Bedros Keuilian Podcast Show - E173 - Embrace The Suck - Brent Gleeson

Episode Date: December 29, 2020

Today you’ll hear life and business lessons from a high performing entrepreneur and former Navy SEAL. From tough lessons learned on the battlefield to reinventing himself and building successful businesses, today’s episode is jammed packed with actionable knowledge. 0:20 - Meet Brent Gleason, a former Navy SEAL turned successful serial entrepreneur and bestselling author. 03:40 - What embracing the suck means as an entrepreneur and business leader.  4:50 - Discover the story behind how Brent was inspired to become a Navy SEAL.  11:20 - Hear about Brent’s first combat mission as a SEAL and how a picture of Muhamid Ali showed up during the mission.  24:28 - Next, Brent shares how he mentally prepared himself for a successful transition from the military to becoming a civilian entrepreneur.  30:43 - Brent shares the mindset and strategies he used to grow and scale a digital media based company despite having zero technological background or experience. 34:08 - Bedros asks Brent a tough question about why some people have a truly hard time understanding and accepting constructive feedback. 34:30 - Brent shares why he created his best selling book “Embrace The Suck” and tells how it’s different than the majority of other self help books.  54:48 - David Goggins endorses Brent’s book and Brent shares when they first met while serving as Navy SEALS.  59:40 How to dive deeper into Brent, his story and his resources available for Entrepreneurs.  "Don’t just accept adversity or accept pain and suffering but lean into it. Be intentional in the fine art of expanding your comfort zone. " - Brent Gleeson Follow me on Instagram: @bedroskeuilian Buy Man Up and get Bedros’ High Performance Leadership Course for FREE: https://manup.com/ Listen on iTunes and leave us a review: http://bedrosmedia.com/itunes131 Subscribe to My Channel for weekly videos: http://www.youtube.com/bedroskeuilian/?sub_confirmation=1

Don't just accept adversity or accept pain and suffering, but lean into it. Be intentional in the fine art of expanding your comfort zone. Hey friends, welcome to another Empire show. My name is Bedrose-Culian, and this is an inside look into the life of another awesome entrepreneur who is also an American hero, who has also gone to two different colleges on two different continents, and who has got a pretty colorful story. He's my dear friend, Brent Gleason Brent. Welcome to the show.

Good to see you, brother. Thanks for having me. Yes, sir. So let's kind of paint in the pictures. You are a former or retired Navy SEAL. Former. Former Navy SEAL. And by the way, your friends, Ray and Jason have taught me the entire, there's the X Navy SEAL.

There's the former Navy SEAL. And then there's a retired Navy SEAL. Am I correct? Is there any others that I'm missing? Retired means you did 20 years or more. Right. Otherwise, you're a former. Right. And if you're ex, then they, like, stripped you of your trident? Is that how that go? I don't know how that goes.

I believe, yeah. If you're an ex-seal, that means something not so great happened. Got it. Are you an ex-seal? Former. Okay. Former. I think. Let's not spread that river. Check the formal records. Right. And so not only were you a seal, but you, man, getting out of the teams, you really went into entrepreneurship and have built several companies. In fact, exited out of two, if I remember quickly or one? Two. exit out of two, which we're going to touch on all this stuff. And second book, Embrace the Suck, which this is a Gallic copy, folks, a Gallic copy. And you can get this from Amazon.com or your favorite bookstore if the quarantine is over by the time this comes out. But more than that, I wanted to really get you here and to talk about what embracing the suck means in your world and how it translates into our world as entrepreneurs, as leaders, as people who want to be.

great servants to society. So Taking Point was your first book. Yes. Really about leadership through change and businesses. Is that a good summary? Yeah, basically a book really about leading organizational change, transformation, leans heavily into culture and engagement and the importance of having really solid leaders at every level within a team or an organization of any size. Now, interestingly, a lot of the principles in Taking Point are even more relevant now, because as we know, the complex world of modern business was crazy enough pre-COVID and now layering in these other complexities of communication and how leaders need to be even more empathetic and understanding of what

motivates and drives each of their team members now because everybody's working in a different environment. Amen to that. And by the way, as this is coming out, guys, we are in late November, about a week away from Thanksgiving. And just today, Brent, L.A. County announced that all restaurants in L.A. County are closed. Not just, you can't just eat indoors or outdoors. It was just all. You can't eat in restaurants. Yet they're expected to stay in business. pay their rents and all that. So it is a complex time for all businesses. And taking point, I believe, was not only,

because I've read it, was not only a great book for the small business owner that wants to scale, but also for the mega business owner that wants to evolve and change with the times. But embrace the suck. First of all, I love the terminology, and I believe it comes from your guys' world as seals, right?

What does embrace the suck mean other than like, hey, just enjoy, a bad experience? Well, the term originally, I believe, was born in the Marine Corps. And so we borrow a lot of things from our wonderful Marines. And we've obviously taken that type of terminology. We have many sayings, obviously, in the Naval Special Warfare community. But Embrace the Suck is one, obviously, in the early days of sealed training and the instructors

say things like Embrace the Suck. It just basically means don't just accept adversity or accept pain and suffering, but lean into it. Be intentional in the fine art of experience. your comfort zone so that you can accomplish more of the goals you achieve and basically make things that seemed completely insurmountable or impossible when it comes to your personal and professional goals or navigating the inevitable suffering we face as humans and really leaning into it accepting it taking stock of your current situation and then developing a plan of action and executing and the more you do that the more your comfort zone expands and then you move the goalpost and you do it again and again and again and the idea is to really widen that field, is it not, as you say, to move the goalpost. So now let's go back to the beginning.

Did you know the suck that you were about to experience as you decided to put your hand up and go, hey, I want to be a Navy SEAL? It's interesting story, so I'll give you a quick couple minute backstory. I grew up in Dallas, did my undergrad at Southern Methodist University with degrees in finance and economics. No real intention or vision of joining the military whatsoever. My dad had served as a Marine during Vietnam. Never really talked about it, never pushed my twin brother or I.

towards military service. And again, this was just pre-9-11. So peacetime, kind of a different mentality of mindset. Yes, important to have that call to service, but a different meaning of what that journey would entail. So I graduated and I was working as a financial analyst out in corporate America. And at that time, I had a really close college buddy of mine who was a year behind me. So he was now a senior and he was one of these young men who did have a childhood vision

and dream to graduate and join the nation. maybe and at least attempts to be accepted into the NSW training pipeline to become a seal. And while I thought that was highly admirable, of course. I deemed it to be a little bit of an unrealistic career pipeline, knowing the attrition rates. And, you know, it's at sufferance of an 85, 90% failure. Are you very pragmatic, logical person? Yes. Just the way you said it.

Weighing the odds. I was like, that seems a little bit ridiculous. For him or for you? I'm curious. For him. For him. Did you tell him that? And then therefore for me.

