Episode 506: Thinking About Your Life in Phases with Dave Selinger

Welcome to this edition of the million Dollar Mastermind podcast. This is where we pick the brains of high achievers from all walks of life and get their hard earned real world insights on winning. I'm your host, Larry Wydell.

This is a great kickoff to our talk this afternoon. I'm here with David Sellinger. And David has had an action packed life right from the beginning, leaving his home in Oregon and jumping into the fire in Stanford. And so we're talking about the things he's learned that are really duplicatable lessons that give you a stability and help you build for long term type success because you can hand your success. So David, thanks for being here. And that reintroduction was so I could start another episode. By the way, I forgot to mention I was going to do that.

No worries.

So anyway, let's go into how did. I don't want to beat this to death, but there's a thing you've got to realize in life whether you're going to be in business for yourself or not. And that is you are responsible for yourself. And if you know, employee, whatever you have to, you can't be blaming people all these obvious things. But life is a great teacher if you'll let it and if you'll notice it. But it will not teach you if you don't recognize the obvious, that like you say, it's not that most young people are too busy, have too much to do, you know, it's the fact that they're just lousy with managing their time.

Yep.

And also, you know, one of the key things I learned this, this is one of the, one of the cornerstones that really helped me early on was I read some book somewhere where the key ability for an executive, an executive is somebody who gets things done, is the ability to say no. And that is something that we all have to be executives in our own life. We're the CEO of what we're doing and you have to, and this relates to the 13 year old and whatever you have to keep yourself from being overwhelmed. You have to figure out what's important to you and you have to start being reasonable about how you slice up those 24 hours in a day. And if you're going to make progress towards the things you want, and that's what we do in this podcast, is tap into the thinking of people that have been through that journey. Not necessarily perfect along the way, but they learn from their mistakes. There's no way you can learn without starting something and then say, oh, I had the wrong idea I start making adjustments. And so as you got out into the left, Stanford, and you said, okay, I'm going to go to work, where did, when did you see yourself getting the cold water splashed in your face? And the reality checks started coming.

I mean, it was pretty quick for me, right, Because I had, I had made this decision not with the entire support of my parents. So my need to be financially independent happened pretty instantly, right? So I needed to figure out how to get a lease without putting my parents name on the lease because they were not going to cosign for me. I needed to figure out which was its own little kind of finagling issue. But I think the guiding principle that I found that kind of helped me here was framing that cold water, as you put it, into three kind of phases that I had planned for my life. And like you said, it wasn't a perfect plan, but I kind of thought about my different phases of life in three chunks. The first one being just exposure. Because I grew up in a pretty small town, I recognized that I wanted to be exposed to as many different types of people, as many different ways of thinking, as many different types of jobs, as many different types of financial environments as possible. I had friends who were from, you know, multi generational, multi billion dollar families. I had friends that came from very poor families. I had friends that came from middle class families. I wanted to explore what was the experience in all of those different veins. Not to judge, but to, but to embrace. And that's the first phase was exploration and experience. The second phase was a little bit more experimentation. Which of these things do I like and do I want to do a little bit more of, spend more time on what are the skills that matter in all of those different veins and all those different experiences and start really honing in and developing my skills. And then the third phase, as you kind of so kindly put it when we started, is me getting old and you know, focus. And that's where I'm at now. I went from, let's say, my impact on the world. I went from being on the board of directors or advisors or founder of 15 different nonprofits to now zero. And I'm very focused on how I want to impact the world. And you know, you may say zero nonprofits is bad, but just kind of, it does emphasize the point that in this phase of my life, I'm very, very focused. My day is about three very crystal clear things, which is my family, my own health and my work. And I spend almost all of my time on those three things. Whereas in my early days, as I said, when I dropped out at Stanford to go to dot com, I went to three or four or five different dot coms in like four years. I mean, I definitely did the whole, let's experience as many of these things as I can. And I'm going to take different roles. I'll do a role in product development, a role in engineering, a role in it, a role in management. And I tried each of those different things to get as much exposure as I could. And in the middle phase of my career, I did two to three year stints at various things, two to three year stints at exposure to different types of families, two to three year stints and experiments with developing skills. And so maybe not quite the answer you were looking for, but in terms of you're always going to have failures. And so designing and recognizing that entire first phase was about experiencing as many failures as quickly as possible, taking them in stride and then directing them to learn for that next phase.

