Coming Back From Difficulties With Optimism And Action With Max Borges – Replay

Is luck still evident today, or is it just a thing of the past? We see many people thriving in their careers and we can't help but wonder what's their recipe for success. Is it grit, optimism, resilience, or just sheer luck? Max Borges is the founder of the Max Borges Agency, a 50-person PR firm that focuses exclusively on consumer tech clients. Collecting wisdom and motivational insights from his growth journey, he compiled his learnings and wrote a book called How to Be Fan Effin-tastic. Some of the things that we discussed today were the role of luck in today's world, building resilience habits, and Max's own journey from starting his agency on a laptop at his kitchen table to generating more than $10 million in annual revenue. How optimism propelled Max to rise through countless opportunities and achieve success, as well as the positive effects of working from home. So sit back, And enjoy this replay episode of my conversation with Max Borges.

Life happens, and not always the way we expect it to. Every single day, we face change, stress, and uncertainty. What if you could learn to thrive no matter what life throws your way? Resilience expert Adam Markel and his inspiring guests explore breakthrough strategies to fully embrace change and build the resilience required to become change. Hey

everybody, welcome back. I'm your host, Adam Markel, and I am in this moment just feeling very peaceful, appreciative of that peace. It's a hard-fought peace, I think, at times. It's kind of an oxymoron or a contradiction in terms, but peace is something that I don't think is— for me anyway, it's not negotiable. And there's so many things that take me out of my peace in my own life and my own way of living, my own way of being. First and foremost. And then there's all that shit on the outside, the world, politics, and other things that we're craving, like justice, social justice, and other forms of equity, fairness, et cetera, that in the midst of some of those struggles, I find myself angry at times. And I've been, even in the last couple of months, just sort of noticing the level of my own anger rising at times. And I did something about that in the last couple of weeks. I went away on a retreat, actually very lucky enough for me to get to go to Costa Rica twice a year. Didn't go twice in 2020 for obvious reasons, but did get to go last week safely. Made it there, made it back, all well and good, to a retreat center where, among other things, I get to work with people individually on finding greater self-love and peace, And get to be facilitated by expert shaman in ayahuasca journeys, ceremonies that we do in the evenings, which is a whole other topic for another day and another show. Although, who knows, maybe my guest and I'll riff on that. I feel really fortunate to have come back from that experience much more grounded. And I haven't myself felt angry in at least 2 weeks. So that's probably good. Mission accomplished. And so I feel really blessed right now to be able to spend some time with a gentleman that I'm going to share with all of you. His name is Max Borges, and I'm just going to read a little bit about him. He's the author of How to Be Fan-Fucking-Tastic, which for those of you that might be watching on YouTube, that's the book right there. Killer book, collection of wisdom and motivational quotes and statements and insights from his journey growing his namesake agency from a laptop on his kitchen table to $10 million in annual revenue. His optimism and positive attitude have led him to countless opportunities, both personal and professional, and resulted in more success than he ever dreamed possible. Just a wonderful opportunity to chat with you today, Max. I'm so glad you could join us and be a part of the show.

Great pleasure to be here. And what a great intro. I totally resonate with a lot of the things that you were saying. You brought up ayahuasca and That's definitely something that's on my list of things to try. I've got a good friend that's done it about 5 times, and it's really changed him. So, I'm open to it. But thank you again for that wonderful introduction.

Resilience. It's the unsung hero in every success story that you will ever hear about. And in times of massive change and disruption, the kind of rapid change that we're all experiencing as leaders, as business owners, as entrepreneurs, we have to learn how to not only increase our own resilience, but that of our teams. So right now we have a powerful opportunity for you to find out just how resilient you are. Some years ago, my team and I created the resilience assessment that more than 5,000 business leaders across the globe have taken. And all you have to do to get your own free resilience leader assessment is go to resiliencerank.com. It takes less than 3 minutes, and it's our gift to you for being the leader that you already are. Other free resources and tools will accompany your score instantly. So go to resiliencerank.com. Max, my first question to you is, what's not a part of the introduction that I just did share that you would love for people to know about you? One thing in particular that you want our folks to know about

you. Probably that it wasn't always easy, that my life's been full of a lot of ups and downs, and that I've had to fail a lot of times in order to learn what I needed to know in order to finally reach the level of success that I always dreamed of.

