The Spirit Of Adventurousness: Signing Up For The Entrepreneurial Roller Coaster With Bill Nussey

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 Markell and his inspiring guests explore breakthrough strategies to fully embrace change and build the resilience required to become change. Proof.

Well, you're going to love this episode of the Change Proof podcast because today I have Bill Nussey. Bill has spent most of his career as a tech CEO helping lead several startups to successful exits, including an ipo. His companies have created billions of dollars in shareholder value, and in 2016, he left the tech industry to join the climate revolution. It started with a TED Talk, which grew into a number one podcast on renewable energy and most recently a book called Freeing Energy, which was the number one new release in energy on Amazon. Stay tuned for this episode. You're going to love it. All right, Bill, you, you have a very impressive bio for sure. My question to you right at the out of the gate is what's one thing, just one thing that's not a part of that bio and your sort of standard fare introduction, that kind of stuff. What's one thing that you would love for people to know about you?

You know, early on in my life when I thought maybe I would do well professionally, a mentor sat me down and said, bill. And to my wife, he said, I know both of you and every dime you make should not go towards buying anything or any place. He said, it should go towards going places and doing things. And that was one of the best pieces of advice. And we've always been modest in our things. We own and we're very fortunate. But we have spent our marginal money on going places and our kids, who are now young adults, have traveled all over the world with us and multiple adventures. And that has been the funnest, most bridge building or bond building experiences I could have had as a, as a person, as a member of this family.

Wow. And you get to, you and your wife have two kids, right? Is that right?

We do two adult kids, 22 and 26.

Wow. You know what, that, that's some really sage advice right there. Folks that know a little bit of my background married my, my college sweetheart, like 30, 30 plus years. I won't say exact number. It's more than 30 years ago.

And me too, my friend, me too.

And one of the things we said when we first got together, as in like we're, we're both aware that we were in love at a certain point. Randy, my wife, she Looked at me and she said let's, let's never get boring, you know, and this is that kind of out of character for her. Wasn't the kind of thing she would say. It's not like a line out of, out of her book or playbook. But she said that. And so I really paid attention and I thought, well, yeah, let's never get boring.

Yeah.

And I feel like it's in line with that advice that your mentor gave you, you know, to invest in experiences. Invest in. What was the word you used earlier to describe it?

To me, it's always been adventures. It's the bonds between our family. But how do we live our life so that we have adventures? We go new places, we think new things. Occasionally we're scared. We all climbed, the four of us, none of us are athletes remotely and we all climbed to the top of the mountain next to Machu Picchu a few months ago. And for the four of us this was terrifying, exhausting. And what a great experience to have done it with our family. Of course there were other people there just going right up to like, like mountain goats just climbing right up of it and we're just looking at them. But for us it was quite a climb and it, those kind of things you never forget. Never ever forget.

My goodness, Bill. Yeah, exactly. I mean with our four kids, I think in part we went through a period where for budgetary reasons, you know, with four kids, like oh my God, four kids, a lot of food, that's a lot of, it's a lot of clothing. Even with handyman hand me downs and stuff, it's a lot, you know, a lot of tuition. You and I have something in common because your youngest about to graduate and you're going to be, you know, theoretically speaking, an empty nester. Right? I mean, yes.

Well, he moved out years ago, but he comes home for Christmas breaks and summers. But theoretically he will be launched on the launch pad in, in May towards a career living somewhere that isn't our house. And I, I'm kind of say to myself, boy, would it wouldn't be all too bad if you end up living with us. But then again he's got to get on his own, so we love having him around. We're very lucky that we all get along.

Yeah. So I mean this is maybe, maybe for more for the parents out there or want to be parents or whatever. And so if you're not a parent at the moment, you don't have any clue about a wanting desire to be a parent. Just bear with just Bear with us. Don't, don't fast forward just yet. Okay? I promise we're going to get past this. But tell me about how adventurous your kids are because I want to tie this. So I'll give this for the people that are maybe a little impatient. Right. I'm going to tie this. I want to tie this to business, I want to tie this to entrepreneurship. I want to tie this to the things that are really relevant in most of our lives these days. So are your kids the adventurous type or kind? Because you've taken them on these wild.

Experiences from early on they've had to face their fears and we push them within reason and safety, but we have pushed them to do things, to get jobs before their other friends had jobs. We pushed them to travel and to hike places and to try things. You know, we put them on dirt bikes when they were probably too young to do dirt bikes and we taught them to build computers from scratch before they were too young to build computers from scratch. So it was the whole range of things. But we got them out of their comfort zone over and over again. I think it's really affected their outlook on life and hopefully it'll end up becoming happy adults, which is all you could possibly hope for.

Okay, so here's the tie in everybody. So Bill, as a tech, as a tech founder, you know, a startup founder, spent a lot of years in tech. How important is it, do you think this spirit of adventure is ness to, to that, to that arena that you've spent your whole, pretty much your whole career in?

Adam, it's everything. It isn't just a nice to have. If you want to do the kind of startups that most people read about that I, you know, and even far less famous ones that I've been a part of, but I've been in the startup world my whole life and if you think it's going, if you're not signing up for an adventure, the slogs and the fears and the heart wrenching soul crushing moments and the glorious ecstasies of success and winning. If you don't want to get on that roller coaster, it's not for everybody. And for people that do want to do that, they want to leave a trail behind them that want to have an experience with friends that are going to last their lifetimes. And I think startups are the way to go. I ran a company many years ago and took it public and we got to as large as about 3,000 people and I was CEO and there's about 15 of us that have 20 years later remained great friends. And every single year we get back together and normally your high, that would be your high school friends or something, or your college friends, but it's the business executive team of this company that we built and we remain great friends to this day. And so I think that it was the incredible adventure of that particular company that bonded us for life.

