Life After a 200 Million Dollar Exit | John Berardi

Hello and welcome back to the Alchemist Library podcast. Today on the show we have John Barardi. John is an entrepreneur who is best known for founding precision nutrition, the world's largest nutritional coaching, education and software company. He then sold that company to focus on homeschooling his children and being a dad. In this episode we talk about what happens after you sell a company for hundreds of millions of dollars. I am absolutely pumped to get into this one today, so I'm going to leave you guys at that.

Catch you guys inside Peace. John, thank you so much for being here today. I'm very excited for this one.

Yeah, well, thank you for having me. I really appreciate it and I'm looking forward to the conversation.

Yeah, I mean, we just quickly talked about this in the pre-interview conversation, but this life path that you have taken is one that is inspiring to me and it's something that I think a lot of people can take something away from in this arc of life, really of building a business, helping a lot of people in the health and wellness space, transitioning more towards parenting and really just being a philosopher of sorts and being able to help a younger generation and then do some real stuff on the side to still scratch that business itch. This concept is so cool and I love the arc that you've taken with it.

Yeah, thanks, man. I appreciate it. For those who don't know, it's starting to feel like my former life quote unquote. But in my former life, I grew a company called Precision Nutrition and it went on to become the world's largest nutrition coaching, education and software company, and it was really well known for that. That's probably why we're having this conversation in the first place. And then, in 2017, I ended up selling that company. Really, things were going great and my business partner, phil. We were co-founders of the company. Life was good, we had a fantastic team around us, we were working a reasonable amount of hours, we were making a lot of money and stuff, but the company needed more financial support to grow and achieve the big goals that we had set out for us. So that's why we went out looking for a big financial partner and we ended up becoming acquired by a private equity company, which gave us a chance to step out and do other things For me. We had have and had four young children, and it was just like cool. This is a great. How many guys do I know who have the opportunity, when their children are young, to stay home and be around them and help shape their education and their experience of life and to spend maximum time with them. You've probably heard of this concept and maybe even seen the book 18 summers, but the notion is about 95% of the time that you'll spend with your children will be before they turn 18. So that means for the rest of your lives you get only 5% on average. So this is the time and I had the opportunity to take it. And so that meant homeschooling, that meant coaching, all their sports, which they still seem to enjoy, and that meant just being super present in their lives. And yeah, and then you mentioned, on the side, some cool opportunities come up. When you have capital and it's liquid, you have the opportunity to invest in some things. So one project that seemed really interesting to me, in contrast to what I did online, which is information to build some things Like, hey, this is pretty cool, I could go to a place, take our family there and see all that stuff that we did that. And so essentially we're building a town in Ontario over 500 homes, commercial stuff, apartment complexes, just creating in a high growth area, but a really small town. I mean, I think with our developments we're like quintupling the population to develop something cool from scratch. You know and actually envision something neat like where can we put walking trails and where can we put parks and where can we put sports fields and where can we put areas that people can be in nature and how can we connect it to all the places that we're building to create a pretty cool environment. So that's a little bit about my path to date, anyway.

This concept. So I listened to a lot of podcasts with entrepreneurs and founders, and one common theme that I see is right after selling the company, these people feel a little lost and I think Jordan Peterson has this quote where he says humans are the happiest or at their best when they're walking uphill, when they're striving towards a meaningful goal. Do you feel like after the sell you felt lost in any way? Or it seems like you had a pretty solid purpose outside of the company, but did selling that change anything for you?

