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Living an Extraordinary Life · Live Your Legacy

0:10
SPEAKER_03: Grace and greetings, welcome to Live Your Legacy, a Miss You Graham production, the conversational podcast where we explore how life's defining moments shape the legacy we leave behind.
0:21
SPEAKER_03: I'm your host, Patricia D.
0:22
SPEAKER_03: Fordenberg, also known as Patty from New York.
0:25
SPEAKER_03: I am the founder and CEO of Miss YouGram, and as a grief consultant, my area of focus is legacy, empowering you from grief to a life to be remembered.
0:35
SPEAKER_03: This show is rooted in a simple truth.
0:37
SPEAKER_03: Grief is not always about death.
0:39
SPEAKER_03: Sometimes it comes through life's changes, losses, detours, and new beginnings.
0:45
SPEAKER_03: And here we speak with entrepreneurs, authors, leaders, and creators who have turned their life-defining moments into meaningful work and lasting contributions because legacy is not only what we leave behind, what it's shaping now through vision, impact, and purpose.
1:03
SPEAKER_03: And today I'm honored to welcome our special guest, Steve Robbins, is an MIT computer scientist, Harvard MBA, entrepreneur, TEDx speaker, and former host of the top 10 business podcast, The Get It Done Guy, raised in a traveling new and chipy commune before going on a co-found startup and helped redesign Harvard Business School Leadership Curriculum.
1:27
SPEAKER_03: And he now helps people create lives and careers that are both successful and deeply meaningful.
1:35
SPEAKER_03: Stever, thank you for being here on Live Your Legacy as a special guest.
1:40
SPEAKER_03: Tell us where you're coming in from, my friend, and thank you.
1:42
SPEAKER_03: Over to you.
1:44
SPEAKER_01: Thank you very much.
1:45
SPEAKER_01: That was a fabulous welcome.
1:46
SPEAKER_01: I feel so honored.
1:48
SPEAKER_01: I'm coming in from Boston, Massachusetts, home of the Red Sox, home of lots of people.
1:53
SPEAKER_01: I know the whole place of the country.
1:56
SPEAKER_01: You had to say the Red Sox.
2:00
SPEAKER_03: You just had to get it in there, right?
2:02
SPEAKER_01: Come on.
2:02
SPEAKER_01: You put New York right there on your screen.
2:05
SPEAKER_03: You got me.
2:06
SPEAKER_01: You got me.
2:07
SPEAKER_03: You got me.
2:09
SPEAKER_03: Thank you, my friend.
2:10
SPEAKER_03: And thank you for being here today.
2:12
SPEAKER_03: And I'm getting excited to get into it.
2:14
SPEAKER_03: So we usually like to get our feet wet right away.
2:16
SPEAKER_03: So take your shoes off.
2:18
SPEAKER_03: And we like to start off with a question and love to hear what you have to say about this.
2:23
SPEAKER_03: In hindsight, would you agree or disagree that hindsight is always 2020 and why?
2:31
SPEAKER_01: Oh boy.
2:32
SPEAKER_01: First of all, no, it's not always 2020.
2:34
SPEAKER_01: For sure.
2:36
SPEAKER_01: I would say that hindsight is optimistic in the sense that we can actually figure out more about what happened with hindsight than without, but I don't think it's 2020 at all.
2:45
SPEAKER_01: And the reason is, and it's interesting, I've given a lot of thought to this.
2:50
SPEAKER_01: It's an interesting question because four times in my life, actually, it might be five by now, four, but four times.
2:57
SPEAKER_01: There are four decisions that I made, very specific decisions, which if I had made them in an opposite direction, I I would have, I would have gotten all the things I wanted.
3:06
SPEAKER_01: I would have fulfilled my dreams or my dreams of that moment.
3:10
SPEAKER_01: And those four decisions, all of them instead took me down a different path.
3:15
SPEAKER_01: And I would love to say, oh, I'm so much better for it.
3:17
SPEAKER_01: No, I'm not.
3:18
SPEAKER_01: I wanted, if I could go back, I would change all four of those decisions because I really do believe I would be better for it if I did it the other way.
3:26
SPEAKER_01: But the reason this relates to hindsight is the first of those decisions was one that I made in I think 1989 or 1990, something like that, a long time ago.
3:36
SPEAKER_01: And I have always been searching for what could I possibly have known or done at the time so that I would have made the right decision.
3:44
SPEAKER_01: Because in hindsight, I can't figure that out, right?
3:49
SPEAKER_01: Hindsight is not 2020 in this case.
3:51
SPEAKER_01: I'm like, there were other people who were in the exact same situation as me, and they did make the right decision.
3:57
SPEAKER_01: And I'm like, why did they make the right decision and I made the wrong decision?
4:00
SPEAKER_01: And how can I make better decisions going forward?
4:03
SPEAKER_01: And I've asked this question with all four of these decisions.
4:06
SPEAKER_01: And and I never came up with an answer, which to me implies maybe these are random.
4:12
SPEAKER_01: Maybe this is something where I believed that I had agency, and I believed that believed that I could have made the right decision.
4:17
SPEAKER_01: But the reality is there was no way to make to know.
4:39
SPEAKER_01: And the reason I'm bringing all this up with respect to hindsight is that with hindsight, we're very humans are very, very good story makers.
4:48
SPEAKER_01: So we can construct a story saying, oh, here's what happened in this situation.
4:54
SPEAKER_01: But even if we construct that story, it doesn't mean that the story is right.
4:59
SPEAKER_01: It just means that we're better at constructing stories in hindsight.
5:04
SPEAKER_01: That's good.
5:05
SPEAKER_01: One of the things that people don't stop and think about is you always know everything that you tried and thought from the inside.
5:14
SPEAKER_01: What you don't know is what's happening outside your field of vision.
5:18
SPEAKER_01: So when you're trying to decide with hindsight, how did the work or how did this thing happen?
5:23
SPEAKER_01: You're always thinking about what could I have done differently?
5:26
SPEAKER_01: How what parts of this were up to me?
5:28
SPEAKER_01: And the reality is there's a whole world out there that you don't even know what's going on.
5:34
SPEAKER_01: Can I tell you a very important story about that from my life?
5:37
SPEAKER_03: Yeah, please.
5:38
SPEAKER_03: I'm fascinated.
5:39
SPEAKER_03: I've never heard it said this way.
5:41
SPEAKER_03: And I've asked this question to a lot of people, so I love this.
5:44
SPEAKER_03: I'm leaning in.
5:46
SPEAKER_01: Okay.
5:47
SPEAKER_01: So I moved away from home when I was 15.
5:49
SPEAKER_01: And there were times my father was supposed to send me child support payments, and he didn't, because I had no way to enforce that.
5:57
SPEAKER_01: My father was a very nice guy.
5:59
SPEAKER_01: He was not a very good guy.
6:01
SPEAKER_01: And it's taken me decades to understand the difference.
6:05
SPEAKER_01: So he was supposed to be sending me child support, and there were times when he didn't.
6:09
SPEAKER_01: So there were times when I literally didn't have enough food to eat.
6:13
SPEAKER_01: The most memorable of those times was one night I was hungry and I went to my cupboard, and the cupboard was bare, except for a box of craft macaroni and cheese.
6:22
SPEAKER_01: And I took it out and I made it, and it was this weird, but supposed to be the color of an orange traffic cone.
6:27
SPEAKER_01: And instead, it was more like kind of this kind of something like this.
6:34
SPEAKER_01: And I took one bite and it was not edible, and I threw it away, and I looked on the package, and I noticed that it had expired eight months previously.
6:43
SPEAKER_01: And we're talking craft macaroni and cheese expire.
6:46
SPEAKER_01: It's not supposed to expire, isn't it?
6:48
SPEAKER_01: Like made of radioactive isotopes.
6:50
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
6:51
SPEAKER_01: So somehow I made it through that period of my life without turning to drugs or becoming uh becoming homeless or whatever.
7:01
SPEAKER_01: And for years and I decades, I thought that I don't know how I had done it, but I thought it was my fault.
7:08
SPEAKER_01: I thought, wow, I must have been a really resourceful 15-year-old because somehow I made it through all of this.
7:13
SPEAKER_01: What I found out at my 20th high school reunion is that all of my friends knew about my situation and all of their parents knew about my situation.
7:24
SPEAKER_01: So the parents had this little arrangement that I, of course, knew nothing about, where their kids would invite me over to do homework right around dinner time, so that I would be there for homework and I would also, they would also feed me and make sure that I was being looked for.
7:40
SPEAKER_01: What a blessing.
7:41
unknown: Wow.
7:42
SPEAKER_01: What a blessing.
7:43
SPEAKER_01: And I know that, I know that half a lifetime later.
7:47
SPEAKER_01: But for years and years, my hindsight explanation of that was oh, look, look how strong I was, and I didn't need anyone, and I was independent.
7:58
SPEAKER_01: And that's the wrong hindsight explanation because you didn't see the whole picture.
8:04
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, that was a lot of people.
8:05
SPEAKER_03: I only knew my way to think about that.
8:08
SPEAKER_03: Wow.
8:08
SPEAKER_03: And you're like the proof is in the pudding, right?
8:11
SPEAKER_03: These are facts.
8:13
SPEAKER_03: This is like true story here.
8:15
SPEAKER_03: So I love that perception.
8:17
SPEAKER_03: It's not even perception, it's an another perception on hindsight.
8:20
SPEAKER_03: I think that's fair to say.
8:22
SPEAKER_03: Our perception on hindsight.
8:24
SPEAKER_03: Wow, that was great, great.
8:27
SPEAKER_03: And you did you want to add to that?
