Speaker 1The most accomplished who have actually done so much better than their parents and they're sitting on some, however you measure success, some kind of success, what they want to do is protect their children from the very things that made them amazing. Everything in modern society now is creating guardrails so our kids can't figure out life. So we are protecting them from the very pain, setback, hurt that could make them a LeBron James or could make them a Howard Schultz.
Speaker 2Welcome to the Revenue Builders Podcast, a weekly show featuring B2B sales leaders and executives hosted by five-time CRO John McMahon and force management co-founder John Kaplan, the show takes guests in the barrel, behind the scenes with the people who've been there, done that, and seen the results. Revenue Builders covers best practices for scaling and growing your business while sharing the pitfalls to avoid.
Speaker 3Today's guest is Doug Holliday, who's back with us for the next installment in our series on his book, Rethinking Success. In our last conversation, we explored humility and the art of letting go. This time, we're looking at two practices that build directly on each other, defining success and failure for yourself and inviting risk into your life. If you're just joining the series, Doug has had one of the most varied careers out there, public service, international finance, private equity, and now he's the founder of an organization called Path North, where he helps CEOs and business owners broaden their definition of success. In this conversation, we ask the question most sales leaders never stop to ask, whose scorecard are you actually playing by? And why do the sales leaders who take real risk, not reckless ones, but real ones, end up building the most? These conversations with Doug are so good. Let's take a listen. So Doug, it's so great to have you back. Today, we're going to continue. With thoughts on the incredible book that you provided, you know, the world in Rethinking Success. And we're going to talk about chapter six and seven today, which is around defining success and then failure for yourself. And also the concept of how risk plays a significant role in that. I mean, you're such an amazingly talented individual with an incredible story. You know, I don't know if I've ever asked you this, but like when you were growing up, I know what you've done. When you were growing up, how was success defined for you when you were growing up? And how did that manifest itself into what happened for you?
Speaker 1Well, it's interesting. My sister and I, if you met her, we're almost bookends. I mean, she's been in fashion with Vogue and raised her family in San Francisco. And she but she's definitely out of the box. And like me, and I think we've talked about it. We had a father who was a finance guy. He was a trained accountant, all that really in the box, but he had a creative streak. But my mother was kind of this magical, you know, visionary dreamer. And she was a dreamer. And, you know, visionary dreamer just believed that anything is possible. Every breath I took was the greatest breath anyone's ever taken in their life. So I mean, it was like having my father was very much achievement oriented, traditional way. My mother is very much unconditional. You are the greatest, smartest, best, everything. So so you had this funny kind of combination. Yeah. You know, it's it's it's the same thing. You know, we're both my sister and I were high achievers. But we also love people. And we, we understand the most important thing of life is connecting and knowing people and, and and going there. And we both always took crazy risks. Like recently, she told me that her husband freaks out over this. She went to go to the Madonna concert in San Francisco. This is typical of my sister. So she said, there's no way I'm paying $2,000 for a ticket. So she says to her husband, let's go down there in San Francisco. And I'm going to have a little sign that says I'm willing to pay $450 for a ticket. Her husband says there's no way I'm doing that. So she goes down by herself with a ticket, or with a sign and a woman comes out saying my daughter's sick, and I've got this ticket. So she sells you the ticket, they go there. My sister then was going to Italy for a month to do all her fashion stuff. And she takes women to all this couture places and all that. So the women now is one of my sister's best friends. But that's fairly typical of how she rolls. It's almost like instead of saying, you know, why shouldn't we do this? It's always why not? Well, yeah, if you want to do it, let's, let's just do it. Just show up. And it typically works. And so so that was the that was the world I grew up, grew up in. He was much harder on my older sister than me. She was kind of a math nerd, even though she's beautiful and homecoming queen in those days in college and all that. But but he would, they would work on math equations late into the 90s. And so he was kind of a math nerd, even though she was beautiful and homecoming queen in those days in college and all that. But, but he would, they would work on math equations late into the 90s. So he was kind of a math nerd, even though she was beautiful and homecoming queen in those days in college and all that. So he was kind of a math nerd, even though she was beautiful and homecoming queen in those into the night he kept saying to her you know good looks are only going to take you so far you've got to really do the work and all that he kind of thought i was a ne'er-do-well because i could i didn't have to work that hard you get pretty good grades and uh and he just felt like everything kind of broke my way and uh it frankly sometime it bothered him he says you know it's you you somehow it always turns out
Speaker 3so yeah so when when we dig into this chapter there's a theme of many of us are playing to a scoreboard we didn't choose yeah yeah and um that's deep and when i think about our audience there's a couple of themes then in this section i'd like to talk about first of all that scoreboard you didn't choose like when do you realize it and my hypothesis is the earlier you realize it the better life you'll have and so many of the the leaders that i spend time with i ask them a simple question about what's your exit strategy and it's a simple question if it's an entrepreneur if it's a business owner it's a you know you'd expect them to have yeah exit strategy and i'm amazed at how many people don't have an answer so they're in a race and none of us are really built that way if we were if we said to ourselves no you know i'm competitive i know what the start line is i know what the finish line is i know what the metrics are i know but when you ask them that question as it relates to kind of like your life yeah exactly why is that doug why why is the why do we seem to be running at a scoreboard we didn't choose