I can see how what you described happens and I can see why it's common and I can see how natural that feeling would be. So I'll talk to it on three different levels. So number one is like I well, I'll start this way During our time of growing and leading precision nutrition, we stumbled on an organizational philosophy called holocracy. So it's a way of being together in a company, right? So that seems vague and I kind of do that on purpose. But the idea is like what's your structure, look like who's the boss and who works under that boss, and what's your management structure and what's your organizational structure? In your company we're 125 full-time, full-manifits people at the time, so not among the world's largest companies, but not really small either. And at a certain point and it's usually around 20, you have to start thinking about like, okay, it can't just be the founders and a bunch of people helping them, that you have to have an organizational structure for everyone's benefit. As a founder, once you hit 20, 25 people, everyone coming to you for what to do next. Everyone coming to you for development, everyone coming to you for growth, everyone coming to you with questions or problems or whatever. You can't do your own work. The work becomes meeting with people all day, and if you're a founder in a company that did what we did, which was science and education and stuff, I can't just stop doing science and education to meet with staff all day. So you have to put an organizational structure in place, and the one we chose is this idea of holocracy, which is called in fancy terms like a distributed authority system, where there really aren't bosses and employees. People are all just working together in a team capacity towards a common goal. There are some people who sign the checks, of course. There are some people who make certain critical decisions, but those are all outlined explicitly. So I don't make certain decisions because I'm your boss. I make certain decisions because that's my role in the company and I've been given that role because I have a specific expertise and so, while sometimes it may feel like semantics, it creates a very different culture than a normal hierarchical organization. So why am I talking about organizational stuff when you're talking about retirement? So the answer is what you learn in holocracy is something that was probably the most profound lesson for me. The other stuff was like how to run a business, stuff which is cool and it was a good skill to have. But it was how to separate your role from your soul. And so I used to say that Dr John Berardi, what I was at Precision Nutrition, is a role, it's a character. Now he's not super divorced from who I am, but he also has to show up at work and in the world in very specific ways to be authoritative and educational and all these kinds of things. And if your soul is too intimately tied with that role, then if you were to retire, you would feel absolutely lost, because then you're not only losing a hat that you wear, you're losing your whole self. So holocracy years before we ever considered bringing on a partner or selling the company or whatever holocracy taught me that hey, dr John Berardi is a character you play at work, and when you're not at work you don't have to play him and you don't have to fuse yourself with this character, with these roles. It also makes you get very explicit about all the roles you hold in your life and in your work, right? So probably the easiest way to categorize what my role was before holocracy was I would call it like chief worry about everything. But that's not healthy, that's not sustainable and that's not what you're supposed to be doing, right? So then you just write it down. You actually there's exercises you do and you explicitly say here are the 50 or whatever it is things that I actually do at work. And once you do that, you're like, okay, cool, do I want to be doing all these? Can I outsource some of these? Sure, that's all the efficiency and management stuff. But the other question is just, oh, can I look at these as just roles, like things that I do to achieve certain goals at work, rather than critical pieces of my identity? So there's a lot more to it than that and I write all about it in my book. But the idea is, for years I was training at being retired. You know I was training at this notion that, hey, when I sell my company, I haven't lost anything important from myself as a soul. I just there's certain roles that I no longer feel in that context, and if there's skills that I have that I'd like to use in roles similar and other roles, I can choose. Those like precision nutrition didn't have to be the vehicle for all personal fulfillment and all uphill walking and all striving and goal orientation and goal achievement. So that was part A. So I was prepared, I was training for this. The other part is the process of selling the company was a multi-year process. It was at least longer than one year, closer to two, and so during that, during that time, we weren't desperate to sell. I mean, it was actually literally the Friday before the deal closed where my partner, I, sat down and said do we really want to do this? For sure, you know, like, because we don't have to right, we both have enough money, we have a lot of meaning and fulfillment in our work. We're working 30, 35 hours a week, so we're not killing ourselves at this thing. It'd be really easy to just keep going. This is pretty straightforward and we like it. We feel meaning, satisfaction, purpose, so we weren't desperate to do this. So during this time there was a lot of you know, psychology and philosophy and deep conversations about what we're trying to achieve if we sell the company what the pros are, the cons are, what the downsides are. Another thing Phil and I were always very big on was like just talking to experts who've done stuff that we haven't done yet, multiple right. So let's talk to people who've sold their companies. Let's figure out what they did and badly, what they did well and like, let's like make a map like we would for our business of what it would be like to sell this thing, to transition out of this thing, because it's not like on Tuesday you sold the company, on Monday, on Tuesday you're done right, like there was. There was a good one year period of transition where I was handing off my roles and hiring replacements and all that kind of thing. So let's make a real map of a successful transition out and then what a successful life looks like after. So a lot of this is more heady philosophical stuff. Now here's like a rubber meets the road thing. There does come a point, though, where you're doing less at work and very like tangibly and tactically and tactile, we like you have time just in the day that you would have spent worrying about things or talking to staff or whatever. So you're just sitting there going okay, what should I do with this time? So part of you has planned it in advance, but the other part is just that feeling of sitting there with like no one meeting you for anything, and this may seem like a weird thing, but I remember there was a very specific schedule I always kept during the week, right, so I would wake up with the family. I'd help get the lunches packed and breakfast on the table and stuff, and then my wife would take the kids to school. I would brew tea, I would sit on the counter and I'd sort of just close my eyes, breathe deeply call it meditation, whatever for five minutes while the tea was brewing and then I'd go to my office and start the day. So it's like a pattern and it's actually a path. You walk in your house. You know what I mean. If there was, like you know, heat sensors or whatever, all of you could see this exact path that I walked every single morning, right, for many years. When you retire, if you keep walking that path, like subconsciously, instinctually, you end up sitting at your desk with your tea, having meditated and prepared subconsciously in many cases for work, and then there's no work to do. You could imagine someone going absolutely crazy and then rushing into some next project, right? So for me, I was like I know this already is going to happen, right? I don't have to experience it to know this is likely, you know. So I'm just going to change my routine. So one of the simplest things I did was I started working out first thing in the morning so that I didn't subconsciously walk that path, sit in my office, feel unfulfilled and rush into the next thing, right. So I was like get the kids off to school, instead of making a tea, I made a workout drink and I went to workout. So now I disrupted that old pattern and then was able to like forge a different rhythm to my day. That didn't make me feel sad that no one needed me to answer their email or take an important business meeting or help out with the problem at work. So I think there's a couple of yeah, I was writing about this last night because I told you I just got this event coming up and I was writing about how one of my unique abilities is to like find patterns and things and organize ideas in a really orderly and understandable way for other people. And this is just and maybe you can feel a little bit of this as I talk about it. It's like how do you prepare for retirement? Well, I have a three-step plan for you. Right. One is right Prepare in advance, emotionally and psychologically, for the notion that when you sell your business or change your job or whatever it is, your soul can't be tied to that old work. You have to find identity outside of that and you have to have a deep embrace of the notion that this isn't who you are. Dr John Brody isn't who I am fully. He's like a subset of who I am. Right, he's part of the broader circle of who I am. The next is you have to talk to smart people who've done this already successfully and think about what are the challenges that I'm going to face when I retire or sell my business, change roles, whatever the case may be, and then how do I get ahead of those things? And then the third thing is how do I just change the routine so I don't find myself walking through the old rhythms and stuck in a spot where people don't need me and then feeling unneeded? Now there's actually a great paper, so I'm just looking it up. It's in my bookmarks right now. It's called a successful post-exit entrepreneur on how to optimize your life for happiness after your liquidity event. So AJ Wasserman is a researcher in the space of entrepreneurship and he did a really good interview on a podcast with one of my friends, but they actually published an academic paper out of Harvard on this very thing. They studied dozens of post-exit entrepreneurs and talked about pros and cons, challenges that they faced, challenges that they overcame, and then laid out kind of a roadmap for this as well. So that's a really helpful resource too, because I think sometimes, even just in conversation with folks like, first of all, if you're an entrepreneur and you sell your company and you're poised for retirement or maybe the next chapter of your life, you're not going to accidentally stumble into lots of other people like you. You're not going to be like, oh, is that my kid's soccer game? And I was talking to this guy and, oh my gosh, he just sold his company for $200 million too. So I don't want to make it sound like elite, because that's not what I mean. It's just in company with very few people who you're going to meet, who are going to meet, they're going to have had this experience, so you got to go find them and maybe you don't have access to them. So resources like that, like Wasserman's paper, are really, really helpful to be like oh shoot, okay, here's some really smart people from Harvard. I can respect that Talking about this very thing and I can read it from the safety of my own home, even if maybe feeling vulnerable in public isn't something I'm ready for on this particular topic. So that's, that's part of how I was able to successfully transition. And, you know, the happy answer to the real question is did you struggle at all with this? And the answer is generally no. I had a couple of years to prepare. I prepared in the ways that we talked about and I had the next thing lined up, which was the thing that I sold the company for in the first place, which is to be around my family more. So, my priorities had always been and these I always had written and posted in my office so I could see them every day, because every day I would forget. You know, I'm big on like posting my values, my unique abilities, my purpose and my priorities in my workspace, because then when my brain gets scrambled or chaotic or busy and my best self isn't showing up, then I can just be reminded visibly like here's what I'm thinking about, here's what I've already, like the clear-minded, sober, thoughtful, philosophical me, already decided what to spend my time on this dummy sitting here right now, forgot, but I'll just consult with the smart one. And so, yeah, I mean my priorities, written and posted, were always in no particular order here, but, like you know, being a present, positive partner and parent, taking care of myself physically, mentally, emotionally, health. And then, third was, you know, contributing to precision nutrition in a valuable way that makes a difference in the lives of my staff and others. You know, there are customers. So those are my top three. So, you know, life just became a bit easier because I didn't have to think about the third one anymore, you know, so I could spend more time on health and more time on family. So those felt really great, of course. And so we started homeschooling and doing a host of other things. Of course, in the beginning you have moments where you're doing this new homeschool project and you're not good at it yet, you know. And then you have moments like, damn, I used to be good at that thing I was doing at PN. I'm not that good at this yet, and now I'm in collaboration rather than in like a leadership authority position, right. So at work I signed the checks, I had certain roles, so generally when I made certain decisions they got done without any pushback. And now all of a sudden your family isn't in that role, in relationship with you, right. So now it has to be more community and collaborative and stuff like that. And it's challenging, right. So it challenged me in a host of ways and there were certainly moments where I'm like this sucks and they probably they did feel the same way. But then, like anything else, you get better and then you start to slip into this new community which we called it quite often like, hey, we're going to have to figure out how to be in community together. And then after a not very long period of time it becomes a really beautiful community where we're all contributing, we're all learning together, and so we're getting all the ideal things that you wanted, with less of the growing pains you know. So that's kind of the post exit part and I was having a great time with that, and then some of the real estate stuff that came later. You know again, I mean we sold our company for close to $200 million and we split that two ways. So there's not a need for me to work anymore. The anyone who studies economics and investments. I mean, if I put that money in an investment portfolio that just matches index, you know, when I'm 100 years old, that's $400 million. So there's no need to actively make money. You know, you just stick it in an index fund and let it ride and you know there'll be more money than anyone ever needs. But the real estate thing was a fun project with my father-in-law. Actually, you know we get along really well. He's a smart guy. I probably wouldn't have done this with anyone else, but he was a farmer his whole life. He owned a couple of thousand acres of farmland and in an area that's now transitioning from agriculture to having a lot of residential and we just kind of had this opportunity to start dreaming about what you could build on some of this land. So we partnered and then we've been doing this and it's a lot of learning. You know. It's a lot of good stuff to keep my curiosity and my desire to learn going, but I wasn't desperate for that I mean honestly, homeschooling with kids was plenty of learning for me. You know what I mean. That was. I mean, essentially we weren't doing like online or anything like that. It was Amanda, my wife and I were making all the curriculum, so it was a ton of learning. How do we teach? You know, our kids are now 13, 11, 9 and 7. So how do you teach this diverse group of students? In a single classroom. You know what do you teach Like. If you could make your own curriculum, what would it look like? All that kind of stuff? So I never felt like my intellectual capacity wasn't being stimulated, because it was, and it was a ton of work, you know, and the real estate thing was just a fun project with people close to me that I could also learn something new at and involve the family in, you know so they've been involved in. How do roads get made, how does you know water flow into and out of a new community? You know how does power and gas and how do you, what do you have to do to make sidewalks and parks and all this kind of thing. So it became a cool part of our homeschool experience to build a town together.

