Sam Parr says the hardest part of scaling a company isn't strategy, it's controlling your emotions. He traces adult behavior back to childhood moments, like his father's comment about straws, and credits a decade of weekly therapy and a CEO coach for helping him manage how those patterns affect his leadership and risk tolerance.
For a lot of companies, like, it could be like WeWork or Instacart, these things that are— or Uber— these things that are really large, they're very simple concepts and they're not that hard to execute. But what's really hard is controlling your emotions. That's, that, that, that's incredibly challenging. And what I've learned throughout the years through paying a lot of money for therapy and coaching and reading, is that the majority of, of both good and bad behavior that you have now, it started back in childhood. And so what I tell people and what I've learned and what I tell myself is if you just study your childhood, you're going to learn a lot about why you are reacting to certain things. And I remember being a kid, I was only 4 or 5 years old, and this is just an example of how things that happen when you're a kid, a lot of times you don't even realize it, but it actually sticks with you. I remember when I was a kid and I was at a, we were at like a bar or restaurant or something with my family and my father was drinking, it must have been like a Jack and Coke or something. And I remember he ordered this glass and I saw him get the straw and take it out. And I was like, why are you doing that, Dad? I was a little kid. And he goes— and he just made some comment, no big deal. He's like, oh, men don't drink with straws. And he didn't even think twice. He was just joking, or I don't know. He just said that because he meant like— he was saying like men don't use like dainty straws when they're drinking alcoholic drinks. And my whole life I never used a straw. And it wasn't until I was older when I realized, oh, he was First of all, he was just, he just made some offhanded comment. He didn't even think about it. And second of all, he was referring to alcohol. And so for my whole life, when I went to McDonald's or a fast food restaurant as a kid, I would never, I would always pull the straw out of the drink. And that's an example of how little things happen when you're young. And sometimes you notice them and sometimes you don't, but they entirely shape how you behave as an adult. And I think it's very, important to study your childhood and to study how you were raised, trauma that happened when you were young, because as you grow a company, all of those things that happened to you, they become magnified. So good things and bad things, both 10x as you get more people and as you get a little bit more successful. And the way you react to things, the way you gauge risk, the way that you react to people doing what you said or them not doing what you said, the way you trust people, a lot of that stems from how you were raised and things that happened to you as a kid. And so what I do is I, I have a therapist, so I've gone to therapy every week for maybe 10 years, and I've had to work through a lot of interesting things. But I think it's quite common that people have the same issues that I have, but going to therapy is incredibly important, or at least it has been for me. And the other thing that I did is I have, um, a CEO coach that has helped a ton. It's pretty much like therapy, but it's all related to your job. But like, when you really talk about all types of relationships— girlfriends, wives, boyfriends, husbands, father, mother— I mean, you talk about all this stuff, co-workers. And so that has been incredibly helpful for me. And so The things that have made a massive impact, the resources that have made a massive impact are I use Torch. So torch.io, that's my, that's my coach. We pay him, his name's Peter. We pay him a monthly fee and myself and Adam, the president of our company, go to him and it's been wonderful. The second thing is The Body Keeps the Score. It's a great book on dealing with trauma. Now, trauma, a lot of times people think that means soldiers who are in war and who saw people die and their best friends, and they're dealing with PTSD, uh, post-traumatic stress disorder. But the reality is a lot of people can go have that. So whether you— your parents or your siblings or someone in your life was abusive to you as a kid, or it could be you just got really scared, you saw something that was pretty wild. It could be one When I lived in Missouri, when I grew up, I remember being in 4th grade and seeing 9/11. And it could be— it's a— could be relatively small, but that made a massive difference on me. And that was a small indicator or a small example of trauma. And that shapes how you feel. And so what The Body Keeps the Score does is it teaches you how to recognize when you've experienced a little bit of trauma or a lot of bit of trauma and how to deal with it. And so that's a great book.