8:29
SPEAKER_01: I just wanted to say it works in both directions because even though your successes may not actually be explainable, like solely about you or solely about the external world.
8:41
SPEAKER_01: Maybe you say, oh, that success was just about the external world.
8:43
SPEAKER_01: Maybe, but maybe it also is about you.
8:45
SPEAKER_01: Same thing for failures.
8:48
SPEAKER_01: That if you do something and it doesn't work out, it's very easy to think, oh, I could have done something differently.
8:54
SPEAKER_01: But maybe not.
8:55
SPEAKER_01: There are things happening, again, outside what you can observe that could make it absolutely impossible for you to succeed.
9:01
SPEAKER_01: I know that in America we have this sort of myth of if you want to hard enough, you can do anything.
9:08
SPEAKER_01: But honestly, I just don't believe that reality supports that.
9:12
SPEAKER_01: I believe it's a nice, empowering belief.
9:14
SPEAKER_01: What that belief does is it basically lets you blind yourself in a very useful way.
9:19
SPEAKER_01: It lets you blind yourself in a way that you're gonna go for it, you're going to give it a shot, you're gonna do everything in your power to make something happen.
9:26
SPEAKER_01: But if you are, let's say you're starting a, oh, actually, I can use a real life example that because this happened to someone I know.
9:34
SPEAKER_01: Someone I know started a food truck business.
9:38
SPEAKER_01: And he started, I don't remember what kind of food, but it started with a Greek truck, and then that was successful.
9:43
SPEAKER_01: And he got up to six or seven trucks, and the local organized crime syndicate or whatever gave him a visit in his office and said, if you continue doing this, we will kill you.
9:56
SPEAKER_01: So you probably want to change profession.
9:59
SPEAKER_03: Not all burn your truck.
10:01
SPEAKER_03: Oh my god, which is already bad enough.
10:03
SPEAKER_03: She was again so circumstances beyond our control.
10:07
SPEAKER_03: And I'm glad you mentioned that because, like, I'm all about optimism and you can do it and mindset.
10:13
SPEAKER_03: However, to your point, I'm glad that you are talking about this because this is fact.
10:20
SPEAKER_03: Sometimes there are circumstances, no matter how much you want it and are capable of doing it, there are circumstances that are beyond our control.
10:29
SPEAKER_03: Is that fair to say?
10:31
SPEAKER_01: Absolutely.
10:32
SPEAKER_01: And I wish there weren't, but there are.
10:35
SPEAKER_01: And I have fought against that my entire life.
10:39
SPEAKER_01: I'm like, I don't like that.
10:40
SPEAKER_01: I want all circumstances to be under my control.
10:43
SPEAKER_01: And it's funny, but when I was a kid, I would like to yell and scream and pound my do the temperatant thing.
10:49
SPEAKER_01: And somehow that only occasionally resulted in my parents giving me what I wanted.
10:54
SPEAKER_01: And I noticed that when I do that for the universe now, and I yell and scream and I pound my fists and I say, I want everything to be under my my control.
11:01
SPEAKER_01: The universe is actually less responsive than my parents were.
11:05
SPEAKER_03: Yeah, it laughs back at you.
11:07
SPEAKER_03: It's like a boomerang.
11:08
SPEAKER_01: So the real question is how do I operate in the world as it is?
11:13
SPEAKER_01: And maybe change that.
11:14
SPEAKER_01: If you can, if you have the power to change it, absolutely change it hopefully for the better.
11:19
SPEAKER_03: But maybe in the next question, you'll answer that.
11:22
SPEAKER_03: Maybe in the next question you'll answer that because, and again, I know we've talked behind the scenes, and I would love to hear your MBA trap.
11:30
SPEAKER_03: However, I'm not sure if that's where we're gonna go with this next question, but before we get off the show, I definitely want to hear about that.
11:36
SPEAKER_03: But can you take us back a moment and share with us a pivotal moment that changes the direction of your life or work or both?
11:43
SPEAKER_03: That changed the direction of your life or work or both.
11:47
SPEAKER_03: A pivotal moment.
11:49
SPEAKER_03: And I know getting an MBA is definitely a pivotal moment, but I'm not sure if that's what you want to talk about right now.
11:54
SPEAKER_03: There might be other ones that we just don't know about, and there are many, there are many, but what's at the top of your mind?
12:00
SPEAKER_01: There's two of them.
12:01
SPEAKER_01: One was getting into Harvard Business School because I applied as a joke.
12:06
SPEAKER_01: And when I got in.
12:09
SPEAKER_01: Oh boy.
12:10
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I just lived down the street.
12:12
SPEAKER_01: So I was like, what the hell?
12:13
SPEAKER_01: I'll just wait on the apply.
12:15
SPEAKER_01: And I got in.
12:16
SPEAKER_01: And I still remember when I found out that I got in, and I called my butt, my boss at the time was the person who had basically said, ah, go ahead and apply.
12:26
SPEAKER_01: If you get in, you can always say no.
12:27
SPEAKER_01: And I remember getting finding out that I was in.
12:30
SPEAKER_01: And they actually told me verbally two weeks before they mailed out the acceptance letters.
12:35
SPEAKER_01: And I called her up and I said, Nancy, you told me that if I got into hard business school, I could always say no.
12:40
SPEAKER_01: And I said, You're wrong.
12:42
SPEAKER_01: I grew up in this hippie trailer thing, wandering around the country doing psychic growth centers.
12:47
SPEAKER_01: And here I have a chance to go to the school that the most prestigious prestigious business school in the world.
12:55
SPEAKER_03: Yeah, let's call it what it is.
12:57
SPEAKER_01: How can I have if you want to call it what it is?
12:59
SPEAKER_01: It's the it's the finishing school for the mainstream elites, is what it is, which which leads, which is that's just a little teaser for everyone for our later story about about the NBA.
13:11
SPEAKER_01: Okay, so pivotal moment number one was getting into HBS because I seriously was not, I didn't really, I there was no grand plan.
13:18
SPEAKER_01: I hadn't wanted to go there for years.
13:20
SPEAKER_01: I applied, I got in, and I was how could I pass up this opportunity without even knowing what the opportunity was or meant?
13:28
SPEAKER_01: So that's number one.
13:29
SPEAKER_01: But the second one was I was working at a job and I was asked to do something unethical.
13:36
SPEAKER_01: In fact, possibly even illegal, but definitely unethical.
13:40
SPEAKER_01: And I was not comfortable doing this.
13:42
SPEAKER_01: So I wrote the whole thing up like a business case at Harvard Business School.
13:47
SPEAKER_01: The way what the education consists of is that every day they give you two or three write-ups of business cases.
13:52
SPEAKER_01: Here's a real situation that a real company was in or a real manager was in.
13:57
SPEAKER_01: And what class is you all come to class and you just discuss it.
14:00
SPEAKER_01: Which when I sat in on a sample class, and when I did that, I was like, oh my God, this is so much fun.
14:05
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, it's a lot of fun once you've done two or three of them.
14:08
SPEAKER_01: When you have to do 800 of them over the course of two years, let's just say it gets a little old.
14:14
SPEAKER_01: But oh my gosh.
14:16
SPEAKER_03: So you've talked about every scenario I'm imagining, every scenario possible.
14:21
SPEAKER_03: Go ahead.
14:22
SPEAKER_01: And so I wrote this up like a case study.
14:25
SPEAKER_01: And I said, here was the protagonist, and here was the business situation, and here was the protagonist's career, and all this.
14:31
SPEAKER_01: And I sent it to my favorite professor at Harvard Business School.
14:36
SPEAKER_01: And I said, His name is Lynn Schlesinger.
14:38
SPEAKER_01: And I said, Len, this is the write-up of my situation, and I'm being as objective as I can about it.
14:44
SPEAKER_01: Here's my analysis.
14:46
SPEAKER_01: I and I have two questions.
14:48
SPEAKER_01: One question, one question, is my analysis correct?
14:51
SPEAKER_01: And question number two is what should I do?
14:54
SPEAKER_01: Should I do what would be advantageous for me in this situation, but which would hurt someone else, or should I do the right thing, even though it could get me fired?
15:05
SPEAKER_01: And he sent me back a uh five-word response.
15:10
SPEAKER_01: The first word was yes, analysis correct, and then do the right thing.
15:15
SPEAKER_01: And that was the moment in my life where I was setting my moral and ethical thermometer as to what was acceptable and permissible in the business environment.
15:29
SPEAKER_01: Because if he had said, go ahead and do the thing that would be advantageous for you, I think there is a real chance that I would have then just said, okay, I guess that's the way the world works, and that's what I'm gonna do, is I'm gonna feel free to hurt other people if it benefits me.
15:43
SPEAKER_01: And yeah, so that one sentence, and I have no idea.
15:48
SPEAKER_01: I've told him before that that what a difference that sentence made.
15:51
SPEAKER_01: And I don't know if he intended it to make a lifelong uh difference, or if he was just I was gonna say, here you are, how many years later, decades later, still talking, referencing to it?
16:01
SPEAKER_03: That's that's miraculous, and that really is lead by example.
16:05
SPEAKER_03: That that that's a heavy-weighted statement, and that was beautiful that he led you in the right way.
16:11
SPEAKER_03: That's really awesome.
16:12
SPEAKER_03: I didn't know if you were done with that story, but what did your you know classmates must have been like also you because you discussed this in the forum too, right?
16:21
SPEAKER_03: Did you discuss this with the class that turned in?
16:23
SPEAKER_03: Oh, okay.
16:24
SPEAKER_01: No, this was after business school.
16:25
SPEAKER_01: This was several years later once I was out in industry.
