166: Brian Solis — Live a Happier, More Productive Life

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Three places at once when we're not anywhere at all. Our world is fixated on hustle and grind. We tell people we're busy like it's a badge of honor. And yet we're not present. We're not aware, we're not in flow or not so much of the time. I don't know what you're doing right now, but I'll bet you're struggling with this because we all are our devices.

Demanding our attention and not always making.

Us more effective and more powerful. So this is a fantastic show with a great guest who's got a powerful new book in the world of Being Present, Being powerful, scaling yourself. So really excited. Listen in for this insightful show. Hello and welcome again to the Scaling Up Business podcast. I'm your host and favorite neighborhood scaling coach, Bill Gallagher. On the show with me today is Brian Solis and we are talking about something that we're all. Wait, what was that? We're talking about being distracted and busy. I'm so the king of this. I'm really excited for this topic. This is in the world of sort of developing yourself as a leader. Brian is a digital anthropologist. I'm not even sure what that means. I know some of you aren't. It sounds really cool though. He's going to tell us all about that. He's a keynote speaker. He's the author of eight books. He studies disruptive technology and how it impacts the market, society, individuals. And he lives and works not far away from me, across the bay, on the other side. So welcome to the show, Brian. Happy to have you.

Hey, Bill, I guess I could have just hopped on over to your studio.

You could have, yes. And we rarely, rarely get. I think I've done like four shows here. I Do a number in person at conferences. I can see that. But it gets like somebody speaks and then I miss the next person while I'm recording the podcast with the other one. It gets a little something to manage. In fact, it's almost easier sometimes to do it like this. But when people are in town, it's nice to visit and talk in person. So this is. You're going to get into it more. But two things stood out to me. One is like distraction and, and noise in the environment and the effect on me personally, but then also what I see in others. And then this thing that we say, and I think we mean it sincerely, oh, I'm so busy. And some days it feels like a cop out of a racket. Like busy is sort of an excuse for being productive. But my most fulfilling days are not necessarily the days that I'm slammed. But there's something in that that we like, feel good about saying that. So before we get into that, take us through a little bit of your background. Talk to us about what you did, how you got here and that kind of thing. Let people get to know you. Then we'll get into the core of this.

Okay? Okay. Okay. Good. Well, thank you very much for giving me this opportunity to share my story. It's certainly not one that I expected to talk about. I've been in the 10 tech business living here in Silicon Valley since my goodness. I've been in tech since the early 90s and moved here in 96. And my job has been to either make markets by advising early stage startups and to help them grow and achieve whatever their business goals are, whether that's total domination or an IPO or an acquisition. And also along the way, because a lot of this technology has been so disruptive going back to the just the mid to late 90s. I've also studied how that technology impacts specific markets and then ultimately became a digital anthropologist in the late 90s to study how that technology was changing us, changing societies, changing behaviors, norms, values, and then also reverse engineered. A lot of the once I figured out what was happening in the world to help reverse engineer it so that I could bring those markets closer together to help tech have a positive impact. And the reason I share that is because somewhere along the way I became a speaker, an author, an advisor, and I shared most of my work for free. Aside from the books, a lot of research reports, what have you, Countless, countless articles. Just sharing my findings and observations and ideas for the future and that kind of helped me build a reputation here in Silicon Valley. I've launched over a thousand startups, I've advised the biggest companies in the world. And I've also had a fun several years advising celebrities in their market making and their relevant strategies and also in their tech investment portfolio. So it's been interesting.

That's fun.

Been a very interesting career. And then in the last two years, I set out to write what would have been my eighth book, which was a book about the work that I do, not about what the book. I ended up writing and ironically found myself affected by the very technologies that I had been studying and had been writing about for all of these years. I just figured I was immune to it, but I didn't know at first what the problem was. I just couldn't get past that book proposal. I was making all kinds of just little mistakes. I wasn't going as deep as I used to. I wasn't clear in my ideas and their relevance as, as in the past. I was, I just, I just wasn't in the game. I wasn't focused 100% on it. I was, you know, multitasking. I was keeping up with everything else. I was busy as you were talking about earlier, and I just kind of chalked it up to writer's block.

Yeah.

But over time, you know, in months and months and months into that proposal, I just realized that there, there had to been something else besides writer's block. And as a speaker, books are critical to being an in demand personality. And if I didn't get that book out, I was going to run into some real problems.

