I Didn't Know ADHD was a Superpower Until THIS Happened | Cameron Herold (Podcast 357)

I get paid $10,000 for a one hour Zoom or 15,000 for one hour Zoom or 40,000 for an in person speaking. So I know my value is somewhere between 4,000 an hour and I can't even say 40 because then you have to travel for that. But somewhere between 4 and 15,000 an hour is my hourly rate. Why am I doing jobs that are $20 or $50 or 100 hour jobs? Right. If I can get paid $4,000 to coach someone, I should delegate everything except genius and just spend a couple hours cold calling to land a couple more coaching clients. So I just want to see how truly entrepreneurial you are. So I'm going to read A list of 11 traits of entrepreneurs. I want you to count how many of these 11 describe you. Are you often filled with energy? Does your mind get flooded with ideas? Are you driven? Are you restless? Are you unable to keep still? Do you often work on little sleep? Do you get euphoric? Do you get easily irritated by minor obstacles? Do you burn out periodically? Do you act out sexually, which is like flirting? Do you feel persecuted by those who do not accept your vision? If you have nine, 10 or 11 traits, you would be clinically diagnosed as bipolar. If you have more than five, you're on the spectrum. So you're complete f ck ups, just like I am. What's interesting though about entrepreneurs is we're wired very differently and there's nothing wrong with us. So I was sitting on a plane from Chicago to Miami and I got bumped off my prior flight in first class. I'm sitting back in economy and in an exit row sitting beside a guy who's even taller than I am. We're both like doing work and as we're talking I noticed that he's very kind of up and down with his emotions and he's very scattered and, and he has this nervous tick. And so we're talking and I said, so by the way, you've got really wicked ADD just like me. He's like, how do you know that? I'm like, well, because I just, I know you and you're bipolar as well. And he's like, how do you know I'm bipolar? So I started describing it and he said, he told me he'd been clinically diagnosed as bipolar and he has all. I have 17 of the 18 signs of ADD. My ex wife said if I was paying attention during testing, it would have been 18 for 18. And then I also diagnosed him as having Tourette's. And then nervous tic is something in Tourette's. We were then talking and I said, so you know, what do you run your business? And he goes, yeah, I've got a business. And I said, what are your revenues like? He's like, 700, 800. So I'm like, okay, small business, 700,000, 800,000. I said, how many employees got? He's like 17 or 18. I'm like, that math doesn't work. You've got like 18 employees with 700,000 in revenue. He goes, no, 700 million in revenue. And I look at him and his name is Marcelo Claret Marcelo. When I met Marcelo was running the largest Hispanic owned company in the United States called Bright Star. Six months later, he sold his company for over a billion dollars to SoftBank. And Marcelo was then appointed as the CEO of Sprint. He later became the chairman of WeWork. To have to turn WeWork around after they threw this founder's Adam out. He's now on the board of SoftBank, on the board of Google, on the board of WeWork, et cetera. So I diagnosed this classic entrepreneur as having three strong entrepreneurial traits. There's nothing wrong with being add. So there's somebody here, he might even be in the audience, who I met at the event, who came up to me at the party a couple nights ago and he said, you know, you said, you've got really bad add. I can help you with that. Stay the away from me. I don't want help with my ADD because as an entrepreneur, it's a superpower. The fact that I can see what's happening with the economy, my customers, my suppliers, the market, I can see the problems with my website, I can notice little trends, but because I'm seeing everything, it's so overwhelming to me, I have to delegate them quickly. I don't want to be a doctor, I don't want to be an engineer. I don't want to be a teacher. The bipolar disorder, the mania of bipolar disorder is why people will follow me. It's why they'll invest, it's why they'll quit their job. It's why they will take on a project that we don't know the ends to. It's why somebody will literally join the company for less money than they were making elsewhere is because we're on that manic fringe and they love that energy. The stress and depression is simply us course correcting because we can't tell our peers, we can't tell our employees how stressed we are. We can't really admit to our leadership team that we're scared at times or that we're screwing things up. We, we can't admit to our customers that something's going wrong. We can't tell our board. So as the entrepreneur and sometimes we don't even tell our spouse that we haven't paid ourself for six months or six weeks or drawn a paycheck or paid herself back. The expenses when we were building one, 800, got junk. I went three months without a paycheck and without submitting expenses because we didn't have the money to pay it. I sure didn't tell my ex wife that because she would have been freaking out. So Brian and I kind of lived in this little zone of stress and depression. The reason I bring this up is I know entrepreneurs. It's all I know. I kind of feel like a bit of a fraud at Mindvalley because I'm not this heart centered meditation blissed out. Even though I live in like the closest I get is I live in Vancouver part time. But I like it and I want to do it and I want to get better at it and I want to explore it. But you guys are like miles down the road in that for me. But I do know entrepreneurs. So I've been paid to speak to groups of entrepreneurs now in 26 countries on seven continents. All I really know is entrepreneurial leaders. And what I'm going to give to you today are the lessons that I wish I'd known at a younger age. So When I left 1-800-got junk, I decided to journal, which is something that we teach you at Mindvalley. And I started journaling 20 minutes every morning for three and a half months. And while I was journaling, I came up with a lot of these lessons. And these lessons became what I call the letters to my younger self. And they're all in my very first book, Double Double. So they're the last chapter of the book Double Double. I know the book is really good because it was in Richard Branson's library on Necker Island. First off, I don't think he can read. He's so massively dyslexic. And secondly, Necker island was obliterated about five years ago in that massive storm. So that library doesn't even exist anymore. So let's go into the letters to my younger self. Now I can stand up here and talk to you about all my successes, right? How big we grew. 1, 800 got junk. I took them from 14 employees to 3100 employees in six years. We went from 2 million to $106 million in revenue in six years. We had no debt. We had no outside shareholders. We gave up no equity. We ranked as the number two company in Canada to work for. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. What I want to talk to you about today more is the failures and the struggles and hopefully give you some of those lessons from there, because that's where a lot of my real strengths came. So the first one was I was at a cocktail party one night. This is around 2007, 2008, I think I just left when I kindergart junk or was just in the. In the process of probably leaving. And one of the women who worked for me, Gillian, came up to me and she said, you know, you're really boring. And I was like, really? She goes, all you talk about is work. You have no other passions, no other hobbies. All you talk about is work. And she was right. The weird thing was Brian, my best friend, who we built the company with for six and a half years later. I didn't out until two years after I'd left that Brian liked to ski. My best friend. He was my best man at my wedding. And all we ever talked about was work. And I didn't know he liked to ski. I've skied in the Canadian American Championships twice. Skiing was a massive passion of mine, and we never talked about skiing for six and a half years. That's kind of messed up because I was so out of balance. What that taught me was no one actually gives a about what you do for work. Now imagine this for a second. Like, let's say you're in a fun industry, right? You teach sex. That's cool. But if you're at a cocktail party and you just want to keep talking about that, it starts getting a little awkward for everybody at some point. Unless you're at some of the fun parties like Burning Man. But if you're at the party, you don't want to hear what the accountant does for an hour. You don't want to hear what the lawyer does for an hour. You don't want to hear the doctor talking about surgery. Like, so many of these jobs and professions are so boring. We don't want to hear about them. What makes you think they want to hear about your business? What made me think that they wanted to hear about mine? So I had to really learn that. And that's why now people will come up to me and they'll say, what do you do? I'm like, oh, I go to Burning Man. I like skiing. I travel all over the world? No, no. Like, what do you do to make money? Oh, yeah, I really don't talk about that. Have you been to Burning Man? And I just kind of with them a little bit