How To Get Ahead Of 99% Of People

We're calling Active Index your unfair advantage. It's unfair. Like, I know people better than they know themselves sometimes. This psychometric assessment is looking at someone's natural driver, and it tells us a lot about where that person fits, where they will be fulfilled, where they will have to stretch in order to be successful, how much they'll have to stretch to be successful. And so if we pull on that lever, we create an incredible culture where people thrive and feel empowered and grow, and they stick around.

Guys, welcome my good friend, Jason Carroll. Jason. Dude, I'm excited to talk to you, man. I tell you what, you guys are revolutionizing the kind of the. The workspace and environment, just helping people understand themselves and they're hard wiring better. I'm curious, how did you find yourself into this field?

Oh, man, it's. It goes way back to. Not way back. What is it, 2024. So 2016, I got introduced to psychometrics for the first time. I was the president of a company called Champion National Security, and we were in hypergrowth mode. So when I, When I joined, it was 33 years old. We had gotten to about 800 employees. And then over the next seven years, we grew to 2,500 employees. Holy smokes. Yeah, just. Just nuts. So, you know, hiring was the bane of my existence. I had some turnover within leadership teams. I had an executive team where we had some butting of heads. I was very much at fault for a lot of that myself.

Me too. I get it.

And so this idea of psychometrics, of measuring hard wiring kind of came into the fold, and it ended up really transforming how we worked together. My COO looked at me like I was some sort of wild card jump out of the plane with no parachute, and I looked at him as a stick in the mud. You know, you're always going to do things the way you've always done them. You're not going to. Right. And we were both wrong. We weren't making generous assumptions, and we realized that there are these innate drivers behind our needs and our behaviors. And we realized we're literally opposite of one another. We started seeing each other a little bit differently, more generously and able to work together with just a lot more effectiveness.

Well, it's crazy to me that most people spend their life reacting their way through life, right? They're not. They're not choosing to. To most folks. And I. And I'm Use that. Use that. Generally, most folks don't do what I would refer to as the work of trying to understand them themselves better because it seems to me you have to understand yourself better long before you can understand anybody else around you better, you know, and I know with the, with the new est, with the new assessment you guys have, you know, I just took it just before we hopped on the show. Yeah. And it was actually really, you know, what's really cool about your assessment is the fact that it's, it's quick and painless. Like I was able to move through it in just a few minutes and.

Stuff like that a lot.

You know, I've taken a lot of personality assessments and different types of tools along the way and they take 30, 40 minutes a piece and stream finder disc and value, like all these different tools. You know, I'm just curious, how did you get, how did you get to the place where you have such a robust tool that kicks off so much great information, but also it can be done in just a few minutes?

Yeah. So a lot of backend analysis, working with data scientists, working with psychometricians. Did you know that that was a role. That's another great. Never even heard the term before. I know psychometrician, IO, psychologists, the whole, the whole nine yards. Right. So you've got the big ones out there that are Hogan and Insights and Colby. Fantastic assessments. But like you said, they take 30, 45 plus minutes and then you need an expert to analyze them for you. And so that's not adoptable. There's too much friction for companies to use that beyond anything past their executive team or leadership team.

Right.

So if we really want to empower employees, we need to get something that is adoptable and is frictionless. And to do that, we went through and as you saw, it's like a free choice stimulus response. Right. You're seeing these adjectives and like, does that resonate? Is that who I am? Is that strong or someone me? Or like, oh, that's definitely always me. And so there's a couple of modalities, but it's all stimulus response. And that being the case, we, we had to do all these analysis of how long is too long. Right. There's a long, diminishing returns and then how short is too short. And so there's, I can't remember what they're called, but the different tests, there's icc, I know that's intraclass something or other, RSME or RMSE and then.

MAE or something like there's all these like initials for all these like robust validity tests that we went back and forth and back and forth and found the sweet spot to where it's Averaging just under seven minutes. And it's scary accurate. People feel like I'm peering into their soul. And it's about hardwiring. It's not personality, because personality is how we adapt, how we move through the world because of our context. But hardwiring is like, what's really driving my behaviors and understanding that allows us to predict, like, how well am I going to fit into this job, this role, this. Even this temporary position to lead this project or initiative? How well am I going to work with this person? How are my spouse and I going to have, you know, conflict?

Yeah, yeah.

That's real too, by the way.

It's very real. Yeah. For sure. Yeah. No, you know, it's, it's interesting, you know, when I, when I start thinking about the different assessments that are out there in general. You know, there has to be something that was missing from the marketplace that made you want to go to the extra. Honestly, the extra leg work of creating your own assessment and the apt of index is, you know, it's, it's one of the best in the world. So I'm, I'm curious to know from your perspective, what was missing from the marketplace that really said, hey, look, I really feel like we can get further, faster and help people understand the team members hardwiring, help them hire better, you know, fire better, you know, what was missing from the marketplace that made you want to really kind of lean into this?

