BoneChat #84 - Failures and lessons learned.

Eric got his IDE approved today. It's a red-letter day.

Hey man, congratulations!

Holy cow, it's a big one. Now he needs— now he needs to raise money to do the study.

Yep, it's, it's, it's, it's very exciting, you know. It's taken years to get to this and If especially it's, it's a cervical arthroplasty device. So, you know, those, the results, we know how the results will be. They, they turn out the same. So it's not gonna be any big surprise when we get the clinical study done. So most of the work is into getting the, the IDE approved, which is, which is great. You know, it's taken years off my life and additional years, years spent doing it. But it's, it's kind of anticlimactic 'cause I really would like to be doing a surgery today, you know?

That's true. Yeah, I have a— I'm kind of connected to some people who were involved in that reverse hip arthroplasty that's been kind of spoken about here and there recently. But they're in year 15 now trying to get through the IDE process. And their issue is, is that there's still probably sometime away and they're only going to have 3 years left on their patent, I think, by the time the thing gets through, which is a real problem.

But well, you got to keep investing in the patent. You know, you got to spawn children to the patent and you just got to keep it going. Smart patent attorneys can keep patents alive forever. It's not cheap.

Tiger, we just— that's— you can't believe how relevant that is, that statement. I just we're launching— I'm launching with a surgeon inventor and a couple of, uh, you know, business partners, a new hip positioning system. That's not— it doesn't— people don't get excited when I say that, but what we have is, is really special and it's patented and everything. But I was with the engineers today and they, they kind of just, uh, they mentioned a couple things when they were comparing what we're designing to the patent, and when they said a couple things. I, I was like, I spent the last hour on the phone on the drive down talking to the attorney to say like, listen, this engineer just brought up 2 or 3 things that about this patent, like this is where we're heading with offshoots. Like we got to lock this thing up now. Um, and I, it's my first time through a patent situation, but, uh, I, it gets you scared because you think like, oh my God, you know, we've got this whole market interest or pre-market interest and, and you think like, my God, you know, am I vulnerable? You know, for the value of this thing. So we're, we're making that correction. I got out of that meeting. I couldn't get on the phone with him fast enough.

Yeah. File provisionals now.

Yeah. Yeah, we, we are definitely doing that. I said drop everything and file this extension or the like kind of offshoot of it.

I call it children. Yeah, I call it children. There's a better word for it.

Yeah, yeah, I guess like offspring of it or whatever, or extension, but it, it literally was just very relevant today. So interesting. Yeah, it's going to be cool when we launch it. It's, it's, it's really going to change a lot of things based on everybody's feedback that has seen it.

And, um, so you'll have to share that one day on BoneChat.

Uh, I will share. Uh, yeah, so we're gonna Yeah, we're gonna, um, once, once I— we're gonna put out some, some commercial teaser, um, animations and different things in, uh, late August. So when I do that, I'll be more comfortable, um, because we'll be— we'll have the final prototype. Should be a Class 1, so we— that's what the FDA is, is pretty— everybody consultants come back, so we should be fairly quick to market with it. Um, but once I get through the last clinical lab with the 4 surgeon experts and they tell me it's perfect, then I know I can put out there to the world. I just don't want to do it before that.

Yeah, yeah, I understand. All right, all right. So today our topic is, if everybody heard, it's share your failures. And Mark Maloney suggested it's a great topic. So we're going to go around the horn and basically say, you know, where did, you know, it can be a business failure or personal failure. It could be anything, but it, you know, looking back, what did you do wrong or, you know, earlier in your career and what would you do differently now? This could be a lot of fun. And I can kick it off because I've got a, I have a huge one. So, Everybody knows what opportunity cost is. So, sometimes you make decisions and then sometimes you don't make a decision and the lack of the decision costs you dearly. So, I interviewed at Danek when there was about 12 people and I passed on joining Danek. And then I interviewed at Mako for a director position when they had 15, 18 people. And I said, this is crazy, you know, this is all software haptic people. And, you know, both, I just left millions and millions of dollars on the table by both of those times. And what I didn't understand at the time was when you interview at a startup, they're always messy, you know, they've got, they have issues, they don't know who they are. Funding issues. They haven't figured out the technology yet. They're in the middle of moving offices. You know, they've got, I mean, it's just, the best opportunities always look messy. And I didn't understand that. And so, I just stayed in my comfortable job at Smith Nephew or Wright Medical. And then I jumped into startups later on. But anyway, that was my, I had two big, if I could wind back the clock, man, It would've been different.

I have a similar story with, with the Medtronic thing, Tiger. I had, I had interviewed there. I, I had started at, Smith and Nephew and, and, and wasn't, wasn't loving it. They had, they had shut down their spine business and, and I was— I remember that.

I remember that. Loris Small was, was running the R&D. I remember that very well.

Yep. So I wasn't happy in the way it was turning out. So I interviewed with some people there at Sophomore Danek and you'll remember David Brumfield.

Oh yeah.

Brummy.

I interviewed with him and he scared the absolute shit out of me. I was like, what sort of company is this? You know, these all rednecks or what the heck's going on here? So I passed.

