153: Eric Partaker — High Performance Without the Costs

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So there's a default, a reactive self, and then there's a self that you create and invent. And the big question is, who do you need to be? Who do you need to be in each and every area of life to have the performance, to achieve the performance that you want to see? Not just in your business, business life as a leader, but in every area of your life? There's a question about who do you need to be and who could you invent yourself to be? That's what today's show is all about with an acknowledged or renowned CEO entrepreneur from the uk. So listen in as we talk with Eric Partaker. Hello and welcome again to the Scaling up business podcast. I'm your host and scaling coach, Bill Gallagher.

On the show with me today is.

Eric Partaker and welcome to the show.

Hi, Bill. Thanks for having me.

So we're here in Atlanta in an empty meeting room right in the middle of the Scaling Up Summit.

Slightly too cold.

It's a little chilly.

Right?

It'll keep us awake. Yeah, that's an issue. And we're gonna talk about high performance. So Eric lives in London. Right. And your accent's kind of blended.

Yeah. So I'm half American, half Norwegian.

Half American, half Norwegian. Norwegian.

Living in London, living in London. Also have a chain of Mexican restaurants.

And a chain of Mexican restaurants.

Right.

And as we're getting set up, so Eric talked to the coaches, he talked at Scaling Up Summit. And this focus around high performance, I think is of interest to everybody all the time. All our folks, they want to perform well in their company. They want to perform well personally. They're trying to balance all of that kind of thing. So Eric's background. McKinsey, CEO of the year. Top 30 CEOs. Crowdfunded a restaurant, now a restaurant group. Right. A restaurant chain and worked with Skype while on the consulting side, helping to build Skype's business. And my son's business efforts have been funded by one of the shared investor. Shared investor.

Right.

Jan Tollent, who's helped my son, Jack Gallagher with his projects around AI and crypto and now crowd cloud computing, hosted apps kind of stuff. So cool.

Yeah.

It's funny when you find that you're connected.

Who would have known? It's like same investor. And we're in Atlanta, so we have.

Great speakers all the time. It's great when we can actually kind of do it in person and have the show recorded when we can actually see each other versus Skype or that kind of thing. So before we get into it, talk to us again about this interest in high performance. Right. Anything that we have like that usually starts early on. I know it started for you.

For me it was an obsession that started quite early. I remember being in high school and wanting to make the high school basketball team.

I was never a dream at my height.

Right. But when you're six two, it's like you feel inadequate when you're not on the team. But I didn't have the benefit of anyone in my family being athletic, so I literally did not know how to play. And this is my freshman year and so my goal was I have to make the varsity team. And so from summer of freshman year through sophomore year, basically almost every day I would wake up before school about 5:30am, go with my basketball to the park, dribbling the whole way, do a bunch of drills, practice, and did that for about 15 months and it worked. And then I went from not knowing how to play basketball at all to through all that deliberate practice, you know, making the varsity team. So I can't, you know, the seed was planted then that if, if you really want to develop mastery at something and you know, close that, that gap.

Be obsessive.

Yeah. Be, you know, really, really go for it. Put in, put it, put in the, put in the practice. You know, one of the things I try to teach my boys, a 14 year old and a 5 year old, is that everyone is born exactly the same. Right. We're all a white canvas and what you paint on it is just what hours you put in, which direction, how many repetitions you rack up, you know, all of that. So that was like the seeds of high performance. And you know, along the way I got my first job was with McKinsey and Company.

Yeah.

So super high performance environment. They call the bottom 10% every year fell more in love with it. But that kind of started me on the path of probably pursuing high performance and not the right way though. So. Yeah.

You're saying that working in a consulting company environment is unhealthy.

Yeah.

But you learn amazing things and you.

Get, you get exposed to, you work on cool things.

Learn amazing things and it really, it fortified the high performance drive, but it also created this person who would work two days straight. One time I worked nearly three days straight, no sleep, 100 hour weeks, 120 hour weeks. And then that started to seep in other areas of my life.