Speaker 1yeah i mean i i think you raise a great point point and i i've seen that up close and personal with so many of the leaders that that i've interacted with that they they have been successful i i contrast the difference between the how and the why yeah the how is all these things that are metric oriented and they're they're easy for men to understand okay you you work hard you make the team you do work harder you do better on the team you know it just seems like it it works that way most of the times but the problem is when the how keeps succeeding and then you we all get to a point where that how stops and you've got to then ask the awkward question of why what's my why and we have never been trained in the why we now we used to be when you look at for example in liberal arts colleges up until probably the early 50s liberal arts college the most important thing that went on was the last day for seniors where the president of the college would would deliver something they called the last lecture in the last lecture the the president of school felt like it was his job to say okay we've we've equipped you with the technical things to succeed in the way the world is going to work and i think that's a really important thing to think that's a really important thing to think that's a really important thing to think that that is going to serve life up for you think that's a really important thing to think that that is going to serve life up for you but that's not the most important thing but that's not the most important thing but that's not the most important thing it's the kind of person you become it's it's the kind of person you become it's it's the kind of person you become it's your why it's your purpose in life and your why it's your purpose in life and your why it's your purpose in life and all that they used to do that because all that they used to do that because all that they used to do that because they saw the integration this is why they saw the integration this is why Most of us that grew up in a certain era, when you went to college, I went to Chapel Hill, the first two years of college were all about broadening your view of life. So you had a larger aperture. So in other words, you take languages, you take philosophy, you take English literature, you take history. Now, I teach at Georgetown. What do you do? You apply to the business school. You apply to the School of Foreign Service. So day one at 18, you're supposed to know what you're supposed to do with your life. And you're taking business courses. The messiness of having, the only school I know that still does what Chapel Hill did when I was there is Columbia University. The first two years, you still have to take what they call the core curriculum because they feel like to be a good leader in anything, you've got to be grounded in certain traditional ways of thinking about your why. So it's not surprising that people are confused because eventually we get to that point. And I have this New Yorker cartoon with this guy on his deathbed with all these wires hooked up to him and tubes. And he's looking over at the nurse and he says, I should have bought more crap. Of course, no one's going to say that. But no one prepares you for how should I think about this last chapter? What does that look like? There's a great book I read in the 90s called Die Broke, and it was really interesting. It was a financial planner in New York City who always puzzled, I'm dealing with the most wealthiest people in the world, and none of them feel like they have enough. and the reason was they never calculated they were going to die so he would go to see them so a guy 75 says okay when do you think you're going to die i don't know 85 95 okay let's let's let's do it crazy let's say 95 okay 95 great now let's work backwards there's no way you can spend all this money so why don't you figure out how to die broke in other words bless the people that have blessed you that that tutor that you had that sixth grade teacher that that your kids instead of leaving themselves great memories go on great vacations with them you know empower them now while you can work with them so it was it was a very interesting thing because he felt like um the the reason they never really dealt with this because most people were in fantasy land that they're never going to die and they just kept thinking and thing and it was like so once he they had the courage to put a number on that then you said okay you got 15 more years what do you want to do with those 15 so they are
Speaker 3unbelievable well i you're hitting a real chord for me i just read a book by jimmy johnson i wasn't expecting to i don't know how it popped up on my kindle jimmy johnson the coach yeah for dallas dallas and in miami and i wasn't really a big fan of his and like i was watching him i found his book so profound because this lesson that you just shared with us he calls it qt uh qtl quality time left yeah if you remember he abruptly left yeah yeah he abruptly left the dallas cowboys and then he did what i think he came back and he coached the miami dolphins i think and wayne heisinger had a huge impact on him it's actually his boss that introduced him to qtl and he could tell that jimmy johnson had no plan and it was really around the concept of death like the concept of death he didn't he never went to a funeral his entire life the first funeral he went to was his mother's and he was wrecked by it and he was probably in his probably in his 60s or 50s and he was wrecked by the and i just you know so q2 qtl i actually have it written down on my desk now it's profound for me because i'm 63 years old and although i feel blessed because of some circumstances in my life i don't really feel like i'm going to be able to do anything anymore used to badly but i don't fear death anymore but the concept of quality time left oh yeah would i really be doing this johnny and i talk about in this podcast one of the reasons why we continue to do this because we like spending time together we love spending time with you yeah yeah we're gonna spend time yeah so quality time left is is something of a real really
Speaker 1important i take it another step i'm i'm shocked that how many people have not with their children had these kind of conversations so i have i just came back from three days with my two oldest boys we do this every year where we just go through everything it's an inventory i i wanted to know i don't want any surprises you know i i've done things like okay let's drill down on everything from a medical directive i don't want a team doing this guys my older son's making decisions you can give your points of view but the last thing we need is to have a debate about well there's going to be a new medical advance so don't pull the plug on that i said you guys need to i've had a great life we don't need to do anything crazy so we have these kind of conversations about everything and it's it's not like a depressing conversation it's kind of liberating i want them to know uh how i think what as long as it's
