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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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Today we re talking with Bert Jacobs.
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He s the co-founder and CEO of the Life is Good company.
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You ve seen that little smiley guy logo everywhere.
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Spreads the power of optimism through inspiring art, a passionate community, and groundbreaking non-profit work.
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He s also the co-author of the recently published Life is Good, the book.
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Why is optimism so important?
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We ll find out about that today.
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And how did Bert and his brother turn a t-shirt company that operated from a van into a nine-figure business celebrating optimism?
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We re gonna talk about gratitude being one superpower unlocked by practicing optimism.
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We talk about nine more.
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And with that, welcome to the Art of Charm.
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I m your host, Jordan Harbinger.
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I m here with my producer, Jason.
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What s up?
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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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We may not have all the answers, but we definitely have all the questions.
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Now, let s talk to Burt Jacobs.
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Tell us what you do in one sentence, because you have kind of a unique path, and definitely a business that you don t normally hear about being as successful as it is.
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Sure, so I ve got a business with my brother John, and we try to spread the power of optimism.
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First of all, what s the business?
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And then we ll get to why optimism is even important in the first place.
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Well, the main product has been t-shirts.
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but I think really it s about communication with people and showing people one way or another that optimism can help their lives.
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Why is optimism important to you and why was it important to you, more importantly, when you started Life is Good?
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Well, I don t know that we knew that it was at the time, and we didn t really set out to build a business around optimism.
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But I think it was important to us when we started because pessimists see obstacles and optimists see opportunities.
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So entrepreneurship, you know, almost by definition, is optimistic.
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You have to try to see things, especially when they re not totally clear or not totally obvious.
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Otherwise, you re not going to develop anything that has a point of difference.
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But how did you start the business not necessarily knowing that then?
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I mean, was it just like, hey, we gotta eat, why don t we start selling T-shirts?
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I mean, walk me through the process a little bit in the beginning.
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Yeah, I mean, it was kind of like that.
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I think we were trying to avoid getting a job.
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I think we just got out of school, and it just didn t seem really appealing getting a job and trying to climb the ladder.
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And I don t know, we just, we liked school, we liked life.
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Now we were supposed to take the next stage, and it looked like,
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we might get caught behind a desk somewhere.
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I think that was kind of scary to us.
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So I think it was an effort to avoid that.
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At the same time, we were both really involved in artwork and had been sketching and drawing our whole lives.
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I think we were intimidated by the world of fine art, which is kind of why we didn t go to art school.
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I think T-shirts was just a financially accessible way to both avoid a job and try to take a shot at making a living selling art.
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avoiding a job, now you re the CEO of Life is Good Company, which is nine figures.
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Do you feel like you have a job now?
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No, definitely not.
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It s many things, but it s not a job.
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Got it, okay.
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You know, so we were successful.
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We did what we set out to do, no job.
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No job, right.
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Just a living instead, which is great.
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Guide us through the timeline briefly, from t-shirts and the van to some of the major milestones for the company, because it s not just
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shirts selling well that get a clothing company to 100 plus million dollars.
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It s just not.
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Yeah, that s true, but it was a lot of it for us.
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A few stages.
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The first six years was not life is good, was any and all art styles, any messages that we thought some of them would be very life is good, some of them not so much.
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Messages like Open Your Mind and messages that were more specific, like that were sold for the 4th of July or for
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St patrick s day or something like that whatever was happening or sometimes specific for college you know we were just trying to create anything that could sell so six years we really didn t have much commercial success i think that s the summary there we sold in the street in downtown boston and then we sold up and down the east coast in college dormitories we traveled in a van for a better part of that time
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Then at the tail end of that, we had this recurring conversation about how the media always focuses on what s wrong and rarely focuses on what s right.
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And we thought, well, it was a bummer of a conversation.
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Every time we had it, it kind of, you know, really just brought things down.
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And as optimists, we were upset about it.
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We were like, wow, this is almost like systematic pessimism.
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We re kind of told as members of the human race that we re failing as a team.
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That s kind of what the 6 o clock news is.
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So we talked about that over and over.
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And then this one time, we did what optimists are supposed to do.
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In the gloomy darkness of the conversation, we saw an opportunity.
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The opportunity was to create a lifestyle brand or some symbol that celebrates what s right with the world rather than what s wrong.
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So that s where the character Jake and the three words life is good came from.
