Latest / WTF to Unstuck™ with Clint Williams / Lessons on Leadership, Resilience & Growth with Garett Jones
Transcript
- speaker-0: Today I'm chatting with my longtime friend Garrett Jones. Garrett is a project manager at W Energy, and while he's not in the agency space, he's got an insane amount of experience managing people and organizations. He's a dad to three kiddos, and life is always busy, but always really good. Garrett, welcome to the coffee chat. speaker-1: Hey Quinn, thanks. Thanks for having me. Yeah. speaker-0: ⁓ for sure. It's good to see you this morning. How are things over you're Owasso, right? speaker-1: Yeah, ⁓ in Owasa just north of Tulsa, so yeah, yeah, we're close. ⁓ you know, don't get to see each other in person quite as much now, but yeah ⁓ you know, just a couple hours down the road. speaker-0: Nice. I know I was ⁓ we were reminiscing earlier when we were chatting about the first time we actually hung out together and I think it was maybe Halloween of twenty ten. I think so. Yeah. I think it was Halloween of twenty ten, so sixteen years ago. speaker-1: Dangerously approaching sixteen years. speaker-0: Yeah, right? Isn't that wild? It's crazy. A few kids since then. Life and all the things. Yeah. speaker-1: Exchange between every day. Yeah. speaker-0: Yeah, for sure. Man. Well it's good to see you this morning. I'm excited that you were up for a chat. speaker-1: Yeah, thanks for having speaker-0: We're not gonna talk too long. I like to limit these to about five minutes, but I gave you some questions yesterday, and I'm just gonna ask those today and we'll kick off the conversation and go from there. Cool. Awesome. All right. So I mentioned you're a project manager at W Energy right now, but I'm curious what has made you successful so far, and was there any kind of a specific catalyst? speaker-1: Yeah, sounds good. Yeah, thanks for sending those over early. ⁓ so I I got those last night and it was kind of mulling over it a little bit and thought about it some more this morning. I thought maybe like the best way to answer that is like so I started my career in retail, like kind of knew right away that wasn't really for me. kept alive, you know, kinda got me started. ⁓ paid for us to live when my wife's in grad school. ⁓ kind of really helped us buy our first house too. ⁓ but not long after that, so I I was an accountant. ⁓ so like oil and gas, Oklahoma City, ⁓ spreadsheets, you know, that kind of whole life there. ⁓ and then like, you know, that progressed for a while. ⁓ but in twenty nineteen, I took a job running a non profit ⁓ in the North Texas area, so like Dallas Fort Worth. ⁓ so that in some ways I I can really had no business taking that job. ⁓ but I was super pumped about it. ⁓ I've never run like an organization on my own. ⁓ I didn't really know like a single person in the city other than maybe like a couple family members that are still there. ⁓ and so the work ⁓ was sending volunteers into people's houses to fix stuff like roofs, ramps, ⁓ plumbing, you know, folks that couldn't afford it for themselves but did have a home to live in. Right. ⁓ but like a a lot of the world, like six to nine months, ⁓ COVID hits. ⁓ And the entire model basically becomes like illegal overnight. You know, if essentially Texas was a little different, but ⁓ you know, you can't send thirty strangers into an eighty year old's ⁓ home during a pandemic. Right. ⁓ so that whole really first year was me kind of figuring out what I was doing, ⁓ and then like what we could still do and can keep doing that. ⁓ so we came out of it like really, really, really you know, pretty good. So with without anybody Getting laid off. ⁓ I still had my job. Yeah. ⁓ I don't know that there's one you said catalyst. ⁓ you know, like catalyst so much as it was that it was kind of the first time for me that I found out I could really run something. ⁓ without yeah, yeah, for sure. Even without a direct experience. ⁓ and I could keep it running and hold something together even after there's not really a plan. You know, it's kinda like, Hey, here's how we do things. Yeah. And that changed. ⁓ so ⁓ it kind of feels like pretty much everything else has been kind of a version of that ever since. And so that that shift in that moment was kind of the the catalyst and me kind of learning that about myself through that opportunity. So really that was kind of the big change. speaker-0: Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. ⁓ what's been the driving factor that's kept you through the hard parts, like the highs and the lows? I they all kind of you know, it ha life happens. What's been that factor? speaker-1: I think like the the hardest parts are like never like the big dramatic ones. ⁓ I don't feel like, you know, that's kind of what I was alluding to just now, I guess a little bit, but like I don't feel like that's the hardest part. You know, it's kind of the day to day. So like there's obviously like stretches when like nothing's on fire, but you still can't quite explain to anybody that's not in it like how bad it actually is. ⁓ or what's really going on. So Like you mentioned, like last year I started at at ⁓ W Energy where for the most part nobody really knew me ⁓ or anything I'd done in the past outside of, you know, whatever you put on your resume. ⁓ so I kinda got to jump in and be and you be useful without a reputation. like you said, I've got a a family, I've been married for eighteen years. Nice love being a husband. ⁓ I got three kids. Like right now I'm coaching a fourth grade flag football team. I'm an assistant to to the first grade team. ⁓ like those my kids, the kids on those teams, like they could care less what my title is at work. and you know, for the most part, you know, at work maybe it's kind of the opposite. ⁓ so it's really kind of both combined between those two things. And it's really that the people count on me at work and people not at work count on me as well. So I guess the people behind what I'm working on, whether that's personal or professional, is reality of kind of what keeps me going, I guess. speaker-0: I love that man. Well, thanks for chatting today. We're at our I think we hit six minutes, so I don't want to keep us too long. Sorry, I talked too long. No, not at all. This is awesome. So yeah, thank you so much and talk to you soon. speaker-1: Yeah, thanks Glenn. See ya. Bye.