Speaker 3healthy like so you're talking to a guy that used to carry eight names in his wallet so if he died my wife didn't have to search for friends oh god he was going to carry me as a pallbearer and that was just you know yeah that was my own anxiety of if i don't have eight friends you've got to search around for eight friends at the end of my life that's a true story yeah
Speaker 1that wasn't healthy
Speaker 3the
Speaker 1tragedy is they have this thing now where people have to actually hire pallbearers because they don't have any friends see i was in my time it's unbelievable it's it's these things are just so crazy and uh but i think there's a fear of it it's almost like um you know the death thing's a part of it it's almost like the things that brought you meaning so you think about particularly for men that worked the closest thing they had the most uh authentic relationships was in the workplace so all of a sudden that goes away they don't know how to do it so i i tell my class this fictitious story i said okay so so bob's wife died two months ago so you know they've been married a long time so i say to my wife hey i'm gonna go play golf with bob today oh that's fantastic i'm so glad you're gonna spend that time with bob so i'd go play golf with bob and i'd go play golf with bob and i'd go play golf with bob and uh it's a beautiful day so i come back my wife so how'd it go oh great beautiful day oh my gosh we had the best time at the club and saw some old friends um well how's bob doing what do you mean how's bob doing his frickin this is your best friend his frickin wife died two months ago oh it never came up now every man knows exactly what i'm saying and every woman would be this idea of a woman spending four hours with their best friend and never discussing the fact that their spouse died is like an unconscionable to them but for men that's dangerous territory i might have said to bob you okay yeah i'm good you good great that's about as far as we get
Speaker 4now i want to talk to cap about some of those things but when he's always in the woods searching for his guy those conversations just
Speaker 3so doug you pick people to play golf with that are going to build you up and not me so terrible
Speaker 1okay but no but they're
Speaker 3going to support you and john's just hurtful so i don't know where i don't know where that comes in in your chapters is it
Speaker 1just well we'll we'll put him on the spot and say what is it about you that max you've got to
Speaker 4win no let's let's switch gears a little bit in your book you do talk about this landmark study that was at boston college by a researcher i think her name was karen arnold and she wrote a book lives of promise where she tracked 81 high school valedictorians for 14 years after their graduation to see how their academic success translated to success later in life right yeah very well but they were very competent they worked hard but none of the valedictorians grew to become very successful in their fields and you might ask why and what the book said is that valedictorians typically succeed by playing it safe, you know, conforming to expectations and prioritizing, you know, high grades and test scores over, you know, any like passionate success in any one area, right? So they kind of, they're generalists and they basically are trying to please every teacher across all these different subjects. But in the real world, success often rewards deep specialization and risk-taking that versus broad, you know, compliance and pleasing everybody, right?
Speaker 1Now, you've articulated it so, so beautifully, Mac. That's exactly the thing. It's the very thing our parents, everyone celebrates in school, but it's the very thing that doesn't equate to success in life. You know, I remember talking to a guy who's a billionaire I went to school with. He said, well, all you guys got great grades and I was just screwing around. Was a C-minus student and I eked out of Chapel Hill. But, you know, I was a risk taker. I built companies and did all this crazy stuff. But so, you know, we don't reward that. And I think it's a tragedy because you look at kids like you take kids high-risk neighborhoods and all. Some of these kids that have developed drug empires, for example, do you think that's the same gene that's an entrepreneur? Gene, but they haven't had an outlet for that. So so you kind of feel like if our schools did more of that celebrating entrepreneurship, risk taking, you know, trying things and that there were little things when I was in school that I would try. You know, you had theater, you had you could try to play a musical instrument and there are people there that would teach you and you just tried things you weren't going to be great at it. But it was a way to not just conform and be in that thing. Now, everything is geared to one direction. You know, in the seventh grade now, I want my kid to go to the Columbia University Summer School for Film because that'll look good on the resume. So we're teaching these kids. It's all about building resume, resume, resume. Right, right. And by the time I get them, these MBAs that are. Average age, about twenty nine, thirty two. I mean, they're kind of burnt out. They're just tired of being on this Pavlovian kind of cycle of just chasing, chasing. And they're they're feeling kind of lost and empty. And, you know, it hasn't delivered what they've done. So one of the things I ask my class sometimes that how many of you had a passion growing up that you really love and name it? Oh. I like the tap dance. Oh, I like to do creative writing. I was in musical theater. They all start naming stuff. I said, how many of you are still doing it? Maybe two or three out of 40. Why? Why? Well, I was busy chasing what's really going to equate to success. And I said, wait a minute. These things that fed your soul when you're playing the piano and you love doing that when you were 10. Didn't that feed your soul? And then I say, well, some of you vow to me that you'll re-engage with that thing you loved. Look, if you just re-engage it for an hour a week, do you think that'll make you a better version of you? I think so. So it's funny how I'll get notes back that, hey, I tried out for a musical theater part in my community. It's really a blast. And they're they're really rediscovering the things that really bring them joy. And but this. This is another thing, Mac, that's really interesting on this whole thing. So I was reading this article by a New York Times reporter who, you know, repeatedly people in Nordic countries report that the happiest people in the world, Sweden, Norway, these. So she wanted to know why she went over and spent six months there. Here's what she discovered. It was a nation of hobbyists. In other words, if you were a quilter, you didn't just quilt 30 minutes every month. You're a quilting 10 hours a week with a community of quilters. If you were an ice skater, you didn't just ice skate once a month. You ice skated a lot. So when you eventually left your company or quote unquote retired, you had a built in community. All you did is build. You did more of what you loved. Yeah. Isn't that interesting and
Speaker 3say, yeah, it's a flow state. It's identifying a flow state.