Yeah. To which he said. But I had read, I had read a couple. a couple books, Dick Marchenko's books about Seals of Vietnam and Rogue Warrior and some of the other ones and obviously fascinated by, you know, the history, the culture, the mindset and the grit and mental fortitude of, you know, essentially a high-performance team environment. And so while I was working out in finance and he was a senior, we started training together. I played rugby in college and wanted to obviously continue fitness regimens and whatnot. And so I felt it be a great way to help a friend prepare for an arduous journey. And we started spinning nights and weekends together, having a lot of dialogue.

about the implications of what he was taking on and the requirement that it would take both physically and mentally, for him to even have a chance of succeeding in what is arguably the most challenging military training pipeline known to man. And I started reading more books, and we started leaving the office a little bit earlier.

We started training even harder on the weekends. And long story short, that growing fascination and with all the reading I was doing about it and seeing his passion and his excitement and really emotional connections. emotional connection to this journey. Eventually, over time, I decided to really work for one of the first times in my life take some very serious calculated risk and not be that guy later on when I'm 40 or 50 years

old being like, oh, I thought about doing that or I was going to do this. I don't be that guy. You don't be that guy. Nobody wants to be that guy. And so I wrote my parents a letter. It's back when we actually wrote letters. And it was a very big deal and I never talked about it. So I wrote my parents a letter today.

Hey guys, I'm quitting my job and joining me in Navy and I'm following my buddy into the seal program. You're how old at this point? 23. Okay, you're 23 at this point. So you had at least a couple years in the financing world? One year. Yeah. So it was at about right of the nine or ten month mark of having that job that I gave my notice to the firm, worked for a couple more months.

I did not get my bonus for some reason. I'm not sure why. They're like, okay, you're out of here. Never mind. You're not getting your bonus. And so then he and I moved up to Crested Butte, Colorado, to do. train for an additional about I think it was about four or five months at high altitude to really really take our fitness level as far as we possibly could before we had to enlist and

then go to boot camp and get out of shape okay so so so so as you do that did you both enter boot camp at the same time we did astonishingly by the way they filter people back I mean hundreds of kids you know coming in and you're all on different buses and somehow we made it into the same division in booge in camp and then we made it into the same Buds class and we were roommates at Buds when we checked in and yeah so it was it was by the grace of God that that even happened right because from what I understand like that was unlikely that that should have very unlikely right yeah and I am curious did he make it through so here's the interesting part of the journey yeah we all know God works in mysterious ways

and and obviously Matt was put in my life for a reason so uh the sad part of the story is that he did not make it and it's my fault so I'll get to the crux of the issue here so st. Bud's class and so we run six classes a year so every couple months so guys for your class are filtering in any time between that two-month period coming from you know college or ROTC OCS other branches of the military sometimes or just guys who are just filtered in from when they're done with boot camp so you have a couple months sometimes before you class up and begin training with your class

And so we were in the dorms doing, you're doing like half-day workouts, and you have a proctor, an instructor who's kind of your, he's a good guy at that time. They're running you through some of the drills and the training and the running and the swimming that you're gonna be doing once you class up. And that's when things get really hard. And so the week before we started all the horrendous things

you see on TV and documentaries and stuff. So Hell Week is about usually week four or five. Sometimes that changes a little bit. But those weeks leading up to Hell Week are really almost just as bad as Hell Week. You just get to sleep for a few hours at night. And so, that week before we started first phase when we class up and launch into all that crazy training.

I was horribly ill, like violently, 104 fever, horrible flu, couldn't stay hydrated. Well, that weekend, I got better, and he got sick. Oh, no. Oh, no. You jerk. So, yeah, so he was my roommate. I got him sick. And literally, like, that Sunday night came down the worst, you know, worst fever. And the, you know, in all seriousness, if you can't stay hydrated, then they have to. either drop you or you have to make the decision to pull out. Because, I mean, you could die. And it's happened before.

So there is a silver lining here. He always had a passion for being a pilot. So what he did was after, I think, four or five months of doing some physical security or base security, basically like an MP. He did a lateral transfer to the Army, became a warrant officer, and flew MH60 Medevac helicopters, 12 combat tours in Afghanistan, a highly decorated pilot. And now he, then he did a transfer to the Air Force. Now he was a captain in the Air Force running some black ops. Holy smokes.

Gotcha. Gotcha. So I saw a picture of you online. Not of you. You posted up a picture. It was like a flashback Thursday or a throwback Thursday. Bro, it was Muhammad Ali having what looked like supper with some high value target that you guys whacked. or captured or did something to.

Yeah. You'll never know what you find on a target when you're doing what's called on SSSE. I was going to text you about the backstory. I'm like, no, we're going to hear this on the show. Well, the story of this op actually is pretty intense because ironically, that picture came from doing, after you secure the target, you'll do an SSC

or sensitive site exploitation, basically gathering intel. So you're always going to secure the target and you're always going to gather as much Intel as you can. So our task unit from Team 5 on my first deployment, We were the first task unit operating in and around Baghdad, Ramadi, Fallujah. Obviously, there was other Tier 1 special operations. What year was that? That's circle what?

We were there first in April, 03. O3? So as soon as the city fell, we were working in conjunction with other agency and OGA assets, basically hunting down bad guys. OJ stands for other government agency. Bingo, got it. So it basically means nothing. It could mean a lot of things.

Any one of the three letters. There's another three letter that basically means. And so we were. We were doing, the op tempo back then was super high and we were operating sometimes, we're two or three of those types of capture or kill missions at a night. Sometimes we'd go for a week or two with doing nothing, and that's just how it ebbs and flows. But we'd be working in conjunction with the OJA assets who would basically come to our camp a few times a week, give us a potential target package.

We would work up a mission profile and if it got approved, then we would rehearse and go out that night. And so from that picture that you're talking about, he was one of Saddam's right-hand men, high-ranking Iraqi Air Force General, also directly linked to attacks on American convoys, the loss of many American lives, also potentially a rapist. So that was our op that night. Now, the op is a bit of a goat rope leading up to the ultimate success of the evening. So oftentimes, too, when you're, you know, when you're using ground intelligence, it can be flawed, obviously,

especially if you're paying for that intelligence. Got it. There's obviously a lot of different things we can't get into. I imagine people, they're incentivized financially, so they maybe want to come to you and go, hey, I've got information. You pay them and the information may not pan out. As we know, and just like in business,

sometimes you're giving the wrong incentive for the undesired outcome. Bingo. And so, long story short, the target house where basically it's like, this bad guy is going to be at this location, Oftentimes their trade craft was to move from house to house or, you know, safe house to safe house. Sometimes it'd be like five houses down the road.

It's not very sneaky, but anyways, we, you know, rolled into this neighborhood. Oftentimes these targets early on would be like five minutes from our camp, you know, outside the country. No kidding. Yeah. So sometimes we're flying three hours, sometimes we're driving six minutes. And so, you know, we hit the target, explosive breach, wakes up everybody in the entire neighborhood, dry hole. Nobody's there. And then we get over the radio, basically three minutes into the op after breaching the target door, we find out that we're at the wrong house. It's not this house. It's two houses down. So two houses down after you've put two pounds of C4 in someone's door at three o'clock in the morning. And oftentimes because it's so hot outside, people will sleep on the roofs just for some extra air. And so now you've got shadowy figures emerging across all these houses down the road. All right, you got to stop you. You know who's bad, who's good?