Yeah. Yeah.

So that's where I took a time out and decided to just reflect on what was going on. And I took a step back from everything. And really, when you give yourself that space, when you give yourself time to reflect. Wow. I mean, because we're so busy, I mean, what's the word these days? You know, hustling or, you know, suffering from hustle porn that, you know, confusing busy with productive and also output with creativity, you know, and expression, with originality and individuality. It's really easy to get caught up in everything without realizing that there's any problem at all. Because you're just so busy checking the boxes and cranking stuff out and keeping up with everything. And boy, though, when I.

Well, so there are a lot of folks in our world and others that that's. I mean, it feels like it's probably not, but it feels like their whole Persona is dropping f bombs and telling people to hustle and grind and that you just need to work harder and you're not working hard enough. But I think a lot of us are working pretty hard. And I know there's slackers out there and we all have days where we do that. But that notion of just hustle. In fact, some of my least effective CEOs are the ones who are awake all night long and who are working a million hours and sending out all these chaotic emails to people, and they just are, like, thrashing around.

That's a perfect way to put it. That's exactly the problem. We're so busy being busy and we glorify that busyness, that it's a badge of honor, it's a status symbol, and we actually lose sight of the purpose and the mission that we're on and also the importance of the relationships that we have around us and that the productivity of those relationships. Right. If you're cranking out email after email 24 hours a day and you're responding in whatever way you want, I guarantee what you're actually missing is the relationship component, the inspirational component, the motivational component, the leadership component of what makes you greater than everybody else. Who's busy and who's hustling and who's dropping F bombs. Because I'll tell you straight up, when I took a break, I could tell you that I was in the process of completely ruining my marriage, completely treating my friendships at a much more superficial level. And I don't think anybody noticed because everybody was so busy. Or at least that I believe that everybody was so busy that it wasn't even just the book proposal. It was every aspect of my life that was suffering from this degradation of just hustle and hustle porn and keeping up and trying to do better than what you did the day before that, but without sleep, by spreading yourself thin, by switching from task to task to task, hitting every channel on slack and responding to every text notification. It's absolutely possible and scientifically. We'll talk about this later. It's impossible to be your greatest, but we don't see it.

So I've been thinking a lot about this since we scheduled the show and I got the notes in preparation and looked at your material, and I was really interested and intrigued with the conversation and talked about two things immediately pop to mind. One of them is like, watching kids and Friends is really easy to see other people do it, less easy to see yourself. But I get annoyed when my wife is texting a friend or looking up something when we are ostensibly supposed to be together. And I get super annoyed when, especially my kids. Well, my kids are grown now. But the rare times that I see them and then they're like looking at something on their phone or a laptop. Stop it. Put it down. Talk to me now. And laughably, tragically amused when I see people walking down the street looking at their phone instead of noticing they're about to walk into a pole or traffic or something like that. And hyper annoyed when I look over as I drive through traffic and I see person after person after person looking at their phone instead of really driving. And again and again I noticed that like people driving slower and not keeping up, putting more. It's not they're being safer, it's that they're trying to manage something so they don't really have to think about the driving. But we know that that is getting worse and worse. So there's that, right on the one hand. And I suffer. Sometimes I notice that, like I go to check something like, oh, I want to know what the weather is today so I can choose what to wear, that kind of thing. And. And then like 20 minutes later I'm like, oh, what was I looking for? Oh yeah, the weather. And then I'll pop that up. Because there are things that are so like wired in now to distract and engage me, some of which are fascinating and some of which are just pure nonsense. But then there's the old experience. Cause I've talked before about busyness with my teams and stop saying you're busy. It's just nonsense. It's not something to be proud of. To one of my earliest experiences in management and that was that I was trying to shield one of my teams from doing a lot of work and keep them unloaded. And I felt like that was being protective and a good manager and they were really unhappy and they were very mission focused in this team and so I'm like, oh, you want more stuff? So I went and then I started loading them up and the more I loaded them up, the happier they got. They wanted to be busy, they, they hungered to that. But I think it was different. That was very purpose centered. It was on task. And I think that we collapsed the two ideas. The one is like the George Bernard Shaw quote that I want to be thoroughly used up when I die, right? And he goes on that it's not, the more I work, the more I live. And he wants to be. He's got hold of a splendid torch and he's got a hold of it for the minute. He wants to make it burn as brightly before handing it off. This idea of just being spent of Ending at the finish line, like thoroughly exhausted, no potential left. And I think that is the hunger. But then we say busy, and it's not the same thing.