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So then we made 48 t-shirts, we got out in the street and they sold.
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Not 48 different styles, but 48 shirts.
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That s what we always did in those days.
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We got one style and we printed it and we got out in the street, you know, as long as it would take to sell them.
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And sometimes selling 48 t-shirts would take you a week, you know, if you didn t have a good design.
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This took 45 minutes.
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45 minutes, we sold 48 t-shirts.
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That was a first.
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So back to the phases, it was five years I was mixing things up there.
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The second phase is six years.
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The first year is five years in the street in the band.
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Pre-life is good.
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Not much commercial success.
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Okay, I want to pause right there.
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So you spent five years touring in a van.
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I want to really highlight that because I think a lot of people now
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and whenever, probably it s not unique now, they start businesses and they re like, I ve been doing this for a year, a year and a half, two years, is it ever gonna happen?
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You were in a van for five years.
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By the way, did you guys wanna kill each other at any point during this?
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Yeah, we came pretty close a few times, you know, your siblings can push your buttons.
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And we did, we had physical fights a few times, but we got over it and back to your point about entrepreneurship,
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most people these days that approach us with ideas or look for advice or something there s so much more sophisticated than we were when we started many of them have like years of development before they made anything or sold anything
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They have focus groups over and over and they find their product or service and we always tell the same thing you know just make a move like get going because they re all more advanced than we were and i think one of the big necessary early steps to start a business is
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the idea that you re never entirely ready, forget about 80, 20, if you re 51, 49, make something, give it a shot, learn something, you know?
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And so I think we were naive enough to do that.
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Those first five years, we didn t live in the van, but we did live in the van for six weeks at a time.
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We kept an apartment in Boston, but when we were on the road, the van was our home.
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We never stayed in a hotel, and we slept in the van at night.
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People say life is good now that the business is successful but life was miserable in those days it wasn t miserable at all we had a chance to give it a shot and we re enjoying it.
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We got to visit all the college campuses on the east coast that we didn t get into it was good so what happens is.
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We sell the first life is good shirt now so i first started making t-shirts is nineteen eighty nine.
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It s now 94 and we make the first life is good shirt.
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Okay.
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That was the first time once we saw it sell on the street, that was the first time we started wholesaling.
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So for the next six years now, between 94 and 2000, we grew the business from zero to 3 million.
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We were making mistakes operationally.
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and had no idea what we were doing.
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We didn t have independent sales reps.
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The retailers were talking to each other.
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The t-shirt style was selling.
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The retailers were giving us ideas about what the character Jake could do.
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Jake started mountain biking and eating ice cream.
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Rollerblading was big at the time and you know whatever people loved we re putting that on a t-shirt the three words life is good and jake that was the beginning of the business it became a one page line sheet with a handful of characters of jake doing different things and we were taking orders and we re running it out of our apartment you know we had all the boxes piled up in the kitchen and it became a legitimate business at three million dollar business.
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Can you two thousand.
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That kind of ends the second stage because these guys paid us a visit and they wanted to buy the company.
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We weren t interested in selling and we said no.
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But then they offered to license the brand and so we said okay.
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Okay, how would that work?
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Well, the way that would work is my brother and I continue designing and they handle the operation and everything else.
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They handle sales, they handle finance, they handle everything.
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And these guys had been around the block and they d been through some great growth with other t-shirt concepts.
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So we did it.
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Between 2000 and 2004, just focusing on the creative and letting them handle everything else, we grew from three million to 40 million.
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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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Listen to Ways to Win wherever you get your podcasts.
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How did that happen?
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Because that s a huge jump.
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I mean, first of all, going from $78.50 t-shirts in the van to three million, that s big.
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I get it, you got into retailers, they sold well, you got industrial printing, but three million to 40 million, that s like, t-shirts existed at this point, they weren t new.
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So you usually see this kind of growth.
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It s like, this is the kind of growth you see when they re like, hey, you know, you can check your email on your phone now.
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That s the kind of thing that sells for,
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that kind of money in that day.
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That s a huge leap.
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You re right, so it s sharp growth.
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You know, to be candid about it, my brother and I weren t close to the operation.
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We were in Boston and we were designing t-shirts.
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The guys running the operation were in Southern New Hampshire.
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They had a previous business that became Pro Player and Fruit of the Loom bought them, and they had seen a lot of growth.