All these things that you described, the thoughtfulness, these skills, this ability to stay disconnected from your ego, not be attached to any labels. And then that doesn't even take into consideration all the business lessons and skills you learned from your time as a leader. It seems like all those skills almost perfectly can be applied in almost any situation. What were those skills? Or have those skills been incredibly similar in the skills required to leave, lead a business and leave a business? Have those skills been incredibly similar to the skills required to parent, to coach, to homeschool, all these new roles that you're taking on? Has those skills been easily transferred?

Yeah, yeah they have. You know, obviously there's new problems and challenges and new spaces, and context really governs people's confidence and their particular way of making certain decisions and solving certain problems. But yeah, I mean, I have often said this and I really believe it down to my core. You know, some people will go out in the world and look for information on how to be a better coach. Some people go out in the world and look for information on how to be a better parent. Some will go out and look for information on how to be a better leader, and to me it's all the same. It's how do you be with people successfully? Right, because that's the common denominator. You're leading who? People. You're not leading a company. It's a group of people all working towards a hopefully common goal. And if you're the leader of that group of people, hopefully you've articulated the goal and you've found out what their goals are and you've dovetailed it all together so it works. Parenting, it's the same People, coaching People. The common denominator is get good with people and you'll be able to use that goodness with people in any context that you could possibly need it. Now, that may look different for every kind of person. I have some friends who their way of interacting and being good with people is being funny and entertaining. I have friends who are really good with people, who are very empathic and they listen a lot and they reflect back other people's goals and needs and try and integrate them with their own. There are different ways of being good with people, so you don't have to go out and find one way of being good with people and generally the best way to find is the one that is most consistent with your own personality and your own life experiences. People talk about this idea of purpose quite often nowadays and I think that it can just become a weird word. You know what I mean. It means different things to different people and mean nothing to some people, but for me, purpose just stems from the stuff that's happened to you in your life. Why do I like this thing over that thing? Why do I want to do this job over that job? You can start tracing that down to its root, but at a certain point you're just like I don't know, because some stuff happened to me along the way to make me like that and that's good enough. That's generally how we get to our preferences and things. Some stuff happened to me along the way Good things, bad things, neutral things that shaped me to like this thing over that thing. So I feel like we have to respect that and employ it to our benefit. What am I mostly like? Okay, cool. How do I use what I'm mostly like to be successful with other people? And even if you're introverted which I am, natural introvert have been since I'm a little kid and all the hallmarks of that over stimulated by a lot of lights and a lot of sounds and being around a lot of people need a big recovery time after that. I remember being a little kid and my mom used to like to shop, so she would always drag me to the mall and I remember just being like I felt like I had the flu. After every trip to the mall I literally had to go in my room, draw the blinds and sit in the dark for a while and I felt like I was ill and I didn't know what the heck that was. I was like, oh, maybe there's something. And you're a little kid, you're like the mall makes me sick, but it's actually the over stimulation, and so that's always been a thing for me. But even being a strong, natural introvert, you can find ways to be successful and effective with people. It'll look different than someone who's an extrovert and funny and loud and gregarious, but that's okay To get. What you want in this world usually involves people you know and often what you'll find that you want includes people too. It's not just for you. So, yeah, I think the skills that make you successful in business will also make you successful as a coach and will also make you successful as a parent. I don't think there's any problem with reading things on coaching and parenting and you know business in separate but looking for the through line between all three of them is critical. So if you're reading the business stuff, think about what's the through line to parenting and coaching and friendships, and you know having a good relationship with my own parents. What's the through line there? Right, and you'll find to some people it's surprising. To others it's not that the same skills work in all these contexts, you know. But it is important to try them in all the contexts because, like I said, your confidence is contextually specific. You walk into a new scenario you haven't tried before, you're nervous, you're not as confident, you're not sure you can hack it right, but if you remember like oh wait, the same skills work here as they work over there, right, and there's other ones too, obviously. Like you know, I teach our. You know I coach a lot of youth sport now and a number of very successful youth sport teams, and the three things we talk about on day one when I meet them. This is what we're going to do here. Okay, if you're with other sport teams, you guys can do something different there, but here it's going to be about hard work, like we have to show up and work hard every time we're together, and I give some definitions of what that looks like. Next, we're going to be good to each other and to the people we play against, so we can call that sportspersonship, but it's just good to each other. And then the last thing is we're going to find ways to make it enjoyable and have fun, and I'm like, hey, isn't that really what we ought to be doing in all contexts as well? Right? So we have to work hard, we have to be good to one another, and then we have to find ways to have fun.

It reminds me of this quote when you know the way broadly, you see the way in all things and it's just perfectly. Yeah, it's a great quote.

Actually, one of the guys I'm going to be lecturing with next week is one of the world's best track and field coaches. I still run master's track, I compete and he's my coach, and so people always ask him what coaching books do you read? He's like I don't read any coaching books, but every book I read is a coaching book. So it's the same thing, right, every book that I read, and this is what you'll do. When you have a vocation and a passion and a thing that's your hobby and your work and your life's purpose or whatever, this is what you do, right? I don't even think you have to be taught to do this. Everything you read or see or talk about will be perverted into a lesson on that thing. You know what I mean.

You're looking at it through that lens, that's right Now.

The thing that you have to be taught, though, it's not to look at things through that lens, it's to look at different things. That's what the young coach has to be taught. They have to be taught that it's not just coaching books that you should read. You know what I mean, and when they're taught that and they start reading fiction and business books and personal development books and whatever else philosophy books they'll do it anyway. They'll turn that into a coaching thing anyway. The point is just to get them reading those other things.

It reminds me of Leonardo da Vinci. He has a quote I feel like I'm quoting every two seconds now, but it's to develop a complete mind Study the art of science and the science of art. And when you look at his life, he's done all these different things. They all kind of come together in each individual thing.