We see that all the time. I had some clients who were doing regularly like two three hour nights all the time on. And I'm like dude, stop that like.

And the research is so great. Book out recently, why we Sleep by Matthew Walker, preeminent sleep scientist or researcher, neuroscientist. And you have all this hustle attitude out there. Yeah. And it's literally going to kill us.

Hustle and grind, man.

Yeah, yeah. I mean here's an interesting thing to look at. So one of the coaching certifications I have is through a high performance institute. And one of the studies that they did is looked at the energy expenditure of a CEO versus professional athletes, elite military. And they found that a high performing CEO is actually using the same amount of energy as a professional athlete. So then let me ask you the following question. How many professional athletes have great seasons and play the game well if they're sleeping five hours a night, you know, not looking after themselves, don't have, you know, the family support, maybe are drinking too much, not exercising. Right. None. Right. They're gonna have very short careers. Yeah. So you know, it's, I almost feel like we have to start communicating in an anti hustle.

Right.

You know, message because it's just incongruent with what the job demands.

So tell the story for our listeners of where it shifted for you.

Yeah, so I had, so I've been obsessed with, you know, I say I've been obsessed at a high level, high performance for about 20 years, 43 years old now. Although again, you know, the seeds were you know, kind of planted in high school and for the first. So following my time at McKinsey then went on to manage a non profit, joined Skype in its very early days, helped build that up to its multi billion exit to ebay. And all this time I just kept pushing, pushing, pushing myself and then started my own business, a chain of Mexican restaurants in London. And again just kept pushing myself and it Culminated it was November of 2010 and I hadn't been having issues with my blood pressure and feeling quite odd and had gone to see my doctor and he kept advising me to really chill out. Your vitals are not looking good. You need to be careful. And I had an emergency room episode and they had that kind of give me some nitrates, actually to open up the arteries and pathways. And he kept telling me, calm down, you need to calm down. And then I was at the airport feeling quite funny, and I gave him a call and I was about to board a plane and I told him what was going on. The last thing I remember him saying is, Eric, don't get on that plane. He's worried about changes in pressure and all. I hung up the phone. My friend and colleague was sat next to me and asked me, so what did he say? He's well aware of the symptoms that was going on. And I said to him, he said, everything's okay, get on the plane. This is, this, you know, literally in the face of death.

How many of us have done that to a spouse, a business partner, somebody. Oh, it's cool. I'm cool, man. And you heard stuff, advice that you didn't want to hear.

Yeah.

Because you weren't willing. I'm like, I'm going to go for it anyway because I'm special because I'm.

And you're untouchable. Right, Right. So get on the flight. Sure enough, almost like as soon as the door is closed feels like, you know, a bit of a weird sensation.

Well, your anxiety's building because now you're going against the.

I see. And then at cruising altitude, and then things go seriously wrong.

So cruising altitude, right now you're at 38,033 or something, but you're operating at like a 7,000 foot altitude at that point.

Yeah, yeah, exactly.

That's in freedom units.

But so. And things are. Yeah, they're just fundamentally different than anything I've felt before. And. And I look over to my friend and I said, I'm not. Something's not right. I'm not feeling well. And moments after, just literally felt like somebody was sitting on my chest.

Yeah.

And I said to him, again, something's not right. Something's about to happen. And he came over, he grabbed my arm and he would later tell me that he thought it freaked him out because when he grabbed my arm, he said it felt as if it had been in an ice box. Like it wasn't part of my body, but like freezing cold. You weren't getting left Army. He jumps over me, goes to the stewardess and calls for help. I'm also sweating quite a lot at this point and feeling very, very nauseous. And calls for a doctor. Doctor races up, takes my vitals. So lucky that there was a doctor on the flight. And then very quickly says to the stewardess, we need to land the plane. I think he's having a heart attack.