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So they kind of had the muscle and the experience to be aggressive.
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So they were aggressive.
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So what happened was they had a third party that was a network of sales reps all over the country.
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And what worked in New England and up and down the East coast worked on the West coast, worked in the Midwest.
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And so it was just like virgin territory everywhere.
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And you know, there was no other kind of optimistic brand out there.
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If I think what was out there, what was more popular was brands like, do you remember no fear?
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Yeah, I remember that.
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I had some no fear gear.
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Yeah, it was like, you know, kind of edgy and sort of like I jump off the cliff and land on my face and I have no fear.
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And that type of line was very popular.
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There was a lot of similar lines like that.
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And then you had the big athletic brands like Nike and Adidas and Reebok.
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But there was nobody that was doing something similar to what we were doing.
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So it was different.
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It was novel.
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It was appealing to college age kids, but it was also appealing to like mom and dad.
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And then we developed a kid s line and that was easy.
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We would look around the world and poke fun at things.
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And when mobile phones first came out, you know, we drew a picture of a mountain bike and wrote mobile device.
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We drew a fishing rod and wrote handheld device.
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You know, it was just simple puns.
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It s a little bit resistant.
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Right, I mean, it s like, it s a little bit like, ah, we don t need that crap, we got real life over here.
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And I remember no fear, I remember hiding from girls in middle school wearing my no fear T-shirt.
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Ironically.
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It sounds a little resistant, it sounds like, look, you don t need this, you got real life, you got real hobbies, and it sort of stays in line with maybe some of the other values that you had.
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I don t want to impute these to you, but you know, being present, being real.
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Yeah, simplicity is a big one, authenticity, you know, these things.
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And when we got on something,
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we would kind of like read the greats, you know, what did da Vinci say about it, et cetera.
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And then since you can t really put all that Einstein and da Vinci necessarily, I suppose you can, but a lot of that is too much, then we would kind of distill it.
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We d say, okay, what s been said about this subject.
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And then we would make something that was more digestible, really simple.
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And for, you know, regular people like us, I think that was another thing that was, uh,
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appealing and still is about the brand.
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It s for anybody, really, and it s not overly sophisticated and it s not for world-class athletes.
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It s really for somebody that likes to garden.
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It s for somebody who likes to climb mountains.
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It s for somebody who likes to just have a laugh.
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And it s all of the age-old wisdom, you know, the little things are the big things.
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We grasped hold of those kind of things.
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The big focus of ours was to try to be timeless.
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Do not be just attached to trends and if you think about the basis of life is good it s the idea that human beings are powerful and whatever we focus on growth so let s focus on the good things it doesn t ignore that bad things happen and challenges happen in the world but rather it makes a statement that the best way to overcome
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obstacles is to focus on opportunities and gratitude is one of these values gratitude is really powerful so you know what s in our lifetime one of the most popular bands who maybe invented the genre of
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jam bands is the Grateful Dead.
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So we made a t-shirt that says Grateful Dad.
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It s been our best-selling Father s Day t-shirt for a long time.
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There s always something fun to do with it.
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But essentially, Grateful Dad speaks to a lot of dads out there.
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They know life s not easy, having a family s not easy and everything, but they re happy.
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If their family s got enough to eat and they can have a barbecue in the backyard, then life is good.
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Not rocket science, you know, simple.
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I mean, take something like dogs.
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Dogs became a big part of Life is Good.
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I don t know that we had that figured out.
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We just saw that it connected as soon as we made a t-shirt that had a dog on it.
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There was a community of people that were optimists, and they came and led to slogans like, be the person your dog thinks you are.
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It s about authenticity, once again, but it appeals to a dog owner.
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Not rocket science.
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Now, I wanna go back a little bit.
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First of all, you re the youngest of six.
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What did your family say when you started your business?
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Because at that point, you probably had brothers and sisters who were like, get a frickin  job already, dude.
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Not the way our family is, actually.
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We were really lucky that way.
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Nobody discouraged us.
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Everybody kinda said, you know, cool, give it a shot.
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four older brothers and sisters that were recently out of college themselves and on different career paths.
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And then our dad worked in a machine shop his whole life and was a smart guy, but not college educated.
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And he never discouraged us.
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He encouraged us, actually.
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And our mom was
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really the influence on not just the optimism, but also on getting involved in art.