Yeah, it is absolutely yeah. The idea of the polymath is pretty celebrated in certain circles, and I think because it feels like it's becoming rare and rare, which makes sense too. I mean, in the time of da Vinci, the number of educated people was very small, and so to seem well educated and accomplished and to find out new things was challenging in the lack of tools, but easy in the sense that almost everyone was dumber than you. It's easy to seem smart or informed in a room full of uninformed people, and when education is the levels of the population being educated is so low, it's easier to become a polymath. You just have to know a little bit more than all the other people, and when you have access to education you prioritize it. It's easy to shine there, and I think maybe that's why we see that less and less today, because there is so much specialization and so much education possible on any given subject that you can chase it all the way down the rabbit hole. But nevertheless, I don't know that anyone has to be a polymath, in other words like super accomplished and celebrated in multiple fields. Right, sometimes you could just be really good at it a number of things without anybody knowing. You know what I mean, which is fine, too right, and I think it's an important thing to remember, and it certainly is for me, because when I try new things, one of the things that my brain does is tell me to go really deep in it and then do what I did earlier in my career, which is why I should make a website to talk about this and. I should write articles on this and I should make videos and I should teach everyone I know about this thing, and then I can remind myself and I've grown this skill of saying or you can just appreciate the knowledge that you gained, use it to good effect in your life. You can share it with a few friends who might need it also and go about your day you know what I mean and it's freeing and liberating and a good reminder, as you said earlier, to detach from the ego pull of that and I don't even know if it's an ego pull at this point. It possibly is to some extent, but it possibly is also just running old scripts, right, you've got this software that's embedded in your brain and it likes to glom on to this particular thing which is, hey, new knowledge, right? So I don't know. I've started a project with a couple of doctor friends of mine and I called a project was overestimation. It's just a personal curiosity here about, like, let's say, I was really interested in the concept of longevity or even just extending health span, so maybe I don't need to live to 130, but what if I could stave off heart disease, cancer, neurodegenerative disease and metabolic dysfunction for as long as possible, right? What would I have to measure at different stages of my life? What would those measurements have to look like? And if those measurements didn't look the way that they ought to look, in those cases, what would I have to do? What could be the interventions? Right? So I started just researching this and reading the experts and getting into the literature and nowadays, with chat GPT, save 100 times the time that you would have spent just five years ago on this kind of thing. And then I just started creating this spreadsheet right, so it has different tabs with the different markers and the different time courses and the different measures and things like what genetic tests, what you do? And nowadays, with like a simple 23andMe test, you can essentially have your genome tested once, and then you can use chat GPT to run your particular genetic polymorphisms against the database of all that we know about them, and you can look at all your risk factors as well. And you only have to do that once, right? What am I at higher risk for from a health perspective? Great, okay, that helps inform the measures that I should take, how often I do them and what my intervention should be like. So, anyway, I put together the spreadsheet and you know, there's like a quiet voice in me it's much quieter now than it was like right after I retired which is like you should share this with the world, you should publish this, you should go, you know, publish it on Precision Nutrition and on these websites and do some videos about this. And I was like, what is what's that voice coming from? Is that ego? Do I want attention? No, no, I feel like I got enough attention in my career, you know, like that need was satisfied and that cup overflowed. I didn't need anymore. It's just coming from running an old script, you know, when I learned something really new and I invested in something heavily and I put together something cool that I never seen anyone done before, I would do that. I would write articles and make videos and all that kind of stuff. So it's just my software running, you know, and I can just, I can override it, you know so. So instead I'm not spending 10,000 hours on this project and spend a couple hundred, you know, and it's for me, and then I send it to my close friends who I know are interested in this stuff, you know, and I'm like OK, mission accomplished. That's all I needed from this project. Now I can spend the amount of time I already earmarked for family and, you know, coaching and all the other things.

What stands out to me about you is your awareness that you have and you carry a very particular sense of thoughtfulness and awareness of where things are coming from strengths, weaknesses, how to approach things. They're very well thought out and something that has came about from being a teacher to your students and really sitting down or to your children. It's really sitting down and thinking through all of these different key things that you want to give to them.

I think I think it came sooner than that. I probably can't take any credit for it. I think I probably always had like an inkling towards that. Yeah, I don't know some mix of chemistry and you know genetics or whatever that may, and also introversion that made me sit around and think about things more than I would have any interest in like talking about them with others, and so I think part of it's that. But then you have to build the skill of getting it right, and so I mean, you know, my PhD is in exercising nutritional biochemistry, but all my electives were in philosophy and psychology. So even in university, when I was 19 years old, I was just super interested in reading about psychology and philosophy, figuring out what smart thinkers and and you know I should caveat this was saying. Like I was a fuck up in high school. I was failing most of my classes most of the time. I was skipping school most of the time hung out with a bad crowd. I was usually high and drunk Most of my free time. So it's not like little Johnny was always smart, and you know. So I don't want to give the wrong impression here it I had a couple of life events that shook me out of that and caused me to, you know, change my ways, and I had a couple of young mentors when I was young who helped point me in different directions. You know, when I stopped drinking and when I stopped hanging out with certain groups and I started thinking about what I might want to do differently with my life, I had a few people were like, maybe you should maybe read this. You know, maybe think about this, because I all of a sudden had time and that's when I got into all this stuff. So, yeah, I mean University. All my electives were psychology and philosophy. Again, I've had some really great mentors along the way, seeking out people who could help me think better and like who seems to have their shit together. That's always been a question of mine, probably since 20. Looking around, you know, nowadays. You know I was well known in my field. I have financial resources, so now I can access, you know, famous people, really celebrated and accomplished people in these spaces if I want to. But when I had none of these things, it was still who's around me who seems to have their shit together. Okay, cool, how can I be next to them for more minutes? You know, it's really the thing and ask them questions and be of service to them, right? Rather than just someone like squeezing them for information and knowledge to help me. How can I just get next to smart people and not just smart people, it's just people who seem to have their shit together, you know, and, and one thing that I realized in doing that I mean it's paid tremendous dividends for me is that most of them have done therapy in some form. You know what I mean, and and, and we'll just let's abstract from that a little bit and just say they've done work on understanding who they are, what their strengths and weaknesses are, what their needs are, what their traumas are, with help from someone else. Maybe we can call it therapy or whatever. But let's just be clear. I mean, there's sometimes you can get it from a book, sometimes you can get it from watching someone on YouTube, sometimes you can get it from, you know, one-on-one work with a trained therapist. But the idea is they've done work to figure out who they are all the way through with the help of another person, and I was like, oh shit, okay, if most of the people that I meet, who I want to spend more minutes with because I recognize that they seem to have their shit together, have done this, I ought to probably do that too, you know. So that was another big part of my own journey here, like how can I get, and when I'm poor and a student and stuff like that, maybe I can't hire a therapist but maybe I can read books from therapists, you know. So it's, it's, it's a lot of that, and you know, and then discovering some Western ideas around this and then discovering some quote-unquote Eastern