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This is the art of charm.
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Learn everything you need to know to crush it in business, love, and life.
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Welcome to The Art of Charm, I m Jordan Harbinger.
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The Art of Charm brings together the best thought leaders, teachers, and exceptional individuals to teach you how to be a top performer in life, love, and at work.
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Imagine having a mix of experienced mentors teaching you their expertise and packing decades of research, testing, and tough lessons into a curriculum.
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We may not have all the answers, but we definitely have all the questions.
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Make sure to stay up to date with The Art of Charm and get some great stuff that we don t or can t share on the show by signing up for the newsletter at theartofcharm.com.
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That s where we ll email you our Fundamentals Toolkit that covers topics like body language and nonverbal communication.
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dating, attraction, persuasion, business networking, public speaking, negotiation, and a whole lot more.
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I m also doing regular videos with drills and exercises to help you move forward every single week.
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We ve also got our live programs running in LA, and we ve got people from all over the world, which shows that no matter where you are, you can make it here if you want to learn and grow.
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I also want to encourage you to join us in the Social Capital Challenge,
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at theartofcharm.com slash challenge, or you can text charmed to 33444, and we ll text you instead.
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The challenge is about improving your social capital, inspiring more people to develop a personal and professional relationship with you, and during the first four weeks, we re giving something special away as well.
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This will make you a better networker and a better connector.
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If you want some accountability, ask your friends to join as well.
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That s theartofcharm.com slash challenge or text charmed to 33444 and they can join the challenge too.
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Today we re talking with my friend Cameron Harreld, former COO of 1-800-GOT-JUNK.
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He brought the company from $2 million to $106 million in 2020.
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in six years.
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It s not his first rodeo.
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We re gonna be asking him all about hiring, something called R&D, aka rip off and duplicate, how to build a great company culture and attract A-level talent.
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All of this, especially, and I d love to focus on the entrepreneurship rollercoaster, and are you a naturally born, hardwired entrepreneur?
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Do you need to tell your wife about the entrepreneurship rollercoaster?
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All this and more on this episode of The Art of Charm.
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So enjoy this one with Cameron Harreld.
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Tell us what you do in one sentence.
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I help entrepreneurs make their dreams happen.
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And a lot of entrepreneurs, myself included, we have a lot of dreams.
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So I think the challenge that might come about first thing would be settling on one or more dreams that we actually make happen.
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I don t know about you, Cameron, I know you ve been in the game for a long time, it s hard to choose
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which dreams to make a reality, especially if you find yourself kind of a serial entrepreneur, where you have a million different ideas, instead of just running one business.
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How do you get people to focus?
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Yeah, focus is really the key word of this era as well that at the end of the day, we need to treat every business like it s a toilet.
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And if a person sits on more than one toilet, it gets kind of messy.
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So what I try to do is work with entrepreneurs, serial entrepreneurs, multiple company entrepreneurs, and look at each business as its own
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vision that needs to be treated reverse engineered so i try to do is get the CEO to lean into the future and lean three years old almost as if they re going on to a time machine to december thirty first three years from today and they described every aspect of their business.
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They describe the people, the culture, the meeting rhythms.
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They describe what they re seeing.
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They describe each functional business area of their org chart as if it s in its finished state.
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And they don t talk about how it happened, but they describe what they see and what it feels like, and then we can figure out how to reverse engineer that.
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Excellent.
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So having people think that far out sounds really hard.
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I mean, if you ask me what I m gonna do in three months, I don t know.
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No, but you have some aspect and most entrepreneurs have some ideas to what their business is going to look and feel like three years in the future.
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If they don t, it s really the key to actually grow fast growing and great companies.
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It s what I teach CEOs all over the world to do.
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I ve actually taught this content now in 28 countries.
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I ve got the governor of Arizona doing it.
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I have the CEO of Sprint doing it and entrepreneurs of all sizes.
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So most companies do what you re saying you do is we try to have what we have and make it a little bit bigger.
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What you need to do is actually lean out into the future and decide what you want and then figure out how to make that happen.
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A great example of that is Elon Musk.
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You know, Elon s brother worked for me 20 years ago and I was a reference for Elon in his very first round of funding.
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He has a vision idea that s bigger than most.
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The example is his Tesla Model S. The reason it s a seven-seater is he has five kids.
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So he thought, if I m going to build this amazing car three years from now, it better fit my family.
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And he didn t decide to make the Prius a little bit bigger or a little bit faster.
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He leaned out and decided what he wanted.
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And then he figured out how to make it happen, how much money he needed, how to build it within his core values.
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But he decided where he was going and then reverse engineered that.
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And that s really the key, is leaning out far enough, but not too far.
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You don t want to go out five years or 20 years.
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You need to go out about three and reverse engineer that.
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So it really is about working backwards, and I think a lot of people don t do that.
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I certainly have not really done that until very recently, because before it was like, ah, starting a business, it s fun, this works, oh, that didn t work, oh, this kind of worked, oh, maybe we ll do this kind of thing.
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And I ve found just personally that
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I thought it was a coincidence, but perhaps not, that now that I ve started working backwards a little bit, things have become a little bit more clear, but I just hadn t really had an idea about really what I wanted until more recently.
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I know I want a family and kids, and I want lots of time, and I know that certain things take lots of time, so I ve got to eliminate or automate those, and some things I ve found that I used to love, I hate, and some things I used to dread, I love.
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and so I started doing more of those, but it does all kind of point to my personal and business goals, which are basically intertwined so completely I can t separate them, and I think that s one of the reasons why we re seeing a lot of success at the Art of Charm as well, and I can see that being something that most people struggle with, because when you re broke and you re 25, you re just thinking, how can I make money?
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And then when you re not broke and you re 35,
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You have to change your thinking, otherwise you re just gonna be that same guy you were when you were 25, working 18 hour days, trying to make money, except now you don t need it and it s not making you happy or exciting you anymore.
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Well, I think this is where I always try to R&D.
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My R&D stands for rip off and duplicate.
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So I try to look at what the most successful people on the planet have been doing and I just do what they ve done.
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So when I was 25, I strategically decided where was the best place for me to be working that I would meet the most successful people.
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I didn t just try to get the best-paying job.
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I had a friend of mine who went and got the best-paying union job at General Motors.
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Meanwhile, I went off and got a role with College Pro Painters so I could be taught how to run a business and hire people and manage people and lead people and run a company and get some fantastic business training.
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I decided to work at a golf club when I was very young so I could meet all the influential people at a wealthy golf course, instead of going to work at McDonald s and get the shift that everybody else wanted.
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Strategically, I think people need to lean out into the future.
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If you want to meet the great girl, well, what s the great girl do?
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Where does she live?
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Where does she hang out?
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What does she do for hobbies?
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Then go spend time with her.
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You re not going to bump into her walking down the street by accident.
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You know, the Cheshire Cat from Alice in Wonderland said, if you don t know where you re going, any road will take you there.
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And I think entrepreneurs need to remember that, that we need to lean out a little bit and figure out some direction, because that direction that we re going in will then align our customers, our suppliers, our marketing, our messaging.
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And it gives people value every day when they show up to work and go, wow, what I m working on is driving towards this three-year vision.
