The Untold Secret to Building an Unstoppable Company

So a vivid vision is a four or five page description of what your business or your life or your relationships looks like, acts like, and feels like three years in the future. Writing that five page description helps other people conspire to help you make that come true. So the more people I share my Vivid vision with, the more they can help me make it come true. They see certain sentences that they can introduce someone to or they can hold me accountable to, or they ask me questions about and I get more excited about.

I have got to bring in the master himself. Cameron Howell, you are the author of Vivid Vision. What made you write down?

Well, the first book I wrote was called Double Double, right? And Double Double, chapter one of Double Double was the Vivid Vision concept. And people wanted more information about it. They wanted to understand deeper how to write it, deeper how to roll it out much deeper on how to connect the customers and suppliers and employees with it. And then I also covered areas on personal vivid visions and families Vivid visions. So there's just much more content than I could deliver in one chapter. So that was the reason for writing the book Vivid Vision. But I was introduced to the concept 25 years ago now, back in 1998 in Vancouver, Canada, where an Olympic coach was teaching a group of CEOs. It was an entrepreneurs organization event. We had 120 CEOs that were invited to the event. Only 16 of us went. And in the first five minutes we all thought it was going to be the stupidest session ever because the this high performance Olympic coach was talking about looking into the crystal ball and visualizing our company in the future. And we're like, what the are you talking about? It ended up becoming a very profound concept. I used it to scale up my private currency company at the time, started talking about it on stages and that's kind of where it started.

Were you kind of amazed at how many people grasped it? Because I remember having a conversation we had Brandon Turner over at the Hollywood Speakeasian and he basically spoke about Vivid Vision in so many statements, it was like his bible. Were you also kind of in awe of how many people actually grasped it and took it and ran with it?

I think in the early days I was really excited about it. I was less in awe because I don't think I had the perspective globally yet to see the impact it was going to start having. I was excited that people were latching onto the concept and I saw this as a tool to help people. So I was more excited about it where I really became kind of in awe about it was when it started to pick up globally. You know, I had the governor of the state of Arizona, Doug Ducey, asked me to come and sit with him privately in his office to walk through the vivid vision concept and help him craft one for the state of Arizona. I had Forbes magazine, the actual physical print edition of the magazine, write a full page article about the vivid vision concept about 10 years ago, like in the actual magazine. And then I had people in foreign countries starting to use it. That's when I really kind of was like, holy sh. T is big.

So that brings up a big question. Is there any difference in its acceptance based on culture? Now, I know you do a lot in the Middle east, but, you know, the underdog story, for argument's sake, is a great US thing. But the underdog story isn't so grasped in, say, Korea or Japan.

So, yeah, I think, I think the vivid vision concept has really taken hold in probably 26 or 27 countries. Some of my other content is not as well received because culturally, the way that you build a company culture, you know, driving core values, the open office environment, the profit sharing program, a lot of that is not as embraced in cultures around the world as it is in North America now taken for granted. But the vivid vision concept, strangely, has been very well adapted. And I think it's because it is just a leader sharing the vision of their company or a person sharing the vision for their life. You know, all of that is very, very global.

What is a vivid vision? We want to know how to construct it. But what is the first thing people do wrong when they try to build that vivid vision? So give us the reason and then give us the first mistake into making a good one.