You know, I'll tell you, the journey I went on, that was my little.

Rant that you got stimulated in me.

The journey I went on was. Was. Was purposeful in its. In its. In its roots of fixing what I thought was broken or at least getting to the heart of the matter of what had happened and what to do about it moving forward. Yeah, purpose can't be overstated. But purpose is also. It's evolutionary and sometimes revolutionary. Right. Because the more you unlearn and the more you learn, the more you grow. And as you grow, the more you see what you couldn't see before. And I think that's one of the beauties of life. Right? But when we're so caught up in doing anything and everything at the moment, no matter how busy we are, no matter how productive we are, I think the key is being in the moment. And for whatever reason, you have to be in that moment. If it's single tasking, if it's giving somebody your undivided attention, if it's putting breathing in and taking in that sunset, allowing yourself to be in that moment is exactly what wires you to be in those moments more and more and more. Because right now we have been rewired, intentionally or unintentionally, to be distracted. And we confuse distraction with multitasking, and we confuse multitasking with productivity, and we confuse that busyness with happiness because that gives us some sense of achievement. But achievement and outcomes are really aligned with what it is that you're trying to do and why it's important beyond just that moment. I can't tell you how difficult it is for anyone to be in the moment. Which is what you were talking about earlier with people walking on their phones, driving with their phones, responding to every email that isn't living right. And also being spent at that finish line has to be much more than the energy you exerted to get things done. I mean, that GTD and NLP and all of these things that we're using to hack our brains to do all kinds of things isn't necessarily what happiness is about. If you can love and be loved, if you can create and have people enjoy and appreciate your creations, and if you can give yourself to something bigger than yourself, then that's what life is about. And that's. That's where I want to be at the end, but that part is so difficult to appreciate. These days, because we're sort of living life on the standards of what other people and generations before us, going back centuries, have defined as success, right? Material assets, material wealth, you know, superficial relationships. All of the things that actually could be challenged now in a world where we have access to more information, more insight, more cultures, more scenery, other places around the world that we didn't necessarily have access to. So I would challenge anybody who's multitasking and hustling out there to ask yourself, what is it that truly will make you happy? And what is it that you can truly create beyond that mission that you feel you're on today? But the only way to get there is to give yourself the space and time to explore that.

For me, it feels like there's two things that have enhanced that in my life. One of them is just a simple practice of gratitude. So I have two gratitude reminders in my day, and when they come up as an appointment in my calendar and I see the alert, I'm like, oh. And I just stop for a moment and I'm like, what am I grateful for right now or today? And I think about that for a minute. Just bring it to the foreground. And that's such an enormous difference in being happy and centered and all that. And it could come up at lots of different times. And it's a standard recurring thing that I sometimes move around. The other one is just all manner of mindfulness practices, whether it's a yoga or a meditation or taking an awe walk, looking to be awed by something, or just pausing a minute to notice, right? Like that kind of thing. There's a tradition in our. We were told when we got married 25 years ago, and I forget it had a funny old name. But between the wedding ceremony and the reception, we were shuttled off to a side room to have a couple quiet dinner together. And I didn't expect to be emotional about it, but I can feel it as I think about it now, because it was a pause that was just for us to stop and notice the day. Because a thing like that happens in a whirlwind, right? Like there's people and there's stuff, and you say, I do, and then you run off, and then there's a party, and then there's presence and life happens, right? And that little pause. So cool. It was all of 15 minutes.

Just even thinking about that gives me goosebumps. And hearing your reaction to that is. I mean, it's powerful. But you think about how little we give ourselves that space in even the Smallest of moments. Right. I, I have a 22 year old son, but I also have almost started over again with. Well, have started over again. Seven, seven and a three year old. And I have to tell you that.

Bless you.

Just the, just the, just, just the gratitude and mindfulness, just the simplicity of appreciating them.

Yeah.