ideas around this. So I appreciate you noticing it. It's, it's definitely a thing that's important to me, it's definitely thing that I would say categorize as much of my waking life, you know, thinking about who I am and who the people are around me and how we can use each other, and not in the using each other way. But how can we collaborate, how can we work together, how can we be in community together so that we can, like, celebrate in each other's strengths and benefit from them and help bolster each other's weaknesses? You know, and again, do you do that in business? Of course you do that in youth sports, you know. I mean, like the during tryouts. We're going through tryouts for this international travel team that our sons play like football on, and I coach one of their teams and that's what you're doing in tryouts. We're going through trials right now, who's who here? What can you do? Right, it's not good player versus bad player at this level. They're all good players at this level. They're the best of their respective leagues. It's who are you? What can you do? What are your strengths and weaknesses within the context of being great already at this sport? And then how do we put you in community to be successful? You know so. Anyway, that's some. I think some of it is, you know, temperament and an accident of birth and chemistry, and then the rest of it is just work, thinking about thinking, getting help about thinking about who I am doing exercises and drills, and you know I outlined a number of them in my changemaker book, because there were pivotal times in my career where I had to figure this stuff out in a deeper way, and I can't figure it out alone. I have to get help from the people closest to me to do it. So the unique abilities exercise, for example, is one of them, right? So I tell this story and I'll share it here for those who are never going to go on to read my book. But there was a time where precision nutrition was absolutely crushing it. You know, I was really famous in my field and I was sad every single day and I felt like a really ungrateful bastard, you know, because I'm like most people would just kill for this life on the outside. You know we had just had our third child and they're all beautiful and healthy and capable. And then business is rocking and people think I'm making a big positive contribution to the world and I'm hearing all these good things about what I'm doing and I'm just sad every day and you know I even write about suicidal ideation, like to the point where you know I'm organized and conscientious and stuff. So you know I right now, next to me, I have this notebook here where I'm taking notes about the things we're talking about and I always take notes. I had a page in my notebook about like ways that I would consider killing myself, you know, and mind map of like how I could do it in a way that would like most minimally affect my family and at least they'd be taken care of, and stuff like that. How close was I to quote unquote, pulling the trigger? I don't know. I don't remember, but I still have the page. You know what I mean. Like the notes and with some help from friends, you know what we realized was that I was doing meaningful work, but I was not doing unique ability work, so every day I was spending my day doing things that I didn't quite enjoy, I wasn't particularly good at and I didn't feel like I was making it any difference with, and that's the opposite of unique ability. The unique ability is things that you are good at, you have the potential to be world-class at, or already are, that you enjoy and you can see yourself doing for the rest of your life in some way applied in some direction. And then the third is that when you do it, it moves the needle on the things that matter to you, and so the dream of work is to be in that zone, not a hundred percent of the time. That's unreasonable. Sometimes you still have to do your taxes you know what I mean but 70 80 percent of the time. And so then we created this kind of grid where, like, the upper left is your unique ability stuff and the lower right is the full opposite of that, and then there's stuff you are good at but don't particularly enjoy, and then there's stuff that you enjoy and aren't particularly good at, and then you just categorize your work week, and I was like I was like 10% in the unique ability zone. So I'm like, oh no wonder I'm sad all the time. You know, I'm literally not expressing any of my gifts or my capabilities in the thing that I spend the most hours of the day at, and so then we set out to fix that, and so part of the thoughtfulness and the things that I teach to others came at different points in my life from these, like realizations that I was up against particular challenges and I needed frameworks to figure out my way through them. So, essentially, what it comes down to is having an understanding of what makes you excited to work hard and doing more of those things yeah, I mean, for me there's like really three prongs to this when it comes to work, but it could come to your hobbies and other things too. Is the purpose part we talked about? Right, it's what animates you. What do you feel like if you do it? When, when you do it, maybe you have some experience doing it, it matters, right, it matters even if it just matters to you, right, that's purpose, or why would any particular thing be your purpose over another? I don't know, it has to do with your origin story, right, like where you come from, stuff you've seen stuff you've done, stuff that's been done to you for whatever reason. Then you feel like, okay, this thing really animates me, or these couple of things really animate me, and then you can sort of craft that into an explicitly detailed purpose, right, and then you say, okay, cool, I feel like this is a thing that matters when I do it. And then you have to figure out this unique ability piece, right, what do people count on me for? You know and I have a, I have a worksheet that I have people give to the 10 people around them who can answer these kind of questions and there are questions like what, what am I good at. What do you rely on me for? You know what kind of things does the world count on me for? Like, if I went missing, what contributions do I make would be missing in your life? You know, and you start to really get this picture. And it's it's not like I'm a good science writer. That's too specific. Right, they have to be broader so that you can use them in all the phases of your life, in all the different things that you might choose professionally. But you come up with this thing and I've posted mine publicly and I have like 20 points of things that are my unique abilities, as you know, sort of curated from the thoughts and feedback from the people around me, and so the unique abilities is what you know. Again, you're good at what you really like enjoy doing, passionate to do, and moves the needle, and then you use those in service of that purpose. And the last thing is values. What are my values? And values are just the things that you believe make for a good life. You know it could be adventurousness, it could be conscientiousness, it could be discipline, it could be fun, it could be socializing with others. There's thousands of potential values here, and again I have exercises that help to me and help others, like work through what your values are, and it's, it's and you. Again, all these things have to be done with people around you. Right, sitting in a quiet office by yourself is a great start, but you also want the people around you to help contribute to this project because, again, you don't live alone, you don't work alone, it's always in community. And then the critical part is testing your values against other values. Right, because it's really easy to say I value discipline, I value hard work, I value adventure. The question is, like let's figure out your top value. So let's say, like, career progression is one of your values and adventurousness is another one. Okay, great, let's put them against each other. Okay, so I got an offer for you, right? Okay, next summer, the job of your dreams will be waiting for you. Let's say I get to know you and I know what that is. And also, I got a ticket for you here and it gets you to Australia, and when you get to Australia, you'll spend three months there doing these things, you know. And then there's a ticket to go to India and you get to do this there. What should you pick? That's how you figure out what your real values are. You pit them against your other values and say what you. How would I spend the next six months when I travel around? Or will I take that job of my dreams? You know, and your answer is highly informative about what your real values are. So now, all of a sudden, you have this picture right. My purpose purposes are this, my unique abilities are this and my values are this right. And values help you decide, right, what your priorities are and stuff. But they also set your guardrails right, because when you're on purpose, using your unique abilities, sometimes you can overwork, you know, sometimes you can forget about the other important things in your life. So they also keep you on track from getting too single-minded on the particular thing. Because the dream is you know work that is on your purpose, that uses your unique abilities 80% of the time right. Most of the world doesn't have that. If you are blessed enough to have the opportunity to pursue that, you better. But you also better make sure that you don't ruin it by living outside of your values. This is how you construct a vocation, a career. You know a way of using work as an expression of your highest self.