One of the things that we learned, and this was again, rolling back 25 years, which is if you lean too far out, you fall over. If you try to write a vivid vision for five years or 10 years out, it doesn't work. It's too far out there for people to latch onto. So there's a very big difference between a bhag, right? And my bhag is to replace vision statements with vivid visions worldwide. But a vivid vision should be a shorter time constraint. If you only go one year, it's really not different enough from what you have today to provide enough kind of excitement and energy and tension. So we found that three years tends to be the right amount of time. But if you go out too far, not far enough, it doesn't work. Secondly is if you just roll the vivid vision out. So a vivid vision is a four or five page description of what your business or your life or your relationships looks like, acts like, and feels like three years in the future. Writing that five page description helps other people conspire to help you make that come true. So the more people I share my vivid vision with, the more they can help me make it come true. They see certain sentences that they can introduce someone to or they can hold me accountable to, or they ask me questions about and I get more excited about. So that's the length of the document. When you roll out the vivid vision, where a lot of people make a mistake is they roll it out and they expect everyone to be just as excited as you are. But it takes time for people to understand the whole document. It takes time for them to buy into the whole document because they're still focused on what today looks like. And if you're talking about three years out, three years out, three years out,' and all they can see is today. It takes time for them to get excited about that Future. So the CEO's job is to communicate vision constantly. As Jim Collins in Good to Great says that a leader has to be talking about the idea long enough that your people start making fun of you and only then have your ideas started to stick.

What's the difference between a vivid vision and a mission statement?

So a mission statement tended to be, you know, we'd pull our leadership team together on an off site, we'd all put our favorite inspiring words up on a whiteboard, we'd vote on our favorite words. We might end up with six or seven words and we mash them up into one sentence. You know, go team. That was never enough. Like a one sentence mission statement or vision statement. Didn't talk about your culture, didn't talk about your meeting rhythms, didn't talk about your office space and your hybrid workforce. Didn't talk about how you live core values and how you embrace your core purpose. Didn't talk about what customer service looked like or what it looked like. It didn't explained it enough. And then Gino Wickman, who I'm friends with from a few different masterminds in his book Traction, talks about the vision. Traction organizer. That is not a vision statement. That's merely 10 goals that you're driving towards, which is great. But the vivid vision is a four or five page description of every aspect of your company, as if you're standing, walking around your company three years from now. Almost like we hopped out of a time machine and we're describing everything. We describe our meetings, we Describe our offices not knowing how it came true. But if we can describe it in its future state, we can then reverse engineer every sentence and figure out one or two projects to make each sentence come true.

You've stated the vivid vision is something that you present, you offer out. It's not something you hide. It's not something that this internal way you go, oh, I wish I could have you actually declare it. And until you declare it, it can't great gain any traction and come true. Is that right?

One of the worries that entrepreneurs tend to have is, well, what if people take my vision and they rip it off? So what? They don't have your tenacity, they don't have your team, they don't have your laser focus, and more likely their vision is going to be different. It's kind of like if you had a vivid vision for what an electric vehicle would look like. Not everybody is designing the Tesla. You know, all these other car companies have their electric vehicles. So don't worry about sharing what your vivid vision is. Stay focused on what yours is. Be cognizant of what the competitors are doing, but be obsessed with where you're going.

Now. You actually spoke at the speakeasy in Arizona. You went down a path talking about culture. And it was very impactful to me because I've actually quoted it many times since. If we're going to be putting out a vivid vision, then it's very important that we're putting out to the right group of people and therefore culture. Why is culture so important in our growth?