It kind of brings me back to the, the old blockbuster Netflix story. Okay, right. Blockbuster wasn't innovating because they didn't have to. And I've got some competitors out there that are the shorter form, really quick hitting, frictionless, and they're fantastic. I mean, I've used multiple tools that are similar to Active Index.

But you kind of peel back the layers and you realize they're using the same modalities, the same questions, the same words that they used 20 years ago. They haven't updated their science, their, their web, their applications. They don't work on a phone. Right. Like, you know, I mean, it's 20, 24.

So there's just the. Are these, they're super out of date. And, you know, if I have a doctor who's like, yeah, I mean, I, I went to doctor school 20 years ago, so I'm a doctor, but, you know, they haven't continued education for the last two decades. Yeah, I'm. I'm going to a different doctor. And we're, we're making major hiring decisions using this as one of the legs of the stool. So if it's 20 years out of date, that's a problem. Right. We have, we've had multiple generations come through the workforce that don't resonate with some of that older mentality and older modality. And so that's really the, some of the big things we wanted to address. And with the innovation also, their architecture's super old. So the things that we're implementing like generative AI.

Yeah.

They can't even if they wanted to.

Rebuild it from scratch basically to even Totally.

Yeah, yeah, exactly.

Yeah. No, I think that's great feedback. Again, I'm thinking. All right, so I've been an entrepreneur for 30 plus years.

Ever. Yeah.

As long as I can remember.

Yeah, I saw your problem.

Yeah, I, I started a company 1998 from the trash piles of a construction site. Literally started there. 1999 was my first full year in business. I ran from 1999 to 2001 as a. What's. What's known as a DBA doing business as. And then incorporated in August of 2001. And one of the things that I wasn't prepared for is I didn't know myself well enough to know that my, I had, I had my own shortcomings. Kind of what you mentioned with you and your, the, the former CEO that you mentioned or leader. But more importantly, there was a study done and I, and I realized all this the hard way a number of years ago. I think it was like three years ago that I read of the study that it basically says that every time you make a bad hire, you lose $50,000. Like it's, so it's not just, it's not just okay, we, we hired someone, we brought them in, we got them up to speed or trained. If you actually have a training program. Most businesses don't take the time to train their people.

No, they don't.

You know, so you. So, so then it really is, is it the team member or is it the leader kind of concept? But let's, let's just say for a second that we, we, we hired someone that didn't either fit the culture, didn't fit the business model maybe. And I've dealt with this many times, sold me on multiple interviews. I mean we used to have a seven stage interview process at my organization, thinking that the more, the more we saw people, the more we would see fractures. And we did like. So we, it helped us along the way and we used some tools and assessments as well. We still had people that would get into the organization that just didn't fit the organization. Either it was a lack of culture fit or a lack of competency. In many cases it was one of the two. Okay. In some cases it would be the lack of the leader and I would have to address the leadership problem. But in most cases it was one of the two. You know, so you would spend on average, if you got a hiring stage of seven stages, you're taking about a month to interview candidates, run them through your filter, really figure out, okay, who's the best candidate. You know, this person looks great on paper. This person interviewed really well. This person came as a referral from one of the other team members. So you run them through the filter. That takes about a month, maybe 45 days, maybe in some cases 60 days, depending on the, the type of role. You know, some cases we would hire HR or HR headhunting firms to kind of like try to bring people in. So we tried to do our absolute best to screen as many folks as humanly possible. I say all that to say that the studies generated said not only do you spend the money hiring and training and bringing them in, but the downtime that it takes to let someone go, bring someone new in, go through the process all over again, hoping and praying it's going to work out better this time. Like is there's a real cost of that, of being about $50,000 a team member. And the study was trying to help you understand that maybe it's better to try to work and retrain or mentor a team member. You know, I've shared on the show before, my, my theology is you hire slow fire, fast mentor often. Right. That's kind of like my, my internal three stage process.

Yeah.

At the same time, how can a tool like APTIF help us like shorten the bell curve of hiring bad or having bad hires?

Great question, and you're right. I mean, $50,000, it's almost an arbitrary number. Because I've seen some studies that say it's less. I've seen some studies that say it's 5x to 27x a salary. Yeah, I know, Yeah. I mean, if you think about a C level person. Right. The dials at the very top, the ripple effect, it's.

Yes.

Astronomical. Right. So I had a bad hire that.

I, I can't even say the name or the role because I just don't want them to, you know, feel like I'm throwing on the bus.

We don't do, we don't do shaming on the show.

This is years ago. But the wrong hire cost me literally over $600,000. We were expanding in all of these new states. We started in Texas. We were already in Louisiana and Florida and Pennsylvania, some really easy states to be an employer. But Ohio, California, you know, not so much.

Right.