because I really don't like talking about what I do for work. When I'm working, I'm on, and when I'm off, I'm off. And I really want to talk about my passions and my fears and my insecurities and my bucket list. And that's what I want to know about. Like, I really don't care what you do to make money, but I want to know what your passions are. I want to know. Your bucket list is, I don't give a what you do to make money. I don't even really care what your old business was that your partner pushed you out of and lost some money on. Whatever you took your money. I want to know you. Because when everybody else knows you, that's when everything grows. I learned that balance is key, but there's no way to be balanced. You can't keep your friends and your family and your faith and your fitness and your spirituality and everything perfectly in balance all the time. It's impossible. Especially if you're a woman who's trying to, like, be a spouse and a lover and a best friend and a mom. Like, are you? And run a company? Are you kidding? Of course you're not going to get that perfect every single day. So what I think balances is a bunch of this. So what I try to do is find the eight areas of my life that I'm working on, and I pick two areas, and I go really, really deep in those two areas for about a month or so. And then for the next month, I pick two other areas and I go really deep on those. So last week when I was at Mindvalley, I only came to two sessions because I was really, really focused on two things. My business and my wife. And this week I've been spending more time at Mindvalley. Coming here, working here, networking here, going for lunches with people, going for coffee, showing up first thing in the morning, going to the parties at night and kind of ignoring my wife a little bit. But this is like Mindvalley week for me. And then next week when we go to Sweden, I'll recalibrate a little bit, but. Because there's no way, like, I would feel too stressed out trying to be to everybody all the time. So I give myself a little bit of a break when I'm not quite in balance because I realize the balance is more of a teeter totter, a balance board. That's what balance is for me. I also learned that when I show up at the end of the day, my ex wife used to say that she was getting leftovers. Not for dinner, I was leftovers. I was coming back with no energy because I'd given everything at the office. And then I showed up back at the home and I didn't have any good energy to bring into the relationships with my kids and my spouse. So I had to learn some kind of a way to keep my business in a box and close it. So when I used to work at a physical office, I would shut my laptop and I would leave. And I realized when I was doing that that I couldn't take my laptop home with me at night because I wasn't going to catch up anyway. You're not going to get your list done because all you're doing is lying to yourself. I'm going to catch up. So I'll work this weekend. No, you're just working this weekend and you're avoiding the pain or relationships or something else that isn't going well in your life. You're using work as the dopamine rush to fill the voids of everything else. So what I learned is close the laptop and go home. I've worked from home for the last 15 and a half years. So now what I do is I never work nights. I will allow myself to work one night per month maximum, but every other day of the week I'm done at 5:30. And I haven't worked a Saturday or Sunday in probably a decade. I've said no to speaking events that want me to travel now because I just don't want to. So I'll turn down. I get paid $40,000 for a keynote plus business class travel. I say no to that all the time because I'd rather do it over Zoom. So I have no commute. You can't get me to do the wrong things anymore because it allows me to keep my problems at work. I also had something happen back in October of 2000. We were running a big Internet company. If everyone REMEMBERS March of 2000, we just sold our company for 64 million. So March of 2000, that was a lot of money to sell for. And it was March 15th. We were public. The company that was acquiring us was public. I think we sold like March 10th and March 15th. Steve Ballmer stood up from Microsoft and said there was an Internet bubble. And we're like, no, don't tell people. And then the stock market started to crash, and our stock, it needed three months for the transaction to close. By the time it closed, our $64 million valuation was worth 3.8. Our stock went from $24.65. It was called Network Commerce. We went from $24.65 down to about $3. And I'd gotten married, and I realized on the wedding day I wasn't in love. And a month after the wedding, my wife conceived. I was stressed. A friend of mine tapped me on the shoulder in the elevator one day, and he said, are you okay? And I collapsed on the floor of the elevator, sobbing and shaking. And I was having a nervous breakdown. Three weeks later, I went to the doctor to get a routine medical for a physical that I needed to get insurance for a house that we were buying. And the doctor said, how are you feeling? I'm like, pretty good. I've got this kind of a weird metallic taste at the back of my neck. Has anybody ever had that? Like, it's this weird. So I'm kind of describing what this feels like, right? Like this weird thing. Taste something. And he goes, what's going on in your life? I said, well, my wife is pregnant and I just quit my job. And we lost 64 million. So my 3 million is worth about 140. And I'm moving from Seattle back to Canada. My mom is terminal with stage 3B colon cancer. My wife's quitting her job, but we just bought a house, so that's kind of cool. I'm getting my first mortgage, and the doctor's looking at me and he goes, that medical or that taste at the back of your neck is actually a chemical secretion being caused by stress. So we did this test that they give you, and you have to fill out all these questions, and they give you points. And if you get like 150 points, you have a 50% chance of a heart attack. If you get 250 points, you have a 90% chance of a heart attack. I had 435 points. I was clinically redlining this morning when I weighed. I carry a scale in my backpack. So we've sold everything, and we literally travel with a backpack. In my backpack, I travel with this little flat scale because I weigh myself every morning. When I woke up that morning back in October 2000, I weighed 222 pounds. This morning, I weighed 180.0. But you don't lose 42 pounds because of dinner. You lose 42 pounds because life all of a sudden gets better. And you learn how to reduce stress. So I started running, I started doing yoga, I started doing some meditation. I started talking to people. Honestly, like when somebody said, how are you? I didn't say, I'm good. Like, I don't actually say I'm good unless I'm good. Sometimes I'll be like, actually, I'm having a day and you'll probably not want to hear about it, but you ask. So I'm going to tell you. Because I like getting the stress out of my body that way, right? So I had to learn to reduce stress in really healthy ways. I learned that having a drink is okay, but starting every meal. Because this was at the height of the Internet and we were really successful and we were all really stressed. I lived across the street from the office. We would get to the office at 7. I'd work till 7pm growing. We had 900 employees at the time. The CEO and I would go for dinner and I would start my dinner with two Manhattans. He would start his with two dirty martinis. And then we would have a bottle of wine, maybe two bottles of wine, because we could each put down a bottle, no problem. And then we'd finish our dinner with Grand Marnier. That was five days a week. And then I would drive home to Vancouver on the weekend. I was living two and a half hours away and I'd spend two days with my wife and I'd wake up at 4 o' clock in the morning on Monday and drive back to Seattle and do it again. And I thought I was managing stress perfectly. So I realized that having one drink is okay, but having dinners like that, it ain't okay. Smoking a joint is okay, especially now. Especially if you're in Vancouver. Smoking seven of them a day, probably not a good idea. Doing yoga once in a while is good. Doing yoga seven days a week for two hours and avoiding your friends and family, probably not so good. It's kind of that. All things in moderation. Except McDonald's. We never feel guilty about plugging in our Tesla at night. We never feel guilty about plugging in our phone at night. Why do we feel guilty about recharging ourselves at night? There's not a single athlete on the planet that performs their event 60 hours a week. They might practice, they might cross train, but they might perform four hours a week, six hours a week, one hour a week. Their game on is in short bursts. We as entrepreneurs and we as leaders need to really remember to recharge. You're never going to get caught up that big long to do list that you've got delegate. And somebody asked me a question later, about to do lists. And I'll give you some ways on getting through those. I had to learn how to set boundaries. I was so wanting to help everyone else. I was so willing to help everyone else. Just like when I walk around here, I always like, yes, I can help you. Yes, I can help you. Can I ask if you. Of course I can. At some