Built On Purpose Podcast – Building an Anti-Fragile Life with Eric Partaker

Welcome back to the Built on Purpose podcast. I'm your host, Max Hansen, the CEO of wisecots, where we find purpose aligned and performance proven leaders. Speaking of today, our guest is Eric Partaker, a peak performance coach, entrepreneur and author of the Amazon bestseller the Three Alarms. With a background that spans from advising Fortune 50 CEOs of McKinsey to helping scale Skype into a global success, Eric now helps leaders worldwide reach their potential through coaching. Through his coaching, he's on a mission to empower 100 million people to become the best versions of themselves by 2030. He has incredible content that we'll get into. Eric, welcome to the show.

Thanks so much Max. And it's, it's amazing that you. It's great to be reminded of our purpose.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, we'll talk more about that for sure. Let's start out. I just like a short software. You and I obviously had a couple minutes to catch up prior to this, which was awesome. What's the best thing going on in your life right now?

God, there's so many, there's, there's, there's a few, there's a few things and, and it kind of relates to like my view on the world that we can't just over track like on the work front, you know, we have to take this like three pillared approach. It's not just about our work and wealth, you know, our wealth, you know, it's like our health, wealth and relationship. So I'll give you one in each. So on the health grunt, I have struggled on and off with sleep for my whole like life. Like I struggle. Yeah, I struggle to sleep deeply enough, I'll wake up, you know, I might need to use the bathroom. I start thinking about something and then like my brain's on for like an hour and a half, two hours. And I just couldn't figure out like how to remedy that. So I'd go through good periods and then bad periods and then I came across Andrew Huberman's sleep cocktail. Like the supplement stack. Oh yeah, like simple stuff like magnesium L theanine, AP again. I've been sleeping like a bit. I'm getting like the best sleep in my life now, which is great, right? So it's like instead of it being up and down and hoping for a good period, that's just like kind of like nice and stable though. So that's good. That's a big, big, big, big thing. Second thing I would say is my two boys, I got a 19 year old and 11 year old and I'm you know, I'm a coach and mentor right. To others and I've suddenly started to like really lean in about providing that like same coaching and mentoring to my boys. And so you know, I'm helping my 19 year old, you know, in school right now kind of like, you know, get on the, on a good path, you know, doing his best and helping teaching like some of these basic peak performance principles to him. Like the foundation of like really, really strong, you know, habits and that if you take care of the inputs, the outputs, you know, come later. Like he's only like 19 and I never would have, I never had somebody like me, you know, helping train me at that age. So it's like I almost feel like this is this incredible gift to be giving them and that's like very like motivating and inspiring for me at the same time. And Even with my 11 year old, you know, I'm teaching them like concepts of like, you know, like anti fragility, you know, the things that stress us can actually make us stronger and, and you know, and the power of, of you know, a growth mindset, all that. So that, that, that, that's super cool. It's like actually becoming a coach and mentor for my boys. And then the third thing. So on the work front, so I've been a one, I've been doing one. Well, I've done a bunch of different things but lately the last few years I've been doing a lot of one to one coaching and mentoring for CEOs. Sure. Which is fun but it's kind of like limiting. Right. You can't reach a big number of people with that. But then I just created this new thing called the CEO accelerator where I integrate company building, leadership development and peak performance all in one thing. We're running our first cohort now. We have like 78 already on the wait list for the second one which launches in January. And it's just so much fun. It's like we're, we're, you know, we're, it's the start of an ed tech that we're making here focus on you know, the SMB leader space and yeah, it's just exhilarating, you know, seeing it all come together and, and also to seeing like how positively it's being received by the participants.

So.

Yeah, so those. Yeah, that's. You never get a short answer from me.

No, I, I love it. There's a lot there. I mean we kind of. I have a 19 year old in college too and this is just good. I'm kind of learning as we're talking about this. And that was, that's what I was looking forward to on this was, you know, when you get to talk to a coach or somebody that's coached a lot of CEOs, you know, I get a coach get, I get to be coached for free while I'm, you know, gathering information for everybody else, you know, that are also getting coached. But so this is wonderful and you know, got me thinking that I can't, I don't know if I do enough coaching and mentoring with my 19 year old. I mean, he's in Dallas, he's a few hours away from here. So it's just a good reminder that, you know, that, that to take everything you're learning professionally and apply it, you know, personally. How would you like? I know this might be a very like, basic and broad question, but I love people when they explain this. But like, who are you? Like, you know, I, I gave a little bit of your background. I love your background. You know, obviously you've scaled the company, you've done some really cool stuff. But like, who, how would you describe you today?

Very different from like who I thought I was, right. So the first half of my career I, I thought I was like naturally super extroverted and that I was, you know, like a chronic procrastinator, unable to focus a bit all over the place. And in the later, and this back half of my career, I've realized that I'm actually quite deep, reflective thinker. I prefer more time on my own rather than, you know, in a large room with others. I rather work with a very small group of people, you know, rather than, you know, a large, a large group as from a working team point of view. I really care about like what people are feeling and experiencing around me. Right. And, and especially those that I feel like are that I'm responsible for, you know, and, and, and I like to think of myself now as, you know, the home of the second chance is. I think we all need a second chance in life. You know, I certainly did. And, and I think lots of people out there want like a second chance, you know, because we never get it right the first time in life and in work and in business and with our families and in our relationships and you know, frankly, even what, you know, parenting. Right. We don't, we don't get it right the first time. You know, we, we learn. So yeah, I'm, I'm the home of the second chance.

Ah, man, I love that, I love that when, when you think about like so a lot of leaders out there that I run into and I'm sure you coach, you know, a lot of them are moving very quickly and what I've recognized and again asking for a friend. But like I, I, I run into this all the time that I feel like I'm moving so fast that I have to remind myself that I'm never really going to be happy or feel like I want unless I can slow down. Which it sounds like kind of that's you're more reflective now, probably in a better place, definitely in a better place to coach people and you know, kind of teach them that type of framework. But do you do a lot of the people you coach that they run into that same problem where they're just chasing something so relentlessly that they have a hard time slowing down? And when they have that problem, how do you coach them in order to implement mechanisms to be more reflective and slowing down?

Yeah. So there's no magic solution for it. You know, I think like one of the skills with like coaching and mentoring is that you have to meet the person, you know, like where they're at. And you know, like my 19 year old is very different personality from the 11 year old. And the things that work with my 19 year old, you know, don't worth with like the 11 year old. So I think in that sense you have to help someone, you have to ask the right questions just to make sure that you understand, you actually know what are their 80, 20s. And what I mean by that is what are the 20% of things that that person needs to focus on for 80% of the improvement that they're seeking? And when I run programs, for example, coaching and mentoring programs, and I asked people what are the tools, concepts that most resonated with you? Everyone says different things.