So as we were expanding, the person that I really had entrusted to make sure we were compliant just lacked that, that attention to detail and follow through. The crazy thing is I've already had a psychometric test like active index, and I knew this person wasn't the best fit, but I just kind of got sold by the winsomeness and the, you know, and my coo. Love and you can sell you totally. Yeah, I know. And so I got. I got duped and wooed and it costs dearly. So, yeah, I'm right there with you. And we've all seen that, right? Resume looks good. Killed the interview and trusted our gut intuition and then it just fell on its face. And so that is what we're trying to address with Aptividex. And even just if I may, kind of going back a little bit to what is it we are actually looking for, you know, what's the first thing we see from every new applicant?

I mean, the resume, basically, it's kind.

Of like the resume.

Maybe a call.

Yeah, maybe a call. Yeah. But we usually see the resume and what we're looking for, hypothetically is skills and experience.

I just wrote an article where I started brainstorming. Like, at first I was like, man, skills and experience isn't even in the top three things that I'm looking for. And then the more I started brainstorming it, dude, it's not even in the top 10.

It's something I would look at and consider, but it's not even in the top 10 highest priorities of hiring for somebody. So I would say that it's broken that we're even looking at that as the first lever in the first place. But even if it were important.

Who wrote almost every resume that would have come across your desk this year?

I mean, in theory, the person that. In theory, the person that's, you know, putting the resume out there, maybe they had some help, but.

Yeah, well, got GPT.

Oh, well, that's true too.

Yeah. DPT wrote almost every resume these days. And you probably don't, you know, being an entrepreneur, you probably don't have to read a lot of resumes. You certainly haven't had to do it yourself.

Really funny about resumes is I scan them. I have a. I have a much better. Maybe because I've screwed up so much in my time's past. I have a much better feel when I meet people in person, especially when I meet them repeatedly in person.

So yeah, totally. Yeah, yeah. Getting that gut feeling is so much better. So, yeah. All that to say, like, resumes are relics. They just don't do us any good anymore. And so we have to have another leg of the stool. Obviously the interview is a part of it. References, et cetera. The psychometric assessment is looking at someone's natural drivers and it tells us a lot about where that person fits, where they will be fulfilled, where they will have to stretch in order to be successful, how much they'll have to stretch to be successful. And if you think about like the big gregarious salesperson, super winsome, never met a stranger, also assertive, can close the deal. Right. The hard wiring behind that person is something that would make that same person a miserable accountant.

Oh, for sure.

Yeah.

Different skills entirely.

Yeah, totally, totally. And it's, I mean it is skills, but like it's all before they ever learned skills. Something drove them to their field. Right. And you don't see a lot of CPAs walking away going, I think I'm just going to pursue sales now.

Yeah.

Right. And there's a reason for that. But we are. You even mentioned this at the top. A lot of us were very self unaware, so we don't really even know where to go. And we can talk about self awareness too, that there's a whole framework that I, that I love to talk about there. But now look at yours. You know, you. You took the assessment.

Yeah.

Right. You are what we call a challenger. All gas, no brakes.

That's mainly true.

Yeah.

I've had to learn breaks.

I've actually totally. Right, right. So everything that. So you are virtually unemployable. All right.

You know what's really funny is I, as I took an assessment 10 years ago that told me if I'd be anything other than an entrepreneur and it probably wouldn't work out. Yeah, I was pretty successful in sales back in the day.

But yeah, yeah, sales, you kind of get to, to carve your own path. Right. But if that, if put yourself back in that sales position, if that sales leader came back to you. Stephen, come on. I need all the details in the CRM. That's what I need. You focusing on data, data, data. You'd just be like, man, you're crushing my soul. Like, just let me sell, I'll stop and do it. And it is crushing.

It is soul crushing.

Yeah. So you come up with coping strategies. So your hard wiring isn't who you are. Because we learn how to cope what we were are hoping to. You know, obviously for the employer, we want to show people or show them who are the best fits. But for the people in those roles, we want to show them what their superpowers are and where their caution areas are. So sure, I might say you're virtually unemployable, but that's just kind of a tongue in cheek way of saying I've already peered into your soul a little bit. The superpower there is. You are all gas, no brakes. Right. You're going to think outside the box because you're like, screw the box.

Right.

Like I've been wanting to create stuff from scratch. Yeah, yeah. And sometimes you'll create chaos for the sake of chaos. And so there's, it's a balancing act. Right.

So I would agree and disagree at the same time. I think Stephen, up until about five or six years ago would create chaos for the sake of chaos. For fun, honestly. Because I would get bored. Mature. Stephen, Stephen now knows that chaos causes culture breakdown. So now, now Stephen's more cognizant of not creating chaos in order to establish a consistent culture.

Exactly. But your, your hard wiring didn't change.

Yeah.

You're the way your behavior show up change. So let's, let's dive into like some self awareness. There's like, there's three levers. The first is data, which just. I recognize the behavior. Right. I create chaos.

I have created chaos before. We can leave it there.

Yeah, there's a behavior, but it's just, if it's just data put into a spreadsheet, it doesn't do anything for anyone.

Right.

But if I go the next lever go a little deeper is impact. How is my behavior impacting the people around me? And you just said it like it's creating this culture. Yeah, it's the culture friction. We, we have to face that negative consequence to our behavior. And that can be really difficult. But when we do it, we're now motivated to change.

