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Nathan Whitaker: Success vs. Significance: What Are We Really Chasing? · Uncommon Impact

• 0:01
  Speaker: Welcome to Uncommon Impact.
• 0:03
  Speaker: I'm Nathan Whitaker.
• 0:04
  Speaker: Tony Dungy's college football coach, Cal Stoll at the University of Minnesota, one time told him, "Success is uncommon, therefore not to be enjoyed by the common person.
• 0:14
  Speaker: I am looking for uncommon people." And so, after Tony Dungy's memoir came out in 2007 that we wrote, Quiet Strength went very well.
• 0:24
  Speaker: The publisher came back to us after a year and said, Would you do another book?
• 0:28
  Speaker: And Tony said, Well, I've really only got one life story, one memoir.
• 0:32
  Speaker: What else would you like us to do?
• 0:33
  Speaker: And they said, What about a book of values?
• 0:34
  Speaker: And so Tony hatched this idea of uncommon.
• 0:37
  Speaker: It was really fun.
• 0:38
  Speaker: We sat in Tony's living room one night watching an Indiana Pacers game.
• 0:43
  Speaker: He was still coaching the Indianapolis Colts.
• 0:45
  Speaker: And we've kind of fleshed out ideas on what would be the things we would want to pass along to the next generation about values, things that were important, things that we wanted to make sure they knew.
• 0:55
  Speaker: And so those became the book Uncommon.
• 0:58
  Speaker: Now, one side note is that Tony had said to me before I talked him into writing Quiet Strength: look, I don't know if people want to hear what I have to say.
• 1:07
  Speaker: I don't know if I have much to share anyway.
• 1:09
  Speaker: And certainly I don't know if I need to walk into a bookstore and see a book with my picture on the cover.
• 1:14
  Speaker: So let's just take a quick look at Quiet Strength, Uncommon, the Daily Devotional that came out a couple of years after that.
• 1:26
  Speaker: The Mentor Leader, which has a picture of a couple of hands shaking, but then it also has Tony.
• 1:34
  Speaker: Soul of a team, where they went with this shield idea, and then Tony.
• 1:39
  Speaker: And then we even get into foreign languages.
• 1:43
  Speaker: This is uh Indonesian, uh maybe Malay as well for Malaysia, Indonesia, Malaysia, Tony Space, and then uh German, Stille Kraft, Quiet Strength.
• 1:53
  Speaker: Again, you might notice the cover is similar.
• 1:56
  Speaker: We had to actually get to um this Asian language, and I can't remember if this is Korean or Filipino or anyway, I should know.
• 2:04
  Speaker: But this is the Mentor Leader, and they went with a much different uh color cover as you can see.
• 2:09
  Speaker: And so, look, it's not like me to complain about my face never getting on any books and Tony's face always being on the books.
• 2:18
  Speaker: That would certainly be beneath me.
• 2:20
  Speaker: Let's just say that for whatever reason, the publisher decided to mock up a uh cover of this book some years later.
• 2:27
  Speaker: They called it uncommon too.
• 2:29
  Speaker: And then, of course, Tony has a blurb at the top that says Nathan Whitaker is really uncommon, which, depending on the inflection you put into it, either is a compliment or not.
• 2:39
  Speaker: But the idea was uncommon.
• 2:42
  Speaker: Why do we do what we do?
• 2:43
  Speaker: What are we trying to do in life?
• 2:45
  Speaker: And I think that brings us back to the point of success versus significance.
• 2:49
  Speaker: And that's why I launched this whole podcast.
• 2:52
  Speaker: Because at the end of the day, Tony would tell you that having your face on the cover of a bunch of books is not what it's about.
• 2:58
  Speaker: It's about impacting people's lives.
• 3:01
  Speaker: And I am trying to take his word for it and learn to live with my face not being on the cover.
• 3:06
  Speaker: He's right though.
• 3:07
  Speaker: Donnie Jones in one of the earlier episodes talked about success versus significance.
• 3:12
  Speaker: Tanley Stearns talked about what it means to be for impact organization, this idea of significance and why we're doing what we're doing.
• 3:21
  Speaker: So let me just share a little bit about my story and what maybe I've learned along the way, but maybe I still have to keep fighting, like the book cover issue, which I joke about, but Tony's memoir, Quiet Strength.
• 3:34
  Speaker: I had been working for first the Jacksonville Jaguars, then the Tampa Bay Buccaneers.
• 3:39
  Speaker: Thought I was on a path to become a journal manager.
• 3:42
  Speaker: The Buccaneers cleaned out much of the front office, including me, and I decided that I was not going to join the Seattle Seahawks or Atlanta Falcons or some of the others that I might have had an opportunity to join.
• 3:54
  Speaker: And I would set out to do something else.
• 3:56
  Speaker: And I thought that I would write a book with Tony.
• 3:58
  Speaker: I thought that he had things to share.
• 4:00
  Speaker: I thought that he could make an impact on people's lives.
• 4:02
  Speaker: He had certainly impacted mine.
• 4:04
  Speaker: And so it was a three-year journey of unemployment, of ultimately being hired by our church.
• 4:11
  Speaker: For about nine months, where we tried to stay afloat while I pursued this dream of writing a book.
• 4:17
  Speaker: And finally, Tony's book came out.
• 4:19
  Speaker: And it opened at number two on the New York Times bestseller list.