It is a backing and filling process, right?

Absolutely.

No straight lines in the cosmos, I suppose. I'd love to just dig into the book, for example. What was the inspiration for writing a book called How to Be Fan-Fucking-Tastic? And by the way, I love this, what's probably a bit of a subtitle. It says, 100+ pages of practical advice on how to stop sucking at life and start being fan-fucking-tastic.

Yeah.

Yeah. And it's funny too, because right before we started the show, you asked me whether it was okay to use expletives in the show. And I said, yeah, we're rated for that. There's no—

Man, fucking fantastic.

No kids, as far as I know, that are consuming the podcast. Yeah.

So over my lifetime, I've had so many great mentors and people that have helped me throughout my life and given me this great advice. And I always wanted to write a book. So I started just one night making a list of these great quotes that kind of came to my mind, put them in a book form, and showed them to a friend. At this point, I had maybe like 20, and he thought it was great. So I showed a few more friends and I got some really great feedback. And I thought, oh, well, maybe I could turn this into a book. So over the next year and a half, I started just developing more and more quotes just based on experiences that I'm having. I say developing, I should say, recollecting, remembering these quotes that are part of my principles and my values and the way that I think and the way that I do business and the way that I conduct my life and came up with over 100 of them and put it into a book. And so far, the feedback has been incredible. People are buying it and then they're turning around and they're buying it for their kids, not for their little kids, but for their teenagers and their college-age kids. So it's been really rewarding to hear that positive feedback.

I can so see that, that this is just a great It's a great gift for somebody. I mean, when did the book actually officially launch?

It was just a few months ago. Yeah. I don't remember the exact date, to be honest with you, but I think it was maybe like 4 months ago.

And so far sales are pretty good, pretty strong?

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Sales have been good. And surprisingly, you know, and surprisingly I say, because I haven't done a whole lot of promotion for it and yet people seem to be discovering it and liking it and word of mouth is causing it to sell. So.

Yeah. And this is maybe a little bit of a cheesy question, or at least a question that might be tough to answer, but is there a particular quote in the book that is your own personal favorite? Or maybe there's one or two that you might unpack for us. The other thing, the alternative to that, while I give you a moment to think, because I dropped that on you, would be I can just randomly turn to a page or two and we can discuss a couple of these. And I don't normally do that with guests, but I just feel like Yeah. This book is tight. There's some really great language and concepts in here that are obviously— I think the strength is in the simplicity, but like all great things that are simple, there's also a lot deeper level that you can go to with it. So with that—

Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. There's a backstory on every one of the quotes. Which one is my favorite? I mean, it's like they're all my children. But I think one of my favorites is It ain't rocket science. Even rocket science ain't rocket science. And then the subline is, ask Elon. And what I mean by that is, you know, I always used to take this attitude about everything is not rocket science. You can learn how to do it. You can open up a book, you can ask some experts, some friends, like every— you can figure out just about everything. You

can go on YouTube today.

Yeah, absolutely. And the only thing that you can't do that with is rocket science. But then Elon Musk comes along who did not go to school to be a rocket scientist and reads a bunch of books and talks with a bunch of experts and has a rocket company. So now even rocket science isn't rocket science. So I think it's just an inspiring quote for people just to remember that things are not as hard as they look. And if you just take that first step forward and start learning and educating yourself, you'll find that you probably can do things that you never thought of.

Yeah. I mean, it would be challenging for me, even if I knew all the quotes by heart, to tell you which one is My favorite. There's just so many. I mean, I'll read a couple of these ones. Smile, it pisses your enemies off. That's probably the New Yorker in me that's just a little sadistic there.

I like that one too. Sometimes people, they want to get you down and they want to see you down, and somehow they pick themselves up by seeing you down. And so that's a way, like, don't let them do it. Just keep your head up and keep smiling because even though Not everybody's going to be on your side. You know, you've got to be on your side.

