Ep 683 | The Problem Was Never the Problem

Thank you for joining me today. It's Brian Gubernick, and welcome to the No Days Off podcast, where we believe that every single day brings a new opportunity to get better. I think that there is a quote for me that has shifted my thinking. When I first heard it, it shifts my thinking even still today. Sometimes I catch myself and I remind myself of this quote. And it's something that you likely have heard as well. If you're a No Days Off listener, if you're part of the No Days Off Nation, you think along the same lines that I think. And so, you've probably heard this one. And the phrase is, the quote is, "Change the way you look at things and the things you look at change." Change the way you look at things and the things you look at change. Now, I first heard this from a mentor of mine Diana Kokoska. And I believe she, she drew this quote from Dr. Wayne Dyer. Wayne Dyer had said this many decades ago. Wayne Dyer was a man who spent his, his career studying human behavior and studying mindset long before it, it became the norm, long before Instagram and all of that. This statement, it sounds pretty simple. It even sounds a little cliché. But when you really live it, you realize it's, it's not a philosophy, it's, it's science. Because the moment you change your perception, your reality begins to shift. The same facts still exist, but a different lens has been introduced. And that leads to completely different outcomes. See, see Wayne Dyer's point was this: we don't see the world as it is, we see it as we are. We see it through our own filters, our own experiences and beliefs and expectations. They create these filters. And these filters shape what it is we notice. They shape how we interpret different events and they ultimately shape what opportunities we're even able to recognize. So, when you change how you look at, say, a challenge, the challenge itself starts to change shape, not because any of the facts changed, but because your interpretation or your perception of things, and then subsequently your response, ended up changing. There's lots of really cool business stories we could draw from or successes that have been had because of the way things were changed in terms of how they were being looked at. Or they were being reframed. One of my favorites is the story of Slack. You may use Slack every day. You've certainly probably heard of it by now. It is used by many, many, many across, across the business landscape. In 2011, Stewart Butterfield and his team at a company called Tiny Speck, they were building this online game called Glitch. And they spent years on it. They spent millions of dollars on building this game. And the game, frankly, it failed, completely failed. But instead of viewing that as a complete dead end, Stuart Butterfield asked a different question. He asked, what if the real value isn't the game at all, but the tool we built to communicate while making the game? See, Tiny Speck had created this communications tool that all of its, all of its employees were using to, to interact as they were building the game. And that internal chat mechanism, that became known as Slack, and it launched in 2013, and it actually ended up selling to Salesforce for over $27 billion. See, the world in which Stewart and his teammates were operating in, it didn't change. Their view of what their product was actually changed. See, they stopped seeing a failed game and they started seeing this successful communication platform. And that to me is Wayne Dyer in business form. Change the way you look at things and the things you look at change. There's some classic examples like Netflix. Netflix in the early 2000s was a mail-order DVD company. Many still don't know that. It's kind of funny. But as Netflix has been around for so, so many years now, we forget that it started as a mail-order DVD company. And the entire model was dependent on, on sending these physical discs, these DVDs through the mail. But as the internet or broadband speeds grew, Reed Hastings, the, the leader of Netflix, he asked himself, are we really in the DVD business or are we in the entertainment access business? And that reframe of Reed's, in my opinion, changed everything. Instead of seeing the internet as a threat, as many of his competitors might have, he saw it as the ultimate distribution channel for Netflix. And so as the story goes, Netflix went all in on streaming. And later started creating its own original content. And probably know how that one played out here. Had they stayed locked in into their, their old lens, they'd probably be extinct— Netflix. Instead, this company redefined how the world consumes media. I think the guys over at Airbnb did something, something similar. They reframed risk into connection. In 2007, these two broke designers in San Francisco, Brian Chesky and Joe Gebbia. They couldn't pay their own rent. A design conference had filled every hotel room in town in San Francisco. And they thought, hey, what if we rent out air mattresses in our living room? And that idea sounded ridiculous, because who would ever let strangers sleep in their house? But they changed their viewpoint, they changed their lens. They asked, hey, what if people aren't just looking for a bed, but for belonging? What if, what if travel could be more human? And that question became Airbnb, which is now valued at, I think, over $100 billion. So the same world and the same constraints, they just looked at it differently. And that changed everything for them. Now, there is some science behind this. It's, it's your brain's reticular activating system, which we talked about here many times, the RAS, R-A-S. It filters, it filters what you notice. It's, it's, you know, if you buy a new car and suddenly you see that new car everywhere, that's just your brain's filter tuning to what matters. Now, when you look for problems, what happens? Well, you find them. And when you look for opportunities, your brain literally starts scanning for opportunities. Wayne Dyer's line was a poetic way of describing this exact mechanism. If you change your focus, your brain rewires what it shows you. So how do you go about applying this in your world? Number one, I would reframe problems as prompts. Instead, I would be asking things like, what else could this mean? Or what might this be trying to teach me? I think this simple question breaks this, this, this mental, um, this mental lock, if you will. Number 2, I think you got— you have to audit your language. You have to shift from "I have to" to "I get to." It is a mindset change. Your words shape your perspective, and your energy does follow that. Number 3, in business leadership, I think when your team sees a roadblock Train yourself to see leverage. A setback, a setback in, let's say, marketing might be an opportunity to clarify your message, or a tough sales quarter might be forcing— might be, might be the forcing function, I should say, that public— that, that pushes for innovation. Just like what Slack had gone through, just what, like, what Netflix had gone through. Now, for me personally, not to bore you with any of my stories, but when I think back at the start of my real estate career, As many of you may know, my career started because I went through personal setback. I was going through financial distress. I had a bunch of investment properties, real estate investment properties that were going south on me. And in the course of that, or while I was experiencing that, I did ask myself, gosh, I wonder if others are going through the same sort of thing. Maybe I'm ahead of the curve a little bit, which didn't feel great at the moment, but maybe there's a business opportunity here. And fast forward years later, I was helping more people get out of foreclosure through modifying a loan or through short selling their home than most anybody else in the nation. I built an entire business around that. Now, I'd love to say I was genius and all of that. I don't think I was nearly as calculated, but I definitely did look at my scenario and say, gosh, this is terrible. I wonder if others might need help with the same sort of thing. And it worked out pretty favorably for me, and it was the launchpad for all that I get to do today. So, I think today's reminder is simple, but it's not easy, of course. Reality rarely needs to change. What needs to change is you. Slack, Netflix, Airbnb, these 3 companies didn't invent necessarily something new. They simply looked at what was already there in a new way. From a different perspective, from a different lens. Your life and business are full of those same opportunities if you're willing to shift your lens. So, your action item today, I want you to identify a situation in your, in your business or even in your life that feels stuck or frustrating. And then, I want you to pause and write down, how else could I look at this? What else could this mean? How else could I look at this? And then force yourself to come up with 3 different interpretations. Then choose the one that maybe creates some movement instead of the misery. Act from that perspective for, let's call it, 24 hours. I think you'll be shocked how fast the thing you look at starts to change. That's all I have for you today, the No Days Off Podcast. Thank you so much for listening. And remember, every single day brings a new opportunity to get better. So let's get after it.