• 4:23
  Speaker: Before too long, it went to number one.
• 4:25
  Speaker: It spent 26 weeks in the top ten of the New York Times hardcover nonfiction bestseller list.
• 4:30
  Speaker: Did remarkably well.
• 4:32
  Speaker: The first year it had a million copies in print and now has over three million in print.
• 4:36
  Speaker: So it did remarkably well and launched me onto other things.
• 4:38
  Speaker: A few years later, I was giving a talk on success versus significance, and I actually gave a talk anchored in Tony's life verse, Proverbs 16:3, the verse that he was raised on.
• 4:47
  Speaker: And the verse says, Commit your actions to the Lord and your plans will succeed.
• 4:51
  Speaker: And so I pointed out that it didn't say anything about timing, that here I'd been on this journey through the NFL, and then being fired, and then being unemployed, and I followed the call that I thought I had on my life.
• 5:02
  Speaker: And so it took me three years, but ultimately sold a book that won awards that are on the shelf behind me, that sold a bunch of copies, and on and on and on.
• 5:12
  Speaker: And afterwards a friend from law school, John Kingston, took me aside.
• 5:16
  Speaker: He was in the audience and he said, That was fantastic, that was so spot on, just perfect.
• 5:20
  Speaker: You've got such a great delivery.
• 5:21
  Speaker: But I think your premise is wrong.
• 5:24
  Speaker: And I looked at him funny and he said, Look, you know in your heart your premise is wrong.
• 5:30
  Speaker: Because even though you know it's about significance, you ventured into that path that so many of us do here in the world of success, talking about sales figures, talking about awards, talking about being affirmed at the end of the day that your plan was correct because all these things fell into place.
• 5:48
  Speaker: And the reality is, and John's right, that in the 19 years since Quiet Strength came out, it's not about the sales figures and it's not about the top ten, and those things are all nice and well and good.
• 6:00
  Speaker: And as John said, he's really glad that those things happened, but that's not the point of it.
• 6:05
  Speaker: And it's true for us as well.
• 6:07
  Speaker: It's about the occasional letter that Tony gets that he passes along to me, or the person I run into who tells me a story, and the stories are all different but similar.
• 6:19
  Speaker: They're about in whatever way their lives were impacted by what we created.
• 6:25
  Speaker: That's a father started talking to a child again after years of estrangement, or that somebody realized that there was another way to organize their life around family and faith and work or whatever it may be.
• 6:38
  Speaker: Everybody has a different path, and the book impacted some people in different ways.
• 6:43
  Speaker: And that's what matters.
• 6:44
  Speaker: Not the overall sales figures, not the awards, not whatever it may be.
• 6:49
  Speaker: But what matters is the impacted lives.
• 6:53
  Speaker: And I know that, and I knew that.
• 6:55
  Speaker: But it's easy to forget at times.
• 6:57
  Speaker: Similarly, every year Tony went into the playoffs with his teams, whether it was the Buccaneers or the Colts, and ultimately winning a Super Bowl with the Colts, he would tell them, look, whether or not we win the final game of the year does not impact who we are.
• 7:13
  Speaker: Who we are is going to manifest itself every day along the way, and we are going to either become people of character by how we conduct ourselves, or we're just going to chase a ring that at the end of the day we'll find out is hollow in what it means.
• 7:28
  Speaker: And sure enough, I won the Super Bowl with the Buccaneers, Tony won it later with the Colts, and you wake up the next morning and you think, that's so cool, that's so great.
• 7:37
  Speaker: It's really neat to have done that.
• 7:39
  Speaker: But you're the exact same person that next morning that you were the night before, even before you'd won.
• 7:45
  Speaker: It's true in so many other ways of life.
• 7:47
  Speaker: That even though we think we're chasing the right things with success, we need to be chasing significance, that impact, that how we're uncommon, how we're different, and how we do things.
• 7:58
  Speaker: The guests have talked about that and how we conduct ourselves, whether we micromanage, whether we ask our followers questions in ways in which truly helps them, whether or not we're making an impact to change people's lives, whether or not we're telling people how much we care about them when there's time to still do it, whether or not we mentor people along the way and figure out what we can do to help them.
• 8:21
  Speaker: How are we being uncommon?
• 8:23
  Speaker: How are we being different and chasing significance instead of success?
• 8:28
  Speaker: I'll leave you with this.
• 8:29
  Speaker: Impact and being uncommon isn't about the size of what we do.
• 8:36
  Speaker: It's about who we build into.
• 8:38
  Speaker: And at the end of the day, it's not about the awards.
• 8:41
  Speaker: It's about the fact that something is better because we were there.
• 8:46
  Speaker: We were there to impact it, we were there to step in, we were there to play a role, even if it might be really small.
• 8:52
  Speaker: There are times when we look and think I didn't do that much, or I just gave something a tiny nudge, or I only changed one person a little bit.
• 9:00
  Speaker: I didn't make this dramatic impact.
• 9:02
  Speaker: But that's what we need to be striving for.
• 9:03
  Speaker: Figuring out ways in which we can make an impact, ways in which we can make a difference, ways in which things were better, because we were there and we were uncommon, doing things that the common people didn't choose to do, whether it was reaching out, writing a note, doing something intentional, ordering our lives in a way that's congruent with our philosophy and our priorities.