Yeah.

And last thing I hear is the pilot echoing the request and asking for an emergency landing. We land, Runway's cleared off, there's an ambulance there. They come on board, take me off immediately. IV in the arm, nitrates again. And I came. Super. And you know, you mean you're still here, right? You're alive. You look pretty good. And you know, I remember at the time saying, the only thing that came out of my mouth was, I have a five year. I had five. My son was five at the time. I have a five year old son. Please don't let me die.

Yeah.

And they later said to me, you're so lucky. You're so lucky. We caught you just in time to open things back up. And that was the wake up call for me because I realized that, you know, in Japan, I think they actually.

Have a word for.

When people have a heart attack from working themselves to death. I know there's an actual term for it and I don't know what it is, but, you know, I experienced that and I started just re looking at things, consuming every book I could on psychology, neuroscience, Habit Formation. Did a coaching certification with High Performance Institute that I mentioned was really inspired by Brian Johnson, who runs Optimize, and Professor BJ Fogg at Stanford University's Behavior Design Lab, trying to figure out, well, there must be a better way. There must be a better way of still achieving the life you want, but not dying, but not dying from it.

Right. Like balanced performance.

Yeah. And so the first 10 years of this kind of high performance journey was pursuing it the wrong way.

Yeah.

And then from that moment on, and look, things didn't. It wasn't like the next day, everything was perfect.

Right.

It was still a lot of struggles.

You know, but that's a shift to wake up.

My family almost left me even years after because I still hadn't changed quickly enough. But it was, it was a mortality kind of thing and it changed my view on things.

As I've said on previous shows, I did about 45 endurance events in the past and I would do like four triathlons or marathons a year and long swims, long bikes, things like that. And I became very obsessed with it. I weighed a lot less than I did then and I was more fit and could do more so that time. But there were many times where I had similar kinds of wake ups where I was training so hard. I was running one day and my heart went all the way up to 225 and I started to sort of lose my stuff and it pulled back. And then I went through all the testing. They're like, okay, you need to back off the coffee. You need to make sure you hydrate better. Like that kind of thing.

And I think as entrepreneurs we're all, you know, we have this gene or this, this mindset that is quite dangerous because it can, you know, lead to this kind of like all in nature at all costs.

Yeah.

And, and, and all the hustle talk out there right now certainly doesn't help. And yeah, I get when you, when you're starting, you know, when I started out my. There's times when you have no choice. You have to, you have to hustle to keep things together. But it's unsustainable is the point in the long term.

I like that. I think that's the problem is that there are many times when I hustle and grind.

Right.

And when I'm obsessed with and I dig in. But it's only after time and experience and today that I also remember, okay, I also need like a beach day. I need a chill out day. I need a like whatever. And then. And I work with teams from time to time on sort of planning your life and structuring things out. My wife looked at my calendar and she's like, oh, that freaks me out the way you do things. I need some spontaneous time or whatever.

Right.

And then because I like to structure and plan and organize things. So I put in time for us to have that way. And for a long time I don't have it anymore. But I used to have like all Sunday morning was blocked out so nobody could ask me what to do because there was already an appointment. If you asked me, I'd say oh, I'm already booked. But what was in there was surprised and delighted by what the universe threw my way.

Awesome.

And then stuff up for spent time with my wife and family. But it was booked and structured in that way. Right. Which is a particular phrasing that I learned from a thing called mission control some time ago. But that look at the designing the life. So talk then about growing the business. Right?

Yeah. So left Skype, ran a non profit for a while and was Missing Mexican food.

Yeah.

Because I had grown up in Chicago, love Chicago.

I could eat Mexican food every day. You grew up in Chicago?

Yeah. And then I thought there was no good Mexican food in London.

There's not a lot in Chicago.

No, there's some. I certainly got the taste of something better than London could offer.

Yeah.