Yeah, I mean, Cheryl, I mean the bond I think is the word you said earlier with regard to your, your family. And now we're back to that word bond again, which is really, really important. What is it, do you think about being on an adventure in business, in business in particular, that creates that kind of a bond and is it something that can be replaced? It's kind of a two part question here, and I think this is the harder part. Can it be replicated somehow without, without the painful moments of uncertainty?

I think that going on a journey with another group of people, your family, colleagues, one that's got highs and lows, is defining because it forces you to be human. If you have a veneer, a polished veneer, which we all have, most startups I'm familiar with will tear it down and you get to see the actual person that's there. And sometimes that's not the person you want to be, to be seen as. Sometimes it's different than what you thought of your colleague before the adventure. But that, that raw humanity is what causes people to bond, in my opinion. You know, when we were at the, near the middle of that mountain I was telling you about, one of my family members, not me, could have easily been me, just lost it and said, this is too hard, I don't want to do it. This is terrifying. We could die. There was no safety nets. It was just a sheer thousand foot drop a foot away from where we were standing. And we just sort of sat there with, talking about it and eventually my family member was very upset and we just sat there until they weren't upset anymore and we continued on our way up and getting to the top was even more amazing because we had to stop in the middle and be just absolutely authentic with each other. Other. I don't like that word authentic because it's actually an inauthentic term, but just the rawness.

Thank you for saying that, by the way.

Yeah, yeah, it's the rawness of your, who you are, you know, don't you.

Think it's sort of like transparent? I mean, I've been kind of calling not so much BS on that word authentic, but you know, it's Been used a lot.

Well, it's used in the context of how you're supposed to present yourself, which automatically means it's not authentic.

Right? Exactly. Here's me not selling you. Yeah, this is.

My PR agent wants to tell you about me.

Right?

This is authentically.

Authentically, Yeah. I mean it's a level of transparency. There's a, there's some interesting stuff. I was reading an article about, about some politics actually. This is freaking funny as heck, I think to me, I'm reading an article about this young woman Who's I think 22 years old and I, I wish I had the article handy. So I won't, we'll, we'll, we'll insert her name hopefully. I mean the AI will be so, so, so ready for us very soon that I'll just be able to say that. Anyway, it'll happen. But basically she came on board with the Raphael Warnock campaign some months ago and you know, he had a good following already and some social, you know, some of his social was pretty powerful but was. Had no presence on TikTok. And so she comes in and she starts doing some things and, and sprinkling, you know, TikTok dust or whatever. And then he grows to like 250,000 followers on TikTok. But mostly, mostly because she was sharing these moments of transparency, what she calls these cringe worthy, you know, like the embrace. The cringe is kind of her, her thing at 22 or something. It's just like this, you know, and she was just featured in a very major publication for sure. Her, her star is rising to be sure. But this idea of sort of embracing the cringe, like when we're looking at what is, what does authenticity mean or transparency even. It's like in today's world it, there's some element of, you know, there's a lot of cringe. Right? I mean on all, you know, everywhere, you know, can you, can you embrace that? I, I think it's this book I had come out earlier in the year called Change Proof. The original title was a, was, was the word embrace. And it was to be a follow up from a book I'd written a few years ago called Pivot. And so this was more of a starting around. How do we embrace the pivots in life, Embrace the changes in our lives, which is kind of along those lines of embracing the cringe, you know, because the changes in our lives are often super messy in there, ugly, because we're, we're also scared. Like I can imagine being on that mountain and Somebody's literally just like having a. An. You know, an osm. My buddy likes to call that the oh moment, you know? You know, and that's what's happening. And, and when you're having that moment, wherever that moment is happening, it doesn't have to be in a mountain. Right. It's like you're a. You're kind of an ugly mess. I mean, a beautiful.

Exactly, exactly. And that's when the people, when, when you're feeling this fear and this uncertainty, and when the people around you, whether your colleagues, your family sort of rally around you and say, but, you know, we'll get through this. Fail or succeed, we're going to do it together. And that shows the commitment people have to each other, and that's what forms the bonds in my experience is if I'm willing to help you here, of course I'm going to help you for the rest of your life in other ways. And, and I. And I think that that raw humanity, the transparency, you. You are shed of the version of yourself you'd want to tell tick tock about, and you're replaced with who you actually are.

Yeah.

And I think a lot of people suffer from. I know I do. From. I think the term is imposter syndrome.

Yeah.

The. And so we, in the world of social media, we are getting ever skilled at presenting who we would like the world to see us as and further from who we really are. Maybe sounds a little deep for me, but. But I do think that's reality. So when you're in a situation that forces you to get beyond that veneer and there's people around you and they're still there for you, man, that's. That's what makes those relationships so powerful and special. And that's what I've loved about being an entrepreneur my entire life, is that every company that I've built and run with a team, every single one, is. It's the greatest adventure. And the friendships and the bond, occasionally the burned relationships and people they never talk to again. But the vast majority, at least in my experience, have been people that, even if they don't, Even if they don't end up working out for the company, in many cases, they end up being lifelong friends because you've just been through the trenches together.

Yeah. Would you be willing to share, like, where the imposter syndrome has shown up for you, either recent or in the past?

Sure. So really famous podcasters reaching out to me, saying, hey, would you like to be on our podcast? And you know, like, like you and it's like, well, what could I possibly, especially talking about my life, I mean, what could I possibly share with anybody they would find interesting and relevant? And I'm still quite in doubt that anything I say today will be of value to anyone that listens to this. But I trust your, your judgment and sufficiently flattered to be invited that I'm willing to give it a shot. But you know, anytime you, you, you're pitching a startup or pitching yourself particularly.

Yeah.