16:29
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
16:29
SPEAKER_03: Okay.
16:29
SPEAKER_01: And by the way, I know that there are definitely classmates of mine who did not adopt that same philosophy because there were a couple of times that I have been on the opposite side of a transaction with someone I knew, with somebody from HBS, and I watched their behavior and I saw someone just lie outright to the person who had hired him so that he would increase his fees by 30%.
16:52
SPEAKER_01: And I actually took him aside and I said, What you just told your client was literally incorrect.
16:57
SPEAKER_01: And he looked at me and said, Yeah, but it's gonna make me an extra$200,000.
17:00
SPEAKER_01: And I was like, Oh my gosh, I was like, How do you justify that to yourself?
17:04
SPEAKER_01: And he said, She should have a rep, if she wants accurate information, she should hire a representative.
17:09
SPEAKER_01: And I was like, dude, that that's what you are that representative.
17:14
SPEAKER_01: She literally hired you to be the person on her side, and yeah, yeah, wow, it was not crazy, it's not a euro decision, didn't it?
17:22
SPEAKER_03: But this is this is like reality check, right?
17:24
SPEAKER_03: For for us good people, it still boggles my mind.
17:28
SPEAKER_03: That happens, but still blows my mind.
17:30
SPEAKER_03: It's no different than opening seeing the front page, usually is not a fun, exciting thing.
17:35
SPEAKER_03: Once in a while, there's there'll be something to celebrate, but usually not.
17:38
SPEAKER_03: It just boggles my mind every every time.
17:41
SPEAKER_03: But I'm glad you're on the better side of things, and thank you for sharing that story.
17:47
SPEAKER_03: What challenge would you say was a blessing in disguise?
17:51
SPEAKER_01: Oh boy, a blessing in disguise.
17:54
SPEAKER_01: Work challenge or life challenge?
17:56
SPEAKER_03: Whatever comes to mind.
17:58
SPEAKER_03: It's uh we our inquiring mind, we want to know.
18:02
SPEAKER_01: But to me, I I recognize that statement.
18:06
SPEAKER_01: I wonder how many, I wonder how many of your viewers recognize that.
18:09
SPEAKER_01: Those of you who are under the age of something, even around anymore.
18:14
SPEAKER_03: Is that even around anymore?
18:17
SPEAKER_03: I don't think now it's just me, maybe people magazine.
18:20
SPEAKER_03: I don't know.
18:20
SPEAKER_03: No offense, People Magazine.
18:22
SPEAKER_03: They're not as bad, they're not as bad.
18:24
SPEAKER_03: But anyhow, I'm all kidding is blessings in disguise.
18:27
SPEAKER_03: And I feel like you already shared a couple, but what really to you, what really is like no, this was the this was a blessing in disguise?
18:35
SPEAKER_01: It's hard for me to decide, yeah, without knowing what would have happened otherwise.
18:42
SPEAKER_01: But I would say that there was a time that I was working for a company, and they had made a number of promises which they did not keep to.
18:52
SPEAKER_01: And and it made me miserable.
18:56
SPEAKER_01: I was at the point where I was getting depressed and I was just absolutely at my wit's end.
19:01
SPEAKER_01: And I decided to leave and without knowing what I was gonna do next.
19:09
SPEAKER_01: And two or three days after I left, actually, it was the two days, two days after I left, my mother was diagnosed with cancer, and I didn't have a job, and I didn't have responsibilities because I had just quit.
19:26
SPEAKER_01: And so I was able to go and take care of her for the rest of her life.
19:30
SPEAKER_01: Wow.
19:30
SPEAKER_03: You know, in hindsight, so little sweet, but beautiful, yeah.
19:34
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, in hindsight, because hindsight is sometimes 2020.
19:38
SPEAKER_01: Um what I thought was just this was this horrible, untenable work situation ended up putting me in a position to have just an incredible relationship with my mother during the last weeks of her life.
19:51
SPEAKER_01: And that was pretty darn important.
19:54
SPEAKER_01: So that I would call that a blessing in disguise.
19:57
SPEAKER_01: That's and you are the only you're the only person who's ever asked that question.
20:00
SPEAKER_03: You're getting my heart strings.
20:02
SPEAKER_03: That just I wanted that to marinade for a minute because sometimes, and here you you are, you speak on living an extraordinary life, and you took that risk of I I'm just getting out of here, I don't know where I'm going.
20:17
SPEAKER_03: And little did you know it was a blessing.
20:20
SPEAKER_03: Now you have those precious memories that nobody could take away from you, but they wouldn't, they you wouldn't have had them if you had just stayed in a situation that you were not happy, but out of fear of leaving.
20:35
SPEAKER_03: So absolutely a blessing in disguise.
20:39
SPEAKER_03: Wow, thank you for you know your mobility and sharing that story.
20:42
SPEAKER_03: Go ahead.
20:43
SPEAKER_03: Sure.
20:43
SPEAKER_01: And I have one that's a little bit less, a little bit less emotionally extreme.
20:48
SPEAKER_01: I'm getting connectivity problems.
20:50
SPEAKER_03: Oh, I hear you still.
20:51
SPEAKER_03: Are you I still hear you?
20:53
SPEAKER_01: I have I have one that's a little bit less dramatic, too, if you want that, because this was Yeah, let's hear it.
20:59
SPEAKER_01: In 2007, I hit podcasting was just this new thing, and I decided to start a little podcast about business.
21:08
SPEAKER_01: And then one day I listened to Grammar Girl, who has who still has a podcast about grammar, and she had these fun characters that she used, Squiggly the Snail, and the Ardvark, to illustrate grammar points.
21:21
SPEAKER_01: And I thought, oh my gosh, her podcast is so much more fun than mine is.
21:25
SPEAKER_01: And but she did, but and she had a little network of podcasters.
21:28
SPEAKER_01: She was grammar girl, legal lad, something about motherhood.
21:32
SPEAKER_01: I forgot what it was.
21:32
SPEAKER_01: Anyway, she had this whole little network, and I wrote her uh I wrote her a fan letter, and I said, if you ever want to adopt a business podcaster, I would love to be your business podcaster, and I will do it with fun characters and stories and because I'm actually I cannot stand acting professional.
21:51
SPEAKER_01: I cannot stand it.
21:52
SPEAKER_01: I am fun, I try to be fun and playful.
21:55
SPEAKER_01: I'm a bit cerebral, but I try to be fun and playfully cerebral, and Wanted a I want I wanted a fun outlet and my letter just happened to reach her.
22:07
SPEAKER_01: She had just sold her network to McMillan Publishing, and my letter just happened to reach her on the day that they had the first meeting to decide who their next podcaster would be.
22:18
SPEAKER_01: Come on.
22:20
SPEAKER_01: Long story short, I had you do an audition.
22:23
SPEAKER_01: I did it, and I did that for 12 years.
22:26
SPEAKER_01: And I was the top.
22:27
SPEAKER_01: It's funny because I was planning on doing this big PR push to try to make it into the top 100 podcasts.
22:33
SPEAKER_01: And the PR push was going to begin on January 1st, on December 27th, three days beforehand.
22:41
SPEAKER_01: Was that four days?
22:42
SPEAKER_01: Four days beforehand, I hit number one on iTunes.
22:45
SPEAKER_01: So I didn't have to do the PR push.
22:48
SPEAKER_02: Oh, commissions, that's awesome.
22:51
SPEAKER_02: It doesn't get better than that.
22:54
SPEAKER_01: No, no.
22:55
SPEAKER_01: And the podcast led to a book.
22:58
SPEAKER_01: So I had my first published, my first mainstream published book, and it was really cool.
23:02
SPEAKER_01: So that was another one of those moments where I was just thinking, yeah, another shot in the dark.
23:09
SPEAKER_03: That's gonna be a middle name, shot in the dark guy.
23:12
SPEAKER_01: Oh, maybe you're gonna ask towards the end of this what's my next shot in the dark, and I'm gonna tell you what my next shot in the dark is.
23:19
SPEAKER_01: And then you're gonna go, like, yeah, that's a real shot in the dark.
23:23
SPEAKER_01: Don't know where that's gonna lead.
23:25
SPEAKER_01: But you have to watch the rest of this, you have to watch the rest of this stream in order to find a cliffhanger, cliffhanger.
23:32
SPEAKER_03: Oh gosh, moving on.
23:33
SPEAKER_03: Who has been the most memorable mentor in your life and why?
23:37
SPEAKER_03: And you could name more than one, but what comes who comes to mind?
23:41
SPEAKER_01: That's totally easy.
23:42
SPEAKER_01: There are three people.
23:43
SPEAKER_01: One, two, three.
23:44
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, three people.
23:45
SPEAKER_01: First one is Richard Bandler, who invented the field of neurolinguistic programming, which as a yeah, I'm a certified master trainer elite in LP.
23:55
SPEAKER_01: I've taken thousands, if not tens of thousands, of hours of training in it, and I've used it since I was a teenager.
24:02
SPEAKER_01: So I don't know if I'm actually on the spectrum or not, because I always because I also was raised in this weird commune.
24:11
SPEAKER_01: So I couldn't relate to other kids, but I just assumed it was because I had a different upbringing.
24:15
SPEAKER_01: And I got really interested in NLP as a teenager, and I read all the books, and then through a series of just again random happenstance, I ended up taking a seminar and got very into it, learned how to do it and learned a lot about it.
24:28
SPEAKER_01: And I also then took every psychology class that MIT offered, and it's just I'm fascinated by how people think.
24:36
SPEAKER_03: And it served you well, may I say.