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It really aligns and inspires everyone.
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Did you meet your wife that way?
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Cause that s a little bit creepy.
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I did not meet her that way, but I was very intentional on what I was looking for.
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I actually had a list of all of the traits that I wanted my wife to have.
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And Kim has every single one of them.
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That s great, so you d kind of work backwards from there anyway.
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Oh yeah, I knew what I wanted.
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I wanted a woman who was smart and sexy and fun and brilliant and super in business and really active and engaged and could handle me on the business side and was a great family person.
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Like I had the full list and she s got the package.
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So I knew how to eliminate the other ones when they came into my view because they didn t fit.
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And Kim was like a magnet towards me because I knew where I was going and she fit on every box.
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Right, so you didn t get distracted with like, you know, the weird, well, this person s right here, so this is good for me.
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Now, maybe I do like X, Y, Z more, and then rationalize your way into a disaster.
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Exactly, same as I am with my customers today.
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You know, I coach entrepreneurs and entrepreneurial companies.
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The reason that I m even coaching the CEO and the president of Sprint
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They re not an entrepreneurial company, but they re in a massive turnaround mode right now where they need to actually become more entrepreneurial and learn systems to make them grow and get rid of this kind of giant hairball that the MBA s created for them.
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So I m teaching them these entrepreneurial systems that they re injecting into Sprint.
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So that s a fit for me.
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I have other clients who want to pay me to coach them and I won t coach them because they just don t fit my typical criteria of young, fun, entrepreneurial, high viral, high growth companies.
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And so there s a lot of people that you refuse to teach
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because it won t be fun for you or because you think they won t listen to you or both?
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Both.
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I just don t want to do this for the money.
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There s all kinds of money and if I keep attracting the right kinds of clients, they ll resonate with me, they ll work well with the systems that I give them, they ll tell other people like them if I get deep into
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networks like EO and YPO and Vistage and Mavericks and mastermind groups, that s where my tribe hangs out.
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So my messages get received and spread and then it gets very easy.
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And then if all of those customers know where I m going, they help conspire to make that happen because they re so excited with what I m doing for them that they want to help me even more.
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Yeah, this is of course some of the foundation of what we teach at the Art of Charm, right, kind of delivering value wherever you can, your reputation makes itself.
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And you were the former CEO of 1-800-GOT-JUNK, which on your watch, you brought it from two million to 106 million in six years.
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That s not just impressive, that s kind of crazy.
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Yeah, we did it with no debt, and we gave out no equity either.
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We actually grew six consecutive years of 100% revenue growth.
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We ranked as the number two company in all of Canada to work for.
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We had 3,000 employees system-wide when I left, and we were operating in four countries.
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It was a really fun ride.
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But growth, that kind of growth is hard, and you need the systems to do that.
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But I d done it before.
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I d done it multiple times before.
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Yeah, this wasn t your first rodeo.
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You ve been an entrepreneur for 20 plus years.
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What did you do before that that prepped you for that?
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Because I just can t imagine anybody walks into a company with money or no money and goes, oh, I know how to make this 53 times bigger in six years.
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So I was a little bit lazy as a child, but I had big dreams and big goals.
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And what I realized by being lazy was that there were shortcuts.
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There was the path of least resistance to get things done.
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So I always found that the kids who are working hard and studying hard were the idiots because there was an easier way to get to the answers.
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So in business, it s the same thing.
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There s all kinds of hard ways to do stuff.
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But if millions of companies have spent millions of dollars with the smart people figuring out the best systems, why don t I just take the best systems and put them in place, but kind of strip them down so they re easy.
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So that s how we kind of built each of the companies.
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And then I also really absorbed, like I said, my R&D stands for rip off and duplicate.
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Well, at College Pro Painters, I don t know if some of your listeners would obviously know College Pro, it s the largest residential house painting company on the planet.
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And every year, the 40 people at the head office would go out and recruit 800 franchisees.
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We would then go out and get the 8,000 painters.
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And then the 8,800 franchisees and painters would produce $60 million in revenue in four months.
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And then they d all go back to school, and the 40 people would have to build the 9,000-person company again.
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So for seven years, I was on that leadership team of 40 people building a 9,000-person company from scratch.
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You become very operationally excellent at doing the critical few things versus the important many.
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So how did you decide what those were?
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Just trial and error?
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I mean, it seems like you could try that for a hundred years and not get the magic sauce, but obviously you have.
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My mentor at the time and the founder of College Pro used to say, it s about saying no more often than saying yes.
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It s about saying yes to the absolute right opportunities and saying no to the ones that just don t seem like the fit at the time.
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So again, at College Pro, we only had four pieces of marketing collateral, just four.
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And the reality is we only needed four because the customers are never tired of your marketing.
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We get tired of our own marketing because we see it every day, but the customers don t see it enough to get tired of it.
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So as long as you have four really kick-ass marketing pieces, you can hammer customers with that for five years before they get tired of it.
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So instead of working on always new stuff, new stuff, new stuff, we just made sure that the stuff was great and we just kept using it.
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So we focused on the critical few things versus those important many.
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What are some of those critical few things?
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I m guessing attracting talent has to be the number one if you re continually rebuilding the company from scratch.
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Well, before talent, it comes down to vision.
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You really need to make sure that everyone knows where you re going and that helps you attract talent.
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And then when the right talent is there, it helps align the right talent.
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It also inspires the right talent.
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So you re right on the people.
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But first vision, then people.
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Second part of people is getting rid of the assholes.
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You know, so often we work on interviewing, recruiting,
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rid of the wrong people.
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You need to work really hard at getting rid of the wrong people.
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I think of people like horses, and I categorize them in three ways.
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Your A players are your racehorses, your B players are your workhorses, and your C players should go to the glue factory.
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We often spend too much time with our C players.
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We spend time with our underperformers, or we spend time with the people that are cultural cancers.
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And trying to get them back into shape, what we should do is get rid of them.
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We should be giving our time to our best people and to our B players and growing them.
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instead of giving our time to our worst people.
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Same with our customers.
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The only reason that we have customer service departments is because our products or services suck, or we ve over promised our customers, or we have customers with unrealistic expectations.
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But if we can fix our products and services, sell properly, and align the right customers and get rid of the negative ones that will never please, you don t even need a customer service department.
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When was the last time you ever phoned Amazon?
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Yeah, I mean it was recent, but it wasn t their fault.
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It was one of their vendors.
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I just couldn t get a hold of the vendor, so Amazon took the brunt because they re accessible.
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But yeah, yeah, you don t need that usually.
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You can just put it in a box and print off shipping label and they handle the problem.
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So they put everything online for us, their product works, their service works, they ve set expectations very clear, and they nail it every single time.
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And I think
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Business is so extraordinarily simple, but we really overcomplicate it.
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So I take the really complex, and I simplify it, because I m just that kind of a guy.
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I was the guy who found the shortcuts, and didn t work hard in school.
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I always saw the path of least resistance.
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We ve all seen that fly that s trying to get out the window, and the fly keeps bashing on the window, trying to get out the window.
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But if it just turns to the right, it goes out the door, and it s open.
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We often don t look for the door.
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We don t look for those easy wins, and that s what I try to teach companies to do.