Indeed. If at first you don't succeed, and we all know how it's supposed to go after that, right? If at first you don't succeed, and then it says at the bottom, fucking Google it.

Yeah, yeah, exactly. Because, and this is a message that, you know, comes through on a few of the quotes in the book is that it's not about knowing everything. It's about being able to find the answers and being able to find them in real time and being able to find them fast. Another one of the quotes is life is an open book test. And it's kind of the same thinking. We go through school being taught to learn and memorize things, and then we're going to be tested on what we know. But in life, life isn't really like that. Life's an open-book test. If you're challenged with something, you normally get time to go and look up the answer, to read a book, to ask some experts, to surround yourself with your mastermind alliance who you can reach out to and get some input from. on how to do things better. And it's really about being able to learn, being able to find the answers, not necessarily know the answers.

Yeah. To me, the 2 words that come up are resourced and resourceful. And I think a lot of people don't utilize either of those, that they feel like they're under-resourced because perhaps they don't have the money that they think they need to succeed in something. And the fact of the matter is that there's the resource of Education, mentorship, other people's experience. So many things that you can learn from in that regard that are priceless. Some of the best lessons in life cost a lot of money. So to be able to learn some of those lessons without having to put up that money is really, really valuable. But people don't ask questions where they feel as though somehow or another to ask a question is indicating that they're dumb, they're not educated, or they should know. So there's all this sort of ego involved in why someone won't just walk up to someone somebody that's doing well, that they respect and simply ask them some basic questions about how it is that they were able to get to where they are or what have you, and then being less than resourceful. So there's the resources that people might not feel they have, and then there's this concept of like, how resourceful are you in the midst of a pandemic? There were more opportunities and more ways to really thrive in the midst of chaos and uncertainty and adversity this year than I've ever seen before. And the proof is in the pudding in so many different respects. But of course, if you weren't resourceful, then you're just watching the carnage, really.

Yeah, absolutely. I think, and I strongly believe that everybody's lucky, but some people are better at turning that luck into something great than others. Some people are just going to let those lucky luck events pass them by because They're not optimistic enough or positive enough to go, oh, this is something interesting. Let me try this out. Let me go down this road a little bit and see where this might lead. But I think that successful people, they see those opportunities and they realize, oh, this is a detour. You can't get too stuck on your path that you've set for yourself for your life that you're not going to be open to these great opportunities that life gives you almost every single day that you've got to take advantage of and get that, what Jim Collins calls, return on luck. You've got to capitalize.

Indeed. Yeah. Where opportunity and preparation meet is the crossroads called luck.

Yeah. Yeah. Or where opportunity and optimism meet.

Yeah. Wonderful. I love this too. Spend some time each day doing nothing at all. It is during this time that the best ideas will come. And scheduling nothing, to schedule time to think or to do nothing, it's really a profound ritual. that I was introduced to years ago. I don't know

if— We used to do it a lot more before the iPhone, right? And now we've got something to literally fill up every moment that maybe you might have just been thinking and coming up with a good idea or a solution to some problem. You're in the elevator, what are you doing? You're staring at your phone. You're on the toilet, you're staring at your phone. I think now the only time that maybe we're not doing anything is in the shower, and that's usually not long enough. to allow you to get some great ideas. I mean, you're on your phone until you go to bed. You're on the phone the moment you wake up. You're listening to a podcast on the way to work. It's like you need some dead time to let your mind just go and think through all of the challenges and all of the opportunities that are before you so that you can come up with ideas and come up with solutions.

Yeah. Love that idea. So, you need dead time to come alive.

Yeah, absolutely. And meditation is, I think, important, but I'm not talking about meditation because meditation isn't really about thinking. It's going out and just taking a walk, or if you're a runner, not running with music, not running while listening to a podcast. Just let yourself think. Let your mind go.