25:12
SPEAKER_01: Now, I was just doing that because I thought it sounded interesting and fun.
25:16
SPEAKER_04: Yeah.
25:16
SPEAKER_01: I am now starting to think, you know what, it's entirely possible that I don't actually recognize emotion except because I took that course.
25:24
SPEAKER_01: And if I hadn't taken that course, I would have a lot more challenges because as an executive coach, one of the things that I have, I've had a number of clients who I seem to attract the clients who I guess are like me, who are very technical or analytical, and they tend to be the ones who are a little bit oblivious to the emotional stuff.
25:42
SPEAKER_01: And I find that I can help them do that.
25:44
SPEAKER_01: And I'm like, why am I able to help them?
25:47
SPEAKER_01: And I'm like, oh, yeah, I guess I learned how to do all of that by taking classes.
25:52
SPEAKER_01: So I know I kind of know how to guide people to the right classes and the right skills, which has led me to think, gee, would I still have those abilities if I hadn't taken the classes?
26:02
SPEAKER_01: Maybe that's literally how I learned them.
26:04
SPEAKER_03: The awesome part is that you can you you're on both sides.
26:08
SPEAKER_03: You you can relate to this, and now you know you're the proof that you can use these tools to get here.
26:15
SPEAKER_03: That's really awesome.
26:16
SPEAKER_03: That's really awesome.
26:17
SPEAKER_01: So Richard Vandler is one.
26:19
SPEAKER_01: The second one is Professor Lynn Schlesinger, who was also the chief operating officer and the vice chairman of Limited Brands, the company, and he was the president of Babson College.
26:31
SPEAKER_01: Just an amazingly skilled and intelligent man.
26:36
SPEAKER_01: And he was the one who sent me the do the right thing message.
26:42
SPEAKER_01: So that's one obvious thing.
26:44
SPEAKER_01: But several years later, I got the chance.
26:46
SPEAKER_01: He was put in charge of redesigning the Harvard Business School curriculum.
26:49
SPEAKER_01: And he asked me if I wanted to come be on the design team and help redesign it.
26:53
SPEAKER_01: And I said, under one circumstance, one of one of the conditions is when you go out on a consulting engagement and when you do a business analysis, I want you to come back and explain to me how you did the diagnosis and what your thought process was.
27:08
SPEAKER_01: So this is this was how he was influential to me, is that literally I imitate a lot of the way that he thinks and a lot of his problem-solving techniques.
27:17
SPEAKER_01: And then the third was a man who I haven't actually seen in many years who just died two days ago.
27:23
SPEAKER_01: His name is Howard Stevenson.
27:26
SPEAKER_01: He was also a business school professor when I was there as a student.
27:30
SPEAKER_01: And Howard was an interesting guy because I don't know how he saw the world differently from most people.
27:37
SPEAKER_01: And he, like every book that he wrote, to him was just, oh, I had this interesting idea that I was playing around.
27:46
SPEAKER_01: And I read it and I was like, holy crap, he just completely reconceptualized the way that human motivation works.
27:53
SPEAKER_01: And his conceptualization is powerful enough that when I think about it, I can do something useful with it.
28:00
SPEAKER_01: So he had a book called Do Lunch or Be Lunch, where he basically said, the way that humans, the number one driver in humans is not fear of death, it is predictability.
28:12
SPEAKER_01: And I was like, okay, I'll try that one on for size.
28:17
SPEAKER_01: And when you read the book and then start looking at your life through that lens, it makes sense.
28:23
SPEAKER_01: He had another one talking about the balance between, he said, in order to make good decisions, you have to observe the world, you have to then think about what you observed.
28:32
SPEAKER_01: He says, observe, compute is what he called thinking about, because maybe you have to do computations, and then control, which means that you then do something to try to get the world into your into shape.
28:42
SPEAKER_01: Now, I've heard some variant of that for a long time.
28:45
SPEAKER_01: Observe, compute, control.
28:47
SPEAKER_01: The P, the observation that he just casually made, that to me was like this big aha, he said, but the problem is you only have limited time to make any given decision.
28:59
SPEAKER_01: So for any given decision, you have to decide what is the right proportion of time for observing and computing and controlling.
29:06
SPEAKER_01: Because if you spend all of your time observing, you're never going to get to the point where you make a difference and all that observation is wasted.
29:11
SPEAKER_01: If you observe and you don't spend enough time computing, then the observations are meaningless and you're going to still make an uninformed decision.
29:18
SPEAKER_01: So it's it's very interesting.
29:20
SPEAKER_01: So the three people, Richard Vandler, Lens Lessinger, and Howard Stevenson.
29:24
SPEAKER_03: Wow.
29:25
SPEAKER_03: First of all, that was fascinating what you just shared.
29:29
SPEAKER_03: However, I want to give you my deepest condolences, and I just want this show today, this episode to be in memory of Howard.
29:37
SPEAKER_03: I do because of who I am.
29:39
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, that would be nice.
29:40
SPEAKER_03: And in memory of Howard.
29:42
SPEAKER_03: Thank you for sharing his legacy.
29:44
SPEAKER_03: That's really special and fascinating.
29:47
SPEAKER_03: Gosh, I was ready to just sit at your feet.
29:49
SPEAKER_03: You could have kept talking about that.
29:52
SPEAKER_03: Really great stuff.
29:53
SPEAKER_03: I love stuff like that.
29:54
SPEAKER_03: Wow.
29:55
SPEAKER_03: You got me there.
29:56
SPEAKER_03: You you got me there.
29:57
SPEAKER_03: Was there any revelation, personal motto, lesson that helped guide your journey?
30:03
SPEAKER_03: You shared one about doing the right thing, but what tell us a little bit more?
30:08
SPEAKER_01: I not really, actually.
30:11
SPEAKER_01: My journey has been, it's taken me, it's taken me many years to realize this, but I am my father.
30:16
SPEAKER_01: I very clearly am.
30:18
SPEAKER_01: And my father, we were this random traveling hippie commun where we followed whatever his spirit guides told him to do next.
30:24
SPEAKER_01: And I am actually not a big believer in spirit guides.
30:28
SPEAKER_01: Now that I've known a bunch of people who have passed, I'm like, yeah, they're spirits now.
30:31
SPEAKER_01: I don't know that I'd want them guiding anyone or anything.
30:34
SPEAKER_01: But but in terms of the way that I live my life, I seem to be hardwired to do the things I'm called to do rather than do the things that I should do.
30:45
SPEAKER_01: And this is a very much a double-edged sword, right?
30:49
SPEAKER_01: It means that I do some really interesting and fun things that are way outside what people plan to do, or gives me like a unique, novel, interesting view on life.
31:00
SPEAKER_01: On the other hand, there's plenty of stuff that if you want certain results, the the here's what you should do path works better.
31:10
SPEAKER_01: I would like to have vast sums of money.
31:12
SPEAKER_01: And I have never had the patience to join a consumer packaged goods company like Kraft and become the brand manager of Kraft macaroni and cheese.
31:23
SPEAKER_01: And of course, the first thing I would tell them is I would be like, I would be like, people, this stuff actually does have an expiration date.
31:29
SPEAKER_01: We need to think about it.
31:30
SPEAKER_03: I was gonna say, check the expiration date.
31:32
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, there are a lot of things you put me in a corporate environment, and I let me put it this way.
31:39
SPEAKER_01: I can certainly behave myself as a consultant.
31:41
SPEAKER_01: But if I am working in a corporate environment for 10 years, at some point during those 10 years, I'm going to accidentally say that thing that everyone is thinking, but no one's supposed to say out loud.
31:52
SPEAKER_03: The elephant in the air.
31:57
SPEAKER_01: I have done that on a couple of occasions.
32:00
SPEAKER_01: And it's interesting because there was a company that I was working with where there was a meeting of one of the product teams, and I basically something was said that implied that that I'm trying to, I want to maintain confidentiality here.
32:16
SPEAKER_01: Something was said that implied that the company was doing something that would hurt the customers because if you hurt the customers in a particular way, it would create a market for this other product that the company had.
32:29
SPEAKER_01: So after this conversation happened, I just looked around the room and I said, excuse me, ladies and gentlemen, do I understand that we are literally talking about hurting our customers so that they will have to buy this other?
32:40
SPEAKER_01: As I said, I'm not going to go to the press.
32:42
SPEAKER_01: I just want to understand, is this actually the decision we just made?
32:46
SPEAKER_01: And people are like, not really.
32:49
SPEAKER_01: And I'm like, then could you explain to me how it was different?
32:53
SPEAKER_01: Like, okay, yeah, really.
32:55
SPEAKER_01: Okay, I just wanted to get clear because if we make an unethical decision like this, if we're honest to ourselves about it, then we can come back and revisit it someday and say, you know what, we're not, we're we did this before, but we're not going to do it again.
33:08
SPEAKER_01: Whereas if we pretend that it was ethical, what we've just done is moved the goalpost.
33:13
SPEAKER_01: And this is that slippery, this is the slippery slope moment.
33:16
SPEAKER_01: Right now we have a chance to slow down the slippery slope by recognizing what we're doing and saying, This is we drew a land in the we drew a land in the sign.
33:26
SPEAKER_01: We drew a line in the sand.
33:28
SPEAKER_03: And um, I knew what you were saying anyway.
33:30
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
33:31
SPEAKER_01: So, okay, so this is right.
33:33
SPEAKER_01: I I am that guy who at this point in my career I would probably be smart enough to keep my mouth closed, and I would have done that individually with people.
33:41
SPEAKER_01: Like, yeah, let's not call everyone out in public about it.
33:44
SPEAKER_03: Yeah, but not unless you're going to address something when it needs to be.