Bro, this sounds bananas. I mean, obviously you guys were operating off the best Intel you can, and I'm sure their cities are not as well structured as ours. Like, hey, you're there. I live off, well, let's say I live off Butterfield Ranch Road and I can give you an address. I'm guessing things aren't that specific. So you hit someone else's house who doesn't seem like they were the bad guy. Luckily, there was nobody there. So oftentimes you'll get in these areas, you'll have three generations living on target.

Right. You know, women, children, grandparents and the bad guys. Okay. And like, do you guys then like start swinging the hammer and fixing the place? Or is there a crew that comes in? Like, I'm really curious about it. Yeah, I mean, what happens? We try to be good stewards of non-combatants in these types of areas.

So when in all it, when it all possible, I mean, they'll send people to, you know, repair. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Some dude shows up with that dual belt. That's what I'm picking. Local contractor. Yeah. Okay, got it. So the guys are few doors down.

A few doors down. So we're just, you know, running like crazy people down the road, carrying the big ladders that we carry it because almost every house. in these areas had six-foot wall in front. So we had innovated and created these ladders just literally had a two-by-fourths, and now we have real good collapsible aluminum ladders. But back then, we had to suffer. We had to embrace

the suck. Like straight up Somali pirates. Yeah. You guys were using Somali pirates yet. Okay, got it. And it was great. And so, you know, we had the ladder slapped up on the wall. Guys were, you know, leaping over the wall. The breacher had gone ahead. He was set in the charge by the time

half of us were still coming into the guard. So by this time, you have no time to wait. You know, it's not like get set and ready for the, it's three to one. Because it jigs up. Yeah, jigs up and you know that by that time, assuming there are bad guys in that house, well, they've heard the explosion already. So they're probably getting themselves in barricaded positions with, you know, the AK-47. They pulled from under their pillow. Sure. And so three-two-one execute, blow the door.

We had what's called a failed breach. So not only did we hit the wrong target. Now a few minutes later, we have a failed breach, which means the door didn't blow all the way, which means we cannot enter the target. So now, definitely everybody in the Target house, if there are bad guys in there, know that the other bad guys are outside wanting to come get them. And so then we have to switch to a manual breach. Luckily for me, that was great because I was a new guy and new guys carry all the heavy shit. So in addition to all of my gear, I also had a 30-pound gas-powered metal cutting saw on my back.

Strap-downed kind of like a backpack. And so I'd finally gotten to use this thing. And so, you know, I run up and I get this thing started. And it takes a couple minutes to cut through twisted steel, big enough to get people through the door. And so as soon as we get into the Target house, the general, our HBT, or high-value target, was actually in the front room. And this happened, it's very strange. He was standing right there. AK-47, you know, around the wall, the spray-and-pray maneuver where they're not really actually like tactically ending at you.

Fire in a few rounds, guys tackled him, zipped him up, zip tight him up, excuse me. Zipping someone up is a different term. That's when your night's really bad. Body bag? Yeah. Got it. And so my fire team started peeling up. There's a big spiral staircase that goes up to the second deck.

You know, other fire teams were clearing other rooms on the first floor. And so we're halfway up the stairs. And we start taking heavy, fully automatic AK-47 fire from, I believe it's just one enemy shooter in a barricaded position just right there at the top of the second deck. So you're talking, I don't know, 12, 14,000. 14 feet away from an elevated position. And what was interesting is, you know, this was our first, for any of us, our first gunfight in a close quarters combat situation. What's fascinating is you don't realize how well trained you are until you get into those

situations. And they're serious, I'm not making light of it. But it is looking back, you realize that, you know, the lay person might think, oh, you're getting shot at from 14 feet away. People are getting diving for cover. Yeah. I mean, that's what I would do. Nobody do for cover.

like everybody's rifles raised, return fire. And so we're returning fire. My rifle jams twice in a matter of like four seconds because we've been using this graphite lube for our rifles that was recommended to us by our turnover assets because it was so dusty in the desert. They didn't want to use like WD40 because I've gummed up their weapons.

But now we're in the city where it's not all that dusty. And so the graphite loop doesn't work that well. So my ride's like bang, bang click. You immediately have to transition to your pistol. So we're in this first gun fight. rifle jams twice and then all of a sudden our corpsman gets hit and he goes down he's standing next to me like one or two stairs up because we're pointing up this way and he gets hit and goes down starts sliding down the stairs we're like fucking Nelson just got hit and so our

point man at the time mark Owen who wrote no easy day you know special mission team leader he called for us it's like collapsed back down and it's another kind of that leadership at all levels we're not waiting for our platoon commander of the chief to tell us what to do everybody's making decisions on the fly based on what's best for the outcome. And so we collapsed back down, dragged Nelson with us. And then Nelson passed back up to his feet. I thought you got shot in the face, bro. Holy crap. And he didn't know what happened either. He thought maybe he tripped, but he hit the wall hard and just went face down. And so we lob a couple grenades up over the balcony. Well, I'm going to ask a dumb question here. So he was shot. Well, I'll get to that. Because we didn't find out what

happened until the next morning. And so lob a couple grenades up, re-engage, up the stairs, finished clearing the target. And during the search and sensitive side exploitation, that's when we found a bunch of intelligence and that picture of Muhammad Ali and the general having dinner together. You have to know when one of my questions was, do you know what era that was that they were having dinner together? I have no idea. It was a colored photo. Yeah. There was an inscription on the back, but it was in language. That's bananas, man. But yeah, you know, you've, Find some interesting things on target. So with everything that went wrong there,

from hitting the wrong house to then haul an ass to the right house, only to have a failed breach, then you're taking a couple minutes. You're talking probably 15, 20 minutes for all that to happen. But there's a lot of things that went wrong. Oh, yeah. One thing after another. It doesn't seem like anyone was panicking,

even up the staircase. Yeah. Is that you're relying back on your training? Yeah. And again, that's not to be macho by any means to say that. It's muscle memory. It's slow as smooth, smooth as fast, good communication. You're talking to one another.

We're not screaming like crazy people. We're literally talking loud enough if there's gunfire going on. Not like what you might picture with a mild state of panic and chaos. So the next morning we're prepping our gear for an op. We probably have very similar up that same night. I'm standing next to Nelson. He pulls his helmet out of his par bag. And he took a double take at it.

And he looked down and there was a bullet, clearly a spot where the bullet ricocheted. He got hit in the helmet, basically half an inch above the lip of his helmet. Get out of here. Square on from an AK-47 round. Holy smokes. And it ricocheted up and blew part of his night vision, left night vision, goggled tube off. He didn't even notice it because there was so many other things going on at the time until the next morning when he saw that. No kidding.

Yeah. So what a close call. Holy smoke. Interesting evening. So those experiences. You then get out, and obviously you've had a lot more missions since. How many, how long were you in the SEALs? Not long, but I did, you know, long enough back when there were, you know, several, several trips like that. My last deployment was to Africa, very different, obviously, than the urban combat environment of Iraq.

Did you use the right loob in Africa? I did. Okay. Definitely. It's a matter with you, man. Don't make this. Don't make this weird. Yeah, on the goats.