I think culture is what excites people and aligns people and inspires people. I think it's what kind of fuels the conversation. I'll give you an example of where culture matters and where vision matters. 100 years ago, there were three guys sitting on a sidewalk and they were making bricks. And they asked the first guy, what are you doing? He said, I'm making bricks. That guy's not super inspired. He's not super passionate about his role, but he's making bricks. They asked the second guy, what are you doing? He said, I'm building a wall, and I get to make bricks to build this wall again. He's got some purpose with what he's doing, but he's not super excited about it. Where the culture really emerges and vivid vision is one part of culture is. The third guy said, they're building a cathedral to worship God. It's called the Casta Grada Familia in Barcelona. And he gets to make the bricks to build the left wall of the cathedral. All three guys were making bricks. All three guys were building bricks for the left wall. But the third guy was inspired by the vivid vision that Gaudi had for this unbelievable cathedral. And he found meaning and purpose in his work, which, frankly, that vivid vision of what they're building is what has allowed them to build it for 125 years. Some families have had three or four generations of people working on that same vivid vision to make it come true. I was just really curious about, like, the systematic approach you were taking to the four to five page document. So. So I caught that you were just kind of saying it towards the end that you would break down every line and create like little mini projects towards accomplishing each item. And. Yeah, so it's almost like if we were going to build a home, right? If I was going to build my dream home and I could describe the kitchens and the bathrooms and the hallways and the bedroom, you'd have a very clear description of what my home looks like. And as the contractor, you could create the blueprints and the elevation drawings and the plans to make my vision come true. Right. The homeowner explains the vision in such detail. The contractor can create the blueprints and plans to make my home come true. Now, you know as well as I do that we're excited about what the kitchen is going to look like, but we don't install the cabinets on day one. We have to do the foundation like there's an order of operations to building the home. Many entrepreneurs get super excited about installing the cabinets and putting in the right countertop, but they do it in the wrong order. So that vivid vision document is not written in the order that it happens. Right. It's written as a whole, describing your whole business. Your team's job is to figure out what parts to put in place first. What are the foundational parts of your business? Right? Like your core values, your core purpose? You're interviewing the hiring of people, the growing of people, the leadership training programs, the alignment with vision, your one year plans, the meeting rhythms. There's like an order of operation, of doing the right things. And that's how you decide what are each of the things to make each sentence come true and which ones should we do in year one? And of all the things we're going to do in year one, which parts do we do in fourth quarter, third quarter, second quarter, first quarter? Let's execute on first quarter and keep reminding people of what's happening in year three. So you have to keep reminding people that all of the vivid vision is going to happen, but some of it's not going to happen until the third year. So they don't get discouraged. And you also don't want the entrepreneur with their big shiny objects getting so excited about install the cabinets. Install the cabinets. Like, dude, we haven't even got the floors put in yet. That's, that's kind of the methodology. And, and that's the, the metaphor that I use all the time is building this home.

How often do you go back and actually check it? Is there, is there an audit time where you go every six months, I'm going to revisit it, or is it just, hey, this has just popped up. That's going to impact my goal. So how often do you go back to it?

Best practices is at least every quarter. You and all of your employees and all of your customers and suppliers and they should all be rereading it quarterly at best. You want to be rereading it monthly. And then, you know. Hal Elrod and I co authored the Miracle Morning for Entrepreneurs together as part of the morning savers. The V is visualization. You could be reading your vivid vision on a daily basis or reading a paragraph daily or listening to parts of it on a daily basis. The more that you as the entrepreneur stay focused on your vivid vision, or the more that you as a human stay focused on the vivid vision for your life or your marriage, the more that you're going to be able to make it come true. So you're always thinking about it, but executing on today, you said there quickly.

You actually release it to your customers, vendors, so outside of your team, you're releasing your vivid vision every quarter.

Yeah. So what I do is I first release it to the leadership team and make sure I get buy in from the leadership team. Secondly, I release it to all my employees so I get buy in and alignment with all my employees. So now the entire company is aligned and inspired and excited about the vivid vision. Then we start rolling it out to potential employees so they're excited about what they're joining. Then we roll it out to all of our suppliers and then we roll it out to like our lawyer and our accountant and our bankers so they can all see what we're building last. I start rolling it out to customers and then potential customers. So that's kind of the rollout over the first quarter and then every quarter afterwards, simply emailing a PDF document or the link on your website to everyone and reminding them about the vivid vision, maybe doing a quick one minute loom video, getting people excited about it and asking them to reread it again and asking them to let you know which sentences they can help come true.

Scary, but beautiful.

To me, what is scarier is having all your employees and customers and suppliers all thinking you're building something very different.

If you're rolling this out to all of these people, how do you create a culture of patience within yourself and within all of these people that you would reveal this to so that they're not trying to put the cart before the horse?