33:47
SPEAKER_03: And that is a really good motto.
33:49
SPEAKER_03: And I think it goes back to what you shared earlier, which seems to be in alignment with what you just shared, is do the right thing.
33:56
SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
33:57
SPEAKER_01: But here's the thing, here's the thing is when I left that company, when that engagement was over, I had the people in that room, almost every single one of them came to me and said, We're sorry to see you leave, but if you ever start a company, we want to come work for you.
34:12
SPEAKER_03: Wow, that says a lot.
34:14
SPEAKER_03: Integrity.
34:15
SPEAKER_01: So that was a moment where I'm like, ah, this must be that leadership thing.
34:20
SPEAKER_01: And that was a very powerful lesson.
34:22
SPEAKER_01: That one of the one of the things about leadership, as distinct from management, one of the things about leadership is that people look to leaders as a confirmation of their values.
34:33
SPEAKER_01: And for and they look to leaders for permission to live their values.
34:37
SPEAKER_01: And we're seeing this in America right now because our who our leaders are like totally flips the national mood and like a light switch.
34:46
SPEAKER_01: And that's really important because that's not discussed at business school, at least if it were at least it wasn't when I was there.
34:53
SPEAKER_01: No one said your personal behavior is going to become the role model for everyone who works for you.
34:58
SPEAKER_01: You know, you need to hold yourself to a high standard.
35:02
SPEAKER_01: Like I believe you should hold yourself to a high standard because what the heck?
35:05
SPEAKER_01: Like what you would say.
35:07
SPEAKER_03: That point is a really important point.
35:09
SPEAKER_03: It reminds me, I took a course at Harvard X and it was lead exercising leadership.
35:14
SPEAKER_03: And who was Ronald Hell's?
35:17
SPEAKER_01: I can't remember.
35:18
SPEAKER_03: I think yes, yes.
35:21
SPEAKER_03: He was my professor.
35:22
SPEAKER_03: He was like a big deal, right?
35:23
SPEAKER_03: He was the founder of the Center for Republic of Leadership, right?
35:27
SPEAKER_03: Really fun professor.
35:28
SPEAKER_03: It was virtual class, but it was really fun.
35:30
SPEAKER_03: But sometimes you have to be that one.
35:32
SPEAKER_03: You just reminded me being that person.
35:34
SPEAKER_03: That class was a lot on adaptive challenges, right?
35:37
SPEAKER_03: And and being that person to fill in that gap, because there certainly is, especially in situations like you just shared.
35:45
SPEAKER_03: People are they don't want to be that person to pioneer and make change by through leadership.
35:50
SPEAKER_03: And sometimes leadership is not always appointed, it's taking it into your own hands.
35:54
SPEAKER_03: So that's really a way to be.
35:57
SPEAKER_01: If you want to see what I consider to be my lifetime, the largest epic failure of leadership of my lifetime is that we currently have a Congress and a legislature that is allowing our institutions or in our safety institutions, our food institutions, our energy institutions to be dismantled by the president and the executive branch.
36:19
SPEAKER_01: And what's interesting to me about this is I was talking to a friend of mine who is high up in the Republican Party, and I said, I don't understand.
36:27
SPEAKER_01: You are literally doing things like dismantling the National Weather Service when we're having genuine weather issues.
36:34
SPEAKER_01: You are dismantling the health infrastructure, like the research, the world-class research that America was renowned for.
36:41
SPEAKER_01: And what his response was, but the legislatures are all afraid.
36:45
SPEAKER_01: They all agree this is bad, but they're all afraid.
36:47
SPEAKER_01: But you know what?
36:49
SPEAKER_01: Their job is to not be afraid.
36:51
SPEAKER_01: That is literally the primary job that they have is to act as a check and a balance of power so that the country, and I'm like, so I'm sorry.
37:00
SPEAKER_01: We are we're and there's not just one person who is afraid.
37:03
SPEAKER_01: It's I don't know the actual current numbers, but it's hundreds of people are sitting there going, we are scaredy, we are scaredy, oh, we are afraid.
37:12
SPEAKER_01: And I'm just screw you, then resign if you can't do your job.
37:17
SPEAKER_01: And the funny part is, these are the same people who would instantly fire someone who wasn't doing their job.
37:23
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, and I'm like, do your job.
37:26
SPEAKER_03: I feel like the supplies really, and I know you mentioned like something that we could all relate to as a country, but I really feel like the supplies, like you shared before, in in the it could go in in the workplace.
37:37
SPEAKER_03: But you you gotta you gotta just talk about it, talk about the elephant in the room.
37:42
SPEAKER_03: I think it's really important.
37:44
SPEAKER_01: And I think if I'm doing that oh no, go ahead.
37:47
SPEAKER_01: Sorry, I was like, I think if I were doing that again today, I would probably use humor a lot more.
37:53
SPEAKER_01: Like instead of going, we just did this serious thing, I feel like I would go like, oh my god, we just screwed our customers.
38:00
SPEAKER_01: We're gonna screw our customers.
38:01
SPEAKER_01: How about if we have each one of them submit a mug shot when they buy our product, right?
38:05
SPEAKER_01: You're very animated.
38:08
SPEAKER_01: Well, thank you.
38:08
SPEAKER_01: I'm assuming that's a compliment.
38:10
SPEAKER_03: Yes, you're very entertaining, even just because when you were talking about the podcasting show and you were talking about nine-to-acting, you're you are naturally just funny in a good way, in a good way, because you're getting the point across by your animations, and I think that's really awesome.
38:27
SPEAKER_03: But I'm totally in agreement.
38:28
SPEAKER_03: I don't know if that's a good segue to talk about how MBA is a trap.
38:32
SPEAKER_03: I feel like this is a good segue.
38:34
SPEAKER_01: This is funny too, by the way, because I have my eye on the clock and I warned you, I warned you that we were gonna have no problem with that.
38:40
SPEAKER_01: It's okay.
38:40
SPEAKER_03: This is good conversation.
38:42
SPEAKER_03: It's okay.
38:42
SPEAKER_03: I'd really like to hear what you have to say about this since we're getting it out there.
38:47
SPEAKER_03: Tell us, we're all ears.
38:49
SPEAKER_01: So I have what would be considered the most prestigious business degree in the world, or if not the most, one of the top five for sure.
38:57
SPEAKER_01: And that has been a blessing that has opened doors that I would never have even known existed, much less been able to walk through.
39:05
SPEAKER_01: And that has been a curse because it didn't just open the doors, but it opened the doors and put a big sign above it saying, come this way.
39:16
SPEAKER_01: And I'm a geeky, I'm a geeky new age commune hippie kid at heart, right?
39:24
SPEAKER_01: Look at this.
39:24
SPEAKER_01: I'm wearing freaking paracord.
39:26
SPEAKER_01: Now I'm wearing paracord for a very practical reason because I'm practicing knots, because I I'm fascinated by knots and I can do all these cool things.
39:34
SPEAKER_01: And you would be surprised if am I exhibiting that geeky?
39:38
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, okay.
39:39
SPEAKER_01: Your point.
39:40
SPEAKER_01: Thank you.
39:41
SPEAKER_01: Thank you for calling me back from that.
39:43
SPEAKER_01: So one of the things, one of the things I've realized, it took me decades to realize this, is that I have spent a lot of my life saying no to myself because under the logic of I want to do this outlandish crazy thing, but I must be a proper Harvard MBA, which means that I must be presentable when I'm talking to the boardrooms of Fortune 500 companies, and I must work with top investment banks and just all of this.
40:10
SPEAKER_01: And by the way, I built this up in my mind myself.
40:13
SPEAKER_01: They didn't tell no one at HBS said you have to have these career paths, but it seeps in because everyone around you, when you're there as a student, that's what they're all talking about.
40:23
SPEAKER_01: And that's what everyone's trying for.
40:25
SPEAKER_01: And even the people who say they're not going to try for that, then they go try for it anyway.
40:29
SPEAKER_01: And it has only been fairly recently that I've really come to understand how much of the kind of wild and wacky things that I might have wanted to go off and do over the years, I've stopped myself from doing because of my beliefs about what opportunities these would close off.
40:48
SPEAKER_01: If I do this wacky thing, if I go out and buy an amusement park, no one will ever ask me to be on a Fortune 500 post.
40:56
SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
41:02
SPEAKER_01: That's what a ball gag is for.
41:04
SPEAKER_01: People they're underappreciated.
41:06
SPEAKER_03: But you can live outside the box.
41:09
SPEAKER_03: You could live outside the box.
41:11
SPEAKER_03: You can be you, Boo.
41:13
SPEAKER_03: I love to say that.
41:14
SPEAKER_03: You have a degree, you have a career, and that's beautiful.
41:17
SPEAKER_03: It doesn't mean you should stop being authentically you.
41:20
SPEAKER_03: And I think that's a really important message.
41:22
SPEAKER_03: And don't get boxed in.
41:24
SPEAKER_03: And I love that you mentioned, like some people say they won't, but then they do.
41:27
SPEAKER_03: That's so true, right?
41:28
SPEAKER_03: Because again, it's mediocracy.
41:30
SPEAKER_03: I don't know if you were complete when I was trying to show somebody in the background.
41:34
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, not yeah, not quite, but the the thing is when you put up, when you put a big, when you make sacrifices to do something, like to get a degree, right?
41:45
SPEAKER_01: That MBA was not cheap in terms of time, money, effort.
41:48
SPEAKER_01: I was in debt for years from that.
41:50
SPEAKER_01: And again, it was a ton of work and all that.
41:52
SPEAKER_01: When you put in that kind of effort for something, you want to make it count.