Brummy was a brilliant engineer, but he had no engineering degree.

And, but, and, and, and, you know, you, you know how he talked. Yeah. And he's like, wow, what kind of place is this? So I, I skipped, and then I came back, you know, I went, I went through, uh, uh, Wright Medical, and I went through Synthys, and then I came back and interviewed again, and I got the job. I was first, first employee right after, uh, Medtronic bought them. So I got none of the benefit. So So again, a lot of money left on the table.

Yeah, because Danek had just merged with Sophomore and then they had gone public and then Medtronic paid a premium for buying a public company and you were way too late.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah. I did that a couple of times, but it was funny how it mirrored your story.

And what, you know, what I didn't know then was when you're young, you need to take chances. You know, and you could just try something crazy every year. And then when you're older, you figure out what lane you're in and you figure out how to scale that. But, you know, take chances when you're young.

Well, I kind of have an opposite type of story. You know, I was working for big companies most of my early career, very successful company that was sold to IBM. And so I joined a couple other individuals I was working with and we became co-founders of one of the first cloud-based storage companies. Wow. It was 2000 and we raised a ton of money. It was easy to raise money then. I mean, we literally raised almost $200 million, but we spent all of it and it was too early to market. And I kind of, I had this gut feel, you know, and hesitation about joining, but I kind of said, oh, well, you know, I need to take a chance. I need to risk it. And it was, you know, 2 years of like being strapped to a rocket ship. But then it was a complete meltdown when the whole dot-com thing—

Dot-com crash. When did AWS, when did they, when did Amazon launch AWS?

You know, I think in about 2008, 2000, something like that.

You were way early.

Yeah, no, we were way too early. And I mean, we actually got to over $10 million in revenue and lots of customers. But, but yeah, it was just not a model that people were ready to adopt. And then, you know, it was mostly dot-com companies that were adopting us. But I gotta say, I gained a lot of experience And many of the, um, positions that I had after that, I probably wouldn't have been hired had I not had that startup experience. Because prior to that, I worked for, you know, large companies. And, uh, you know, startups really hesitate to hire you when that's your sole experience. So it was painful for a few years and, you know, maybe the year after, but it eventually helped.

Wow.

And how did you end up at ConsenSys? I never heard the story.

So I, after StorageWay was the name of the cloud storage company, but after that, I ended up going to another data storage company because that was my career path at the time. And I met a large investor there. That was their principal investor at this company. And we successfully, I got them out of, I replaced the CEO, they appointed me CEO, I replaced the founder CEO and I got them out of the company, which is what they want. They wanted out of the company, we sold the company. And at the same time that was happening, they were the principal investor in ConsenSys. So they convinced me to make an industry change. And that's when I started in orthopedics in 2004.

Well, and you didn't know a lot about hips and knees when you started?

I knew nothing about hips and knees. I was, you know, I spent probably the first 6 months just trying to figure out, you know, the business model and the company I joined, was really, it was kind of a kill it or cure it situation with Consensus at the time. And so we had to figure out which one it was gonna be. Wow. I mean, thankfully I had some good team members around me that really had spent their whole careers in orthopedic. Otherwise I wouldn't have been successful.

Interesting.

I didn't know that cloud background.

Yes, it's interesting, you know, when you have to hit the timing right, and if you're way too early, it's, you know, there's nothing you can do. You have this great idea, but it's not going to go anywhere. And another story I had at Smith Nephew, I have 2 of them where we were way too early. I had worked for, I don't know, 3 years on a hyaluronic acid project at Smith Nephew. And the powers that be there, they're, you know, they were like, well, what are we selling here, syringes? You know, what do, you know, how do you make money on this? And they got rid of it. And then who was it? I guess Synvisc bought it up and they made, made a really good business out of it. But that was first time. Second thing there, same place and same, you know, shortsightedness. Um, I was working on BMP at, at Smith Nephew back in— wow, yeah, what was this, like 2000? And again, it was just like there, and, and you would know all the people who shut it down because they moved over to, to Danek and most— to Medtronic, and most of their paycheck was then paid by it.. But, uh, um, yeah, they're like, what are, what are, how do we sell this? I mean, this, this makes no sense to us. You know, it's, it's not, it's not a rod and screw. It's not hardware. So, uh, yeah, there, we, we, we didn't have the right people to, uh, to tell the story for us. You know, we were a bunch of engineers, you know, playing around with this stuff and, you know, it's too, it's a, yeah, it's a drug.

I mean, it's basically a drug and Yeah, it's just different world that people don't realize the risk that Danek took. They, they, they weren't very big. They weren't a very big company. I don't know what they were doing, $50 million, $100 million. And they bought the license from Genentech for the, for the recombinant molecule for $50 million. And that, and before they even tried to develop the product, they just bought a molecule for $50 million. I mean, what a gamble that was. Um, incredible.

So Eric, what'd you, what'd you do with the BNP?

So nothing. It, it, it just absolutely went nothing. They just canceled the project. They say, hey, you can't spend any more money on this.

Okay.

Um, nobody picked it up.

