the barista mentioned they've been using square to manage everything from inventory to building their loyal customer base it's so much more than just that little white card reader that we all recognize square knows that local businesses can be big businesses and as things get more complex square meets you at every opportunity so whether or not you're expanding to new locations building a loyal following even covering cash flow gaps squares powering all the behind the scenes stuff that matters they knock out today's to do's and they unlock tomorrow's what ifs if you're ready to see how square can transform your business go to square dot com slash go slash success to learn more that's square dot com slash go slash success square me you there the hubspot podcast network is a success story partner now the house hubspot podcast network has great podcast like the ops authority if you are constantly putting out fires in your business instead of focusing on growth and innovation listen to the ops authority hosts hosted by natalie gin and brought to you by the house hubspot podcast network natalie speaks about actionable strategies that actually move your business forward so every week natalie shares some transformational stories from real business owners who've mastered their back end systems so they can focus on what really matters so get your ops in order get your business running smoothly so you can scale and you can really build something meaningful stop letting all this chaos steal all of your energy and listen to the op authority wherever you get your podcasts 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 dot com slash scott and i guess my i have questions about what that result is but my before it before that i think i would ask is this this is is this a dangerous model to build is this a model that could god like dangerous as if you if you can predict how somebody makes decisions could that be could that be used to influence like i i don't know i'm trying to think of the implications of building out a model where you can predict certain things that certain people can do or or decisions that they would make well well let me start by saying the human interface is the most complex node on the most complex network and we've ever experienced so you i'm flattered but we we we don't have that degree of of of of predictability yet we what we what we have is something that goes beyond anything we've ever had but it's still you know it still leaves a lot that we don't know but so what we've we've done is you know for a hundred years the conventional wisdom was that demographics really could be used to to tell us why we did these things mh you know but after a hundred years we we know a lot about demographics they tell us kind of who we are and what we do but they are really lousy at telling me us why do why do we do it and there's so many segmentation models that are based on on those pre sets of of demographics and and they've all sooner or later will under scrutiny scrutiny and so we added these instinct points of view these are five things of how do you care about children what is your your need for fairness what's your who who are you loyal to who how do how do you what are the rules of the game what's your authority idea and then this this instinct for purity so with what they are they're they're not to be confused with an end instinct like when we you go into the doctor cross your legs and you get a patel in in instinct where you kick the the yeah doctor right like a response exactly yeah those it's not like that it's not you you you trigger the care instinct and bam something new automatic comes in but what these do the the patterns of those instincts you you do have a have a early in child that we've figured out that you have a pattern of which which ones of these instincts you're sensitive to mh and what happens is as you go through life and your you're your life experiences edit those those instincts we know that how you see the world your world view is is constructed by those life experiences and your instincts and your demographics and all the other things that we we've known no over the years go into creating an identity and we've we've decode that we think there are five of these instinct extinction patterns that we can identify but two of them are really really significant and these two were what we see all the time referenced in in our tribal world you know the the and and they're they're referenced in politics and and philosophy and all sorts of things but these two are really really kind of be bi the world in in terms of these two major instinct profiles and then the the three in the middle are the kind of the way we marry up which part of of the of of of the two instincts are are you most influenced by so they're they kind of morph back and forth so so so really it's these two two big ones that are really hard are the immutable forces and and the rest of the other three would just to draw a parallel would it be almost like a a venn diagram of crossover of various components between but you can make polarizing ones and then the smaller yeah exactly okay and and and and and yeah and so what we've done is we've started over the last six years to explore the way these profiles can predict what people help people will will respond to different environments different problems for stimuli and things like that so the the the real wildcard is to say what do we what do we think these instinct patterns are because we've done a lot of the the work on the on the back end of saying oh if we know you have this one instinct pattern likely you're gonna be really fair minded empathy is is is is a is is a given you probably fight the conformity of of of a cultural mandate but you're you're you're probably gonna look for new and different problems to solve and and trends to to make friends with so that would be one and then we can get all sorts of detail about what that looks like and so what we've what we've done then is created this intelligent