Joe Sanok — Living on the Road, Opening to Heartbreak and Parenting as a Single Dad

You know, as soon as the sun came up at 5:30 or so, like, I was wide awake. And so to say, I'm awake, what can I do to ground myself, to be the dad I want to be, to be the person I want to be, to be the business owner I want to be? My strongest meditation practice started then, and it came from a place of need rather than a place of I should be doing this.

Welcome to The Art of Accomplishment, where we explore how deepening connection with ourselves and others that leads to creating the life we want with enjoyment and ease. All right, everybody. Today, I'm excited to speak with Joe Sanock. Joe is a business consultant and a productivity researcher. He's written 5 books on the topic, the most recent being Thursday Is the New Friday, which is a book on the 4-day workweek, which is an idea that I can definitely get behind. He's also the podcaster behind Practice of the Practice. The podcast. How are you doing today, Joe?

I'm doing great, Brett. How are you?

Yeah, doing well. And I'm really, really happy to have you on the show today.

Yeah, yeah, this show is awesome. So can't wait to be here. Or I am here. So can't wait to talk.

Yeah, well, tell me a little— tell me and the audience a little bit more about yourself. What did I miss there? I know that you've also been living in a camper van with your kids. Tell me something more about Joe Sanock to fill us in here.

Yeah, you know, I took a really traditional path in regards to studying psychology and getting master's degrees in psychology and counseling and worked in the nonprofit world for a long time and also just mental health, had a private practice for a number of years. So was in the work of individual counseling and growing a group practice, which, uh, I really helped, uh, and enjoyed helping angry kids for a long time. So I think that really positioned me to, uh, know a few different techniques in regards to connection, because teenagers just often, rightfully so, have a lot of boundaries up and, uh, shields up. So that's part of my history. Uh, went into business and podcasting back in 2012, uh, to just teach therapists how to start, grow, scale, and exit their private practices. And so I've been doing that work for a decade now. Um, I have two awesome daughters that are 7 and 10, and they are bold and creative and push back on things. So, you know, it's a two-sided coin— lots of fun and lots of, uh, challenges.

Beautiful. Well, I want to get right into the meat of it then. Tell me something in your personal journey that shifted the way that you relate to either your therapy practice or your growth as a consultant and your growth in business?

Yeah, so the biggest thing actually is pretty recent. In September of 2020, my family, we went on the road in a camper, 37-foot pull-behind camper. I'd never pulled a trailer before. You know, there's very few times in life that I'd never backed up a boat. Uh, and so there's very few times in life that you have the opportunity to, uh, learn something new that if you do it wrong has the potential to kill people. So, you know, took this on. Uh, Christina, who was my wife at the time, uh, it was her big dream and I was totally down for it. And so we were on the road for 9 months, uh, living in national parks all over the nation. Uh, but in February of 2021, uh, we began our uncoupling. And in the middle of this road trip, she decided she wanted to stay in California and not have the family stay with her. So we spent a couple of months kind of sorting through some of that and a lot of uncertainty. And I mean, 17 years of marriage where it was very confusing. And so in that, you know, getting her a car, getting her an apartment, not knowing if this was temporary or long-term. And then, you know, taking two little kids, 7 and 10, across the country all alone. You know, I had never backed up a camper without another adult helping. So to have, you know, these little kids with walkie-talkies helping me back up the camper and having them have big questions like, why isn't Mommy coming home? And so then, you know, throughout that summer, going through that uncoupling and eventual divorce and now being an unexpected single dad of two little girls that You know, their mom flies in once a month to hang out with them for a bit. But it's one of those shifts that in so many ways revealed in me my own thoughts. And I mean, we can kind of go into some of that, but to really— in the past, I would have tried to optimize, like, how can we get marriage therapy? How can we work on us? How can we fix this? But to really let that go and to go into my own self-development during that time, to let things unfold. Really became a really helpful thing for me in a ton of different ways.