And so it's very unglamorous. Why that business started. It was a case of me missing the food. The food didn't exist. So I had this crazy idea, why not build a restaurant and we could almost like it will feed us.

Yeah.

And got the first restaurant open and, you know, now it's become a well known, you know, public favorite Mexican restaurant chain in the uk.

Chilango.

Chilango, yeah. Also the most successfully crowdfunded restaurant chain in the world.

So we're literally crowdfunded a restaurant that's pretty unusual in itself, right?

Yeah, yeah, yeah. And so we're powered by the people, you know, we're not powered by private equity, we're not powered by the banks, we're powered by the people that bring the money in the door. Yeah.

And I haven't been, but it looks cool. And I'm in London in a few weeks and I'll have to go.

Well, we're definitely going to have to meet up then. Yeah, that's awesome. I'll take you through the whole menu. So just as a side note, because I'm very passionate about branding and any entrepreneurs out there who haven't come up with a one word distillation for their brand yet, I think they have incredible opportunity and I'll give you perfect case study. Okay. So when I got the first restaurant open, it wasn't actually called Chilango.

Yeah.

It was called Mucho Mas. It's sort of like an mvp.

Yeah.

Great post. Rationalization.

Yeah, yeah.

And did the Chilango brand reinstall that into the restaurant? Yeah, food, people and the place are all the same.

Chilengo is a term that means like Mexico City, someone from Mexico City.

So we get the right brand in.

Yeah.

The sales go from 12 and a half thousand pounds a week to 25,000 in six weeks. And have never and have just grown from that base. So 100% uplift from getting the brand. Right. So the one word distillation of the Chilango brand is vibrancy. Vibrancy for Nike say it's competition, Disney's happiness. If you haven't invested in branding, do it. So that was a journey from that was a founder to CEO journey. So founder, you Know, in that early days, it was like everyone can kind of just do everything, and it all works out somehow magically, but that doesn't scale. And, you know, and I knew that innately from my time at McKinsey and Skype. And so, you know, now as a. As a CEO, we have 100, nearly 150 employees.

Yeah.

And I have to kind of, you know, be the coach and hire the specialists in each of the area.

Yeah.

Right. To do the job, you know, that. That I can't do. That I used to do. Right. And, you know, that's the kind of the journey we've made. And along that way, you know, when I was an entrepreneur, was recognized as one of the top 30 entrepreneurs last month, CEO of the year. So I feel, like, fortunate that we've scaled up in the right way. Right, people?

Well, there's a big shift from the launch of something right. In the founder stage when you're doing stuff too. That and a lot of times we see as CEOs go through this, as founders in particular, there's not an evolution of their role. And sometimes you need to move entirely into R and D. And sometimes you're just the visionary, but figuring out who you are and creating that role, understanding, evolving the behaviors, rather than just doing more of the same.

And I'm super fortunate. And this is a great testament for first who, then what.

Yeah.

So I'm super fortunate in that I co CEO Chilango with my business partner, Dan Houghton. We were colleagues together at Skype, and we had a pact then whoever had an idea would tell the other. We'd start that business on psychometric testing. We literally, like, literally test at opposite ends of the spectrum.

Oh, that's good.

Completely opposite. So the reason. The reason our partnership has worked so well.

Yeah.

Is that together we create a human that doesn't exist in the planet.

Yeah. Yeah.

So, you know, Dan's very, very focused on the details. I'm more focused on the future and the brand, the culture.

Yeah.

And, yeah, that works.

You know, we tend to think of that as somebody has more of a strategy visionary kind of thing, and then somebody is more operator, integrator kind of role.

That's me and Dan. Yeah. And that works super well. And that duo, by the way, that you just described, that exists unknown to so many people behind all the world's greatest businesses. You look at Microsoft, you look at Apple, there was a duo there. It's just you only tend to see the visionary, but they're really only half the equation.

Yeah. And I Think a.