I love that concept of having the people around you help answer those questions, because, yeah, it's so hard to have an objective sense for yourself of the things you're good at, yeah, yeah, and at different parts in your life, your own objective sense will probably wax and wane as well.

But there there's a fundamental problem with thinking you're gonna figure everything out on your own, right, like, and the people who are the worst offenders of this are the smartest people. You know what I mean. Like now, I'm really smart. People come to me to help figure shit out. Of course, I'm gonna figure this out on my own. They're the worst offenders because, again, like, it's hard because a lot of words are co-opted and become cliches and then they don't mean anything to us anymore. But when I talk about being in community with people, I really mean that's what life generally is right. Like stuff is done with others. Like you're gonna go off on your own and do stuff alone as well. I get it, but most of what we're driven towards has some context around others, and so the idea of trying to figure out what you should do with your life alone sitley right. I mean, you have to decide what to do with all the feedback and input, but you have to get the feedback and input. It's like decision-making right. The best decision-makers I've ever met get more input than anyone else, and they aren't worried about getting competing opinions because they know it's up to them to decide. I have no problem listening to a group of over-passionate, ill-informed idiots, because when it's up to me to decide, I can fully disregard everything they just said. You know what? I mean so if I'm gonna be a leader or decision-maker, it's imperative to get all the feedback from all the directions. You know, we were always big on this at PN, getting customer-client feedback like how much can we get? How can we organize it so that it's useful? Yeah, but you know, and people would always have a yeah but yeah, but like, what are you really gonna do with that? Are these people the people you want to be making excuse me, business decisions for you? No, of course, I would never call a customer and say, hey, help decide on my next project. No, I mean, you're, it's not up to them, it's my. That's my job, that's my role. But I need to hear their thoughts, right, and I need to hear how often certain thoughts occur. Right, because maybe everyone's wrong about what we should do next, and I think this is I'll. I'll give you a quote, neil Gaiman quote, right, and I'll probably not get it entirely right, but the idea is, when you ask people what's wrong with your book or your project, they're usually right. When you ask them how to fix it, they're usually wrong. Right, a reader's expertise isn't writing your book, but it is saying I felt this way when I read your book, you know. So that was always my thing. I there's actually an exercise that I love. I love I still use it in non-business context it's called thinking allowed right. So I learned this from the Jacob Nielsen group, which, in the early days of like doing online content and work and business, you had to learn how to code websites and you had to learn about website usability and all this kind of stuff, right. So my to have my first blog, you know, in like 2002, I had to learn not only how to write blogs, but I had to learn how to code a website to have a place to put the blog. You know, and Jacob Nielsen group was the top group studying how people use the web, how to create websites that are usable. So, anyway, I learned this thinking allowed exercise from them, where what they would do is they would bring and they were a big research group and they would bring people in and they would say, okay, here we want to test out this new website, and they would give you like four or five jobs. Go read this article and then summarize it in 50 words go buy this product from this website and while you're doing that, we're gonna record you thinking allowed, your process, okay. So it's like, okay, cool. So I'm typing in wwwamazoncom, I hit enter, okay, stuff's loading now. Okay, I see a bunch of bikes and basketballs and books and men's shaving products on the cover here and I'm looking for they asked me to buy whatever. Okay, cool, so I'm gonna go to the shop link, I'm gonna click this. Okay, now, that's not taking me or I want to go. So you're just narrating your experience as you go through a website. And that was their most effective first pass at usability, right. And then they you've probably heard of they establish these eye tracking studies to see where you look on the screens and stuff like that. But it all started with think allowed and I was like, oh man, I bet you I could use that with my articles. I bet you I could use that with everything we do right. So my book change maker I had 15 people that I really like trust and think could add unique perspectives. Do think allowed with my book. But instead of think allowed and like recording it, I just, you know, used a Google document and I had them put notes in the margins and my instructions were don't fix the grammar. I got editors for that. What I want you to do is say what you're thinking and feeling when thoughts and feelings come up, right. So I'm reading this section and I disagree with this, say I disagree with this. Here's why I, jb, made a joke and it is not funny, right, that I want you to react to it in real time with how you're thinking and feeling. And I mean that that created for me the 15 people reading a 350 page book, the 2,000 notes, and it made the book so much better, right, because I could see when someone didn't get what I was trying to say. I could see when they really got what I was trying to say. I could see when 15 out of 15 disliked something. I could see when the audience was split in half, right, and I'm like, oh cool, so half of them hated it, the other half loved it. How do I make the haters love it? What did I need to add? Right, so it's just this, this process, right. So I mean, as you see, like I like to organize my thinking, but I also like to go on, like I can tell a lot of stories you know related. So I mean we originally started with that, this idea of feedback and and using others, you know, to help you define yourself, and you can see that I use it everywhere. I just think it's so critical to hear what other people think, and the caveat, though, is you have to be strong enough and confident enough to hear all the kinds of feedback and then, second of all, to not let it derail you from your purpose. You know, I mean, it's here's what I'm up to, and that, to me, is an ongoing exercise. You don't fix that once. The give the example of youth sport again, because it's a lot of my life right now, but when driving to a game that I'm coaching or a game that I'm watching just as a parent, a game that I'm coaching where I know we're gonna win, game that I'm coaching where I think we might lose, game that I'm coaching where I'm not sure about the outcome, I have to set a different intention in the car on the way. There takes 10 seconds. Who am I gonna be today? What's the energy I'm gonna give right now? Sometimes like I mean, sometimes in the same night I have to coach a sport and then go watch a sport as a parent right from the sideline, and I have to change. You know what I mean as a coach. I'm loud, I'm vocal and passionate. I give instructions during play, I give encouragement, I give constant feedback, positive and negative. You know I'm generally skewed towards positive. But someone does something wrong in the field, I tell them immediately how to fix it. And then when I move over to parent, I have to just shut up, sit on my hands. You don't talk to referees, you don't talk to the players on the field. You don't talk to your kid, you don't give them any instruction or guidance and you don't give them any correction or feedback. Right, and so this idea of having to set that intention. I am not good at just showing up and then just reacting. I'm okay if I have an intention. So watch the game, don't say any words. You know cheer when a good thing happens, say oh, that was heartbreaking. If a bad thing, you know what I mean. That's your job now, right? So I think about that in the context of getting feedback right. How, what, how do you set an intention so that you use? You can use it right? You know I've been subject to lots of criticism and negative feedback. You know, at a certain time we had coached over 200,000 clients and over 200,000 professionals we had certified. So not all and we're gonna be happy with your stuff you know, and so how do I show up? you know, and then, all like you know, my work predates social media. So I remember when social media came out and everything that comes with that, you know, and it was like, how do you handle social media related criticism when you've never seen that in your life before? There's a quote that gets thrown around quite often that I think is well-intentioned but incorrect. It's if you wouldn't ask someone for advice, don't accept their criticism, and I hate that quote. It's. It's terrible, it feels elitist to me and it feels like we're fundamentally cutting off feedback that could help us get better. It's like, hey, if I don't respect you enough to have asked for your opinion in the first place, why would I listen to your negative feedback? No, maybe it's good advice for someone who hasn't figured out how to master their emotions when someone tells them something negative. Right, so it helps shield them from overreacted emotional response, but does it actually help them get better? Like it's okay if idiots give you bad feedback, right, I have to hear everything that everyone's saying so that I can filter it, sort it and use it to get better all the time. So getting a little long-winded on this, but the idea is always, as often as possible, get people to help you figure out how to be better. Always, as much as possible, as often as possible. Are you gonna get some bullshit along the way, of course, but it's okay, right, it's okay. But what about if someone offends you to your core? Right, they say things about your mama and your family. Great, I can just disregard that. That's so easily right I'll. There's nothing useful here. Go to the next, right. But if I shield myself from other people's thoughts and feelings about my stuff, then I am missing constant opportunities to get better and grow. And level one, it seems to me, for most people, is just figuring out how to accept it. Level two is like getting to mastery, is going out and hunting it, you know, like creating environments where I make people give it to me. You know, one of my favorite exercises was to have my work reviewed by smart people who don't like me. That's my favorite. I know they're gonna be extra critical, so I'm gonna find all the things right, they don't like me, but they're smart, right, gotta use that, right. And that's what I call hunting, because they're not gonna give it to me, right? I have to go out and humble myself before someone who doesn't like me they've professed it on the internet or wherever and say, hey, listen, man, I know you're not a big fan of me or my work, but I think you're really, really smart and I'm doing a piece of work now that I really like your feedback on and I'd appreciate it. If you know you had some time and had an inclination to help me make it better. That'd be awesome, and I have to. If I have to pay you, that'd be fine too. Right? It's going with your hat in your hand to someone who's like expressed f. That guy, you know. But there's, that's some of the best feedback you'll ever get. This guy wants to tell you all the things that are wrong with your project, right?

so I want to hear it. I love that thinking out loud activity. It's one that I'm in the process now of getting started with my first company and we're done with the website design phase, so you got my wheels spinning on all the people I want to reach out to, to do that activity, because it's so helpful to go back to what we were saying earlier to just get a third-person perspective, because you're always so close to things absolutely 100%.

Yeah, I mean, I think, as you do that right, like you know, obviously, you know you're developing this website right, and you're like, okay, cool, I'm looking at it most of the time on my laptop or desktop, right, well, now you have a mobile experience. That has to also be good, right. And then all different iterations of you know phones right, are you on the Samsung, or you on the Android, or you on the Apple? Right, and this starts to feel like technical stuff, but this is like a metaphor for life, right, people are having all kinds of different experiences with you and your work based on the quote-unquote device. They're on right, which may be the way that they think about the world, or where they grew up, or whatever. And so we have a process for testing the websites. You know functionality and how it looks across platforms right. But the real question is, as you run your company, will you do the same for all the things you know? Will you test your words, effectiveness, will you test your products? You know perception, among others, across platforms, you know, and what most people do is and sometimes this is something, sometimes it's not even like hiding from negative feedback, sometimes it's just a bit I'm busy like what do you do with all that feedback, right? How do you collate it, organize it, put it to use for positive effect? I don't know. It would have felt intimidating to me if there wasn't a process for testing the iPhone 7 versus the 14, you know I mean. So there's processes for it, and that's where processes come in really handy. So, anyway, I think it's a nice metaphor for all of your business as it develops it and a nice tool thinking about a nice tool for it, you know, not just for the website, but for your writing, for your product, for your customer service experience. It's another one that's often neglected, right? Have someone do a think aloud of their buying experience, their post purchase experience, their the email campaign that they get after they've bought. You know what I mean. All these things can be, data can be collected on and it and it'll be really useful and this isn't just theoretical. Like I grew a couple hundred million dollar business doing this exact thing it really brings the conversation full circle.

Going back to what we were saying before of, in a way, all things being the same and being able to piece all these things together. It's really brings perspective to that first away. We started this conversation, mm-hmm yeah.

