It All Works Out In The End | Ep 12

Speaker A

00:00:00.480 - 00:32:34.630

This is episode 12, and today I go off the rails and talk about some philosophy that might help you through this coronavirus chaos. This is the Bottleneck Breakthrough podcast.

I'm Josh Long, and this is all about helping you find and fix the biggest challenges in your business to unlock growth and profits that last. Hey. Hey. Welcome to the episode. I don't know about you, but seems like things are getting wilder and wackier out there.

States are now letting beaches be reopened, it seems. I know Florida and California. Santa Cruz in California has opened up the beaches. Still trying to practice social distancing.

They haven't opened the beaches here in Hawaii. It's as of April 19, and the state just put in a mandate that going into any public building or place, any business, you have to wear a mask.

And so my wife and I, when we went to Costco the other day, before it was mandatory everywhere Costco was requiring it and put our masks on. And it was really interesting feeling because I totally get the need to reduce the transmission of coronavirus.

But what qualified as a reasonable mask that people wore was quite hilarious. I even saw one lady had what looked like a crocheted scarf hanging all over her head from the back of her head down to her chest.

And, I mean, the holes were big enough. She could drive a truck just fine and see the road just fine if she needed with that thing on.

So obviously that wasn't reducing the transmission of coronavirus. But I know that there's a lot of fear, there's a lot of hysteria out there and a lot of uncertainty.

So I'm happy to wear a mask to help others feel safe. I. It felt quite oppressive in the moment when I was wearing it, but I get it, and I don't agree with anything going on right now.

Personally, I will state that I think killing the economy to kill people later out of poverty and hopelessness is not a good solution.

And the government should have just funded hospitals, overfunded them, sent trillions of dollars there instead of trillions of dollars into thin air, saying that they're helping small businesses. But that's for another podcast, not mine. What I want to talk about today is some belief stuff.

I know that I talk about mindset as being the most important thing in growing your business, and right now, I think it's the most important thing in surviving in your life. I talk with a lot of business owners right now, and I realized I had been carrying a lot of frustration over this. I'm fortunate, I'm blessed.

This hasn't changed my life. Much other than I'm not playing tennis and my kids aren't going to basketball and gymnastics and we're not going to the beach all the time.

That's about it. We have all the food we need. We have my income still coming in. I've still got plenty of clients. Seems like I'm getting more now.

I learned a lot I'll talk about from the 08 recession and my mortgage brokerage. That put my head on a spike, it felt like. So I've adapted and we're going to come through this just fine, it looks like.

But I was carrying a lot of frustration for the small business owners and those living paycheck to paycheck who are now out of a job and relying on the government to come through for them. And I was just really angry. I was feeling bad that there's so many small businesses that are never going to reopen and they didn't do anything wrong.

They may not have had the right business, perfect business model. They may not have been able to save as much money as they could have or should have to weather out any storm, any emergency.

But they had a profitable, successful business that is now never coming back. And these people are going to be dramatically affected by it.

And so I realized over this weekend that me carrying that frustration, that anger over public policy, government policy, affecting their economic livelihood is not my burden to carry.

And I realized that once I let that go, a lot of my anger, a lot of my frustration, a lot of my just ideological perspectives on how this isn't going the way I think it should go disappeared. And I could see that it's all going to work out in the end. It always does.

At least that's my worldview and that's my pattern that has succeeded, has been supported up to this point.

And so I just wanted to share some other perspectives that might help you as you look at how to navigate with your business, how to adjust, how to pivot.

I know friends that they had, their businesses were doing mediocre prior to the coronavirus, and the coronavirus just shined a light on the holes and they've gone back and innovated, changed their offers and are now winning in the midst of this chaos. They're getting more sales because they're adapting and innovating. So I know that's what all of us need to do.

I know that's what the world is requiring of us right now. And it feels scary, it feels unnerving. But we all adapt and we all have the skills and ability to keep Adapting, and that's the human experience.

So one thing that I think is worth looking at is last week I talked about optimism versus reality and how Viktor Frankl says focusing on meaning is great. And what was that other guy's name?

James Stockdale, talking about those that were overly optimistic about getting out of the prisoners of war camps were the ones that finally gave up because their expectations were never met. And so. But the idealist is the other thing that I think I had to be healed of, I had to grow through.