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She d shut the TV off as kids and encourage us to create our own stories and world.
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I think that very much led us to this path of starting to design t-shirts.
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So we didn t get that discouragement.
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In fact, even when we weren t having success, nobody in our family discouraged us.
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A lot of friends and people we bumped into would say those things, come on, you guys went to college, get a real job.
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When is this t-shirt thing, when is enough enough?
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They d see us in the street and we d be a little rough around the edges and they d politely or impolitely say, get a job.
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But we didn t really get that from our family.
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Our family is not traditional path people, so they were open-minded about it.
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This makes sense and I guess it may be easier for people who come from a more open environment.
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First I want to start with or get to some of the
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10 key superpowers that you talk about in the book, namely openness, courage, simplicity, humor, gratitude, fun, compassion, creativity, authenticity, and love.
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Did I leave anything out?
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No, that s it, you got them.
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To what extent
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were these superpowers clear to slash accessible to you before you were successful?
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Because what I m trying to avoid here, and I m sure you ve got this covered, is that 20-20 hindsight is so easy to confuse with foresight, especially when you re successful, and especially when people don t necessarily know how to explain their success.
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They re often like, uh, follow your passion, and it s like, that s a bunch of BS.
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So I m not saying that your superpowers are BS, I just want to know to what extent were you like, okay, we believe in these 10 ideas,
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Yeah, to an extent of almost like 0.001%.
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We weren t focused on those as the ingredients.
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We actually were stumbling into those things and realizing that they were important to us.
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One thing we did very well from the beginning of the business is we kind of enabled our consumers to co-author the story with us.
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So we really listened to people.
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We didn t have all the answers.
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We didn t know where Life is Good was going.
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But when we heard things that resonated with us, our ears would light up for more of that.
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And we d say, OK, how many other people feel like that?
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And all of a sudden, something would start working.
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The idea of gratitude being a superpower to us
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Really came from our customers it really came from people who wrote us letters who are going through very difficult things in their lives we talked about it over and over so why are these life is good people people going through chemotherapy people been in car accident people born with one leg you know why are they life is good and we came to this conclusion that you know you make a good point in hindsight it s obvious
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At the time, we couldn t figure it out.
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But you get enough of these letters, you figured it out.
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So what we figured out is that people who face the most adversity, the most difficult things in life, they never take life for granted.
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When you go through chemo and you make it and you come out the other end, you never take a day for granted.
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When you ve been in the hospital and you re eating through a tube, a sandwich isn t just a sandwich anymore.
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You know, if you and I had a sandwich today, we might say, ah, it s just a sandwich.
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But when you ve been really challenged in some way, there s a richness that comes to life and all the little things seem magic to you.
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So we started taking lessons from people who really face some difficult things.
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You know, that s a good example, the gratitude thing.
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Another thing we learned from our customers was we tried all kinds of different designs.
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Some of them were very complex.
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They never sold well.
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It was the simplest ones that we could make.
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Just Jake with an ice cream cone in his hand, sold like mad.
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We try to do a complex scene of a mountain and, you know, skiers and the latest equipment and all that kind of stuff.
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Nobody bought into it.
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The world is was and is even now more so busy with the information and visuals.
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So simple things calm people down.
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Simple things bring us nostalgic joy.
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We actually all crave simplicity.
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You know, Da Vinci did say it the right way.
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Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.
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So, we started focusing on simplicity and realized, you know, the more things with our company and with the images that we can make simple, the better.
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Through the years, it was a gradual process.
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And it s only in recent years that we kind of laid them all out and said, okay, we have 10, no more, no less.
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i wish it was nine or eleven cuz ten sounds like a little too formulaic but that s what it ended up being we didn t take some value that now and then showed up we only looked across the years that things that we hit over and over and things that are timeless values things that
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you re great great great grandparents used to live happy and fulfilling lives and things that you re great great great grandchildren will be able to use creativity gratitude a sense of humor the sense of humor showed up in a lot of ways on the early shirts but i remember one place we talked about it with my brother was
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We used to be scared to death and we probably still get nervous now when we had to do a speaking engagement.
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So you do a speaking engagement and we realize that if in the first 30 seconds we can make that audience laugh, you got a crowd of whether it s 500 people or 5,000 people, it s a lot of people to speak in front of and you re scared.