A problem often is not understanding what your identity ought to be and what role you're playing and what behaviors you need to do and then what you need to honor and respect in other people. Right. Having that balance to that team. When I went to hire my assistant, I had two changes in assistant. Last couple of years. I'm like, okay, the job description is really clear. There are things that I do terribly. They're like consistent operator routine kinds of things. They're the follow through kinds of things. Things. Their social and relationship management kinds of things. I do a terrible job at those, but I hired specifically for those. And then I honor and respect that that needs to be done versus, like, screw that. Like, you know, we're on this. And then. And I have before hired people who were like, just like me. We had similar hobbies, we had similar.

It feels great, right?

Feels good.

Oh, this is my friend.

But like, why am I hiring a friend? I don't need to pay your friend. Your friend.

And I think, you know, what you just said there about, it's about at least having, from an emotional intelligence point of view, the awareness of where your gaps are.

Yeah.

And being able to leave your ego at the door such that you can hire the person in to kind of COVID those gaps.

Yeah, yeah.

And not being precious about it.

So you have this wake up call, you begin to shift your approach. You learn some coaching things, you start a new business. Now you're obsessed in something else.

Yeah.

And you mentioned something. What happened to the family?

Yeah. So, you know. Yeah, I'd love that. The story was like, you know, Hollywood perfect and you nearly have a heart attack and everything is perfect after that.

Right.

It wasn't the case. And so after that, whereas I was pedal to the metal all the way to that point.

Yeah.

I then started to go through bouts of. Okay. Try to keep things balanced and, you know, have family time and, you know, not work too much and get into the gym. And, you know, that would go well for, say, five, six months. And then I'd be, you know, all in again and ignoring everything else for another five, six months. And so it ended up being not this like, high intensity thing all the time, but almost like a roller coaster.

Yeah.

And it got to a point where, you know, my wife came into the bedroom one morning, so Saturday morning. And. Yeah. And she was, you know, she was really emotional and she said. She said, I'm gonna leave you. It's okay. Yeah.

Sorry.

Thanks.

Look, your love for your family and your wife is obvious. It's Funny, we don't often talk about these things.

Right.

We like to talk about our business.

Strategies.

But talking about the things we care deeply about.

Right? Yeah, yeah.

Plus you're Norwegian.

Yeah, yeah. Sorry about that. It's the first time I've ever talked.

You to about this. No, it's a gift. Look, I have CEOs who struggle with issues in their relationships. We have other members of the leadership team. We have people whose wives come to them and say, I'm through with this.

I'm not part of this.

I have one going on right now in my client base.

It's a gift. Thank you. Yeah. So that was a wake up call. Yeah, it was a bigger wake up call than the plane.

Yeah.

You know, and, and so then I, you know, I really, you know, really focused. How do I, how do I get my identity right? You know, I, how do I not lose what's so precious to me?

Yeah.

And, and so that inspired, you know, a lot of, a lot of soul searching, A lot of like, okay, I can't just, Eric can't just be about work. And you know, there's, there's the family side of my life.

Yeah.

And there's the health side of my life. And, and so, you know, looking at each of those three things and then I mentioned before, I was very inspired by Brian, Brian Johnson at Optimize and some of his stuff. And so I started this exercise of on a daily basis asking myself if I'm going to close the gap between who I am and who I'm capable of being and if I'm going to really become the best possible version of myself in each of these three areas, then that needs to be very identity driven. And so on a daily basis I decide, well, what does the best look like showing up today work wise? Give that a name. And you know, I have a default for that. So often it will say world's best CEO.

Yeah.

World's best coach, depending on what I'm doing.

Yeah.

And. And then within my, you know, kind of health area or energy area, I have a default there to, you know, say World Fitness champion. Yeah. And then I have a default, you know, identity for, you know, family or in the love area. So the world's best husband and father. And that you say default.

You mean this is your standard?

This is my standard.

