Welcome to the Relentless Few Podcast. So,
or welcome back if you've been here before. Well,
just a fun little note. This will be the second time I recorded this
episode because I'm using some new software so I can record anywhere
and remotely. And, um, I didn't press the right button. So
I texted Lisa, who's my wife, because I said, hey, I just recorded a
podcast. And I said, well, actually I didn't record it. I just talked for 25
minutes. But I didn't press the record button. So this is actually take 2,
which will be great because it won't be a repeat of take 1 because
I have no idea what I said on that one. And I have no intention
of trying to figure it out because what I'm trying to do with
the podcast from this point forward is I actually want it to be
kind of a record of processing for
myself. I don't have a clean
script. I don't have even an outline of what I want to talk about.
I have thoughts and I wanted this to be, I was telling
Brett, who was my producer, that I wanted this to be kind of a
live processing of those thoughts that aren't clear yet, that I don't have answers
for, that I don't have systems or frameworks or results or
anything for. I'm just going to share my thinking.
with folks because I want them, I want all of
you to do it for yourself, to
share your thinking and to think out loud for yourself
because everybody's doing it. We just don't admit to it, I
guess, because we all want to look like we have answers. So that's what this
is. And, and I think it's a little bit, um, I actually want it to
be like a pirate radio station and those things don't exist anymore.
Because, you know, traditional radio doesn't exist hardly anymore. But back
in the, I think it was the late '80s, it might've been, there was
a movie called Pump Up the Volume with Christian Slater. And he had a, he
was a young, young kid at the time and he had a pirate radio station.
It was like an alter ego for himself. And it was very different than
the person he was day to day. It was subversive, like pirate radio stations
are. And I liked it. I like the concept
and I like the idea of having an opportunity to
talk on the airwaves in a way that you wouldn't talk face-to-face because
it's okay. It doesn't make people as
uncomfortable as if you were doing it face-to-face in a group.
And it is uncomfortable. It's uncomfortable to process life. What's uncomfortable for me, I
don't want to universalize this to everybody. I have no
idea if it's uncomfortable for everybody else. It is uncomfortable for me to
to not have an outline, an answer, a product, a
solution, whatever that is, because I spent so many years
crafting that brand or persona
of having the answer, the insight, the understanding, the solution,
easing the anguish and anxiety and uncertainty
with a solution. And I don't,
I don't feel that's the way to go forward. That's been an evolution of my
thinking. It's been a painful one at that because when
you have an identity that's aligned to that, shifting your identity
can be scary and uncomfortable
and anxiety-producing, which is doing all of those things for me
or to me as it were, or I'm doing them to myself, I guess.
I do think that, you know,
I'm getting to the point where I think that for my, for me,
the point of living is to play at the meaning of life. And so that's
a constant evolution for me. And I want it to continue to be, I want
it to continue to be something that evolves for
me. And that's, again, it leads to a little bit of
discomfort, but I'm okay with that because I don't, I don't want to continue to
tranquilize myself with trivial things, which I do quite frequently. I'm not
sure about you, but I definitely do
it. And I try to,
I've spent many years trying to
immediately intellectualize something for myself because it gets me out of the
discomfort and I want to be able to dwell in things. I want to develop
the capacity to dwell in things. I don't want to dwell
on them because I do really good at dwelling on them. Believe me, I can
dwell on things almost better than anybody I know for
days, weeks, months, holding
myself horribly accountable in a negative way with a lot of guilt
and shame. Guilt being that I did wrong and shame being that I am
wrong. And then sometimes a little bit of despair, which is, you know,
I'm never going to be able to change it. It just is what it is.
And those are 3 things I want to have less of in my life,
but those are also up to me to figure out. Nobody's
doing it to me. I'm doing it to myself and I'm damn good at
it. In fact, that's the thing I'm probably best at.
And it's ironic for me because I spend
so much of my focus when I'm working with people trying
to make it clear to them that they shouldn't do that.