point, like, no, Like, I can't, or you got to send me an email, or, I'm sorry, your business is too small. Like, I can't be there for everybody because then I lose track of myself. My clients used to call me a lot and say, can we just do a call on the weekend? No. And then I'd explain it, and I'd also tell them that they needed to take some weekends off. And they're like, oh, you're right. So the more that I set boundaries, the more that I said no, the more that my clients and my people that I worked with started to really grow from that as well. I learned about something called the top five. So this is something I learned from the book Napoleon Hills. It was Think and Grow Rich. And it's the story about Charles Schwab and Ivy Lee. I think it was originally like six, a half dozen, right? The basic story goes like this. There was this management consultant, Ivy Lee, or, sorry, Charles Schwab, and he went and cold called the CEO of this steel company, and he said, you know, with my systems, you'll know how to manage better. Lee said, I don't need to know how to manage better. I need to do the stuff I already need to know to do. Like I need to get more done of what I should be doing. And he said, okay, I'll give you a system. And if you try this system for six weeks, after you do it for six weeks, send me a check for what you think it was worth. So the system was this. At the end of every day, make a list of the top five things you have to do tomorrow. Just sit down and spend time. And not 12, not 64, not three. What are the top five things you have to do tomorrow? Then put them in order of impact from the highest impact to lowest impact. So now you've got your top five. And when you wake up in the morning, go about your normal routine. And then when you start working, don't check email, don't start working on random projects, don't do any calls. Start working on project one. When you finish item one, start working on item two. And don't work on the rest of your business until you get through your must do list. Ivy told Charles. Charles Schwab had all of his employees do it. They did it for six weeks. He then sent Ivy Lee a check for $25,000. That was 100 years ago. $25,000 for that system 100 years ago was worth millions today. At the time, it turned Charles Schwab into a name that we all know. It also turned him into the wealthiest steel producer in the world. And it was that simple. Top five list. We rolled that out at 1,800, got junk, and had all of our employees doing it. It was massive. And I still use that today. In Good to Great, Jim Collins talks about his stop doing list. I call it my list because I have my bucket list and I have my list. So the bucket list is all the stuff I want to do before I die. And the list is all the stuff that life's too short and I'm not doing it anymore. Like, do you know what's on my list? Drinking wine on planes. I only fly first class, but they serve wine on planes. Like, I would never buy that wine at home. Why would I ever drink it on a plane? Like, great, give me a glass of a four dollar bottle of red when I only buy $100 bottles at home. It doesn't make any sense. It, I'm not doing it. I'm not checking my own email or it. I'm not replying to my own DMS in social media except on Instagram because I like Instagram. So I've got like, you start looking at the stuff that isn't worth your time doing or drains. You have energy. So I'll give you a really good system to help you with this. Pretend that someone follows you around with a video camera for a month and then you get to watch the video and you watch everything that you do at work. Open emails, reply to emails, book flights, meet with teams, coach people, talk to clients, prep for events, prep for speaking events, look at your slides, whatever. You might have 80 things on your list of things that you do every month. So what I do is I open a spreadsheet and I write down every single task. In column A, I might have 80 rows of all the things that I do in column B. I categorize them all in one of four ways. Either I for incompetent, C for competent, E for excellent, and U for unique ability. This is a system that Dan Sullivan teaches at Strategic Coach. The incompetent means you suck at it. The competent means you're okay at it. The excellent means you're really, really good at it, but you don't love doing it. The unique ability is the stuff that you love doing you're really good at. You get energized while you're doing it. You would do it for free, except your kids have to eat. And then in column C, for each task you write down a dollar value. If you were paying someone just to do that task every day, all day, let's say the task was clean toilets. What would the hourly rate be? Or what would the hourly rate be for booking hotel rooms? Or what would the hourly rate be for doing slides? Or what would the hourly rate be for coaching someone? Put an hourly rate down for all those things. Then what you want to start doing is getting stuff off your list or putting it onto your stop doing list. Anything that's below your hourly rate. So I get paid $4,600 an hour to coach CEOs. That's why I say I coach real companies. So $4,600 an hour is my effective hourly rate. I get paid $10,000 for a one hour Zoom or 15,000 for a one hour Zoom, or 40,000 for an in person person speaking. So I know my value is somewhere between 4,000 an hour and I can't even say 40 because then you have to travel for that. But somewhere between 4 and 15,000 an hour is my hourly rate. Why am I doing jobs that are $20 or $50 or 100 hour jobs? Right. If I could get paid $4,000 to coach someone, I should delegate everything except genius and just spend a couple hours cold calling to land a couple more coaching clients or finding somebody who can go cold call the coach. Right? The more you can get off your list so that all you do is work in your zone of genius unique ability, then you win. So I had to learn that because I was always that kind of radically self reliant. I can do this myself. It's just faster to do it. Sometimes it's faster to do it yourself, but sometimes it's better to hire someone or coach someone or train someone to do it for you. I Learned about the 80% rule. This is not the Pareto principle. This is not that 80% of your results come from 20% of your efforts. This is. That stuff can always be a little bit more perfect. So if you saw my transcript from university, you would never allow me to come up on this stage. It's terrible. I got a 2.2 GPA I had 63% because I was running a business. I was president, fraternity, I was on the ski team, and I didn't go to classes, but I learned that A's, straight A's, who's. Who got straight A's in school. Do you know that no one has looked at your transcript since you graduated? Sorry to break it to you. They didn't matter. You were lied to. We were all lied to. The straight A's didn't really matter. What mattered was getting educated for yourself, for the sake of learning more, not to have a transcript that no one's ever going to look at again. So what I learned is that most people are okay with a solid B. Most people are okay with a solid 80%. So what I try to do is get stuff done and get it out the door as quickly as possible and then maybe pass the part that could be improved to an expert who can improve it really quickly. So I'll show you how this works. I'm a really bad writer. I'm a horrible writer. So when I write something like I can piss people off with a happy birthday email. It comes off as too short and like, why don't you care? I'm like, God, I said happy birthday. Yeah. But that was it. I'm like, I'm busy. Well, now you're swearing at me. I was like, jesus. So I learned that I shouldn't write emails out to my my tribe or my clients or my franchise partners. But I had the idea of what I wanted to say. So my 80% was to do a transcription. I would literally record it. This was back in the day when it was Dragon Dictation. Now you've got Siri or Otter, whatever you want to use. So I would do a transcription, I send it to my assistant and she types it up and makes it better. So she takes my 80%, which is verbal or transcribed, and she can polish it and she can take that part that was 20%. She can get it really quickly, like in 15 minutes, she can polish my email and get it to 96% perfect. Now if I'm going to send it out to the millions of people, like a mindvalley, Vishen could do his verbally. Somebody could actually edit it for him and then he'll send it to a copywriter or communication specialist and they really make it pop off the page. They take that 4% and they polish it to 80% in a half an hour. And now it's 99.2% perfect. That's pretty amazing, right? Because we're not flying planes, there's no surgery. Perfect. Slows everything down. But how can you quickly have a bunch of experts that you can pass things to and do it 30 minutes. 30 minutes. 