adviser so that when somebody says i'm i'm interested in my brand for example and i'd i'd like to figure out who likes to do doesn't like and what can i do about it and those those are kind of the simple questions that we can answer now 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 success story is a square partner now your favorite neighborhood spots run on square you know i was just a panther coffee here in miami last week and beyond the incredible cor potato what struck me was watching them seamlessly handle the morning rush the barista mentioned they've been using square to manage everything from inventory to building their loyal customer base it's so much more than just that little white card reader that we all recognize square knows that local businesses can be big businesses and as things get more complex square meets you at every opportunity so whether or not you're expanding to new locations building a loyal following even covering cash flow gaps squares powering all the behind the scenes stuff that matters they knock out today's to do's and they unlock tomorrow's what ifs if you're ready to see how square can transform your business go to square dot com slash go slash success to learn more that's square dot com slash go slash success square meet you there monarch money is a success story partner now you know what 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 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 from eight months ago when i sold some stock that's eight months ten thousand dollars that could have been workings instead 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

success story is a square partner now your favorite neighborhood spots run on square you know i was just at panther coffee here in miami last week and beyond the incredible cor potato what struck me was watching them seamlessly handle the morning rush the barista mentioned they've been using square to manage everything from inventory to building their loyal customer base it's so much more than just that little white card reader that we all recognize square knows that local businesses can be big businesses and as things get more complex square meets you at every opportunity so whether or not you're expanding to new locations building a loyal following even covering cash flow gaps squares powering all the behind the scenes stuff that matters they knock out today's to do's and they unlock tomorrow's what ifs if you're ready to see how square can transform your business go to square dot com slash go slash success to learn more that's square dot com slash go slash success swear me there life is unpredictable but preparing for the unexpected shouldn't be take ownership of your life planning with policy genius to help your loved ones have a financial safety net in case something happens to you they offer life insurance policies starting at just two hundred and seventy six dollars a year for one million dollars in coverage don't wait for life to make other plans protect your family today heads a policy genius dot com that's policy genius dot com in this lessons episode explore why entrepreneurial thinking is essential in both startups and large corporations discover how adopting this mindset keeps organizations competitive understand how to present innovative ideas effectively within bureaucratic systems and uncover how perspective shaped by pressure passion pleasure and pain leads to better decisions for lasting success and i'm thing that you mentioned and and you you sort of highlight on your site and i like it a lot there's people that are in all walks of life all stages in their journey trying to do a thing you know the side hustle is more popular than ever now and one of the pieces that you actually mentioned was entrepreneur entrepreneurs is not nice to have it's a skill that must be unlocked in every company so speak to me but what that means for somebody who's in a company that doesn't understand how they can associate with the word entrepreneur yeah it's a great point so there's there's two kind of lens of this one lens is okay you're in a company and you're thinking about leaving and doing your own thing and that applies to some of things that we've just been talking about but companies to compete past to sync like entrepreneurs right i mean i mean amazon should not exist right walmart should have created amazon and blockbuster should creative netflix and sony should have created spotify like these organizations tied all the way with all the duties old things and today if you don't think we call think like an entrepreneur if you don't think like an entrepreneur within a larger company you're just gonna become kind of the next you know company that just doesn't stay up at the times and that's a difficult thing to do right because large companies don't operate that way they think about quarterly numbers and it's really hard for them to innovate so we have a program called think like an entrepreneur which is a training program which helps large organizations take what you learn from entrepreneurs and employ it within a corporate environment to try to create some of these methodologies and thought processes that entrepreneurs have all day long but just don't regularly get deployed in a in a corporate environment do you feel like you have advice for people that feel like they're are being i guess held down or or or just like just like their ideas are being choked out in in the organization like how do they how do they actually thrive in a company that is by the quarterly numbers with all the red tape i'm curious to how to do that so there are people the people that rise the men and women that rise to senior levels within organizations are the ones that are able to deliver results right there are ones that if you ask them what do you do with your job the first thing they're gonna do is give you a number right i deliver x i deliver the sales or this expense savings or whatever maybe add the shareholder value those people are always