And I wonder if it's the same for you that being entrepreneurs, being visionaries, we see the potential in so many things and we want the best in everything for everybody. Like, that's the, that's the awesome thing about the healthy side of capitalism and entrepreneurship, is that we're making the world a better place.

And for our services, that or products that we create, we want them to be the absolute best. We don't cut corners, we don't try to rip people off.

We really want outcomes for people that are meaningful, that are worthwhile, that are fulfilling. And that makes us idealists at the end of the day.

The problem with that idealism is that when we see public policy and we see all the people arguing on social media and we see the news pushing whatever narrative that doesn't seem to make sense right now, we get really, really angry because we see all the ways it could be done better and we want it to be done better.

And I think for me, being an idealist, being able to see the potential in things, being able to see how to fix things, it reminds me when I first took this personality assessment in 2009, my friend Tom Schoff had me take it. And there is this section, I think they call it the Hartman Values or something like that.

And it covers three traits on the internal mind and three traits on the external life.

And so the three traits on the internal are empathy, your ability to understand others needs and situations, practical thinking, which is like book smarts, and your ability to learn, and then systems judgment, which is like being strategic and connecting the dots. And it's on a scale of 1 to 10 for each of those. So you can have a cumulative of 30.

And I don't know exactly how they figured out the scoring, but needless to say, my friend Tom said, for executives and people in business that are higher level, you want everybody that you work with to be a 24 or higher, an 8, 8, 8 across the board. And so when I took it, I scored a 9.0 on empathy, a 9.1 on practical thinking and a 9.2 on systems judgment.

So I scored, I think it was a 27.3 the first time I took it. And I was like, I should have gotten a 30. Tom, what did I need? What do I need to do to get a 30? How do I get a 30? Because I just didn't know.

I didn't know where I ranked. And he's like, out of 18,000 people that had taken it, he said he had met one person who scored a 30. I said, wow, what was that person like?

And he says, she was absolutely miserable. I'm like, what are you talking about? And he said, because she understood everybody's situations better than their own. Her empathy was so high.

She knew exactly what people were struggling with and how they got there and knew their life stories better than they did. And she was so smart. She could learn anything quickly, easily pick it up effortlessly. Learning was never a problem. And she was so strategic.

She could see into every system and every problem in society, from education to health care to politics to roads to all of the stuff, electrical systems, grids, everything that saw every flaw and everything and how to fix it. And it just made her so frustrated because she felt like the world was run by idiots and she had the answers to everything, which she probably did.

And so I said, well, how does my rank? 27.3. And he's like, you're smart in all the right ways.

And interestingly, I've assessed about 800 people with that assessment since then over the years. And this is going to sound arrogant, but I've never seen anybody score as highly as I have. I think the next highest score I saw was, like, a 26.9.

And most people are in the 24 to 25 range that are bright, capable. And so it was kind of a blessing and a curse. I was kind of like that gal.

Not that I was as smart as her, but that I saw all the potential in things and was so frustrated.

And I had a real bad habit of seeing the potential in my friends and then trying to encourage them towards it, and then them feeling scrutinized or judged or like failures because they didn't live up to the potential I saw in them, even though that was exactly the opposite I wanted. My intentions were I wanted to encourage them. I wanted them to achieve their fullest potential.

And so I go back through all of that because there's probably a lot that you see like me right now that doesn't make sense. That's frustrating. That's essentially bringing causing you suffering by you getting angry at what's not happening.

And I think that there's an old Taoist parable that it goes like this. I'll just read it to you. That says there's an old farmer who'd worked his crops for many years and one day his horse ran away.

And upon hearing the news, his neighbors came to visit and said, oh, such bad luck. They said sympathetically. The farmer replied, maybe. The next morning the horse returned, bringing with it three other wild horses. How wonderful.

The neighbors exclaimed. Maybe, replied the old man. The following day his son tried to ride one of the untamed horses and he was thrown and broke his leg.

The neighbors again came to offer their sympathy for what they called his misfortune. Maybe, said the farmer. The day after military officials came to the village to draft young men into the army.