You're like, well, what if people find out that of all, all these faults I actually have and all these mistakes I've actually made and what if they find out about it? And I think that's a fine line we walk in business. You're not as one of the, one of my great moments in life was a friend of mine was, was an ex Israeli military, top level person. And there was a night before I resigned, before my resignation from this large public company I was mentioning earlier and it wasn't announced, but I was with him and I told him and confided him and I said, you know, when we announced that I'm leaving, you know, I'm going to go to a startup, but I feel like my career is going to be over. And it was just, you know, just two months ago I was, I won this massive award as the most, what was it, the most innovative consultant in the world or something like that. And, and he said, and I said, I'm just struggling with this. And he said, listen, Bill, I've been, you know, I've been called a savior of a country and I've been called a criminal by the same group of people from the country I'm from. And he said, the one thing I've learned is that I'm not nearly as good as everyone says and I'm not nearly as bad as they say. And, and maybe that doesn't resonate, but with, with everybody, but boy did it hit me at the time that I am not. The things that people say about me now. I'm not nearly as good and I'm certainly not as bad. In the end, I'm just me. And it was beginning a real process for me. It was in my early 40s when I started to realize that I was just going to lean into who I was and, and accept some of the things I was never going to be good at, that I idolized other people. You know, I was never going to be the charismatic, go charge the hill kind of person. I'm more of a, we call it more of a Spock. Brain than a Kirk brain, if anyone's old enough to remember that reference. But you know, I, I owned it and it's been. I've been a much happier person and maybe more successful.

I don't know that really draw Bill that, that couldn't be more. More on point for me just at this moment because was sit. Sitting in a hot tub just a couple of days ago was our son's birthday, his 21st, fourth birthday. We went out and played golf and came home and just as dinner was being prepared, we decided just go sit in the tub and, and, and continue to catch up. We wouldn't you know, been fortunate to spend a whole day playing golf together. So we did some of that. But, but you know, our conversation went deeper than it. That it would typically go on, you know, like in between shots and stuff. And, and we were sharing some stories both he and I from, from our, our high school days. You know, I obviously my high school days a little further back. Oh yeah, yeah. But, but I was sharing some things he didn't know about me that I was concerned about back then. Like things I, I worried about things that were bothering me, things that I didn't like about myself to be, you know, like really on point. And he was sharing some of those same things with me that I actually didn't know that he was worrying noodle, you know, like really obsessing about back then that just like I couldn't believe it. I'm like really like you were you, were you worried about that? You were, you know, upset about that, you know, wanting to change that. Couldn't believe it, you know, and I, I shared one. Like I, you know, I wasn't going to be six feet tall. My dad's six two. He was a basketball player. And for, I don't know, some good period of my early life, I was upset that I wasn't going to be six feet tall, that I wasn't going to like, get to do some of that or somehow that number of just even what my physical height was would somehow equate. Equate to a certain level of acceptance or love or approval or worthiness. You know, like bizarre. Like, you know, like I look back then and it's laughable, but it was hardly laughable at that time. So I had said to Max, our son, I said, you know, it's really about objective truth. Don't you think, Max? Like when you're. If you look back, if I look back at that time in my life and think about the stories I was telling myself or even the things other people might have said to me that, that I accepted as the objective truth. Either, either one of those two scenarios were both false. My story about myself as well as the story that others might have been telling about me, which objectively false. But I can't, couldn't, didn't know that then and not sure I could have known that then. But I look back on it and it's obvious. Just like if he looks back on his thing and I, and I was saying to him, so is objectively true because he's only 24, so it's not that far from the point where those things were, were really concerning to him. And I think it's on some level still a little, you know, concerning. So it's really, it's, you know, this imposter syndrome I think is something. So, you know, again, it's one of those terms we, we now sort of go, oh, get it, know what that is? And yet it's so prevalent, especially in, in people, regardless of how, how successful they are on either spectrum. Part of the spectrum question for you that I wrote down, I want to ask you now is do you think more people talk themselves into things or out of things relative to that whole imposter syndrome?

Good question. I think many more people talk themselves out of it. There's a thousand reasons to say no and usually very few, if any logical, objective reasons to say yes. Whether, you know, I asked my wife to marry me. There was the logic, the spreadsheet didn't have an answer, so I just knew I had to do it. Thankfully she said yes. But I think the greatest decisions, the most consequential decisions, are rarely objectively clearer answers. So I think depending on whether you have a taste for adventure, taking the leap, so to speak, I think it's one of the reasons a lot of people sort of wake up 10 years later and say, gosh, I didn't really do a lot in the last 10 years because they kept finding the reasons to say no to whatever crazy crap that came up from their lives. And what is it? There's a saying, I forget who, who said it, but somebody, something like, never has anyone at their deathbed said, I wish I traveled less.

Right.

And so I think there's, there's an.

Adventure we don't do or the things that, you know, if you, again, if you look back, you go, geez, what, what's the worst case scenario? Like watching. I don't know if you're a. Are you a music guy? Music fan?

Not much. No.

Okay, so then this is completely irrelevant to you. But, but that said, Bill, you know, you've been involved in the tech space and you know, but you heard of a guy named Bruce Springsteen? That ring a bell?

That, that is a name I've heard, yeah, actually.

Yeah, right. Everybody has, right? Regardless of their music or not.

Yes.

