Ep.01 | "Everything Is Figureoutable"

Welcome to the Lead Fast podcast. My name is Daniel. I'm your host. Let's try it again. Let's try it again. So I'm Daniel. I'll be your host. This is Tommy. He is the co founder of Lead FastCo. And today we're going to dive into some, what we call conversations on the couch. Where you have conversations on the couch.

And that's where we got the name from, at least plain and simple.

So what we're gonna do is we're gonna go through that, we're gonna play a clip in just a second and we're gonna talk about some of the stuff you say within that. Because most of the time when we shoot it, it's like 60 seconds. And so you're just condensing everything. But there's some stuff you say that we can definitely unpackage. And I know I wanna know more. There's probably lots of other people who wanna know more.

So let's do it. I have always been accused of being sort of an eternal optimist that I think everything's gonna work out for me. And I'll admit there's a level of self confidence. Some people who know me best might say arrogance. I really do believe that things are going to work out for me, but not because I deserve it. I really think things are, by and large figureoutable. I know it's not a real word, but if you give me enough time and enough data and enough information, I can figure out whatever problems that we're facing as an organization. I want you to start believing that about yourself, that as a leader, you. You have everything it takes. Because it's not about what's happening outside the outside circumstance, it's about what's going on inside of you. If you begin to cultivate that you believe that everything is figureoutable and you have the skills necessary, you can overcome whatever challenges you're facing.

All right, there we go. First question right off the bat, was that your word? Did you come up with figureoutable?

I did come up with figureoutable. So if you get enough information, you could probably, you know, craft your way around it. We, as entrepreneurs, that's like the whole job, because you don't know what you don't know. And so you've got to figure it out. But most people just stop when they think that they can't anymore, like their resources are depleted or they just like, don't have the answers anymore. But rarely, if you just give it a little bit more time and a little bit more effort, do you not come up with a answer?

Okay, yeah. So everything is figureoutable. So the origin of that. So where did that come from? When did you start realizing everything was figuring out figureoutable?

About 10 seconds before I said it. No, not really.

I would believe that.

You would because it probably true. So everything for me has been a negotiation my entire life. I negotiated my way through kindergarten and got out of naps. You know, like everything given enough leeway is figureoutable. It's one of the best things that my parents did for me was they let me negotiate my way through school. Great story is in 11th grade, yeah, going into my senior year, I needed an extra science credit to graduate, but I didn't want to take physics and I didn't want to take biochem or anything really hard. And so I went to a science teacher that was a mentor to me And I said, Mr. Carroll, wouldn't it be great if we had a class where we could, like, really do the scientific method in practicum and so we could do a experiment, set up a semester long experiment where we had to test everything and do all that stuff? Wouldn't it be great if that's what we did? And he was like, oh, yeah. So. So we pitched it to the school board and we pitched it to the principals, and I created a class where I got to write my own curriculum, create my own experiment, and then. And that literally was it. And as long as I followed the scientific method to completion and had something to show, I made an A in that class. I did that class in three weeks.

Wow.

And for the rest of the semester of my senior year, I was literally. We were like sitting around drinking coffee, listening to music every day. So.

So you created that your senior year. You created.

Because I didn't want to take. So, like, no one told me that I couldn't just go create my own class. And I didn't want to do this thing that I hated. So it was figureoutable. I just, I was like, well, if they'll let me negotiate this, then I'm going to try to. And they did. And no one thought to stop me, which was, you know, crazy. But we did. And like five other students and me got actual credit towards a diploma for sitting on our hands for six out of eight weeks.

Oh, man. So many high school kids listening right now is probably going to be.

Yeah.

Creating their own classes.

We have high school kids that listen to this.

Hopefully.

I don't know, but that's a. That's a great example of everything is figureoutable.

So that's. That's the origin. When have you used this figureoutable to kind of, like, pick up some steaming moment and be like, okay, this is working. Let's stick with this. And you figured out, like, hey, I'm on to something here. Like, when can you. The earliest moment, I would say, other than the high school class, you know, I don't know.