41:57
SPEAKER_01: And the way that my brain was trying to make it count was to say, oh, I should go ahead and do the mainstream path from people who have this degree.
42:06
SPEAKER_01: And with 2020 hindsight, I can now say that a way better way of thinking, brain, would be to say, you know what, I can do anything I want to.
42:19
SPEAKER_01: And when I'm doing those things, I happen to have this skill set that I paid a lot of money and time to acquire, but I have this skill set as one of the tools to use in doing that thing.
42:30
SPEAKER_01: And that's a very different orientation.
42:32
SPEAKER_01: So in one case, I'm choosing a destination and saying, let me use my amazing, incredible toolbox and connections and all that to reach my destination.
42:41
SPEAKER_01: In the other case, what I'm saying is, I have a wrench in my toolbox, so the only thing I should ever do in life is find things that you can do with a wrench.
42:51
SPEAKER_01: And I made the I made that second mistake.
42:54
SPEAKER_01: Do not make my mistake.
42:56
SPEAKER_01: Make do it the other way.
42:57
SPEAKER_01: Find where you want to go.
42:59
SPEAKER_01: And if you've made sacrifices to get where you are, great.
43:03
SPEAKER_01: Yay, but now you're where you are.
43:05
SPEAKER_01: Sunk cost, all those sacrifices, but you have skills, you have connections that came about as a result of that.
43:11
SPEAKER_01: Choose your direction in some wacky, wonderful direction going forward.
43:16
SPEAKER_01: And by the way, I'm the one who needs to hear this.
43:19
SPEAKER_01: I still need to hear this.
43:21
SPEAKER_01: So I'm gonna play this back and go listen to him.
43:23
SPEAKER_01: He's very wise.
43:25
SPEAKER_01: Why can't you be more like him?
43:27
SPEAKER_03: Oh gosh.
43:28
SPEAKER_03: And again, I apologize for the interruption of if there was a little mini interruption there by me, but this is a really strong message, and we did get some comments, and people are enjoying this.
43:38
SPEAKER_03: I want to say, shout out to Brian Swift, who's doing a great, great, amazing things, and a few others.
43:44
SPEAKER_03: Um, I want to ask you the next question as we're starting to wrap it up here.
43:48
SPEAKER_03: We might skip a couple questions, but that's okay.
43:50
SPEAKER_03: I want to get to the good stuff.
43:52
SPEAKER_03: What would you say to your younger self, Stever?
43:55
SPEAKER_03: Your younger self.
43:56
SPEAKER_01: What I just said.
43:57
SPEAKER_01: What I just said, I would say don't be a good harvest.
44:00
SPEAKER_01: NBA, take the skills and do something.
44:03
SPEAKER_01: There's three or four things.
44:04
SPEAKER_01: So that's one thing is don't let yourself be trapped by your credentials.
44:08
SPEAKER_01: Thing number two is spend two years doing sales.
44:13
SPEAKER_01: Just grit your frickin' teeth and spend two years doing sales.
44:18
SPEAKER_01: And one of two things would have happened.
44:20
SPEAKER_01: Either I would have gotten really good at sales or I would have discovered that I really may be on the spectrum and I can't detect buying signals, in which case I would have figured that out at the age of 25 instead of figuring it out many years later.
44:32
SPEAKER_01: So one is don't be trapped by your credentials.
44:35
SPEAKER_01: Two is very much do sales.
44:38
SPEAKER_01: I don't care if you hate it.
44:39
SPEAKER_01: I don't care if you, in fact, if you hate it, that's even more reason because everything is sales.
44:45
SPEAKER_01: Everything is if you're doing anything that involves other human beings.
44:49
SPEAKER_03: I was gonna say people skills.
44:51
SPEAKER_03: Now the shark on Shark Tank, I think it's Barbara who says it often, but maybe all of them do.
44:56
SPEAKER_03: They want you to do that before you do anything else because of people skills.
45:00
SPEAKER_03: That's so important.
45:02
SPEAKER_03: So I'm glad that you brought that up.
45:04
SPEAKER_03: But you said you had a couple other things.
45:05
SPEAKER_03: Go ahead, tell us.
45:06
SPEAKER_01: Yep, I would obviously say buy Apple, buy Apple stock and a lot of it, because we wouldn't be having this conversation if I had done that at the age of 25.
45:21
SPEAKER_01: I would I'd own the TV network, but actually with with reference to that, and this is one that would be a could be a whole course in itself.
45:29
SPEAKER_01: Ignore all of the success literature and learn how the world really works.
45:35
SPEAKER_01: And I will give you one line that sums up what I think is the biggest secret to success from what I have seen, and I'll be clear, this is not how I live my life.
45:48
SPEAKER_01: It doesn't matter what you do, it just matters what you own.
45:53
SPEAKER_01: And if you take a look at capitalism, if you look at people who are retiring and you say, How did you get the money to retire?
46:00
SPEAKER_01: 99.999% of them will say, I saved it up.
46:03
SPEAKER_01: And then when you ask them in more detail, what you will discover is it wasn't just the saving that made them able to retire.
46:09
SPEAKER_01: It was the fact that they use the saving to buy stock or to buy other assets.
46:15
SPEAKER_01: And it was the asset value that they're retiring on.
46:18
SPEAKER_01: And and the basic, and by the way, the really rich people, they don't think this way at all.
46:23
SPEAKER_01: They understand that it's all about owning stuff.
46:26
SPEAKER_01: But if you look at all of the robber barons and the if you look at the great capitalists, right, Bill Gates did not is was not the richest man in the world, and I don't know who is these, I guess Elon Musk, they're not the richest people in the world because of what they did.
46:42
SPEAKER_01: They're the richest people in the world because they own a chunk of what they did, or they own other assets.
46:50
SPEAKER_01: Because Steve, I would argue that Steve Jobs accomplished far more in his lifetime than Bill Gates did.
46:56
SPEAKER_01: I would say that to if we were to eliminate the dollars from the equation and just look at the difference that he made on the planet, Bill Gates, or sorry, I think Steve Jobs just doesn't even leave Bill Gates in the running.
47:08
SPEAKER_03: However, when Steve Jobs died, Jobs is a brilliant, they're both brilliant men, but I'm a big Steve Jobs fan too, so just brilliant.
47:16
SPEAKER_01: And when he died, he was worth one twelfth of what Bill Gates was worth.
47:22
SPEAKER_01: And I always looked at that and I said, How is it possible that this is a man who gave us computer animation, personal, consumer personal computers, the first graphical window system, and by the way, the first Mac was way better than Windows for the first 15, 20 years.
47:38
SPEAKER_01: He revolutionized the MP3 player market, he gave us streaming audio, he gave us uh software, software stores online, and uh he did all of this, and he was worth one-tenth of Bill Gates when he died.
47:52
SPEAKER_01: And the reason was because he sold all of his Apple stock in 1987 when he was ousted as CEO.
47:57
SPEAKER_01: That one decision canceled out the value for him, the amount of the value from everything else that he did in his life.
48:04
SPEAKER_03: But his but his legacy in defense of legacy, his legacy continues, his legacy continues, but I I hate to say it, I'd just rather have in his lifetime, fortunately, right?
48:14
SPEAKER_03: And could laugh, and but unfortunately, that that was it, that was heavy hearty to see that.
48:20
SPEAKER_01: And let me be clear, he wasn't hurting, he died a multi-billionaire.
48:23
SPEAKER_01: My point, my point is simply you asked, what would I tell 25-year-old me?
48:28
SPEAKER_01: 25-year-old me genuinely believed that the that success was directly correlated to how much you personally contributed to the world.
48:35
SPEAKER_01: Um, and there's still a part of my brain that still believes that, despite all evidence to the contrary.
48:41
SPEAKER_01: And capitalism literally just doesn't work that way.
48:44
SPEAKER_01: I mean, it's called capitalism because the people who provide the capital are the ones who are then rewarded with all the wealth.
48:52
SPEAKER_01: And that's literally, it's literally in the name of the economic system.
48:55
SPEAKER_03: I'm gonna crossroads like that too, because I'm a believer, and again, not to take away from your interview, but just to contribute to what you just shared.
49:03
SPEAKER_03: I'm one of those that believe the purpose supersedes the profit, but that's not the world we live in.
49:09
SPEAKER_03: That's not the people don't care about purpose as much as profit.
49:12
SPEAKER_01: But this girl right here, I'm probably gonna hang out, you're gonna end up hanging out with the people who care about purpose.
49:19
SPEAKER_03: Exactly.
49:20
SPEAKER_03: Hence, I have people like Stephen Robbins on the show.
49:23
SPEAKER_01: So so it's just gonna, you're just gonna end up in a different crowd.
49:26
SPEAKER_01: I'm simply saying that I would like to try having my own jet and my own beautiful mansion just to try it for a few weeks, but I'm not gonna get that opportunity because I am also much more purpose-oriented than I am, like uh much more purpose-oriented than I am, money-oriented.
49:44
SPEAKER_03: I feel you, I feel you.
49:46
SPEAKER_03: What does legacy mean to you personally?
49:50
SPEAKER_01: I don't remember his exact words, but the legacy to me comes from Mikhail Gorbachev, when he was the I don't know what the grand premier.
50:00
SPEAKER_01: I have no idea what the person at the top of the of the USSR was called.
50:05
SPEAKER_01: But there was a TV interview with him once, and they said, Mr.
50:08
SPEAKER_01: Gorbachev, what do you want your legacy to be?
50:11
SPEAKER_01: Do you want to have a monument?
50:13
SPEAKER_01: Do you want this or whatever?