It's not a default. It's not accidental. It's actually created and invented by you.

Yeah. And it's again, I might change it. If I'm cycling one day, my identity for that day might Be Tour de France endurance cyclists or something.

It's aspirational, it's created, it's something that you want.

But let me tell you something for sure, if you don't. We all know that we want to close the gap between who we are and who we're capable of being, because all our pain, discomfort lies in that gap. Right. And if you don't set the bar for what you want to be in each of these areas, well, if you have no target, what's your chance of closing any gap? Well, there is no gap because you've not even set a higher bar. So it's just. You don't say. So this changed me in. Give an example. So I've taken each of these identities, these default ones, the ones that don't change on a daily basis. So 6:30am, I have an alarm that goes off. It says, World Fitness Champion. And it's really fun. It still makes me smile when I look at my phone and I see that go off because it says, World Fitness champion starts in 10 minutes. And it changes the way I show up in the gym. I ask myself, well, how am I walking into this gym right now as a World Fitness Champion? At 9am, World's Best CEO goes, well, how am I walking into work right now as the world's best CEO? It changes the way I show up. And then the best one for me is at 6.30pm, world's best husband and father goes off as a prompt to remind me, how does the world's best husband and father walk through that door right now? Because in the past, I'd walk through and the littlest one might ask me to play hide and seek. And I'd say, I don't have time.

Right.

Later, my wife might ask me to help her with something.

Yeah.

I'm too tired.

Yeah.

But knowing this identity and being intentional about that, how would the world's best father respond to the hide and seek requests? Right. How does the world's best husband respond to that? And we know the answer.

Yeah.

And so the exercise that I do daily, which I would encourage everyone to do. Yeah. Is because. Because your life is fundamentally, it's, you know, it's about your energy, it's about your work, it's about your love.

Yeah.

You know, Sigmund Freud said it's, you know, as humans, it's all about work and love. But you need energy to power that.

Yeah.

And write down, what does my best self look like today? Yeah. And then write some virtues down.

So this is the morning.

Right.

And Then what do you mean by virtues?

So world's best husband and father, you know, how does that look? What are the characteristics? Behavior. So I write things like, you know, playful, loving, full of laughter.

Yeah.

World's best CEO, decisive, inspiring, reliable. And then in the spirit of 40X, love that book. We need lead measures each day, which tend to be behavioral.

Yeah.

Right. So pick one thing that in a way will prove that you're being that identity.

Yeah.

In congruence with those virtues. So for example, today I wrote down this morning, my energy identity was world fitness champion.

Okay.

My virtues I wrote as relentless, varied in my approach to exercise in the gym. Calm, confident. And my number one today is I'm gonna do three sets in the leg press, but crazy reps. So I'm gonna do a set of 100, a set of 200 instead of 300.

Oh, yeah. Nice.

For world's best coach because it's a coaching event. So I'm in that kind of Persona now. I had inspiring, reliable, just a couple of virtues. And my number one behavior today that I wanted to now was this podcast with you and then world's best husband and Father. I actually wrote, say World's best father and virtues. I put it as caring and reliable. And my number one today is when I call my 14 year old Alex later on a video call on WhatsApp. And yes, there's lots of other things I need to do in each of these categories. But by choosing a really high bar, identity, some virtues, and then picking a number one that maps back to it. If I just do those three things today, I'm winning the day.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So there's creating an identity, choosing or identifying the virtues that go along with that. Right. And then the qualities, the aspects of being. And then picking specific behaviors, behaviors or actions that you could take that are consistent with that. Right?

You got it right.

And I hear you doing that in the morning and you said do it then at the end of the day too. What's the end of the day routine look like?

So a great day starts the night before.

Yeah, that's for sure.

Especially if we want to get out of this vicious, not enough sleep cycle.

Yeah.

People complain about their productivity.

Yeah.