I see that all the time in leaders. I see that all the time in
people, everybody, whether leading is a verb,
not a noun. It's just something we do. But I think when we get into
those roles, we put so much of that responsibility on
ourselves. And I am not universalizing this. I'm speaking from
experience, which I think is different. I'm not trying to universalize something
that I don't have experience in. I've spent the last decade talking to leaders in
organizations and I see it. Now, I will openly admit, I see
it through my frame, so I'm probably looking for it because I feel it. So
I'm, there's a certain amount of projection that probably goes on here. There's no doubt
about it, but I do hear it in people's voices. I ask them straight out
how they feel about it. And it's so funny because I don't think
we're okay in business to talk about shame and
guilt. We want to talk about failure and loss and
accountability, and metrics and KPIs. And
we want to take that stuff out of our heart and into our head. And
I get it. I get why, because it's far easier.
I can attest to that. Like, it's far, far easier
to deal with those things, something that's objective, rather
than deal with something that could hurt.
And so I get it, but it's also the human condition
and there is no business doesn't exist.
You know, business is just something we made up, but it's still a bunch of
humans. And so we're really at the mercy of who we are
and how we feel based on what we're going to achieve.
So a lot of this that I'm working through right now is really,
you know, based on a couple— I'm always trying to
look for new thoughts on what I'm, you know,
learn from smarter people. So I'm reading a couple books, The Denial of Death
by Ernest Becker and The Courage to Be by Paul
Tillich. And I just finished Becker's Denial of
Death, and that was some great stuff in there.
You know, one thing that struck me, and the reason I read the book is
because I was doing some other research in it, and the concept around
where Becker's book came from is
His general concept is everything we're doing, anything anybody, anybody,
any human is doing in their life is more or less at some
level building an immortality project for themselves because we're
trying to escape death. And I've always thought this was interesting because,
you know, as I dove deeper in existentialism,
one of the core tenets, interestingly enough, of
that when it comes to the behaviors that we exhibit, As you talk
about all the planning we do, because we are generally, and again,
just speaking from my own experience, we are obsessed with planning.
Like there's a lot of planning that goes on. You know, we've got to have
checklists and plans and 5-year plans and 3-year plans and visions and, you know, call
them what you will, you know, whatever you want to say. We have to have
big, hairy, audacious goals. I mean, God, there's the vocabulary goes on and
on for how we're going to plan for ourselves. And
One thing that struck me, I read several years ago, was that
all of the planning is really another way for us to
avoid death. And that was, you know, Tillich's,
or I mean, sorry, Becker's book, The Denial of Death. I mean, that's the title
of the book, but the reason that plans help us do
that is because the underlying assumption when we do any plan, big, hairy, audacious
goal, any of those things, The underlying assumption that we never
vocalize is that we're still going to be alive to
achieve it or when that happens. So that's great to come up with a 5-year,
10-year, whatever plan, because we're just like, the natural assumption is, well, I'm still going
to be here. So we're pushing death out. Like we're stiff-arming death
to a certain extent. And I think that's true. And
that's what struck me. Like what struck me about Becker's book was the thing about
the immortality project. And that really kind of shook me
to my core of what I do for myself. You know, thinking
about all these things that I try to work on and create
and what, why do I do it? So I'm not questioning what I believe, but
I am trying to question why I need to believe it.
And then shifting it when it doesn't align with my values, because that's the tricky
part. The tricky part is I thought it did. Like I thought those
things aligned with my values and then I was challenged by that because
the thing it shakes for me, this whole thing about planning and, you know,
the, and again, you know, there's Friedrich Hayek and his knowledge problem
about where does knowledge reside to be able to do
things. I keep going back for myself to this
level of humility. And I think for me, that's
what's core in all this. And that's why I try to now, which I
didn't before, My God, I had answers at every turn for everybody,
but I never stopped and thought about how was I getting to those answers and
why did I believe those answers were going to work for other people? Because what
I was drawing on is my own experience, my own insights with little
to no concept of what they were actually seeking.