In, in, in the simplest of moments is. It's eye opening and it's heartwarming and I don't know, I didn't see any of that before. I mean, it took me failing to get a book out to see that I was actually living my life in a way that I couldn't appreciate all of those things and just wanted more. And you know, it's this idea of working so hard because you want whatever things you want in life or whatever accomplishments or whatever motivation that drives you, but it doesn't necessarily mean that that's what's going to make you happy.

Right.

And if we don't know what it is that's truly going to make us happy, then we become entitled to expect the things that we're aiming for simply because we're working hard. And that's destructive. And, and it's not only destructive, it causes some real shit inside and all around us that I'm still paying for because I've spent the entirety of our marriage, from that day of getting married and just doing all of the things that you said and going from here to that, to this, this, that, to the honeymoon to that and then starting my other businesses and advising all these other businesses and building my career and writing all these books and. I just wasn't there, man. And do I have a lot of things? Yeah, but I also have a lot of regret.

Right. I think there's something like you have to forgive yourself. You have to get to the place where you can forgive yourself for that shit and then do something about it now that impacts of it. And as long as you have a now you have an eternity of something. There's an old Star Trek, Next Generation episode that I'm mostly not a huge fan of the Next Generation, but I'm old enough to be an original series guy. But there's this episode where Captain Picard is caught in some alien thing and his time slows down and in this realm he can stop time or somebody, I forget it exactly. But they have this ability to just sort of slow down their awareness and perception and just savor a moment. And I remember being really struck by that idea. And now I think about that. I'll be sitting around times when my kids are grown. So I have a 22 year old son also and a 20 year old daughter. And then it's not very often I see him, but we'll get around the table or be out somewhere together and I'm like, oh, just soak this up. Just stop and feel it, like notice it, smell it, hear it, look at it, savor it. And kind of like the same way that you would swirl around your favorite adult beverage before you swallow it and try to experience all of it fully is not a common thing, I think for everyone. I think we all maybe do it. But cultivating that is really rich and.

Rewarding and doing that in all you do, right. Being blessed, no matter how busy or how much we might struggle, just being blessed to have that opportunity to try to do what you're going to do. I didn't know any of that and I'm lucky enough to have failed in that endeavor. But you know, it wasn't an easy.

Journey to what had you noticed? Was it just the book and not being able to get the book done that had you notice this and take stock of everything or what was the trigger?

It was a domino effect, I guess, where the first fall was realizing that I was not going to get through that proposal. And then the journey of exploration of what was going on in my life is what triggered the next one and the next one and the next one. Until I got to this place of realizing that I was so far from where I thought I was. And by that I mean from a center of reference. Right? So all of the things we hold as our core value, our core purpose and mission, that vision that we have for ourselves. I was so far from where I thought I was that in taking stock, I saw every aspect around me of which was either failing or holding on by a thread. And none of it, and none of it was any good. I was who knows how far away from a lot of things completely collapsing. And it wasn't as simple as saying, oh, okay, now I'm going to do something about it. It's also realizing that I had gotten there for a lot of reasons that weren't necessarily any fault of my own. Right. So anytime you pick up a device, a lot of these devices and apps and services these days and games these days are actively designed with what's called persuasive design. And they're techniques that are meant to change your behaviors.

Oh yeah.

And in that is not like. Well, it's not unlike any drug. Right. Because when you're changing your behaviors, it's doing so by emotionally coercing you to feel good as you do it, so that it becomes a new normal without you realizing that you're changing. But in those moments, it's any combination of six different chemicals that are swishing around your body and your body craves it more. And as the persuasive design gets you to do more, share more, check more, talk more, express more, consume more, scroll more. We are aware we are to society as a result of 10, 15 years of constant persuasive design changing us and pushing us. But I had to study that first to understand the science and the biology behind it and the psychology behind it of how I got to where I was because I needed to. It's just probably the research background in me, but I also needed to break it down so that I had something tangible to build upon and realized, hey, you know what? I. I'm still always going to be an entrepreneur. I, I'm still, you know, I live in Silicon Valley, I'm a geek, I'm not going to abandon technology, but I am going to be much more empowered, mindful and intentional about it. And now that I know all of these things, what am I going to do about it? And that's, I think, where, that's where my life really started to change. Because it wasn't just about trying to get back to where I was. It wasn't just about fixing my relationships, getting back to creativity, finishing that book. It was what a gift to have this moment happen, to have all of this stuff that I was able to uncover. I started sharing it in my work as I was going along so that I could sort of shine a light on what was happening to all of us. But then it was still, I was still faced with the challenge of what are you going to do about it? That's where I started to go on this. What ended up becoming the Life Scale journey where I tried all of these things like meditation and digital detox and you name it, whether it's Burning man or the Esolin Institute or having productivity apps or mindfulness apps, all of those things, exercise, they all help. But none of them were treating the symptoms or they were all treating the symptoms, not the root cause of the problem. The root cause of the problem was that my brain and my body had been literally rewired. And that's what I had to focus on first, was rewiring that brain and that body and also that spirit to get stronger and stronger and stronger, step by step, so that I could get to a place of not just healing, but ultimately a newfound greatness. And that's ultimately what I stitched together to become the Life Scale Journey.