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And you get out there, if you can make them laugh, that room gets real small in a hurry.
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There s no connector like a sense of humor.
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There s no social lubricant.
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Like a laugh when you re laughing together so it s powerful and each of the superpowers the ten values that we call superpowers each one of them is something we kept seeing over and over and thought okay that s why this is working.
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The way we look at it sometimes, we didn t invent anything.
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All we re doing is reminding people of the most important things in the world, and those things are really powerful, not just in good times, but in bad times.
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I would say especially in bad times, and it sounds like, forgive me if I m oversimplifying, it sounds like you listened
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really intently to your consumers, but not only that, you listened intently and read between the lines.
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And I think that s a difference that a lot of business owners don t do, is they either listen to the wrong customers, or they don t read between the lines and they think, okay, we re just gonna take everything that people say and tally it up this way.
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SPEAKER_00
But it sounds like you looked for
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And again, I could be completely jumping to conclusions here, but it sounds like you looked for the important themes in the letters that you were getting and in the feedback that you were getting and probably had to discard a bunch of stuff where it was like, oh, this design s not colorful enough.
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You ll sell more if it s colored more.
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And then you get another letter that says, this got me through this really tough time.
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You parsed it that way.
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You re right, you re right.
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But I think that s a big piece of it and giving us
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information and stories and things.
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There were also influences that had kind of built up in our entire lives.
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So we love stories and we love movies and we love books and film and music.
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And so looking at our favorite lyrics and our favorite bands, they often tell stories, you know.
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So we would go from
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emerson and thoreau or shakespeare to dr seuss to led zeppelin to the grateful dead and we would sort of say what are they saying here and sure enough the same values would pop up
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we would look at something and say, okay, you know, Dr. Seuss is teaching about compassion here.
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That s really cool.
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Are we hearing any of that?
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The importance of compassion from our customers?
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Yes.
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And then we connect the dots with the film that we saw and, you know, realize that, you know, piecing these things together, if we keep driving at those things, we re not so different than most people out there.
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And it s not about us.
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It s about the receivers of the message, you know?
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Now, no more excuses, let s get back to Bert.
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SPEAKER_00
Yeah, it s about the audience.
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SPEAKER_00
I 100% agree with that.
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Your audience slash customers, my literal audience.
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SPEAKER_00
I gotta wonder though, and don t take this the wrong way, because it might come across a little bit insulting, but at some point, are you just hitting so much success that the message starts to become,
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SPEAKER_00
Well, it could go one of two ways.
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SPEAKER_00
It could be a little bit less important because you re just like, man, we re selling $100 million worth of T-shirts, mission accomplished, let s go get a pizza, or is it like, great, we re selling $100 million worth of T-shirts, let s just focus on the message because we got the underwear Fruit of the Loom guys doing all the heavy lifting.
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SPEAKER_01
Yeah.
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So where we got in the phases, we got through the first phase of five years in the band.
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The next phase is six years where it was zero to 3 million on our own.
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SPEAKER_01
The next phase was year 2000 to 2004 was zero to 40 million, right?
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In 2004, we bought back the license and we bought that company because we were getting a pretty good royalty at the time.
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We didn t have the money to do it.
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We borrowed $26.5 million, $10 million for inventory, and $16 million to buy out of the license and buy their company.
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So we went in the hole in 2004.
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Luckily, we then grew between 2004 and today from $40 million to over $100 million.
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So while that s a big story for us, and a $100 million company is a success when you had
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you know, $78 when we started in the street.
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SPEAKER_01
$100 million company is not an enormous company.
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It s a medium sized company.
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So there s a lot of people out there.
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I think there s something like 30% awareness of our brand in America.
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So we want to be a global brand.
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And so we ve got a long way to go.
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And we re only really in mostly one product category.
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So there s a lot of places to go.
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SPEAKER_01
I think your question about does it get tired after a while does a message you know just a message is three simple words.
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That depends to be candid about this too i think we made the brand tired a little bit and now we re finding out ways to.
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really bring back the magic.
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SPEAKER_01
So why do I say it went tired?
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It s still been very successful commercially, but I don t think we ve been brave enough artistically.
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SPEAKER_01
I think we got kind of a formula working with Jake and his dog Rocket, and the retailers wanted Jake and Rocket doing everything under the sun, so we became more of a production house for all of that.