Yeah.

Right. So like I always do, I kind of, I, I, I steamroll meetings. You know, I, I kind of dominate. I've got assertive personality.

Yeah.

Uh, but that was just data. The impact was that my executive team didn't feel like they had a voice.

Mm. I actually lived that out. Yeah.

I mean, I know you have, we're very similar profiles.

Yeah. Well, it's the reason I'm, I'm saying that is because I'm also, as you're reading the data, you're making Assumptions based on the data that you're seeing, and I'm validating the data that you're seeing is, is in fact true. In fact, one of my biggest lessons in building businesses was twofold. One was building a business without building myself. That was number one. Number two was rather than going into our executive team meetings and just saying, this is, this is where we're going, this is how we're going to get there, da, da, da. I now, my normal behavior now is go into the room, let all the letter, let all the leaders do their part, let them all speak. And then I make assumptions or opinions or judgments based on the data that I've heard and the wisdom I've heard in the room. And I found that to be literally 10x more effective than me just over talking and trying to lead the meeting. In fact, some of the best ideas for the company have come out of the people sitting at the table. So I'm a big believer in now, in maturity, trying to let the team always feel seen, value, heard and appreciated.

Yeah. So what's I love about that? It's so similar to a lot of my journey as a leader as well. One of the attributes that we're measuring is influence. And it's not what disc would call influence because they just don't use it. Right. Uh, they wanted to spell the word desk. It's cute, but. And it's not, it's not whether you're influential. It's it's are you driven to influence or impact your situations, your outcomes, the people around you. Right. And you are, for you, that's your highest scoring rate. It's mine too. Right. So that was the driver behind the.

Dominating meetings. But when we realized the negative impact, and then we understand the driver, here's the beauty. It's not easy, but it is simple. Like, is dominating a meeting the only way to impact an outcome?

Not even close.

Yeah, not even close. Right.

Yeah.

So you picked a different behavior, you picked pro social behaviors where you now set up a meeting. You're still in charge, you're still leading this thing. You're still creating the environment, the culture, everything else. But now you're raising the collective intelligence.

Right.

So now the outcome is even better. The impact is surely better. And you're filling the exact same drive.

Hey guys, I hope you're enjoying the show. Steven Scoggins here. I've got something that I think is absolutely going to blow your mind. Imagine taking your life and your business to the whole another level. I'm talking about an eight figure Level and beyond. You see, you've been working your butt off to build your business where it is now. But what if you could work smarter, faster, free up more time, make more money and impact along the way? How much would that be worth to you? You see, I can prove that basic steps, basic mindset shifts and subtle changes can make the biggest difference. I want to introduce you to the eight figure mindset makeover. It's absolutely free and it's here for you. It's a powerful summary of my top strategies that help propel me from the streets, if you will, to upwards of nine figures and quote, unquote success as we like to chase it. This is more than just tips, though. It's a complete mindset overhaul with simple hacks that you can apply today. To begin working on your unprecedented heights in your business. I would like the honor to share these types of things with you that turn my dreams into reality so you can experience the same type of joy and freedom that I now get to live out in my own day. In other words, it's time for you to build your own unstoppable enterprise. And if you're really ready to take it to the next level and elevate your life and your business, this is an absolute game changer for you. So if you want to take advantage of this free resource, simply go to the show Notes and click the link. Or you can go to stevenscoggins.com backslash8 figure, that's Steven scoggins.com backslash 8 figure. Until then, much love. God bless. Let's get back to the show. Take care. One of the things that I realized during that same transition, this is again a number of years ago and I, and I would say that, I would say that a lot of leaders who would, you know, score out like me, right? They do what they do because they simply don't know any better. In fact, I would say I've always told people all the time that there's, you know, the world would say that, you know, lack of business failure or business failures because of lack of money and marketing and leadership and not having a business plan and all this. Top seven, right. In fact, it's in my new book. I'm. I'm right. I'm almost finished writing now. I've discovered that it's actually impatience, arrogance and ignorance and pride and fear. Right? Th. Those categories right there are more disruptive because they cause the behaviors of the other things that take place that then the, you know, we kind of measure on a regular basis. You Know, lack of funding and da da da da. And what's. What I found was interesting and this is something that I would like. I'm reason I'm sharing because if for those who would test out like me, I think this is a powerful awareness tool. I realized that there is a very fine line between manipulation and influence. And it comes down to intent. Manipulation specifically is based on selfish intent. It's making yourself feel more grand than you actually, you know, maybe that you actually are. It's making your ideas more important than somebody else's, which is just, it's you just trying to feel better about you, you know. So I would say that manipulation is funded by insecurity, right? Where influence is based on selflessness. How do I actually help the team win? And one of the other tools that I began using a number of years ago that seemed to have a lot of social capital was when we would have a big win as a team, whether it be the executive team, whether it be the operations team, the, you know, you know what I would call the administration team. It didn't matter who, whoever won, right? Whatever team was winning, regardless if it had a heavy influence of myself or not, I would always give the credit to the team. Always.