Wow. Yeah. That must have been really challenging to be going through an uncoupling with your kids, going straight from being together 24/7 on a road, on a, you know, living together on the road, not just a road trip. And then having the uncoupling happen in that, in that process, that must have been really hard.

Yeah. I think especially the 2 months before I left, as I knew, it seemed like we were uncoupling and the girls didn't know yet. To, you know, every morning when the sun kind of hit, like, we're in a camper together, you know, we're seeing each other every day, you know, as soon as the sun came up at 5:30 or so, like, I was wide awake. And so to say, I'm awake, what can I do to ground myself, to be the dad I want to be, to be the person I want to be, to be the business owner I want to be? My strongest meditation practice started then, and it came from a place of need rather than a place of I should be doing this because Prior to that, meditation was something that, "Oh, I should probably do that. All the smart people do that. All the successful people do it." But to really have it be a place of need where every morning I was doing Sam Harris's 20-minute daily meditation, was reading the book "Awareness" and then the book "The Untethered Soul" to really just allow things to unfold naturally, studying Taoism a ton during that period of time to just let myself allow the world to unfold and to stop clinging to what I thought it should look like. To have daily walks and daily planks and daily push-ups to just get that physical frustration, anger, sadness out, it set up a foundation for this new life that still sustains and has become something that are tools that I probably wouldn't have learned as quickly if it wasn't such an intense situation.

You mentioned that you had studied psychology and you'd been doing therapy, and then you had this realization that you really had this need for this deeper self-exploration. And, and these tools. And what was it about your, your way of being with yourself prior to having this experience that you now recognize wasn't serving you?

I think I've always been— we might call it like a knowledge broker, someone that just craved knowledge and curiosity. And, you know, I double majored in both psychology and comparative religion in my undergrad. And, you know, after I graduated, took a year off to travel and, you went to Nepal and Thailand and stayed in some monasteries and went to Haiti and met some voodoo priests. And so, I've always been someone that wanted to see how other people view spirituality and philosophy and ways of thinking. But in a lot of ways, it was kind of a slow creep to going from kind of your head to your heart and just allowing that to unfold. And I think for me, I'm not sure that it was that I did anything wrong prior, but it's more that I had been through really tough things. Like in 2012, my oldest daughter had open heart surgery and then a couple months after, I was diagnosed with cancer. And I mean, 2012 was just a rough year, but it didn't really crack me open in the same way as having all this stuff hit the fan. And there's things that I wouldn't talk about publicly in that, but they were just terribly, terribly hard. And so to have that full-on cracking open, I think that was almost what was needed in order for me to go kind of deeper into my psyche and into my own role within that couple for 17 years.

Yeah, so tell me, having had that cracking open, one of the things that, you know, Joe, other Joe, and I often talk about is that heartbreak increases your capacity to love. It allows you to see the world more clearly beyond your ego, beyond your identification. And it's something that we often avoid, and in the avoidance of, we end up recreating for ourselves. And then when it comes, we find that we're— we tend to find, if we've processed it fully, that we're actually okay as we are and have everything we need. And what is it that— if that resonates with you, what are a couple of gems that you pulled from this heartbreak?

Yeah, I think the, the biggest thing is, uh, you know, as Michael Singer talks about it, that natural unfolding of life. Um, I've always an achiever, someone that goes after big things. I'm an Enneagram 3 and all those type inventories point to that. I like to get things done. But, to really understand what it means to find peace kind of in the moment without having achievement be the thing or that external reinforcement be the thing that provides that. My dad is a school psychologist. In that era of psychology, behavioral psychology was a huge thing and it was a big step forward for the evolution of parenting to go from the World War II generation that oftentimes sometimes hit their kids to I'm going to give them a star chart and give them rewards. That's a huge step. And, it also created in me a ton of external reinforcement, the star chart that someone in authority gives me. That doesn't always help the individual develop internally to find the internal lotus of control. And so, to be able to get to that point where I'm able to say, "Okay, I've achieved so much, great, but I also have a life that millions of people would die to have this life exactly how it is.