Speaker 1Yeah. And it's and we don't value that. Sometime I get frustrated with some of my European friends because, you know, I'm taking another vacation. I'm doing it. And there's a side of me that admires that there's a side of me that says, you guys don't work. You know, you I don't get it. Live. Yeah. Johnny and I have lived that. I know it. It's right. But.
Speaker 4But what they're saying is that they work to live. They don't live to.
Speaker 1Yeah. Yeah, exactly. And I I feel like I I see my two older boys who are composers and they're doing really well and doing big time compositions for the best, biggest films in the world now. But they they work nonstop. They love working. It's their joy. It's their joy. Now, in their case, their passion is what they get paid for. And that's that's not a foregone thing. I feel like some time and I've been a part of this. A lot of people have talked about live your passion. And I agree on one hand, but I think it's frustrated some people. You tell a young person who's 20, you know, live your passion. Number one, you know, his passion is. But if he says, OK, I think my passion is to do X. How do I get a job? How do I support myself? So so I've come to a different paradigm. I put two circles up. One is the things you have to do. You have to pay the rent. You have to have an apartment. You have to do all this kind of thing. Then the other circle, the things that you know make you come alive. You should pursue both. Now if you're lucky, you might they might intersect and you might get paid. For what you love. Gotcha. But it's not a foregone conclusion. And we we frustrate people. I mean, I put that quote up all the time by Mondavi says, you know, do the thing you love. You'll never work a day in your life. Well, that's wonderful for him. But there's a lot of young people have told me, Doug, I how do I do that? Where do I go to find that kind of job that I'm going to get paid for?
Speaker 4You know what? Doug is on the going back to the Boston College study is I tried to see because we have all lot of enterprise software salespeople on the podcast. And I tried to say, what's the sales version of that? And in a book named The Challenger Sale, they categorize sales pros, sales professionals as five different groups, the relationship builder, the hard worker, the lone wolf, the reactive problem. The solver and the risk taker. And then what they found out is that the risk taker wins overwhelmingly dominated performance, especially in complex enterprise software sales areas where it could take you nine months to a year to sell a deal, right? Because they were willing to assertively push back on clients and disrupt conventional thinking in order to deliver value for the client. Whereas the generalist, almost the same as that, the BC study, those people became relationship builders. You know, they were the ultimate pleaser person. Yeah. Yeah. Valedictorian. You try to keep all the teachers happy, right? Yeah. Yeah. The generalist or the pleaser was least likely to succeed. You know, that's I love that.
Speaker 1I love what you're saying. That's so interesting. And it's the very thing that probably the client doesn't want to hear. But if they try to me, that gets back to trust. Will someone trust you to take them in an uncomfortable place? Yes. Yeah. This is what we do. Sometime at Path North. I was thinking about, you know, thinking about joining you guys this morning, I was thinking about in San Francisco, we have we've had these things called salons all over the country where you have 35, 40 people for dinner. Somebody's house or a club and I'll have a speaker or something, but it's not about the speaker. It's about the questions. So in San Francisco, we had one of Mike DePete's house, the chairman and CEO of Kempton Group. And the question that night was, what would your children say is most important to you? And I tell you, it was it was uncomfortable at first. But I tell you. 30 minutes, you had some people People crying, some people feeling connected for the first time. And it was a magical night. But it all was predicated on trust. I'm going to take you to a place that's going to be uncomfortable. But trust me, you're going to be glad once you get through this. When you start seeing that other people are struggling in the same way.
Speaker 3In that, Johnny, in that Challenger book, I always struggled with that book. I think it's translated in every language around the world. It's a very successful curriculum. But the one thing that I struggled with is trying to put people in a box to say, you are this, or you are that, you are this. And what I found on this topic, is it's more related to somebody's tolerance for failure. Meaning, how do you view failure? And what does failure mean to you? And it's so related to both of these chapters, Doug. It's so related to your definition.