Absolutely.

Hey, you guys rocked it. You guys are amazing. You guys are so awesome. Conversely, if we had a negative outcome, I would say you guys really sword. You try. You tried so hard. You know what, this is my responsibility. I didn't lead you guys very well. That's. I'm learning a lesson from that and that's me being vulnerable with you. I hope we can just keep trying again. We'll find our path. I found that that methodology with the things that I've already shared, going from mature or immaturity to maturity has been a game changer, game changer in building teams because I do move fast and, and just as I move. It doesn't matter in my relationship circles, whether it's in my personal relationships or whether it's in my business relationships. Most people can't keep up with me. And it's not, it's not, it's not a dig on them whatsoever. As if I'm some. Something more important. I, my, my brain processing speed is just rapid fire in many cases now because of that I miss out on details. Because of that, I miss out on certain things. And when you become self aware to realize that now you can actually grow that methodology which is I think another, where, another place where the, these, the active index comes into play. It's like, okay, let's be aware of who you are, what's your strengths, your struggles and your blind spot. So let's dig in some more into the challenger because I'm curious. I like learning more, so I'm curious to know more.

Yeah. And my profile is called a trailblazer. And we're almost identical in the kind of four primary attributes, which is like a little switch and it's barely. So, I mean you and I are very similar.

There's some other attributes we measure that are interesting for you because this is actually where we differ. There's one that we call emotional resonance. So think about, think about resonance, like the frequency you know, I'm all in. Emotional resonance is how much space is new emotion taking up and how long is required to process that emotion. Right. So you're not like sky high, but you're a, you're a six, whereas I'm a two. So, so what does that mean for me? Emotion, for me, emotion hits and I process it very quickly.

Which can be good. Right. Cause I'm not, I'm not. I never really get derailed by emotion. So the really high scores, they, you know, the 8, 9, 10, they get derailed because emotion hits. And like, I gotta deal with this right now. You're on that mid to high level, which means you experience emotions in a, in a strong, profound way and you're aware of what other people are experiencing. But it's just a little more manageable compared to the folks that can really get knocked off course.

A lot of work that I've done.

Yeah. Therapy for the win.

That's right, that's right. That's right.

Yeah. For me, going into the therapy is, you know, growing up, the only emotions were happy and mad. Like I was sad wasn't even an option if I was sad. It was just I was angry that I wasn't happy. Yeah, Right. So my vocabulary, I was just dumb.

Yeah. So I started reading Bernie Brown and got to actually meet her and get trained by her. That was fantastic. That was a huge awakening. Some of this work was, was a huge awakening.

But yeah, I would say where your er, your emotional resonance score is as a gift for you that like you're wired to be able to tap into that a little more readily without it knocking you off course. That's really cool.

Some of the biggest mistakes I made in leadership were not recognizing how emotion played a role in change.

Yeah.

Like the silly example.

We had an email system that was running on a box in a closet at our corporate office. It was on an expired license of Microsoft Exchange. Okay. And they were doing tape backups every week. But I'm sitting there going, y', all, if this closet burns, gets flooded, hit with a tornado, we're dead. Like, the whole company's dead.

Yeah, it's gonna be hit with.

I'm like, this cannot be. So we switched over to the cloud. We went over to Google Workspace. I'm like, this is. Everything's gonna be on the cloud. It's all backed up. You can log on in any device. We can collaborate on documents and spreadsheets, we can chat. Everything's amazing. And we even rolled it out to where, you know, people left the office on Friday with Exchange. They came in on Monday morning, and they logged in. Their passwords work. Everything was great. So logistically, I'm like, wipe my hand. Yeah, that was awesome. And people were pissed. They were so mad at me.

Folks don't like change, Jason. I know regardless of change, good or bad, it's true.

And. But one of the things that I just neglected was to give people space to feel that way and to get ahead of that strong emotion that is associated with change.

So, yeah, like, I would say, you've probably had similar things, but you haven't just railroaded people the way. I unfortunately, had to learn some of those lessons.

I did.

Yeah, you're really differently.

Just to be fully candid with your audience and stuff like that. And the reason I want to share that is because one of the things that I think that leaders don't do is they're not vulnerable to share their mistakes. And one of the things I try to encourage all of our listeners and viewers to do is to, yeah, go ahead and be honest with folks, because you'll get buy in a lot quicker if you're honest with folks.

Yeah, yeah. Vulnerability breeds trust. You know, if I trust you, you inherently start to trust me. And by giving vulnerability, exposing this thing, not disclosure, not telling all, you know, you don't need to do that. But. But yeah, you're right.

That.

That authenticity and transparency. I agree.

So, yeah, I mean, I would say that, you know, being in sales and being your own entrepreneur has served you really well. You know, if you had to be in a role where.