The way that you stay patient with everything is remind yourself with a plan. Like if I came up with 84 projects to do to make my vivid vision roll out, I can then show that 30 of the projects happen in year three, 20 projects happen in year two, and I've got 30 projects happening in year one. Project plan shows me to not worry that it will be coming. Much like the blueprints of building a home, I now have the plan to make my vision come true. Remember, Thomas Edison said that vision without execution is hallucination. So we have to actually roll out the vivid vision, but then we have to have the plan and the people in place and the meeting rhythms to make that vision come true.

How do you keep your people from not jumping ahead?

By keeping them focused on the plan. Right. Thinking about the future, but executing on today. Knowing where we're going, but focusing on their quarterly plan, focusing on their quarterly metrics, focusing on their top five for the week. So it's always important to know where we're going, but then execute on today. You mentioned earlier on about core values. People have differentiated different views about core values. Some people like sort of, you know, what one word. What's your view on it? So I've been speaking about core values now for 22 years. Your core values should be a maximum of four or five core values. If you get more than that, they start becoming. Some of them are aspirational values. My test is you have to be willing to fire people who break your core values. And you must recruit an interview and hire people based on the core values. So 5 tends to be enough. More than that tends to be too many. Core values should never be a single word. Spell it out as a very clear, concise sentence or a phrase that everyone can understand that need no explanation whatsoever. So a great example of some core values. Deliver what you promise. Respect the individual pride in all you do. Find a better way. They're all very clear. You can be willing to fire people who break them. They're super easy to understand. The only time I've ever allowed anyone to have a single word as a core value was one of my clients that I coached for four years. One of their five core values was simplify. I'm like, oh, that's so good. Like, it just, like, it's just perfect, right? Like, but that's the only time a single word's ever been so perfect for me. Next one is, is if don't put a bunch of core values to create an acronym. Like, it's about the core values, not some cute little acronym that you come up with. And I think the acronym often diminishes the core values because people think you're trying to be cute instead of trying to obsess about what really matters and then think about the order that you're putting them in intentionally, you know, One of my clients had five core values and their fifth core value of the list was safety is number one. Like, well, if safety is number one, that should be your first core value. So be very intentional when you roll those out. Now, the reason I say that they shouldn't have any bullet points or explanation is they need to be so clear that everyone understands them. You can then have explanations on how we live them. So you might have deliver what you promise as a core value, which is super easy to understand, doesn't need an explanation, but then you could have five bullet points in a document, part of your training program on how we deliver what we promise. Right? We commit to goals and we deliver on our goals. We commit to showing up on time for meetings. We commit to, you know, replying to emails within 24 hours, whatever our commits are. It's like, oh, I understand how I'll use that core value on a day to day basis. Those are some of my ground rules though. I visualize every company like a jigsaw puzzle. The vivid vision is the picture on the front of the box of the jigsaw puzzle. And then whenever we start a jigsaw puzzle, we like to get the four corners first. Well, the four corners of all of your companies are your core values, your core purpose, your bhag, which is your big hairy, audacious goal, and your one year plan that everyone's executing. On the four sides of the jigsaw puzzle are the people systems, the meeting rhythms, the strategic plan or strategic thinking systems, and your financial systems. And then the culture emerges from that jigsaw puzzle approach. That's the way I visualize every company.

When you're talking about your journey as an entrepreneur, as you are working with different companies and different pillars of where you're taking both your personal vision and your global business visions. You've created all of these different companies, right? And so you must have a separate vivid vision each of those companies. But how do you distinguish from the personal and the relational piece, which I love sharing with your spouse, your family, your kids, your inner circle, but then also these different layers of different businesses that you're building?