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SPEAKER_01
It s been successful, and I m not knocking that.
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But I think we can be so much more.
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So we re in the process, my brother and I have just actually taken over the creative process at Life is Good.
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It was like a reverse mutiny two weeks ago.
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And we re going to bring a lot of new art styles and a lot of new looks.
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and we re enabling our creative team to do a lot of fun, new things.
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And we re gonna take a lot more chances, I think, than we have in recent years.
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SPEAKER_00
Definitely.
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In the book, you spend a lot of time talking about each superpower in each chapter, so I don t want people to be like, what the hell, you just blew through all that.
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SPEAKER_00
I was just curious because this is a lot of money that we re talking about right now, and so for a lot of people, I feel like they would either say,
3
SPEAKER_00
I m done, and drop the microphone, or they would go, great, I am so blessed now with the amount of revenue that we re doing that I don t have to do anything I don t wanna do, and that s why, by the way, you re the CEO, but you re the chief executive optimist.
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SPEAKER_00
You re not running the frickin  enterprise-level spreadsheets about inventory and how much can the truck hold, and if it leaves Chicago at 4.55 a.m., is it gonna get to blah, blah.
3
SPEAKER_00
Like, that s somebody else s job.
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SPEAKER_00
That used to kinda be your job at some level, and now you don t have to worry about it.
3
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, that s right.
3
SPEAKER_01
I mean, ultimately, as CEO, everything s your responsibility and, you know, you re accountable for those things.
3
SPEAKER_01
But I think we ve been smart through the years in hiring people that are specialists and that can do a much better job with operational things than we could do.
3
SPEAKER_00
One thing that I wanna ask you is, while working her way through art school, you told me pre-show, your mom suffered a breakdown, was committed to what s basically a mental institution, and people told her, you re never gonna live a normal life, you should not have children.
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SPEAKER_00
Why is that story important to you?
3
SPEAKER_00
Because that s a really random thing to include.
3
SPEAKER_00
Obviously it s significant for you, but why?
3
SPEAKER_01
Yeah.
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So it s significant because our mom, you know, the same person that was told she d never have a family, never have a normal life.
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SPEAKER_01
She was the influence of optimism, the biggest in our household.
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SPEAKER_01
And she was really the inspiration for life is good.
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SPEAKER_01
So like most families, we had a lot of dysfunction growing up in the house.
3
SPEAKER_01
And our mom had a ritual at the dinner table where she would simply look around at all her kids and say, tell me something good that happened today.
3
SPEAKER_01
We probably didn t realize it at the time, but she was changing the energy in the house.
3
SPEAKER_01
There were so many things to complain about and point the finger at and argue with each other over.
3
SPEAKER_01
And she got us focused on the good things, telling stories, laughing, ripping on the funny things that happened that day.
3
SPEAKER_01
And she did it every night.
3
SPEAKER_01
And it was like,
3
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a real lesson, and it wasn t until later when we were selling t-shirts that we realized how impactful that was.
3
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So combining that with the stories of adversity from all of our customers, the lesson is that when people go through really difficult things, maybe our mom was the first example of it,
3
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They don t take anything for granted.
3
SPEAKER_01
She was grateful that she was able to have a family.
3
SPEAKER_01
She was grateful that we had a roof over our head.
3
SPEAKER_01
She always looked at the glass half full.
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So she was kind of the poster child of life is good before we had Jake.
3
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So I think the adversity she faced and the difficult things in her life earlier are important to us and important sometimes to people out there.
3
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Life s not easy and life s not perfect.
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for anybody that I know.
3
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And the most interesting people and the strongest people that you meet out there, they never have an easy background.
3
SPEAKER_01
They always have something.
3
SPEAKER_01
Every great story has villains in its past and dark things that happen.
3
SPEAKER_01
You can t have light without dark.
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SPEAKER_01
You know, all those age old elements of a great story are taken from real life and unfolding all around us all the time.
3
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So that s why I think it was important.
3
SPEAKER_01
And my mom didn t just survive those things.
3
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She thrived as a result of those things.
3
SPEAKER_01
And she unlocked our imagination and got us focused on storytelling.
3
SPEAKER_01
And when she read our stories at night, she acted out the characters and danced around the room.
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became the wolf and scared us and became the pirate and took us out in forbidden seas.
3
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And as kids, your imagination can go anywhere if there s adults around you that unlock it.