I mean, on the rifle. A totally different mission profile there, which is also very, it's funny. I can talk about that less and I can the Iraq stuff, but very interesting. And then I hadn't planned on doing it as a career. And so I always kind of felt like I would feel it out if that decision was to change. You know, getting out when I did, I'll be fully transparent. I've got some regrets about that. But then I've got out of those who were in, you know, 15 years or 20 years.

I'm like, you're always going to regret getting it. Sure, yeah. Because you're leaving the brotherhood behind. Yeah. And I imagine that's a very special camarader you guys have. It is. It's impossible to replicate anywhere else as you're going to imagine. Yeah. But then transition out and my transition plan was to have no downtime because I saw a lot of guys would get out and didn't have quite an executable plan lined up. So that, you know, just lended way to either nothing or not so great stuff. Or some of them would just, you know, six months later, just be like, screw it. I'm going back. Sure. All right. Let's talk about that for a moment. So guys, one of our friends, Sharon Stravata, he built a, he took over a company, a CEO, was a real estate.

company, it was doing $300 million in sales, and it was still not breaking even, because he built in five years to $3 billion in sales and sold it. And I happened to meet him. A friend invited me to fly with them on a private jet to Arizona, and Sharon was sitting across from me. He's like, man, I asked our friend here to invite you because I'm in this weird state. I sold my company. I'm financially doing well, but I've kind of lost my sense. of purpose. Right. And he's been on the show before, and one of the things he said is, transition fast.

Tom Bill, you said the same thing, the co-founder of Quest Nutrition, transition fast. What gave you the insight, Brent, into, I'm going to transition right from the teams to back to business, back to some kind of purpose thing and not just co-chilling. Did you see a trail of other dudes doing that and it wasn't working out for them or what? A few, but I just know how I think and how I am. it's got to be violent execution. I don't like downtime. I mean, just see me at home.

I can't, I rarely can just sit for watching football for more than five minutes. I'd have to be, you know, doing something else at the same time. So I wanted that transition to be quick. I found, you know, a great MBA program at the University of San Diego. And so I figured that would be a good way to kind of retrain my brain towards business and be a good segue into, you know, a new career. new job, what have you. Also at the time, no aspirations of entrepreneurship whatsoever.

And so I took the GMAT test for entrance into grad school prior to my last deployment. So, and then got accepted. So literally a week after I got out of the Navy, I started that program. So zero downtown. Good for you. Zero downtime. I love that. And so as you get out of, is the San Diego State or San Diego University?

University of San Diego. University of San Diego. Do you find yourself a career or at what point? Like, did you say, I think I'm going to try entrepreneurship? It was, a story's kind of cliche. You know, one of the great things about grad school is just like any school environment. You're not necessarily learning a lot of the functional skills to be an entrepreneur or this or that. There's some great, you know, finance and accounting and stuff that's always going to be important running a business.

But a lot of it's around networking and the people you meet both in your coursework and also outside of coursework. Good programs usually have really good networking opportunities or internship program opportunities. and they're really encouraging to get out there and meet people, meet executives, meet other entrepreneurs. And so the business plan for my first company came from one of our finance projects. You know, you do group projects or, you know, five people come together and three people drink beer and two people do all the work.

Yeah, yeah. It was one of those projects. You guys were the two that did the work and drink the beer. No, no, I was drinking the beer. Okay. But I found a white space either way. Got it. Got it.

And interesting enough, you know, entrepreneurship, as you know, has a similar failure rate to seal training, if not more. And the first business was a home finding search engine, which we launched right before the housing market crash. Delicious. The timeing was a little bit of a lot. We're like, we're going to raise tons of money. We're going to flip this thing in five years, retire. Just like all entrepreneurs.

Right. None of that happened. It just feels so real when you come up with an idea. Like, I do remember the feeling of the first company that I started was an online personal training software in 2002. And it felt so real. Like, I did the math on a spreadsheet, dude. and it's told me I was going to make $10 million a month. And so I...

Of course you were. Brent, I believe it. It didn't quite work out that way. So what happens with this home search finding software? Well, we built it out. It's basically an early version of Trulia or Zillow. Not quite obviously technology has advanced a lot since then. But, you know, we took the business plan that we built was so complex, so convoluted.

And even considering, like, you know, selling houses online, all this stuff. We threw the whole thing in the garbage. and found a very simple reoccurring revenue model for monthly advertising fees for home builders or home marketing firms that were representing the home builders. Back then, people were just throwing money at digital media for selling homes because homes were selling. So nobody cared about the analytics. Nobody cared about the reports, the return on ad spend. They were like, whatever, we're selling the homes. So, sure, we'll try this website and this search engine.

And so, I mean, we built it very quickly. And again, the model was so simple that it was really easy to scale. And of course, we were riding the wave of the non-bubble all the way to the top. Sure. What year was that? Well, we started before that, but then obviously, 08, 09 happened. Right. And so, you know, within a couple years, we, you know, it was tripling in size, revenue-wise, and very profitable.

Didn't need a massive headcount when it came to employees at that time. And so, but then, of course, obviously we didn't just get nailed by the housing implosion right away. But obviously, it was a slow erosion. It was a slow erosion. Obviously, just like any entrepreneurs, hockey stick growth will eventually plateau, and it plateaued a little faster than we thought it was going to. But, you know, kind of like a lot of people are doing in this 2020 environment, you know, my first experience with a severe pivot on the battlefield of business was this. And obviously, you've learned a lot through, you know, micro failures and obstacles and unforeseen ambushes that you never knew could possibly happen. Yet they always do somehow.

And so we had learned so much about digital media, analytics, digital marketing. that we decided to expand our offering. Originally it was going to be sort of an additional revenue offering to our current client base and then expanded into, well, I guess any organization really is going to benefit from the growth of digital media, which was kind of new back there, at least compared to what it is now.

And so we decide, because on some of our clients, we're like, do you guys also build websites? Can you guys help social media? Do you guys know how to use Google AdWords and paid media spend? And so we decided to start saying yes. And so we basically borrowed $100,000 from that company to start a separate entity that would be basically a digital media arm of this first business. Sure. And then it just blew up and started growing, growing, growing,

while the other business started slowing, slowing, slowing. And so we raised a couple million bucks for the first business. So we gave those shareholders equal common stock shares and the new company, which is the right thing to do. Some would argue a legal and fiduciary responsibility to do. Sure. Some people would argue that, but it was the right thing to do. And so, yeah, and then I just took off. So that speaks to a lot of things. One, creating multiple income streams. Right. You talked about that a lot. Yeah. Had you had not had that opportunity to create that digital media arm. I mean, your personal finances might have looked a little different. Yeah. Right. Back in the Navy. Yeah. Guys, I'm coming back. Or worse.