So you're— but you're an engineer, correct? Okay. And so I was just wondering you know, as kind of a non-scientist, what your job was with the BFDL.

Yeah, no, no, you're exactly right. It— I was in a group that had all the, uh, you know, the misfit toys kind of thing, um, all the tangential stuff. So definitely had, um, people that were helping on it that knew a whole lot more about that kind of thing than I did.

But you were like in the Area 51 of Memphis.

Oh yeah. Which is great and super frustrating at the same time. I have drawers full of products that didn't see the light of day. That's great. But everything comes, comes around. I, I, I married the, the person who did all the regulatory work for, for BMP when, when all the hubbub was coming up about, hey, you know, it, it causes cancer and all that sort of thing. That's, that poor regulatory person's my wife now.

She worked for Rick Treehart, probably.

I mean, you were just, you were born lucky.

I don't know. She's, she's, she's great at that stuff, but it was, it was, it was Rick and it was Bailey. And, and yeah, a really good, great group of people there who, who brought it through. But, but, you know, a breakthrough product like that, it's always gonna catch a lot of flak.

Yeah. They, they had no competition. I mean, they, what they, they hit one time, they hit 2 or 3 million sale sales per day. I mean, I mean, that was probably the largest selling orthopedic product in history ever.

It's fantastic. They did great. They sure did.

All right, Mark, you started this monster.

What? Oh, you know, I, I, I think the topic scared a lot of people away.

I got a more personal one, if not a product-related one, if folks want to hear.

Please shoot.

This was, I guess, a personal failure rather than a product failure. My first job in marketing, I'd been a salesperson for all of 9 months and done very kind of well, very quickly in the company I was in. And was asked to join an assessment center for a marketing role. Didn't expect to get it, ended up getting it. So I had to pack up, move down to head office and very, very kind of green around the gills and was fortunate to get an amazing boss and mentor. And my first, my first review with him after I'd been working probably for a better part of a year, it would have been. And he was going through, you know, what's gone well, what's not gone well. And he said, feedback-wise, he said, for development, he said, you need to work on your listening skills. I said, oh, okay. He said, you tell your, you know, you're a quick study, you tend to get to the conclusion before everyone else. And so you don't wait for them to catch up and you just, you just don't listen, you'll just kind of pile through. Okay, harsh feedback to hear, but I, fine, get it. And so, uh, focused on it, worked on it all year. Get to the next performance review and we're going through, you know, the sales and how the products have performed, all the good stuff. And then we get to the personal stuff and he says, right, you know, like we set a goal for you to improve your, your listening. And I was like, here it comes, worked on it all year, this is going to be great feedback. And he said, he says, you still need to work on it. So what do you mean? So I've been working on this all year. You've seen, you've seen me in meetings now. And he said, yeah, all you've done is got better at not interrupting. You still say exactly what you were going to say in the way you were going to say it. You just bite your tongue to let the other person finish first now. And it was a proper kick in the ass. I thought I'd worked on it for a year, I thought I'd made great, you know, great, great progress. And he said, no, you've basically not got any better. You're just a little more polite in how you do it these days. So then I had to really knuckle down and learn how to listen properly, which is probably one of the biggest gifts anyone's given me in my career, to have a level of feedback and to see it through with me for like 3 years. But made a heck of a difference in terms of my performance when I got to be a little bit older and started managing people and had to coach them, um, to kind of develop the listening skills. So that was a, that was a personal one where I got taken to the mat by the boss and, uh, and got given some, some difficult feedback that, uh, had to build on.

That's a good story.

He's a good—

he's still—

this guy's retired for 10 years now. I see him once a year for dinner and he still takes me to school. Just a wonderful, wonderful, uh, leader of people.

That's amazing. So, you know, that kind of, uh, I've got part of my many stories about this, uh, certainly resonate with that particular, uh, theme in that you learn to listen, but you also learn to listen to a, a leader or a mentor. And, uh, many of us, uh, go through most of our lives, uh, thinking we're the smartest guy in the room and we don't listen to our leaders. We just kind of wait till they stop talking so that we can say the really, the smart thing. Or we avoid mentors because we don't want the criticism because we think we're right. And, uh, you know, anybody smart enough to pull that off is pretty good at hiding it too. So, like I'm sure you did. So I love this subject because it implies, uh, a certain degree of self-reflection and just a high degree of awareness. And the thing that, the thing that I think about a lot, and it's actually part of my daily mantra for meditation, is the word awareness, because It's so easy just to kind of— especially if you're kind of Type A, it's just so easy to sort of blindly go through the jungle without looking up, you know, just charging ahead one step at a time. Because it's, you know, every— the, you know, the longest journey starts with a single step, you know. Never talks about looking around, looking behind you, looking up, that degree of awareness.

Um, Mark, can I answer that? Good one. Have you ever— have you ever read Anthony DeMello?

Yes.

Yeah, yeah, he's— yes, that's his whole thing, right?

Awareness.

Yeah, I'm reading that right now.

Yeah, great.

Um, Awareness. It's from my bedside. Awareness. Little— many, many chapters that are easy to read.