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SPEAKER_01
And she did.
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We begged for more stories.
3
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We begged.
3
SPEAKER_01
So it was another real lesson in there.
3
SPEAKER_01
So I think the influence of our mom, it really shows up in Life is Good all over the place.
3
SPEAKER_00
If this makes sense, and it seems like it s such an impactful event for her that there s kind of no way it couldn t have trickled down to you for better or for worse.
3
SPEAKER_00
It could have been completely disastrous, right?
3
SPEAKER_00
I mean, you hear stories about people whose parents have drug addiction or something like that all the time, and it s never like, yeah, so she was really fun.
3
SPEAKER_01
I don t know if you ever saw the Book of Manning.
3
SPEAKER_01
It s like an ESPN story on the Manning family.
3
SPEAKER_01
So I m from New England, I m a Patriots fan, right?
3
SPEAKER_01
We re taught to hate the Mannings, right?
3
SPEAKER_01
So I never knew much of their background.
3
SPEAKER_01
And I watched the documentary recently and like, while the documentary is probably not all that well made, the story, you can t not love these guys.
3
SPEAKER_01
Archie Manning as the father, the parallel here is that
3
SPEAKER_01
His father committed suicide.
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SPEAKER_01
He didn t have a strong relationship with his father.
3
SPEAKER_01
He came home after a football game, an Ole Miss, with his sister and his mother.
3
SPEAKER_01
And he came into the house first and saw.
3
SPEAKER_01
He ran out and told his mother and sister to go away.
3
SPEAKER_01
He went in and cleaned it all up.
3
SPEAKER_01
And it must have been a pretty traumatic situation.
3
SPEAKER_01
Well, a person can go one of two ways on that.
3
SPEAKER_01
It can ruin their life and eat them alive.
3
SPEAKER_01
or they can get empowered by it.
3
SPEAKER_01
So in the story, you learn that he made a determination that he was going to be the greatest father he could possibly be.
3
SPEAKER_01
And he dedicated his life to that more than football.
3
SPEAKER_01
It was more important.
3
SPEAKER_01
I thought that was just really incredible.
3
SPEAKER_01
And, you know, of course, his sons go on to have great football careers and everything.
3
SPEAKER_01
But
3
SPEAKER_01
More importantly, when you look behind the scenes, they re great people.
3
SPEAKER_01
If you had more athletes today that had their values in order and made decisions like Archie Manning did to just be a great dad, like that was enough.
3
SPEAKER_01
We d be in a lot better shape, you know?
3
SPEAKER_01
So I think that you make a decision with everything in your life, how are you going to handle it, you know?
3
SPEAKER_01
And what you re going to focus on, are you going to focus on the problems in your life
3
SPEAKER_01
or you re going to focus on the good things, and whichever you choose to do, those are the things that are going to grow.
3
SPEAKER_00
Now, some of the practical things that we ve talked about pre-show, when you wake up, decide to grow the good in your life, things like that, I mean, these are not necessarily brand new practical exercises, but it is interesting because there s so many people that say that, but they re usually broke slash don t have anything happening.
3
SPEAKER_00
How can you look back and say, look, this is something that s been so important in my life, this has been instrumental to the growth of the company?
3
SPEAKER_00
I mean, you come from a place of such credibility that we can t really brush these types of things under the carpet at this point.
3
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, there s probably a million techniques and thoughts about how to be happy or, you know, how to have a fulfilling career or whatever.
3
SPEAKER_01
You know, I said before, I don t think we ve really invented anything.
3
SPEAKER_01
We just remind people of the most important things.
3
SPEAKER_01
And I think it s empowering for a person who has a lot of anxiety.
3
SPEAKER_01
A lot of people have anxiety.
3
SPEAKER_01
A lot of people have a lot of stress.
3
SPEAKER_01
If you pause for three minutes
3
SPEAKER_01
in your morning and say what s good that s happening in my life well that may be something you ve heard before but have you practiced it because when you look at somebody and they can hit 30 file shots in a row most people go that guy s a good file shooter well that s not the story the story is he practiced file shots so you actually have to practice optimism
3
SPEAKER_01
You actually have to wake up and say, I m going to try to be more optimistic today.
3
SPEAKER_01
So it s second nature to us because we ve consciously been focused on optimism for 26 years now.