Speaker 4It basically said that the generalist, or the valedictorian, essentially, if we look at both of those studies together, was trying to eliminate, was trying to eliminate risk and trying to comply. Failure is not an option for them. Whereas with the risk-taker, they were embracing rejection and failure. And that rejection and failure became a key data point in their mind. Like, I got to change, and they change. Yeah, yeah. Whereas the other guys were trying to stay down that steady road with guardrails on both sides, and they weren't going off the guardrails.
Speaker 3And it's so related to who's scoreboard. So for me, my greatest attribute to this book, is the fact that I'm not going off the guardrails. I grew up around failure let's say I'm loving loving situation but failure was obvious to me it was it's scary to me the consequences were gross I hated them and so I spent the rest of my you know my teens and then my early 20s of that's not going to happen to me and it's it's my definition of failure needed to adjust because okay I was afraid of failure but that same failure created incredibly loving and nurturing parents the fact that I just didn't have money like everybody else did or what have you so I had to reconcile that so it's like your biggest strength can become your biggest oh yes if you're not aware so Doug what I love about you and what you teach and what you talk about is the how you how to become aware so like and if I like I say it took me some freaking therapy and bad stuff happening to me I don't want that to happen to other people like our audience like how do you learn these things earlier
Speaker 1in life how do you do it I love boy I love what you're saying that's why I love teaching these MBAs but this is another data point for us there was a 1962 study called the cradles of eminence and it looked at the lives of 400 famous people uh in the in the 20th century you know Henry Ford um Louis Armstrong on and on people like that Roosevelt the interesting thing was 75 of them grew up in a very difficult dire circumstance where it was either utter poverty hopelessness a non-nurturing thing but it was the very engine that that really birthed them to be great now this has so so today the people that you would name that would be along that line would be people like um Howard Schultz and LeBron James who all grew up in that kind of circumstance but here's here's the challenge here's the challenge for and this is a depressing thought to give some some of our people that are listening to us but the most accomplished who have actually done so much better than their parents and they're sitting on some however you measure success some kind of success what they want to do is protect their children from the very things 100 percent that that made them amazing 100 percent so the very thing that fueled their passion we're protecting them from it so so I have a woman that works for me this is a very interesting data point she has three kids she was telling me recently it's interesting even since I've had kids she has one that's 10 another one that's three she said when I first started going to the playground all the parents would come and they'd sit on the benches and they'd watch their kids play okay that's fine now that's changed the parents are doing the things with the kids because they're afraid they're going to get hurt so they're going down the sliding board with them or they're at the bottom of the slide on the side the jungle gym they're there with them so she told me this too that is astonishing they were in LA with so her husband is a big-time criminal defense lawyer and they were there with their family and they put the hurt the all the cousins and all go in this camp every year for a week and then the parents just hang out well there was a young person there so she's raised her kids to take risks to do things they get cuts and bruises sometimes this young counselor who was 15 year old young man reports them and says there might be some child abuse going on oh my God this launched a two-week investigation into their life uh interviews with law enforcement and on it's unbelievable and they're saying why did they have this bruise and cut because they're a kid and this is what you do but everything in modern society now is creating guard rails so our kids can't figure out life so we are protecting them from the very pain setback hurt that could make them a LeBron James or could make them a Howard Schultz and I I have to tell you as somebody like that and I see my peers the same way it's like oh my gosh what are we doing but we want to help them no one helped me fill out a college application no one helped me do any of that stuff I had to figure out everything
Speaker 3but here's the thing and here's what I have learned if you don't understand because like you're talking to a guy right now who I I used to say one I was afraid that one of my children was going to be homeless and I'm dead serious it's not a joke not a and my wife I was afraid of being homeless yeah so my wife you're
Speaker 1passing on your narrative
Speaker 3she would grab my face and she would say they're not you they're not you now if I could have learned that so much earlier okay so that failure for me having to show up in school without having money to buy this or whatever here's the point that I wanted to make because I love you you talk about it in the book I'm in kind of a failure situation let's say but I don't have the experience or the knowledge or people around me to tell me that this is not
Speaker 1how
Speaker 3it ends yeah
Speaker 1I love what you're saying and to me to me cap this this speaks to our whole educational motif we in my judgment wouldn't it be amazing in the seventh and eighth grade if we started introducing these things hey some of you have grown up in the hard circumstances we just want to tell you that's not the end of the story and let me what we're going to do every week we're going to have one hour where during the course of week where we're just going to talk about the life of somebody that's overcome something despite adversity all of a sudden in the seventh grade you're putting in the mind of that young person wow the fact that my father's an alcoholic or my my mother abandoned the family that's not the end for me i don't have to repeat that story i can make other decisions but we don't give you're right we don't give anybody any learning in that area we don't give them any instruction and if they're lucky somebody will give them a book um that might help them someday but it almost requires a a certain i think i think a certain point in your life a certain epitome uh you know epiphany where you either suffer greatly with a medical issue or your wife leaves you or a death of a close friend, something that causes you to say, oh, my gosh, the world is not stable. I what are my what are my points of reference that that are enduring that I have to really