interested in innovations at work right so if you're s then you're in an organization i mean i think about we talking about before we sold the health plans health plans did the same thing for fifty years and the people that you were selling to were the very same people that put in place the things that you were trying to get rid of right yeah so and the same thing exist within an organization what i would say is i respectfully whether it's the innovation people or the senior leaders in your group and say listen do your homework like come up with a business plan come up with a business case don't just walk in somebody who's the executive vp vp of blah bitty blah and say i have an idea do your work and put in a package but say this i believe that this can deliver us revenue competitive differentiation significant cost savings and i'd like to have the opportunity to present it to you and i can tell you that the people that are in those roles certainly you and me we would always wanna have that conversation if it was something that was that was credible even if you're s at different levels of your reorganization yeah yeah not the very good point very well said i think that that's something to take note of like you don't even if you feel like the organization doesn't support or perhaps you don't see the peers your peers working on things like this take that initiative and and i think the the takeaway message the lesson is to you know you'd be surprised at what you can accomplish if you start going out there and like you said acting like an entrepreneur within a company and pushing these ideas in front of the right people are presenting them in front of the right people it could really take that career to the next level within an organization yep i gotta you i can tell you what i did when i started my company and all our clients were health plans and we're an early stage company i used to literally sit down at eight o'clock at night and leave voicemail mails for the ceos of our nation's largest healthcare care companies united healthcare ci ae and i got seven out of ten calls back and and that wasn't because of my bubbly personality i basically said listen so there's gonna be a health plan here in the united states that's gonna have a reward program just like marriott in citi bank and the one that does is gonna win the consumer and the one that it doesn't is gonna fall behind this is what we're doing give us a callback right so the ceo would we'd normally say how you could never get to the ceo if you go to somebody and say this is how you really win or this is how you really lose right they will break all the rules for you obviously you have to be concise on point and really talk to something that really makes a difference but the people that arise to senior levels rise to senior levels because they they cut through things and ultimately deliver some kind financial performance mh the hubspot podcast network is a success story partner now the hubspot podcast network has great podcast like the ops authority if you are constantly putting out fires in your business instead of focusing on growth and innovation listen to the ops authority hosts by natalie gin and brought to you by the house hubspot podcast network natalie speaks about actionable strategies that actually move your business forward so every week natalie shares some transformational stories from real business owners who've mastered their back end systems so they can focus on what really matters so get your ops in order get your business running smoothly so you can scale and you can really build something meaningful stop letting all this chaos steal all of your energy and listen to the opt authority wherever you get your podcasts success story is a square partner now your favorite neighborhood spots run on square you know i was just at panther coffee here in miami last week and beyond the incredible cor what struck me was watching them seamlessly handle the morning rush the barista mentioned they've been using square to manage everything from inventory to building their loyal customer base it's so much more than just that little white card reader that we all recognize square knows that local businesses can be big businesses and as things get more complex square meets you at every opportunity so whether or not you're expanding to new locations building a loyal following even covering cash flow gaps squares powering all the behind the scenes stuff that matters they knock out today's to do's and they unlock tomorrow's what ifs if you're ready to see how square can transform your business go to square dot com slash go slash success to learn more that's square dot com slash go slash success square meet you there 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 dot com slash scott one point that i wanted to highlight because you list off a whole bunch of problems with mentors that align themselves with entrepreneurs yep people that overs sell themselves people that are only looking for winners so on and so on that keeps going going so as an entrepreneur scare there to align with someone yeah how do you look for the right person there are a lot of mentors that are doing all the right things but then there's also a bunch of mentors that are trying to sell you things trying to bring in their own financial partners trying to bring in their own you know marketing partners and things like that here's what i would say a lot of times mentors that maybe don't always have your best interest at heart like i said there's many to do mh a lot of times they they prey on the risk that entrepreneurs are feeling when you're talking to somebody and you have a mentor and somebody you really like and you're connecting with go ask a colleague of yours not somebody that has the last same last name in you or somebody you're dating or your brother just somebody whose business judgment you respect and say to them hey listen i'm i'm thinking about getting involved in this can you talk to them for a half hour an hour because