Experiencing as many failures as possible and directing them. Is that what you said?

Yeah, and maybe that's all me reflecting on horrible experiences and putting a good light on them, but that's, you know, I mean, I did get upset at some of them, but I did have this kind of view that I am young and now is the time to do as much of this as humanly possible.

And what if I say, give an example of one of those.

Join a company that's like almost 99% gonna fail.

Oh, really?

Yeah. Every job that I have no experience.

In and probably no interest in doing, but yeah, and so probably everywhere you looked you saw disasters like stupidity, huh?

Yeah, I mean, and it wasn't that it was like a bad company. It was just like a really super ambitious company that was going to try to change more than maybe, you know, the world thought it could change. And, and, and that turned out, in that particular case turned out to be true. But it wasn't that I was surrounded by bad people or dumb people. I did don't, I didn't do that. I didn't intentionally ever surround myself by people that were trying to fail. I surrounded my people that were trying to do more than the world thought was possible of them at a level that was like, you know, intense odds against them.

And one of the things to guard against, you know, you have to have big dreams and all that. But one thing to guard against being stupid and, you know, going from a dream to a fantasy and separating that is results. You know, it's just like if it's not happening from the beginning the way you expected and there's no adjustment you can make to kind of get it on that track, then you might need to say, make a bigger adjustment.

That's right. So I never spent an extended period of time with people that were kind of doing the typical analysis or story of banging your head into a wall a million times and expecting something different to happen. You these are always dynamic leaders who had successful pasts, but they were just trying to do something really big and ambitious. And I was always excited to be part of that type of an endeavor. And again, recognizing that the likelihood of failure was very high. It was like a bunch of 27 year olds, for example, who were starting a company to try to reinvent wireless communication. Odds are against a bunch of 27 year olds because that's an industry that's dominated by slow moving big giants. But they had new technology that was way better and a view of the world of the future that was way stronger and more valuable. And so again, it wasn't. I would caution against taking dumb unfounded risks, but like you said, picking people that were more dynamic and excited and had a lot of intellect and experience, but valued failure the same way I did, if they ran into a wall, going to try something else, run into a wall, try something else.

And what, how would you describe the difference in the experience for you working for companies when you were working with companies like that that were, had a big vision, had a big plan, were having success, we're moving up versus being on your own as an entrepreneur, what's the difference there?

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Yeah, I mean the only really big company I worked for for a significant amount of time was Amazon. And so that's also like not a fair analogy in terms of big companies because that's kind of a standout. One of five companies that broke through the $100 billion mark during that phase. But that'd be my only contrast.

Even with smaller companies. Even with smaller companies being a part of that. But as an employee, rather than, you.

Know, having skin, there's always a they. That. That was the number one thing that I always noticed.

Talk about that.

