What We’re Currently Learning And Working On
11 Jul 2023 · 16 min
A conversational podcast episode (Lori & Chris Harder) recorded at a lake house. They reflect on being energized by water, road-trip listening habits, and concrete takeaways from other podcasts (notably Rob Dyrdek on meditation and Craig of Craig's on customer service). Practical lessons emphasized: use meditation as a daily "strategy session," show up professionally despite behind-the-scenes problems, be aspirational and over-deliver on customer service, and create intentional family memories. The episode also includes sponsor reads (Blinds.com, Shopify) and mentions Chris’s Elite Mastermind application requirements.
Questions this episode answers
July 11, 2023.
Must be making more than $500,000 in the application year.
Not opening again until 2024.
2018 (he says it accounts for 90+% of his abundance).
Chapters
Be aspirational and over deliver on customer service. Do those two things no matter what's burning down in the background, and people will want to follow you and do business with you and learn from you or buy your product in droves.
And we're back with another episode of he said, she Said.
We're also back at the lake house. Look at this view, babe. I wish they could see this right now.
I know for me, water is everything. I just feel like a completely different person around water. So maybe for you guys listening, you know where your spot is, like, maybe you're like, I love the mountains. I love the desert. For me, I have grown up like six blocks from water my entire life. And I know when I'm around it, I feel it. I feel different. I literally feel different. And it's, it's a true story. So when I'm here, I'm very happy.
I don't know if you remember this. When we lived on the lake in Minneapolis, I actually made you a promise that we'd always live on water or live like really close to a body of water. And I meant it at the time. But then somehow we ended up for that year or two in Arizona. But I redeemed myself, right? We got the Newport place and this place. So most of your life is unwater now?
Most of my life is around water.
But you are genuinely a happier person. Like there really is something physically to be where you're meant to be.
I don't know what you guys believe. I don't know what actually. You know, I do think everything is energy.
So.
So I'm also a fire sign. Like a lot of my. I'm Sagittarius, pretty much everything. Whenever people are like, my risings, my through and through sag through and through fire sign. And so I really, when I am in the desert, I can't explain it any other way than it feels like I'm on fire, that I need to just be like balanced by water.
For me, the lake house represents like this place to create family memories. You know me, I'm the sentimental one, right? So we only been up for like three days, but this has been everything that I hoped it would be already. We've had giant family friend cookouts. We've been up in Door county hanging out and having like small town Americana with families, you know what I mean? We've been out on the boat twice, two out of three days already. That's pretty damn good. Wake surfing, all the things. And this is what I wanted it for. I wanted to Create as many memories as possible every single summer so that nieces, nephews, my brother and Jackie that everybody remembered coming up to the lake.
Well, we grew up like that. You and I both had friends who would either go rent a cabin or have a cabin on the lake. And those are truly my core, core memories. Of course, I have some with my family, but the ones that like, those ones where you're like, summer bliss was always when I would get to go up and stay a week with my friends whose parents would rent a cabin and had a boat, and we would go tubing and wakeboarding and just have fires out by the lake. It was literally. It was everything.
Tell you what, one more thing this place represents. I'm bringing half of my Elite Mastermind here in a couple of weeks. How wild is that? Like, this place is so special to me. I wanted the members who renew. So little background story. Every year in the Elite Mastermind, anyone who renews for the next year, we do an extra bonus trip that's very casual. It's just us getting together. You know, usually 15 out of the 30 people renew. Right. So it's a very small, intimate group. They already knew each other from the year before. Well, last year we did Park City. This year we said, let's bring them up to the lake house here. So I cannot freaking wait for that. By the way, you guys, if you want to get your application in line for the Elite Mastermind, you have to be making more than $500,000 a year for the year that you're applying in. So, for example, we're not opening this up again until 2024. But get your applications in now because they're first come, first serve in terms of the order we go through them in to see if you get an interview or not. So there's a big advantage to getting it in early. Anyhow, if you want to check that out, you can go to Chrisharder Me Mastermind, get your app in, and then we'll contact you on it again. Go to Chrisharder Me Mastermind. Literally game changer of entrepreneurs every single year. Well, on the way up here, we have another tradition. We drive up, and we took four days to drive up. We drove up some friends, separate cars, but, like, you know, chased each other on the way up and stayed in Airbnbs together, which was so much fun. And Lori and I, whenever we drive, first of all, we are total road trippers. Like, I love it to the max, and I think she loves it a lot.