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And I try to cover that in my videos, and double-double as well.
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Where do we even start with that?
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I mean, it might make sense to give a framework for that, looking at the easy wins, because it seems like everything is hard.
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You see other companies doing it, they spend lots of money doing it.
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Occasionally you see people doing it and they say it s easy, but it s almost like you don t believe them.
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Well, I ll give you an example.
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First thing this morning, I can almost guarantee you that one of the first things you did in your business was work on something that started with the letter E. You jumped into your email, right?
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Oh, email.
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Oh, okay.
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I was like, this is a trick question.
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I overthought that big time.
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But was that one of the first things you started doing today was check your email?
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Yeah, absolutely.
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So you got sucked into the email vortex in the busy work right away.
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That s insane.
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What you should do.
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And this is from 90 years ago, Napoleon Hills think and grow rich.
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He taught us the system.
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Every day at the end of the day, he said the top six, make a list of the top six or top five things you need to do tomorrow.
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Put them in order of impact, highest impact to lowest impact.
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And first thing in the morning, start working on number one.
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What I do is I write the five things on a post-it note, and I put the post-it note on the side of my laptop so it nags me all day.
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And I just keep focusing on number one until I get it done, and then I try to do number two, and then I try to do number three.
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And when I need a break, I might go in and check email.
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But imagine the millions of employees and the millions of leaders and the millions of CEOs that wake up every day working on their busy work instead of deciding what are the critical few things to get move forward today and realizing the rest of it will take care of itself.
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Right, well if you re in sales, email might be the critical thing that you re using to communicate.
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But for most of us, it s crap, right?
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What are the goals?
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And I don t allow anybody to tell me that email s important.
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Yeah, the leads, the customers that are ready to buy, things like that.
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What specific customer do you want to engage with?
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Which specific customer do you want to send something out to?
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What exactly are you going to move this customer forward on?
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But checking your email is not a goal.
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It s just simply busy work.
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That s absolutely true.
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Same thing probably with social media and things like that, which I also do in the morning.
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Exactly.
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So at the end of the day, we re busy, but we re busy on the busy stuff.
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We re not busy on the critical few things.
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You started this call by saying focus, and I m like, boom, that s the word.
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And if we can just get our people focused, focus is like light.
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If we disperse light, it lights up a room.
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If we focus it, it s like a laser beam and it cuts through anything.
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Hey, Art of Charm listeners, I m excited to share a new podcast I ve been absolutely binging.
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Winning is an everyday mindset, and Craig Robinson and John Calipari are here to help.
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On Ways to Win podcast, Craig and Coach Cal use their on-court wisdom to solve your off-court problems.
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Whether it s trouble at home or a workplace dilemma, the coaches will help you find a winning formula for success.
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You ll hear from prominent athletes, business leaders, and celebrities who reveal insights that made them into the leaders they are today.
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And don t miss President Obama sharing how he deals with pressure by projecting confidence, believing in your team, and taking criticism.
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Listen to Ways to Win wherever you get your podcasts.
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Over the last 17 years, we have launched our fair share of online courses, coaching programs, and finding the right platform has always been a challenge.
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They say if you do what you love, you never work a day in your life.
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But if you re an entrepreneur, you know the hard work that comes with it.
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That s why you need Kajabi.
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Kajabi makes it easy to run your entire online business from one platform so you can focus on what you love, creating.
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SPEAKER_01
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2
SPEAKER_03
right now I should say, easier said than done, but it really isn t that much easier said than done.
2
SPEAKER_03
It s a matter of eliminating distractions versus focusing on something through brute force, I would imagine.
2
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, and brute force doesn t get you there.
2
SPEAKER_00
But just deciding what to focus on and making sure that all of your employees decide what to focus on gives everybody a huge head start.
2
SPEAKER_00
So, the same with employees.
2
SPEAKER_00
Let s say we re recruiting employees.
2
SPEAKER_00
You know, that adage that we ve heard years ago and time and time again is hire for attitude, train for skill.
2
SPEAKER_00
Well, that only gets you 7% growth.
2
SPEAKER_00
What you need to do is hire for the attitude and skill.
2
SPEAKER_00
But most people don t know how to hire for attitude or culture fit, and they don t know how to interview for skills.
2
SPEAKER_00
So, what I do is I try to teach you the shortcuts for that.
2
SPEAKER_00
So, what are the five core behavioral traits that you want your employees to carry in their role?
2
SPEAKER_00
At College Pro, when we were recruiting franchisees, it was leadership, attainment, tenacity, introspection, and interdependence.
2
SPEAKER_00
And then we taught everyone in the company the definition for those five skills.
2
SPEAKER_00
Then we taught everyone the five questions to ask for each of those five traits so that everyone knew the definitions, everyone could repeat the definitions word for word, everyone knew the questions to ask and probe on so we could rate people against each other.
2
SPEAKER_00
So we knew what we were looking for and how to find it.
2
SPEAKER_00
Then once we narrowed down the core candidates into the behavioral traits, then we could figure out if they had the skills.
2
SPEAKER_00
But again, most people don t know what to interview on skills.
2
SPEAKER_00
They interview against a job description.
2
SPEAKER_00
What I do is I say, what are the five things the person needs to get done next year?
2
SPEAKER_00
What are the five core projects they need to get done?
2
SPEAKER_00
And if they get them all done, I ve been thrilled at my decision to hire them.
2
SPEAKER_00
Then in the interview, I find out if they ve done it before.
2
SPEAKER_00
Not if they know how to do it, but have they done it?
2
SPEAKER_00
And I want to find people and hire people, whether it s contractors, sub-trades, contract employees, or full-time employees.
2
SPEAKER_00
If these are the five or six things I need you to do, show me the work that you ve done before and let me talk to the people that you worked with in it so I can do reference checks against that.
2
SPEAKER_00
When people know where they re going and work it backwards, it s easy.
2
SPEAKER_00
But most people just wake up in the morning and start.
2
SPEAKER_03
Yes, that is very true, and I m also very guilty of a lot of that.
2
SPEAKER_03
Creating a company that s the number two best place to work in all of Canada would require not just making it a really lax, or I shouldn t say lax, but not necessarily just a fun culture.
2
SPEAKER_03
You ve got to attract talent, you ve got to lure
2
SPEAKER_03
A, players away from competitors.
2
SPEAKER_03
You ve got to get people of different ages to work together.
2
SPEAKER_03
I would love to talk about some of this because those all sound really difficult for entrepreneurs.
2
SPEAKER_00
them it engages them they show up in the morning going shit what I m doing is valuable so that s number one number two we talked about people it s getting the right people on the bus getting the wrong ones off and making sure that you ve got everybody in the right seats like Jim Collins talks about but obsessing about making sure you have people in the right seats so we talked a little bit about that the third is around the communication protocols and it s making sure that you have clear communication
2
SPEAKER_00
teaching people how to communicate verbally, how to run proper meetings, how to communicate using video so that you can actually see the emotions on the person s face and that you stay connected versus email, which gets miscommunicated.
2
SPEAKER_00
And I d have all your listeners write down this six-word sentence, the words, I didn t say you were beautiful.