Seeing that the son's leg was broken, they passed him by. The neighbors congratulated the farmer on how well things turned out.

Maybe, said the farmer, and I think that perspective of just it's not being apathetic, it's getting space.

I think that is so useful to step back and find where the positive, where the gold, where it all works out for good in the end, where that thread comes up.

And so as I've looked at my frustration of this situation and letting go of the need to carry the burden of small business owners that have gone through, that are going through hardship right now, and people at the lower end of the economic status that are in pain and suffering in fear that may go back to drug addiction, that may commit suicide, that may start abusing their families, that all of that negative that I see coming out of this because of the policies that don't make sense to me, letting go of that frustration just really lifted a burden, stress, suffering, whatever. And that daoist farmer's experience of, well, we just don't know.

We've got to let time go by to see the positive thread through all of this, and I'll talk about my experience in the prior recession in just a second.

But another perspective that I think is useful is from my friend Justin Fairman, and he wrote something on Facebook about a month ago saying that I think his take on this is a positive thread that we'll see if it comes true.

But he says what you're witnessing on a meta level is the collapse of the last dying breaths of an old system built on fear, scarcity, greed and control. And the way to thrive through this is to not cling to old ways and embrace the new paradigm that's emerging.

And I think as we look at this, there's so much opportunity coming out of it and there's so much potential healing, so much potential growth. And that was my experience from the 08 recession. I met with a bankruptcy attorney.

I've told this story so many times, you've probably heard it, but I met with a bankruptcy attorney that was a mentor of mine in grad school. I met with him in February of 2008. My oldest daughter, who's now 12, was a week old when we walked into that office to sign our bankruptcy papers.

And I'd met with him previously and he'd helped me see that there was no way out of my situation. And it was just the beginning of the end. The mortgage industry was the first hit. We were the canary in the coal mine, so to speak.

And so my daughter's a week old in the bassinet or carry, whatever car carrying case thing, and we're sitting in his office and my wife and I signed the paperwork to get the process started.

And what seemed like the worst failure that I could ever experience that would prove that I was a fraud, prove that I didn't know what I was doing after getting an MBA in entrepreneurship, having a mortgage brokerage for four and a half years and all of these things come to a head at the age of 29 was such a gift. And I say, I've said before that I wouldn't wish it on anybody, but actually, I don't even care about that. It wasn't that bad.

Going through bankruptcy, losing our house in foreclosure, and figuring out a different career that got me into consulting.

And I had a lot of bumps and bruises along the way, but it's been a journey of healing and it's been a journey of growth and it's been a journey of more fulfillment, more love, more joy.

And I don't know if I would have ended up here if the recession hadn't hit and the mortgage brokerage had survived and God forbid I had more success earlier. I don't know if I would have ever gotten to this point. And maybe I would have. Maybe I would have found the way that I was searching for anyway.

But regardless, I'm thrilled with how things have ended up in spite of financial difficulty and in spite of stress.

And the things that got healed in me may be different for you, but for me it was my drive to make money and improve myself, that I was worthy and that I wouldn't be subjected to the financial rollercoaster. My parents lived through, because my dad, as brilliant as he was and capable as he was, I think the stat was he had 16 jobs in 17 years.

The first 17 years of my life, because of attitude or company changes or whatever. And so my mom worked at the company my grandfather founded, and that provided some stability.

But there was a lot of bumps and bruises in my family growing up. We didn't have much until mid high school and when both my parents were doing really well in their careers. And so I just wanted to make money.

And I always envisioned myself being wealthy.

I thought I was going to be an orthopedic surgeon and would own a lot of businesses out of all of that money and just bypassed the surgery part and tried going down the entrepreneurial track.

And so that striving to prove myself and prove that I was worthy and make up for all the insecurities in me, was so valuable to have a light shone on it and be able to start the healing process starting in 2008 and even before that, just before that, I was really starting to see the stress and the frustration and my hair falling out and gaining weight and all the toxicity in my Life that by 26, 27, 28, I was like, this is not what it's supposed to look like. And so with the recession and filing bankruptcy, it forced me to have space. It forced me to take time off. It forced me to stop my workaholism.