you know they're completely objective view yeah right and they will come in and say well i think this person's a little too this a little to that and that can really help you especially you know you talk about the book and this this whole idea of perspective we all know this we're in the middle of it we have a really tough time seeing things what other people can see really clearly that also works a lot when you're hiring employees right when you're working twenty four hours a day the person in front of you might just hire them just because they can speak right because you're so busy if you go to like if i went to you and say hey listen could you interview this person for me you would give me us reason thoughtful you know objective view and i'd be able to make a the right type decision just like i would with a with a mentor yeah good advice it's very good i've never heard a frame like i've never heard that suggestion before but i i really like that a lot especially when you're you know as an entrepreneur you right you're you're just over tired absolutely exhausted no decisions you're making are probably the right ones so so yeah i mean you're trying to look for all these little tricks and tips to to make it easier on yourself i like that a lot i'm not what we've said before about like bit being a series of skills yeah right it's it's not yes the big things matter but it's also you know how you hire the wrong partnering person you get the wrong mentor you know you're already kinda you know behind eight ball a little bit yeah yeah one of the the last thing not to end innovate with lessons from the book but i thought there was a a few really good ones and then i wanted to ask to some like some personal insights from your career but the four p's you mentioned that perspective can be influenced by pressure passion pleasure pain yep or a flawed per flawed perspective you you speak a little bit more on that and and extrapolate just what that means exactly and how to sort of watch for that as an entrepreneur i think we sort of touched on it a little bit but just to make it clear interesting thing yeah it's really interesting when you take a step back after i sell my company and you're like what is what do we all really go through like when we writing the book risk and what do we really go through and and this whole idea a four piece camera we started saying well you you have passion right and you're like well i'm gonna make meatballs right and somebody will go well the world has plenty of meatballs and you'll be like well not my meatballs right so with we also have that kind but then you also have you know pressure right there's a lot on you sometimes financial pressure sometimes you leave a job you know you have the pleasure of you know the first time you you you print your business card you get your first customer it's like your first kiss right mh and and then the pain you know when the first time an investor tells you that they don't like your business it's like somebody's calling your baby ugly and and we're really investing and when you're we're always under the influence of these four p's doesn't make us do the wrong thing when we're under pressure right we hire the wrong person right when we're dealing all passion about our meatballs sometimes we're not listening to the feedback of the market saying hey doesn't think we're this way but it might work that way so we just always have to be really cognizant to the fact that we're kinda under the influence of these things so we can employ some of the techniques we were talking about before thanks for tuning in if you found this valuable don't forget to hit that subscribe button so you never miss episode and if you wanna dive deeper into this conversation check out links in the description to full episode see you in the next one 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 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 cognate 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 in all these spam calls it's 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 is 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 cog 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

success story is a square partner now your favorite neighborhood spots run on square you know i was just at panther coffee here in miami last week and beyond the incredible cor potato what struck me was watching them seamlessly handle the morning rush the barista mentioned they've been using square to manage everything from inventory to building their loyal customer base it's so much more than just that little white card reader that we all recognize square knows that local businesses can be big businesses and as things get more complex square meets you at every opportunity so whether or not you're expanding to new locations building a loyal following even covering cash flow gaps squares powering all the behind the scenes stuff that matters they knock out today's to do's and they unlock tomorrow's what ifs if you're ready to see how square can transform your business go to square dot com slash go slash success to learn more that's square dot com slash go slash success square meet you there did i put the clothes in the dryer i hope they don't think i was saying to be a ranch cut just sleep already when you're racing thoughts keep you up at night it's tough to let go and get the rest your need better sleep can help you might have heard of white or brown noise there's a whole rainbow of color noises and they can help you calm your mind reduce stress and sleep better like the green noise you're listening to now with the better sleep app you can discover more color noises and over two hundred soothing sounds guided meditations and bedtime stories high quality rest is vital to your mental well being and physical health calm your restless mine conquer your day and sleep better at night download better sleep from the app store or google play and start a seven day trial today because when you sleep better you feel