I think. I think it does, I think it's and I think it's a real superpower to be able to do that right, to be able to say here's a thing, right, I'm holding this thing and I'm looking at this one thing how is this thing like other things? How can I use what I know about this thing when I'm learning about this thing for all the other things in my life? It's one of my great moments with our kids when I see them doing that like I. Again, I am not shy to give constructive feedback. Hey, you did that thing wrong. That's fully okay, because that helps us figure out how to do it right next time. All right, here's how we're gonna do that. But when they do stuff like this where I see them use like they're not, they go oh, that's kind of like what I learned over there, I can use. I praise the hell out of that. Like, oh, that's amazing. Seriously, I need you to know how important it is what you just did. Right, that is incredible. And if you can do that in your life, like and no one will be able to hang with you you know you'll be able to solve problems. It's incredible. That's why you can. You know so it's stuff like that.

That really gets me excited because I really do think it's a superpower as well, and I want to return back to something you said a little earlier in talking about mentors, because there was a time in my life where I was probably 20 years old, I was in college and I really started to walk this path of like self-development or self-improvement, and I looked around at the people around me and we all know that quote you're the sum of the five people you spend the most time I was like I don't really want to be the sum of these people and to outsource that and to change those five people. I made those five people like podcasts and I was made guys like Joe Rogan, mark Bell, just these type of guys who I really look up to, and I thought they had it together, quote unquote, like what you said before, and I saw them as mentors and made their voices the ones that were in my ear more than anybody else. But outside of that, I think there's something to be said about having mentors in real life. Yeah, I agree. How do you think we can go about finding mentors?

So I think, like, the podcast thing you talked about is just a beautiful example of, like, access to thinkers in this generation. You know, I don't know if you ever watch Goodwill Hunting Great movie but you remember when Will is talking about who his friends are and he's like I got Nietzsche, I got content Right. And so I mean this has always existed in some fast, in some way. Right, like books have always been that conduit, and now you have podcasts. But it does create a problem as well, right, like, everything has its cons, or you know trade offs, and the trade off is here. We start to believe that mentors ought to be these famous people, so people who are accomplished plus celebrated right, and we forget that there's people who are accomplished but not celebrated Right. Like we don't know who the hell they are, but they're at the top of their game. We fully forget about those people, right, and that's what I think, like a bit of sort of expertise and celebrity make us forget. And so what I always and it's really interesting because my old business partner, phil, he was a guy, it continues to be a guy, and this guy's a brother to me We've, you know, we worked together for nearly 20 years, we still spend a lot of time together and his bent is to go find those people right, like, for example, he. I don't know if you ever heard the story before, but you've probably familiar with Ray Dalio and his book. Principles Yep, okay. So Principles started as a PDF on the Bridgewater website. It was just for their staff and Phil somehow found it, read it and was like, oh, this is a really smart guy. Right, he's not a good writer, you know, but really smart guy. Phil and I are both from Italian immigrant families, so he's like, here's this Italian guy, really smart, accomplished, runs a successful company. I think I could learn from him. I want to go be friends with him, all right. So what he did was he took principles on the Bridgewater website on this PDF he hired one of the world's best book designers. This guy called Rodrigo Corral. He had just finished doing Jay-Z's book and we have lots of experience publishing, so cleaned up Ray's thing, turned it into like a readable, bookworthy thing, had Rodrigo Corral design this thing like, made beautiful leather bound, looked like the Bible and just made a couple copies right One for Ray, one for us and he went to Great Lengths to send this thing to Ray. So at this point I mean the guy's Phil has spent I don't know six months professional editors, book designers. He's probably 60 grand into this project. Now, part of it was to meet Ray, but another part of it was a legit gift. He's like I read your PDF and it was important to me. It taught me things that I'm using in my business. Thank you, right, that's the spirit. And then he went to Great Lengths to get this on Ray's desk. Well, every year he and his wife spend like a month in Italy and Phil's in Italy, and he gets a phone call. Phil. Ray Dahlio, I loved your book. Can you get to Connecticut to meet with me? I got a project I want to work with you on. He's like I'm in Italy, that's okay, I'll send my chat. So he sends the jet over and picks up Phil and that brings him back to Connecticut. They meet. I want you to run. I want to publish this as a book. He's like I've been thinking about it for years. I got this team but they're going nowhere. Will you run it? And Phil's like I can't. I have my own business man. He's like, but I can help. So Phil helped put together the team and put together the book principles. So this is Phil. This is a cool story, but also as a way to suggest what Phil's like, okay, I'm much less like that. For me, I'm like who's around and demonstrating excellence. I'm just literally going to go stand next to them. Example right. Like. I'm a pretty accomplished guy. You know I have been successful in this field of sport, all right, and fitness and health and coaching, right. But my kids wanted to start to play soccer. I look around and I'm like many of the coaches are not very good. They're going to end up on some shitty coach teams. I'm a good coach, but I don't know soccer that well. How do I learn about soccer? So I meet this guy, matt. He recently came from England, moved to Canada, was a pro player, runs academies, running academy in our town, and he's so, and and we're in this little town called Port Colburn, little tiny blue collar town, right? So this guy's running academies in a little tiny blue collar town, right, and I'm just like he's, he's good though, I'm just going to go stand next to him. So I signed our kids up for academy the first night I walk out Hi, my name's John, Listen, I know you probably have a whole system and stuff, but I see you here by yourself. I'm going to help you set up cones and stuff. And so he's like oh no, man, it's cool, I got this. I'm like listen, I got four kids here. I'm going to be sitting in a lawn chair over there, anyway, and rather than sitting, I rather be walking around and doing something and getting some steps, and one of my values is being useful. So I'm just going to help, like, tell me where to put the cones, and then I'll go stand on the side until you need the cones moved again. And I ended up being his helper for every academy that my kids were in, and as he started to feel less and less like I was some weirdo, I started just asking him questions about soccer and we got to be friends and we went for tea, and then I would be like, hey, what resources should I read next? And so got this guy to mentor me. Now am I ready to coach Manchester City? No, but I'm good enough now to be able to coach a youth team and to me, that's how I like to do. Mentorship it's find like the local craftspeople who are good at the thing I want to be good at, and just find a way to like help them. You know what I mean Be next to them, learn from them. But I don't couch it as hey, you would be a great mentor for me. I'm just like you. Look like you have a big heavy bag to carry. Let me get it. You know what I mean Be super useful first and then slowly and I know how to do this better because I've been on the other end of this very often where young people will come up and the good ones will do like I did, like I do, and the bad ones quote unquote will walk straight up and be like it's just the energy, the psychic energy, is squeezing you for whatever they hope you can give them you know what I mean. Just, it's all about them. They're single-minded, they're focused on their career, they're focused on making money, they're focused on, like, having an impact or being a legend or whatever it is they have in their mind and they're coming up to you because they think you have some of that and they don't know what they need from you, but they're going to squeeze it out of you. You know what I mean and that feels really bad, you know, and I have this one example that I always returned to. I was speaking at an event I had brought our daughter, who's now 11, was five at the time, and we have this ritual in our house when you turn five, you get to go on any trip you want with dad, just one on one time, wherever you want to go. She wanted to go to California. I was speaking and then we were going to go do fun stuff. And so we're at this event, my five-year-olds by my side. I had just gotten done speaking for an hour and a half, and she sat patiently in the audience, wonderfully, not stirring, not wanting to leave, and then people line up to like have me sign their book and ask questions, and she's waiting patiently through that process. And this guy comes up and he is like almost pushing her out of the way right While and he's seen we've been here a long time while just pumping me question after question and I'm like, hey man, listen, like our time is almost up here. I really appreciate meeting you. Answer the questions, like email me, I can have our team help get the rest of your questions answered, whatever. And he's like no, it's trying to get it, it's just squeezing right now. That's not the way to do it. Oh yeah, you know. So I've been on that side and know what that's like. I know what people who are like overly pushy you know I am pushy in this quiet, helpful way Like I am going to coach Academy with you, whether you like it or not, but the way that I'm going to get there is by being of service. I'm going to bring you a coffee, I'm going to carry your bag, I'm going to set up the cones. If I see there's kids standing around with nothing to do, I'll get them involved in a drill. You know, I will help you in all the ways until you're like hey man, stand next to me, what's your story? Anyway, he knows nothing about me, right? And then I remember, like about six months into this relationship, he's like hey, I Googled you the other night. I wish I had known who you were early on. And I'm like, yeah, but I don't use that. You know what I mean. I use humble and helpful. So that's how I think about mentorship. Who is the talented, successful local craftsperson that maybe no one knows anything about that I can help so that I can learn. And then you know who knows. Like maybe my ambitions are greater than theirs. And when I get to the point where I feel like I've learned everything I can from them, now I have to look for the next step. But, like I said with coaching, like or the Da Vinci thing earlier, right, like knowing more than the next person, like it's, getting to that next level of knowledge is all you need. You don't need to get to Ray Dalio on day one, right? You just need the next step above you. It's a progression. You're just climbing this staircase until you go as high as you want to or need to. So that's how I think about it. Right, it doesn't have to be this formal process, and I can share a good example. There's this guy, nate Green, and right now Nate works for Sam Harris. He is the content director for the Waking Up app and, nate, like he's my close friend now, but I became his mentor at an event. Like he walked up to me at an event he said I know you're busy, I see all these people have questions and stuff like that, but I've been reading your work for years. It's made a difference in my life in these ways and I thought you would really like this book. I brought it, and I brought it for you at this event because I knew I would see you have a great rest of the event. I'll see you around. Good luck with your next talk, whatever. And then he rolled right and the book was excellently chosen. I really dug it and in the very end he was like hey, if you ever want to chat, here's my name, here's my email address, right. And so, of course, like I dropped him an email saying thanks for the book. Man, I really liked it. Here's what I liked about it and that kicked off a correspondence, a friendship I ended up hiring. He worked at him and he worked at Precision Nutrition for years when I sold a company and he left and went to work with Sam. It's little things like that Little human, thoughtful, helpful things. You know he showed up with empathy. You know you're busy. I'm not going to try and like, make my pitch to be your friend or your mentee in a busy crowd, you know. But he did things that other people wouldn't do, right? So, again, there's a lot of ways to think about this, but if you look for the through line, it's you know this person doesn't need you in their life. Now, mentors enjoy having mentees, right, it's important to us, but I don't need it. Right, and the relationship mostly goes to the benefit of the mentee. Right, the mentor is still getting something, but yeah, and you have to appreciate what. That is right. So how do you repay your mentor? You have to use and demonstrate yourself using what you've learned. You know what I mean. That's what they need. They don't need money, they don't need gifts, right, they just want to see like, hey, this is an eager, curious person who's nice to be around. And when I teach them stuff, they seem to go employ it with positive effect to help other people. So part of that is go do that. And the second is like, show me how you've done that. Once in a while, be like hey, man, I learned this important thing from you and I had this moment the other day with a student, patient, client, whatever, and it made me think about the stuff I learned from you. And this is what happened. That's all the payment, you know. So it really is about getting into the mind of the potential mentor and showing up in a way that they need you to show up, helping them in a way that they need help, so that you can benefit too.