30 minutes. Now that memo that used to take me six days, takes me five minutes, takes my assistant 15 minutes and takes a copywriter 30, and everybody's thrilled. And if you can remove the time in between each of those stages, your stuff's getting out the door faster. And momentum is creating momentum. Because of that 80% result, I had to learn to outsource. Now this is becoming more and more obvious today. But I've been outsourcing now for 12 years. I just got a note the other day from one of my former assistants who's based in the Philippines, and she was an assistant of mine 12 years ago. The Philippines to Vancouver was amazing. For time zones, I would work from like 8 until 5 o' clock during the day in Vancouver, delegating tasks out to her. We could sync up over Skype because there was no zoom back then and have like a quick 5 minute call or a 10 minute video call. I would then go about my evening, go to sleep, wake up in the morning, and all the stuff I delegated to her got done. Because 5pm my time was 8am in Philippines and I was paying her $3 an hour. Like my assistant, my executive assistant who's with me six and a half years is 85,000 a year plus five weeks vacation. I have Meredith, my assistant, delegating to people now overseas to get some of her admin work off her plate. Because if we can get it done for $6 an hour and I pay all my outsourced people, my freelance people, more. So if they come to me and say it's $5 an hour, I'm like, yeah, I can't do that. But why? It's fair. No, I can't pay you $5 an hour. I'll give you seven. What? Because then if I give them seven, they're blown away and they do work for me faster. And for me it's still $7 an hour. So I treat them way better. They don't quit, they feel thrilled. And it's such a rounding error in terms of what I could be spending. But then I have them going through brick walls for me. I had to learn that deadlines are useless. When an employee comes to you and says, I'll have the project done by Friday, they won't get it done by Friday. The reason isn't because they don't intend to it's not because they're lying, it's because they haven't sat down and thought about the project and all the different things that have to get done in the project and how many hours each or how many minutes each of the items are going to take and when in their calendar they're actually going to do the work. So what I want my team to tell me now is what's the project? What are all the steps in the projects, how many minutes are each of the steps and when in your calendar are you doing the work? Tell me when you're doing the work, not when you're going to get it done by. The best to do list we all have is our calendar. Because when you look at all the projects and work you have to do and how long it's going to take and you put it in your calendar, you're going to realize you don't have enough time this week to do the stuff that's on your list. So start outsourcing, start delegating, start saying no more, start focusing on the critical few things, but stop fooling yourself and stop trying to work nights and weekends and stop lying to yourself and everybody else saying you're going to get it done because you haven't thought about what you need to get done. And that was huge for me, it was to realize that if I plan my calendar, it's that old plan your work and work your plan. Those adages, all these grandmotherisms make sense. They all work. I was going up the elevator in Vancouver years ago and I was COO. We had about 2,500 employees, system wide. We had 250 at the head office. I was going up the elevator with this employee. I didn't know what business area they worked in. I thought they worked in the call center. Turned out they worked in customer service. Had no idea what their name was. Once you get past about 150 employees, you just, you can't remember everybody's names. And you start losing sight of even where they work because you just. We had 60,000 square feet over three floors. I didn't even know what business area they were in. He said to me, how's it going? I'm like, good. I'm a little pissed off about our customer service. We've really got to change some stuff up there. And I was literally just thinking out loud. The next day, he and the head of the customer service department come up to me with this new proposal of how they're going to re engineer the entire customer service department. They'd Worked on it for eight hours the day before. I'm like, why are you doing this? This isn't on our project map. The guy said, well, you said that we had to do it all. I'm like, no, dude, I was thinking out loud. He goes, you're the coo. You can't think out loud. Because if you think out loud, we will do what you say. And I realized that titles carry a lot of weight behind them, right? Good and bad. There's ripple effects with every single action that happened. The CEO is the chief energizing officer. We have to be very careful with everything we say because it gets taken with way more intent than we often anticipate it will. And one of the detriments of ADD is that we think out loud. One of the detriments of bipolar, or the manic side of bipolar, is that we're often going so quick that we're thinking out loud. But the problem is that when we're thinking out loud, everyone else is internalizing those thoughts and figuring out how to make us happy because they're searching for that praise still that we're all starving for as kids, right? We're all 16 year olds trapped in adult bodies. So just remember that the titles carry a lot more of this unintended weight. God gave us two ears and one mouth. We need to use them in that ratio. We need to listen twice as often as we speak. So Simon Sinek, who think one of his books was called Leaders Speak Last or Leaders Eat Last, Eat Last. Simon was on our board of advisors. Simon actually flew out to Vancouver to meet Brian and I. He read about us in Fortune magazine and flew to Vancouver from New York to see if it was real. And that was where we first met Brian or Simon. He stayed at my house that weekend. We had lots of dinners together. He ended up on our board. And his thing about the leaders eat last, I've always said that the leaders need to speak last as well. When you're in a meeting, the last person to be speaking should be the CEO or the most senior person. Because our job as leaders is to grow people, to grow their skills and to grow their confidence. If we're always speaking, they're not getting to share their ideas. When we get them to share their ideas, we can go, that's amazing. And then they feel good about themselves and then they'll share more ideas. So our job is to shut up, ask questions, get them to give their ideas, help them give better ideas, give the quiet people a voice so they're in the room. Right. If you're going to invite people into a meeting and they're not going to speak, you shouldn't be inviting them to the meeting. That's what I try to do is that, that listen and don't talk. Another one is to be a thought leader for everybody in this room. And Alicia, you'll love this. Alicia Dumas, who like helps thought leaders and authors have their books end up on Wall Street Journal bestseller lists. Bishon, with your list. I don't know who you're working with, but I think you know Alicia. I'm sure you do. Alicia Dumas over here helps a ton of the best authors in the world get their books on the biggest list in the world. Who here has written a book? Who here has written two books? If you haven't written a book yet, you should. It's been no easier time in history to get a book written. I'm working on my sixth book right now. It's called the Second in Command and it's how to Unleash the Power of a coo because that really will drive the CEO alliance and it's way for me to share all my ideas finally. But it's also I get all the ideas out of my head. So I work with a group called Scribe. It's not cheap, it's about 40,000 to get your book done. But here's how the process works. I do about six hours, six zoom calls where they ask me questions and I talk and I keep talking and I walk around my home talking and they get all this content transcribed. I send them videos for my speaking events and stuff that I've written and stuff from my coaching calls. They pull all those transcriptions together and they start framing it out into this book. And then they keep asking me questions and I go through and read it. My total time commitment for my CEO COO book will be about 30 hours. My total time commitment for the book vivid vision was 18. And it's a really, really good book because they do all the post production and all the pre press and all the rounds of editing. It's all me, it's all my content, it's all my words. But for me to sit down and type it. I suck at typing, I suck at writing. It would take me forever. But to get that book out there, that fuels everything. That's where my speaking fees went from 3,000 to 40. My coaching fees jumped, my brand awareness jumped. It's all because of that. And you can do it in cheaper ways as well. But this is an example of what you can do. I had to learn that my mania is good when I harness it, but there's lots of times when I need to slow down and be a little bit less manic. I had to be able to find ways to be a little bit less manic so that my team didn't feel like I was coming at them with 70 ideas. The classic for me was if I would go away to like a YPO event or an entrepreneur's organization event or a genius network event, and I would come back with the 64 great ideas that I had, and I was all filled with energy and I wanted to share them all. My team was in full on panic mode because they think that they have to now work on those 64 ideas. Some of them next week I'll think are terrible ideas, But I just was so excited I had to share them them. So by slowing down and being less manic, it allowed me to then work better and better with the team. I had to