It's not, uh— it's, it's in my library, you know. Probably like you, Elizabeth, I have hundreds and hundreds of books. So actually, one of my projects right now is I'm actually, uh, I'm actually cataloging my library, you know, by, by, by the title of the book, by the author, by the publisher, by the year, and what edition it was, whether it's a, you know, second or third or first edition or whatever it is. Anyway, but I guess, you know, my first failure that really had an impact on me I was 13, and, uh, as the oldest, uh, son, child of a big Irish Catholic family, uh, I sort of got drafted to go to the seminary. And so I packed up my suitcase, I left Georgia, I go to Pennsylvania. Now I'm in this all-boys school. Everybody there's, you know, dreaming about being the Pope, I guess, or bishop or whatever. And I hated it. I tried, uh, but at the end of that first year—

well, did he freeze?

Yep.

Oh no, we're good. We're all hanging.

He failed in the middle of his failure.

Oh, that's great.

The Wi-Fi doesn't reach the porch.

Be like But it's okay because we weren't really listening anyways.

Mark, you froze. We lost you for the last 30 seconds.

You froze. Let me— bandwidth. Can you hear me now?

Yeah. After I went to Pennsylvania, I hated it.

Oh, okay. So it just, you know, my prefect and everybody around me knew that I just wasn't happy to be there. So at the end of that year, I was not invited back. So to some people, that was, that was a failure, uh, and I thought it was too. So, you know, I came home with my tail between my legs, but I actually learned some very valuable things during that year. One was meditation, and the other one was that the— our school had a forbidden part of the library. Okay. And the caretaker, whose name was Vince, uh, I would on weekends walk to town to buy him cigarettes, and he would let me into the library on the weekend. That part of the library was the philosophy section. Wow. So by the time I'm 14, I'd kind of read my way from, you know, Plato, Aristotle, to Hegel, Hume, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, all the way into the century. And so that was what I brought from that year. So although it was a failure, there's always a silver lining, so to speak. And I gained from that, that gift of awareness through meditation. I've got a lot more failure stories, and then every— in every one of them, there was a silver lining. But the part that resonated with what we were talking about earlier about mentors and leadership was that when I was director of sales at Orthologic, I thought, you know, we took them from $2.5 million to $28 million in sales. And I really thought that we were on top of the world, you know, sitting on several million dollars in options. And one day the CEO decided that instead of using our indirect, our 1099 sales force, we were going to go direct in 90 days. And I'm going, this is insane. But I, you know, I saluted. We did it. Our stock fell from like 52 to like 6.5 in the next 120 days. And there I am in my 40s. I got fired for the first time in my life for something I didn't do, and I felt like a huge failure. I took that experience though, because up until then, from a leadership perspective, my two rules were leadership is everything, and something I learned from the Army always lead by example. I mean, I was in the Army till I was 31. So, but I added a third one that year. Out of, out of that humbling experience, I decided to learn to listen to a mentor or a leader. And then my third rule now is great leaders have always, have also learned to be great followers. And I never was until then. Uh, so this, this is why I like talking about this subject. I like to hear people talk about it. Um, I mean, I've got a lot more stories, uh, because I don't look at failure— and even from the time I was 14, I don't look at failure as, as necessarily bad. I don't know why. I'm very risk-prone. Um, I mean, my whole family and every— all my friends know I've said for decades, if nobody's shooting at you, it's not that bad.

Put it in perspective.

So that's how I kind of put business in perspective. So anyway, that's enough stories for me right now. I'd like to— like to hear from a couple of other people.

Yeah, I'll jump in. If you're noticing my background changing all the time, it's because I have a dog who's following me around and I'm trying to hide from him. And, uh, so I I keep trying to get away and the damn thing is so smart. He's like, opens doors on me. So, but I think, you know, about 8 years ago when I left Depew after 23 in the distributorship going direct, I think that my failures are multiple, just an abundance of them along the way as I started my own thing and started using a much more entrepreneurial spirit and the knowledge I had. My problem was people. Partners and the wrong ones. And I don't blame them. I blame me for a lot of it because I think, you know, I have a work ethic and a vision. And, you know, I failed because I assumed they had similar, because I said it out loud. And ultimately it we were never on the same page. Our visions were completely different, and it cost me quite a lot of money. And I did it 3 times thinking that I had it communicated properly. There's a great saying, and I can't pull it up, but in my brain right now, but I looked, I just look back on, on every challenge I've ever had related to when I really went out on my own, and it was, it was just simply just not going at it by myself with really good— and I don't say this by like I want followers around me, I want followers that become leaders, but I needed those, you know, kind of just loyal followers to trust in the vision that I had versus me trying to augment it or share that vision. And it just, it really is the thing that had almost made, you know, one of them almost, you know, brought me to insolvency. Thankfully, I I recovered, but that has always been my problem. And I listen to Mark talk and I listen to just awareness and everything, and I've tried to adapt that after each failure and ultimately just come into the realization that I have to develop the leaders that I have hired versus trying to clone myself. And I'm not saying I'm perfect. I'm far from it. But trying to clone it to offset the grind was my problem. And it just, I mean, it really has been the only, you know, I think of what have I failed and it has really been in my how I picked the people that probably I didn't need in the first place. So that's changed my whole perspective and everything that I just, kind of do it myself and try. And now these young followers I have are becoming leaders. And it's much— it's so much less stress. I mean, the anxiety of dealing with people that you just can't understand why they can't see your vision and work as hard as you is just— it's overwhelming at times to the point where it's taken a lot of prayer and meditation and other things that I've tried along the way to offset it. But Yeah, that, that if anybody ever asked me, you know, the failures, and I've said I've had my— I've many little ones, but they're recoverable, right? The ones that can sometimes push you to the point where maybe you can't recover for a while, or you got to go kind of dark, has been, has been my experience with, with trying to— to that dynamic of trying to find the person, right? Um, so, but yeah, I love— I mean, it's just, it, it, it's been said to me a thousand times by people, just you, you You got to make sure you're picking the right person and that communication is so clear. And it's not just oral communication, verbal communication, it's documented communication by expectations and responsibilities and roles and just get the hard conversations out early so it's on paper and record. And that certainly would've saved me hundreds of thousands of dollars at this point. So That's my, that's my failures.