Speaker 3focus on? Well, for me, this is leadership like anybody listening. One of the greatest skills that you could have is to help another human being be present in their suffering and to and to also help them realize in your book, one of my favorite stories is the Zen master and the little boy. And I saw that in Charlie Wilson's war. And if you if you wouldn't mind just sharing with us the power of really that story. And it's based on this kind of we'll see. Now, if I had if somebody had shared that with me when I was 10, we'll see how this turns out. My life would have been a little bit. It wouldn't have been easier. It just would have been I would have been more aware. So first share the you know, I just want
Speaker 1to underscore, you know, putting these things in because I think we we assume that younger people can absorb this at a young age. Look, look, I I you know, you guys have been in my class and you see I when these kids tell these stories I come from, I think I was shocked because these are the best and brightest. And all of a sudden they're saying I lived in a car with my mother for two years. I had to be raised by a grandmother because my my parents both died. You start saying, my God, they already have experienced a lot. But what they're not getting is the interpretation of how that could be transformative. And they're like, you know, there's a guy at Princeton. I thought this was so funny, but really wonderful. So it's like his name is Johannes Hoffenhauser. And this guy has you can look this up. It's called a resume of failures. So he felt like everybody looked at him. I'm a professor at Princeton. I have a Ph.D. from Harvard. All this. Great. He said, you know, I realize that narrative is total B.S. So when is on his resume, it has a failures has here's all the Ph.D. programs I was rejected for. Here's all the grants I didn't get. Here's all the tenure. You know, the the interviews I had at different colleges that wouldn't hire me. He just put one failure after the other. And I thought that is great because people need to know it didn't like you had this. golden list that, oh, everything's fine for this group and the rest are losers. It's not that. It's somebody that has decided that they're going to let this pain fuel them and they're not going to say no. And the people that I admire the most are the ones who have been fueled by suffering and hardship. And you wouldn't want that. But unfortunately, it seems like not only is it the essence of success, but it's the very thing we as privileged people now are trying to protect our kids from. And is it any wonder that they're entitled? They aren't motivated. They don't care about much, a lot of them.
Speaker 4Going to that point you just made, I don't know if you guys. I saw the speech that, commencement speech that Roger Federer did. Yeah. We talked about how in his life, he's won probably more games, more sets, more matches than any other player in history. However, he lost the majority of points. So you have to have that, even if you're at the top of your game, you have to have this mindset that there's, to get to the top, chances are I'm going to lose. That's really great. A lot of people don't have that mindset. They lose once or twice or three times and they throw their hands up in the air.
Speaker 1Well, there's a lot of shame. There's a lot of shame. And it comes back, as Cap was pointing out, to our story. If you grew up in a shame culture where your parents are always disappointed in you or teachers or whoever, it's almost like you try to hide that stuff as much as you can. Yeah. And then what I'm suggesting is instead of hiding the very things you're ashamed of, if you start to share those things, all of a sudden you find community and connection because everybody has stuff they wish they hadn't done. Everybody has disappointments that they're just surprised at.
Speaker 3This point for our audience is such a home run. Yeah. If, and we talked about this before on previous ones, it's this, it's this, I learned this concept through my father's generation and my father's background is this concept of sitting Shiva. Oh, yeah. The Jews have this, have this concept of sitting Shiva, which means like you're, you're, you're there for another individual to be around them in their suffering. You're not supposed to try to get them out of their suffering. You're not, you're supposed to be available to them.
Speaker 1Well, you said that, well, you said entering and being present for people and teaching would be.
Speaker 3This is leadership. This is leadership. And I think the greatest leaders I've ever been around are the ones who can recognize suffering and they don't try to fix the suffering for the seller. They don't try to fix the suffering for the child, or they don't try to, they try to, they try to first, sit Shiva, which means I'm going to sit with you in your suffering, let you talk about it. And then if, if you come to me, I'm going to give you perspective about how long that suffering lasts, or I'm going to share something with you about my own suffering. The greatest leaders, the most authentic leaders I've ever seen are the ones that share something with you in your moment of pain that you didn't know about them, that gave you a different perspective, on how long you were going to be in the suck. And I think that's a, that's a huge leadership
Speaker 1attribute. Huge. I love that. I love that because I think, I think the typical leader and probably a lot of people listening to this, we're taught, we've got to have answers. The longer I live, I feel like it's more about learning the right questions. And, uh, for me to say to the really, what is the thoughtful question that I can ask Mac, you know, how at this point in your life, are things working the way you had hoped? What happens? And see, I, I believe we run business meetings all wrong. For example, you have, let's say I'm a, I have 10 people that report to me. So I have a huge problem. I just lost my biggest client. So of course I bring 10 people to get us this gap. What are we going to do? Okay. 10 people are there. The two people that always talk the most are going to come up and they're going to have ideas and blah, blah, blah. And we're going to be right back to where we were. What if we change the narrative? And we said, instead of trying to find the answer, let's all take 10 minutes, write down two questions that are going to help give us insight into how we lost that client, how we can get them back. So everybody, this little meek woman that never speaks, writes her two questions. So everybody has a question or two. All of a sudden, the conversations enlarge and guess what? We're going to have a better outcome. Yeah. Yeah. When we just are looking for answers, it's always going to be the know-it-all who was the valedictorian. Everybody said, you, you're the smartest you got. And it's going to be the same old thing every time.