learn to think before speaking, which is really hard when you think out loud. Right? So I've often said that for me to have a thought, it needs to come out of my mouth so my ears can hear it, so my brain can have the thought. It's kind of the way my brain works. I don't understand why people are like, no, it doesn't work that way. No, it really does. You've never been inside my brain. I started brushing my teeth yesterday, and I hadn't finished going to the bathroom. My wife looked at me, she goes, are you kidding? I'm like, I didn't even realize it was happening. I swear to God. Literally yesterday, when an ADD brain is. I know. That was way too much information. I'm not going to show you a slide of it happening. But when the ADD brain is going, it's hard to unwind that. And so you have to learn how to work with that. So I've learned to tell my team, now just let me talk. Don't write it all down. When I'm finished talking, I'll tell you what we've summarized or where we've netted out, But I'm going to meander a little bit. I need to work through this. Or I'll just say, I'm just thinking out loud right now. Just. Just don't. Don't take any notes. Right? Just let me think. And they're learning that. I learned that every single action that we have as a leader has a ripple effect. And it's almost like a big boulder that we drop into a pond. Let's say it's a new project that you're doing that's like a big boulder. That project is going to have ripples, good ripples and bad ripples. That new team leader that you hire, that new senior person that you bring into the team is going to have good ripples and bad ripples. And often as leaders, I'll give you an example. Let's say we hire a new VP of technology and we bring this. And all we're worried about is onboarding the new person, making sure they know everybody, making sure they know their job, making sure they know the tools that we use, making sure. Making sure that they're getting along with everybody. And we're missing all the ripples that are happening. We're missing that the six other directors are still pissed off that they didn't get the job. We're missing that two of the directors don't like that person. We're missing that two of the directors are worried because they think that this VP of IT is going to fire them and hire their friend. All these ripples that are happening that we don't even spend time looking for. So our job as leaders isn't to focus always on the projects getting done. It isn't to focus always on getting these people onboarded. It's to sit and watch for the ripple effects. To literally watch. And that's one of the strengths of ADD, is you notice them. But what I want us to do is to actually proactively look for them. I get so confrontational. I don't know why I get confrontational. I used to take every. Somebody earlier said, like, feedback is great or feedback is whatever. Feedback. I hated feedback, man, because I was always working so hard. I took feedback as, like, intense criticism of me as a human being. And remember who you're looking at, right? You're looking at the kid who every day in school was told, you're a 62% student. I was running businesses. In grade five and grade seven, I had two employees. When I was in grade six, I had 12 employees. When I was 20 years old, I'd go to class, and every single class, I was getting a D minus. I can show you my transcript. D minus. D, D plus. Withdrawn. So when I was being told by the system for 18 years, from kindergarten until the end of university that I was stupid, that I wasn't smart, anytime anyone told me that I could have done better, like that memo could be better, or the report could look better, or the marketing could be better, the result I Took it intensely personally, and I took everything as arguing. And then I had to learn that if it's okay for me to tell someone they did something wrong, why am I taking it so personally? So I had to learn to just slow down, let it sink in, and just say thank you. And half the time now, when people give me something that I could do better or whatever, and I go, thank you, they go, yeah, man, you're welcome. You're killing it on this. Like, oh, yeah, good. It's really weird. I also had to remember that at the end of the day, none of this matters for all of our employees. This is just what they do to make money. And they're trying their best, but there's probably something happening at home with their spouse or their partner or their dog or their condo or their parents or the economy. Or maybe this stress is really building up in them, and maybe I can just slow it down and be more empathetic as a human with them. And maybe I don't have to be so confrontational with them as well. Maybe I can actually be more understanding and really know what's happening in their life. And then all the other stuff just starts to not even matter as much, or I realize I can just help them with it. Instead, I was a part of an organization called eo, which is the Entrepreneurs Organization. And we were in a forum group where every month these eight entrepreneurs would meet and we would share the most vulnerable and scary and nervous parts of our business and lives with each other. And we were supposed to literally put it all out there. Well, the benefit of that is that you have support from these people who understand the problem is that loose lips sink ships. If you don't want a secret to get out, you can't share it. You can't share it inside of your company all the time either. Because what happens is, as humans, we need someone just to gut check, did we give the right support? So I could tell Brian, here's something that I'm worried about, and I don't want you to tell anybody. He's, yeah, I won't tell anybody. But then he goes home, and he needs to tell his wife, Lisa. Like, yeah, Cameron told me this thing. You can't tell anybody. But, like, did I give him the right feedback? Like, I'm worried that I told him the wrong thing. She goes, no, I think you handle it really well. I think it's good. And then she has to go tell her friend Kelly. Like, by the way, like, Brian came home and he was worried. He didn't tell Cameron this thing. And I supported him, but God, he's really scared. Like, should I give my husband more support on this stuff? She goes, no, no, it's really good. But guess what? Kelly does. Kelly knows my CFO that I'm firing, but Lisa didn't know that. She knew Loose lip sync ships as a leader. When you get into these senior roles, at times you have to be very, very careful with the stuff that you get out. I'm helping four clients right now sell their companies. And it's a real art to be able to continue running a company, continue managing a leadership team and only have one or two people on that team actually know that you're working for an exit because the rest of people would be panicked. So you have to be very careful when you get into those situations. 900 employees and I got an email one day from our CFO. This was around probably January of 2000, February 2000. It was right when stuff was starting to get a little nervous with the stock market. And we knew we had to do a layoff. And we got an email from our cfo and she said, take every business area and rank the employees in each business area by order of importance, order of impact from your highest impact to lowest impact for every area. And I was in the C suite. So we all did it for all of our business areas. We sent it back to the CFO and it was like an auto reply a minute later, fire the bottom 30% tomorrow. Have 150 people off this list. Or but was 15%. Have 150 of these people. Give them this letter and tell them to come down to the building at 411 Jackson in Seattle. Come down to this office for a meeting. They're all going to be terminated. I had this one girl, Jennifer, she's like, how come I didn't get a letter? I want to go to the meeting. I'm like, shut up. Sit down. 150 people go and they get fired. So then we spend a week and a half managing the collateral damage, the worry, the fear. And we get an email from the CFO two weeks later. Please rank your 750 employees by business area by order. I'm like, are you kidding? And we had to do it again. 