Lloyd Blankfein talks about how life rarely goes as planned. He went from wanting to be a cop to leading operations and teaching, driven by a consistent need to help people. The hosts warn entrepreneurs against staying stuck and share how a failed three-month tech rollout at TDS taught them to keep experimenting.
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Good morning, Believe Nation.
Today's message is life is unpredictable. Over to you, Lloyd Blankfein.
I wake up every morning with espresso to keep me going.
Life is quirky. I'm sure all of you have your lives planned out, and the one thing I can absolutely guarantee is it won't work out that way because it's just things happen. First of all, the world changes and the world evolves, so whatever plans you're making, it's based on a static world that won't be there because things will happen. And you'll change, or maybe you won't even change. Maybe you're just misidentifying yourself now and you don't know, which is a perfectly appropriate way to be when you're young or my age, 'cause who knows.
So what do you think?
You know what, this actually is very much talks about how I've lived my life or where I've gotten. Quick background, I originally, when I went to university, I studied psychology to be a couples therapist because I was really obsessed with relationships and wanting to help couples. And then as I was going through university, I changed my career path completely and I wanted to be a cop. So I did all the testing, I did all of that. And then when I started dating my current fiancée who I met at TDS, that career path changed into sales. And then to here now, you know, right up in charge of operations for TDS, teaching at TDS. So a lot of small moving parts will happen. The one thing that I do say is, Life is unpredictable, but you know, all these career paths consistently showed that I wanted to work with people, that I wanted to make a difference in people's lives. Whether I was a cop, whether that was a psychologist, even in sales, I've helped a lot of businesses in sales make sure that they save money and they stay in business with teaching and all of that. So life is unpredictable. I believe in that. I'm a perfect example of that because I would never have imagined where I am now 6 years ago. But consistently, it's like your core things, as long as you know who you are, or what you're strong at, what you're good at. Whatever life throws at you, you can be flexible enough to sort of, you know, mold yourself into that while staying true to yourself.
My thoughts on this are, one, as entrepreneurs, you need to change your business as you grow and evolve as a person. You're going to become more and more interested in other things as you get older, and a lot of entrepreneurs get stuck in a rut where you just keep doing the same thing over and over and over again, and you don't change your business as you change who you are. And that's when people hit these blocks and you stagnate, you don't continue to grow, and you need to always make sure your business is a reflection of who you are as a person, or, or sell it and move on to something else if your business can't change with you. The other thing I would add to it is I think a lot of people are just too afraid to take risks on things because they're looking for certainty. And I look at, I look at what we've done here at TDS. Some of the things have worked out really well and some of them haven't, right? The thing that we're pissed at right now is we've spent 3 months working on a new technology backend for our school that just hasn't worked out. And it was my call to start to say, hey, I want to try this system out. I think it's going to push us forward to improve our systems and our admin and our sales. And 3 months later, it's worse than we were when we started. And so we're going back to where we were before. And that's like like massively painful, right, to be behind where you were and then go back to what you're doing before. But sometimes it doesn't work out, and, and be okay with that, right? That's not going to prevent me from taking the next risk and the next idea and moving forward in the next project that I have in mind, because a lot of things that we have done have worked out. And I think too many people are caught up on previous failures that then make them afraid to go out and take that next risk. So it's maybe not totally related to life is unpredictable, but that's what I'm vibing, so that's what you get.
So the question of the day today is: How do you find order in chaos?
Leave it in the comments below, join the discussion. Thank you so much for watching, have an amazing day, continue to believe, and we'll see you again tomorrow morning for another Shot of Espresso.