50:14
SPEAKER_01: And he said, Look, I want people's lives to be better because I was here.
50:17
SPEAKER_01: And if people's lives are better, that's my legacy, and I don't care whether or not they ascribe it to me.
50:22
SPEAKER_01: And that's that that's my legacy, is I want people's lives to be better.
50:27
SPEAKER_03: And well, you just answered my next question.
50:29
SPEAKER_03: How do you want to be remembered?
50:30
SPEAKER_03: So it seems to me like you want to be remembered leaving an impact, right?
50:34
SPEAKER_01: Leave leaving Yeah, I don't actually, I'm not sure that I care if I'm remembered because once I'm gone, but I would say that I want the people who love me, and hopefully there are some of those.
50:44
SPEAKER_01: I would want the people who love me to remember me fondly and in whatever capacity they need to remember me by to get comfort with me not being there.
50:58
SPEAKER_01: That's so it's not the traditional definition of legacy.
51:01
SPEAKER_03: No, and and this is why I love this show because each question I love hearing the answers, and it's always a different perspective, and I just love it.
51:10
SPEAKER_03: And that was really kind of you to be honest, to want that for others.
51:14
SPEAKER_03: So if you could do it all over again, would you change anything, or did every part of the journey have a purpose?
51:22
SPEAKER_01: Oh god, that's one of those loaded questions.
51:24
SPEAKER_01: Of course, I would change things, I would change things left and right.
51:27
SPEAKER_03: There hey, not everybody gets us that way.
51:31
SPEAKER_01: There are people who I found out at my 25th year high school reunion that were flirting with me all through high school, and I was convinced that they weren't into me, and I was totally into them.
51:40
SPEAKER_01: And man, if I could live it all over again, you can bet I'd be asking for a little more of what I wanted out of life.
51:47
SPEAKER_01: If you get my drift, I would definitely I would make those.
51:52
SPEAKER_01: I I would teach 25-year-old me that decision, the decision tools that I mentioned before, so he would have made the right decision for those four decisions.
52:00
SPEAKER_01: And there are a few, I'll tell you what my biggest in some ways I'll call it a mistake.
52:07
SPEAKER_01: I don't know if that's the but something that I would do differently next time.
52:11
SPEAKER_01: Is I really have lived my life for the most part, just following the things that interest me and pursuing those things as limited by my concept of an MBA.
52:22
SPEAKER_01: So if I had to do it again, I would either drop the concept, and as I said earlier, I would find I would essentially follow my heart to set the direction and then use all of my skills to make that work better.
52:33
SPEAKER_01: I think that would have led me to more interesting places uh over the course of my life so far.
52:39
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, so I guess those are a few of the things.
52:41
SPEAKER_01: So no, I would definitely do things differently, right?
52:43
SPEAKER_01: Because hindsight is 2020.
52:44
SPEAKER_01: So I can go back right now.
52:46
SPEAKER_01: I can look and say it's all because of my decisions that I didn't get some of the things I wanted.
52:51
SPEAKER_01: And all I have to do is go back and make them right in today.
52:56
SPEAKER_01: Of course you do.
52:58
SPEAKER_01: Of course you do.
53:00
SPEAKER_03: I love it.
53:01
SPEAKER_03: So this is our signature question.
53:03
SPEAKER_03: What is something about your journey that most people would be surprised to learn?
53:08
SPEAKER_03: Again, no right or wrong answer, but let the people know.
53:12
SPEAKER_01: I would say how much of my biggest decisions and most consequential decisions quantum, how much my biggest and most consequential decisions have been made spur of the moment.
53:26
SPEAKER_01: I recently did this thing where I went through and I listed every major life choice that I've made, every major career choice that I've made, and did my best to recall why I made that choice.
53:39
SPEAKER_01: And much to my extreme surprise, despite the fact that I have this self-image as, oh, I'm an analytical kind of guy, I carefully consider all of the pros and the cons.
53:51
SPEAKER_01: Most of my decisions, and in particular the ones that that really led to extraordinary places, were just made to kind of spur the moment.
54:00
SPEAKER_01: Oh wow, I think I'm going to write Grammar Girl a letter and say, tell her how much I like the podcast.
54:05
SPEAKER_01: Oh, my boss thinks I should apply to Harvard Business School just for the heck of it and see what happens.
54:10
SPEAKER_01: Okay, fine.
54:10
SPEAKER_01: I have nothing to lose, big deal.
54:12
SPEAKER_01: I, a bunch of friends and I were sitting around a table my senior year in college, saying this was a long time ago.
54:19
SPEAKER_01: So wearing suits was a typical thing.
54:22
SPEAKER_01: And we were saying, we don't want to wear suits at our job, let's start a company.
54:26
SPEAKER_01: And that company ended up creating some of the backbone of the internet, right?
54:30
SPEAKER_01: Because we didn't want to wear suits.
54:31
SPEAKER_01: That was the reason.
54:33
SPEAKER_01: And and when I look at the things where I did all of this analysis and I said, let me set the rational goals, and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
54:40
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I've achieved a bunch of those goals.
54:42
SPEAKER_01: But in retrospect, I'm like, they weren't really, they weren't things you talk about and are proud of.
54:49
SPEAKER_01: They were just so I guess that's oh my gosh.
54:51
SPEAKER_03: I think Michael Jordan should just move over because you're the just do it guy.
54:56
SPEAKER_03: Just do it guy.
54:57
SPEAKER_03: I mean, I just because this is what it's sounding like to me taking action, just do it.
55:04
SPEAKER_03: This is like just keep thinking, just do it.
55:06
SPEAKER_03: So Michael Jordan, we loved you all these years, but a move over, Steve is coming.
55:10
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, no, I do want to be a little bit careful by saying that because let me tell you what I am not saying.
55:16
SPEAKER_01: I am not saying do what you love and the money will follow.
55:19
SPEAKER_01: Because if that were true, we wouldn't need the saying.
55:22
SPEAKER_01: I am not saying that you will get everything you want if you just sort of follow your heart.
55:27
SPEAKER_01: I'm saying two things.
55:28
SPEAKER_01: One is if you follow your heart, you will go in the direction your heart wants to go, by definition.
55:33
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
55:33
SPEAKER_01: And I'm saying, in my particular case, I think that I have overcompensated from my wacky upbringing to say I'm gonna try to be mainstream and do this thing and be like the for so I I kid you not, this is true.
55:50
SPEAKER_01: Okay, what I want to say is true, and I don't care what it does to my public reputation.
55:54
SPEAKER_01: I spent decades of my life not doing wild and wacky things because at the back of my mind, I was literally thinking, this is what I was thinking.
56:04
SPEAKER_01: I was thinking, if I do this, I'll never be able to be on a Fortune 500 board, and I don't want to close off that opportunity.
56:11
SPEAKER_01: Okay, number one, I've never even taken a step to be on a board.
56:16
SPEAKER_01: I've never so much as Googled what does it take to be on a Fortune 500 board.
56:22
SPEAKER_01: So, number one, I don't know why this thought was controlling me for decades, because I've never actually tried to be on a board.
56:30
SPEAKER_01: Number two, I don't think I would like being on a Fortune 500 board from what I have seen of the way a lot of Fortune 500 companies operate.
56:37
SPEAKER_01: And and number three, I don't know if you've noticed or not, but I'm wearing fluorescent paracord around my wrist.
56:46
SPEAKER_01: Even though, in my mind, I think I'm fitting in and I'm no, I'm not.
56:52
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, people can tell when I walk in the room.
56:54
SPEAKER_01: People can tell.
56:54
SPEAKER_01: I can't I can't hide who I am.
56:57
SPEAKER_03: I love that about you.
56:58
SPEAKER_03: I that's my favorite part about you.
57:00
SPEAKER_03: I love that you are aware and raising awareness of the MBA trap because it's raw and real, and I feel you with that.
57:09
SPEAKER_03: I feel you with that, and that resonates with me too.
57:12
SPEAKER_03: So thank you for sharing that.
57:14
SPEAKER_03: We're gonna move it along.
57:15
SPEAKER_03: We want to know where to find you because we like you, Steven.
57:18
SPEAKER_03: We like you.
57:18
SPEAKER_03: We want to know where to find you, and uh, I'm gonna bring up your your website here because it's awesome.
57:24
SPEAKER_03: And uh yeah.
57:26
SPEAKER_04: Yeah, I can figure out what you're doing.
57:28
SPEAKER_03: I know, right?
57:28
SPEAKER_03: I get confused like that too.
57:30
SPEAKER_03: But tell us a little bit more about what you're doing now and where people could find you and why would they want to hire you for what you're doing?
57:36
SPEAKER_03: Go ahead and take it away.
57:38
SPEAKER_01: Sure.
57:39
SPEAKER_01: The main thing I do is executive coaching, and I do executive coaching around two groups of people.
57:43
SPEAKER_01: The main group of people is people who have hit an invisible wall.
57:47
SPEAKER_01: So people who are top performers and they've hit some invisible wall, they're not getting the results that they want, and they don't know why.
57:53
SPEAKER_01: And I, one of my superpowers is that I can see invisible walls.
57:58
SPEAKER_01: So I help people find the wall, understand what's going on, and figure out how to fix it.
58:04
SPEAKER_01: And that's often with people who are like striving for career advancement in corporate environments, things like that.
58:09
SPEAKER_01: And then the other, which is really the same thing in a slightly different context, which is working with founders, people who are building organizations, high growth organizations from the ground up, typically multi-person organizations, but not always, sometimes solopreneurs.
58:22
SPEAKER_01: And same kind of thing.
58:24
SPEAKER_01: They are concerned, those are the those are mainly who I work with.