I love it.
You do?
Okay, good I like learning on the road.
See, that's why, like, you gotta find your way on the road. And so we always listen to podcasts or books and we just devour them. And we went down a rabbit hole devouring a bunch of Skinny Confidential podcasts. One day. We thought we'd share a takeaway from each of the episodes because we had these aha moments like, oh my God, this is going to shift. Oh my God, we're going to start doing this. So just like you're listening to a podcast right now, and the fact that you tune into us every week, which means the world, we tune into other people and it gives us these moments of, holy crap, I need to start doing blank or holy crap, I never realized this. So, Lori, what's the first podcast you remember on this trip and what'd you take away from it?
So the first one we listened to was an interview with Rob Dyrdek, who if you guys listen to this podcast, you know that we are obsessed with him and the way that he thinks and the way that he sets up his life. So one of the biggest things that I always get from Rob is the fact that he puts meditation at the forefront of his life and really accredits pretty much everything. Obviously he's a genius business person, but he accredits big shifts in his life to be able to create a lot of abundance to meditation.
Specifically, when he got his sonodome in 2018, he said, from that moment on, he gives 90 plus percent of his abundance and everything else credit to that creating of daily practice.
And he listens to. I think it's a manifestation recording that you can do in the Sona Dome, which if you guys don't know what that is, it's like this crazy meditation egg that uses lights and sounds and you go in and you close it and it's like you have this little time to yourself, the space pod. But you don't need that to create what he's creating at all. Because you and I used to be in a good habit of this. But it was such a good reminder that, wow, when we were in this, we really were on rocket ship trajectory of building a lot of abundance at the time that we were doing it really regularly. So for me, this was a reminder of, yes, it takes all of the physical action that you need to go do out in the world. That's very, very important to be doing those things. But you also have to be really. I'm going to view it as like calibrating. I think one of the things that Lauren Bostick said that was in there, that just rocked my world, which I absolutely loved, is she said, you know, for all of the tactical people, like view meditation as a daily strategy session with yourself.
That rocked my world.
When she said that, I loved it. I was like, that's all it is. It's a meeting with yourself to say, how do I want my life to go? What do I want this to look like? And I was like, oh my God. Sometimes you just hear these things that make it so practical that you go, how could I not be having a daily strategy session with myself?
Uh huh. I mean that changed every. That went from it being this woo, woo, whatever thing where you're, does it work? Does it not? Like, you know it works and I know it works. But I mean, just saying in general, people question it too. All of a sudden a real practical thing of wait, this is just a daily strategy session with yourself. So for me, I'm very much, I need to be guided in a guided meditation, otherwise my mind just goes wherever. Right? So I'm taking the idea of the Sona Dome where you get a guided meditation and this idea that she said of it's a strategy session with yourself. And I'm going to script out what I want my life to look like in five years. Literally, I'm going to script it out as if it's already happened. Then I'm going to read it, record it. No different than we are in a podcast right now. So it's my voice speaking as though it's already happened. And then I'm going to get one of my video editor friends to go out and get B roll and make a movie of this thing and I'm going to put it in my ears, I'm going to put it on my screen and I'm going to watch this movie of my life as if it's already happened. Spoken by me and my voice looking back on it as if it's already happened. And I'm going to watch this thing every single freaking morning and see what happens.
Let's make sure if there's like, there's no actors in it. Maybe we're really in it with our faces because we don't want to like attract those actual actors into our life.
No, really, I'm going to get B roll of you and me and that'll be in it. But then we'll also just get B roll of other things or people or whatever it might be in whatever meditation I script out. Right, Whatever I script out.
Green screen us on A yacht in different.