Randy and I, my wife and I, we've been doing such great thinking together, ideating about things in the hot tub. You know, and, and that's a place we don't take our phones. So it's interesting, you know, it's where can you be phone-free on some level? And, uh, my recommendation would be don't take it into the bathroom. I know you're right, lots of people are doing lots of tweeting. Yeah, at the highest levels.

Absolutely.

Or at least they used to be, you know, tweeting.

Yeah, my, my agencies did a study last year on millennials' Amazon buying habits And found that— I can't remember what the percentage, but it was like 30-some percent of millennials had purchased something on Amazon while sitting on the toilet. So we're just using our phones too much and need to schedule that dead time. If you don't schedule the dead time, it doesn't happen by itself anymore. It doesn't happen organically anymore.

No. That's sort of the law of the cosmos anyway, that a vacuum is always filled. There's always a sort of rush to fill a space. And we know space is creative. So how it is that you organize space, organize the opportunity for there, and even quarantine, if we can use that word a little differently, quarantine ourselves for space, for the creative ability or opportunity that exists in that space. I've got a book that's coming out in August myself called Change Proof, which is all about leveraging the power of uncertainty to build long-term resilience. It's a book about resilience, which I want to talk to you about. Yeah. But I already know what the book after that is now, which is a book about imagination. So I just want to— because you're in a creative business, you're in the marketing space, you own an agency, or it's a PR agency, but I imagine you do marketing as well, or some element of it. I'm curious what your thoughts are on imagination. And maybe that's a really broad question. I'm looking at imagination as a way to guide us today. So to look at the future as a guide for the present, as opposed to And here's my premise, looking at the past, it is conventional to think that the past, our past experiences teach us, give us this wisdom to be able to know how to pivot. And I'm throwing in another book title for the moment, In the Moment. And my theory is that we're always going to just be as adept and agile and able to deal with disruption in the present as our past has allowed us to form some wisdom To operate now. And the thing that we're not prepared for is this unknown future. And I think about the unknown future, I think about the people that were able to iterate things in the space where the past wasn't going to inform them, like Walt Disney, people that were really known for that imagination and imagineering and visioneering and that kind of thing. So just curious of your thoughts on imagination and how much you use it in your business.

I've used it a lot in actually building my business, not just for my clients, but thinking about my business in an imaginative way. And one of the things that I've observed over the years is that people— well, look, first of all, people are not afraid of failure. They're afraid of looking stupid in front of other people. They're afraid of being humiliated. And so, when it comes to being imaginative and coming out with some crazy idea. And oh, by the way, every great idea starts as a crazy idea. So you've got to be willing to humiliate yourself a little bit. You've got to be willing to put on the clown nose. You got to be willing to be laughed at if you're going to be truly creative. Otherwise, you're going to limit yourself to only the stuff that's safe, only the stuff that's safe to say without humiliation. And that's not really where the great ideas come from. And if you look at For example, Uber. Uber was a terrible idea. Let's think about it when it first started. Okay? You're going to have a stranger pick you up in their car. So 2 strangers driving together in their car. How is that a good idea? That's a terrible idea. When I first heard of Uber, I thought, that's weird, man. I don't want to get inside some stranger's car. But then when you think it through, when you think When you allow yourself to have that crazy idea and go, well, how could this work? Well, what if there was an app? What if all the drivers were rated? What if all of the passengers were rated? What if you could see exactly where your driver was on the way to come get you? What if you could share your location with other people so they always know where you are? What if you could see where your kids are, if they're in an Uber driving somewhere, so you can follow them at all How does that make it different? And suddenly, Uber becomes a brilliant idea. And it's the same thing with Airbnb. You're going to let some strangers sleep on your sofa? Terrible idea, right? But when you think it through and you think about how the app assists that idea and makes it better, then it turns into a brilliant idea. But you've got to be willing to go, okay, to think of these crazy, stupid ideas and think, How can I make them not so crazy and not so stupid? And if you're not, if you don't allow yourself to kind of live in that crazy place in your mind and to share those ideas with friends and people who you trust in a constructive way, then you're never going to get to that place where you've come up with something that's really imaginative and that's really unique.