2
SPEAKER_00
And if you read that sentence out loud and put the emphasis on the first word, I didn t say you were beautiful, it means something completely different if you put the emphasis on the second word, I didn t say you were beautiful.
2
SPEAKER_00
You put on the third word it s i didn t say you were beautiful in fact if you put the emphasis on each of the six words it means six completely different things so the problem with our written communication like email and text or yammer is that we re miscommunicating causing conflict so we need to teach people the skills to communicate internally and that builds a great culture and a great fosters a great team.
2
SPEAKER_00
And then lastly, it s your environment.
2
SPEAKER_00
And most often we need to get rid of the private offices.
2
SPEAKER_00
I m not so worried about whether you have a Wii room or a foosball table or free bicycles.
2
SPEAKER_00
Big things I want to get rid of are the blinds in the offices.
2
SPEAKER_00
I want to get rid of doors.
2
SPEAKER_00
I want to get rid of physical private offices so everyone is connected.
2
SPEAKER_00
Everyone s on the floor working together and everyone s completely engaged.
2
SPEAKER_00
And that s really where the core of culture comes from.
2
SPEAKER_00
The last part is just deciding what your core values are and being okay with firing people who break the core values.
2
SPEAKER_00
So it s not okay that somebody breaks the core values that you have to be willing to fire people.
2
SPEAKER_00
So it s not again about creating a fun place to work.
2
SPEAKER_00
It s about deciding what your culture is.
2
SPEAKER_00
Getting rid of the people that are cancers in that organization and fostering that very disciplined people this one you know i m thought this one action culture, work hard play hard culture and giving people the environment to see that what they re working on matters.
2
SPEAKER_03
So when you do this, you then get the ability to lure those A players away from competitors because you have the culture to show for us?
2
SPEAKER_00
Right.
2
SPEAKER_00
Most competitors are really kind of beige.
2
SPEAKER_00
You know, they ve never put in place a fantastic workplace.
2
SPEAKER_00
They ve never put in place a culture that gets rid of the C players.
2
SPEAKER_00
they ve taken care of those people.
2
SPEAKER_00
Most of them think it s about the perks and the pay and the reality is we can pay at 70% of the bell curve and attract people away because they re engaged and there s no jerks in the office and everyone sees where they re going and they re excited about it and we ve got this open communication culture.
2
SPEAKER_00
That s way more exciting to people.
2
SPEAKER_00
When you teach Gen Y that it s about
2
SPEAKER_00
Leadership and growth and give them new systems and tools to grow that engages them when you actually align the baby boomers and show them that they need to learn technology and you can really get all these cultures to mix and it s easy to pull people away from average companies there s millions and millions of average companies.
2
SPEAKER_03
So the trick to getting the boomers and the millennials to work together is teaching each of them a skill set of the other, or at least the communication skill set of the other?
2
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, the communication skill set and recognizing that everybody has value.
2
SPEAKER_00
You know, the guy sitting on the street corner has value, has a lesson.
2
SPEAKER_00
The clerk behind the counter has value and has a lesson.
2
SPEAKER_00
If we re truly a community versus a family, some of us had dysfunctional families, we need to create a culture that everyone has value and we need to appreciate everybody s value and be gratitude of everybody s value.
2
SPEAKER_00
The baby boomers bring some wisdom and some process and some designs, loyalty.
2
SPEAKER_00
The Gen Y brings levering technology and the hacks and doing stuff faster and in a more entrepreneurial way.
2
SPEAKER_00
So we need to be able to teach them the value of each other and how to work together and not just say that one group is better or worse than the other.
2
SPEAKER_00
You know, the Gen Y wears their headphones to work because they ve always worn headphones.
2
SPEAKER_00
Baby boomers never wore headphones because our stereo headphones only had three foot cords.
2
SPEAKER_00
We couldn t walk around the house with them on.
2
SPEAKER_00
Gen Y walks into the CEO s office and demands what they want because their parents told them to.
2
SPEAKER_00
Whereas the baby boomers were taught to respect their elders and only go one layer above you and work at a job for 20 years.
2
SPEAKER_00
So of course they re gonna have different attitudes in the workplace.
2
SPEAKER_00
They were raised completely differently.
2
SPEAKER_03
How did you grow up?
2
SPEAKER_03
I mean, is this something you learned from a functional family upbringing or not?
2
SPEAKER_00
Yeah.
2
SPEAKER_00
Well, again, I was raised as an entrepreneur.
2
SPEAKER_00
My dad was an entrepreneur.
2
SPEAKER_00
Both of my grandfathers were entrepreneurs.
2
SPEAKER_00
My sister owns her own company.
2
SPEAKER_00
My brother owns his own company.
2
SPEAKER_00
And my wife s family is exactly the same.
2
SPEAKER_00
Her dad, her mom, her brother and sister all own their own company.
2
SPEAKER_00
So it s all I ve ever known.
2
SPEAKER_00
And then I just, again, looked for the best companies out there.
2
SPEAKER_00
And I realized that it wasn t that difficult.
2
SPEAKER_00
Like I just look at stuff and I see the fly banging against the window.
2
SPEAKER_00
And i go why don t you just go out the door it s so simple and then i see companies the same time trying to create all this great marketing material to sell us a crappy product i m not gonna buy it.
3
SPEAKER_00
So create a better product and I ll buy it.
3
SPEAKER_00
You know, we often in North America are trying to invent something and market it like crazy.
3
SPEAKER_00
Why don t we just go ask people what they need and sell them that?
3
SPEAKER_01
When I saw you speak at Camp Maverick a couple months back, you had these quadrants, and they were different, actually, than the quadrants most people had seen before.
3
SPEAKER_01
The kind of, if they re a high promoter, and they re this, then promote them, and if they re this, then train them.
3
SPEAKER_01
I would love to go over that, because I think anybody who s got any, even if you have one employee in your organization, or one team member that s not you, this was useful.
3
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, so so it s less of the training and hiring quadrants, and it s more every six months, you want the CEOs to draw a simple diagram on a piece of paper, or a leader in a business area to draw a diagram and a piece of paper.
3
SPEAKER_00
The diagram is a box that s split up into, you know, vertical and horizontal.
3
SPEAKER_00
So four boxes.
3
SPEAKER_00
So four squares inside of the bigger square.
3
SPEAKER_00
And then on the y axis, the up and down axis is results.
3
SPEAKER_00
And then on the x-axis, so the bottom axis, it s values.
3
SPEAKER_00
So low values on the left, high values on the right.
3
SPEAKER_00
And on the y-axis, low results on the bottom, high results on the top.
3
SPEAKER_00
And then you put the names of all of your people in one of those four boxes.
3
SPEAKER_00
So if I was the CEO, I would put all the names of my direct reports in one of those four boxes.
3
SPEAKER_00
And then I would put the names of all the people who report to my direct reports in one of those four boxes.
3
SPEAKER_00
So now I ve done two layers below me.
3
SPEAKER_00
So in the bottom left hand corner is the people that have a low results, low values.
3
SPEAKER_00
And if you ve got low results, low values, it s easy.
3
SPEAKER_00
They need to be fired.
3
SPEAKER_00
If someone s in the high right quadrant, I m talking very high values, very high results.