I'm telling you, I've got the vision. Anyhow, I'm going to build this. I'm going to do it. It's going to be so cool. And I'll let you guys know how it goes, okay?
Amazing. Okay. Second one that we listened to was Craig's. Craig's from la. It's a restaurant owner.
Craig is the founder of Craig's in LA in Beverly Hills. Right there on Beverly. And it is just one of the best restaurants. Every single time I'm back in la, that's where my friends and I go. We go to Craig's. And almost any single night that you're in there, you're going to be looking to your left and seeing a Listers, looking to your right and seeing a Listers, but everybody leaves them alone. And it's almost like even though it's in la, this super vibey, cozy New York steakhouse, right? Like it was there from the 40s the way he's built it out.
So I've only been there once and he came up and sat with us and which is what he's known for. But I was like, this is crazy. Okay, so I'm obviously not a celebrity. And there's like when I say a list, I mean like picture the a list of a list in this restaurant. Yet he still comes and takes time to go and sit with pretty much everybody eventually, right? And he sat and talked and it's like nobody else was in the restaurant except for us. And I just felt like there was so much attention to detail. I was like, this person is elite at what they do. This is incredible.
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Yep. And one of the things I've learned from him is not only has he created the team around him so he can go be present with every single table, but at the same time, his story he was a server at Dantana's, which is another super iconic Hollywood restaurant right next to the Troubadour. And so when Elton John or Madonna or anybody was done playing at the Troubadour when they were on their come up, they would go next door in the middle of the night at bar time, basically, and go to Tanna's. And he was a server there. And he did such a good job learning from the ground floor up how to be great at his craft and then how to be the maitre d and then how to run the restaurant, that when it came time for him to say, hey, I want to open my own, he had all of this trust because he walked the walk in all the positions and they saw him do it, and he worked with them and served them. He had already built the trust to get investors, and he was able to go from a ground floor server to owning one of the most popular restaurants in Beverly Hills, all on his own accord of showing up and showing up big every single day, and then other people were willing to show up for him.
So my biggest takeaway from that podcast was he talked about how when you are a true expert, a true professional, there will be so much going on in the background that you don't know about that you have no idea. He said there'll be so many fires burning that you in the front of the restaurant, the main concern is what is their customer experience, how do they feel, what's going on? You can't lose attention to detail. Even though there might be things that are happening in the back of the kitchen. He said, you know, shipments don't come in, people don't show up. It might feel like everything is falling apart. Maybe there's a mini kitchen fire. Like, who knows what is literally going on back there, but you just keep your cool in the front of the house. And I thought that this is so interesting because I think that if you can apply this to any or if you can think of this in another way, I thought of this in terms of sometimes we look at those experts and professionals in our field and we say, oh, everything must be going right for them. They probably don't have the same problems I have. Why do I have this? Why am I plagued by this? Why did my launch not go well? Why did my product not go well? The thing is, that is happening to them as well. They are just choosing to show up as a professional and not show all of those parts. Now, this is interesting because we're in a time where it's like, yeah, but what about being authentic? Okay, you can totally be authentic, but still make sure that you are showing up, making sure you're putting your best foot forward all of the time and making sure that your customers and the people who are following you that you're showing up professionally. I think of this for the people that we love and that we want to emulate. I'm like, I'm just going to bring him up again because we are just obsessed with the way he lives life. And that's Brendon Burchard. We know that so much stuff goes on behind the background. But to you, to us, what he's showing is a consistent picture for us to follow, a consistent inspiration for us to follow and to be out in the world.
Yep. I think two things came to mind when you said that be aspirational and over deliver on customer service. Do those two things no matter what's burning down in the background and people will want to follow you and do business with you and learn from you or buy your product in droves. Yep. I hope you guys liked our takeaways. We tried our best to always just pass on, like, what we're learning. I think when I look up to other individuals or learn from other individuals, when I find out where they're at in their life and some of the cool things that aha. Moments that they're doing, I find that valuable. So hopefully you guys like this when we share these types of things. And thanks for listening. We always love and appreciate you guys.
We will see you next week.
Sam.
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