As a founder and a CEO, what I like about it and what I find keeps me up at night and drives me nuts is that there. There is no they. Right? So if someone on my customer care team does something that I think is dumb, that's my fault. Like, there's just. There is no they anywhere in my company, and I don't accept that. And I may be very passionate and directed towards one of my employees, but I never fail to recognize that there is a power structure in my company, and that power structure requires me to be responsible and accountable for any of the problems that happen at my company. And I. And I think working at a smaller company or as an employee helped me understand that, because I can very directly relate to the mentality of, well, that's beyond my purview. Well, that wasn't my job. That wasn't my role. And if someone who reports into, you know, three layers below me says, well, that's not my job, I know instantly that's my problem. Because there's two causes for someone to say that. One, they're incompetent, they don't know their job. That's the obvious one. But let's put that one to the side, because that's obvious. The one that I think is more nuanced and that's harder for a lot of entrepreneurs to recognize, is that when someone who reports to you says, that's not my job, and it's identifying a hole that is either a hole in your management structure below you that they have not defined the process or the areas of responsibility clearly enough so that whoever that person is can do their job. Or it's a new problem that's just emerging, and it's our job as the management team to identify, track it, and enable our employees to be successful. And again, that's all. Recognizing it may just be this guy's a schmo and he's got to go. But. But always assuming that we've hired good people, and then always working the problem, always working the problem as a gap in process, and then you may uncover, nope, this one actually is completely covered. That person was trained. The process exists. The other person was trying to do their job. Everybody else did their job, and this guy just sucks. Sweet. Gone right. Easy peasy. But you reach that conclusion with complete fortitude if you work it as a process issue. And if you always assume this is mine, let's go figure this out.

Yeah. That allows you to have an emotional maturity and stability to your company because you don't have these lapses where you throw up your hand, you're blaming other people. And this, that, the other. I found. David. CEOs, high achievers are just as likely to bitch and complain as everybody else and blame other people.

People.

Except. Except they do it for shorter periods of time. You know, this whole idea that the high achievers, they never get mad or they never blow off or, you know, they never, you know, why me, Lord? You know, they don't ever. Yeah, they do. They just don't stay there. You know what I'm saying?

You know, I mean, I recognize it for me, and so I'm probably in the middle of the functional autism spectrum. And so for me, I have these really neat things that happen where my emotional level will actually get. Just like you said, it'll get triggered.

Right.

But what I do is I build in place these catch, catch triggers that when I recognize. All right, I'm feeling mad at an employee. Cool. Let's turn on our left brain. Let's go from our right brain, sending us a signal that I'm upset about something, send it straight to the left brain and say, cool. Well, who's the CEO? Whose problem is this? Oh, look at that. It's mine. All right, cool. Let's go and just again, channel it and direct it. I used to try to control it. I used to say, don't get mad, but that's dumb, right? Like, that's getting rid of all of your humanity. And frankly, I find that the emotional side of the human experience is so much richer and more intelligent than the analytical and intellectual side. I can detect problems so much faster with my emotional side than I can with my intellectual side.

Absolutely. I mean, that's the. That's the divine spark, you know, the intuitive side that if you don't let that rolls somewhat, you, you know, you need to get mad. I mean, there's certain times, you know, because you need to get mad. And then it's a matter of, well, who should I be mad at? Well, sometimes it's yourself, you know, because direct it.

Get in control. Get in control of the mad. Don't prevent it. But.

Right.

But direct it. Right. Like, cool. I'm channeling that towards now. We're going to put a bunch of energy behind X and Y and Z initiative or we're going to change our priorities or we're going to, you know, and there's examples where, you know, people have kind of blown up, like Steve Jobs, right, when there were these huge failures of teams, and he just bring them all into a gymnasium and say, all right, so we failed. And the good news is we're going to succeed the next time. The bad news is you're not going to be part of that team. And, you know, you can dramatize that however you want, but, like, you know what? That's actually a reasonably great way to direct that type of energy. You've watched an entire team fail. I could spend six months and analyze and figure out where that failure is, or I could start over from scratch. And I've made the decision. Starting over from scratch is better.

Yeah. You know, and the thing is, like, as you were describing, we all sense things that we need to be, you know, that need to be dealt with, need to be improved, need to be done. And, you know, you can't do everything. But what happens is when things reach the point that there's an explosion of anger, whatever that's, like, now you've got the energy, you need to go fix that thing. You know what I'm saying? And somehow you see things clearer when your energy's up. It's like, wait a minute, you know.