Please. Let me back. Yeah. Yeah. So, so that, that is paramount. The other thing, and I'm going to, I'm going to ask a question that the audience is thinking right now, which is, dude, you never once said that you have a background in software engineering or app development. So who are you and how do you go about creating an app? And how could you do that? How dare you? Well, the core tenet, as you know, of great leadership is to surround yourself with people much, much, much, much smarter than you, and then you take credit for all their work. Brilliant. No, but I'm not all serious. I know you talk about this a lot too, but it's, you know, the most senior leader on a team isn't always, nor should be the highest level of subject matter expert in a given field. Right. Those are, those are

subject matter experts in a given field for a reason. The leader needs to have obviously a higher level of situational awareness, a real connection to the vision of where to go so that you can communicate that to the team so that they understand how their job function drives mission success as a whole. So no, I mean, we'd used, we'd obviously hired agencies. We'd hired one-off contractors and consultants, some from India, some from Thailand, some of the North America for the first business, just because we needed to, you know, start with a website, We can get analytics set up, understand how to use paid media, so we would hire, you know, we would hire agencies too.

So we'd been on the client side of the agency world. And so we kind of understood what we liked, what we did not like, and how we could possibly do that better, too. And so, you know, we would hire these mostly contractors at first, and we gradually started bringing things in-house more and more when it made financial sense. That absolutely helps. So guys, pay attention here. What Brent's saying is something that we've heard echoed many times before, which is leadership

isn't about you being knee-deep in the weeds. It's really about being able to surround yourself with great people who are experts in subject matters, and then being able to share that vision with them so clearly that they can execute on that. Right, right. Just like at a sealed platoon or a troop, your platoon commander may not necessarily be the number one sniper, or have gone to breacher school or driving school or all these different things, but they're the leader for a reason. You know, they have their subject matter experts to be able to execute the mission plan

while they're focusing on the big picture. Let's talk about leadership for a moment, man. Is leadership factory installed? Is it like the best leadership factory installed, or can it be learned? Oh, 100% can be learned. And I think oftentimes two people have innate leadership ability that they don't even realize they have sometimes. Some do at first.

I never thought I did. In college, for example, I've just elected, unknowingly elected to be the captain of our rugby team. And I was shocked that people saw me as a leader because I did not see myself in that capacity at all. And then I was re-elected to get in my senior year, so I did it two years in a row. And so I thought, you know, maybe there was somebody to that, but then I consider myself as you do to be a student of leadership and a student of high-performance mindset and high-performing

teams. You know, it's never, you know, it's a journey. There's never a destination when it comes to being a good leader. The best leaders I know and that I, you know, respect out there, are in a constant state improvement. They're never satisfied with their capability as a leader. They're always reading, they're always writing, they're always studying the art of leadership, and they're really good at doing their own personal after-action reviews. What did I do right? What am I done wrong? And they also not just accept transparent, open feedback from their team. They crave it. Like, they desperately

crave it. And then they apply it into constantly improving or making fewer of the mistakes they've made over the years. What do you think is a matter with people who have a hard time taking feedback or criticism. Even if the person delivering it has the best of intentions. Right. Well, it's obviously that is showing an unwillingness to change, you know, for that individual. So they either perceive themselves to be already in a heightened state of whatever it is.

Awesomeness. The badassery. Or they're, I mean, you can go as far as saying they're insecure or they're unselfaware. They lack emotional intelligence. And they lack the understanding of what it takes to. really, you know, lead a team with empathy and humility when you can, you know, lead and follow simultaneously sometimes. Good point. So as you went on to write Embrace to Suck, what vacuum

did you see in the world? Like, what was the impetus to go, I'm going to write this book after taking point. Why? Well, with, you know, my current company, Taking Point leadership, you know, we're a leadership and organizational development consulting firm. And we've been really blessed during 2020. Obviously, you know, our 2020 revenue projections got destroyed. But we've been working with... Your spreadsheet didn't match mine. Yeah, I don't know what happened there.

A lot of tears, mostly by me. But then quick recovery. I mean, we've been working with Google and Facebook, and we have an event with Salesforce this week, and we've had a lot of our current clients through a global medical device companies continuing to invest. We're just doing it differently.

We're doing it virtual. And, which, frankly, is a lot more cost-effective. That's for sure. That's for sure. So within that, obviously you can't transform a team or an organization without transforming the people in it. And so in reflecting on a lot of the things

that we teach in these leadership development courses, which could involve sea level executives all the way down to frontline contributors and sometimes a cross-functional mix of all the above. So we've found ways to make sure that the curriculum and learning modules are relevant to anybody, just like in any sort of high performance team environment, you want leaders at every level.

You're high performance emerging leaders. So it could be the newest person on the team all the way up to the senior people who are sometimes even the biggest problem on the team. You're a coach, you know. And so in reflecting on that, I was like, wow, I've never really explored the, for lack of a better phrase, self-help genre, self-help category. You know, I like to read and read a lot. And I've been, you know, studying, did a lot of reading and studying on culture and leadership and engagement strategies to align, you know, rituals and behavior with the actions associated with taking to, you know, or achieving desired business results, but you keep looking back at what the problems are

and why a lot of organizational transformation efforts fail, it's behavioral, it's people problems, not the plan or the structure, the framework, or the operating model that was in place. Although sometimes those things have to change, as you know. And so I started looking into, I bought a bunch of self-help books. I always kind of like, I don't need that stuff.

I couldn't know. And the stuff I'd seen is kind of fluff, and it doesn't really tell you what to do, and a lot of happy self-talk and things like that, which I didn't really find all that helpful for me. But then I also noticed it's one of the, if not the, top one or two genres and books out there. Which to me tells me that people are craving self-development. I really don't believe, from personal experience,

and those that I've coached over the last 15, 18 years now, that you can read a book or go through a course or even sit at a four-day seminar and learn it. Like, you have to be in the trenches feeling it. Right. And for people who do what we do, you know, I enjoy speaking and doing keynote presentations, but what I really enjoy is longer-term engagements with people or organizations. Because that's when you can actually impact change. Yeah.

And so I started looking at some of the work that's out there and a lot of it I didn't connect with. And there are some of the stuff that's a little more countertuitive. It's a little more raw. It's a little more gritty. I really like Mark Manson's work because it's very creative. And, you know, now people are starting testing like, should I use an F word in the title of my book? Should I not? and all of a sudden, everybody started using F-words in the title of the clock.

And so I thought I could go a little edgy and use a title like this, and the publisher got really excited about it. But I wanted to take a different approach in large part in a couple ways. One, a little bit more gritty. And again, to your point earlier, had no idea 2020 was going to be 2020 when we started this project. So it did give us the opportunity to go back and do some more creative editing in second and third pass edits.

To make, obviously, the content is supposed to be timeless and relevant for any sort of scenario, but I was able to make some loose references to the pandemic and to small business issues and the struggles that a lot of people are having in their personal finances, their personal lives, their careers, relationships, divorce, illness, death, which was already sort of referenced in the book, but now it's unfortunately very relevant. And obviously this year and beyond and will be historical. And there's the ripple effects we're going to feel for a long time to come.

I hate it when people say, well, when this is over. This is not just going to be over. There's permanent transformation that's happening here. And some of it quite good. I've seen a lot of innovation, digital transformation for businesses that normally takes years or fails. And companies doing it in three weeks. Weeks. It's fascinating.