So if you can boil that down, one of the things I hear in all of our, all these stories is that, let me turn off, let me save some bandwidth. One of the things that I hear is that the process of failure and the learning from it is really hard. Okay, it's, it's, it's hard to understand. It's hard to take the good from it and, uh, and not repeat it. Um, the master's program I did when I was still in the Army at USC was on behavioral counseling and assessment, and one of the things that was beat into us is that people don't change. Generally speaking, um, and that, uh, that lack of— the fact that people don't change means that many people repeat the same cycle over and over again unless they have just an epiphany that comes from cancer or a war or the Holocaust or a bankruptcy or, you know, one of the big ones like, you know, family, a death, or job loss. You know, that time I got fired for something I didn't even do, the reason that was so devastating to me is that the reason I resigned from the Army was that, you know, I was a regular Army top 5%er. I was an XO of an aviation company, which is a really big outfit. Uh, I was the commander of the only Cav Platoon in the 1st Armored Division, and we had an audit. And because several big expensive gas trucks, whatever they were, you know, called, were misnamed, the brigade commander made my commander accept that as a loss. And he and I got dinged. For me, about $40,000, and him about $100-something thousand for something that we were totally innocent of. And I was just so outraged that I resigned. And looking back on that in my life years later, I'm going, well, that was stupid, you know.

Yeah, I say that to myself all the time. That was stupid.

Love to hear. So how would you boil that down from what you said? Because, you know, with me it was I eventually learned I had to listen. I had to accept becoming a follower before I could ever become a true leader.

You know, I boil it down to that moment for me when I, when I really was the lawsuit from somebody that I had trusted so well and I thought I had corrected the first time I hired the wrong person and Ultimately, it was not too financially painful, but I think I was just so wrecked emotionally from it that I just sat there saying to myself, I mean, not to think, I mean, I was, you know, I top rep nationally in Depew and made a ton of money and, you know, was on my way to a major distributorship when they changed gears on me. And I just thought, how did I get here? How did I get here? And And how am I staring at this piece of paper where somebody's suing me for something that I thought was so clear and I, all opportunity and all generosity and almost made me insolvent just paying the guy. Like, how did I get here, man? So that was, and that was not that long ago to the point where I've, things have really taken off for us. But I have on my wall of my office, it's 5, not, it's 6 numbers, but it was all that was left in my company's bank account. And the date. And, uh, nobody knows what it is but one person. And I look at that and say, like, I almost went under. And all because— not because of— because of me. Yes, I, I take blame for it. I still take blame for it because I just— I didn't learn from the first time, and I thought I did, but I, I just So that was it, Mark. If I had that moment where I just thought, my God, like, I can't believe I'm here when I've worked so hard to build something so special. And it was all because of poor choices of people that I thought saw the vision and wanted to take advantage of the opportunity I created. But they were takers. And that's what I've learned in this world is those that take is the ones you have to avoid that just keep taking.

The irony of that is that it goes against the law of the universe, and that the more you give, the more you—

that's what my wife says. I don't know, but yeah, I agree.

I agree with that. I mean, that's like, to me, that's just, that's as, that is as solid a rule as E equals mc squared.