A couple of complimentary shows that we've done in the past on this. We did a Show with Don DePonti talking about training yourself and your ability to focus your attention and to manage yourself. So it was a great show there. Don deponte, and then also Mike Simonson, Silicon Valley tech CEO, who talks about trying a different approach of just managing the activities that balance him and produce a sort of better hormonal state. So managing oxytocin, serotonin, dopamine, et cetera, and. And working through those things, I think both very related to the work that you're talking about here in Life Scan. We've done shows with both those guys before.

So.

Where does that leave us? What are the practices? What do we need to do about this? Right.

I'm sure complementary to the other shows, a lot of this is about essentially re. Channeling those neurotransmitters and those emotional states to allow yourself to go on a different journey that allows you to build upon it, giving yourself the freedom and the space and the permission to say that it's okay to challenge the conventions and the beliefs that you have today. It's also okay to recognize that you aren't where you necessarily want to be or need to be, and also to question everything. And that's the hardest part, man. That was the hardest part. I was worshiping the wrong gods. And I mean that. Not just spiritually, but I mean, the things that we just prioritize in life.

Yeah. Where you spend your time. Yeah, yeah.

Where I spend my time. What I was aiming for. Shit, I had around me, the. The people that I had around me. Oh, man. And that. That Life Scale Journey allowed me to take the small steps that would eventually go to the big steps. And I used. I used creativity as a muse to kind of help me along. And creativity is a scientifically proven way, whether it's Big C creativity or Little C Creativity, you know, with the difference between Van Gogh and Singing in the shower. Right. Just the idea of allowing yourself to create and be creative are so productive and are actual accelerators to rewiring your brain and body in a much more productive and healthy state. And that at least allowed me to get to the position where I could see that my values were all left up. And my. Oh, man. Just the exercises that I introduce in the book alone. I don't spend too much time in tech, just enough to get you to Say, oh, my gosh, I had no idea. But it all makes sense now and then. The rest is just about the journey towards this newfound greatness and happiness ultimately.

So you're saying that while these technologies and practices that we have today can get in the way, we don't need to necessarily just block them out. There's a way to use them more thoughtfully, consciously. By design.

By design, right. Because persuasive design has ways that change your behaviors for better or for worse. I used to say that there's two ways to change people. One is to manipulate people, them or inspire them. And the book itself, I used persuasive design techniques in the design of it. So there is no table of contents. The language and the structure of the paragraphs, and also the visual imagery and also the. The aesthetic of it is all meant to grab you and hold you in that moment longer and longer as you get stronger and stronger. But it's also meant to create a sense of happiness and just joy as you go through it. So you feel, one, that you're happy to be there. Two, that you're excited to be on that page, and you actually end up hopefully retaining more of the information and then also to keep you turning the pages. And so that. That wouldn't have happened if I wasn't able to get through the book itself. I was so.

Bill.

I was so, so inspired and so happy as I was going through this entire journey because I could actually feel even the smallest bits having just the greatest positive impacts, that I ended up writing 105,000 words and I didn't want to stop. The book ended up being only 50,000 words, but I was half of them.

Or did you leave those for the second book?

They're still sitting around somewhere. I haven't figured out what to do with them, but I went back and decided that I was on fire. Creativity. Creatively, I was able to achieve flow, which I hadn't achieved in the longest of times. And I went back and decided to go and study persuasive design at deeper levels to go and design the book, which is thankful. Thank you. Thankfully, the publisher gives me that freedom, but that wouldn't have happened otherwise.