Yeah, I'm curious, and this might be a vulnerable question, uh, to answer, and you don't have to, but to what extent did that, you know, external star chart get projected into your relationship, and how much did that impact it?

I mean, I think that I, I've been aware of kind of that star chart mentality, um, for a long time. And so I've been doing a lot of work, you know, even since college, in adding to that? Because I don't think it's necessarily bad to have that as a starting point. I think too often we just throw out the way that we were raised and say it's bad. Um, you know, there's this philosophy of personal development called Spiral Dynamics with, you know, the first tier, each phase you're kind of saying that the group behind me is so dumb because they think this way, now I'm so evolved. But kind of the next step is what they say is transcending and including, to take the best of things and include that, and to just say the other things don't serve me. And so I think that, um, within the relationship itself, I definitely had a— there's a way to do this that people have studied and figured out. So the Gottman Institute, they've been studying marriage for 40 years. They have all of these great research techniques. Why wouldn't we implement those within a marriage? And so I would say it probably wasn't as star chart-y as it was, uh, we can optimize this, we can optimize this. And, and probably watering the lawn for 2 people, and that's why the grass was green, rather than letting things naturally unfold. If I had genuinely stepped back and didn't overcompensate as much as I did, most likely this would have fallen apart years ago, um, because the natural disconnect probably would have been revealed much earlier, at least, you know, in hindsight. Um, but who knows, you know? I mean, if we could always replay history in a million different ways, if I could have done this or done this. But I mean, I think what I'm seeing is, for me personally, I don't want to overcompensate, uh, for someone else's lack of their own development. Like, I shouldn't care about their development more than they care about their own development.

Yeah, or try to fix them or think you know better for them on how they should develop.

Yeah, exactly.

And then have that energy in a relationship. I'm curious how your relationship with your children has changed having undergone this experience and whether it's on the axis of the star chart or optimization or some other major axis of shift that has occurred.

Yeah, I think there's been a lot of positive things that have come out of this. To be the primary parent, I mean, in a lot of ways, the structure that I just have for my own life, uh, to be able to do things that I know are good for me and my kids, um, is entirely in my control now. And so that's really helped our relationship for the three of us to say, hey, we all value a straightened house, we all feel better mentally, let's just together keep the house clean. And so we do. So it just becomes part of our new family culture. Or we converted one of the rooms in the house into a Zen zone, which my 7-year-old initiated. She said, what if we had a room that was just for meditation and calming down when we're upset. So they got all their toys that are more kind of like self-development toys, or, you know, ones that will help them relax if they're frustrated. And, you know, we went to Target and got a really soft, comfortable blanket and, uh, you know, put things in there that they'll see and they'll say, oh, this would be great for the Zen Zone. Picked out a carpet that they can kind of trace when they're frustrated. And so I, I think there's a lot of like, what are we feeling and what do we have control over and what do we not have control over, that has helped us kind of together bond differently. And I also think that, you know, in parenting, so often we see people on Instagram or other social media showing how to be the optimal parent. You know, give your kids milk, don't give your kids milk. You know, give your kids a high protein diet, don't give your kids a high protein diet. And, and there's this idea that you can always optimize your child. And honestly, at this phase, they just need a lot of hugs. They need a lot of like downtime. They need to have time that we're creative and we dance and we move and we spend time outside. And those really kind of simple human needs are, are primary. And so we're not going to be in a million sports. We're not going to do a bunch of things where we're running around. We're going to have weekends where we play the piano and, you know, we play outside and, you know, maybe invite a couple people over for a campfire. So it's really, I think, paced us out to say my kids' human needs of connection, of love, of touch, like, that's good enough. And I can provide that all the time. And so I think it's really been a settling for the three of us into it.

Something interesting in that is like, what do you optimize for? Optimizing is a skill that can be very useful in life. And especially in the example of with children, but also in the example with business or with clients or with, in the therapy practice, optimizing for connection seems to get better results every time.