150 more people. The 150 people the second time was 10 times worse than it was the first time. And if we were going to do 150 and 150, we should have done 300 or 400 on day one. It's like ripping off the band aid when you Rip off the band aid one tiny little hair at a time. You just rip the sucker off, right? You need to cut deep and cut once. So you need to look across the organization. If you're firing one person, do a full review of every single person and see if there's anybody else that has to get let go. And do them both on the same day. Do them with integrity. Do them like you're firing your mom and your dad, you know, whatever, like. But you have to cut deep cut ones, because each firing is like an earthquake with an aftershock or a tremor. It's the aftershocks that freak everybody out. The one earthquake they got over quickly. But then every single aftershock for the next two days is what really. That's where the PTSD comes in. So I was at a restaurant years ago, and I had the CEO of a company that I was eating lunch with, and the waitress came up to take our order, and he was looking down or looking at me, and he goes, no, no, we're good. He was talking to me. And he goes, no, no, she was here. He didn't even look at her. I was like, wow, what a. And I realized that that's probably the way he is inside of his business as well. And it's amazing how you can see people and the way that they treat their employees, the way they treat their teams when they're just in public around other people, not at necessarily an event that they're running, but when they're just going about their daily lives. In all of my years of knowing Brian, I've known him now for 25 years. Brian who? The founder of One Attender Got Junk. I told one of my kids this the other day. I don't think I've ever been able to open a door for Brian. And I open doors for people all the time. 20 bucks. What's the charity shows 20 bucks to. He'll tell you a charity or just buy me a beer later or eat. I told my son the other day that I don't ever remember opening a door for Brian, because Brian gets to the door first on purpose to open a door for everybody. He's just wired that way. I had someone the other day come up to me. They go, did you just pick up garbage here? I was like, yeah, she was one of the staff from Mindville. She goes, you don't have to do that. We've got cleaners. I'm like, no, it's good. It was right here. I just picked it up. It's not a big Deal. I'll wash my hands later. But I'm hardwired to just pick stuff up, be a good person, so look for that. Vishen has an uncanny ability to hire great people. I met someone last night at the speaker's dinner, and she told me that he hired her at a cocktail party because she was dating one of his employees. And he's like, I don't even know the role that we can put you into yet, but we'll figure something out. Because you see the energy, you see the person. It's not about understanding exactly the job. As Jim Collins said, you get the right people on the bus, the wrong people off the bus, and everybody in the right seats. It's that. And you can notice that with those restaurant rules and how they go about their daily lives, you'll see leadership traits in people in their normal day, just going to yoga. You'll see leadership traits, you'll see people that care. As leaders, we often really don't know how to ask the right questions of our team. So one of my mentors was being groomed as the second in command at Starbucks, and he was a real mentor. We had a one hour call every month for two years, and then we would meet in person for a full day every quarter. One quarter I would go down to Seattle to their head office. One quarter he would come up to Vancouver to our head office office. And he was mentoring me for free for two years to help grow me. And I picked him out as a mentor. So I was talking to Greg one day and I said, tell me one area that you were grown that you grew kind of at Starbucks. And he goes, well, I'll tell you something. And how I grew the CEO because he was working with me on leading up. I had to lead Brian, the CEO in some areas, and he was working with me on the art of leading up, leading the CEO. I said, so what's the example? He said, well, Howard Behar at the time was CEO of Starbucks. We had Howard Schultz, Oren Smith and Howard Behar. And I think there's a fourth now, or I think Howard's actually back in Howard Schultz. So Howard Behar was CEO, and Howard Behar called Greg on his cell phone and he said, hey, Greg, why is the letter B on this sign at 50th and Wallingford in Seattle not working? I only use that example because that was the first Starbucks I ever went to in Seattle in 1993. And Greg's like, I don't care. That's a terrible question. Howard's like, dude, like, why is the letter B not working? Greg said, not a leadership question. And Howard said, okay, and at the time, I think they had like 11,000 locations. And Howard said, what's a leadership question? Greg said, what system do we have in place to ensure that every letter on every sign at all of our locations is always working? He said, that's a question I'm going to answer, but I don't give why the letter B on that sign is not working. Howard goes, touche. So as leaders, we don't have to find out why something got broken. Why did that not happen? Why did this not happen? That's not the question. The question is, what system do we have in place to ensure that those things never happen again? And it does actually stop with the CEO because you hired the people or had the systems in place that allowed people to come in. Right. It can always go to some underlying system. So what system is broken? Create a no blame environment where people don't fail. Systems fail. Michael Gerber from NEMA said that when you create that no blame environment, people are going to be willing to say something's broken because they know they're not going to get in trouble for. Because you're going to put an underlying system in place so that it doesn't happen again. One of our COO alliance members, they've been member for six years, their CEO is a really good friend of mine and I found out that I'd referred something over to them and they're in the medical space and one of their clients wasn't very happy. And Dave, who's one of my best friends, the CEO said, it's okay, I got it, I'll fix the problem, I'll talk to the customer, he'll be all good. I said, no, Dave, you're missing the point. I really don't care that John is unhappy with you. That's not the point. What system can you put in place to ensure that your tens of thousands of customers going forward never have the issue John had? Dave's like, oh, you're right. Right. We go to that underlying, what's the broken system or fixed system that we can put in place, then your business really scales. But if you keep focusing on fixing the problem or that one thing or who did it wrong, you're missing the whole point. So the leadership questions are, what system is broken or system is missing? And then it creates this trust within your team. You know, Bill Gates used to do what he called think week, and he would go away twice a year and take all these books and just go without technology and just allow himself time to think. Do you ever take time to just think? Right? No phone, no laptop. I talk about it in the Vivid Vision Quest, about getting away from your laptop and away from your office and going somewhere just to allow your mind to dream. But what about just leaving your phone and going for a walk or leaving your phone and going for dinner or closing your laptop down for a week and going out? Like, go on vacation. That doesn't mean working while you're there. It doesn't mean checking email. You're there. It means, like, disconnecting. It's okay. Do you know that your grandparents used to go on vacation without technology and the business was there when they came home? My grandfather taught me that. My grandfather, both sets of grandparents were entrepreneurs. And one of my grandparents said, when you go on the golf course, don't let me ever see you have your phone. I'm like, but I need to check. He goes, dude, I built. I didn't say dude. He was like, I built my business without a cell phone. I can go golfing for six hours, five hours. I'm like, yeah, you're right. Makes sense. So take the time to disconnect. Take the time to think. I talked earlier a little bit about the criticism or the feedback. I had to learn to embrace the criticism, learn to actually take that criticism and say, thank you for that. Take it as a chance to grow and not see it as something that I'd really done wrong or something that I had to. Didn't have to take it so damn personally. So I look for that feedback now. I probably look for it too much. Like, I'll come off a stage and people are like, oh, you were great. No, no, I could do this better, that better, this better. So I'm okay now with taking the criticism in just as a feedback loop of ways to improve. And I look for a system that's missing to help me get better at that. Years ago, I was running a daily huddle at 1-800-GUT JUNK. I was really pissed off about some stuff around time management. And I felt like a lot of our employees were wasting time in meetings. It actually got talked about in my book. Meetings suck around meetings and running highly efficient and booking meetings for half the time. You first think about booking them for just how to really get highly impactful meetings happening or phone calls. And I decided at huddle, we had 150 employees there. I decided to just give them all for how much time they were wasting. Seemed appropriate at the time Because I was manic and a little bit bipolar and was a little add, and I just went for it, and it was good, man. Like, I cut them all down perfectly and destroyed the energy in the company for a solid two months. The recovery from that 30 seconds took two months for them to have trust and feel okay again. So I learned that negative public comments don't actually help you. It's that that whole private criticism, public praise, and just really remembering that as CEO, you're the chief energizing officer, right? What are you doing to actually stir the Kool Aid to get more energy? And be careful with anything you're doing that lowers the energy of your team. It's incredible how fast you can shift the energy in a room. You know, we talked about Esther Hicks and the movie the Secret. That's so true. In the business world, we had all of our employees watch the movie, and we had all of our franchise partners watch the movie, and then we had all of our top franchise