And quite honestly, I think we all ought to stay six feet apart all the time. I'm not down from I'm trying to buy some gum from the store. was right in my back pocket, bro. Yeah, I like that. Right? Right. But, you know, it's funny you say that because there is no off switch when people say when this is all over or I can't wait for 2021 until this year's over. It's not a finishing line that we cross and some of the things that we put into action

like the masks. I know a mandate can go in and say, hey, use the masks. Put the masks on. I don't think there's a something, hey, take the masks off now. It's safe. I think it's something that's going to phase out. And even if they do something. say take the masks up.

Some people are still going to have their built-in internal hysteria and fears and maybe use the mask as a security blanket and keep it on for many, many years to come. And my son was asking me, like, Dad, when will some of these things change? I was like, buddy, I don't know. But he had enough wherewithal to be like, Dad, it ain't just going to change like this. Like the way school is done for me is going to forever change, right? I'm like, yep. And I think there will be, there is going to be permanent behavioral change.

permanent permanency in the and you know companies looking at their workplace needs their workforce needs for some that's good for something that maybe won't not be so good i feel bad for the commercial real estate professionals out there and everybody's you know canceling their lease um and uh but at the same time too there's going to be other um you know positive uh permanent changes and how we behave how we think about our finances how we think about our relationships how we consider time with family. I was on the road all the time prior to COVID. And even Nicole and my wife and I, which was part of our strategic plan in 2020 was to get Brent off the road more, get the team out there more. And of course make the brand more about taking point. Not Brank Leeson because you can't

sell Brinkleason. It's not an exit strategy that I would eventually want. And all it took was a little global pandemic. Here I am home every day. And now Nicole's like, when is your next trip? I bought your plane tickets here. Fly. But in all serious, you know, the, the, the, time with family and the time for us that's been great, which we didn't used to have. I mean, the normal was me traveling almost every week, which isn't scalable anyway, and that wasn't the permanent plan. But things like that that I think that are going to enact positive behavioral change, you know, there's always a silver lining of some kind.

Yeah, and it's interesting that you say that the reason you wrote that was to bring change to the individuals at every level, at every level, C level, all the way to frontline team members in a company. my friend Clayte Mask wrote a book called Conquering the Chaos. He is the founder of InfusionSoft, right? And InfusionSoft has something like 15 or 20 million businesses that they're running the marketing automation for. And being a geeky, nerdy dude, we're in a group together called Genius Network run by Joe Polish. Shout out to Joe Polish, the man.

He's a cool cat. He says, he goes, man, I saw behind the scene. and of all these businesses and two almost identical businesses in the same niche. One company is like blowing up. The other one will like have these little spurts and then come back down to whatever again. And so he starts reaching out and says, hey look, you use my software. I get to see behind the scenes and what you're doing. What exactly are you doing that's different than these guys? And what he found was that most leaders, because when you're hired and your company's hired, they're hired, you're hired because the leader of the company

he's like, I read your book taking point and I saw you on stage and I want you to come and create change in my business, right? Odds are that leader, the person up top is into self-development, self-growth. Right. Does the things to create emotional discipline, mental toughness, sharpen their leadership, etc. So what Clayte found in his research was that for every 300% percent, increase. Let me get this right. Every 300% increase in business that there was a 80% attrition

in employees. And he's like, well, why are the CEOs still around? And the thing that he was able to connect as he asked them a lot of questions was the CEOs and the people to the left and right of them immediately did the self-help, the self-development. In other words, grew. Right. To be able to handle the new level of stress, the new level of complexity and new level of risks. the people down there didn't. So when the company was a million-dollar company, it's like, all right, they can handle this. Now it's a $2 million company,

and you begin to wonder, hey, why is Bob not performing like he used to? Because Bob did not increase his glass ceiling. The business outgrew him. The business outgrew him, exactly. And so as you talk about this, I believe this was more needed than ever, because when you ask a CEO,

you ask me for any one of my companies, truly a fit body boot camp, whatever, do you want to lose any of your employees? No, like, I got really solid people. But as we grow, if they don't grow with me, they're going to have to move on. And sometimes they feel the tension and they start moving on because they realize, I just can't run as fast as this business is running anymore. The problem is, though, that a lot of those organizations or those CEOs or senior executives

that are into self-help and they are into personal development, aren't heavy into wellness, those types of activities. Sometimes there's a gap there, though, because they're not providing those opportunities to those employees as an engagement. strategy is a retention strategy, they're just expected to do it on their own, which most people aren't. Most people won't because those C-level executives are C-level executives for a reason. They've earned that capacity to lead in complex environments where that has to be either learned or trained or you have to go out and get a coach or you have to engage in your own personal

and professional development, whereas oftentimes we just don't provide our employees that. We just expect them to grow with the business as things get more complex and move to a faster pace. yet they won't naturally. And I can see why. Listen, man, when I worked at Disneyland, I was a fric. I was a bus boy. I'm sorry, can you back up? What?

I used to work at Disneyland. Can we dive into that a little bit? Fun fact, I worked at Disneyland and at Oz Gay Club. It was a gay nightclub at the same time. You could possibly be the scariest person to ever have worked at Disneyland. Could you? Yeah, well, I was a lot cuter than. Come here, kids.

I got something for you. But, you know, when I worked at Disneyland, dude, I was a bus boy, and then I became a fry cook and then ultimately a sous chef, which is a whole different story there. I remember, as much as I hate to say this, I worked hard on my shift, but when it was over, peace out, man. I'm gone. Because I'm working so that I can take the money you give me and a trade for the time that I gave you to add wheels to my truck or to go and hang out my friends in Tijuana, not necessarily like how can I make Dizzland bigger. Whereas I imagine at the time Michael Eisner was the CEO, he's working.

around the clock because the growth of the company increases revenue, his income, his profits, shares exponentially. I see that now as the founder of companies versus, so as you're working with these C-level entrepreneurs, founders, executives, how often do you find yourself trying to educate them on taking care of their, I guess, mid-level, low-level frontline team members in that capacity? We spend the majority of the time on that, to be honest with you. Because And this isn't just our experience, but research shows that when you invest the majority of your time, different matrix organizations are going to react differently, but in the development of your mid-level managers, and in a way that that trickles down to the front lines, the business is going to grow exponentially.

And you're creating more profitability through retention, through higher levels of performance. And we also teach that regard to teach motivation theory. And a lot of what's, I mean, this isn't a business book like Taking Point One's. This is meant for anybody. Yeah. But interestingly enough, a lot of the tools, and one thing I do. didn't like about the other fluff out there was it doesn't might be an interesting read but I was like great now what now what do I do yeah so each chapter has a mental model or a tool basically a

framework or something simple not complex to use and so well we teach going back to the first part of your question we teach motivation theory and one thing that and also leading change so these C-level executives are more in tune with the changes that need to happen usually because they or the visionary behind that change and they assume that everybody on the team understand because, well, I told them at the company meeting and there was the email blast that went out. Everybody knows about what we're doing. And more importantly, they know why. They're connected.

They're emotionally connected to the vision of all those new changes going on. They're not. They're not. No, they have no idea what's going on. Why? Because it takes them longer because you have to use formal and informal communication strategies and use what I call on taking point in the book, purposeful storytelling too. Not the email, not the company-wide communication at the big event, but different types of storytelling by well-trained and intentioned change evangelists and managers throughout the company that can continually tell the story and celebrate quick wins and help people understand the progress towards whatever change is happening.