Yeah, well, and even just saying, what's a kid who becomes an adult really need to be a successful adult? So sure, there's a basic level of reading and writing and communicating and math that all adults need. Sure, uh, you know, most kids need to have at least, you know, 8th grade reading and math skills to be an adult. But if I really think about the people I see that are successful, what can they do? They can relate and connect with almost anybody. And so making sure that with my kids, sure, I'm going to have them keep up with their homework. But, you know, if we had, you know, an outdoor fire, a campfire thing where we had 3 different campfires, invited a bunch of people from the school and neighborhood, you know, wore masks and all that. But there was a person that I'm really good friends with that my 10-year-old hadn't met. And so I introduced her to Jay and he said hi, and she was about to leave. And I said, wait a second, why don't you ask Jay how his week's been or something about himself? So, so she's getting in that habit of having conversations with people different than herself. And so to then see her have this kind of micro conversation, a little bit of back and forth, and to get better at that over time, you know, the next weekend she was sitting down with one of my closest friends, Paul, who she knows really well. And she just sat down next to him and said, hey Paul, how's your week been? It's like, this is a 45-year-old guy that my 10-year-old just sat down and was chatting it up with. So, yeah, so to me, discovering what are the true things that I want out of, you know, the limited time that I get to be a parent for them to have as they go into adulthood.

Yeah, interesting. Something I wanted to go back to, you mentioned that your 7-year-old came up with the idea of having a Zen room, someplace where they can go to, to calm down their anger, uh, and among other things. And I'm curious how, how you approach emotions and difficult emotions such as anger with your kids, you know, whether it's on that spectrum of, you know, a star chart to these are the kinds of emotions that we're going for versus letting things just develop. How does, how does anger show up in your family and what is, what is the way that you hold it?

Yeah. So just yesterday, my 10-year-old, um, she had been in quarantine, uh, for 5 days. The— me and my 7-year-old tested negative. And so, you know, she had had a number of days all alone, but she had all this homework she needed to do. And she had been amazing, like more amazing than I expected for such a difficult situation for a 10-year-old. Um, but she just like hit a breaking point yesterday. It was screaming at me about, I'm not gonna do my homework, and this and that. And so I just said, I'm gonna step out for a minute, I'm gonna come back in a few minutes and let you cool down. So allowing it to unfold, allowing her to regroup. But I would say centering ourselves is a big conversational piece. So saying, what do you need right now to, to regroup, or to recalibrate, or to recenter, um, to get back to your baseline? Um, so really letting them initiate that process. But then, you know, in that situation, she, she was very mad, and I just said to her, I think you need to go 'Go outside for a little bit to just get back to baseline.' And, you know, usually she'll listen, and other times, like yesterday, she was like, 'I'm not gonna do it.' And I just said to her, 'I know this is what your body needs. Please do it.' And at that point, she listened and went outside, and then she's able to process. She built a snowman— she— or a snow woman, uh, a very nicely sculpted snow woman. And then she came back in an hour and a half later and, uh, you know, said, 'You know, Daddy, I'm sorry. I shouldn't have yelled at you. I don't want to do my homework, I need to. And so being able to then say, we're all gonna get angry, that's part of having different opinions. Your opinions that are different than mine are important. But we also need to say, hey, I'm just here to help you with your homework. Ultimately, you need to get your homework done. And, you know, was that anger serving you in the way you wanted? Um, so helping her understand like the function of her anger, that it's normal, but it's more, are we injuring people through that anger? And then are we resolving in a way that's healthy?

Yeah. What's a good example of when you've had some unexpected or uncomfortable emotion come up with your kids in ways that you've, you've owned it and shown that vulnerability and, and let the wisdom of that emotion come through you in, in the most productive way?