Because oftentimes it takes so long for people to be clear about what they actually
want. All of us as humans, I'm not, again, not trying to
universalize, but I'm just saying, my experience with myself and others is, you
know, we, if you sit and talk with somebody about a challenge or something
that's challenging them right now and they want to fix, we're all about solutions,
but we're very, we, I try to do it more and more
now, be more curious about the underlying issues that are going
on for them so I can truly get to the, help
them get to the root of what they're trying to accomplish and what's holding them
up. Instead of just locking in on, oh, you
said their first initial statement is, well, I want to fix this. And then we
just go whole, we go no holds barred on coming up with solutions for that
problem. And oftentimes that's not that from
what I've seen year after year after year, after doing this for over a decade,
is that that's very rarely somebody's first initial thought
of, well, this is the thing I want to solve for. That thing will
very rarely hold up. Under scrutiny.
And so for me to exercise that curiosity more
for myself and for other people with the
underlying value being humility, because
I don't know, I don't know what they're talking about. I don't know why
it matters to them. So if I'm curious, I can, I can ask better
questions that will help me help them.
Because again, there's this great thing.
It's like, you know, the bad news is no one's coming to save us. The
good news is we never needed saved in the first place. So it's great that
nobody's coming to save us because we don't need it. All we need is
space and safety to explore what we're
thinking. Because it is my belief
that most people will get to the solution. And in
fact, They know what the solution is,
but they've created a problem to shift away from needing to do the thing
they know they need to do because they don't want to do that thing. So
they shift into a different problem so that there's a different solution
that's more,
let's see, less taxing, less emotionally taxing, less personally
accountable, less uncomfortable. Call it what you will. And again,
just sharing my experiences here with a lot of watching people go through this,
watching myself go through this.
That's the hardest part of the human experiment, right? That's the hardest part
of this whole thing. At least it is for me. I don't know if it
is for you. Only you know that. But actually
locking into what I know to be true. And then,
but for me, it's taking, it's creating the space for myself
to dwell in that for the appropriate amount of time and not jump, not let
it jump from my heart to my head, not try to intellectualize it too fast
because that's my superpower is intellectualizing things.
And I've spent a lot of years honing that superpower and it provides safety
for me. And that's what the safety is. I never
have to do the other thing. I never have to dwell in it and sit
with what my body's feeling and telling me. And I don't sit in that discomfort
and I need to. That's my own personal observation for me is I need to
do that. It's valuable for me to do that. And it also slows me down
and makes me more present, which is also what I would like to
do for my own, just me personally. And
I know I'm Sisyphus pushing the rock up the hill.
And I know that, and that's a, It sounds like a grind because
it is, because every time the rock, at the end of the day, the rock
rolls back down the hill as it should, because I never meet the same
rock. It's like Heraclitus, right? I'm never meeting
the rock the same way the second time after I've already put— this isn't
eternal repetition, it's recurrence. And repetition and
recurrence are different for me because I'm
convinced for myself, I never, I might, I might run into a similar
challenge, but it's never the same because I'm not the
same. I don't see it the same way,
hopefully, because I keep evolving. So if I keep
evolving, I'm never repeating anything. If I'm repeating anything, it's because I'm not
evolving. Because I can run into the same challenge, and believe me, I
do. I run into the same challenges for myself.
I hear the same challenges from other people. Yeah. And
that's the biggest aha for me. And the thing that freed me
up the most is knowing that I'm not repeating things. It isn't like, how many
times do I have to solve this? Or why do I keep running into this?
It's not the same. I'm not the same person in
my estimation. Like, that's my goal. My goal isn't
to change the world. It's the change.
It's that I evolve so that I never meet the world the same way
twice, I guess.
Because life, in my opinion, life is an insurmountable problem. And
it's not a bad— and problem doesn't mean bad. Problem just means
it's always going to present itself as a challenge.
And that's really what where I'm at.