Wow. The pace of change over the last couple of years has been rapid. And if you're a leader, a business owner, an entrepreneur, you know exactly what I'm Talking about every day, it's something different and something new. But the one thing that I've learned in performing at the height of all of those roles has been that we must be resilient. In fact, it's the unsung hero in every success story that you will ever hear about, and it's the reason why my team and I created the resilience assessment that more than 5,000 business leaders across the globe have taken. And all you have to do to get The best way to get your own free resilient leader assessment is go to resiliencerank.com. It takes less than 3 minutes, and it's our gift to you for being the leader that you already are. Other free resources and tools will accompany your score instantly. So go to resiliencerank.com and find out just how resilient you are. There's an old expression, you've probably heard it before, where the concept of thinking outside the box. But the problem with thinking outside the box is that the instructions for how to get out of the box are on the outside of the box.

That's great. I've never heard that before.

And it's, it's wonderful. I'm glad. Oh, that's cool. Because this stripping away whatever the walls are, the walls that hem us in, I think is really a big deal. And in our work, we train speakers, we train people that want to speak professionally and those that want to get on a TED stage with an idea. And one of the big things that's a challenge to so many folks is not the fear, because you just said this a moment ago. In other words, it's not the fear of public speaking. It's the fear of public humiliation.

Right. Exactly.

That's really at the root of why somebody won't go there, even though they have this desire to share something and they just won't go there because the risk Yeah. And

a lot of times we can have somebody in our life, whether it be a spouse or a parent or a close friend that we think of in that kind of situation. And that makes us feel very, very uncomfortable because we think, oh, what if this person who means so much to me, whose opinion I value so much, watches me and I don't think they're going to like it? And that can really, really bring you down. So that's why it's so important to surround yourself. And that's one of the quotes in the book too, is, if your friends don't make you better, then get new friends. And someone said, you're the average of the 5 people that you spend the most time with. So it's critically important that you surround yourself with the right people who are going to support your crazy and imaginative thinking and support you when you're trying to do something that maybe you're not that great at yet, but you're giving it a try. So that you can develop and you can grow and you can have that support system that you need to be the best you can be.

Yeah. And it's not easy. In fact, I love this quote from the book. It says, if being fan-fucking-tastic was easy, everybody would be fan-fucking-tastic.

Absolutely.

Exactly. None of these things are— and it's funny because on the other side of the page, it says some people would rather sleep than be successful. So again, there's this sort of an understanding that Things that are easy or things that are simple are not always easy. A lot of what we're talking about really is simple. We make it complicated. That's what we do as human beings. We complicate things. And I think in part, I don't know if you agree with this or not, let me know, that we complicate things to make it easy for ourselves to not do something.

Absolutely. 100%. I think that happens all the time. And I think the most important thing When thinking about any idea or any endeavor, and my friends will say, oh, I got this idea, or, I got that idea, but they never take the first step to research it. And taking the first step doesn't mean making a commitment to starting this new business, to quitting your job and starting a new business or starting— it's just, hey, let me look at it and see if this is even feasible, if this is even doable before I make a big commitment. The guy that started Netflix, before he started Netflix, he wasn't sure if you could even mail a DVD in a regular envelope through the mail without it being broken. He had no idea, but he didn't go, well, I don't know if that's the case, so I'm not going to start. He went to the store, he bought 3 CDs, he stuck them in an envelope, and he mailed them to himself. A few days later, he got them. They were all in perfect condition. Bam. Okay. Step 1, done. It cost him a few bucks, right? Right.

Business is born.

It wasn't a commitment. He didn't say, I'm going to start Netflix before he sent those CDs out. First, he sent them out, made sure that they weren't going to break, make sure that the post office was going to do their job, and then he started it. But most people don't send those CDs to themselves. And it's such an easy step to go, is this even a good idea or not? Why don't I just take a few steps to see if this is something to do? They talk themselves out of it. Before they even know if it's doable or not.