I mean, can you imagine this year the amount of changes, just even small business. We've seen restaurants change the way they operate every seven days. You can imagine the people. I mean, one of our clients is a restaurant group in Texas, and it's pure chaos. They're making money. They're actually going to make more money this year than they did last year. But that's through creative recapitalization of the business and making sure they're not being wasteful from a monetary standpoint, reworking everybody shifts and stuff like that. But going back to the book is I wanted to make sure, if I'm talking about how to use pain as a pathway or about how to avoid temptation by limiting your choices, well, let's actually give the reader a tool that can use.

Now, again, not every tool everybody's going to use, and you can use it in your own capacity. but one thing I liked about the first book was the people who really liked it the most read it three times. And they have Post-it notes in it and they took notes. And that's what I wanted something similar to this while still being creative and a good read, but also a tool that people can refer back to. So a lot of the stuff that's in the book are from some of the modules that we train leaders and emerging leaders on in organizations around strategic planning, after-action reviews and debriefing and other types of mental models that we share.

So how can someone who's not an entrepreneur, someone who's not necessarily going to start a business, but is it what I call an intrapreneur? They are happy working for someone and they're happy to create change and they want to better themselves so that they can really be well taken care of in that organization. What would they get out of this? It's really a personal transformation journey. So whether you want to be a manager or a leader or an entrepreneur or whether you're just happy being a direct contributor or a subject matter expert on the team, which many people,

people are happy in that regard and that's where they should stay because that's where they thrive. So really, but also it, you know, there's no such thing as work-life balance anymore, especially now. It's work-life integration. So when we can invest time and resources in developing ourselves, our relationships, our home life, our ability to connect with our peers, direct reports, or managers in the workplace as well. So developing our emotional intelligence or our self-awareness or ability to communicate. or if I'm a middle manager who doesn't have a lot of direct reports, understanding how to mentor and coach, just like you do.

These aren't, for some people, these come more innately, but for a lot of people, they don't. They really, things that we have to practice and learn. Like, when I was a new entrepreneur, you realize that you go from the guy with the great idea and the business plan crumpled up in his hand to you're a leader, and you're meant to inspire, you're meant to coach, you're meant to mentor, communicate the vision effectively, build a great culture. Oh, no, they didn't teach that in grad school.

You have to learn by a series of costly mistakes. And honestly, if you're a husband, a wife, a mom, a dad, you're in a position of leadership. You're in a position of self-development. Right? And we oftentimes forget that. And I think one of the greatest goods that's going to come out from your book here is the fact that more people, when they read it, are going to understand that it is okay to put yourself through adversity. it is okay to practice the things that you're not good at over and over again, and that we are supposed to be role models in every capacity.

Whether you're a leader of a big Fortune 500 company or you're just a leader of a family, to me when people ask me, what is the big legacy that you want to leave behind? And they're waiting for me to say, like, well, I've donated, you know, whatever, billion dollars to Shriners because that's the organization we donate to. It's not that, man. I want Andrew and Chloe to be this impact-driven humans on this planet that surpassed any level of impact. that I was able to do.

And for that to happen, me and die, as their father and mother have to pour into them. Well, I could only pour into them as much as I know. Like if there's four ounces of water in this cup, I could only pour out four ounces of water. So I have to be developed. I have to be mentally, physically, emotionally, spiritually developed so that I can pour into my kids.

And I think that's one of the biggest takeaways that folks are gonna get. Well, and you can't, whether you're a direct contributor or not, let's say you are a direct contributor on team or your family. Even if you're not a manager or leader of people per se, you always kind of are because there's influence. And even if you are or aspire to be, you cannot lead other people until you lead yourself first.

And again, that goes into the family setting. Like Nicole and I are co-leaders of our family unit, which again, co-leadership is not always easy. And so, but what she's really good at is calling me on my . And also coaching me in a way to make sure that I'm practicing what I preach. Because situations are different, they're dynamic, and we have different feelings as parents as to how we should be more hard and when we should be soft and anywhere in between. And ironically, I have a tendency, interestingly enough, to, I could be a little bit more

consistent in my parenting style and in how I discipline and stick to rules and communicate with Nicole and make sure that we, because alignment, you know, it's not always there. No. And you're not always going to agree, too. And I've had business partners in the past where we have more or less equal authority, which can be great and can be a terrible thing at the same time. And it's, you know, obviously it's complex in a marital environment or parenting environment. Yeah.

Yeah, you know, it's funny to that point. My wife said it best. She was like, hey, you lead the family from here. She leads the family from the heart. Right. And it's only, what, 10, 11 inches apart, the brain and the, the, the, head and the heart, but I really do. I'm very judicial. And sometimes my wife has to remind me that you got a 13 and a 15 year old, it's okay to just listen to the long story that Chloe's going to tell

you because in the end, she could have told you that in two minutes and not 20, but how she feels about you know, daddy paying attention. I just forget about feelings sometimes, Brent. I just forget about it sometimes and I need to be reminded. And my wife does a great job with that. with reminding me that. So to that point, David Goggins wrote the forward. And were you in Bud's with him or were you guys on a, at what point did your guys path cross and how do you know David Goggins? To your point, both. So we met when I, when we both checked into, we were in Bud's class, 235, run six classes a year. So we checked into 235. He had been, and many know his story, he had been already at the command for probably a good six to eight months.

and gone through Hell Week twice. But he kept getting injuries. And typically if you have an injury or you get really, really sick, if it's Wednesday or to Thursday morning during Hell Week, they'll roll you forward. So you pick up with the next class, or whenever you heal with the next class, timing appropriate. And so, but if it's like halfway through Wednesday,

you go back to the beginning. You'll pick up with the other class from day one. And so he had done that twice already. And I know, it's terrible. And so I was like, I wanted to be one and done type of guy. First time every time, let's just get this over with as fast as humanly possible. Yeah, I'm going to get my friend sick. Yeah, but I'm good.

Yeah, but I will forge ahead with extreme guilt. And again, there's all types of external factors and you never know when your body's going to give out or when you're going to get sick. And guys enter Hell Week with either sick, injured or both typically. And then it just doesn't get better during Hell Week. It just gets worse. Yeah. And so we went through Hell Week together, you know, graduated together, both. who were assigned to seal Team 5 together.

We were in different troops. So even within a, you know, 90 operators or so in a team, if you're in a different troop or platoon, your schedules are so different if you're not seeing each other all that match. But obviously, our correct paths would cross over the years and whatnot. Got you known him for 20 years. Any cool stories about him that we don't know, that you want to... Just, you know, by the time we got to Hellweight together,

I'd only known him for, you know, at that point in a month and a half. And so seeing how people react in a crucible that nobody has ever experienced, regardless of how relentless you train. I trained relentlessly for over a year and in the cold mountains of Colorado. And did everything I could possibly do to intentionally make myself suffer, to expand my comfort zone, to be able to accept adversity. But then again, you don't know how you're going to emotionally or cognitively react. Interestingly, we've actually spent a lot of time and resources trying to study the cognitive and emotional and physical attributes of students more likely to successfully navigate that funnel.