Speaker 4Yeah. Doug, one of the other things you talk about in your book is that there's this DRD4 variant of the receptor D4 gene, and it's been nicknamed the explorer or the wanderlust gene. And like, Yeah. percent of the population has it. And the reason I think you mentioned is it blunts the dopamine receptors, make them less sensitive to dopamine. And dopamine's a neurotransmitter that is linked to motivation, attention, and reward. So when people have this gene, the dopamine is blunted, and they require more risk and more uncertainty. in order to feel the same sense of reward as a normal person. Yeah, yeah. So there are some people that are born with a risk type G, right? I think of like Alex Holm, the guy that climbed, you know, yosemite climbed you know that rock wall with no ropes oh yeah i was gonna say on steroids i met
Speaker 1that guy and i talked to him afterwards and um he was we were out in california and he he's climbed unimaginable things that are unclimbable but he does it without ropes yes now he was telling me that all of his climbing partners have died yes and he's married and his wife keeps saying when are you going to stop this his view of his life is if i stop doing this i'm gonna die yeah so he's almost defined himself by this adrenaline he gets from doing this crazy thing even if he even if he dies so it's a very i mean it's a fine
Speaker 3line it's a fine we're all fine we're all examples of our biggest strength can become our biggest weakness if we're not aware of our strengths and weaknesses like that's the message that i can't continually get from your book we're we're all in a situation if we don't have the ability to be self-reflective about where we are and what's going on for example for me on risk tolerance for me john caplan i got katie bar the door i've got all kinds of examples i packed up my bag and i went to boise state one-way plane ticket with a duffel bag that's because it was me and and i thought i was alone and i did well then you get a family and all of a sudden my risk tolerance changes i'm still the same john caplan but now i have others in my crew yeah and it's like and i was lamenting i used to say to my wife where the hell is that guy that freaking had one duffel bag got on a freaking one-way plane ticket and she was like she was she's constantly telling me like you got to be really grounded in where you are right now and have an understanding it's not that person is lost it's that person's still there you just you're responsible for more yeah it's this constant struggle of knowing where
Speaker 1you are right yeah well you you said at the beginning of this captain you know how to how at a younger age do we become reflective and i'd say yeah if i were the listeners i'd write down this socrates quote and i would read it every day for a month and it says the unexamined life is not worth living so good now the question is how we're in an age it doesn't examine we're moving so fast and part of that is the pain of of doing the work of going deep but i'll tell you listeners you're not going to die if you start looking at your stuff your why it might be it's going to raise some awkward things and all that kind of stuff but don't you want to know it don't you want to be just be curious about your own life and if you have relatives that are still around parents or grandparents or uncles and ask them questions because so much of your narrative was shaped by all that that system of that web of relationships that were around you but most of us don't take the time when we're young to really pause and consider and that's the unfortunate thing and um because we don't prize that we we prize you know and you guys are in the tech world move fast and break stuff you kind of say you know that's the mantra but you also say wait a minute um what's going on inside of me because that someday i'm gonna have to deal with me why don't we start the process a little bit now start to really do some reflection you're not going to die and particularly if you do it with some other people
Speaker 3you know you know part of it is this what i learned through my own struggles in life is that you are you view those struggles with whatever glasses you had on when so a lot of my stuff comes from my younger self let's say 10 years old well those glasses on a 63 year old when you take the opportunity to put those glasses on you're like the world doesn't look like that like but we're stuck the problem is we get stuck at the time of the experience so if i was 10 i'm 63 and i still feel like that's happening but it's not reality and the only way around that is to and i i don't mean to be prescriptive to people i just want to give them spirit if you can sit in your in your and with yourself every morning i told johnny this i sit every morning for about 15 or 20 minutes and i just ask myself who's here sometimes the 10 year old kid scared as hell and then johnny and i joke about there's this 13 15 year old edgy there's this edgy kid and i'll forget about squeaky that's right that's squeaky and but what i do is i just who's here today because it's gonna determine what the hell's gonna happen during the day if i wake up and the freaking scared 10 year old kid is running around i'm gonna i'm gonna project that those challenges with that little 10 year old kid or the pissed off teenager yeah yeah i think if i could just give anybody any advice on this is to sit quietly with yourself every morning before you get going and say who's
Speaker 1here that's a great great line you know saturday night i was um i was at this dinner uh it was a guy's birthday very wealthy guy here in mclean virginia and we were there and i'm at the table with him and this other guy well-known guy says so doug you spend a lot of time thinking about what's going on with men and leadership uh what do you why do men what's what's wrong with them what's what's going on and i'm thinking yeah i don't know i didn't know anybody at the table uh except the the the birthday boy and i knew this other guy and it was like it's funny how when i laid out a couple things i'll just say well i'll just suggest a few things but everybody kind of comes at that you had one guy really defensive says hey my life's mine i'm good i'm i'm fine yeah it's like everybody they had to stake out a very strong position uh to defend why they haven't been self-reflective why they haven't done the work and i'm not accusing anybody of anything but i do know if you right down the