So I'm watching Howard Stern interviewing Bruce Springsteen and it's on hbo, Max, because I don't, I don't, I don't actually have. I think he's on Sirius or something or xm, those two have merged or whatever. But. So I don't listen typically, but I watch this. And so it's Bruce Springsteen. I mean, this guy's, you know, prolific and has won every award and, and you know, all that kind of stuff. He's, he's talking about just this, this level of discomfort in, in, in what he does in, in, in, in his craft. And, and I was just thinking to myself, you know, to what extent is that, that being, being okay in the, in the space of the unknown. Embracing the suck, I think is the term that, that Navy Seals use. You know, how much do you have to embrace the suck in, in, in. As a, as someone who's involved not just in the tech space, but in any area of the startup arena. Like I have a son in law who's got a tech company that's doing quite well and they're, they're on a pretty good trajectory and I think ultimately they would, they would love to be, they would love to IPO and all that kind of stuff. I mean, to what extent do you really have to have the belly, the, the belly or what is it if it's not that, that cast iron stomach, you know, what is it with Bruce, Bruce Springsteen talking about it, There was just a level of, of his, his willingness to, to make this, this, this set up this equation for himself that was something like, you know what, regardless of what happens in this moment, like it's, let's say he's, he was auditioning for his very first record deal with Capital, you know, and, and his feeling was, look, I, I will be, I will still be the same person regardless of the outcome. If this thing was to fail, if I was to crash and burn, if I never get a record deal ever in my life, I know who I am and, and I'm pretty okay, you know, with who I am. And, and that was sort of his, his, you know, his, his mindset. And, and I'd love to get a sense for, from you as to, you know, what, what is the, the mindset of a person that can take something from nothing, meaning you, you create something out of thin air and go through it, it nearly, you know, dying, I don't know, four or five hundred times, right to the place where it. You, you have that, that, that moment where you're, you know, you're ringing the bell on some exchange and, and even the moment when you, you exit. Can you. I know it's a very broad question, but I want to understand the, the gut, the gut head. Any of the connections that you can make for us in connection with that.

Well, it leaps to mind a question I've been asked a few times in my career. Like, you know, you've had some success, Bill. What have you done differently? How have you embraced all the opportunities and challenges? And the answer I usually give, which is funny but true, which is, I'm too stupid to give up. And, you know, I think that there's really three kinds of people that can survive the journey of an entrepreneur. The first was somebody who's just so successful that they don't. When there are bad things happening, they just deflect right off. Right. The second kind is the kind that's so courageous and visionary that whenever they see they're running into a ditch or hitting a wall, that they persevere through fear. They just persevere. They. They understand the bigger picture, they move forward. I'm the third kind, genuinely, and I think most entrepreneurs are, is that they just. You can take a, you can take a punch, right? You can deal with a level of discomfort that's excruciating for everybody. But you, you are able to just push through it where others might say it's not worth the trouble. You know, get off the. I'm going to get off this crazy pain train as soon as I can because this is harder than I expected it to be. This is not worth the trouble. And I, I certainly don't think I'm any more courageous than anybody. But I, I think my experiences growing up and just the way I'm wired randomly is that I don't have a problem, the same problem with climbing through barbed wire as others do. And, and plus, once I'm vested in something and I'm committed to it, particularly if I'm working with a team, I'm incredibly motivated to get through whatever the downside is. And I do know some people who've just been so successful at everything they do. Yeah. But I, I am not one of those. Any success. There's been a, A long, hard Journey to get there. Stuff that I think a lot of people would have chosen not to push all the way through. And for a variety of reasons, some of them are out of weakness. Just didn't. Just didn't give up. And, you know, it was probably my. The most defining story was back In, I think, 2011, if I remember correctly, back before there was any large companies anywhere in the world that had been hacked or compromised, my startup got hacked and we went. We were the second company in the world ever did we knew of, ever get hacked. Google had been hacked by, I think, the foreign country. And everyone was up in arms about that. And it had never happened, right? It happens three times a week now, but back then it had never happened.

And.

And we. We called the FBI and they accidentally leaked it. And so my whole world came tumbling apart. And I had thousands of customers, big brands, and there was the potential that customer data might have been stolen. We were still assessing it, and they all wanted to fire us. And, you know, the company was over. And it was easily the most difficult part of my professional career. So one of my just up and quit because he thought we were going to spend the rest of our time in jail. Again, there was no precedent, right. You know, today, if your credit card company calls you and says so and so retailer was hacked, you're going to. You're. Here's what you need to do, Change your password, whatever. But back then, no one had any idea whether or not executives would go to jail. And the FBI was not being particularly helpful in a lot of ways. In some ways they were, but. And so what I. That was a crucible for me. And everybody from the board to the employees to the customers were looking at me as if I had the magic answers. And what I decided to do is the next right thing. Right? I had no idea how we'd get through it. And I think odds were that we would fail. We would go under in a pile of lawsuits, and all we could do was the next right thing. So what is the next right thing? Well, let's tell our customers. Well, if we tell our customers, it's gonna be this, this, and this. And I said, well, that's the right thing to do. And so we just did that. You know, how do we get this fixed? Well, let's hire the smartest people in the world. Well, we don't have the money to do it. We'll hire them anyway and to help us fix it. And we did all that. And I think just the punchline was that we came out of it not just surviving it, but we came out of it incredibly strong. And that actually gave my leadership team and my board like one of those near death moments you hear about like someone almost gets in a car crash and they just rethink their whole life. They caused us to stop and think, well, what if we, rather than just thinking about how to get to next year, what if we think incredibly broadly about what we could be because we almost died. And we literally almost died. So we reinvented ourselves and the company took off and we ended up selling it for hundreds of millions of dollars to IBM. And it was a great exit for everybody. And I think that had that really bad thing happened, not happened, and had we not had the courage as a management team, the perseverance, not courage, the perseverance just to push through it, I don't think that great outcome would have happened. And everyone was a winner for it except for the hackers. And they were later caught by the FBI about six years later and made quite a, quite a court case. But at that point they'd hacked a lot more people than us. So we were just a small mention in the list of companies that they had done damage to. But we were the first, we were the first to catch it. We had an excellent team. We caught it when no one else was looking for that kind of thing.

Wow. I mean the do the next right thing, that is, it's all you can do. Yeah.

No plan to get through it.

And yet how hard, how hard is that? Right? I mean, when. Right. With no plan to get through it. Because it's completely unknown territory, you know.

Yeah. And every, most everyone agrees you're going to die. I mean, the 90% consensus is you're not going to survive. Right. And your career is over. And you know, people's resumes are on the street, your competitors are pouncing, hey, you shouldn't work with this company because they got hacked. I mean, some of the most unsavory behavior I've ever seen in my life.

Yeah.