It was super process oriented. Right. Like, all right, you're going to come to work, you're going to be a perfector of repeatable tasks. We're in maintenance mode. So you could have all the I's dotted, all the T's crossed every single day. Like, it would just suck your soul away. Yeah, right. But But I mean, half the population, that's what they prefer. Like. Yeah, I get to. I get to hone my skills, my craft. I get to get into that flow state and just do my work. You know, like, people love that, and there's nothing wrong with either. We just have to understand what those strengths are. So I imagine just out of necessity, you've built teams around you of people that were a little more buttoned up on the details.

Well, yeah, I mean, so that's. And that's where a tool like this can come into play. Right. Is you become aware of your struggles and blind spots. And so I believe that you amplify your strengths, you work on your struggles. Like these are things you can mature. And your blind spots, you hire for.

Yeah, absolutely.

I mean, that's. Yeah.

Your coping strategy is some other person.

Yeah, basically. Now, I was joking around with somebody. I told somebody before, you know, in pretty much every business I've done, when I. Because I'm used to starting things from scratch on my own with cash and. And whatever, I don't. I don't typically go out and borrow money and stuff like that. And, you know, I used to tell folks all the time, but because we had. We got to where we had like 400 team members across multiple states collectively, what time you factor in, you know, or contractors and stuff that only work for us. And the interesting thought part about that was, is I was telling them, I said, I've done every single role in this company once, at least once, for an extended period of time. Every single role.

Yeah.

And I said, however, I promise you that you're doing that job better than I ever could. I promise you.

Yeah, right.

Because I did the work out of necessity. I didn't do the work. I didn't do the work out of passion.

There's a big difference in that. Yeah, it's true. And when you did it out of necessity, you were having to stretch your hard wiring and to do something that had to be done. But again, if you would have had to do the same thing over and over again, it would have killed you. And another thing I love about the. This assessment that self awareness also gives this sense of affirmation, like, there are things that. That we see in ourselves, you know, self awareness, we have the data, and if we do start realizing the impact, it can get us really down really quick because we are like, am I broken? Right? Like, why. Why do I struggle? I love to start new things, but I don't follow through. I hate maintenance mode.

Why?

You know, am I. Is something wrong with me? Right. You know, and those are. We start to use these identity statements. You already said, like, shame. We don't, we don't bring shame here onto the show. But that's really what shame is. It's just, it's identity statements to explain certain behaviors. Like, why do I steamroll meetings? Well, because I'm a jerk or I'm a bad leader.

Your brain is hardwired to answer whatever question you ask.

Absolutely.

By changing the question, you can change the maturity level.

Yeah, yeah, exactly. So if, if, if the reason why I steamroll meetings is I'm a jerk, well, then I am a thing. Why even try to be different? Right. But if I can get past that shame, get away from identity statements, go. Okay, no. What drives that behavior, which now we've already talked about. I said now I have an inflection point for change. Right. But the identity statements don't give us that inflection point because I am a thing. Well, I guess I just am. And it's just so easy to, to fall into that.

Yeah. Well, I think it's partially why, like I have. When it comes to the audience, one of the things I tell them all the time is every single mistake I ever made in business, in people and relationships and stuff like that, none of it was willful. Like for me. Like, I didn't go into the situation wanting to cause destruction, so to speak.

Right.

No matter what it was. Right. I went in the situation with the best version of myself that I had at the time and the core difference between the best version I had at the time and the version that I am now and the version I'm going to be in the future, it comes down to one thing. I didn't know what I didn't know. Right. So when you open yourself up to new levels of learning, new levels of understanding, new levels of self awareness, new levels of maturity, now you can actually do some work with it. Right. So, and again, this is where the active assessment comes into play. It's like, okay, well, where am I? Where am I? Where are my strengths? What can I amplify? You know, where are my struggles? What are the things I can, I can work on? Right. Out of curiosity, with the challenger, what, what other roles or what other.

Results and category wise would be a very supportive system. Way to surround a challenger that works.

Well with a challenger.

Yeah.

Challengers can be people glue, like culture glue. If, if there's self awareness and you don't go steamrolling people. Right. Um, because you are charismatic and winsome and persuasive. Um, you know, you're. Challengers are generalists, right. You're not going to be an expert at anything, at least not for more than like a couple of years. Right. Some, A lot of challengers are like, I'm an expert at tennis right now and I got obsessed with it and you know, bought all the equipment and then like two years later it's like collecting dust. And now you bought a new Golf.

It's funny, I just basically been having for the first time in 10 years. That's so funny. Right.

But I bet before you went all the time overboard.

I've got my own gear and everything, so I was just gonna. Brought that thing up, so.

Yeah, yeah, yep, same here. I just had a buddy invite me to go snowboarding in January. I'm like, man, yeah, that's something I used to do all the time. I haven't done in a decade. Wow.

But, yeah, so, you know, there's a lot of generalist roles out there. You don't just have to be an entrepreneur and, you know, carve your own path. Sales is certainly one of them. People leadership, especially if.