58:28
SPEAKER_01: And you can see my you can go to my website, and then I also have a substack, which is at ideas.steverrobins.com.
58:35
SPEAKER_01: And I don't think I just started it three weeks ago, so it's not I haven't hooked it into the website, but if you go to ideas.steverrobins.com, that's my substack, and you'll be able to get a glimpse into my thinking.
58:48
SPEAKER_01: My idea file has 2980 article ideas waiting to be written.
58:54
SPEAKER_01: I only write myself, I do not use AI to write, so it's gonna be a while until I get through all of them.
59:00
SPEAKER_03: Wow, that's beautiful, and thank you for that.
59:03
SPEAKER_03: Organic, raw, and real.
59:05
SPEAKER_03: And check it out.
59:06
SPEAKER_03: That's Stever Robbins with two B's and two Rs.
59:10
SPEAKER_03: So we've got S-T-E-V-E-R-R O B I com.
59:15
SPEAKER_03: That's for our audio listeners.
59:18
SPEAKER_03: And again, thank you, Steve.
59:19
SPEAKER_03: I'm gonna Steve, I'm gonna ask you to give us some closing remarks and thank you for the engaging, beautiful discovery conversations.
59:27
SPEAKER_03: I appreciate you so much, but take it away.
59:30
SPEAKER_01: Sure.
59:31
SPEAKER_01: The so if you're gonna take anything away from this, I would say, in terms of living an extraordinary life, I like the quote that you put up there: extraordinary lives don't come from having the perfect plan.
59:44
SPEAKER_01: They can come from having the perfect plan as long as you're willing to go off plan.
59:48
SPEAKER_01: And I would say instead of choosing your goal based on your skills and where you are, choose your goal based on where you feel called to go, and then use your skills and where you are in service of going in that direction.
1:00:03
SPEAKER_01: And by way of just giving you a tiny little teaser because you didn't ask the question you said you were gonna ask, what I am currently working on is a book which is gonna be out sometime.
1:00:15
SPEAKER_01: I'm currently targeting the first half of 20 of 2027.
1:00:19
SPEAKER_01: It's called Marketing for Virgins, and it is an introduction to marketing concepts.
1:00:25
SPEAKER_01: It's not a how-to book.
1:00:26
SPEAKER_01: It is here are all of the concepts you need to understand.
1:00:29
SPEAKER_01: Because we have been in this phase for a while, but I think with AI we're going even more into it, where the the secret to success is marketing, marketing yourself, marketing your products, marketing your business.
1:00:42
SPEAKER_01: There are no marketing textbooks out there for the average person or for the people who don't have the business background.
1:00:48
SPEAKER_01: This is the book that 25-year-old me really needed to have.
1:00:54
SPEAKER_01: And of course, marketing is not always the most engaging topic.
1:00:57
SPEAKER_01: So it is a textbook's worth of introductive of information called as a personal memoir of my attempts to get laid at Burning Man.
1:01:07
SPEAKER_03: So Oh, you're gonna come back and talk about that.
1:01:10
SPEAKER_03: You didn't tell me you were a Burning Man.
1:01:12
SPEAKER_03: Oh, come on! You can't ask.
1:01:16
SPEAKER_03: Where do you think the mirror card comes from?
1:01:18
SPEAKER_03: I thought you were gonna just share that in your remarks, but here you are.
1:01:20
SPEAKER_03: You're doing it anyway.
1:01:21
SPEAKER_03: So thank you, sir.
1:01:24
SPEAKER_01: So yeah, so basically, basically you now you gotta get the book.
1:01:27
SPEAKER_03: Now you gotta get the book, that's all.
1:01:29
SPEAKER_01: Oh I've got the I've got the I'm not gonna show you the cover because there's gonna be a big reveal of the cover.
1:01:36
SPEAKER_01: I can I'll show you the back, I'll show you the back of the cover.
1:01:39
SPEAKER_03: Good enough.
1:01:40
SPEAKER_03: Okay.
1:01:41
SPEAKER_01: What do you say then?
1:01:42
SPEAKER_03: Welcome to the best and only Pew mix up yeah, you'll ever read.
1:01:48
SPEAKER_01: Okay, I can I can tell you're over 40 because you don't know what N SFW means.
1:01:51
SPEAKER_01: No, not it means not safety.
1:01:54
SPEAKER_03: You're right.
1:01:55
SPEAKER_01: See this base.
1:01:56
SPEAKER_01: This I'll read for the front cover if you can.
1:01:59
SPEAKER_01: It is the absolutely best gay sex tell all memoir about marketing basics I have ever read.
1:02:05
SPEAKER_01: Bar none.
1:02:06
SPEAKER_03: Okay, okay.
1:02:08
SPEAKER_01: And I will tell you that.
1:02:10
SPEAKER_03: I think it's gonna be a hot, I think it's gonna be a hot book.
1:02:15
SPEAKER_03: It sounds spicy, spicy hot.
1:02:17
SPEAKER_03: I like that.
1:02:18
SPEAKER_03: I like that a lot.
1:02:18
SPEAKER_01: And is he discovery?
1:02:20
SPEAKER_01: It's about body image.
1:02:22
SPEAKER_01: I'll tell you something.
1:02:23
SPEAKER_01: Oh my god, when I was doing the final proofread two weeks ago, yeah, I came around, I came on this passage where I was discussing my body insecurity and how you blushing how no.
1:02:33
SPEAKER_01: The the the the part was I was discussing how I here's these these ideals.
1:02:36
SPEAKER_01: I'm never gonna have a body like this, I'm never gonna measure up to it, I'm like this, whatever.
1:02:42
SPEAKER_01: I wrote that paragraph in 2024.
1:02:46
SPEAKER_01: And what I did not know in 2024 is that I was going to reach a point of so much depression about my body, I had gained so much weight over the course of my life that I decided in at the end of 2024, I am going to get back to having my college weight.
1:03:07
SPEAKER_01: Except the thing I didn't realize is I've been working out since college.
1:03:11
SPEAKER_01: You couldn't tell because I had a layer of fat that hit it.
1:03:15
SPEAKER_01: So when I actually lost all of the weight and I hit my goal weight, yes, I was looking in the mirror one day and I'm like, oh my God, what's wrong with my stomach?
1:03:26
SPEAKER_01: There's some weird growth on it.
1:03:27
SPEAKER_01: And I suddenly realized, wait a minute, those are abs.
1:03:32
SPEAKER_01: Yes, yes.
1:03:33
SPEAKER_01: I I thought I was too old.
1:03:35
SPEAKER_01: I didn't think you could have a six-pack once you were over 22.
1:03:38
SPEAKER_01: So that's a nice silver lining.
1:03:40
SPEAKER_03: That's a nice silver lining.
1:03:42
SPEAKER_03: Part in the part that's a good silver package.
1:03:44
SPEAKER_01: I read that part, I read the part in the book, and I read that paragraph.
1:03:48
SPEAKER_01: And I just thought when I wrote this just two years ago, I wrote this paragraph.
1:03:53
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I literally didn't know I was ever gonna have that body.
1:03:56
SPEAKER_03: But I like that you kept it in because it's going to serve, right?
1:04:01
SPEAKER_01: No, the the book is the story of my sexual awakening, basically.
1:04:06
SPEAKER_01: And yeah, and part of that was body image.
1:04:09
SPEAKER_01: Part of that was I just believe I'm hideously ugly, nobody would ever want me, nobody would whatever, right?
1:04:15
SPEAKER_01: So, how do I take this hideously ugly, undesirable product to market?
1:04:20
SPEAKER_03: Says you.
1:04:21
SPEAKER_01: It's a book about marketing, yeah, yeah, exactly.
1:04:24
SPEAKER_03: And of course, uh, just what you're saying about yourself.
1:04:27
SPEAKER_03: So again, uh I I hope this book is an awakening for many because we know all too well that we're just tapping the surface with this conversation, even though we've come a long way.
1:04:39
SPEAKER_03: I I was around in the 70s too, but nonetheless, we're still only tapping the surface.
1:04:44
SPEAKER_03: So we need books like this out there, and I'm just so happy that you're using your superpower to unveil and tell the truth and change lives.
1:04:52
SPEAKER_03: And I'm so happy that you gave us a little kind of sneak preview on the insides and the meat and potatoes of it.
1:04:59
SPEAKER_03: Appreciate you so much.
1:05:00
SPEAKER_03: Thank you.
1:05:01
SPEAKER_03: Anything else you want to add about the book?
1:05:03
SPEAKER_03: Tell us the title one more time.
1:05:04
SPEAKER_01: Marketing for Virgins.
1:05:06
SPEAKER_01: And if you just go to the URL, marketingforvirgins.com, you can sign up to be notified when the book when the publication, once I have a publication schedule, that's gonna be the where I announce it.
1:05:18
SPEAKER_03: That title alone, that title alone is already a winner.
1:05:22
SPEAKER_03: I love it so much.
1:05:23
SPEAKER_03: Thank you again for being here.
1:05:26
SPEAKER_03: And I just want to say this thank you to all the listeners.
1:05:29
SPEAKER_03: And don't forget to hit subscribe, leave a five-star review rating, and write a review.
1:05:34
SPEAKER_03: You can find us on the Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon, YouTube, IHR, or wherever you get it, your podcast.
1:05:40
SPEAKER_03: And until next time, live your legacy.
1:05:43
SPEAKER_03: Steven, thank you.
1:05:44
SPEAKER_03: Thank you for being here.
1:05:46
SPEAKER_01: Thank you for having me.
1:05:47
SPEAKER_03: You're welcome, and that's a wrap.