Well, so I'm only running one operating company. I have products and services that are parts of that. I learned the hard way back kind of from 2000 to 2007, that I am not the company, I am not my brand, that I'm. I'm a. A human who has maybe 100 years to go through this life. And one of the things that I do is I run a company, but I'm no longer letting my company define me. I'm no longer keeping that as the center of my being. I think that's one of the big values of having lived and traveled. Now the United States is so myopic and focused on what we do. When you're living globally, when you meet someone, they don't say, what do you do? Like, they ask you, what have you seen this week? What have you been doing this week? What are you up to? What are your hobbies like? And then like, maybe at some point in conversation, it's like, oh, what do you do to make money? I think I've really decoupled myself from my company in that it's only one aspect of my life. You know, if I was running multiple businesses, yes, I would have a different vivid vision for each company. I would. A different operating plan, a different team in place, a different P and L in place. I would just think of it that way. When you craft a personal vivid vision for Michelle, you would realize that you can start to uncouple some of what's in your company. Vivid vision. The company vivid vision should be about your customers and each of the business areas and supplier relationships, and, you know, the company purpose as a whole, the company's values as a whole. But you're just like, at the end of the day, you could hire someone to run your company for you, and then Michelle's not part of that vivid vision at all. Right. The reality is we shouldn't be in our company Vivid vision. Even under the law, a company is a legal entity. So the company should have its vivid vision with its core values, its core purpose, you know, its leadership team. And then Michelle should have a vivid vision for her As a human, Cameron.

I wanted to touch base on the bucket list and how you pepper that into the vivid vision is that I see that as a separate list. Is that part of your vision? Can you speak to that?

Yeah. This is something that I learned years ago from a book called the Dream Manager. And it said if companies are more focused on helping their employees make their dreams come true, the employees will go through brick wall for you. So part of that is getting every employ your company to craft their 101 dream goals or their bucket list. And it could be a very local bucket list. It could be everything you want to do or try or experience or see in Scottsdale. Like it doesn't have to be traveling the world. My wife and I each wrote our bucket list. We each have about 150 things on our bucket list. We're constantly working to help each other cross things off our off our bucket lists. And we're living what we call our bucket list life. So we're literally probably every two or three weeks crossing something off each of our bucket lists. And, and we share our bucket list with the world so that people can either help us make those come true or we can inspire other people or they can come with us on some of those bucket list adventures. But like in the last 12, last 12 months, you know, Iceland, skydiving over the palm in Dubai, going on safari in Kenya, scuba diving in the Seychelles, I mean, the list just was like, crossing it off, crossing it off, crossing it off. And that's partially because we have one and we're sharing those.

You mentioned that you go over your vision with your leaders first and get buy in and then the employees and get buy in.

What are usual challenges you get at these steps have you figured out to address? Great, great question. There's a very subtle nuance here on the buy in as well. I'm not going to change the vivid vision to get their buy in. I'll change out the people and find the people who buy in. The vision is the vision right with if Steve Jobs showed the prototype for the iPhone and said, what don't you like about it? Are you bought into it? And they're like, well, it needs a keyboard. He would have designed something very different. He knew what he wanted to design and he found people that were crazy enough to help him make it come true. So the buy in that I'm getting is, are you as excited about building this as I? And are you crazy enough to help figure out how to make this come true? And then it's just Reminding them that some parts of it won't happen until three years and two years. That's where some of the, the excitement comes. A lot of employees tend to be very disillusioned with entrepreneurs because we have the idea of the week, right? And sometimes we're super excited about the idea and then three weeks later, oh yeah, we don't need that idea anymore. They want to just know for sure that we're really locked and loaded on this vivid vision before they get excited.

So many entrepreneurs are and maintain struggles to not be outcomes focused, right? Many are outcome focused. And so vision can be powerful. And visiting it consistently and having the plans and the blueprints right, it's going to keep it present top of mind for you and your team. I love that in yours. You also have a how I feel section within your vivid vision. But inevitably, like, right, life hits and things often don't go exactly as we envision. And how do you coach people to manage the emotions when things don't happen as they hope or within the timeframes that they hope? And how are you encouraging people to evolve in their visions instead of remaining stuck on them?

