Find and Grow Your Passion in Life

Any suggestions on how people might be able to find that?

Yes. So I famously do not read many business books, right. It's like I pick a book and I read it multiple times and I actually do stuff from it. So really I take about a two or three year arc on every book I read. Grit was the last book I read by Angela Duckworth and her whole treatise. And she's a social scientist. So this isn't a woo woo book. This is like Science and Data, which I'm a big fan of. And basically her thesis was you need to expose yourself rapidly to as many passions as you can. The second you find something that you like, you exploit it. And then you do intentional practice, which is you do it over and over and over again with feedback and you intentionally give yourself reach goals. And then when you find something you like and you can improve on and that increases your passion, then you stick with it a long time and that's how you come up with an outlier. So my strategy for my kids is to expose them to as many passions as possible because I don't know, it might be painting, but it might be guitar. So we're also doing that. So rapid cycling through passions. And the second that you like something, you have to do the intentional practice part. If you just. I think her thesis was too, that what I took away was if you wait around for lightning to strike you with your passion, you're doing it wrong. You need to get out there every day and just go wild and try.

Stuff that explains a lot about me. Like everything I've ever done, I'm uber passionate about it. My wife will actually comment on it. There's either all or nothing for me.

Oh, yep, yep.

Once I decide I'm going to do something, I'm all in. My problem has been that while it was a passion at that point, once I kind of mastered it and had proven whatever I needed to prove in it, I lost interest. It was like, like for, for example, with sales for me, I was still improving on that thing and getting, you know, little bits here. But at a point in my life for 15 of my years, it was like 100% all I did, 100% focus. I mean, time I wake up till I go to bed studying, reading, practicing and perfecting and mastering to be the best at what? At what. And that then translated into the next thing, like teaching people how to sell. And then translated into the next thing, which offered me some leadership opportunity, which I got really passionate about and dug into that for many years and started teaching people about that, that seems to be my pattern. Like, I try to go gain these passions and these skills and then try to help impart them to others in a way they can do it faster. And so that's the whole coaching thing, right? So I just took too long. Maybe that was the thing. I took too long. It's like a four or five year cycle. And then I'd be like, okay, I'm born with this. We accomplished everything we said we were going to do. All right, what's the next thing? And so you've never gone through anything like that. You've always been passionate about this thing.

Well, so as you talk about that, I sort of think about, I got a second wind in this industry. So this is my 30th year of doing this. And by this time, you either become a super outlier or you become jaded or you leave or something else. But about seven or eight years ago, I decided to get super intentional about the business side because I realized the business that surrounded my beautiful craft was imparting stress that I never had with just the craft. And it was because I was just an unprofessional business owner. Like, I didn't really know what I was doing. I was just doing stuff and doing more stuff. More people, more vans, more everything else. And I soon realized that as thoughtful as I was with the craft and the science of coatings, I needed to do that with people and with my business too. So I got this crazy second wind that I'm still riding up the transition curve. And as I learned to be a manager and a leader, and it's like, I don't want to say reinvigorated because I never want to give people the inkling that I lost interest in this. My passion was always high. If I could just paint the rest of my life, I would be perfectly happy. Until I found out about leadership, management and entrepreneurship. And now it's like, now I want to do both. And it's giving me this whole nother set of challenges where with painting, it is solvable. Right? There is just an end to the questions. You can be curious about new stuff, but the questions just stop. Everyone, you know, there's not any. Any big lanes, unexplored areas. But with leadership and management and the inspiration of others, I don't feel that ever gets solved. I feel you constantly keep moving through that. That excites me.

Yeah, same for me. So seven years ago, things changed where you went, okay, I've kind of perfected the painting part. Like, I got that down Pretty well now I want to perfect the business part. And it seems like leadership was the area that you went. That's where I'm going to dive in. Or was it all aspects of the business?

Yeah. So again, with no intention and hopeful optimism, I grew a business. And to a dum dum, growing a business is get some more brushes, get some more people, get some more vans, and let's rock and roll. Right? And then soon, that soup that you make, the gathering and the conglomeration of all those parts creates things for you to deal with as a manager and a leader. The interpersonal relationships, the interplay between them and your clients and things like that. So then it kind of forced me to be like, oh, I guess maybe being a business owner isn't just having a bunch of vans and people. Maybe there's a whole bunch of stuff that is like the connective tissue between that all. And I was forced to reckon with all the major hurdles and heroes journeys that business owners go through with that as they just came up in real time in my business.