And I'm trying, I just want to be more okay with that because I don't,
my goal isn't to be, let me think about
this for a second, isn't to be strong enough to change the world, but I
want to be strong enough to see the world differently because if I do, it
presents me with different choices and different choices present me with different
outcomes. So I, I'm not trying to change it because I can't change the
outside. Like I can't change the world. And the more I try to change the
world, I've said for, I've
repeated this so many times over the years, the world, I recognize for myself,
the world never has, it doesn't
currently, and never will care about what I want, nor should it,
by the way. Like it isn't, not only will it not, it shouldn't
because I'm a part of the world. Like I have the humility to understand, well,
actually I don't. I'm trying to develop the humility to understand I'm part of the
ecosystem. Like I'm not above or beyond anything and that I'm just a,
I'm just a cog. Right. And I'm okay with that. Like I don't,
I'm becoming okay with that. I can't say that I am okay with it, but
I'm becoming okay with understanding how much
I don't matter.
And I'm okay with, I'm starting to become okay with and actually
embracing insignificance. Because
when it, for me, the trade-off is once I'm insignificant and don't
matter, I'm free to act because I don't have an outside,
an outsized understanding of my impact that way
because it doesn't exist
for me. And that is not the way I have always thought. It is not
the way that I've thought for a lot of years.
And it makes the world a more peaceful place for
me. And hopefully, ultimately, it makes the world a more peaceful
place for people around me, the people I care deeply about, which is really my
goal because it's, you know, I've, I want to, I want
to be, I want to have clarity for myself about what I want most, but
what I want most is based on the other people that I
care about. It's in context of that. It isn't, and
I'm wrestling with this right now on something else. It isn't what we, I thought
about changing it to what we want most, but I don't want, it's not a
collective. It's not, I'm not taking votes. I want to be
cognizant that I'm impacting other people because, you know, we go
to Maslow and it's the hierarchy of human needs and self-actualization. And
he said later it was self-transcendence. And I want to be clear for myself that
I am striving to, I want to become the best version of myself, To
serve those that I care deeply about. That's what I want to do. I always
want to— that's the humility part for me. That's where you get rid of hubris.
I'm not trying to become the best
version of myself for me. That's why part of it is for me is
that I keep reflecting back on what is needed by other people, by the people
that I serve, by the people that I care deeply about, the people I want
to have a positive impact on. What do they need from me? And that gives
me the motivation to keep evolving. Because
some of the things that, some of the ways I show up aren't
serving others well, and therefore they're not serving me well. They
serve me well because it's easy. They serve me well because I don't have to
think about it and it's, I don't have to expend any energy and I can
do that all day long, but it's not ultimately achieving
what I want to achieve. And that is by making a better world for people
that I care uniquely about. And so that's what all of this is.
in all of this effort and challenge and struggle, which
I view as a positive for myself, that I continue
to do is on that. And I don't have an answer. Like
it's never, you know, one of the things that
I came up with was, you know, the whole definition of a relentless few are
people that they're done when they're dead. And that
sometimes for me is just flat out exhausting.
One of the places that's exhausting is like, you know, physical
activity, like, you know, whatever you do, however you do it, you know, getting out
and moving your body and making sure that you're strong
enough, you know, to do the things you want to do both, you know, in
all aspects, you know, physically and emotionally and cognitively. And I think we need
to be strong across all of those and that requires effort. And sometimes,
you know, I'm at the gym or something and I'm I'm doing
exercises and sometimes I think to myself, I'm like, God, I'm going to do this
for another 20 years. Maybe, you know, I'm 59 years old. So maybe I do
this for another, you know, am I keep doing this? And the answer is yes.
And then I look back and it's funny because part of this is,
you know, the whole conceptual part of this is I've been doing, I've been showing
up in some way, shape, or form. And I'm using this as just a micro
example for myself is at the gym since I was, you know, I first started
really working out when I was in college. So, you You know, that was, you
know, when I was 18, 19 is when I got introduced to formally working out.