So you definitely update it every three years. So as you evolve as a human, as your business evolves, then you're going to evolve your vivid vision. But I think it is powerful when you just kind of stay focused on, committed to what feels right. So if I'm thinking about how I as a leader within my company feel on that day to day basis, I just keep forcing that feeling. I keep going back and revisiting that feeling. I keep going like, what are the things that I can do to protect that feeling? Like as an entrepreneur, a couple things that we have to protect on our own are our kind of excitement and enthusiasm around the business, our confidence. You know, we constantly get told it can't happen or not now or no, or we, we stumble into these problems. So we have to protect that. Well, one of the ways to protect that is to stay healthy, you know, to stay fit, to stay mindful, to, you know, control our diet, to control our use of substances. And again, I learned this twice by having, once having a massive nervous breakdown and once just massively not staying healthy in the growth of companies. I just won't do that anymore. In traveling around the world, I have a backpack and a small little suitcase. I actually have a scale in my backpack and I weigh myself every single morning. This morning I was 182.1 pounds. I'm pretty much at the exact same weight that I was at 30 years ago, but I was 42 pounds heavier than I am today. Ten years ago, I just refused to go back there. So around mindset, around fitness, it has to just stay focused on it and we have to strip our weight from the excuses, right? So I think it's easy to say that, oh well, life happened and stuff got in the way. No. There's plenty of people out there that are with kids or with a spouse who's sick or with a rough economy that are still living their best life because they focus on that. First, I haven't had a drink in almost seven months now. And that was something that I had to realize, that it was affecting my life and my relationship six, seven years ago that I decided I wasn't going to let it do that anymore. Right? That I was waking up in the morning tired, which meant I wasn't going to the gym. So I wasn't eating healthy, I wasn't feeling good about myself. So I was using alcohol to self sabotage or to feel okay. It was this doom loop that I was in instead of protecting my confidence and protecting the way I feel.

The vivid vision is there to obviously help us. Does every goal that we actually list out there have to be a massive one?

No. Some of the goals that are written in your vivid vision and again, they're less of a goal, they're more like, I know this is going to happen. I think feel this or I want this to happen in such a big way. It could just be we want our employees delivering on their core promises or our employees are excited about, you know, our meetings or we actively listen to our customers by xyz. Those, those aren't massive goals, but they can just be very transformational. If there's things you don't do today, that's good.

I think a lot of people get scary because they look at this vivid vision that, you know, like fireman saying, I'm going to have 8,000 franchises that are all going to buy into the culture. And that can scare people.

And often in the vivid visions, I don't even want numbers in there, right. I want it about the feelings it needs to be about, like what can you see and feel like? Elon had a vivid vision for the Tesla Model S when he rolled it out 10, 12 years ago. And one of them was that it had to fit him and his family. At the time he had five kids and he was six foot four. So that's why the Tesla Model S, when I sit in it at 6 4, I sit in the driver's seat. I push the seat all the way back and there's still room for a 6 foot 4 guy behind me is because he designed the car to fit his body and his five kids. Three in the back seat, two in the jump seat by the trunk. There's a seven person family. Like the vision was there, but it wasn't like so massive.

When you're rolling this out, how often do you revisit it? Is it like a rolling thing where every year you go three years out.

Or do you every four. It's every three years you draft a new vivid vision. I think my personal vivid vision has one more year left in it. I think my company, Vivid Vision may have one more year as well. And then I believe my wife and I still have two more years left in our vivid vision because we just, we got rolled that one out about a year, a little over a year ago. And I always like to say that, you know, if my vivid vision is coming true, December 31, 2024, I write it as December 31, 2024. I don't write it as January 1, 2025. That one day all of a sudden feels like I have a lot more time left. I say goals are completed by Friday, not by Monday, by the 31st of the month, not by the 1st of the month. You know, it provides a little bit more attention, even though it's only an hour difference or a minute difference. What do you do when you feel like it's not like you failed the goal? Like, okay, I haven't hit this. How do I pivot? What is your process for that? So you're talking about like pivoting off a complete goal or complete off of a vivid vision? Vivid vision, I guess.