I love that concept of just being useful. I think it was Elon Musk's advice when they asked him what advice he has for young people, and it was be more useful and especially in the current age, where we're so locked into consumption, there's very few people that are genuinely useful and just being like a servant. In that way, it just makes your own life better and it makes the people around you life better.

Yeah, absolutely. And, like everything else, you have to know what the right boundaries are and you have to know when to ask for what you need as well. But generally here, like with this, we're talking about getting your foot in the door, and that's what probably Elon Musk is talking about as well. Right, you want to work at Tesla or SpaceX? You want to make yourself notable? You want to be a great employee, help solve the problems of the people around you? I mean, that's it. Yeah, and our daughter so last year she just turned 13,. But she's super into, like aesthetics and beauty stuff, so she's like really good at it too. Right, like a lot of the women in the neighborhood come to get their nails done and their hair done by her and all this kind of stuff. And so she knows makeup, she knows nails, she knows hair, and like even to the point where, like one day, she's like, can you take me to the whatever the pharmacy I got to buy this, like this shampoo. And it's like men's like anti-fungal shampoo. I'm like, why are you buying this shampoo? She's like, well, you know how I started recently getting acne on my forehead? And she's like, well, there's different types of acne and this is, I'm pretty sure, fungal acne. So one of the best things to do is a mask with this anti-fungal shampoo. And she's like this girl just fixed her acne problem at 12, right. And I'm like this is amazing, right. So we always support this. So this really great aesthetics place you know they do like medical stuff. Plus, you know nails hair just opened up like two blocks from our place. So I was like I'm going to get her a gift for a facial at Christmas, and then she's really social, really likable, really smart. So I'm like and this is in my mind, I don't tell anybody this and like, by the end of that visit, she's going to have a job there, right. And so I took her in there. She's there an extra hour, right? So I'm like this is a good sign, right, I show up to pick her up. They're chatting along, getting along famously Okay, here's my moment. So I'm like you know, rebecca is the owner. So I'm like you know, rebecca, we just live like two blocks away and like this would be Amalyn's dream job. I know she's only 12 and stuff, but if you ever need someone to like sweep up around here or help restock product or whatever you would like make this girl's life and it might be helpful for you. And she's like, oh yeah, let me think about it. A week later, our daughter works there, you know, and I was like you don't even have to pay her, like she doesn't need money. She's 12 years old, it's all good, you know, she just wants to be around this. A week later, she works there and is paid, you know. And my advice to her was what we're talking about here, right? So this I always say, the truest test of what you believe isn't like what you tell the world to do, it's like what you do and what you would tell your kids to do, right? So this is what I told her. I'm like this is like a solo printer running a new business. She's got a couple of kids. She just needs help. So anticipate her needs and then solve them without her asking. You know you do that and you'll be the best employee she's ever had. And then you'll get more responsibilities over time and then eventually you know who knows if you want to work in this field or not. If you did, you would learn everything that you needed to learn here. And then you go to the next big thing. You know.

John, thank you so much for this conversation today.

This was an absolute blast. Yeah, man, thank you.

I don't want to be courteous of your time, but this hour and 40 minutes absolutely flew by and I so appreciate your thoughtfulness and your wisdom today. It was very well received and I have so many notes in front of me that I'm going to apply to my own life.

Yeah, good. Well, I'm glad and I'd love to hear about that Right, because that's what I love, and, especially on the precipice of your new business here, I'd love to hear how that's going. So please keep in touch about it. And everyone else who's listening in. I hope there was some value here for them as well. And I don't really do these very often and I certainly don't have anything to pitch. But if there's some stuff that we talked about that folks want to like dig into, they can pop over to the Changemaker Academy website. You don't even have to buy my book to get this stuff. Like, if you want to, it's 20 bucks on Amazon. But we have, like, all the worksheets and stuff free on the website. So the purpose stuff, the value stuff, the unique ability stuff all of those worksheets are just freely available on the website so you can download them and get to work on them. Probably will help to read the book for a little additional context. But again, I don't need to sell anything here. If you want to spend 20 bucks on Amazon, cool. If not, that's fine too. But this stuff changed my life and it changed my work, and so if any of it like struck a chord for you all listening, please pop over and have a look.

I'll link to all that stuff in the show notes below John, anything that we haven't talked about today that you have on your mind.

No, I think that was a fun conversation for sure.