Yeah. Yeah. It's a really interesting thing, this role of technology and then the design. Intentional use is so interesting. I can remember reading things and this is not going to be exact, but it's like things from before my time of how, like the dishwasher will revolutionize the modern woman, freeing her up for a life of leisure. That kind of. And one after Another, and I do remember my great grandmother telling me how while she didn't do it, that people had washed their clothes outside. Right. And each new thing is going to somehow make it easier. If you get the pressure cooker, then you're going to feed your kids in an instant. And if you get the power mower, your chores are going to be done. And so we got all these things and yet somehow. And the computer, the ultimate productivity tool of all, and we just fill them with more stuff. It's kind of like, well, if we got the bandwidth to this level, and I remember once using dial up acoustic couplers and you'd stick the phone on there and you'd get a 300 baud connection and you'd dial into another system and you'd access a couple of characters that come streaming across to you. And you know, the sooner we do that, now we're streaming 4K DVR or 4K virtual reality files at each other. So no matter what we do, we just fill it with some more stuff.

Yep, yep. And stuff becomes a cognitive load that we don't necessarily realize that the more stuff we have, the more, the more our precious resources are sort of taxed. That part of your. There's two sides of our subconscious. One that is, it can be in the moment and the other one that's constantly thinking about everything else that has to happen. And stuff. This is one of the reasons why the Marie Kondo movement kind of just took off because it was really nailing.

Get rid of my stuff.

Yeah, stuff. But the same thing happens to us when we're multitasking. It's the same whether it's physical or it's mental. Like think about the number of tabs that at any given moment we might have open. Well, the same thing that's happening to your system because of all of those tabs being open is also happening to your body and they're tugging at you and they're pulling at you. So you can never physically or mentally truly be in a moment the way you could or should be. So that I'll tell you, part of the book, part of the journey is getting rid of stuff. Giving yourself the permission to close those tabs and to get rid of that stuff.

Just more memory, bigger monitors.

Yeah, see, exactly right. Because we think, well, I've got this problem, I've got all these tabs open, I've got all these windows open, I've got to track all of these things at the same time. So I'll just need more monitors. Right. And so we actually perpetuate the problem. And your body actually learns how to accelerate to keep up with all of these things. And you're firing more and more chemicals, you're expending more of that fuel that you only have so much of in any given day. And so, as you said earlier in the conversation, the worst performing founders and CEOs are the ones who, who are not getting sleep and who are doing too many things because they're not actually being their best in any given moment.

We walk into our overstuffed closets and we go, I've got nothing to wear. We turn on our TVs that not only have cable channels now, but they've got streaming services. We can watch virtually anything at any given moment. We're like, there's nothing to watch. We flip on our Sonos player that has, in my case, like, five different streaming and library services, plus my own old library music. I don't know what I want to listen to. We open our apps that'll deliver anything to us. There's nothing I want to eat.

Yes.

Like, somebody amuse me.

I call us accidental narcissists. We just sort of become expectant and demanding and entitled to all of this stuff, and it's never good enough because we're so used to having more and more and more and more that we crave it. I remember a quote that I was going through around the early days of research, before life scale was life scale, when I knew that I had to get to the root of the problem. And there was this shareholder call for Netflix, and Reed Hastings was asked about competition, and he set or equipped. Our biggest competitor is sleep, and we're winning.

That's a good quote. Well, well, crafting. You can totally hear that. Like, I. Some people are like, oh, my God, how do you do that? Like, I'm, I need more sleep. And I. Or I, I, I don't want to sleep so much. I'm too busy. And I'm like, I really want eight hours of quality time. Plus I want some morning reflection time. I want to drink my coffee slowly and notice the world outside my window. I want to meditate and reflect a little bit. I want to graze some news, but only if it amuses me and entertains me and like, that kind of thing. And at the end of the day, I want some time to reflect and unwind. I don't want to hammer out one more thing. But then there are other days where I want to tear into it and not having, like, today I've done there'll be three podcasts, three coaching calls, a sales call, and a call with my book editor. That's a lot of stuff. Plus a deliverable major project off to production. That's a lot. And I looked at that and I knew last night that this was my busiest day of the week and the most sort of cluttered. And I'm like, okay, I'm gearing up for it, and then tonight I'll come down and then tomorrow will be a whole different kind of day. Very different tempo. Right? Not the same thing. So did it by design and with intentionality, but not as my everyday, always kind of way of being.