3
SPEAKER_00
These are kind of the God forbid they ever quit people.
3
SPEAKER_00
These are the people you have to handcuff to your organization.
3
SPEAKER_00
You have to find a way to make sure that you lock them up for at least five to 10 years.
3
SPEAKER_00
If people, and if you don t guys like me come and post them,
3
SPEAKER_00
If you re in the bottom right-hand corner with high values and low results, typically this is where people say, let s train and coach people, but that s the wrong answer.
3
SPEAKER_00
Before you go and train and coach somebody, let s make sure they re in the right seat.
3
SPEAKER_00
because you could also just move them into a different role, and all of a sudden they will excel.
3
SPEAKER_00
I think back to our school system, and I think our school system completely damages 95% of the population.
3
SPEAKER_00
The reason I believe it damages them is the only people that come out of school feeling good are the ones that get the straight A s.
3
SPEAKER_00
Everyone else feels like a B or a C, so they ve literally been systematically beat up for 12 years.
3
SPEAKER_00
And the C and D students get beat up completely because they get told to get a tutor and stuff that they suck at, and all of a sudden they really hate school.
3
SPEAKER_00
Well, we do the same thing in the workforce.
3
SPEAKER_00
If you have somebody who s in the wrong seat, and you re coaching and training them, you re literally just getting them to be average at stuff they re bad at.
3
SPEAKER_00
What you need to do is spend time to figure out what do the people love, where are they good, and how can I put them in that role, and they ll probably excel without any coaching and training at all.
3
SPEAKER_00
So that s kind of what Jim Collins talked about.
3
SPEAKER_00
Get the right people on the bus, get the wrong people off the bus, and get everybody in the right seat.
3
SPEAKER_00
So this tool helps you do that.
3
SPEAKER_00
The last quadrant is the top left.
3
SPEAKER_00
The high results, low core values.
3
SPEAKER_00
These are like the salespeople that everybody hates.
3
SPEAKER_00
The engineer that, you know, is the only one who knows the code, but nobody can work with him because he s a jerk.
3
SPEAKER_00
You have to get rid of these people.
3
SPEAKER_00
You have to work at getting these cultural cancers out of the company.
3
SPEAKER_00
If you went to a doctor tomorrow and he said you had a cancerous tumor in your lung, what would you do?
3
SPEAKER_00
You d have it removed.
3
SPEAKER_00
You d have it removed tomorrow.
3
SPEAKER_00
Well, if you ve got cultural cancers in your company, you have to get these people out of your company and you have to do it right away.
3
SPEAKER_00
No excuses, remove them.
3
SPEAKER_00
We need to be able to remember that everyone is replaceable.
3
SPEAKER_00
If you had that salesperson who gets you 50% of the business,
3
SPEAKER_00
If you got hit by a car today, if he was hit by a car and killed, you d have to replace him tomorrow.
3
SPEAKER_00
So what are the five things you d have to do to replace him?
3
SPEAKER_00
Now fire him and get working on item one on the list, but you got to do it today.
3
SPEAKER_00
And the data says the cost of keeping the wrong person is five times their annual salary.
3
SPEAKER_00
So there s a group called Top Grading that went out and researched the data behind keeping bad people.
3
SPEAKER_00
And because of lost opportunities, because of management time, wasting time with the C players, because of customers that won t give you the rest of their business because Bob works there still, because of other A players that won t join you because Bob works there, just all that cultural negativity in the office because of Bob is costing you 15 times whatever you pay them in a year.
3
SPEAKER_00
So it really makes more sense to just get rid of them, paying severance if you have to than it does to keep them.
3
SPEAKER_01
Right, it actually becomes cheaper, because the short-term calculation is, oh, but we ve invested in him, and he s got this going, and he works here, and he s on this team, and just a little bit of training, but it s not just teaching Bob a new skill set.
3
SPEAKER_01
It s everybody having to look over their shoulder at him, everybody else having to manage him, the other people who have to support him, the people who have to finish his tasks.
3
SPEAKER_01
You re actually taking away from them being productive.
3
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, it tends to be a different calculation,
3
SPEAKER_01
At that point, when you describe it like that, it s quite obvious, right?
3
SPEAKER_01
But I don t think most people look at that.
3
SPEAKER_01
They re looking at what s right in front of them, which is, ah, if we could just get them to do this, right?
3
SPEAKER_00
Exactly right.
3
SPEAKER_00
So I go back to that whole A players, B players, C players, right?
3
SPEAKER_00
You give your grain to your A s and B s and get rid of your C s.
3
SPEAKER_00
And I m not talking about being Machiavellian and mean and getting rid of people.
3
SPEAKER_00
I m not tiring of firing people and being a jerk about it.
3
SPEAKER_00
You need to remember that these are human beings that have feelings.
3
SPEAKER_00
You need to try to help mentor them and get them back on their feet, help get them a job somewhere else, but you need to set them free and free them up to go somewhere where they are engaged and they are happy and they are getting along well.
3
SPEAKER_00
Or worst case scenario, they just don t get to come and play with you.
3
SPEAKER_01
Anybody who knows all this must have made a lot of mistakes.
3
SPEAKER_01
What do you think is the biggest business mistake you ve ever made?
3
SPEAKER_01
Do you have any glaring, gigantic thing that you can share?
3
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, I ve got a few of them, but by the way, I disagree with the whole failure is good.
3
SPEAKER_00
I think that s bullshit.
3
SPEAKER_01
Oh, let s talk about that.
3
SPEAKER_01
I hate that too, but it s so trendy that I can t even argue with it, because it gets annoying.
3
SPEAKER_00
I can argue with it.
3
SPEAKER_00
There s billions of companies out there that have already solved every problem, so instead of making the problems, do it with the best people before you have done.
3
SPEAKER_00
So here s what I do.
3
SPEAKER_00
Instead of reading another book, or listening to another podcast, or reading another newspaper every day,
3
SPEAKER_00
I look at what s on my plate next quarter that I m working on, and what can I read that people have written or podcasts can I listen to about that?
3
SPEAKER_00
I try to focus my learning about what s coming next.
3
SPEAKER_00
Most people are so busy being busy and so busy reading stuff at random that they re not learning about what they re working on.
3
SPEAKER_00
Again, companies, if you re putting in place a leadership development program, just do what Starbucks and GE did.
3
SPEAKER_00
They re recognized globally as having the best leadership development programs.
3
SPEAKER_00
Rip them off.
3
SPEAKER_00
They re all public.
3
SPEAKER_00
They re on the internet.
3
SPEAKER_00
We ve got, as my wife says, we got the Google.
3
SPEAKER_01
So you think that the whole fail forward and fail often, you don t believe in that at all?
3
SPEAKER_00
No, because again, for most businesses, we re not reinventing anything, we re not creating something, we re marketing something.
3
SPEAKER_00
We re hiring people, aligning people, managing people, running emails, using time management.
3
SPEAKER_00
Shit, this stuff has been perfected 20 years ago, but we don t spend the time doing it.
3
SPEAKER_00
Here s a perfect example.
3
SPEAKER_00
How much time have you and your employees ever had on running meetings?
3
SPEAKER_01
I don t know, maybe a little bit, some books here and there when we were really terrible at it, but no training.
