Kenny Chapman reflects on how people mistake safety for success by chasing societal signals. He contrasts financial security with meaningful success through stories from his drain-cleaning past and travels to Central and South America, arguing that gratitude and continual improvement beat complacency.
Hey, my friends, Kenny Chapman here, the blue collar coach, coming to you with a Freedom Friday focus that I want to kind of shift it up a little bit. Here we are, it's 2018. You're rocking and rolling. I'm sure you've got your goals. You're, you know, hopefully not your New Year's resolutions, but if that's what it takes, whatever it is, to help drive you to that next level, to help you accomplish the 18 that you want. Now, let's be clear about what that is. The 18 that you want may not be the 18 that you're seeing on TV, that you're reading about in blogs, that you see in the newspaper. I was looking at, I got back to Colorado and they delivered the newspaper here. I don't read it otherwise. So it comes here. I'm looking year in review. What is it? Negativity. This was awful. This was bad. And they fill up a week and a half of the news at the end of the year how horrible 17 was and why 18 should be better. What's the reality here? The fact of the matter is the United States of America is the easiest place in the world to fail. What happens? Don't pay your bills, leverage yourself too much. We're going to give you money. We're going to give you money based on a plan. We're going to do certain things. Now, we might not give you as much as you think we should as the bank, but we're going to give you some to get started. Go out. Okay. Oh. Made some mistakes. Oh. Some things went bad. Oh, okay. Time to file bankruptcy. And I start the game again now. And there's, I've seen many, many people do very, very good things that have been bankrupt. This isn't about the bankruptcy. This is about the fact that there's really no reason to play it terribly safe. Now, safe has different connotations for different people. But today I want to talk about success traps. And I believe that success traps exist because we tell ourselves different stories in our lives about what safety and security actually is. Right. When I say that, you know, as you know, probably, if you're one of our followers, Lovely. Christy and I got back from a life changing trip. South America, Central America. And the difference is there. Like when Oscar, one of our guides in Guatemala, said, here you're a magician to put food on the table. Literally a magician. And guess what? If Oscar doesn't go out and put food on the table, the government doesn't send him a check for him to go get that. Now I'm not here to talk about politics. I'm not here to talk about government. I'm here to talk about you and what that means. What does that mean? Maybe you were raised like me. Maybe you were born, had divorced family, whatever, wore secondhand schools through or secondhand clothes through a lot of what I did in school and different things like that. And so what happens now? As I began to build a company, as I began to build some part of my life that made sense and had some security and some freedom and things, I went, okay, think about Maslow's hierarchy, right? You start going up. But then what happens is I might have been chasing some security and some different things that really weren't real. And what is truly real, right? At the end of the day, you can't take it. I get you might be building a family legacy, you might be wanting to take care of your children. And we all kind of know how that plays out after three generations. So I might challenge you on that too. I'm just joking. But the serious thing is that I see very successful people kind of hit the brakes, kind of hit the stop. Now, when I say successful, I saw a very successful people in Central and South America that live on 300 bucks a month. You're not successful because of your company. I don't care how big it is. I got a buddy that's running the largest company in the country. All kinds of different things. It doesn't matter whether it's his business or whether it was my business when I started as a dead broke drain cleaner in 1994. The success is never about the business. The success is about the derivative that the business creates. What are the offshoots, the different things that come from it? How do you impact teams live? How do you improve the the community, the marketplace? How have you raised the bar for competition? How have you attracted and grown the right management leadership team? Different things like that. That is what makes a successful company. Because you don't need your company in order to put food on the table. Think about that for a minute. How many times have you heard, and we have these different sayings in The United States, U.S. and Canada or U.S. canada and Australia, that we don't think about the connotations. But yeah, I got to go to work, got to put food on the table. That's not true. Somebody will put food on your table. So stop telling yourself that limiting belief, that unhealthy programming, what do you really want to do because you're safe, you're secure, right where you are I don't care if you're in debt. I don't care if you can't make payroll this coming week. That does not define you, that doesn't make you who you are and that does not create your 2018, my friend. It is about right here. It's about right here. And it's about your choices, your actions and your decisions moving forward. So success traps happen. Otherwise Hollywood wouldn't be all on heroin and screwing everybody and whatever's happening, right? So we're chasing a fallacy of success and there's always going to be that gap. So what does that mean? Constant, never ending growth, improvement sealed with gratitude. And understand what's that little uncomfortable part? Because I'm never satisfied. I'm really grateful. I'm so grateful for everything in my life. But if I become satisfied, I become maybe stagnant. If I'm grateful, I can be grateful and still want to move forward, want to learn more, to grow more, to create more influence and to empower and improve more lives. I'm very grateful. But I'm not done. I don't know about you, but if you're in a success trap, let's eliminate it. Success traps are usually harder to get out of than failure traps. My buddy and mentor, Joe Polish says a lot. Until we talk, my friends, have a better than fantastic Friday and weekend and we'll talk to you soon. Cheers.