My dad used to send his manuscripts. He's still plugging away at his writing at 84 years old. And he's into some, you know, like 310 pages of his latest book and still not quite finished, but really close. And I remember as a kid, he'd take a manuscript and put it in a manila envelope and I'd see him write his own name on it and his own address, you know, our address. And I go, Dad, what are you doing? It's like, isn't that supposed to go to like an agent or a publisher or whoever it is?

Right?

He's like, no, No, no, I'm, I'm sending it to myself. This is my copyright protection.

So literally, yeah. Yeah. They call that a poor, a poor man's copyright.

Right,

exactly. I love it.

Yeah. That's what you get for, you know, as a recreation director for the city of New York on a $25,000 a year salary is you do a poor man's copyright.

Yeah. I had friends that would do the same thing with cassette tapes of their songs. They would send them to themselves and that would be the copyright.

So, I mean, and as a lawyer, I was a lawyer for 18 years. That's pretty good proof. It's not bad proof. If I'm a judge and I see that some guy's got that evidence of when this thing was created, it's pretty good. It's evidence of something.

Absolutely.

Yeah. I want to just spend a couple of minutes talking about resilience because you've been in business, you've been an entrepreneur, you started something from nothing, grew it, got 50-odd employees, something like that. That doesn't happen without a lot of pain. a lot of twists and turns. And as you said earlier, mistakes and tolerating, weather those mistakes, et cetera. So first, I'd love to get your definition of resilience, as well as what it is that you've done both as a business operator and owner to develop resilience for yourself and within your organization.

Yeah. Definition of resilience, I think, is the ability to do something new, As if you've never failed before. And in the years leading up, I started my business when I was 34 years old. In the years leading up to my business, I tried starting lots of different businesses, starting when I was about 17 years old. And each time I started a new business, I felt like, this is the one that's going to make it. This one's the one that's going to really do it and make my dreams come true. And then it wouldn't work out and I would find something else to do and try that out. Like, this one's going to do it. And it wouldn't work out. But I wouldn't look back on those as failures. I always looked back on those as learning opportunities. And I can look back at every failed business that I had prior to the one I have now and tell you what I learned from it, because there's important lessons from every single one of them. And I think that's critical in developing yourself in order to have a successful business. Some people, like Mark Zuckerberg, they get lucky and their first business is a huge success and they become a billionaire. But that doesn't happen for 99.999% of us. Most of us don't become successful in a business as a teen or in our early 20s. It takes a few more trip and falls, a few more failures before we have enough knowledge, experience, and confidence to finally make something work. And one of the quotes in the book is, it's never too late to do something great. And I mentioned a few people, like for example, Ray Kroc, who was a salesman before he met the McDonald's brothers. And then at 52 years old, started licensing the McDonald's brand and turned McDonald's into what it is today, from one store to thousands of stores worldwide. He was 52 when he started on that. He was a salesman up until that point. And there's so many stories of people like that, but the ones that make the news are the ones of people who are younger and who don't necessarily require as much resilience as those people who started businesses when they were older and needed to pick themselves off the ground quite a few more times.

I would say even in the success stories, the ones that have been perhaps younger and easier, there are certainly moments along that path that require, that call out a tremendous amount of resilience. I mean, the example of even Zuckerberg, I mean, I'm not going to defend Facebook here, I don't have the best thoughts about that platform actually, or even about him individually. But I will say that to me, it's not all it's cracked up to be. Now, it's a soft landing when you get $40 billion or something to your name.

Right.

But when you're involved at the level that he's involved in and have the mission that the company has and want to succeed on behalf of stakeholders and everything else, you wake up in the morning, it's a heavy load. It's a heavy responsibility. You've got to be resilient because, hey, you can end up getting getting sick and dying at an early age. And we all know that money doesn't turn that around. I mean, it's, uh, you know, time is equal as it metes out in the same way to everybody. So, yeah, you know, money doesn't alter that eventuality. So, I'd say resilience to me is not a soft skill. I absolutely think it's one of the most important things that organizations can develop. Yeah. The best is when the leader of that organization and the leaders are modeling it for people around them. Because I don't know that we're taught that. We're lucky enough sometimes to have parents or others in our lives that show us what resilient habits look like. And by that, I mean habits that help you to recharge. That to me is the way we define resilience. It's not how you endure, but how you recharge. Not how you bounce back, but how you bounce forward. And to do that, you've got to do it holistically. It's mental recharge, it's emotional, spiritual, physical recharging. So I'd love to get a sense of, in your organization, if you are that person, and I don't know that that's the case or not, so you just let us know, but what do your rituals look like? How do you model these things for the people around you?