And I called the CEO of one of my competitors. I said, they're coming after our industry. You need to, here's what you need to do. Here's what we learned, here's how they're going to do it. And a week later, his salespeople were out pitching to, to, to our customers because we had been hacked. So there was some, and it was really bad and, and we, we just pushed through it, all of us did. And I think every one of us was a far better business person. We created A ton of value for our investors and for IBM and. But boy, walking that line for those two or three months was excruciating. And you know, and I think a lot of people would have just said, listen, let's just wind it down or whatever, but you know what? We ended up, we only had one tiny lawsuit and almost every one of the customers we had at the time, thousands, almost every one of them stayed with us. So it was really an amazing lesson to do the right thing.

What a story of resilience. What a, what a yes journey. Really.

Yeah, I wish I didn't have so many of those, but I've got a couple question right?

I mean, you get through it.

How do you do it when your.

Brand is really in so many ways about resilience? Like when you really, you really are saying to the, you know, the powers that be, the universe, hey, let me, let, let me have more, more of a. More, more fodder for this, this.

No, I would have preferred to have far fewer soul crushing experiences in my career. Just a couple, few less that one particularly. But I had a couple.

Yeah, well, I was gonna, you know, you, you answered the question before I, I asked it. So I. Do you think it's hardest to deal with yourself or with. Or with those others that you're referring to, by the way?

I had never thought about it that way. I think it's. I don't really, I don't. The hard to deal with myself doesn't compute with me and so I've doubted myself. So maybe that's what you're asking. If I doubted myself, could I get through it? But in every case where I've really faced a crushing situation, there was no one else stupid enough to come in and take the job. I mean, everyone's running for the hills, so getting somebody in would have been nearly impossible. And the only person that would have come in would be a wrecking ball. A control, alt, delete person who shuts it down and starts it over again. And that was never really an option because of all the commitments that I, and we had made to our stakeholders. So we had to, we had to see it through and die trying if we needed to.

Exactly. Yeah. You know, that's, that's so interesting, the die trying thing. I, I start a lot of my, my keynotes. I'm a, among other things that I do podcasting and, and so I've heard authorship stuff. I love to do the keynote work and, and I always start with the same story. I mean it doesn. What my topic Happens to be. I start with this, with a story from my days as a lifeguard at the beach at 19 years old. And one of those particular stories has not got a happy ending. And it won't ever have a happy ending. But it. At a certain point when we were debriefing this, this, this search and rescue, that. That wasn't successful. And our captain, you know, our CEO at the time for the beach, said to us, you know, we're not gonna. No one's ever gonna go down in our water again or on our watch again. And you're. The command at this point is that you make the save or you die trying. That or you die trying. Stuff I take really to heart because that became.

That's a mantra. That's literal for that. For you, it's a. Yeah, that's really a powerful angle. I hadn't heard anything like that before, except. Except the military.

Yeah, it has that flavor to it. But you know what? There's so many life and death. I mean, obviously that was literally life and death. But you know what, when you're in. When you're. When you're managing, and I've been a CEO, too, of a company that was not as large as the one you were, but when you're, when people's livelihoods are in your hands, whether it's 300 people or 3,000 people or whatever it might be, or it's 30 people, it's. There's. There's a. There's a responsibility that feels like that because, you know, for a person who can, you know, to pay their bills, pay their mortgage, you know, pay their, you know, have medical insurance, any number of other things that are related to. To that, as well as the people who invest, put their money in. Maybe it's their retirement funds, it's their, you know, their 401k. I mean, who knows what, right? This just a big ripple effect for sure.

The way that's always been very visceral for me. Yeah, it's other people's money, which I bear more responsibility for than my own. And I think it's, you know, if I've had some successes. Part of the reason is I take a great responsibility when people entrust their careers and their money with us. And particularly when it's customers, right. These people go out in their line. If you run a startup, any customer that bets on you is often taking a career risk to put you inside their enterprise. And, you know, if you, if you blow up on them, and this happened in the hacking thing, that people that had really bet on us were just getting. Just getting their heads twisted around by their bosses. Like, why did you pick this company?

Sure.

So, yeah, it's. It's. But I think while we focus on all the downsides, I think the other. The upside is that the. The hot. The wins are that much more glorious. They're that much more memorable, that much more powerful and transformative. I was just thinking, I hadn't thought about this in 30 years, Adam, but I remember, you know how you have the senior yearbook and you got this. I don't know about your high school, but I had a senior quote which I just realized is relevant to this. I said, I want my life to be like a roller coaster. The fun isn't being high or low, but I want to ride the hills. And I just said that when I was like, what I. However, 17.

So anyway, prophecy is what that is.

Seriously. Right.

And it's not why when my wife said. When Randy said to me, let's never get boring, I was like, our lives have never been anything but this beautiful.

I love it.

Roller coaster.

It looks great. When you get on a podcast and you've got. You're doing a keynote speech or you're inviting me to talk to your. Your community today, and it all sounds really great. And I guess the point is that the reason you do this and people love to listen to you is that there. I'm sure some people are in pain and they're struggling and they're trying to figure out if it's worth it and to know that they're not the only ones that have ever had to go through barbed wire to get where they're going to go through. And that. That there is hope. It doesn't mean it will work out, but it's probably survivable. Other than your life story. Lifeguard story, but other than that, stories like that, it's the career stuff. You know, you're. Is. My friend from the military said you're not as good or as bad as everybody says. Bruce Springsteen said, you know, you're just the end of the day, you're you.

Yes.

Be that fiercely has been for my. It took me about until my mid-40s to figure that out, but I. A lot of. A lot of things I didn't love about my skill set and my. The way I. I was wired. A lot of things I did like. But in my mid-40s, I. For a variety of reasons, the world told me just to fiercely be who I was. And I was a much happier person after that.

I'm a little thick, you know, I'm like, I'm not the fastest to pick stuff up. It's like at some point you go, I'm stuck with myself. Like, yeah, you know, I'm not gonna be six feet tall. I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm stuck at five, nine and a half. That's it, you know, or five, nine. I probably shrunk by now. So it's like there's a, there's an element of that as, as being good, objective. Truth is the point.