Didn't do a lot of it, did a little bit of it in high school,
but not like I did when I got to college. And so, you know,
19, I'm 59 now, let's call it 40 years. So in some way, shape,
or form, I've been doing this for 40 years already. So on one hand, I'm
like, I only have to do it for another 20. So that doesn't sound so
bad because it's only half as long as I've been doing it. But I will
tell you, and I think it's just like everything else emotionally and cognitively and
physically, I think as we age, the amount of
effort it takes to just keep up increases. So
the effort that I used when I was in my 20s to work out, I
have to use a lot more effort now to get a little less
of a result. I hope that makes sense. So it's, I got to
try harder to just keep— so the amount of effort I have to do just
to stay static is a lot. You know, you work out a lot just
not to lose anything. Then you got to add on to that. And I think
that, and I use the term workout generally for physically, stuff, physicality,
but I'm also talking about cognitively and emotionally because there's a certain amount of
calcification that happens on all those for me as I
age. Again, I'm trying not to universalize, so please excuse that as
I'm sure it's going to happen again and again, is that
I'm not as open as I used to be to things.
I'm a little more risk-averse. And I don't think I mean that from the
standpoint of effort. I mean it from the standpoint of risk,
purely of risk of identity and what I'm doing and standing in the world
and all of those things, right? Because once we have stuff, you know, we, when
we're younger, we don't have as much stuff. So we're willing to risk and then
we get stuff and we shift from risk to protection. Because now I don't want
to, it was all about gaining stuff initially. Now it's not about, now it's about
not losing that stuff. And that's a significant different
approach. Like if I'm risking the gain,
Because I don't have much to lose. But then, you know, they've done all that
work with behavioral economics and they've proven this, that, you know, we're totally more
risk-averse. I mean, I'd rather not lose than gain. And
I think I do that both from an emotional and a
cognitive, not as much from a physical, although I am quite aware there are
things I don't want to do anymore because they're too risky and it takes a
long time to bounce back. And so I, that does creep into
my mind there too. But I'm more cognizant now
of the risk involved in a lot of things, which I should
be. And I'm okay with that, but I want to balance that so I don't
become too risk-averse and things start calcifying even more and more and more
because then we just start, I just start allowing everything to kind of
close in and I do less and I experience less and I grow
less. And that's really my passion around that is I
I don't want to be 100% grow, grow, grow, and evolve, but I also don't
want to close myself off to opportunities and things that would be better
for me because they help me become more the person I want to show up
as. So that's kind of where the thinking is
right now. And I'm sure,
and again, I just wanted to do this as kind of an
insight into where I was, what I was bouncing around inside my head
right now and where it all stands. None of it is
solidified. And I think I'm becoming more
accepting of that, that that's the state. The state I want to stay in
to a certain extent is constantly that subtle
churn of what am I,
how am I showing up? And is it the best version for those that I
care deeply about? And if it's not, what opportunities do I
have? And then continuing to build up the reserves,
you know, physically and emotionally and cognitively to do that. But it does take a
lot of energy to do that. So I have to, that's one piece I've never
been good at is the, we can call it whatever we want, but self-care,
you know, being able to make sure that I show up with the energy required
to do these things. So I am focused a lot on that, making very
little headway in that area, trying to, but
it, but again, you know, adjusting behaviors and habits
and activities is really what's hard for me. Like it has been really hard for
me to make a commitment to do things that I know would provide me with
more energy. So I'm playing with a lot of stuff, doing a lot of experiments,
sometimes, you know, not getting the results that
I want, but I am doing it. And that's all, that's
all we can all do, right? We just got to show up, show up and
put in the work and really kind of absorb ourselves in the process and not
on the outcome. But I think that's a topic for another day.
So. Hope you enjoyed it. Hopefully
this stimulated something in you for you to think about. If not, you know, take
whatever piece did and throw out the rest or, you
know, throw the whole thing out because I understand if it's not of value and
if you're looking for, if you're looking for a framework or an answer, or an
insight, not sure you're going to find it here because
not sure I have any of those to share. And when I, on top of
that, if I do get to the point where I think I do, I'm going
to refrain from sharing them because I don't know that that's good for
anybody. So thanks for joining. Talk
again soon.