So Mark, coming back to something you said about, about change and the difficulty with, uh, with change, um, one tool that folks might find, uh, useful or interesting that really helps when folks want to change is it's a kind of a, it's a journaling tool that depersonalizes everything because it's very— one, it can be difficult to look at your own failures in the mirror.. And to look at them in such a way with that absolute honesty of where you messed up. It's kind of easy to kind of brush them under the carpet. And I had a bad run of luck, or, you know, so-and-so screwed me over. And, but if you can, if you can kind of really dig into it very, very honestly and then get the learnings from it. And the way you do it is you depersonalize it by writing about it in the second or third person. So you'll say, Hey, you know what, you know, Emmanuel had a really challenging quarter last quarter. He did, you know, X, Y, Z, and that led to whatever, you know, on reflection, he may have thought about, and you almost act like you're coaching a person outside yourself. And it allows a level of honesty that you won't usually get with a first-person reflection in journaling, because one, it depersonalizes it. But it also allows you to kind of play coach and mentor to yourself in a way that's very difficult when you're writing in the first person. It's a very, very powerful journaling technique that I've used kind of consistently to be able to kind of look in the uncomfortable dark corners and kind of say like, well, where did I, where do I take responsibility of this? What could I do different if I was coaching Emmanuel? You know, what advice might I share with him that he could do differently next time?. And it gives a different, I find, a different openness to wanting to change because you start from a totally different perception. And you're not, you tend to treat yourself with a little more compassion in the writing as well, rather than I'm such a jerk, I messed up, I shouldn't have done this, or I shouldn't have done that. So it removes self-recrimination, it removes rumination, adds in that compassion, and just allows that reflection. So just sharing that as a tool if anyone finds that they need to do some reflection. Doing it in the third person is a very powerful tool.

I like that idea very much. Elizabeth here, I'm in the car, so sorry. But I also think that you could go in another direction with it. You know, what if you had Gandhi for an hour coaching session, or, you know, Mother Teresa or whomever, you know, just to see how that person you know, whoever you consider to be the height of wisdom might counsel you and help you untangle some threads.

Well, when you were saying that, uh, Emmanuelle, I was thinking, I mean, you can chat with AIs now, and I think rather than journaling, you can just tell the story about a second or third person that did this and made a mistake, and, and you can ask the AI, what would you do differently? What, you know, what are the learnings? What, you It's incredible.

I mean, that's very powerful.

Very powerful. I think that's the, I think it's one of the killer apps right now as we're sitting here in July of 2025 is brainstorming with AIs.

Yeah, the brainstorming is good. I think on the coaching side of things, the LLMs do have some limitations. So there's a little bit of caution to be taken, but, um, yeah, certainly they, uh, they're incredibly powerful for kind of picking out themes.

I love that. So in every episode or meeting or trip I take, if I can learn one thing that I will remember— because, you know, 100 people sometimes have the same wonderful thought, 3 people write it down, one person might do something— but that's a great thought. I've never heard that before.

Yeah, psychology is just a little pet. That's great. Object, and it came from a psych book I was reading. It's, um, good stuff.

So that, that early failure of— like I said, I have many stories, and I didn't— I haven't told, uh, even the worst ones. But the, um, the early seminary experience, which is formative to me Uh, one of the things I did, I actually wrote a book called The Caretaker's Gift. And the character Vince in that, that I mentioned, the one that let me in the library, the quote forbidden part of the library. Of course, you know, you tell a 13-year-old this part of the library is forbidden, it's the most interesting place in the world then, isn't it? He's going to read every book in there.

That's great.

Yeah, but I have the same rule as you about books. If I take one thing from a book, it's a good book.

Yeah, that's fantastic. The, um, the incident in the Army in which we got dinged, which I years later thought, well, that was stupid, um, but I didn't talk to anybody about it. I was just so incensed because it was so unjust. And you know, all three of my sons went to the Citadel. And you know, when you're in the military, and I was in the military until I was 31, I was getting ready to make major, and everybody was shocked that I was getting out. And I didn't tell anybody really the truth, that I was just, you know, I just felt like I'd been crucified. And I just decided this is what I'm going to do, and I jumped. But if you have a sense of honor and integrity, you know, the word integrity just means wholeness. And, um, it begins, I think, with awareness. I, I like what Elizabeth said too, um, and I wish you would elaborate that. I know you're driving. Do you talk to Mother Teresa very often?

She and I, oh yeah, we go way back. Um, actually now I, uh, but I'm thinking, uh, of thanking Immanol in my head and thinking that I'll do that and then also expand it to someone else. I've got a few days at a friend's Airbnb who's giving me some respite care from elder care, so I'm like telling, you know, my respite people, don't pretend I'm gone in another country, and I think I'll do a lot of writing. And I think, you know, I like the AI thing, Tiger. That could be really fun. But there's also something very powerful about the link between the brain and the pen.

Yeah, 100%.

You have these things coming out of you that are unexpected, and I just think that can't be replaced.

Yeah, I think, um, Mark, to, to— that's something I've, uh, it's a tool I've used in the past as well. And if you've, if you've read biographies about people specifically and you have a kind of a feel for them, I think it's quite easy to, to, to, to kind of select a virtual mentor in your head. You know, if I've got a if you've got a branding problem, or if you've got a business problem, or if you've got a, you know, who from history or who from the reading do you think might offer good counsel and what might they say? And you can kind of, you know, just, just makes you kind of take your own thinking and put that to one side and say, well, you know, I was doing some work on some, on some branding stuff, um, product stuff actually, a couple of years ago, and, uh, thought, right, Steve Jobs, you think about when he came back to, uh, to Apple and the place had just gone crazy with the number of, you know, different versions of products they had. They had so many different versions of a desktop and a laptop, and he just said, right, one version of everything, one desktop, one laptop, and he just simplified the whole thing and stripped it right back. And I'd gone to a situation where it was really complex. I'm like, how am I going to, what am I going to do here? And it was just, okay, right. You know, just kind of borrowing expertise from different people and kind of using them as a mental kind of mentor. And borrowing their strategies and kind of— so yeah, from what Elizabeth said, I've used that multiple times and found it very, very useful.