3
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, so we ve never trained most employees in most companies on how to run meetings.
3
SPEAKER_00
We send them into the battlefield with no training whatsoever and we say meetings suck.
3
SPEAKER_00
The reality is meetings don t suck, we suck at running meetings.
3
SPEAKER_00
Meetings happen every day and yet we spend no time teaching people how to run them.
3
SPEAKER_00
We would never send our kid off to little league to play baseball without playing catch and throwing the ball and helping him get a few times because we wouldn t want to be embarrassed and yet every day we let our employees show up at meetings or run meetings without any training it s crazy.
3
SPEAKER_00
How about email management how we train people on email management every quarter no and yet we have people spending two hundred emails a day.
3
SPEAKER_00
Without any training on it on how to write them concisely and how to reply like it s crazy to me that we don t do the basics So what I do is I just look at what am I working on and what are the best systems out there?
3
SPEAKER_00
And how can I just do that?
3
SPEAKER_00
Do you apply that same system to your personal life?
3
SPEAKER_00
In some ways, yeah.
3
SPEAKER_00
I try to focus on the reality that balance, I think balance is a lie.
3
SPEAKER_00
You can t be completely balanced all the time.
3
SPEAKER_00
You need to obsess about a couple things and then switch gears a month later and obsess about two others.
3
SPEAKER_00
So I try to balance friends, family, finance, fitness and faith and know that a couple of those will go out of balance for a while.
3
SPEAKER_00
So in the summertime, I focus obsessively around family and friends and fitness.
3
SPEAKER_00
And then I kind of switch gears in October, November, and I go hardcore into business.
3
SPEAKER_00
So stuff slides a little bit on friends and family.
3
SPEAKER_00
Then December, January, I go straight back in, you know, so I try to chunk it up based on when my demand is.
3
SPEAKER_01
Do you think that everybody s kind of like that, or do you think you re wired differently?
3
SPEAKER_00
I think most people are busy.
3
SPEAKER_00
Most people wake up in the morning being busy.
3
SPEAKER_00
My son came to me the other day, he s 14 years old, and he said, Dad, I really want to run a business.
3
SPEAKER_00
I ve got all these great ideas.
3
SPEAKER_00
How do you think I should do this?
3
SPEAKER_00
I said, well, let me give you a book to read.
3
SPEAKER_00
He goes, okay.
3
SPEAKER_00
I gave him the book, Napoleon Hill s Think and Grow Rich.
3
SPEAKER_00
This was literally yesterday.
3
SPEAKER_00
I didn t know if he was going to read it.
3
SPEAKER_00
He came back to me at the end of the day and he said, hey, I talked to my tutor and this is my next book that I m going to be reading for my book report is Think and Grow Rich.
3
SPEAKER_00
She s really excited about it and thought it was a perfect book.
3
SPEAKER_00
This is a kid who s 14.
3
SPEAKER_00
He says he wants to run a business.
3
SPEAKER_00
Let s start him with the core business tools.
4
SPEAKER_00
Back to the show.
4
SPEAKER_00
Speaking of kids and entrepreneurs, I know that you have given a TED Talk, actually, on helping raise kids to be entrepreneurs.
4
SPEAKER_00
Why is that important to you?
4
SPEAKER_00
I mean, you were raised that way, but why should everybody be raised that way?
4
SPEAKER_01
I think it s more to be entrepreneurial now than purely an entrepreneur.
4
SPEAKER_01
I want people to, or kids to, spot the ideas.
4
SPEAKER_01
And also, I want to spot first the kids who are entrepreneurial and teach them to be entrepreneurs.
4
SPEAKER_01
What I don t want to do is the school system and the medical system to say, hey, these kids that have ADD and are bipolar and have Tourette s, those are medical problems.
4
SPEAKER_01
No, those are actually signs of entrepreneurs.
4
SPEAKER_01
Tourette s is thinking out loud.
4
SPEAKER_01
ADD is that scattering, but we also see everything.
4
SPEAKER_01
We don t hyper-focus, so that actually allows us to start things and pass them off.
4
SPEAKER_01
The mania of bipolar is what gets people excited and listening to us, and the stress or depression is simply us crashing afterwards.
4
SPEAKER_01
These aren t medical problems.
4
SPEAKER_01
These are pure signs of classic entrepreneurship.
4
SPEAKER_01
So what I want to do is recognize those kids that have those traits and say, holy shit, you could actually be an entrepreneur.
4
SPEAKER_01
See, when I grew up, entrepreneur was not a cool thing.
4
SPEAKER_01
I just turned 50.
4
SPEAKER_01
Being an entrepreneur was not a good thing.
4
SPEAKER_01
It was actually vilified.
4
SPEAKER_01
Being profit-centric was not a good thing.
4
SPEAKER_01
It was vilified.
4
SPEAKER_01
Now, since 2000, when kind of the internet was exploding, being an entrepreneur has started to become a little bit cool and started to become a little bit accepted.
4
SPEAKER_01
But we need to recognize these kids that are in the school system that are being told to sit still and pay attention and be like everybody else and stop being so distracting are not problems.
4
SPEAKER_01
They don t need to be medicated.
4
SPEAKER_01
They need to be held up and said, wow, you re special.
4
SPEAKER_01
You re one of the 3% that should be running a company.
4
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When I heard you speak as well, you went over a list of traits and it was a bunch of us in the room at Camp Maverick.
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And I can t remember what they were.
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If you remember, I would love to hear this because I think a lot of people listening to this match these.
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And you told us that these were characteristics of entrepreneurs and they also mirrored characteristics of something else.
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Do you remember what I m talking about?
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Yeah, they mirrored the traits of bipolar disorder, right?
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So the reality is bipolar disorder has been nicknamed by the medical community as the CEO disease.
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So most entrepreneurs have these traits.
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And if we were
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you know, medicated, or if we were told there was a problem with us, a lot of these classic entrepreneurs, Steve Jobs, Henry Ford, Bill Gross, Ted Turner, would all have been medicated.
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The reality is there s nothing wrong with them at all.
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So here s the list of traits.
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And there s 11 traits on the list.
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So if your listeners say yes to at least five of these, they would actually be clinically diagnosed as bipolar.
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If they say yes to nine or 10, they might even be medicated for it.
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Are you often filled with energy?
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Are you flooded with ideas?
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Are you driven?
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Are you restless?
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Are you unable to keep still?
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That s five.
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Are you often working on little sleep?
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Do you get euphoric?
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Do you get easily irritated by minor obstacles?
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Do you burn out periodically?
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Do you act out sexually, which is like flirting?
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Do you feel persecuted by those who do not accept your vision?
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So, those are clinical diagnosed traits of bipolar disorder and most entrepreneurs would say yes that they exhibit 9, 10 or 11 of those traits.
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If you ask teachers, doctors, lawyers, accountants, they might say yes to one or two.
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They literally don t identify to those listed traits at all.
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So, when we re talking about kids in the school system of having a problem, maybe the problem isn t the kids at all, maybe it s the system.
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Do you think possibly to the degree to which people feel those might be different than people that are medically diagnosed?
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Because I do see some people, and I know some people that are bipolar that can t really function.