Well, it's because they're not well rested enough. So I recommend doing three things in your PM routine. One is always plan your next day the night before. Gets work out of them, out of your mind. What are your top three things? Where do you have white space? Where are you going to drop them in? Next thing I recommend you do is have a concrete shutdown complete time, a time when your workday is going to end. Deep work stops, deep love begins. And then the last thing is digital sunset. So if you're looking at any electronics one hour before bedtime, all this is evidence based by the book why we sleep. I have no affiliation with that book. You will decrease your melatonin by 50%. Yeah, melatonin. You need to go into deep sleep. So digital sunset. You set phone alarm?

Yeah.

When that goes off, basically your phone goes off and it stays off for the rest of the night. Use a traditional alarm clock if you need it and just no electronics. That will lead to a good eight hour block of sleep. Might take some time to get used to it, but we need eight hours of sleep. By the way, if you think you're someone who doesn't need eight hours of sleep, five, six hours, I've been doing it for years. Two things. You've just become accustomed to operating at a lower baseline, that's all.

Yeah.

Number two, your chances of being a person that has that gene is equivalent to also being struck by lightning in your lifetime. So you don't have the gene. Yeah.

And so then you create the beginning, you create the end of the day. I used to do the same kind of thing when I was training. I would notice that if I didn't set up my training and my day for that matter, before I went to bed, that it was very hard to get going. But if I would put out my kit for the bike in the morning, fill my bottles, throw them in the fridge, that kind of thing, then getting on the bike in the morning was like fast. I could get off, I could grab an hour, something like that. I have great hills behind my house, so just go climb. And then I would start the day totally vigorous. Same thing with a run or whatever else. It was like setting everything out and then thinking about the day. So what are the appointments in the day? What are the key things? Am I visiting customers? Am I doing whatever was like envisioning that whole day and then whatever the bedtime routine was. And then I would actually wake up and I'd have to sort of refresh because I'd be like, what am I doing today? And I would look at and think about and create my day. And those kinds of days were remarkably better or different. Today I have practices in like, I have gratitude towards the end of the day and I have a wrap up where I look back at what did things. Inevitably some things didn't happen in the day. So I'll move those then to the next day or to some future day re engineer so that they don't disappear entirely and then look ahead at the next day and that kind of thing. And one of the things I do shortly before I go to bed is look at the next day and imagine again, even though I did it at like 5 o' clock now I've had some dinner and that kind of thing. So before I go to bed, what do I need to do? And then I might organize, like if I have an early morning, like get my clothes out or that kind of thing. So getting up is just really easy. I'm not like looking around for what am I gonna wear today.

Exactly. And I would recommend doing that all as part of your shutdown ritual.

Yeah. Well, the one shutdown happens in the office.

Right, right.

And then another one is a little like there's a kind of a shutdown of the workday and then a little bit of a shutdown at home. And then I. Yeah.

And we're. Whatever.

Yeah. There's some having, having.

Having some kind of the two parts of your day where you have the most control over the AM and the pm, so you have to exert it. And then when I go into the day, I like to divide my time between. So number one habit is to always be creative before reactive. That phone should be off from the night before. Do not turn it back on for at least the first hour of the day. Don't do any email because you plan the next day, the night before, whatever your number one most creative kind of strategic or whatever thinking project is, work on that for at least one hour. Right. And then I try to divide my time into maker time versus manager time. So all of my meetings I batch in the afternoons because I'm reacting on other people. Any admin tasks I try to do at the end of the day and you put creative, creative and just working those creative time blocks, single tasking.

So, you know, I think that it's interesting because we see in this, you mentioned before, Viktor Frankl and that work and that notion of being creative and as you create an identity and the virtues, you are actually inventing things. And if we think about the stuff that we see all the time with CEOs, it's like, okay, being this responsive, reactive person has gotten me to this point and many of us. It's entirely like, I have great instincts, I'm going to trust those things. And there is some value in that. I see an opportunity, I go for it, I see a stress and I deal with it.