I'll tell a backstory before I get into the story answering your question. So within the family, I've recognized that as a child there were things that were always right or always wrong. And there wasn't much gray area, whereas in adulthood there's a lot of gray area and things often aren't just right or just wrong. So that's a philosophy I'm trying to teach my kids. So in one area, swearing, I've taught them that. I've said there are words that society says are bad. I don't believe that they're necessarily bad, but there are situations where you will get in trouble for saying these words. So they know the F-word, they know the S-word, they know all these words. We talk about where would you say those words, uh, and use it in appropriate context, where you might get in trouble— school, around the grandparents, probably around their mom, um, so they understand that. When could you use the F word and I wouldn't make you get in trouble for that? And so we talk about when that is appropriate to express an emotion that you can't just say, but I'm, you know, that's so stinking stupid has a different feeling than that's so effing stupid. And so teaching them that, even as 7 and 10-year-olds, the nuances of that. So there was this one day— so they're responsible for putting their own laundry away. So I wash it and bring it up, dry it, bring it up to the room. And they were both being little stinkers and would not do it. And I had had a long day and I was sick of it. And I was also frustrated that I'm an unexpected single dad, and there was just a lot that was emotionally piling up for me. And they just wouldn't do it, and they were being super defiant around. And I just said, put your effing laundry away. But I didn't say effing. I said the full word. I'm not sure how family friendly you want the show to be. And I like stormed out and I was just like so mad. And then I went and regrouped, got back to my baseline, came back and talked about how I wasn't happy that I let go of my emotions, but also why did I feel like the F word may have been somewhat appropriate in that situation. So we hashed through it about how there's times when you are just so mad that you can't find another word than that. And that also could injure them emotionally by, you know, being scary or feeling unsafe or feeling unloved. And I don't want that for them, you know, and I should have stepped out. What should I have done? What could I have done? And having that conversation around, Dad just dropped the F-bomb. Is that appropriate? When do we do that? When do we adjust? How do you recover? How do you apologize? And then what can I as a dad learn from that? What can they learn from, you know, how stressful it can be if you don't put your laundry away? What else should I have done through the day to not get to that breaking point over laundry?

Yeah, this sounds like a common theme of the way that you and your family relate is to be sitting in the question of how do we want to be right now? How do we want to be with this emotion? How do we want to be with this situation rather than should? And, you know, I heard you mention just a moment ago, like, what I should have done. But I still hear you. I hear that being something that you're just going back and replaying and being like, okay, now, now that I've been through that experience, What is it that I would like to do differently? What is it? How is it that I would like to relate to this? And I think sitting in that is something really beautiful to be teaching, teaching your children, which is not that certain things are good and bad, but that certain things have various consequences, and those consequences are different based on your context. And life is an exploration and experiment where you learn what happens when you are a certain way. And deciding which way you want to practice being from a place of discovering what is actually authentic for you. Yeah.

And I think, you know, one, one mindset I have as a parent is that, you know, when they turn 18 or 20 or whenever they decide to leave the house, there's going to probably be only a handful of major lessons that, that they hold with them on a regular basis. And so what are those handful of lessons I want them to leave with? I mean, one, as a woman, is that consent is something that you should expect in regards to relationships with other people. And so, everything I do is around consent. If I'm going to give them a hug, I'll say, "Do you want a hug?" If we're wrestling or tickling or something and they say, "Stop," I stop. And so, making sure that consent is a strong part of their lives to make sure that having some element of choice. So many kids, they can't eat any sugar until they're 18 and then they go crazy. It's like your whole life you've been told you can or can't do these things and haven't had to make your own decisions around food, how you spend your time, how you spend, you know, all sorts of things. I want them to have a lot of choice and have a lot of accountability around that. And so that's gonna inform things differently. So for example, yesterday while my daughter's in quarantine, a friend, just to, you know, drop something off that would make us feel better while we're all kind of locking down, dropped off a bag of Cheetos. So I gave her a little bowl of Cheetos and I said, I have a surprise. Surprise for you. It was behind my back, uh, but I want you to think about what's something you want to do for yourself that's going to make it feel like you're moving forward in any area, and that you can choose to use this thing I'm about to give you to reward yourself. And so instead of it being me giving her the external reward, it's her saying, here's a goal for myself, I'm going to achieve it, and then I'm going to eat these Cheetos that she didn't yet know she was going to get. And so I showed her the Cheetos, and then she, she had said, okay, I could watch a video, do an art project about the documentary I watch, and then when I'm done with that documentary about otters Uh, I could eat the Cheetos. I'm like, great, do it for yourself. Like it's for your own sense of self, but you know, you're rewarding yourself with the Cheetos. Um, so being able to have those handful of things that I focus on, uh, but those are things that in my own life, even outside of being a parent, I'm going to think about that intentionality beyond just being a dad.