And right before that, in late 2007, Michelle was pregnant and she was just overwhelmed thinking about having the baby. And I was working my brains out. And I remember we were sitting in our house, in our old house that we had, and I had a little office there.

And one night she just comes to me, she's like, look, I need your help. I need you around.

I can't have you working till 8 or 9 at night every night, and coming home after this baby's asleep or the kids go to bed or whatever. And I said, I don't know what to do. There's so many things for me to get done. It's impossible to not get to all of this stuff.

And she asked this really brilliant question way back then. She says, what if the doctor said, if you worked more than four hours a day or two hours a day or something, that you'd have a heart attack and die?

What would you do? And I just remember pulling out this ledger pad and started writing down, well, I gotta.

And I don't even know what the crap was that I thought had to be done back then. I had no ability to prioritize. I had no ability to focus on what's essential and sequential, what comes next. So who knows?

I probably had a million different marketing things going and creating some new product line or some service line or recruiting some person that wasn't needed yet.

I ended up filling the whole page and flipping it over and getting to a second page and just kind of staring at Michelle and she kind of walked out of the room frustrated. And I just sat there. So hopeless.

So my mortgage brokerage going down and not being able to get a single loan underwritten forced me to stop and it forced me to have space and it forced me to start seeing, gosh, she's right, I can't work this hard. This is what I hated about my dad growing up was he was a workaholic and I always resented him for that. And now here I am doing the same exact thing.

And so that space from about 2008, I worked for Chet Holmes later that year and then went out on my own in 2011 and had a dry spell in 2011.

And so for that essentially four year period, there was just so much opportunity to get space and stop carrying things and stop feeling like I have to take over the world and prove all these things. It was a great experience for me going through that bankruptcy and realizing, gosh, we never went without food, we never went without shelter.

Our kids never knew the difference. We ended up having two more kids, one each two years later than the other. So end of 2009 and then in beginning of 2012.

And so they were all born through that time of financial uncertainty and hardship. And so the line that you need to have your finances in order before you have kids is a hilarious one to me because we did fine.

They know no difference. Their lives have been blessed and Michelle and I have been able to work on becoming healthy and whole as much as possible through that journey.

It was about four years in, so 2008 was shortly after Chloe was born, was when our marriage really got into it, started getting into a groove. And by about 2012 it's been pretty effortless since. And we're coming up on next month will be 16 years and we've got a fantastic marriage.

And it's partially because I got to File bankruptcy in 08.

And so back all the way to the beginning of this, of the frustration around business owners and the challenges people are going to go through again, I can't predict how people will come out the backside of this and be healthier. None of it's my problem. It's not my burden, it's their life, it's not mine.

Obviously, people that are close to me that come to me for help, I'm happy to help. But the pain of the world is so great and I am not the savior of it.

And I think letting go of that underlying current released a lot of suffering this weekend and just wanted to share that with you.

And I think if we look through history, part of my growth out of being an idealist, of letting go of that idealistic nature and being frustrated, everything was just looking at history.

Richard Koch, the famed investor and founder of the OR the guy that made the 8020 principle famous, he and I've had a lot, lot of emails over the years. I've befriended him through Perry Marshall.

And we got talking one day about religion and he got me looking at the Gnostic Gospels, which were written around the time of Jesus being on earth shortly thereafter and were created that didn't make it into the canon of the modern Bible, but they were contemporary and the Gnostics were an offshoot of followers of Christ. And the interesting thing that came out of it for me was they viewed women as equals and they treated them.

They let them speak at their meetings and they let them lead. And I remember writing, Richard, I said, man, look at that. It was so close a part of history to having women be on equal footing.

And think of if women had been on equal footing 2000 years, 1700 years, whatever you want to do the math. Prior to when the women's revolution and equality went through in the 1970s, 50s, 70s and 90s, I guess, 80s and 90s.

Think if women had had a fair standing 2,000 years sooner, how amazing the world would be. And he said, yeah, imagine doubling the talent pool of the world throughout world's history.

And then I watched Oliver Stone's documentary on Netflix of I think it's the untold history of the US I think is what it is.

And it starts about how Truman got into office with a contested Democratic national convention for FDR's fourth campaign to be president, fourth consecutive presidency. And then it unfolded.