Yeah, it's an interesting question. Interesting how you put it about making an example and then the organization can then become resilient. Because I think in the beginning, and I can think back many years ago when we had a client, it was actually Alienware Computers, and we were a small company and they were a big client of ours. And one day they got bought out by Dell and they fired us. And that amounted to almost half of our company's revenue that I was about to lose in the next 30 days. And at that moment, I had 2 employees who lost faith in the business and quit. I had to stand there in front of everybody and say, we're going to come back from this. This is just a bump in the road. We can do this. I was saying it. I don't know if I believed it, but I knew I had to keep everybody looking forward and being optimistic, or we would never get there. That's for sure. We did. We did come back. That year, the business grew quite a bit, even with that loss, because everybody just plowed forward and everybody got to work looking for clients, looking for new business, and we were able to grow the business. And so, I think that was just one example, and there's others where I showed that we can always come back from a difficulty and that it's really a matter of responding to it, not with dread and fear, but with optimism and action. And that's exactly what we did. And now, I've got a management team that runs the business. I'm not involved in day-to-day operations of the business anymore. And I think that they do a phenomenal job of showing resilience Even as a team and dealing with whatever challenges they are. I mean, we had a challenge a year ago when they announced that they were going to be doing the lockdown and we had to go from everybody working into the office to everybody working from home overnight. And my team did a spectacular job of getting everybody online and working from home very, very, very quickly. I mean, like hours, not days. And came back from that. And now we're in a situation where the business is doing better than we were doing before the pandemic. And people are doing better work working from home than they were working from the office because we found better ways to do it. There were less interruptions that you'd normally have in the company and people could stay more focused, get in the zone more. And so I think that resilience is absolutely something that's baked into our our DNA now. And that can be— I think it can be learned, not necessarily from a book, but if you experience, if you're part of a situation where somebody who's leading you is resilient, I think you can learn what that feels like and then do it yourself.

I really hope you're enjoying this episode of the Change Proof Podcast. If you've not yet gone out and gotten your own copy of Change Proof, it's not too late. You can get your copy right now by going to changeproof.com and not only getting the book and all the bonuses there, but getting access to our proprietary resilience assessment tool. It'll just take you 3 minutes to do, and it's something that will really help you to utilize the book even more effectively. to create practices and rituals and habits that will increase your mental, emotional, physical, and even spiritual resilience for the long term. Again, go to changeproof.com to get your copy today. The efficiencies that have been seen in, in a lot of businesses over the last year are remarkable because it's just The water cooler distractions. I remember when I was a lawyer, just constantly doing something, had a hard conversation with an adversary, or I was writing a brief for an hour. I just got to get up and walk and stretch my legs. Then I end up in my colleague's office next door and we're shooting the breeze for 45 minutes and you go, okay.

Right.

I don't know how useful that was for me to be able to get home for dinner on time. To see my kids, but those distractions are gone. I want to circle back to something you said too, because when it comes to being a resilient leader, which I think is something you can learn and it's something that you model, modeling looks like what you said earlier, I believe in you and I believe in this business. Because there are a lot of people, just like when you lost that client, there's a lot of people that were facing a lot of loss this year, so many different kinds of losses. And to be able to model for their teams that they believed in them, their talents and their abilities, et cetera. And they believed in the business. They believed in the model of the business itself is what people need to feel in order to be able to stick it out when things look dark.