Right.

And I'm reacting and I'm awesome. Except it does get you to these points where you can be out of balance or it's no longer sustainable or workable in a new environment. You come up and things crash down or you plateau and you're like, why doesn't anything work anymore? Right. So your chasing of opportunities, the reactive chasing of that becomes that the ball or squirrel kind of distraction. Then your team goes all off because you write the checks.

And, you know, I can hit this from so many different angles. JOHN LENNON Life is what happens while we're busy making other plans.

Making other plans.

In the military they say, you know, the battle plan never survives first contact with the enemy. MIKE TYSON Everyone has a plan until.

They get punched in the mouth.

And we're getting. Especially as entrepreneurs. Yeah. Point one. Now, if you're also trying to close that gap between who you are and who you're capable being, your best self.

Yeah.

You're experiencing lots of reaches.

Yeah.

Right. So that means that it's not so much about planning.

Yeah.

It's equal part planning. And then how you react to not going on. So. Victor Frank, you know, not going your way.

So.

Victor frankl and man's search for meaning. Yeah. You know, Holocaust survivor saw some horrible things. And I mean, the power of this man. Think about this. So he still feels in control during all of that time because he realizes that I'm free. Yeah. Because my freedom lies in the space between stimulus and response. My freedom lies in that no matter what they do to me.

Yeah.

I still can choose how I respond. Now that's mind blowing.

Yeah. Choice is super powerful.

Yeah. Under the context he was in. So if he can do that. My point is, if you can do that in that context. Yeah. Then we should be able to pull this off.

Yeah.

In the everyday. And that simply means think about what pushes your buttons.

Yeah.

Think about the things that typically don't go right.

Yeah.

And think about your typical reactive response. Yeah. And now all I want you to do and anybody listening to do, is going forward, just try to create a little bit of space between stimulus and response so you can choose the optimal response.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's really bright. I think that's probably a good place to end. There's lots more that we could talk about and stuff, but we probably. This is a good amount for a show. If folks want to learn more from you, they should go to ericpartico.com right. And we'll put the link right in there. But it's Eric with a C, Eric with a C and Partaker with a.

K. You got it? Yeah. Eager to help anyone links your coaching.

That kind of thing there and we'll put the link in the show notes so people can find that. And of course we bring a show like this every week to folks. Something to do with your leadership, your performance, the growth of your business, all the areas of people, strategy, execution and cash. And We've got about 160 episodes now out there on every topic that you could imagine, from getting your team right to dialing in the strategy to managing cash better to executing consistently. And then there's the whole world of leadership and who you are as a leader in the business, whether you're the CEO and founder or whether you're one of the rising leaders in the company or one of the senior leaders. We want to have something for you there. So all that's available on our website along with some free tool downloads and a copy of the book Scaling up for free. If you pay the shipping and handling, we just have people to do that and then so go there. Scalingcoach.com we have public workshops, we have the summits, we have all that stuff available. And if you're looking for a coach, wherever you are, we can help you find a coach. I only coach about 10 companies at a time and you have to have really big goals to be in that group. But I love to talk with everybody about it. So if we can help you find a coach, I'd love to do that. So find us there. Scalingcoach.com, ericpardeker.com thanks so much for being on the show.

Cool. Thanks Bill.

It's really a pleasure to have you. I hope everybody gets a lot out of it. Thanks again.

Thanks a lot.

Special thanks to the original growth guru and our mentor, Vern Harnish. The show is produced by Crystal Carson. Audio production is done at Podfly Productions with audio editing by Albert Burge. Show Notes compiled by Ayn Kudina proofreading by Tim McGowan if you got some value out of the show today, please like share, subscribe, do all that kind of thing. Pass it along. Help us spread the love. Drop us a note. Tell us the parts that you actually loved with a Note to info. Scalingcoach.com thanks again for listening. Keep scaling up.

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