3
SPEAKER_01
It s really practice you can say it s cliche difficult things happen today difficult things are always gonna happen what you learn over time if you practice optimism is that the thing that enables happiness and fulfillment isn t what you have and it isn t where you are it s your disposition.
3
SPEAKER_01
It s actually your view of what s happening.
3
SPEAKER_01
They say when you walk into a room, nobody has the same experience because what you see and what you hear in the room, right, combines with all of your life experiences.
3
SPEAKER_01
So it s yours.
3
SPEAKER_01
And so what happens in that room is actually based on your disposition, your view, everything that, you know, you ve thought about the rest of your life.
3
SPEAKER_01
That s why when we read a book,
4
SPEAKER_00
And then we go to the movies, and even if the director does a great job, we say, ah, he didn t really do it the way it was supposed to be done.
4
SPEAKER_00
Because your mind filled in all of these things while you read the book, all of these images that are based on your own experiences.
4
SPEAKER_00
It may sound cliche, and it may have been said,
4
SPEAKER_00
thousands of times before, it works, but only if you practice it.
4
SPEAKER_02
Yeah, that s why gratitude becomes a habit instead of a task slash an idea, right?
4
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, maybe it s one thing that s helpful for listeners is that the idea that optimism isn t really a philosophy, it s a pragmatic strategy for approaching life.
4
SPEAKER_00
Sometimes optimism s looked at as a soft thing.
4
SPEAKER_00
It s not a soft thing, it s actually really pragmatic, it s really strategic.
4
SPEAKER_00
And when you start breaking it down you can see that when you re more optimistic you tend to pick your head up you tend to see more you tend to become more attractive people wanna be around you more all of these things cause momentum.
4
SPEAKER_02
Interesting guy.
4
SPEAKER_02
The fact that you can sell that much clothing to generate that kind of revenue is still kind of mind-blowing.
4
SPEAKER_02
It s pretty mind-boggling, isn t it?
4
SPEAKER_02
It is, and the fact that they just sold it out of a van, I mean, there s obviously more to the story that s in the book, but at the end of the day, there s no way to get around that level of impressive sales.
4
SPEAKER_01
It s a bunch of optimism and grit.
4
SPEAKER_02
It really is.
4
SPEAKER_02
Optimism and grit, and for a guy to be super kind of down-to-earth about it and not be a little bit head in the clouds is kind of impressive.
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SPEAKER_02
I ll throw it that way.
4
SPEAKER_02
I don t know how many people can handle that level of success and still stay normal.
4
SPEAKER_02
If you enjoyed this one, don t forget to thank Bert on Twitter.
4
SPEAKER_02
We ll have that linked in the show notes, as well as his book mentioned on the show, as well as the other resources.
4
SPEAKER_02
You can tap the album art in your mobile podcast player, click the little screen, and we ll link to the show notes right on your phone.
4
SPEAKER_02
I m also on Twitter, at The Art of Charm.
4
SPEAKER_02
You can also find our amazing sponsors in the show notes or go to theartofcharm.com slash advertisers and I wholeheartedly encourage you to join our social capital challenge at theartofcharm.com slash challenge or text charmed to 33444.
4
SPEAKER_02
That s C-H-A-R-M-E-D to 33444.
4
SPEAKER_02
It s all about networking and connection skills, inspiring people to build a professional relationship or a personal relationship with you
4
SPEAKER_02
We ll also email you our Fundamentals Toolbox that covers all those topics like body language and nonverbal communication, persuasion, networking, public speaking, negotiation, and a whole lot more.
4
SPEAKER_02
I m also doing regular videos with drills and exercises to help you move forward every single week.
4
SPEAKER_02
That s theartofcharm.com slash challenge or text charmed to 33444.
4
SPEAKER_02
This episode of The Art of Charm was produced by Jason DeFillippo.
4
SPEAKER_02
Jason Sanderson is our audio engineer and editor.
4
SPEAKER_02
Show notes on the website are by Robert Fogarty.
4
SPEAKER_02
I m your host, Jordan Harbinger.
4
SPEAKER_02
Now go ahead and 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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SPEAKER_02
Now stay charming and leave everything and everyone better than you found them.
4
SPEAKER_01
Thanks for listening to the Art of Charm.
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SPEAKER_01
Get more confidence, relationship skills, life hacks, and more at theartofcharmpodcast.com.