Like, there's so many. Like, that's always been something that's been pretty second nature to me. You know, if you tell a kid for 18 years that they're great at stuff, they'll start believing it. I wasn't really great at things, but you couldn't tell me that, right? Like, I tried to play Sports. I was 5 foot 3, 100 pounds. I got demolished, but I still played. You know, like, everybody should have walked me off whatever field I got on, but I just tried whatever, and my parents supported it. And I got really good at, like, being okay with messing things up. That never became a thing for me. Like, that was just, hey, I just found out one way not to do this. And I'd go do it again and try it until I got it right. I have, like, literally dozens and hundreds of stories of, like, me just figuring it out. I went to school on a theater scholarship when really all I'd ever done was a couple of high school productions, you know, got a theater scholarship that covered half of it, was going to take loans for the other half. I was on campus the first day of freshman orientation and realized that my college didn't have a mascot. Like, we had, like, a mascot. We didn't have a physical person in a suit. And so I tracked down the head of men's athletics and, like, basically talked my way into the athletic program to be the mascot and got a half scholarship. And so I went to school my freshman year for free by a theater scholarship that I had no real, like, huge stage experience. And because I just tried out and made it, and a mascot scholarship, like, whoever. Who even has ever heard of that mascot? Like, I know that I took a athletic scholarship away from a wide receiver to be the mascot. So I don't know how they let that happen, but I know that that's true.

So. Okay. Everything you're talking about, though, when you're to a place where you have to figure stuff out, it feels like you're almost maybe at the end of the rope on certain scenarios. So, like, everything else hasn't worked out or maybe some of the things you described. There's not Even there's no rope. There's no rope. You just. You just are in a position where you have to figure it out. I know some of this stuff that we've talked about in past episodes, conversations on the couch and other stuff we've shot. You've talked about your business and you've had some that got off the ground and some that didn't. What does that look like when you're in the middle of figuring something out, but you're also in the middle of a failure when you're ready to cut your losses? You know? Okay, because maybe failure is a solution in that. What does it look like to be confident? Because I feel like this is driven from confidence in yourself and the fact that you said, give enough data, give enough information, resources, you can figure it out. And that is intelligence. But that's also confidence. So what does that look like during struggle and during possible failure?

Well, like you said, sometimes it being figured out is, hey, this won't work.

Right?

A solution is a solution. Whether or not it's a go forward solution or a, oh, this doesn't. This will never work. And here's why it won't work. Because if you now know, here's why it won't work. You can decide, can I change the parameters that are stopping it from working? And then if I can change the parameters now, will it work? And then. So that's where like, negotiating parameters comes into, like, this will never work because of xyz, but if I can turn XYZ into qrs, then it might work, right? And so that's part of it. And you just keep trying to run out of letters or run out of, like, energy. There's this phrase that people say all the time, but, like, you know, jump and sprout wings. Like, you'll figure it out. Learn to fly on the way down. Well, sometimes you don't. What helped me was that early on I realized somebody I saw somewhere. And it's a lot of stuff that, like Gary Vee says all the time. Like, I was 20, 25, 30. You know, I was 30 when we started our first company. I was young. There are very few things that you can screw up in your 20s that you can't outlive. You can, you can live, outlive. Like, I'm taking risks now. I'm 40, and I'm starting new companies, and we've amassed a certain level of wealth at this point, but, like, every day I'm putting that at risk. You know, over and over, I could have three things Go sideways for me and be broke again. I'm comfortable with this level of risk because I'm 40. 40, and if I became a pauper tomorrow, by the time I was 43, I could be a millionaire again. Like, there's. That's fine. Like, there's a level of risk that I'm comfortable with. You know, there's a level of risk I'm not comfortable with. Like, I don't want it. Like, I've got kids. I don't want to risk my kids. You get to play within the parameters that you're used to or comfortable with. But, like, financially, business wise, organizationally, where I'm at with my friends, like, there are very few things at 40 I still feel the way at 40 that I felt at 20. Like, there's a lot of life ahead of me. There are very few things that if I burnt the entire life to the ground, I couldn't rebuild it and still get to a place of joy and contentment relatively quickly.

Yeah.

So the whole idea of, like, how do you know if you can figure it out? Like, you don't. You just keep trying to. And more often than not, you do figure it out. And it rarely looks like your first assumption because you've had to change and negotiate parameters. But the goal is often achieved whether or not you did it the way you thought you were gonna do it. And if it isn't, worst case scenario is you burn your life down. If you're not 70, so what, you can rebuild it and people are living to be 90. It would be miserable to be 50 right now. Like, 10 years further and have spent 20 years at a company, and I'm, you know, six, seven, eight years from a pension and that I've been waiting on for 20 years. If I can just make 57 and then that company goes out of business, my pension blows up, and now I'm suicidal because everything I'd worked for since I was 18 to 50 is in flames in front of me. And because I was, you know, prepared for this American dream of, like, I can live from 57 to 90. Who wants to live from 60 to 90? Well, I want to live from 40 to 110. Like, right. I want, like, so I'm not just waiting till I'm 60 to start living that. Like, why wait till you can't enjoy it? Yeah, like, you know, so that's my whole thing is, like, the parameters I'm living within right now are I'm going to try to figure out as much as I can to gain as much as I can right now when the living matters.