I was, I like that. Yeah. You know, I, I, I work at a venture firm that's tied to some of the largest corporations in the world in the US and we held a event at topgolf the other day. And so, yeah, I love that place. I've swung a golf club maybe seven times in my life. And so I'm supposed to be. And I'm the host and we have some of the top executives from these enormous Fortune 100 companies. And so I'm quite nervous about it and complaining to my wife and honey, I'm going to look like an idiot in front of these titans of business. And she just looks at me and her wisdom of 30 plus years and she says, just own it, man. You suck at golf. Just own it. And you know, and I did. And I was a little embarrassed. I mean, I was like many people golf to say, where does the ball go? To me, it's more like batting average. How many times did I actually hit the ball? Right? I was batting about a.500 on that, on that Topgolf. And they were laughing their butts off at me. But it was all in fun. And it was, you know, I think, I don't think any of them are going to invite me to their, their country clubs. But it was, and I would have preferred to do something I might be better at, like chess, chance I can hold my own. Right. You know, or building a computer network or something. That's really nerdy. But we were playing golf and I owned it and I had fun. And you know what? They're still returning my phone calls, so.

Buddy, I love that. I so love that, Bill. I love that that came out. You know, and what you said earlier, I think you, you were, you're spot on that the people who are listening to this, you know, there's a lot of very successful people and success is a very subjective thing. Anyway, again, what's the objective truth? I could say, you know, if you're, if you're listening right now, if you're watching, listening, whatever it is, there's. The objective truth is that, that you are very blessed and there's a lot of ways to, to look at your life and go, well, this is what's missing. That's what's missing. Or that's when I have anxiety about him, is tremendous amounts of anxiety right now. People are exhausted. Right. And so, you know, just the fact that you can take a moment even just to think of things in a little bit of a different light is something of, of a privilege. It genuinely is. Because the, the alternatives. There are many alternatives that are less. Are less of what? Of what you know, are less of a blessing. And we can find gratitude at any second. I mean, that's, that sounds like almost like, I don't know, motivational or whatever, but the truth is we can actually find gratitude in any, in any moment, in any second, which literally dissolves anxiety in the moment, it dissolves anger, which is. We are like literally angeraholics in so many respects in this country.

Powerful phrase, and I agree.

Yeah. So I wanted to come back to that thing you said. For those people who are, you know, in wherever they are in the moment, it, like pain is the, is a, It's a funny topic because, you know, is pain required? Do you think? I asked this question of a, of a brain scientist researcher couple of, couple of weeks ago, So I want to ask you, and I know it's not your area, but, but from the standpoint of a, of a, of an entrepreneur, of a CEO, of an executive, what is pain required or is it optional? What do you think?

I think that if you avoid pain in any pursuit in life and particularly in your career, I think you'll fall short of where you want to be. I don't know that it necessarily means that you'll experience pain, but if you go out of your way to avoid it, as many people do, as I, as we all do sometimes, that you're almost certainly not going to end up where you want. I think it's a necessary being open to it, accepting it and surviving it is a necessary attitude towards being successful in life and in, and in work.

I think this is, this is what you said earlier, like when you said do the. Do the next right thing. Bill and other people were questioning the wisdom of that, of doing that next right thing. They were looking to avoid pain or more pain.

Yeah, yeah. You just want to. It's so difficult. You know, it's funny, you and I had connected to talk about this energy book that I wrote, but I actually wrote a book. So before I wrote that energy book, I was practicing my writing because I'm not a. I'm not. I'm a very slow writer. I want to give a speed. So I took all the notes I'd written for my two boys over their lifetimes and before they were born, and I assembled them into a book I gave them. And a couple friends saw it and they liked it so much that I ended up publishing it. And this is all the stuff we're talking about is like the story of my friend in the military that's in that book, and it's called your Mountain is Waiting. And anyway, it. It's a. It's funny. It's wonderful to connect with you, Adam, because the way that you think about life is. Mirrors a lot of the way I do. And I've never had the courage to. To sort of share it broadly. I'm much more of a nerd, and I'm a business model person. Those are the things that I'll share with the world. But I did write that book for them and was convinced by them and others to make it available outside of just our family. But it's. I think that there's. There's, you know, big, big things like great adventures with great friends and do the next right thing. These are really core principles that I distilled in writing that. That book. And I think the. It's so helpful for people to realize that they're not in these tough situations, not the only ones there. And others have been there. And so. And once in a while, you'll come across someone whose point of view, your podcast and others that'll say, this is what I need to hear right now, and I'll push through it. And that's where I think great joy comes and great sense of reward. And I'm, you know, it sounds like you and I are both at a very good point in our lives, but it's not always been that way. And it's such an honor to be able to discuss the highs and the lows and to remember that and to meet you, to know that you've gone through your own stories is such a. I don't know. That's. That's the only thing that when I think about one of the things I said in that book and I say all that, I always look back, I look forward and say, what are they going to put in my gravestone?

Right?

