FINDING and LIVING your PASSION in Work and Life | Randy Garn

In conversation with a peak performer to help decode excellence and give you some of the strategies, tools and techniques that you can use to close that gap between your current and best self. And I'm super thrilled to have on the show today Randy Garn, who will introduce in just a moment. But Randy, you want to say hi. It's great to have you on the show, Eric.

Dude, I think the last time we were together was in Puerto Rico. Nice warm weather and I've been watching you, following you. I'm so excited to be here with you guys.

Yeah, no, that's right.

Yeah, it was Puerto Rico. We spoke and yeah, it was beautiful. It was very, I think we squeezed that right in before everyone stopped traveling pretty much.

So Randy is, gosh, you have so many accolades. I mean, you're in business together with Brendan Burchard. So I know you're one of the managing partner at the High Performance Institute, which is absolutely amazing, putting together some of the world's most cutting edge research with regards to, you know, decoding excellence and high performance. You've been the Ernst and Young Entrepreneur of the year. You're involved in so many various networking organizations and you're also a best selling author. As a matter of fact, I read this yesterday from to end and it's.

Prosper, create the life you really want.

And yeah, I'd love to speak a little bit about this today and make sure that we give people listening a little inside, inside view on both your world and your thoughts and your approach to excellence and high performance and all of that. So can we bring you back down to earth though, now that I put you really high in the sky?

You were, you know, I always, and.

I always ask this question because you weren't born this way, were you?

I, you know, I wasn't born this way, but I, I actually, I think honestly when God did make me, he like put an extra couple drops of joy in the batch because, dude, I, I am, I, I think that the reason why I'm this way is I've really, truly just tried to love people and see people for who they truly are, regardless of whether they're the CEO or the taxi driver, whatever it is. But I've always been pretty, I've always been pretty upbeat.

And can you, can you tell us a little bit about, about your beginnings? How did, how did life start for you and what was that like?

Yeah, you know, I grew up and honestly, I mean I really was formulated a lot through my father and through my mother. I grew up in a small little Town in Sugar City, Idaho. My dad was a high school football coach for 32 years, and he still is one of the most winning coaches in Idaho. And, you know, you think about that. I grew up on a. We had a cattle ranch and a farm. But every day, right, driving out to the ranch, we'd listen to either Jim Rome or Zig Ziglar or Nightingale Conant. Every single day. Going out and coming back, he's like, randy, the most important asset that you have is between your two ears. He's like, you get this right, you get the inside right, the outside will fall into place. So that was a little bit of my upbringing. You know, being up, being brought up by an amazing, amazing father, that was integral in my life. That was an inspiration. And I know that not everybody has that kind of circumstance and has done amazing things. I just. I feel like I was super, super blessed with my childhood and my upbringing. Yeah.

And it's all about getting that strong foundation. I mean, it's interesting, though, because sometimes you'll hear stories about people having that real strong foundation, and they achieve great things and have a real big positive impact in the world. But a lot of times, too, we hear stories about people who didn't have a very strong foundation, and they equally create an impact. And as a segue to. And they equally create prosperity. So let's talk about that for a second.

That's title of the book.

Prosper, create the life you really want. And let's start by defining prosperity. It's kind of a word that I think everyone sort of thinks they know, but it's not necessarily used all the time. Like, how do you define it?

So for us, and in all the research that we did, you know, one of my things that I really have tried to do in my life is that, do I truly enjoy what I do? Do I truly enjoy who I work with? And for us, prosperity actually is a balance between three things. Money, happiness, and sustainability.

If you have a ton of money, you are rich and you are wealthy, right?

If you are happy and you don't have a lot of money, you are just happy, you know, and you think about that. You think about many people in your life that you love, like, and respect and that you look up to. A lot of them really have a good balance. For me, a lot of those have a good balance between money, happiness, and sustainability. And so that is kind of our definition of prosperity. And is that putting. It's multidimensional, and you have to have those three things in to really live up to the full measure of your creation.

Yeah. And when you talk about sustainability, just so that we clarify for people listening and or watching, we're not talking about, like recycling paper, are we? We're talking about other sustainable. Another sustainability perspective.