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Do you think that s just a result of the system that they re in, or do you think that there s a degree of, okay, well, if you re that flooded, if you re that persecuted, if you re acting out that much, you need to tone it down a couple notches?
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Let s move off bipolar for a second.
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I ll use a different example, attention deficit disorder, or ADD, ADHD.
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The school system says that s a massive problem.
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The school system is medicating 10 to 15% of the kids.
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That s ridiculous.
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Yeah, that s insane.
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I have 17 of the 18 signs of attention deficit disorder, and I m highly functioning and make more than all the school system.
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Every teacher in my school added up I make more than 80.
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So clearly, I don t have a problem.
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But they wanted to medicate me when I was in grade two, because I had ADD.
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So maybe the bipolar people, there s the far, far end of the spectrum that can t cope.
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But a lot of those people can t cope because they think there s a problem.
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A lot of those people are so up and down all the time that they think that s a problem instead of realizing, shit, maybe I m just an entrepreneur.
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I taught this system.
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I cover it in my book, double double, and I have a video about it as well called the highs and lows of CEOs.
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I taught this to CEOs from around the world and I had one very highly functioning, very profitable, happy family, really good guy.
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And he came up to me sobbing after my talk and said, well, I thought I was crazy.
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I ve been suicidal for six months and now I realize I m just an entrepreneur.
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So maybe these people who can t function, can t function because society is telling them there s something wrong, instead of saying your stress and depression is simply because yesterday you were so manic.
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So learn how to ride it better.
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Learn how to temper your highs, learn how to bring up your lows a little bit.
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Learn that taking some time off is not a bad thing.
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Learn to breathe.
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Learn to go for a walk.
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Learn to go, like, don t medicate.
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Learn how to use other aspects to control the ups and downs and to leverage each of the stages.
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I think if you re on the far, far edges of the spectrum, if you re extraordinarily manic or extraordinarily depressed or suicidal, then yes, you may need medication.
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But the 90% of the people that are being medicated for this don t have a disease at all.
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They simply have a trait of an entrepreneur.
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So some people are wired specifically for entrepreneurship.
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It s just that there s a recognition issue here.
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Absolutely.
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Remember, entrepreneurs need people to follow us.
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So if we re flat, if we don t have the energy or the enthusiasm, no one s gonna follow.
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That s called being a teacher or a doctor or a lawyer or an engineer.
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They re boring, but they re supposed to be.
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Really, right?
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You don t meet that many entrepreneurs that haven t got this crazy spark and energy and enthusiasm for what we believe in.
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Most entrepreneurs are told that we shoot from the hip.
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Thinking out loud is on the spectrum of Tourette s.
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We think of Tourette s as the swearing.
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It s one of the reasons why when I swear on stage or in a podcast, I feel bad about it.
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I even know that it s coming out of my mouth, and I m like, I shouldn t say it, and then boom, it comes out.
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I definitely have that.
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That s Tourette s.
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I ve got Tourette s now, apparently, on the spectrum.
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Most entrepreneurs have Tourette s, attention deficit disorder, and are bipolar.
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According to the medical community and the school system, we are disasters, but maybe we re not.
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Maybe we should actually be groomed towards the entrepreneurship and talk about having a job is a bad deal that a regular paycheck is insanity look to spot opportunity, maybe we shouldn t tell kids to stop selling stuff to the other kids maybe we should recognize these are smart kids were selling into the need.
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Now, this plays into another idea that I love from Double Double, your book, something along the lines of the entrepreneurship rollercoaster, where the highs and lows of CEOs or entrepreneurs in general, there s an up and a down, and when I looked at this chart, or this diagram or graph, I couldn t believe it, because it was basically, if you put that on a never-ending loop, that was my entire life.
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Of course, and so I ve had lots of people go, well, I have ups and downs too.
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Yeah, I m not talking about the average human being with ups and downs.
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And here s the key difference.
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The entrepreneur or the CEO is in a very lonely position.
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We can t tell our employees that we re scared.
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We can t tell our employees that stuff is going wrong all the time.
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We can t tell our board or our investors that stuff is going wrong.
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We don t want to tell our spouse often that something s going wrong because we ve got our house on the line.
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We don t even tell our spouse at times that we re not taking a regular paycheck or submitting our expenses.
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We kind of lie to ourselves a little bit.
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We need to always be in that up mode so that people are excited and follow us.
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So we kind of spend our time in this little bubble.
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We re also feeling all the stress of having our house on the line, trying to get the payroll in, trying to make sure our employees get paid, trying to deliver promises to our customers that we knew the product wasn t even made and we already sold it.
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That s not normal ups and downs.
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This is magnified, very lonely, extraordinarily stressful, and it s risky.
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That s where this roller coaster comes from.
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It s very similar to that physical roller coaster in a theme park.
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You go on this up trajectory at the beginning of the curve, and I call that uninformed optimism that you ve got all this excitement and
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your why or where you re going yet.
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When you kind of go over the top and start looking down a little bit, you hit the stage called informed pessimism.
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And that s when you ve got more information, you start getting a little bit more cautious, it s kind of the, yeah, just a little more cautious.
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And then as you kind of start going to the bottom of that roller coaster, you re screaming down towards the bottom, you hit this crisis of meaning.
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And that s the terror stage, it s the stress, the depression, where often you can t even get out of bed, or you call into the office and say that you re not coming in because of some meeting with a supplier or customer, really, you re at home with the debate over your head.
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And then you come around the bottom and you hit this hopeful realization or informed optimism.
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So I try to teach entrepreneurs, again I cover it in my book Double Double and in my videos on the highs and lows of CEOs, I try to teach people how to leverage each of those stages.
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You don t want to avoid the stage, you re going to go through it anyway, but how do you ride it in the right way?
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I would never do a podcast if I was a crisis of meaning, I would find a way to rebook.
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I will do a podcast if I m energetic and optimistic and enthusiastic because that energy is magnified.
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I would never make a decision
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in the energy state that I m in right now.
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I wouldn t make a buying decision or hire someone or spend money on advertising because it would be too overly optimistic.
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I would wait until I m a little bit more cautious, a little bit more informed pessimist to make buying decisions or hiring decisions.
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You try to teach entrepreneurs that what you feel is normal, try to identify where you are by your breathing, by what your body s telling you, by what your feelings are to know what stage you re at.
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And then how can you communicate with other entrepreneurs to tell them you re at that stage?
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And that s why groups like Camp Maverick are so powerful, because we can all hang out together and realize we re not crazy at all.
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And in your book, in Double Double, there s a whole list of things that I looked at that I basically tried to memorize at the time with the roller coaster.
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For example, when you re in that really energetic stage, you want to be doing things like media, sales, you want to be doing
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Things that require you to go up and speak or train.
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Like you said, spending money and things like that.
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You don t want that to happen while you re jazzed up.
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Basically, you don t want your energy to take you too far over the line and make a regrettable decision.
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That s kind of performance mode.
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And when you re in the informed pessimism, that s when you can make the decisions that require longer term strategy because if anything, you re gonna err on the side of caution.
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Yeah, exactly right.
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So you think about all the classic stories that we heard about the early stage internet companies back in 97, 98, you know, pets.com spending a million dollars on the Super Bowl ad.