Love it. Love it. And I think that's part of the. One of the things that I'm following up with. And it's kind of to get on that type of routine. You know, behaviors are formed out of routines, and they're either productive or unproductive, inspiring or uninspiring, happy or depressing. And some of it is inspired by the 55,000 words that ended up on the cutting room floor. But also, I made a decision that I wasn't going to be the Tony Robbins of life scaling. I was going to be the make a mindful decision about spending more time with my family and focusing on the things that give me joy. And Life Scale gives me joy. But I want to help a lot of people, but I don't want to go against everything that I had just gone through to do it. And so I'm creating coursework and certification programs so that I can scale life scale through the intentionality and purpose of others who want to help. And so there's going to be. There's actually a beta right now in two different universities, one in Australia and one on the east coast, for teachers to help their students. And then the next one is for life coaches, and then the next one after that is for parents and kind of see if I can't scale the mission and the work through others and make life scale a community, that's really great.

You know, like, you and I are exposed to it because we do things like speaking and appearances and we generate new content, but even our listeners will do some version of things like that. But if you don't create some way to do it that's beyond yourself, that you might make far less money at, but is a pathway to bigger impact into a different sort of work tempo. I think that there's like, you know, to the extent that we can create online courses or courses that are delivered in other traditional realms or that teach that bring new ideas or new approaches to things, then we have expanded something. And even if we make little to nothing in that, like let's say your content is that you've actually created a movement of something and then when you do appear or do connect with people directly, it's, it's a different kind of background.

Right, right, right. And I think it's, it's impact and presence and, you know, part of the journey is kind of outlining what's, you know, what is important to you. And staying true to those things is also, you know, not, not abandoning the vision, but also focusing that, that vision and then in turn that mission in ways that are going to give you the greatest fulfillment in where you want to be and where you want to go. And that's, I think that's the hardest part, especially for an entrepreneur, is you want to, you're a superhero. Yeah, you want to go do everything, but sometimes you don't need to do everything and sometimes you don't need to have all the money and all the things. Certainly I've made the decision to scale back on all those fronts and not. I did. I'm not practicing essentialism, but I am practicing an aspect of that that sort of still allows me to live in Silicon Valley.

Well, it's really easy to get caught up in that. Right. And I, especially in this area, we have more billionaires than lots of places and millionaires are boring and common in some respects. And it takes an ungodly amount just to have a two bedroom apartment in San Francisco. And people stack up mini to a room to make it work as they're hustling their way through the first stage of life. And I have friends and clients with airplanes and boats and second homes and, you know, et cetera, et cetera. But I find some of that stuff is like clutter in my life. I used to have three cars in the driveway and a motor scooter and, and I came back one day to start the fun car on the weekend, the convertible. And we're gonna go to our. And I'm like, I haven't done this thing in six months and it wouldn't start. And I'm like, you know what, let's just get rid of all of it. And so we got rid of all the cars except for one. My wife is here most of the time and she has a car and drives, but I no longer have a car. I don't even own one anymore. And I, well, I suppose I could say I own the family car, but I am definitely liberated by it. So if I want to take a nice drive down the coast in a fun car, I could just use Turo and borrow that car for a minute when I go sailing. Well, once a month or something like that. And I rent a boat every time I belong to a club. I'm a pilot. I rent a plane when I want to go fly. And there's none of these things that I want to own and manage. They don't make me feel better about myself. To own. Own them than to not own them feels liberating and free.

Yeah. And that is wonderful to hear, and I applaud you for that. I've been working on that since the life scale journey, and it's still continuing, and it feels wonderful. There's like a sense it's literally a weight off your shoulders because it is technically a cognitive load. It's not just an asset. It's pulling, is pulling resources from every aspect of your life and every aspect of your humanity. And so that's why really understanding what's important in our world and what's important to our lives and who's important around us are all critical stages of this growth. And I think that's. All of these things are hard because much of them are counterintuitive because they go against the standards of what success look like going back however long. My parents and their parents and their parents. Where you live, what you drive, what you wear, where you work, how much you make. I mean, those were all symbols.

Big things.

Yeah, big things.

What do you do? How are you doing? Where are you living these days?