And so you see Truman get in and all the horrible things he did in World War II to flex on Stalin and essentially launch the Cold War.

And then JFK comes in and he tries to be this peacekeeping leader and avoids the Cuban Missile Crisis, which would have obliterated the eastern half of the us and then gets taken out. And I have my theories. I think his attempt to try to break up the CIA is what got him taken out.

And so we have this guy that's trying to pursue peace. FDR tried to pursue peace on the back of World War II. Truman screwed that.

Kennedy comes in, tries to pursue peace, and then LBJ and Nixon are about as big a warmongers as they come and launch us headlong into Vietnam. And I look at those inflection points just like with the Gnostics 2000 years ago, that man, it was so close.

And that FDR had peace set up with Stalin and Wilson, his vice president that got ousted in the fourth presidency, probably could have carried that on and Truman wouldn't have started the Cold War and then JFK if he hadn't been assassinated. Who knows if his brother comes in later and becomes president and continues some kind of peace path.

But instead it's LBJ and Nixon that kill caused deaths of hundreds of thousands of people by their leadership. And I saw that and I thought, man, it was so close to just being a completely different reality today. But that's just part of the human experience.

And, and I don't know why that our society, civilization, agrees that these hardships and these challenging conflicts have to be had to create change. But that's what drives change all throughout history.

And so those experiences helped me see that me being frustrated about it is just another form of suffering.

And how do I let go of it and how do I focus on what matters for me and my family and living the best life possible and being as healthy, fulfilled and whole as possible.

Because that creates a ripple effect that I hope helps other people's lives become healthy and whole and that we're not a drain on society and that we're adding love and joy wherever we go, and we'll figure it out. And the chaos and uncertainty and frustration, I think is a great experience to grow through and process.

But my encouragement to you is to find whatever you need to let it go. Because getting mad about it doesn't accomplish anything.

Trying to protest or defy the leadership is a fast path to getting fined, getting jailed, getting targeted, and having your life be just harder. And I'm not saying to just bend over and take whatever comes down the pike.

I'm clearly not going to follow a lot of things that are potentially coming down the pike related to health and tracking and erosion of privacy.

But I'm not going to stand on the street corner shouting and yelling and cursing and getting mad and saying how stupid all this stuff is and how brainless everybody is that agrees with this or that thinks the media is true or thinks the data is true or any of this stuff I'm focusing on today, and I'm focusing on helping clients and helping new clients and helping figure out what makes the most sense for my consulting and the equity deals that are coming across my plate. And I just hope that you can find your path that is the most profitable, the most fulfilling, the most healthy.

And yeah, I think if you have a hard time believing that it works out for good in the end, then I would go back and look at that programming.

What programming was put inside you at a young age to create those beliefs and emotions that make you feel like you don't have control, that it's hard, that life sucks and then you die. That adds to that nihilistic approach and worldview because you can change those. Those beliefs can be changed. It's all beliefs, it's all programming.

It's all encoded in us as children and maybe even generationally. Stuff that is in your family lineage that takes time to get to the root of and get removed.

But I think we're born, as my friend Brian Ridgeway says, infinite unlimited beings. And if we are created in God's image, and if that's your view, then isn't God huge and big and amazing? And we have all that potential inside us.

So anything less than that is just programming and it's just removing that brilliance and that unlimited potential from us that we all keep trying to get back to. And so again, my encouragement to you is to keep growing, keep getting healthy, keep finding the positive line through all of this.

And I think that's the beauty that's going to come out of this is those of us that are focused on unity, focused on finding the best path, focused on adapting and creating the world we want to be in as we come through the backside of this is is where all the gold in the world lies. So hope that's useful. If you have any questions, Comments I've got the Facebook group Bottleneck Breakthrough Method.

I would love it if you leave reviews on itunes. I don't know if you can leave reviews on Spotify, but wherever you're listening to this, leaving a review would be great.

That's how more people will find it. If you find it valuable.

And if you have any questions in the future you want something covered, email podcastsottleneckbreakthrough.com Otherwise, have a great day and see if you can find the fascination in watching all of this stuff unfold and finding your best path through it. Take care. This podcast theme music is an excerpt from Triptych of Snippets by Septah Helix. It's used under Creative Comm.