Yeah, I mean, I like to. I like to direct it as much as possible towards the problem. And I find, like you said, that elevated level of energy, it's not a. It's not a bad thing. Without that, a lot of times it's almost impossible to tear apart a problem, because the reason a problem exists that you as the CEO, are tearing apart is because someone else probably poked on it and saw it, and then it got resistance. And it takes that extra level of energy to go find it. You know, we had it. We had an example just the other day at Deep Sentinel, where we had an analytical report that was. It just didn't quite feel right. And I said, well, how did we generate this? And the person that was responsible for it said, well, you know, I use this system and this. I was like, well, tell me about that. No, no, no, no. It's from the system. I was like, no, tell me about it. No, no, no, no, it's not mine. It's from the system. All right, cool. Tomorrow you're going to do this, this, this, this, and this. And if that's not done by the end of the day, you're fired. And it turns out, sure enough, it took that level of energy because that person was defensive about their reporting to realize that there was a humongous gap in that problem and that person was going to cover it up because they like kind of comfortable report. And then that was going to mean that the problems of that report exposed. Right. I'm a very data driven person. Would never get fixed. And you could tell there were other people in the room that came to me afterwards. You could tell there was like an uncomfortable silence. Every one of them came to me, said I asked the same question like two weeks ago and I couldn't get it fixed. And it did take that extra. I'm just, I'm not here to screw around. I'm not here to waste my time. I'm not here to waste anybody's time. There's a problem, there's a question on the table and if you're responsible for that, answer it or go get another job.

Yeah, it's just, it's like driving a car. You're heading off the road, you're going to hit a tree. I mean, you know, you either fix it, you know, you're going to get smacked back into reality, you know, and so it can be painful sometimes it'll kill you, you know that. You know, that's the end of that career. But you've got to be, sometimes that has to happen in business there because there's no perfect ride. And the way to have the smooth ride is not to do anything or just to kind of putter along as a company, you know, it's like, you know, if you want a neat office and you want people very friendly and walking around normally and dress nicely and everything, it's a, it's a company that's in a decline, you know, because they manage their level of activity is something that they've been able to deal with for years and they can comfortably management and if it's declining a little bit, they can handle it even better. And they look great, but you're going down the toilet. But a growing company, a lot of times you'll have people with their hands around their throat throwing punches, you know, this, that, the other, you know, that's why, you know, fights break out in training camp. You know, it's not necessarily a bad thing. And we used to say in our sales forces that we had too many nice guys and we need to go out and recruit an unwashed heathen to throw into the bush who questioned everything that everybody did and rub everybody wrong and pissed them off so there'd be some competition going again. You know, and so, yeah, I mean.

I've mentored a lot of salespeople. You mentioned salesforces, and I think that's one of the most important organizations in a company because you, if there isn't enough energy in your salesforce to say this is broken in this product or this process or this support organization, to me as a CEO, my salesforce is my canary in the coal mine. They're the ones that should always be complaining and I'm just putting them on my radar. And it's when the complaints hit a certain temperature that I realize it's a real issue. And I've trained many sales forces over the years and the line that I like to use is never go below the amount of energy that's necessary. That's the primary deliverable of a sales organization. Meaning if you have to piss off six people to get something done and you piss off seven, you've overdone it a little bit. But if you only piss off five, you failed everyone. You failed all. Not only did you piss off five people, but you failed us all. And so it is more important that you get to sufficiency. And I'd love for you to be as close to the minimum sufficiency as possible, especially some of those people that are like really, really overly activated damage things. But always remember that if five people need to be pissed off to make the customer happy, and this is a critical customer, those five people better damn well be pissed off because otherwise we've let down every other hundreds of employees that we have here. And that is your job, period, full stop. And if that means that I had to piss these five people off and the process is broken and we don't want to piss them off, next time piss them off and then we're going to fix the process. But do not let yourself fail because you have a job to do. And if you let yourself fail, you're letting the company fail, you're letting me fail, and you're letting everyone fail.

Yeah, sometimes you need to be pissed off, you know. You know, to move to the new level. And so this has been fantastic.

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