partners watch the movie twice to understand quantum mechanics and quantum physics and how to transfer that positive energy around not just the manifestation, but how to actually use energy in a positive way. Negative public comments destroy energy. I also learned that anytime I told the Secret to someone, it destroyed trust. And I learned this because I talked to Tressa, who is my VP of operations. She was literally packing my parachute every day. She was somebody who I would give the most important projects to, and she could handle all that stuff for me perfectly. So I was having problems with one of the other guys who worked for us, Alex. And I decided to sit down with Tressa and talk to her about her peer, Alex, and what was pissing me off. I needed to bounce some ideas around and see what I was thinking. So I told her about it, and I said, nick, you can't tell Alex this. And I thought I was doing something really good. A week later, Tressa came up to me and she goes, I haven't slept in five days. I'm like, why? She said, I know that you needed to talk to me about Alex, but now I wonder who you're talking to about me. I wonder who you're going behind my back and asking questions about. And I was like, well, no one. She would never believe that, because even though. Do you follow where I'm going? Anytime you think that you're doing a favor with doing that, you're everything else up. You're destroying the own trust in your own organization. By the way, Blind Carbon Copy is destroying trust in your organization when you blind. Now, if you blind cc, like blind CCing to save your inbox, by the way. You don't need to say that. We get it. Like John bcc, like we get it. You don't need to say the rest of the whole sentence. But when you blind CC and don't tell people and you're doing so. Hey, Vishen, I'm letting you know what I'm doing over here. Vishen's now wondering who I'm doing it to. Be very careful who you BCC on things or who you tell secrets to because it's destroying the trust that they have in you as a leader. You need to find other outlets. You need to find peer groups or masterminds or coaches or someone outside your organization, or you need to work through it on your own. But you can't tell secrets inside the organization. Brian and I were off on a retreat at 1-800-got junk. Just the two of us, taking some time to think about the business. And we realized that our call center was really massively screwing up. So we went back in and we coined this phrase, inspect what you expect. And we got them to start showing us what they were doing, showing us what they were working on, showing us the reports. And we realized that so much of the work that was happening in our call center center wasn't being used by anyone. All the stuff that we thought they were doing wasn't actually really happening. So we learned that you kind of have to trust but verify. That's not micromanaging. It's just good leadership. I also learned that mentoring doesn't have to take time. You don't have to stop what you're doing to coach someone who reports to you. They can just sit and watch you. You could do phone calls, they can listen in. You could CC them on emails and just say, hey, I'm ccing these people because they're new and I want them to see. You could let them ride shotgun, you could let them sit in your board meetings, let them sit in your leadership team meeting, let them sit in the corner and just watch you do what you do. So years ago, I was doing budgeting with 1-800-got junk with our CFO Trish and got into the budgeting meeting one day and she goes, oh, this is Elaine. Elaine's working with us in budgeting now. I'm like, hey, nice to see you. Trish goes, elaine won't be saying anything. She won't even be asking questions. She's just going to sit here. Okay, that's cool. So we go about the Meeting for a half hour. And Trish is like, yeah, I'll see you Thursday. Okay, cool. We leave, we go about our day. A couple days later, we meet, start meeting. Trish goes, oh, by the way, Elaine might have a couple of questions. I'm like, yeah, that's good. Lane asks a couple of questions. Next Tuesday, Elaine comes in. Trish goes, elaine's probably going to ask a lot of questions. She might even have some suggestions. I'm like, that's cool. Thursday, I come in, Elaine's sitting there. I'm like, where's Trish? She's not coming. I run budgeting. Like, oh, I get it. It took Trish no time to train Elaine because she just kept doing her job. And she let Elaine ride shotgun. Trish had been the former head of finance for Starbucks when she came in to join us at 1-800-GOT junk. We were a cute little company. I got to learn that just by watching her going. Mentoring doesn't have to take time. We need to stop doing and start leading. Our job as leaders is to grow people and it's to grow their skills and grow their confidence. One of the reasons why I launched my invest in your leaders course, by the way, you should all take a look. It's called investinyourleaders.com it's the 12 core leadership skills that every leader needs to get better at in their day and their jobs. The reason I launched that course is for anyone who manages people to grow their skills. So it's situational leadership, coaching, delegation, time management, conflict management, one on one meetings, interviewing, running meetings, email management, project management, all the that managers need to be good at and we don't. Train them in it drives me crazy. Train them in those skills. Their skills will go up. When their skills go up, their confidence goes up. When their confidence goes up, they'll try more new stuff and they'll gain more skills. So our job as the leader is to be at the bottom of the org chart, growing our people's skills and growing their confidence. I want you to pretend that all of your managers are climbing up two ladders, two 40 foot ladders. And in the middle they get kind of shaky. So imagine if the two ladders are right beside each other and your left hand and left foot climb up one ladder, your right hand and right foot climb up the other ladder. One ladder is skills, one ladder is confidence. If the confidence ladder is shaking, I'm not taking on any more skills, am I? If my skills ladder is shaky, my confidence starts to get shaky. It's Pretty terrifying climbing up two ladders beside each other. But if they're both solid, you'll continue to grow. That's the whole purpose for launching that course. Invest in your leaders. Our job as leaders is to grow people, grow their skills, grow their confidence. Stop doing work your to do list needs to get done, but not by you. Technology also didn't drive you crazy. In this day and age, Gen Y has a big advantage on Gen X and baby boomers. I sat on a plane last week, two weeks ago, in first class beside a CEO of a company, typing on his laptop like this. Are you kidding? It's 2022 and you're using two fingers to type. I would fire that guy in 15 minutes. But most people have an iPhone and have no idea how to use the technology at all. We need to actually get trained on how to use all the tools that we have. Oh, yeah, I use Slack. Really? How much training have you had? Oh, none. I just use. Oh, so you really have no idea how to use the tool? So. Or Asana or Basecamp, like all of these technology tools that exist. Imagine if you just got like a half hour or an hour training once every six months for your leaders on how to use these tools and how much better they would get. Don't micromanage. One of my franchisees came to me one day and he said, you major in the minors. I said, what do you mean by that? He said, you spend so much time worrying about the little details, you miss the big picture. You've been on every franchisee. We had 50 franchisees at the time about their email signature not being perfect. They all have to have the right email signature. They got this corporate standard for email signature. He goes, you know, you have 50 franchisees that don't have a marketing calendar, marketing budget, or marketing plan, and you're worried about a email signature. I'm like, oh, so start worrying about the things that provide the biggest impact and some of the little things will start to take care of themselves. It's hard when you have ADD because you spot all the little things and they drive you crazy. That means slow down and take time to think and start noticing the big things. That should really be driving me crazy right now. We're entering this period of wartime. Maybe a bad analogy because of the Ukraine, but there's a wartime CEO and a peacetime CEO. Ben Horowitz talks about this in a really good detail in his book Hard Thing about Hard Things. Leaders have to make decisions. And when you're in a wartime situation, people start Freezing and getting nervous. People want to follow. Leaders have to lead. Make a decision, roll it out. It doesn't have to be the perfect one. I think it was General Patton said, a good plan violently executed now is better than a perfect plan next week. You need to make decisions and roll them out. This is one of my biggest pet peeves. Years ago, There was a TV show called 60 Minutes. 