Yeah.

Let me speak to both. Yeah. So the vivid vision describes your entire company. Only time I've ever really seen companies have to massively pivot. There's been two occasions. One was the global financial crisis where people that were in the mortgage and real estate industry just had to do something different because that whole industry got obliterated. The second was, was Covid. You know, my sister's company during COVID was literally shut down. A 23 year old company went from a million dollars a month to zero. She had to massively reinvent. So even though she was locked and loaded on this vivid vision, she had to stop, come up with an entirely new vision for a business and 12 months later had created a $2 million company with a million dollar EBITDA. That was a very different business. Then when Covid opened up again. She continued on that business and reopened her initial business, and now she's merged the two together and operating both. But that's the only time I've ever really seen a massive pivot have to happen is when literally everything around you falls apart. More often than not, it's where a couple of sentences are too hard to make happen, or we ran out of time, we didn't have the right people or plan or money in place for something. But that's where a few sentences don't come true. Not the whole vision. Would we rather have everyone completely aligned with a vision and then have to pivot and align them with a new vision? Or would we just want a bunch of smart people working really hard and then try to realign them when something happens? It's way easier to get everyone realigned. If they're already aligned with one thing, they can align with something else. One of my obsessions is that a leader's core job is to grow people. And I don't find a lot of companies out there that are growing themselves. Like, the reality is we make business very difficult for ourselves because most of us don't spend the time on growing the executive functioning skills of our people. So training them around situational leadership, coaching, delegation, hiring, interviewing, doing top grading, running meetings, managing conflict, managing email, managing projects. If we would train our people on the skills. Business gets very easy. But right now we have a lot of people that might be aligned without the skills to actually go there. It's like hiring a whole bunch of people that can't build a house. They could be aligned with the most beautiful vision and the most beautiful plan, but if they don't, if they're not skilled at being contractors or doing electricians or plumbing, your house will never get built.

You said, hey, five page mission statement. You know, five page visual. That scared me when you said five page. You know, if someone said, hey, you've got to write a sentence, if you've got to write a chapter, where does the pen start in order to get to that five page?

And it does start with a pen. Here's what I want everyone to do. Close your laptop, turn off your phone, grab a notebook and a pen, leave your home, leave your office with just a notebook and a pen, and go somewhere where you can allow your mind to drift for a half a day, but somewhere where you're not in your office, you're not surrounded by technology, you're not surrounded by planning and how we do things. And then I want you to write down maybe 15 different areas of your business you can describe. Describe the meetings. Describe operations. Describe IT Finance, customer service, sales, marketing. Describe your leadership team. Describe your metrics in your dashboards. Describe your relationship with the bank and your relationship with your accountant, your relationship with your lawyer. Describe what your employees are writing about you online. Describe what your customers are writing about you online in their reviews. Describe how the media is covering you. What I want you to do is come up with three or four bullet points for each of those areas. If you can come up with three or four bullet points of what each of those areas look like, act like and feel like three years in the future without worrying about how to make it come true.

We actually book in our calendar breakfast, and we will literally take ourselves out of our house, out of our office, jump on the bikes, and again, with very little technology, just go and try a new taco stand or a new coffee bar or something like that. And we will sit there and we will just chat and grow. So you are, you know, the pedigree racehorse here. You have to pay attention to yourself.

The key is blocking it in your calendar. It's because it does need to be a regular thing that we do. That's one of the things I love most about traveling and living globally. You know, 41 countries in the last two and a half years. I mean, I've been exploring coffee shops and, you know, yoga studios and new gyms and new trainers and just wandering and walking around the city where I get to explore and expand and just have that time for myself. It's been really powerful.