Right.

You know what? It's actually both.

When we talk about sustainability, and I'll give you a good example of it, is that the sustainability piece to that is that, do I feel good about it and am I making a good impact in the world?

Is what I'm doing making a difference and making other people's lives better? Whether you're building a company or growing a company, you know, if you're just accumulating wealth for yourself and you're not actually making an impact for others, we don't really feel like that's true prosperity. And so is the business you're running, is what you're building what you're doing, what you're growing, is it good for others? That's a big question that we ask in our book and in our research. And then do you feel good about it? You know, at the end of the day, you're like, dude, I accomplished that. And you actually talk a lot about the 2%, right? Yeah, that 2% is like, dude, I made an impact. And so I work with a really, really, really amazing company called the Maloof Foundation. And they're a B corp. And so, you know, B Corps are amazing, but 10% of all their profits go towards a charity to help stop, you know, human trafficking. And I love that because they're building a massive company, but they're also trying to do good and make change. And they're so pumped about it. I just think. I think their company's growing because they want to give back so much and make a difference in the world. So that sustainability is. Is actually thinking about that.

So tying that all together then, because that brings a lot of clarity to your definition.

Right.

Prosperity is that it's not just about money. Money is an important element. Actually, I want to talk specifically about that because sometimes people think it's too.

Taboo to talk about.

But so money is an important element. But of course, you could be miserable with the money and you could be destructive with money. So it's making the money, being happy while making it, and then putting it, doing what you do with regards to the generation of that prosperity is something you both feel good about and is having a positive impact on the world.

Exactly. The other thing is, is that, I mean, I'll give you a good case example. In our book, we actually, one of the, one of the individuals we interviewed was a very, very successful attorney in la. Entertainment attorney, making well over six figures and more a year. He hated being an attorney. He drove two hours to work and two hours back and missed the whole life with his kids. And yet he was very successful in other people's eyes in the wealth he created and the people that he was managing. I can't believe you're actually working with him, you know, but inside he was miserable, but his wealth was high, his happiness was super low. And then his sustainability is like, dude, I would give up everything just to have a relationship with my son and my family again.

And so that's what I'm talking about. When you've got to have that money is not bad. Money actually solves a lot of problems. In fact, we encourage people to create tons of wealth and create jobs and to be successful financially. What we're not saying, what I'm not saying is like, don't be wealthy, be wealthy, but do something that you love to do. And so on the flip side, the other guy that we interviewed, he ran a company called Dr. Detail and he detailed cars, you know, not a lavish job. He worked with his family, he worked with his kids. He made actually great money. I mean, when we, I was like, holy cow, dude, you're actually crushing it. And he made great money, but he would get up at 5, he'd be done by 3. He never missed a game, never missed the soccer game, had his house paid off, was not stressed out financially. He wasn't, you know, tons of multi billion dollar wealth, but he had enough to actually create the life he really wanted to create.

Yeah, yeah, that's, that's great because especially with the focus on money, it's almost like people are afraid to talk about it sometimes. And we've all seen these studies.

You know, over a certain amount of money, there's really no correlation to happen. Every time I, you know, I read one of those though, I do think, okay, I'd like to see the salary of the person who put that kind of thing together and I'd like to cut their salary down to whatever that level is and see if they're still happy.

Yeah, so, so you guys take a slightly different.

And when I say you guys, because you co authored the book with, with.

With you.

You guys take a slightly different approach, which I think is a way more realistic approach too, which is no money can make you happier. Earning more money can drive fulfillment done in the right way. And so money plays in fact a very important role in achieving prosperity. It's one of the core elements as you've described it. But I'd love to hear from you if you go maybe a little bit more personal on this particular topic. How has your relationship to money changed over time?

Were you born into abundance, for example, or is this something that's morphed for you?

Yeah, I mean, I'll share with you again some of my childhood. My dad was going to be a doctor and doing all that and went to school for that. And then he had four sons and two daughters and he like, I want to buy a ranch and I want to be a football coach and I want to be able to spend. I mean that was his goal. And actually he's lived a very. He just bought a beautiful cabin up on the river in Salmon, Idaho and is loving it. And I'm going to go up there and see him in a couple of weeks. But growing up I didn't feel.