Yeah. And I'd love to tie this back into, into your work as well. You've written 5 books and I'm curious how your writing and your approach to writing as a practice. Has shifted through this journey?

Yeah, I think that when I used to write, it was more like, what does the audience want? What's the positioning that I want to have for myself? Whereas Thursday is the New Friday has definitely been about the macro societal shift. Like, do I believe that the way we're living with a 40-hour workweek plus is that good for society? And so, you know, realizing as I dove into the history around the 40-hour workweek and actually how recent it actually is, and how the studies are showing that it really isn't needed to have a full 40-hour workweek, that most of what we can do in building creativity and productivity could be done in a 32 or fewer hour workweek. That process for me first was just gathering as much data as possible. To me, having as much research and citations that is beyond— A lot of coaches or self-proclaimed experts out there will just write their opinions or a few case studies. To me, I wanted the actual evidence that shows this and the historical evidence and the stories behind it. And then, you know, finding those stories as well. So case studies, businesses, um, even just interesting stories about how the 7-day week the Babylonians totally made up, you know, 3,000 years ago because they could only see 7 major planets. Uh, and so we just as easily could have had, you know, a 1,000-day week, uh, if they had better telescopes. So it's like the Romans had 10-day weeks, the Egyptians had 8-day weeks. So this thing that we think is really normal, the 7-day week, is completely made up. So discovering those cool things and saying, well, where would that fit in the book? And then whiteboarding out each chapter, saying, okay, what are the main points? And then just killing it as much as I could every Thursday when I was writing.

Yeah, all that's really fascinating. And I'm also curious how, how your approach to your internal locus of control, your like internal reward system, has moved through this through this process. Do you, do you write books with a similar, with sort of a similar approach to prior to this decoupling experience?

You know, I would— so I finished the book before we hit the road. So it was due by October 1st, and I finished it on September 1st. So I wanted to not have that hanging over my head and could just focus on the media side of, of things when we were on the road, because I just knew that the focus would be much different when I was in a camper and things could go awry much easier when, you know, whether it's water systems or septic systems or who knows, there were so many things that went wrong in addition to the uncoupling. Right. But I would say that my process in writing the book really, I was learning neuroscience around how to be more productive that I applied immediately to be more productive in writing the book about book, How to Be More Productive. So it was very meta in that, you know, like the University of Illinois had this amazing research study, um, that looked at vigilance decrement. So vigilance, how well you pay attention to something. Decrement, meaning that it goes down over time. So tasks that are somewhat boring get more boring over time. You make more errors, you're not as productive. But they found that even just a 1-minute micro break every 20 minutes completely eliminates vigilance decrement. And so even just saying Okay, I'm going to set a timer for 20 minutes, and even if I'm in the middle of a sentence, I'm going to get up, I'm going to do a plank, I'm going to walk downstairs, I'm going to get a glass of carrot juice, whatever it is that I need to do for my body to feel like it's going to be productive. It can't be looking at a screen, it can't be continuing working. Just using that neuroscience around sleep, around how we structure our days, about how we do sprints, looking at my own sprint type, all those things I was writing about in the book, but then directly applying as I was writing the book.

Behind all this productivity, I'm curious, what is your— what is the deeper motivation for you to be productive? Because a lot of people will find themselves in a loop of being productive for being productive's sake, for churning out more work product. And I'm curious for you, what is the deeper want and the deeper need that you're fulfilling in this productivity that you practice?