better in this lesson episode we're talking about all those hours that you spend doing things you hate the soul crushing jobs the endless kid sports practices the networking events the committee meetings the social obligations that you dread if you are constantly sacrificing what you want to do for what you think you should do if your weeks are full of activities that you are just enduring instead of actually living a life that you enjoy this one's for you you are growing your kids up on top of screwing your own life up i'm gonna show you why your kids can tell when you're dead inside what you're actually teaching them about adulthood and how to stop modeling a life that you hate and start turning life into something you enjoy not just survive watch the parents at any kids soccer game this weekend half her on their phones another quarter are gossip about work the rest are staring dead ida the field mentally calculating if they have time to hit costco right after this and the worst part is the kids see it all not that you're distracted they see that you're dead inside that you are enjoying the game not living it's sitting in those bleach features at seven am it's killing you slowly see when dad checks email during the game the kid sees it and the kid knows the dad would rather be anywhere else when mom is fake smiling through another tournament that she rather not be at the kid understands that love means pretending and when parents stand their dead inside pretending to care the kid learns that this is what adulthood looks like see this is a truth that should terrify every parent children are emotional mirrors they don't feel what you say they feel what you feel and if you feel that when you sit in those bleach yours at seven am you are dead inside your kid knows it their body knows it and they're learning that love and life means dying slowly in public while pretending everyone else is fine and this isn't good enough this isn't acceptable being an adult does not mean that you have to hate your life but if you don't work on yourself this is what you're showing your kit we have convinced ourself that to be a good parent we have to sacrifice everything right that love is measured in hours logged at practices or dollar spent on equipment or weekend surrender tournaments or any of the other million different hobbies and past times and extracurricular that kids can do so we sit in these stands and we're dead inside scrolling on our phones gossip with the other dead parents pretending that this is what love looks like but this is what i wish more parents understood your kids don't need more activities they don't need more gifts and honestly they're probably getting lots of love what they need is to see you living a life worth living really living a life worth hopping because right now if you are just going through the motions you are just showing them some cautionary tale that growing up sucks and it doesn't have to you want understand what you're actually showing your kids do this exercise it's gonna ruin your week but it's important for the next seven days track your hours in two columns a live hours and dead hours so a live hours would be hours where you feel genuinely energized and present and chosen and just living and doing things that you enjoy and then dead hours would be hours when you are just enjoying and scrolling and just counting the minutes until it's over and i wanted to include everything so the commute to practice dead the tournament weekend dead the networking dinner dead the gym class you actually love that's an a live hour the coffee with your friend alive the book before bed alive okay what you're gonna discover is that you are modeling seventy plus dead hours per week seventy plus hours that you hate whatever it is you're doing you're modeling that to your kids and that is seventy hours of teaching your kids that adulthood is a prison sentence seventy hours of showing them that love means endurance and seventy hours of programming them to expect misery your kids are watching and they're not learning what you think they're learning they're not learning dedication they're learning that adults are zombies they're not learning commitment they're learning that marriage means two people always fight and never see each other they're not learning love they're learning that having kids means your life ends but news flash it doesn't here's a different way to live life here's a different way to model how to be an adult my dad coached my hockey team for ten years but here's what made him different he didn't do it for me he did it because he loved hockey every practice he'd be on the ice an hour early working on his own game running drills with his beer league buddy still trying to perfect his snapshot at forty five and when practice started he wasn't teaching us hockey he was sharing his religion the way he talked about the conditioning anymore the joy when someone finally got a play right the way he demonstrated a drill and you could see that he forgot he was coaching he was just lost in the pure pleasure of the moment and other kids parents they sat in the stands they're miserable they were counting the minutes my dad was on the ice alive so his alive hours that week probably fifteen just from hockey plus his work that he loved plus his thursday poker game that he loved plus his saturday morning pawn hockey before my game so he was modeling forty plus a live hours per week doing things that he actually enjoyed and that's what i absorbed not that adults sacrifice but that adults play adults live see i learned that adults are allowed to want things parents are allowed to choose themselves and sometimes showing your kid what it looks like to honor your own dreams is the best coaching you can do my mom was the same with the outdoors she'd wake up at five am on saturdays and just love to hike and love to snows shoot and love to do anything outside and she did it on wednesdays and sundays and random tuesday evenings and the mountains of forest