I didn't feel like we were poor, but we did not have a lot. I mean, I always had a car that broke down, you know, taking my date to the prom. We're always, my dad and mom paid cash for everything. And so their relationship with money is much different than my relationship of money now. And so it was more of like, hey, let's just try to try to do that. So because of that, I kind of had to become an entrepreneur at an early age. And you know, the first thing that I did, I set up a miniature golf course on our property and charged, you know, charged money for doing that. I out of necessity I learned how to be an entrepreneur. And so part of the joy and I'm going to go back to sustainability because maybe this will help. Part of the thing that I Learned at like 13, 14 years of of age when I was actually running my own kind of businesses, we sold worms to farmers. I set up, you know, a company in college to pay for my entire college. Part of the joy that came from the sustainability factor and sustainability for us is also really about self reliance.

I think that more people need to learn how to be self reliant and that will actually make you way more happy and that will help you to be able to make more money. I don't ever, I mean I never ever, ever. I've got my skill set to where I'm at and the relationships that I have that I don't ever worry about that I won't make money.

And so think about your life. If you feel confident that you can always generate an income on your own Whether that's being an entrepreneur somewhere or whether that's creating your own business, whether it's a solopreneur or whether it's being, you know, you have to find that thing that you never ever have to worry about money again because you know you can create it like the alchemist, right? So at an early age I remember my relationship of money being so good because I earned it myself. I bought my own clothes, I bought my own car. I, you know, essentially paid through college by getting scholarships and things. But I knew that, I knew that my parents, they always said, hey, you know what, we don't have a lot. You're going to need to figure this out. You know, we've got to pay for your daughter's, your daughter's wedding. So I think my relationship with money was healthy that way because I learned self sufficiency.

That's such an important point. I mean I know you got kids, I got kids as well, you know, 16 and 17 year old boy. And it's when you, when you were, when you were talking, I was just getting flashbacks to my own childhood because you know, when you talked about your car breaking. The first car I ever bought was a Yugo. Do you remember The Yugo?

Oh, 100%, yeah, like old beat up stick shift.

You go, I remember I paid $431 for it, that exact amount because that's all the money I had in my pocket. And the person wanted, they wanted 500 for it. And I said, well I got 431, will you take that?

And you know, did the same thing.

You know, paid my way through school with loans and all that of course.

But that at an early age when.

You'Re required to do that, it really helps, right? Really shapes that, that self reliance. Right. Rather than expecting the handout, for example, now you talk about.

The prosperity zone. Oh wait, actually I'm getting ahead because the whole book is really your whole model here for achieving prosperity is linked to what you call the Polaris point. And I love this and I really love the whole North Star, the other spin that one if you wouldn't mind taking people through that because I think it's a really nice visual to help understand, you know, the Polaris point.

Well, I honestly this is where I think people need to spend their most time and even, even working closely with Brendan Burchard on you know, the six most productive habits to learn not what habits are the best, but which ones are actually help you to be a high performer and to live in that 2% as you would say and is that you have to have real assurity on where you're going.

And really the Polaris point in our book is it's really a guide. You know, the book Prosper really is kind of a step by step guide of some things that you really just give you a framework for your life. Am I living? Am I making the kind of money I want? Am I happy doing it and can I do it over long periods of time? Because if you don't have a clear vision of where you want to go, you'll be like a grasshopper great on takeoff, you'll never know where you want to land. And so my suggestion is that whether you're 65, 50, 30, 20, 18, and you're watching this.

Is to really find out and take time on what you were born to do and what you want to accomplish in those three things. And living in your prosperity zone. And you're. We really call it your Polaris point. Where, where are you at the end of the day when you die? What will you be remembered for? And. And I, you know, and you have to continue to course. Correct. But too many people, if you don't have your own goals, somebody else will use you for the theirs. That's what my dad always said. If you don't have your own goals, someone else will use you for theirs.

And.