So the stakes, obviously, are a little bit lower when you're 20, but, you know, they build as you go on. No, that makes sense. So if I was starting out right now and I was in my 20s or the high school kid we're talking about listening to the podcast.

Yeah.

For whatever reason, how do I build that internal confidence? How do I become the internal optimist that you talk about? Like, where do you draw your resources from? What do you do?

So we. You know, you've heard me say this a million times, but there are two ways to learn in life. Mentors and mistakes. Nothing builds internal confidence like a lot of failure. And I know that's. I know that's super, like, counterintuitive, but, like, surviving failure, like, nothing made me more fearless on a football field, like getting crushed by the biggest guy on the team during practice all week long because there was nobody on the other team that was going to hit me harder than he did. And I never worried about it. Like, I have survived getting my. Like, I've been in. I got bullied. I've been in so many fights. I've survived getting jumped and my butt kicked so many times. I don't. I'm not walking around the street worried about somebody beating me up at night if I go downtown or anything like that. I've been beat up before. I'm going to survive that. I don't live in fear because I've already experienced the worst that someone can experience, and I also sweat it anymore. You know, like, there's nothing that gives you. Like, in your former military, like, there's nothing that gives you confidence in a firefight like surviving the one before it. There's nothing that builds confidence like failure, if in those moments of failure, you have the right perspective. Because failure. Failure is never an indictment on. On you as a person, on your value like that. Those things are completely disconnected. This thing failed you. You as a person succeeded because you tried a thing. The thing failed. You didn't fail. You tried. That was a success. So you have to have the right perspective on everything. This thing failed, you know what? Because the person can just go, try again.

Right.

Leonard Ravenhill said that the opportunity of a lifetime has to be seized during the lifetime of the opportunity. So you'll never get the same opportunity twice. So this thing had a shelf life to start with. It had an opportunity that had a lifetime. It had a span. It had an opportunity timeline. Right. And so it was going to die eventually anyway, whether or not. You had to tie old Yellow to the tree and bash its head in it with a shovel. That's a no. You might not have had to do that. Right. You probably could have made the opportunity last longer, but it was going to die. It was going to pass. You were going to have to move on to a new opportunity. So, like, just because the thing died because you killed it, or it died because it got old age and died, it was going to die. You got to mourn it. Like you'd mourn anything else. Go through all, like, I'm angry, then I accept it, and then I move on. Go through all the phases, but the last phase is moving on. So move on. Try. Try something else.

So this is probably another balancing act, too, because I know exactly what you mean when you say you have to fail to succeed. Like, you got to know what failure looks like. You can't be afraid to fail. You can't put yourself in a box. You know, when do you start, like, trusting yourself again? We're talking about starting out, you know, like, because you are going through failures. You do something swinging a miss, maybe it's. It's high stakes and you lose big because you try to play big. How do you learn to build that trust in yourself? So in your own decisions to keep, you know, stay in the fight and keep, you know, making those mistakes or making progress? Keep trying.

My answer is going to be different from everybody else's, I'm sure, because most people would give you, like, ways to, like, you know, ensure that you can win. Knowing that you've got a team behind you, understanding that you haven't put so many resources out that you can't, like, pivot or recover. My whole thing is it doesn't matter if you win. You tried.

You tried.

Yeah, you tried. Like, and if you play big and you lose, okay, I never. Like, so. So there are two. Like, I play keys. Like, so you and I play music together, and I play keys. There are two types of players. So we have a friend for everybody watching. They don't know we have a friend named Steve. And when Steve plays keys in our band, he turns down and he's like, I'm gonna just turn down in case I mess up and I don't practice. Steve's a great, like, classically trained. Can read music. I can't read music at all. I play by ear. The likelihood of Steve messing up versus me messing up. Steve's not gonna mess up. I'm gonna mess up. I don't turn down. My thought is I'm about to crank this because if I crush this, I want people to hear it. And there's. And that is the difference. I don't care about how much is at risk or what's going on, and I'm not worried about what if I fail or if I succeed. I make the assumption that one of those two things is going to happen. I'm going to give it my best. But, bro, if I win, I'm winning loud. If I lose, I'm going to lose loud. Like, I'm going to. Everybody's going to hear it. I just get okay with losing loud. If I lose in front of people, I'm okay with that, which means I can be okay with winning in front of people. Because people. Like, that's a hard thing, man. People. If you're scared of losing in front of people, you will always be scared of winning in front of people.