street here is the cia if you go in there in the center right on the floor it has a verse from the gospel of john it says john 10 10 it says you'll know the truth and the truth will set you free the beginning of change is to face the truth a lot of us want to have a fanciful view of our family oh they were great they're all this bullcrap and it's really not true um but we we bought into that that narrative because we're afraid to talk about it because it feels disloyal it feels all this kind of thing but until you can face the truth of the world that shaped you you can't move on you're still perpetuating a lie and about yourself and about your family and all this so i'd say to start to do the work requires some you know bravery really requires you know bernie brown um says you know to under to to really understand and embrace your story is the bravest thing any of us can ever do and it really is takes it really takes bravery to face it because a lot of time we don't want to face that my father was an abuser or my mother had a screaming raging temp you don't want to acknowledge whatever that dark story is in in your life but until you do it says in the book of psalms the sins of the fathers are visited upon the third and fourth generation it doesn't go away friends these if you're not doing it for you do it for your kids you don't want them to continue a narrative and they will so one illustration of how insidious this is i was shocked one day to discover this when i found out that children who had been sexually abused by an adult many times preponderant times abused their own children you would think that's crazy they would never do that well so why did they do it it was the closest thing they had to closeness to their caregiver so even though it was sick and horrible there was a weird kind of closeness so you realize these patterns and this is what's happening in our lives why do we keep repeating these patterns because they're familiar yeah even though they're not they're not they're not they're not they're not -
Speaker 4No, it's called "In My Father's House" and it's about all the fathers were in were were crying they were robbers they were thieves they were all those types of things and all the kids wind up doing
Speaker 1the same thing so unless you decide it's almost like what i'll say if you're lost in the woods step one is say i'm lost which is hard for men hard for men and then the second step is okay once you realize you've got a problem okay how do i navigate who are my guys what information do i need to try to make better decisions and there's help for that i i i mentioned to your people i i've been helped by um some some really good you know good kind of workshops so seek out these things with that help you understand where you're going i mean cap you mentioned therapy and stuff you know just it's i think again certain people have a stigma about this but it's trying to just understand the riddle of our life it isn't like blaming it's all that it's it's it's talking honestly about your story so that you can change that story you
Speaker 3can't in my case in my case doug i had created this narrative that it was so nasty that i kept running from it yeah the funny thing is it's in my head it never goes away yeah and in fact it's in my head it never goes away and it's in my head it never goes away until i had the until i sat with people that could help me understand that what's in my head is not as scary as i think it is yes it's it's really it's really freaking powerful but i'm telling you we're talking like we're talking in in my 50s yeah god but what i want to give people spirit if you're listening to this and you're 30 and you're struggling with some stuff don't wait till you're 50. or 60 you're just gonna waste a lot of time yeah a lot of pain
Speaker 1yeah no you're absolutely right and and i i at some point there's a reckoning that we all have to face but what don't you want to do it when you're healthier emotionally physically and you can you can deal with it you just don't want to be that guy that just has all these regrets you know it's funny uh there's this woman and uh australia that uh she um did a study about she she was a palliative nurse so she said probably i've listened to you know 3 000 stories of people on their deathbed about their regrets and so many of them uh the number one regret is they they rather than live the life they should have lived they lived the life that others expected of them yes that was the preponderant regret the second one was i would have taken more risk
Speaker 4yeah excellent doug holiday always special to be with you spend time with you you're one of a kind we're glad to have you in our life likewise thank
Speaker 1you thank you
Speaker 3johnny let's just plug again like we sometimes we forget because we've been doing this for so long you want you want to get plugged in to what we're talking about and go back we have i think this is the fourth or fifth one that we've done with doug it comes from his best-selling book called the rethinking success eight essential practices for finding meaning um in is it at the end is it within what is it at the end eight eight essentials what's the last part
Speaker 1eight essential practices for finding meaning in work and life
Speaker 3in working life sorry i got it cut off there but dude you are uh you're such a joy and uh i'm always better after these i feel the same way i i
Speaker 1love what you guys are doing because you're creating space for people to think explore because ideas have power remember that if you get one idea out of this it can be transformational victor hugo said there's nothing more powerful than an idea whose time has come there might have been an idea you heard today that for the first time it's come it's the right time for you to act on it amazing
Speaker 4you're amazing doug holliday thank you so much thank you john kaplan thanks thank you guys all right thanks to everyone for listening to another episode of the revenue builders podcast
Speaker 2thanks for listening to today's episode if you enjoy the content please subscribe and hit the bell so you don't miss out on any future episodes please subscribe rate and review the show to help us reach more people this show is brought to you by force management where we help companies improve sales performance executing the growth strategy at the point of sale check out forcemanagement.com for more information
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