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That s clearly uninformed optimism.
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Like somebody needed to slow down and look at the plan and analyze the numbers and just say, pause.
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You know, I had a franchisee one time at 1-800-GOT-CHUNK.
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He called me on his third day of running the business and he was super excited because he just hired three people.
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I was like, wow, what s your budget say?
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And he goes, I m supposed to have one.
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And he s like, oh, damn, I ve overhired because he knew he now couldn t afford to have these people.
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He called me the next day.
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He goes, I ve got some good news and some bad news.
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The good news is two of my people hit quit.
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The bad news is two of them quit.
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The good news is I m back on budget.
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The reality is we often make decisions when we re at the wrong stage or we work on the wrong things.
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When we re at crisis of meaning, we need to get coaching.
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You need to take a breather.
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You need to get out of the office.
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You can t work.
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You need to be okay with plugging yourself in.
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Nobody that I know gets upset or worries about plugging in their iPhone.
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Why do we get upset or worry about plugging ourselves back in?
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Why can t we take a break?
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and we need to be okay with taking a break.
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More than ever, we need to be able to unplug.
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Put your damn iPhone downstairs.
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Don t bring it to your bedside.
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Take the weekend off without reading business books and business periodicals and without working on work.
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The reality is you re never going to get it all done.
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The list will always grow, will always set new goals, will always add more to it.
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You need to take the time for your family, for your friends, for your health, for your sleep, to be able to recharge your battery.
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And that s how you get through crisis.
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The meaning is not by burning the candle at both ends.
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That s really good advice.
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I think a lot of us think that we have to do that, especially if we think we re supposed to be even keel all the time.
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If you don t realize the roller coaster exists, you think, but two weeks ago I was thinking this.
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Oh man, you know, I was way off.
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Things are, this is the reality, right?
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This is how it s going to be forever.
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This is why it s so important that we teach our spouses
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About this concept it s why it s important we teach our employees about the roller coaster it s why important that we teach our kids about the roller coasters they re all kind of silently strapped to our backs and they think we re crazy.
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They see us going through the highs and lows you know tuesday afternoon you think you re gonna take over the world and by dinner you think you re going bankrupt and wednesday morning you re sure that everything s ok.
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Of course, your spouse is going to think you re nuts.
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But the reality is when you teach them this Heisman as a CEO is all of a sudden they go, Oh, you re not nuts.
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You re simply at this uninformed optimism today, which means tomorrow you ll probably be an informed pessimism and Wednesday will probably be a crisis meeting.
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That s cool.
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And then all of a sudden they know to just help you get through it.
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And that s why entrepreneurs understand other entrepreneurs, but the classic doctors, lawyers, teachers, the rest of the world thinks we re odd.
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We re supposed to be different.
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Does the curve stretch out over days or weeks or months or does it vary?
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Yes.
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It s a long curve that goes on through the life cycle of being an entrepreneur.
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And then you can have smaller curves that happen weekly, daily, monthly, hourly.
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a great call this morning and then all of a sudden I got off and I was pissed off and then I was back on your call again and I got the energy again.
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Now I looked at my calendar and realized I ve got work to do that, you know, I got to crank out by the end of the day and I m stressed again.
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So you go through that natural curve, but it s magnified because of the stress that we re under.
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Excellent.
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Well, thanks.
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Speaking of getting back to work, is there anything that I haven t asked you that you want to make sure you convey to the AOC fans?
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Yeah, I think at the end of the day, we have to remember one thing.
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And I ll give you a story about Ronald Reagan and Gorbachev.
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We re meeting 30 years ago, the President of the United States and the President of the Soviet Union.
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They were having an all day summit meeting and they were working out the problems.
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And throughout the day, people kept coming in running and screaming and yelling and Gorbachev would laugh and smile and say, remember rule number six.
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And Reagan kept hearing this, you know, remember rule number six.
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At the end of the meetings, he said, you know, I need to ask you something.
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What s rule number six?
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Gorbachev laughed.
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He said, rule number six is don t take yourself so f-ing seriously.
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And Reagan laughed and he said, well, what are the first five rules?
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Gorbachev said there aren t any.
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And I think that s the important thing we all need to remember is none of us are getting out of this alive.
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This is simply what we do to make money.
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And we need to remember to try to have fun and to ride the roller coaster with our hands in the air and wave them and have a good time because we re going to ride the roller coaster.
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But you may as well have fun while you do it.
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Excellent, thank you so much, Cameron Harreld, CameronHarreld.com, is that where you want us to send people, by the way?
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Yeah, CameronHarreld.com is where they can get copies of the videos, and then Amazon, Audible, and iTunes is where they can get copies of Double Double.
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And we ll have that linked in the show notes as well.
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Thank you so much, great stuff.
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Jordan, thanks for having me.
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Good stuff.
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I know a lot of men and women that are hardwired entrepreneurs.
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I don t know, Jason, I meant to ask you earlier, do you feel like you fit those characteristics, or kind of not really, because you re sort of entrepreneurial, but not totally?
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I ve started and sold several businesses, so I m on the spectrum big time.
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You re on the spectrum big time?
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Yeah, I feel like now you re kind of like, you know, you re working with Art of Charm.
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You can t even work here if you re not a little bit messed up.
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Oh no, man, you have to be a hustler to work here.
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You gotta be mover and shaker.
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Yeah, or at least be able to deal with people who are completely all over the place, and you really gotta be wired like us.
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Otherwise, nothing we do makes any sense.
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I love this episode as well, not just because of the roller coaster, but because of the idea that business can be simple.
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I ve spent a lot of years overthinking stuff and then kind of going back to it, and it seems like I do that a lot.
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You know, oh, I can t do this because this has to be that way.
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And whenever we do something that works, it tends to be the simplest way to do it.
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What is that, Occam s razor?
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The simplest explanation seems to be the right one.
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It s kind of like applying that to business almost in a lot of ways.
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I hope you all enjoyed that.
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Show feedback and guest suggestions.
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The show s a fanarchy, it s run by you.
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We rely on you to help keep our finger on the pulse, so if you know someone who s a good fit for us, let us know, guests at theartofcharm.com.
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And if you enjoyed that, don t forget to thank Cameron on Twitter, we ll have that linked in the show notes, as well as his book, Double Double, and his website if you want to book him for speaking or something like that.
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You can tap our album art in most mobile podcast players to see the show notes right on your phone.
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I m also on Twitter, at theartofcharm, you can engage with me there.
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Bootcamp details, bootcamp.theartofcharm.com.
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Remember, we re sold out a few months in advance.
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Get in touch ASAP, plan ahead, subscribe and review in iTunes, and don t forget the Art of Charm Challenge.
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Theartofcharm.com slash challenge or text charmed.
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to 33444.
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Special thanks to the Jasons for their help in production of the Art of Charm podcast.
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Go ahead, tell your friends, because the greatest compliment you can give us is a referral to someone else, either in person or shared on the web.
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Now have a great week, and leave everything and everyone better than you found them.
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Thanks for listening to the Art of Charm.
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Get more confidence, relationship skills, life hacks, and more at theartofcharmpodcast.com.