If you, if you had a chance to go back and do it all over again, would you do anything different?

100%, yeah. So I didn't have job costing, a standard operating procedure, a job budget, anything for the first one to three years of really aggressively growing the business. It was just cowboy style, right? It was just grab a bunch of stuff, do a bunch of stuff. I'm sure this will all work out just great. Right. And so now, I mean, it gives me shivers to think back before there was a job budget and job costing, but now I would go back and from day one, I would build all that first and then hire my first employee. But that, I mean, hindsight's always 20 20, right?

It's what we're trying to get across to people. We got to get that foundation down first so that we can then operate. Well, that's pretty cool that you followed that path like you and actually had the realization of it. Like, man, if I could go back and do that over again, I'd do these things first. So what are we passionate about today? What's the big thing that you're working on today?

Yeah, the biggest thing that I feel has unexplored areas and lanes and dark spots is that situational leadership, inspiration, motivators, things like that. And whereas, you know, I have a 22 step standard operating procedure that has been proven over 30 years to paint the walls in a bedroom and there is nothing quicker, there is nothing better, highest value for the client, repeatable scalable, trainable. That's not the same with leadership and management and accountability. Every single. All my humans are bedrooms that we've never encountered before and we have to create a new sop. And I'm working through that now to try to figure out like I know that people need to be led differently, but how can you apply a standard operating procedure to the different types of people and the different motivators so that I can be more streamlined. So it's not basically every human is a snowflake, that maybe there's 15 kinds and now we can apply to that. So that's the deep exploration and the thing that excites me now, which is I want to be a better, better leader for them. I owe that to them. And I am breaking myself right now to make sure that I just check all those boxes for them.

Are you finding any uniformities?

Yeah, it's interesting you start finding through lines because I travel the country and I talk to other contractors. Right. So you can imagine I was just in Boston. A group of third generation Irish house painters from Boston are way different than a bunch of upper Midwest, passive aggressive, introverted, quiet sort of people like that. So it's funny that there's, there's numerable different types of people and motivators, but we attract pretty similar people from a pretty homogenous area in the upper Midwest. So as far as I can tell, there are. The thing that I'm slowly coalescing around now is there seems to be a through line through people that are motivated by the approval of others. Sometimes they're within the company, sometimes they're without. And there's some people who are motivated by an internal other, like who are accountable to themselves and they, and they would feel really bad if they let themself down. And then the wrinkle on top of that is maybe some people have a proportion of both. And what, what, what lever, what, which motivational lever you do then pull to make sure that they are the most happy and you get the best performance out of them. So that's like, that's the machinations now.

That first off, that's real. That's an accurate assessment. There's far less of group B than there is. I think most human beings are looking for recognition, acceptance, community, that type of thing. And that's their motivating, driving force. I literally just got off of a coaching call that a salesperson knew what they were supposed to do and if they were on their own just out there doing their thing, it was doing their thing. But the second you incorporated another person across the street, working down the street, doing what they do, the motivation changed. There was this, this thing to shoot for. And so I think it's actually pretty insightful of you to kind of figure out that there's this internal like self driven type of person and then there's the person that gets it from more recognition and acceptance and those type of things. Has that been your experience? There's far less of one than the other.

Yes. It's really interesting that my people are breaking down into teams like that, even by job position, which is really interesting to see. And then like you just mentioned, the next layer of that is, you know, in the human soup that we're creating in this business, all the parts are delicious on their own. And when you, when you put some of them together, they don't go, they're not bad, but they're different. And then you're like, oh, that's interesting. Didn't see that coming. And like you said, things change. The squishy, soft, irrational parts of us, the motivators, the happiness, the things like that change based on the combination of humans you put together, which is, and some of that combination makes it. It's like a one plus one equals three, you know, which is cool too. But it's just so interesting. I was not prepared for this in college. Right. Like this would have been a helpful course and it was non existent. Yeah.

I think the only thing that comes close to it is probably psychology a little bit. But I heard you with the two minors in accounting and that kind of stuff, so probably not on the track you were on.

The opposite of psychology.

Yeah, exactly. Ra.