To me, productivity is the end of the cycle. Uh, we have to start with slowing down first, um, to allow our brains to rest, um, to allow those good ideas to come out, and then to spend our best time on the best movements forward instead of just across the board. So when I enter into productivity, every minute that I spend working is a minute I could be doing a hobby. I could be cleaning the house. I could be, you know, putting my kids' laundry away if I made— if I didn't make them put it away. That, you know, I could be doing something different that is good for my family or my friends or my relationships. So if I go into my work that way, saying I can't dink around, uh, and be unproductive because it's stealing from my family, it's stealing from my friendships, it's stealing from my exercise or my body, that's a different posture than being productive for productive sake— productivity's sake. Then it becomes, if I'm going to work, it needs to be the best use of my time in regards to my business. So I can't I can't just waste time to waste time. Now, there are times that I choose to intentionally slow down. I choose to intentionally allow my brain to free associate so that those good ideas can come to the surface because we know from the neuroscience that when we're stressed out and maxed out, that's not when we have good ideas. It's when we're taking a shower, going for a walk, on a long drive without music on. And so, just allowing those intentional times to slow down and have those hard and soft boundaries then allows me when I am going to work to have the most productive days possible.

Yeah, yeah. And it sounds like what you're saying there with recognizing that everything that you're doing in your productive space is in some sense stealing from some other area of your life. It sounds like what— another way to say what you're saying there is just that it's, it's a choice. You're, you're optimizing for a different thing. And if you optimize for productivity, you might forget to optimize for connection with your children. You might, you might not optimize for connection to the source of inspiration of what it is that you're being productive around.

Yeah, absolutely. Because I think it goes back to those, those core teachings of, you know, who am I in the world? Who do I want to be? How, how am I intentional with my family, my friends, my hobbies, my health? All those, you know, domain areas that Joe often talks about. If we're not intentional in those areas, then the work we do is that what you were talking about, that productivity for productivity's sake.

Yeah. So how do you As sort of my final question for this episode, how do you teach your kids or how do you model for your kids how you approach your purpose in such a way that will help them find their own purpose from their internal locus of control without pattern matching too much what Daddy does?

Right, right. Well, we did a podcast together while we were on the road called Leave to Find, which now has a bit of an ironic title to it. So the Leave to Find podcast for us to say what's interesting to us Um, so I reiterate that I get to do work that I absolutely love doing, and that helps a lot of people. So do I want my kids to be podcasters? Sure. If they want to, um, you know, I could care less how they choose to make money. Um, as long as they choose to contribute to society, do it in a way that can eventually sustain themselves and doesn't hurt other people. So for me, it's less important to say, here's how you have to do it, but let me give you opportunities to explore. Uh, so for example, my 7-year-old, um, when we were at the Fort Collins Children's Museum, They have this whole amazing section that's a hands-on, like, DJ scratching, mixing section. Uh, the kids can do this kind of two turntables and a microphone type stuff. Um, from that, she said, I want to be a DJ. And so my backyard neighbor is like, he does that. He's amazing at it. He has a new sequencer he just got. And, um, so giving her the opportunity to just explore and play. And to me at this age, let's explore and play. So, you know, my, my 10-year-old, a couple of years ago, she wanted to do a lemonade stand. And so I said, well, let's talk about this. You know, there's really two types of lemonade. You know, you're going to have the powdered mix, which is really easy. You'll probably be able to charge $0.25 or so for that. And there's hand-squeezed lemonade, which you probably could sell for $2 each. Here's what that would encompass. You know, making simple syrup, maybe having it be fancier with basil leaves or frozen strawberries. Like, which do you want to do? So then we brainstormed. She said she wanted to do the hand-squeezed one, and then we said, well, you know, if you just set up outside, do you think many people are going to come by? No. Like, what other things? Where might be a better traffic area? Well, our friends Paul and Diane have a house that's right on a main area. You know, most lemonade stands, you don't realize there's a lemonade stand until you drive up on it. What if we had signs before it? There was a marathon that was going to be going on. What if you did it on marathon morning? Okay, marathon morning. What else do people drink in the morning? Oh, coffee. So we brainstorm all of these things that she's helping lead and come up with the solutions for, and then I'm helping to support. She ended up making $90 an hour. And so it's like she killed it. I mean, like these people are giving her tips. They're like, I can't believe there's basil and frozen strawberries. They're taking pictures of it. And, you know, she was selling coffee for $2 and lemonade for $2 and just absolutely killed it. And she actually hired one of the neighbor boys. That was older than her to help because it was so busy. And I'm like, you need to pay Finley like a good wage, at least $10 an hour. So after she paid me back, after she paid this kid and paid her sister, she still made $90 an hour. So to me, giving those kind of opportunities and thoughtful discussion, and you know, if she didn't want to do it the next 2 years and then she just said, you know, I think I want to do the lemonade stand again, I said, well, then you need to call Paul and Diane and see if you can get on their calendar to either rent out their front yard or, you know, have them donate that space for you to use it. So she's going through that process of just learning how do you think like an entrepreneur without it being something I force on her.