Go ahead, Al.

I find it— what I'm interested in, because I think what I'm liking about this conversation right now with reflection and awareness and everything, it's like, I think I'm doing a good— I did a good enough job because I'm admitting to myself it was, it was like I did wrong, right? I didn't do this the right way. But it— thinking like, that's it. Like, okay, I'm self-reflecting enough to say, okay, this wasn't all on them. It was a lot on you. You didn't do this the right way. And thinking like, that's the end of it, right? But it's still— I still haven't really recovered from that. And like those, those things that I felt have gone wrong. So I'm wondering if any of this, you know, could actually cross that barrier that I still have with this, these, you know, 2, 3, 3 individuals that, you know, as I viewed, although my fault, really just did me wrong in some way. But, um, yeah, I'm, I'm gonna, I'm gonna think about that because, um, there's a gap right now with— even though I reflect on it and blame myself for a lot of it, I still— maybe there's still more to do to get healthy again.

I think betrayal.

I'll share.

Go ahead.

Sorry. Yeah, I'll share a technique with you I learned early on in my career as a therapist. Learned it at Rutgers. I was working with students there, and my supervisor said there's something called the on the one hand, on the other hand. You know, you've got somebody sitting in front of you, and they're conflicted, and maybe they're blaming themselves, and you say— and they're not sure how they feel. Say, well, okay, on the other— on one hand, I hear you saying that. On the other hand, I hear you say— so you're speaking to both parts of them, and it helps them integrate and see which one is stronger. And so, you know, again, I'm driving, like, I can't use all my brain cells for this, and I'm just super tired. But it might be useful if you find yourself assigning too much responsibility to yourself to say, and, you know, say, hey, you know what, Mark was having a hard time with that. On the one hand, Mark thought this.

On the other hand, Mark thought that.

I don't know if that's helpful.

Yeah, I'm— I, I think that, I think that's a good perspective. Um, again, I've tried for a while to kind of reconcile this, you know, still feeling that I get, you know, you just can't— I don't want it to be a therapy session, but it's, it's truly the, the, the heart of the failures of like where, how I've tried to learn. But when you— when I, when I've done it actually 3 times and thought that I was getting better at not avoiding it. That's why I'm hoping that the watershed moment came for me with the lawsuit, that I'm like, okay, you finally did it. You finally went far enough.

There's a saying that one of my old mentors used to have that he and I— and I find myself repeating it to my children. And it's come around a few times in terms of exam prep. Um, and, and the, the saying is basically the universe will keep teaching you the same lesson till you're ready to learn it.

Yeah.

And it might, and it might be that the first twice you just weren't ready to learn it. So, you know, regardless of whether you've beaten yourself up about it or not, you just might not have been ready to learn it. And so that's kind of how it is.

Hey man, I, that, that is a takeaway, my man. That, that's a takeaway because it's true.

Well, how many times have you ever shown a product to a doctor or a customer and suddenly they say, damn, Eminol, that is awesome, I wish you'd show me this before, and you showed it to them like 4 times, but, you know, the universe wasn't ready for them to hear it. So one of the themes, Tiger, that we're hearing today is that in failure those things that make us fail tend to repeat themselves. Like, for example, to me, one of the things I'm hearing also is that betrayal— I hear this in Al's story— betrayal is so hard to understand, and it's so just morally violent, so to speak. It's hard to even get past it, or in most of all, to understand. Like Like I said, when I was 13 at the seminary, you know, I felt betrayed by God. You know, you, you, you, you brought me here and now you're kicking me out. You know what? You know, it just took so long for me to, to get over that. And the Army, another— first the church, now the Army, another institution has betrayed me. Okay. And then, um You know, and when I was the number one producer at Biomet EBI, I put up to put a business plan together for what I thought would be just a sure thing. And this is how I got to be director of sales at Orthologic, by the way. The regional VP told me that the president had rejected the idea. And I said, what? You know, I said, that's a brilliant idea. So I called Orthologic and I said, are you looking, you know, you looking for a director? I said, I'm number one at EBI Biomedical, I'm your guy. I found out after I did that that the regional guy never even showed it to the president. He just lied to me because I was a horse that was producing, you know, again, a betrayal, so to speak.

Betrayal. Yeah, you threat— you were threatening.

Wow. I guess it's interesting how these things kind of work. Anyway, great.

Somebody said earlier that people don't change their stripes, and that's— that is— I think that's one of the things I've learned in life, is people have tendencies. And if you're, uh, like what Al said, if, if you, if you run into takers, they're always going to be a taker. You know, they're not going to change. Um, and even though you— you know, a lot of marriages fail because people get married, they think they can change their partner, and you, you can't.

Uh, my wife's trying, but I'm fighting the good fight, right?

That's right. I'm gonna keep fighting to try, but it's total futility.