60 Minutes was an investigative journalism show that would go inside of companies to show you the truth of what was really happening inside a big pharma or inside of the pork slaughtering house, or inside of the soy manufacturing, or inside of the big bad marketing agency, Cambridge Analytica, whatever. They would do this investigative journalism. So what my rule is for my company and for all of my clients that I coach is make sure your company is 60 Minutes proof. If they came to investigate your business, would everything you say be true? Are any of your metrics inflated? Are any of your metrics lied? Are any of your metrics puffery, hyperbole? Those are actually called lies. We're just embellishing a little bit. No, you're lying. So I noticed it years ago when we were at our daily huddle and I said something to the team about 60% of everything we haul away at 1, 800 got junk gets recycled. And one of my employees came up to me afterwards. She goes, you can't lie at huddle anymore. I'm like, dude, I don't lie. Yeah, you said 60% of what we hollow gets recycled. I said, yeah, it does. He goes, no, it was 57.4% last week. We can't say 60. I'm like, are you kidding? She goes, no, because if we say six, I'm like, God. I was kind of defensive, but I'm like, you know what? You're right. Like, I wasn't lying. I wasn't intending to like. But it was close. 57.4 60. Who gives a except 60 minutes or accepts a customer or so. So don't exaggerate because you. You end up getting found out. But who you get found out by first isn't 60 minutes and isn't your customers. It's your employees. And when you start exaggerating and embellishing and your employees feel like you're lying or making up, it destroys the fabric of your organization and the core values from the inside out because of you. So fact check, slow down, try to be more exact. Or say things like approximately 60%, they're okay with that as long as approximately 60, and it's not really 51 and then it should be more approximately 50, but 60 minutes proof. Raise the bar. Every single time you bring a new employee into the group, raise the bar. If you got four people in marketing, the fifth one should be better than at least two. If you got six people in sales, your next one should be better than at least three. It's like a sports team. Keep raising the bar. Raising the bar. Raising the bar. And cut the happy talk. For God's sakes. No one has time to read these long emails that you're writing. Who here writes long emails? No one has time to read them. Go look at Apple's website and then look at every other technology company's website. Do you ever notice that Apple has like the critical few words? They really agonize over every little. They got rid of all the happy talk. If you put up a core value and it needs an explanation, it means it's not clear. Clarify. It doesn't need the explanation. Only have the critical few words there so that your employees and your customers have actually time to read them. When you send out an email, limit it to five bullet points or less. I love bullet pointing and happy facing so that it's clear and it stands out. But if you have too much information, people don't have time to read it all and they're skimming stuff at best. Who here skims their emails or skims their messages? All of us. So if you're skimming stuff and if you're doing stuff in multiple countries, multiple languages, forget it. All bets are off because now you're skimming in a different language. Cut the happy talk. We talked a little bit about CCing and blind CCing. I also really limit the amount of people I CC on stuff they actually don't need to know. If you're going to CC somebody on something, tell them what you need to do or don't do it. Do you know that years ago where carbon copy came from was back in the photocopier days or in the multi carbon pit. You literally had to go to the photocopier and photocopy 42 sheets to hand it to the 42 people and put it in their mailboxes. So guess What? You didn't CC42 people because you didn't want to have to spend time doing it. I'm like, I'm not telling four. I'll tell four people. Do it that way. Think about each email that you're ccing as if you'd have to physically walk it to their desks and. And maybe you won't cc 40 people on 16 people a day and get replies from it all. We're wasting so much time because we're being lazy and moving too quickly. Slow down. I'm a big systems person. Every franchise organization I built 1, 800 got junk. Gerber Auto Collision College Pro Painters. I've always cared about systems and processes, but I also care most about the outcome over the process. As Ray Dalio said, if you see a snake in the grass, you don't write a process or a playbook to kill the snake. You pick up a stick and you bash it over the head. If I see a great employee, I'm going to hire them. I'm not necessarily going to run them through my entire interviewing process. I believe in process to a point, but I believe in the outcome over the process. It's not just about manifestation, okay? Vision without execution is hallucination. You can't just like manifest. Manifest. You got to get some going. You got to work towards stuff. But there's a lot of other stuff that comes out from the secret as well. And I really encourage you to rewatch it and see how you can bring all of these systems into your business. If you've got titles and roles, ensure that they're clear from the CEO to the coo. Clear org chart, clear roles and responsibilities, clear metrics, clear reporting structure. And make sure that everybody in the organization knows that and communicate it. Communicate it, Communicate it. Communicate it. Communicate it over. Communicate until your people are making fun of you and then you know your ideas are starting to stick. When was the fall of. Was it 91? The fall of the Soviet Union. So 1990. Mikhail Gorbachev was meeting with Ronald Reagan. I think they were doing it in Berlin. I'll make up some of the facts. It's not a real story anyway. Gorbachev and Reagan are meeting Reagan's President of the United States. Gorbachev is president Soviet Union. And they're trying to solve all the world's problems in their meeting. And all of a sudden this guy comes into the meeting screaming and yelling. And Gorbachev looks at him and laughs and says, remember rule number six. Gorbachev hears it over his headset, or Reagan does, and he goes, that's weird. Remember rule number six, he said. They go about the rest of the meetings. And a couple hours later, somebody comes in upset. And Gorbachev laughs and smiles and says, remember rule number six. And the guy calms down and leaves. Hour later, a woman comes in. She's screaming, yelling. Gorbachev laughs and smiles and says, remember rule number six. She leaves completely calm and happy. So they've solved the world's problems. The wall is going to come down. Cold war is over. Reagan says, I need to know something. He goes, what's rule number six? Gorbachev laughed and smiled. He said, rule number six is don't take yourself so seriously. And Reagan said, well, what are the first five rules? Gorbachev said, there aren't any. That's kind of what we have to remember, and it's kind of what I ended with yesterday. And we're going to slip into some Q and A right now. But none of this actually matters. We're all going to die. The earth was here for millions and millions of years before us. It's going to be here for millions and millions of years after us. Like, whatever we do is, like, completely massively insignificant. Let's just dance and find fun and hold hands and be good people and, like, enjoy the journey, right? Because this is just what we're doing to make a buck. And I think if you bring that attitude back into the workforce, you can still work hard, you can still be passionately driving towards goals. You can still build great companies. But for your employees as well, this is just what they're doing to make a buck. You got to remember that none of this matters. I have a woman who worked for me 20 years ago, Jennifer, and I still to this day get text messages from her, and all it'll say is, rule number six. I'm, like, having a rough day. She goes, oh, again. But I just laughed about rule number six. I'm like, you're amazing. We only talk like, once every three or four years, but I get text messages every six months. And all it says, rule number six. I talked a little bit about investing your leaders. It is the core thing that I've done at every company was to grow my people. It's what I'm known for. It's why I coached real companies. These systems that are in invest in your leaders are the systems that I taught Kimbal Musk. When Kimball Musk, Elon's brother, worked for me in 1993, I taught him how to grow his first company. I was a reference for him and Elon in their very first company. They had one employee. They were raising 600,000. That was the skills I taught Kimball. Peter Reeve, his Cousin who built SolarCity, was also an employee of mine in 1993. The companies that I've built and mentored and coached, this is what I work with them on when I coached the family that owns the country of Qatar. We dipped into about five of these 12 systems. So these are the systems that I'm passionate about. They're there. I really encourage you to go for it.

When you're in a new market, when you've got a really interesting technology, when you've got such incredible customers right out of the gate, you can look out onto the field and say, gosh, there's so much I want to do here. And at a bigger company, you have the time, the resources, the people to kind of set all of those things in motion and. And watch all of them.