Yeah, fascinating. One thing to kind of poke a little bit that I noticed is that in, in a lot of what you're describing there, like, she had the idea and then it seemed like you came to her with a bunch of suggestions as well. I'm curious to what extent, like, when she went to do the lemonade stand the second time, to what extent was she coming up with like, oh, I remember we did this that time, this the other time, and extrapolating from that, I could also experiment in this way. To what extent was that coming up for her internally, and to what extent were you going like straight to suggestion mode?

Yeah, I think that I would see it more as opportunities. So if she decides she wants to do a powdered lemonade stand and sit all day out front in front of our yard and make $2, that's fine. I, I could care less. She'll learn from that experience just as much. But I think most kids at her age don't even know the options. They don't know how lemonade's made. They don't know what simple syrup is. They don't know that people like frozen strawberries and basil in their lemonade. They've never made a cup of coffee. And so just being able to say, here are opportunities, like, we can do this, it's going to be more work. What questions do you have about it? Well, how much, how much does a pound of coffee cost? Well, it'll cost you $12. Or we have a friend Jen who works at a coffee shop, maybe she'd donate it. You could call Jen and ask her if she'd donate that. So Higher Ground Coffee donated like 3 pounds of coffee to her first round. Kids just don't know. And so saying, here's a bunch of options, what sounds good to you? So they said, you know, when we got home, they didn't want to keep doing the podcast. Okay, great. Now they do. And so how do we make it different than just being on the road? Because we're not on the road anymore. So now we're making a list of just people they think are interesting that they want to interview. So their grandparents, our friend Marty, he, you know, he's a DJ, like, let's have these interesting people that we just interview. So letting them take the lead kind of second round and third round while still supporting them and giving them ideas.

Yeah, one of the things that I really like about what you're just saying is that there's, there's this impartiality to the outcome. You're not concerned with how much, how successful the lemonade stand is for your daughter and that it makes a bunch of money. You're excited that it worked out, and that wasn't really the thing you were aiming for. What you seem to be aiming for is being in connection with your daughter, your daughter being in connection with what she's doing, and providing as much guidance without becoming overbearing as possible so that she's able to optimize her learning and optimize her enjoyment. And I think that's a really great way to parent.

Yeah. I mean, I think so many parents have their egos wrapped up in their kid. Uh, my kid got into this college or my kid, you know, got to the state finals. And of course you want to be proud of your kid. Um, but if your own ego and sense of self-worth is coming through your child's volleyball game in 5th grade, like you probably need to do some internal work.

Yeah, indeed. Well, uh, thank you so much for joining us, Joe. I really, really love this conversation, and I'm excited to check out your book too. It seems interesting.

Thank you so much for having me on the show. This has been awesome.

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