Elizabeth is a therapist, and, you know, I did that program in counseling, which I never practiced, but that was one of my big takeaways is that behaviorally we tend not to change. Although I know that people can change, like I said, but it takes—

It takes a radical, radical event.

It takes a big event.

It takes a major life event to kind of knock the wind out of you. Or a really good reason.

Yeah, you gotta sit down.

Like an alcoholic, but they have a kid. You know, they have a child and they're ready to stop thinking war. It's going to be something.

You guys, it reminds me of the proverb. You guys heard about the scorpion and the frog proverb? It's an ancient thing where they want to cross the river and the scorpion says, give me a ride, and the frog says, I'm not going to give you a ride, you're going to sting me. And, uh, And the scorpion says, why would I do that? We'd both drown if I, if I stung you. And so he hops on the frog's back halfway across the river. The scorpion stings him and the frog says, why do you do that? And he goes, I'm a scorpion, I can't help it.

That's good.

Yeah, I love that. And that's, yeah, that's, that's what scorpions do. We sting other animals.

That's great. Good stuff, man.

Funny.

Okay.

All right.

My big life event happened, I think it was Wright Medical 2006. We got a new CEO. We got Gary Hensley, and he just, I didn't understand what was going on. I wasn't aware, but he was cleaning house. I was a senior director at Wright Medical and he was cleaning house and they They brought me in on a Friday afternoon and just fired me. It was like, what? I said, you know, I mean, I was launching out of, I was head of R&D for biologics, knees, and extremities. We were launching 15 new products a year. We were killing it and, you know, growing sales 30, 40% a year. And they just got, they fired me. And I said, what in the world just happened? And, and then the next week they fired my boss and they were just going down the row and, and oh, that was a hard one for me. And I, ever since the pulse of the company a little better, you know, figure out if there was FDA problems or finance problems or management changes. Um, that one scared me a lot. Uh, because, you know, you have a great job and then the next, and then you get, you know, 6 weeks severance and then you don't know what you're going to do next. And you probably have to move.

Yeah, that's a tough one to pull the rug from under you.

Yeah, it is. That's definitely a rug pull. You know, I talk to a lot of salespeople, and I mean, I listen to Al's story. I mean, there's so many really successful distributors that just get rug pulled all the time in these companies. And, and I, you know, I still don't understand it, but you, you build a great organization, you own the customers. But at the same time, a big company can just pull your contract, take away your products, or change your commissions, or change your territory. And it's like, I see this, it feels like sales management or distributors don't have control of their future a lot of times, and unless they're running a large independent company, I, I don't know. Love to hear from the salespeople.

Yeah, that's— I mean, that's 100%. That's why I, you know, it happened to me with the Pew. They just took the distributorship and went direct. I mean, that was a game-changing life thing that was going to happen to me at 46 years old. But yeah, I mean, that's, that's the— it is a game out there right now that you've got to— you got to call the shot before you see it. Like, you've got to make moves. You have to constantly jockey with these companies. I mean, really good companies led by friends of mine that I'm involved with that I just cannot trust long term. And they— I cannot. And I'm very honest with them. I just say, hey, I know what you've just done. You just took in PE money. I know what's coming. Like, I know what's happening.

Yeah.

And that's right. And you— those lessons I've learned, and that's definitely seasoning. And I'm sure Mark can echo that and anyone else who's been out there. From independent to corporate to back to independent. But to survive right now in sales and device, man, you've got to, you got to be able to predict that that's more than likely going to happen. Expect that it's going to happen and then just keep making moves and own your own intellectual property. Your intellectual property is your knowledge, your knowledge of your own market and your relationships. And you've got, you've got to own them and you've got to block You know, in this world, you got to own it and own it on your own.

I wrote a business plan, or an idea plan, last week called the, uh, Southeast Ortho Dealer Coalition. And the idea there is to be able to fight your way through, uh, value analysis committees, fight your way through vendor programs, doing all of the things that make that job harder, not to mention The fact that every good single product startup's gonna be sold in 5 to 7 years. You know, the thing that brought you to the dance, she's gonna leave you without at some point. And if enough dealers coalesce, so to speak, one of the things they can do is if they have product approved for different hospital systems, they can sell that product in a hospital system because the best rep in the world only has maybe 5 docs. Okay, there's so much unused, uh, food on the menu in every dealership, so to speak. Anyway, that's a whole different subject, right, Al?

Uh, no, but one I'll talk to you about, buddy, because there's similar talks going on right now. So I, I'll, I'll I'll hit you offline. Trying to do some of the same just to offset and, you know, with these restricted trade contracts of hospitals and all this stuff. So we're working our way through that now. I'll hit you up and let you know. Love your help in it.

Perfect. That's what we were talking about earlier, you know? If you get a good idea, you can bet 100 people get the same good idea at the same time. Yeah, yeah.

It's not the idea, it's the execution. You just gotta go, you gotta run like the wind.

Right, exactly, exactly.

All right, well, this has been a fun hour.

Thanks for a great chat, guys.

Thank you.

Thanks.

Yeah, thanks for the therapy, Tiger.

Therapy session.

I feel healed. I feel— I felt cleansed. I'm ready. I'm ready.