If the challenger can actually counterbalance the, the initiatives of a company. And that's a weird way to say it, but let's just take software engineering as an example, right? Like, would you want to be a software engineer? Probably not. But I like, how could you. Yeah. Could you lead software engineers?

Yeah.

And it's not to say that challengers have to be leaders. Right. There's a lot of different leaders and a lot of different shapes, sizes, forms. But you take a group of software engineers and usually you're going to see a group of people that are more. I would rather be by myself, you know, work on my own. I don't want to be in large groups of people. I don't need to be in charge. I don't need to have my fingerprint on every idea. They're usually pretty methodical and detail oriented. Right. And those are obviously the qualities you want. But if that software group then needs to shift gears from maintenance mode into new project to innovate, something that brings them out of their natural hardwiring and comfort zone. Right. And so you, you need somebody that almost like that tug of war, like, hey, come on guys, I'm going to pull you over here.

Yeah.

You know, because we, we need to shift gears a little bit. So, yeah, any, any role like that. That answer your question?

Yeah, no, and I think that's it. The reason I want to, I'M a big believer in contrast. Right. You, you have a, you have a source truth over here that's also has a source truth over here and you can contrast the two. And that's where learning happens in my mind, or at least that's where I've seen learning happen. Which actually brings me to an interesting point. You know, one of the things I hear from a lot of entrepreneurs right now is I can't find great people. General. Like I can't, I can't attract great people. I can't find great people. Most of them refer to Generation Z. Some of them refer to, you know, even the, the, I guess the, the laggers on the millennial side trying to attract and whatever. How does a tool like Aptive help attract or retain talent, you know, with, with a different demographic really than everything the world's ever seen?

Honestly, from, from it really is a different demographic. And so. Well, you know, Active Index can only help to the degree that a leader is willing to let it.

Active is fantastic at finding hidden potential because we're looking at something that comes way before someone ever builds skills and experience. One of the kind of qualms about Gen Z hiring Gen Z.

Whether it's true or not, one of the perceptions is a lack of.

Grit or character in the form that an older generation might interpret it.

But if we look at someone's hard wiring and we have a role that's just a perfect fit, they're going to be fulfilled. They're going to be in their natural zone.

Then we have to do our job of empowering them, building trust, creating an environment.

Yeah.

And that's where kind of we don't, we can't help you anymore. If you're a leader and you're not willing to innovate and change some things around. And that's just the reality we live in. If you want to keep hiring elder millennials and Gen Xers, go ahead. You're going to eventually age yourself out of the marketplace.

Yeah.

We have no choice but to hire younger generations and build them up to be our future.

Yep.

But we have to get real uncomfortable with the fact that work, the work environment is going to change.

Yeah.

Like 40 hour work weeks, say goodbye like that. It's just not going to fly. And if it also put yourself in their shoes. I'm a big person on taking people's perspectives. Um, if, I mean, I live in Austin, Texas. If I am 22 years old coming out of UT and I want to stay in Austin, like I need to somehow make 85 grand a year with zero experience in order to own my, to have my own apartment and even put a futon in the living room. Yeah, right. Yeah. But my job offers are probably in the 40 range.

Yeah.

So what the heck am I going to do, you know? And an older generation, they worked and they have fulfillment because they had that sense of accomplishment. And what they brought home, that extrinsic motivator, the paycheck, actually bought them some shit. Now it doesn't. So the mentality has shifted. Like why would I slave away and give you 80% of my life employer for barely making ends meet and having to also drive Uber at night? Now, is that the employer's fault? No. Is it the employee's fault? No. I mean, there's this weird zone of economy we're in, but we have to accept that it is the reality and that their reality is different than ours. We have different perspective, different experiences, and we have to just get creative as a result. And I don't have the answers, but I do know we have to get creative.

Yeah. Well, I'll add a little bit to that from my experience. So one of the things that I have seen in that demographic, it's not a matter of them not having grit. It's a matter of grit not being developed just yet. There's not enough life experience yet where grit was needed. Whereas in the 40s, the 50s, the 70s, the 80s, even in the 90s, you know, there were economic challenges that were going on, there were socio, socioeconomic challenges that were going on. And all of that forced the necessity for grit to be developed. And all the Gen Z folks that I've hired in the past, they just haven't been through enough life experience just yet. Where grit has had, they've had to force themselves to create grit because they grew up in an environment in many cases where things were a little bit easier to gain because the people before them had done the gritty work essentially ahead of time. So I, I find that as being a, as just an understanding.

Great point.

And the second thing that I would say is my experience so far is while.