And then that simplifies so many of the decisions I make in life, because no one on no one's gravestone I've ever seen has their net worth. When they died, I can't recall ever seeing a gravestone that had the net worth. And so my wife and I have given away the bulk of our money because what the heck are we gonna do with the money? So we've given the bulk of it away, and it's never had the companies it took public. Right. It doesn't have that on there. It doesn't. You know, it doesn't. It doesn't. They reached a senior vice president of 141. That's not on their gravestone. Right. But what is captured there is the people that love them and the person that they were. And so that exercise of looking forward has always been one of those powerful ways that I ask myself, is this really what I want to spend my energy on? And I think there's just. I've always. Life's crazy busy, and you get caught up in the moment and you're chasing your career and the next big deal and your kids trying to get into this school or just got in trouble in that way, and you're just, you know, my wife and I are just disagreeing on this thing, and my neighbor just said something insulting or whatever, and sort of getting through those moments can just engulf your entire life. And I love those exercises where you step back and you say, well, let me think just for a moment about everything. And one of the points I make to all the people I've worked with, I do it myself, is if you're in a position in your career to allow for this, and we're going to start doing this at this venture from I've joined is take. Take one or two days every quarter or every or twice a year and shut off your email. Go someplace where you don't. There's no distractions, no kids, no spouse, no cell phone calls, and go, just think about the big questions. And once I got the hang of that, I actually wrote down the way I survived all the stress of my job was I'd write down the. The things that were driving me nuts, that I was like, if I don't just solve this, it's going to be anxiety. I'd write them all down, and I knew then sometime in the next three months, I would have time to go focus on the questions. And psychologically that just those things didn't just add up. They became cumulative. They became stuff that I could solve in the future. And I did. I did.

Yeah. It's so fascinating, right, that, like, questions, questions and answers have a cause and effect relationship. And, and I think when people don't ask enough questions, like what you're talking about is a process to ask, especially the questions you don't know the answers to. Those are the best questions of all. But, but just to ask the question to me, I don't know the timing of it, but I have faith, I truly do, that you can never get, never ask a question, not receive an answer. I just don't know. We don't know when that answers.

I like that, I like that. Should, should have put that on my book.

Feel free. On the next edition. You just. Speaking of books, you've got a new book out called Freeing Energy. And I think this is a great segue into the last piece of our, of our talk today. Would you tell us a little bit about this book, Freeing Energy? Yeah.

I think there are two parts that are interesting and to be brief about each is that, you know, I sold my company, IBM. I was sitting there doing all the interviews with the Wall Street Journal and the Financial Times as they're saying, oh, this is, it was IBM became IBM's marketing cloud. And I, I wanted to remember the moment. So I stepped out of the room and went into a conference room by myself and was just thinking for a very brief moment, wow, I've got all this money now and I've reached this high level in my career. And I was overwhelmed unexpectedly with the sense that I needed to do something that mattered with it. It wasn't because I was called to do something. I just was overwhelmed with the recognition of so many people I'd met that didn't have the financial comfort, didn't have the resume and the network, and were devoting their lives to something much more important than themselves or their career. And so I began a quest to find something that I could do that mattered a lot more than me. And we gave away the bulk of the money. And my wife had this thesis that if I didn't, if I, if I had enough money not to have a job, that I would lose the fire under my ass. And she says almost exactly what you said, Adam, is that, you know, you're going to be boring if you have enough money to worry about managing your money because you got to be worried about building something. And so I went and searched to find something that really mattered that I could get my business head around. So I was looking for something that had three things. I was looking for something that would make the world better for my children. I was somewhat aware of climate change and pollution and all that. Second of all, I had become aware through some travels of the billion people in the world that have no electricity, have no water. And the third is I wanted to do something to make a ton of money. And so I looked across those three and I came across this idea of small scale electricity systems, micro grid, solar plus battery. Whether it's a teeny solar battery system in a hut in Africa that you can buy for $5 or it's one that's powering a whole campus of at a factory. But this, this is a single, I call it a Lego brick, I call it local energy. And the more I looked at it, the more despondent I got because this is such a regulated industry that I thought you couldn't pull it off. And I almost, almost gave up. But I kept pressing on it and found finally figured out how you could take this idea and turn it into an incredibly exciting industry. And that's really what the book's about. And it's written for entrepreneurs and innovators and to some degree advocates who want to have cleaner, cheaper, more resilient, resilient electricity systems. And the timing I didn't know. But the timing has turned out to be fantastic. Since I finished writing the book. The whole Texas grid went down for a week. California shutting off their grid all over the place. Louisiana went down for the New Orleans went down. We're going to have some problems this winter for sure. Across the world. We're watching Ukraine get their power shut off. So this idea of resiliency is moving beyond a existential question into something that's very real for a lot of people. Plus the solar and batteries have become so daggone cheap that it's now affordable for people to do this. It's actually cheaper than buying electricity from the grid. So this whole book was born and it had been such a journey and such an enjoyable time. I interviewed 400 people all over the world. I climbed to the top of a wind turbine. I sat in the headquarters of the largest solar company in the world in China, sat in mud huts in Africa, went to European solar manufacturers. I was so, I mean I was having a great time actually. But the book that came out of it had some, I'd like to think some pretty big ideas that are been fascinating. I finished it about a year ago and I'm still, I'm getting more and more calls now than when the book came out. Yeah, and I think the idea is starting to resonate the US government for the first time since I think it was President Bush, back then energy wasn't political like it is now. And President Bush passed a bunch of laws to make renewable energy affordable and they were re upped by both parties presidents. But this time around the US Government's leaning into it in a way that no other world government has. This inflation, funny name Inflation Reduction act doesn't do a lot of inflation reduction but it's a fantastic for clean energy and it's going to put the United, it's going to create millions of US jobs, good paying jobs. It's going to put the US dependence on China and Saudi Arabia substantially smaller. And while it is still politicized to some degree, you notice it doesn't get the same political acrimony that some of the other things we see up in D.C. so I'm excited. This is a great time to be thinking about clean energy and it's a great time to think about small clean energy. And that's really what the book was, a bit of a manifesto on how to do that and do it well. And I've been very flattered at the attention and the recognition the ideas have gotten.

Wow. Yeah, the, I mean environmental sustainability is such an important topic. I think you're right. There's, there's some policy, you know, I.

Don'T want to cut you off, but that's actually exactly why I wrote the book because everybody, when they, everyone leans into the. It's an environmental thing. It's not. This is the whole point of the book. It doesn't use the term climate change anywhere in the book. Yes, the entire point is this is a fantastic business. So yes, the industry was born out of environmentalism. But leave that aside. You could, you could hate the environment, you could want to shoot all the baby seals that you're going to see. But if you want to get rich, this is the hottest industry in the history of humanity to make a lot of money.