Wow.

Like, you can't have one without the other. You can't want to win loud and want to lose quiet. Those two things are contradictory, because if you're trying to always lose quiet, you'll never, ever give enough to try to win loud. Every time you try to lose quiet, you marginalize the volume of your win. And they're connected. And so for me, I want to win loud, so I have to be okay with losing loud, too.

Wow.

Yeah.

I can definitely see it's. Like I said, it's a balancing act between the culture now. People are afraid to take risk. It's all about mitigation and management and people. Everybody's playing everything safe. And so taking a risk is a big deal because we've made it a big deal. But I also think that's why people aren't having these breakout moments that they want to have 20, 30 years down the road. They're looking back and like, where did I miss it? That's probably it. You're afraid to take risk. You're afraid to lose big. You're afraid to win big. One of the last things I wanted to talk to you about on that is, like, roadblocks and workarounds. So when you were doing this, when you were building this up inside you and you probably weren't, you probably didn't identify this at early age. Okay. This is internal optimism. Let me build this. It was probably just there, and then somewhere along the way, you realize you were doing it. While you were doing that, like, what kind of roadblocks did you run into where you maybe kind of doubted yourself? That maybe even broke your confidence to be this Kind of like high risk. What's the word? Entrepreneur even. Yeah, just a high risk person in general. Not just in business, but even in playing keys. Like, what kind of roadblocks did you hit? Maybe, you know, shook you and what were your workarounds?

Geez, that's a good one. You know, I don't know. Like, so you're always going to have certain roadblocks, especially if you're not the only one that wants the opportunity. Because then you get compared. Because. Right, because the person who. Who holds the opportunity now has choices. So now you have, in the business world, what's called competition, Right? And so because you have competition, that's a roadblock. So you have to not only know how to do the thing, you have to also know how to do the thing and communicate to the person holding the opportunity the distinctions that set you apart so that they give you the opportunity over someone else. And so that was a challenge for me. Not just. And I think it's a challenge for a lot of people because. And I know it is, because I hear people that get disgruntled about missing opportunities even though they think they're the best at something. I can't believe, you know, Betty got this dang job because, you know, she never gets her TPS reports in on time. And I'm always getting, you know, like, they like. And they. They want to talk about the thing that, like, that is the task that would open the door for the opportunity. What they don't understand is Betty has 10 other soft skills that they can't develop. And she's been really good at, like, being a team player and not just TPS reports. Team player and communicator and willing to stay late and, you know, all the other soft skills that you don't see. And she was also able to communicate that value. She had other people vouch for her. And so you've got to understand not only, like, am I bringing a task value to an opportunity, but am I deploying my soft skills to help position me against everyone else that wants this opportunity? And so for me, that was like, that was a roadblock. Understanding that I had competition, right? Understanding that, like, when I went and got the mascot gig in college, nobody else wanted that job. And it was easy. I walked into it. I think the third year, they were talking about holding tryouts, and I was like, oh, timeout. No, we don't get to do that, because I set this like this was mine. When I'm done with it, then you can do whatever. But until then, this belongs to me. Like, that was. That was a thing where, like, competition came in because the opportunity was for scholarship money, right? Because it was connected to a resource. There was an opportunity, and then other people wanted access to that opportunity. Well, then I had to use all my soft skills. Then I had to be like, oh, but no, Michael, we have a long head of, you know, men's athletics. We have a long standing relationship. I developed this program, and I had to start using these soft skills to make sure I maintain that opportunity. That was a roadblock. But the overcoming, it was looking at resources that I could deploy to set me apart from the competition. And, like, by the way, no different doing that than getting a girlfriend or a spouse to say yes to being yours forever. Like, it's the same thing. Like, hey, here's an opportunity. This is. She is connected to a resource, this person that I want to be with forever. And just being able to take care of someone forever is not enough. They've got to understand and appreciate all the soft skills that surround who you are as a person. They got to be able to laugh with you. They got to be able to like the same food and want to get like. You know, those types of things that make a relationship a relationship are all soft skills. Not necessarily the counterpoint of a relationship of taking care of each other and, you know, being partners.

Well, I would love to see some mascot footage, if you have any.

We asked the Cumberland College Bulldog about that because I had to take his head off one time. But whatever, that's a story for another podcast.

Yeah, that's a whole podcast in and of itself, it sounds like. But, yeah, that's it. That's all I have. Thank you for going into that. For everybody watching, check us out on Instagram leadfastco. And we also have lots of resources on our website. It's leadfastco.com so if you're looking for more resources or material like this, check it out. Leadfastco.com and we'll see you next time.