If you're not happy, then you're not growing in productive ways or healthy ways.

There's a role for some of it, though. I. I do very much like having a home base. I like having my home. And when I hear some friends who are completely untethered and they've got no home and no partner, like, wow, that feels a little uncomfortable and insecure to think about being that loose. I love. I travel a ton, like 120 nights away last year. But I love coming home. And after I've been away for a week or two, after I've been away for a week, two weeks, I really kind of want to get home, especially if I was by myself. So having a home base is nice. And I know some friends with family, second homes that are in them a lot. Not just that, maintain them for that five days a year that they're going to actually use them, but they're in them all the time. And I think that could Be kind of cool. Like if you had a weekend place and you went there almost every weekend and the family gathered around holidays, that could be kind of cool too. My dad had a boat years ago that became kind of a central fixture in the family. But it wasn't like the boats that sit in the marina that don't see anybody in them sometimes all year and slowly decay, taking up payments, insurance, slip fees, et cetera, to go. And that don't.

Yeah. And that list, those are things that give you joy. Right. And that. And I have a list of things that are, you know, that might look like aspects of material wealth to others, but on my side of things, there are things that I've intentionally worked for because of the joy they bring me and the joy that they bring others around me. And to get there, you know, was. Was a pretty big mental shift. Everything else was and is being shedded. And I think that's really what it's about. But also getting to understand what you want and what is happiness and why, that's part of the growth.

Yeah. So to kind of summarize some stuff, embracing some of the boring to being present, bringing in some gratitude, letting go of things, thinking about what really matters to you. These are some of the things that I'm hearing in this. Bringing awareness to what makes you happy, what works for your life. Embracing the people, not necessarily the things. Letting go of busyness. Yeah. What am I missing?

Yeah. And there's a journey for it. Right. And I think a lot of it is, you know, the summary, you know, and the conversation that we just had. You know, there's a lot of really wonderful people who can guide you along that journey. And the life scale journey is specific for those who are intent on rewiring their brains and bodies and spirits in a new, creative, productive way that takes us from all this business and all this multitasking into a place of true creation and true happiness and even maybe true outside innovation and inside innovation. And it's a journey crafted specific to that because we were wired and programmed a way that was intentional. And this is about programming it in a different way that's also intentional.

Well, if you've been intrigued by our conversation so far, you should go to Lifescaling Me. Lifescaling Me. We'll put that in the show notes so that you don't have to fall off the road as you listen to this. Try to capture it down. But you can just look at the show notes. It'll be in there and you can read all about it. You can appreciate the way he wrote and designed the book and take yourself on your journey that makes the difference there and figure out how to live a more creative and productive and happy life. Lifescaling Me we're here every week with a new topic in the world of Scaling up that's not only growing your business, but also developing yourself in the process. That includes the very practical kinds of things like improving your cash flow, but also things like this about giving yourself power and freedom to face all the crap that life throws at you and be completely satisfied with who you are and where you are. So you'll find that back catalog of over 160 episodes now@scalingcoach.com where you'll get all the extras, the links and things like that and I'll even give you a copy of the book Scaling up for free. You just pay the shipping and handling cost. It's right there on the website scalingcoach.com youm can like and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts and give us a review there that helps us out. If there's any parts that you love, drop us a note infocalingcoach.com or tell us what you want more of. We love that too. Thanks again Brian for this great conversation today.

Hey Bill, thank you and also thanks for sharing part of your journey with me as well. I actually am leaving this conversation inspired and just motivated to keep going.

Talk to everyone again next week. Oh thank you To Vern Harnish, the original growth guru, founder of the world of Scaling up, author of Scaling up and the Rockefeller Habits. This show is produced by Lucy Summers. Audio production is done at Podfly Productions. The audio is edited by Albert Burge. The show notes are compiled by Encodina, they're proofread by Tim McGowan and then we push it out to you on itunes and everywhere else that you get your may get your podcast. So all places that you get it. We try to be available wherever you want us, but you can find us always@scalingcoach.com if you loved it, share it, pass along with somebody to somebody else right now, like it and subscribe. Give us a review if you're so inclined. We would so appreciate it. You can let us know what you want more of and what you loved or what you hated with an info with an email to infocalingcoach.com thanks again for listening. Keep Scaling Up.

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