Well, it's interesting. I don't know when there was a, the two things got conflated to begin with because how is it that, that that something that's environmental or that you would use the word environment, you know, gets, gets the, the rap somehow that it's not profitable or that it wasn't not for profit even, you know, like.

20 years ago it wasn't. The only reason you would build a large wind farm 20 years ago is the government was putting pretty huge subsidies in. Even more subsidies than the government gets for fossil fuels. And the fossil, the renewable subsidies have gotten smaller and smaller. But what they did in this big Law they passed a couple months ago was they broadened the number of things. It's not just solar and wind, it's all kinds of energy production and energy distribution. So it's a great time to be in energy and hopefully the book will be interesting and inspiring to some folks who I wrote it for. Actually the opening of the book says it's written for the 10,000 entrepreneurs and innovators that have not yet entered the industry, but who will join the industry and change the world.

So my last question is going to be a play on that, which is because for the most part I would say our company is committed to wellness in the workplace. That's, that's why we speak about resilience. But resilience is just one aspect of what it means to create workplaces of, of well being. And I want to know how it is that you renew your energy. So we talk about renewables, we talk about clean energy. We have to constantly be re refreshing, recharging and resetting and restoring ourselves, regenerating ourselves. And I speak to renewable companies. I get, get called in for that conversation quite recently, which is fun. That's a total blast. Right, so my question to you is what's something that you do that is a, a way that you, you create your own renewable energy? Maybe it's practice, ritual or something like that. I want to get your philosophy on that.

Someone told me a couple of years ago brilliantly that the definition of an extrovert versus an introvert is that an extrovert recharges their battery with people and an introvert recharges the battery by themselves. And I am a hardcore introvert. I've spent my life, you know, acting like I'm not, but I am. And so when I, these times I mentioned earlier, when I get by myself isn't just for ideation and big thinking, but it recharges my batteries. I, I, it takes energy to talk to people for me and if I get away from all human beings for a couple of days, that's, that's probably the biggest thing that I do. But when I, when I'm not quite as busy, which has been most of my life, but on those rare occasions of my life I'm not quite as busy as I am. I love to build things with wood and metal and just sort of hammer, nail, saw those things. That brings me to spend a few hours in a wood shop and come out with something that didn't exist before is a source of great reward and battery charging for me.

I love it, buddy. And you Said it earlier. There's a lot you and I have in common, interestingly enough, and despite appearances that I regain my energy in solitary practice or in small YouTube settings. So, yeah, yeah, this. I think you put it. You put it really well there. The objective truth is that I, I, I prefer. I prefer to be alone. And it's not because I don't love people or want to be around people, exactly. I love Wannabe. It's just that I know that. That when I am depleted, when I'm. When I'm tired, that I can go to a source, me, that will restore me well beyond whatever capacity is needed. And I think people don't often, because, again, through youth or through inexperience or. Or just having not suffered, maybe not. Not haven't had. Had those moments of pain that they don't. They don't know themselves well enough to know how. How to recharge. And that's why anxiety and exhaustion and things like the great resignation or quietly quitting, these are just. These are just terms that are used when people are in. Are in. Are suffering. Yeah, great. I like that. Suffering, which is optional. And I, I know that might sound, you know, a bit harsh even, but a great degree. To a great degree. That's why I asked you that question. Who's, who's hard, you know, is it hardest to deal with yourself or to deal with others? To me, my, My, My philosophy on this is that it's. It's hardest to deal with ourselves. But when we, when we learn how to deal with those, Those challenges, we're experiencing, like emotions that feel funky or that we don't want to experience, so we repress them or suppress them or, you know, we learn that from our parents. You should never show your anger or you should never show your, Your sadness or your, you know, like.

Right, right.

Well, so that's, That's a problem that can be resolved at, you know, by going inside and I. We don't go inside best when we're, you know, in a crowd of 10,000 people. We do that on our words.

Yeah, I agree.

Well, Bill, I again, couldn't have. Couldn't have enjoyed this conversation anymore.

Thank you. Same.

Thank you. I got you giving me a great, great, great morning. I love this. So I would love, as we always do, to. To make a request. This is to the audience here. So if you really enjoyed listening to what Bill had, and I can't imagine not for. First of all, go out and get freeing energy. Go to Freeing energy dot com. We don't typically Say it's in the show notes, but I don't really, I rarely kind of do it do it that way. But I do think this is a book you should, you should go check.

Out and change the world.

Absolutely. And, and there will be show notes about more of what Bill is up to. Etc. We would love to hear from you. So if you've got a comment for us or even a question, I can get that question to Bill. It's easy. You can get it to him too. You know, usual social channels and whatnot. But you can go to AdamMarkel.com forward/podcast. Leave a comment, let us know what you thought of this conversation. Leave a review. Because hey, I don't know algorithmically how it works. I just know that when you all give this thing like a great rating, five stars is terrific, then somehow or another more people get to listen. And so if you think more people should be listening and you'd willing to aid us in that endeavor, we'd appreciate that great review as well. And lastly, I would say this. Wherever you are in this moment, if things are feel great or they feel not so great, that thing that you've decided in your head like this sucks or that's great or whatever, that may not be the objective truth and you may not know what the objective truth is for 10 years or 20 years. So right now, do what you can. Just take care of yourself, restore your energy however it is you do that, you know, around a lot of other people or, or in some other solitary way, but renew your energy and, and that way you, you get to keep showing up each day and maybe someday, just like Bill said, you know, you go through the crucible just by doing the right thing.

Thanks for listening. We hope you now have even more tools and greater insights to build resilience and become change proof. Remember to leave a review on Apple podcasts and you may be featured in an upcoming episode. For more resilience tips and strategies, including support for building change proof teams, visit AdamMarkel.com to get your own free resilience assessment, go to rankmyresilience.com.

Sam.