the trails those were her life she take a snows shooting and spent half the time looking at birds or identifying these animal tracks and it i guess a little bit was for education but not really for our education because she genuinely needed to know what made those prints she loved it she'd stopped mid hike she'd pull out her plant identification book totally absorbed basically forgetting that we were even there so her live hours were off the charts every sunrise hike every camping trip every moment that she spent plotting the next adventure and we absorb that energy me and my brother we love the outdoors is growing up but more than loving me outdoors i loved that she was doing what she loved to do see kids whose parents have lives are more secure not less they don't wonder if they're enough to make you happy because they know that the parents happiness comes from all these different sources they don't carry the burden of being your entire world they're just a part of a rich life and they don't feel guilty about growing up and leaving because they know you're the parent you've had a great life you love what you love you're gonna be fine and they get something better than a parent who never misses a game they get a parent who shows them what a life worth living looks like so this is a lesson to you to the parent the parent who's just existing through life because hey it's a job i have it's you know i have to do this i have to do that i'm not saying blow up your life overnight and quit your job and never go to another tournament i'm just saying that start moving towards a direction of enjoying your life enjoying your hobbies enjoying your work enjoying your spouse because what your kids actually need to see is you excited about tuesday because your thing is tuesday you and your spouse kissing in the kitchen not performing happiness but actually being happy your kids need to see you say no to something without explaining yourself to death they have to see you working on something hard because you wanna get better at they have to see you protecting time that's just yours like it's sacred because it is they have to see you having friends who knew you before you were someone's parent they have to see reading a book in the middle of the day to dancing to music that they think is ancient do you starting something new at forty and fifty and sixty do you choosing a alive over dead even when it's inconvenient and to you modeling that life it is worth living this isn't about being a different parent it's about choosing to be alive so i want you to start small this week add one thing that makes you feel electric that lights you up not for your kids not for your spouse do it for you could be a morning run it could be lunch with that friend who makes you laugh until you can't breathe it could be a hobby you haven't touched in years it could be a class that you keep saying you'll take and then look at your dead hours look at the things that you really hate doing and pick one that is truly optional the committee you hate the book club that you hate the standing coffee with somebody who drains you the favor you do every week that no one actually needs cancel it this week right now not after the holidays right now the goal isn't to abandon your responsibilities it's to stop treating every obligation like a life sentence look at everything through this lens and this become alive can i bring something i love into this can i shift how i do this if not if it's truly irr dead can i kill it and slowly and deliberately you're gonna start choosing a alive over dead whenever you have the choice and your kids will notice they won't notice what you're skipping notice what you're choosing they'll see you protecting your morning workout like it matters they'll hear you laugh on the phone with your friends they'll watch you say no to things without apologizing for just existing they'll catch you doing something badly and loving it anyways they'll see you building a life that doesn't require escape and they'll learn that adults get to one things that marriage can include two people with their own interests who choose to come together that having kids doesn't mean your life ends it means showing them what a life looks like a good life looks like remember your kids are keeping score not of your attendance at their tournaments but of your alive ness and for most of us right now we're losing your kid won't remember the activities they will remember that you look trapped that you're living a life that looks like hell that you are showing them that being una adult means your life is over and it doesn't have to be choose things that light you up choose things that make you feel alive choose things that show your kids what living a true good fulfilled life actually is think big bi small is a success story partner now if you love hearing from bold entrepreneurs and leaders who carve their own paths you'll definitely wanna check out think big bi small it's back for a brand new season it's one of my favorite shows think big by small is the chart topping entrepreneurship podcast from harvard business school it show explores an innovative approach to business leadership it's called acquisition entrepreneurship that's where you buy up profitable small business and then you become the ceo rather than trying to start a business from scratch if you need somewhere to start check out their season three debut episode with ensemble performing our ceo and harvard jeff hoe in the conversation you're gonna follow jeff's journey through the search process all the way through to building up a sizable business which is interesting because this all began as a passion project for him so don't miss out follow thing big buy small and apple podcasts spotify or ever you're listening now 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 it's 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 is 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 at 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