Yep. They need to feel it. They need to hear it from their leader. And absolutely, they need to hear that you believe in them. That's so important. And a lot of times, People don't hear that from their leadership enough. And I'm a huge believer that people have way, way, way more potential than what they ever unlock. And so I believe that if I can help somebody through my example and through my words and through my encouragement unlock a little bit of their potential that they didn't know they had, that they're going to be much more successful than otherwise. And that's been one of the biggest joys of growing a business is having that opportunity to mentor people and to coach people and to help them see that they can do a lot of things that they didn't think they could do. And that's why I've got a lot of young people that didn't have a lot of experience, took on a lot of responsibility early on because I knew they could do it. I knew they were smart enough to do it. And they might not have thought so in the beginning, but it didn't take long for their confidence to really go through the roof because they realized, oh, wow, I can do this too. And I've never tried to act like I was the smartest guy in the room at the expense of somebody else. I've always held people up on a pedestal and said, you guys are the important people here in this company, and you guys are the smart ones who make things happen with clients and other parts of the business. So I think that makes a huge difference and it's critically important to do it. Otherwise, you're really not doing everything you can to help these people be the best people they can be.

Indeed. Indeed. It's one of the things I love most about what I get to do now is actually working with business leaders in a mentorship role. It's tremendously fulfilling. It just feels great. It's always easier to help somebody else solve their problem than it is to solve your own, to be perfectly blunt. I want to circle up the wagons here with one final question, and that is really about the rituals that you've got, and in particular one. Sure. I gave a TED Talk some years ago about my one Early ritual, the early morning waking ritual that changed so many things for me and has still to this day continues to change things on a, on a regular basis. And that is waking up and feeling grateful and putting my feet on the floor. And instead of feeling the kind of anxiety that I used to feel before I get going and get the coffee in my veins and all that, instead of feeling that, I feel that gratitude and I say, I love my life. Those 4 words come outta my mouth. Simple words, but not easy. That's awesome. Not easy to pull off. All the time. And just like your book says, being fan-fucking-tastic, How to Be Fan-Fucking-Tastic. It's like, how do you love your life? And that was the question I posed in my talk. So that's my waking ritual. What is your most important ritual, whether it's the beginning of the day or elsewhere?

Yeah. It's not at the beginning of the day. I tend to wake up always charged and ready to start the day and excited about what is ahead of me. I think the ritual that has served me is at the end of the day, just making that one last call or doing that one last thing that maybe you've been procrastinating. And I'm not involved in business development anymore, but before with my business, it was always about, it's a quarter to 6, it's like, who's the last— who's one more person I can call? One more client prospect that I can call and see if I can get some more business. And I can't tell you how many times that one last call Got me a piece of business or got something accomplished that was important and special. And that's just something I picked up, I think, from a book or some other sales motivational speaker and something that I've always done. And I always try to do, now to this day, I'll look at something, I go, okay, it's almost time for me to go. What's one last thing I can do so that I can feel really good about what I've accomplished today?

Brilliant, buddy. Yeah. Max, I've so enjoyed our conversation, really. I knew I would. I knew as soon as you sent me this book, I go, this guy's got the simpatico I can't wait to meet him. And this has just been a tremendous pleasure. I know our folks have loved it. So I'll just say more information about Max, about his book and his company will be part of the show notes. So you check all that out. Everybody, love to get your comments. As always, you can go to adammarkel.com/podcast to leave a comment for myself, questions for me, for Max, and we'll answer those personally. And as always, subscribe, tell a friend. If somebody you know is in business and struggling, or is in between, maybe in a transition phase, think they would enjoy listening to some of the wisdom, some of the experience that Max has shared today, please feel free to share this episode with them as well. And I'll just say again, thanks, Max, for being a part of the show today.

Thank you, Adam. It's a pleasure. It's been all mine. I really appreciate it. This has been a fun talk.

Awesome. Ciao.

Take care.

Thanks for listening, everyone. We hope you now have even more tools and greater insights to build resilience And become change-proof. Help us inspire others by sharing this episode and leaving your comments over at adammarkel.com/podcast. For more resilience tips and strategies, including support for building change-proof teams, visit adammarkel.com/becomechangeproof.