Millennials and Gen X and Gen Z all have different mindsets and how they show up in the marketplace, all of them want one same thing. They all want essentially what equates to the American dream. Right. They want to have freedom, they want to have resource, they want to have high quality relationships. It's more important for the, the Gen Z's to have more travel and do more fun kind of things. I my outside looking in Again, I see them wanting that for about the first three years after they enter to the job market and they realize, oh, this is going to take a little more effort. And then that kind of changes the mentality or the mentality a little bit. But on top of that, as an employer, Gen Zs are the most excited about doing something amazing in the world. So if you can take your organization and you can help them understand how this organization is going to change the world or change the marketplace in, in their niche that they actually care about, and then you create a compensation plan where essentially they get rewarded as the company grows. Whether it's a profit sharing plan, whether it's an esop, whether it's a, you know, just a bonus schedule or whatever. My experience has been that because there's a passionate pursuit, that it's in alignment with their driver. As you were talking about right now, they're, now they're more motivated than they would be if they went to your competitor down the street who doesn't really care about them. Right. I'm a big believer that if you show people that you care, in fact I, I'll share this little quick tidbit real fast and then we're about right of time. But with the company I just exited last year, one of the things that we would do annually is I would have the team list out a handful of goals and 8, 8, 8 areas of life, right? So relationship, professional, financial, so on and so forth. And then we would, we as a group, because we had an open, kind of an open culture, we would actually have people pick up, hey, if you want to share one, share one. And they would share the xyz, right. And then when I go to share the company's vision of the company's goals and how we're going to get there, I would tie the company's goals to their goals and show them how they could achieve their goals by actually leaning into the company's goals. And then all you have to do is show up. All you gotta do is make that a truth. Meaning by the time you get to the end of the year, if Jane over here wanted to buy her first house and she put some extra time and energy and some talent in or whatever to earn that, to turn that path forward. If she's able to buy that house at the end of the year because of a save a savings plan, a profit sharing plan or whatever, Jane's now invested. Jane now knows now that the company wants to take care of Jane and now Jane wants to take care of the Company. So those are some of the things that I have seen work in the marketplace in the last five years, specifically.

Yeah, I'm with you man. If you take a Gen Z or entering the work marketplace and you do that exercise, what are your goals? How can we help you achieve those goals? You tie it to a purpose like maybe we're going to change the world, maybe we're just going to change a piece of the world, but give them.

We're changing somewhere.

Yeah, yeah. And then, and imagine if you had this tool like, hey, I've seen kind of your hard wiring. Granted your prefrontal cortex isn't fully formed that, that might, you might not be fully aware of who you are, but. No, no, no. Yeah, yeah, you wouldn't say that. But, but like I can help you understand who you are better. I can create this role expectation that really caters to how you're wired and how you're going to feel fulfilled. And when you screw up, which you're welcome to do, we'll just have a conversation about it.

Yeah.

You know, it's okay to mess up and to make mistakes. And you, if you create that environment and you don't slave drive them, then I promise you'll have higher retention within Gen Z. You'll sure as hell have higher retention than your competitor down the road. Yeah. And it like we're, we're calling Active Index your unfair advantage, your un, your unfair talent advantage or what? I need to come up with the tagline a little bit better. But yeah, it's unfair. Like I, I know people better than they know themselves sometimes.

Yeah.

And so if we pull on that lever along with all the other things we talked about, we create an incredible culture where people thrive and feel empowered and grow and, and they stick around.

Yeah, no, a thousand percent. And to that, to that course correction mentality, whenever possible, address the problem, not the person. We, we want to avoid making them feel guilty and shameful. We want them to be accountable and responsible.

So there's a time and they want, they want to be as well. They want to be accountable.

Yeah, well they, they. Look, most folks want to be the best version of themselves. Most, most folks just need help doing it again. Where most of us are walking around here not self aware at all. Lord knows most of the problems that I make, relationships, business, whatever comes down to I missed the boat on a self awareness piece that if I'd have known better, I'd have done better. And I find that to be true in the, in the, in the workplace, the home space all of it. So, dude, man, I can't thank you enough for coming on the show. We're going to drop a link down in the show notes for Everybody, both on YouTube and the audio version to make sure everybody can take the assessment themselves. Once they take the assessment, what be their next step?

Well, I really got to talk to me or one of my advisors. You know, we can get you like a basic readout PDF, like I can send you what a challenger is. Yeah, but you know, it's, it's real high level, doesn't really scratch the surface. So. Especially for business leaders that are interested in finding out more about their own wiring and how this might, you know, help with how they hire, how they build teams, hit me up on LinkedIn. Come to our website, right? We'll, we'll get you taken care of and give you the unfair advantage.

That's awesome. And we'll throw the website and information down in the bottom of the show notes and stuff. But for everybody listening, what's the website?

Aptividex.com A P T I V E. It's a made up word. It's a combination of words that makes sense, but for this purpose. Aptividex.com dude, love it, man.

Jason, thank you so much for coming on the show. Can't wait to do this again.

Yeah, thanks much.

All right, take care. See you.

Bye. I hope you liked that video.

And if you did, make sure you check out this next video right here.

The world going forward is going to be so heavily driven by AI and AI innovation. And our biggest ability to compete on the global scale because AI costs so much money is only to do it through the major tech companies. You know, Facebook, Google, Amazon. These are the only guys that really, really compete.