Think about it from a sales perspective. We want to close more deals, a.k.a. get more seals. Therefore, we need better leads in the top of the sales funnel. Have they figured it out? No. No. But we'll get there someday. But in all seriousness. Well, you can't measure a person's heart. You can't. And that's the exact point that I'm about to make. of, you might think these narratives of star athletes in college and high levels of academic capability. Yes, you get a lot of that.

Is it the most important thing? No, it's not. It's the less measurable attributes of grit, resilience, and passion. The size of someone's heart and how emotionally they connect to the mission of not just serving in the military, but of becoming a seal, or a Green Beret, or a Delta Force operator. You'll navigate those types of uncertain waters,

like in the world of entrepreneurship, when you're getting attacked by all sides and the razor blade covered water slide to hell never seems like it's going to end. Sure. Got to stay emotionally connected to that vision because that's what's going to keep you moving forward. And so it was interesting to see his, now he takes mental fortitude to a whole different level. Most of us maybe he's got a different part of the brain that we don't have. But being in the same boat crew with him in Hellweek, I got to obviously kind of witness, you know, you witness everybody, how everybody. that reacts differently in his types of situations. He seemed to thrive on it.

He said, I thought, I was like, you're doing hell way three times because you want to be here. You enjoy this, don't you? He just keeps coming back. I haven't we seen you before, Mr. Gagas. That's bananas. But some people are really meant to go through that level of adversity. Just they really do thrive on it.

I see this in the project. And afterwards, at the graduation dinner, I'll be like, dude, you don't once look at the bell to ring and Steve caught on to your happiness and he was trying to break you. He's like, no, I only got happier as instructor Steve caught on to me. And I believe that there's that,

and every time those special souls tend to just do better at whatever they attack because this magical word, they embrace everything. They don't just tolerate it. They don't just kind of try it. They embrace it. They go, I'm going all in.

And I think when you embrace everything and you embrace the suck because everything will come with suck. Look, I want it to be the best personal trainer on the planet. All I want to do is help more, people transformed because when I was a fat kid, losing weight, getting fit, like girls started to talk to me, man, and I started making eye contact with people and shaking hands with them.

Like, I felt confident, right? And so, you know, being a personal trainer at a gym wasn't good enough. So then I opened up one studio of my own and then a few others, et cetera, and then sold those. For you know what Fit Body Boot Camp comes around. And in building Fit Body Boot Camp, my whole goal was I'm going to build this fitness franchise where people are going to lose weight, They're going to transform their lives, their marriages, their income, because you've been around long enough to know this. When someone loses weight and gets fit, the ripple effect in every other category of their life is huge. Right. I've had clients when I was a personal trainer tell me, you saved my marriage.

I was like, no shit. Like me? Like, well, yeah, like my husband was going to leave me. Or I was able to get out of an abusive relationship because I gained the confidence, right, because of that. So all this is to say, so I create Fit Body Boot Camp because my only goal, is I want to help people and these people will never see me. They'll never meet me. They'll meet their local Fit Body Boot Camp owner and the coach there.

But I'll know secretly that there's tens of thousands of people. Well, then 2020 comes come March. And I'm like, holy crap. Like nobody would want to be the CEO of a fitness franchise right now. And I'm just still like, let's go, right? I have my days where I'm just like, what the fuck is going on? You know, why are we wearing masks again? Why are we going down to 10%?

But that's exactly it, man. And once you find that thing, you lock on, like, I don't know what would have to happen to take me away from opening up more FitBide of Buchamp. You'd literally have to, like, cut my head off. Like, my brain has to stop working for that to happen. Where do people find you, Brent? How can they learn more from you, get information from you, engage you in your team? Sure. Social media-wise, I'm on Instagram, Brent underscore Gleason, LinkedIn, obviously, Twitter as well, just at Brent Gleason.

I have a Forbes leadership column as well that I write on. It's supposed to be weekly, but that never happens. So a couple times a month. There's been doing that since 2012. So there's hundreds of articles on leadership, culture, mental toughness, high performance. And then, of course, our company website is Taking Point Leadership.com. It's got all of our services, case studies, tons of video content, the types of clients we work with. So those are some of the places that we can be found.

Amen to that. And guys and gals, if you're watching this episode, If you're listening to it on your favorite podcast platform, listen, embrace the suck. It's the book you got to get, and here's why. Not only is it going to make a great Christmas gift, so I want you to buy two from Amazon, one for you, one is a Christmas gift. It's not just for entrepreneurs. In fact, as far from that, is for anyone who wants to level up.

Yep. Right? Who wants to level up in any category of life. Like, this is what's going to take them there. And the most important question I'm going to ask you here, Brent, is when the audio book comes out, is it you or is it someone else reading it? Oh, it's me. It's you.

I did it for the first book, too. I was a little hesitant because it's, you know, it's like audio reading hell week. You're there for, you know, five hours a day. And by the time you finish reading your own book over and over, you hate it. Bro. But again, the popular thing is especially for people who are speakers or consultants, they want to hear from the office. Yeah, yeah. So to that point, when I wrote Man Up, everyone would ask me, like, hey, are you going to read the audiobook?

I'm like, yeah, sure, right? And when I read a book to myself, like in my own head, dude, I can read it just fine. But soon as I have to read it out loud, the foreigner steps in, right? And it's because when I was an immigrant to this country, do you remember when the school teachers would be like, all right, you're going to read the first three sentences and then the next kid and the next kid? Well, of course, had an accent. English was a second language.

So I was all choppy and messed up. As soon as you asked me to read out loud, I would just get all choppy and messed up like that. So I'm sitting there in Costa Mesa at the recording studio, and they got like Jamie Fox's whatever, platinum record and Whitney Houston. They did a lot of like great musicians and stuff, comedians. And I had Joan scheduled twice the appropriate amount of time just because I knew I was going to mess up. And at the end of day one, it was supposed to be two days.

I had her schedule 40s. At the end of day one, I went to a nearby Starbucks. This is so embarrassing. I want to tell you the truth, full transparency here on the impoverty. show because one thing that grasped me is the way you speak I first met you in Florida we were both speaking in an event and when you were speaking I was like holy smokes this dude can like project he can draw a word picture very impressed with the way you speak and so I call my wife from Starbucks I'm like hey I've made

a big mistake I don't know if I should read this why the hell am I reading in the first place I've got enough money to hire anybody I want to read it right and so I'm just going off it and she's like chuckling on the phone I'm like like what's so funny and now would be a good time to tell me like hey come home I'll make you your favorite meal right you can hire something right right right she goes she goes you know you'll never put the book out if you don't read it it's got to be you I'm like yeah you're right and I went back ironically the last two days were so much better because the dudes were there were so good to me and just like hey take your time read out so I literally just

was reading out loud and they weren't even recording it the first two days or the second day all me and then just reading out loud they weren't recording it and then day three and four we actually recorded the book but i say this because i was in that place where i was negotiating with my inner bitch going just leave you don't belong here this is for people who's the language is like the you know the primary language is english not yours and uh man i'm so glad i did which is why i ask everyone else because for me you know if a book's not read by the author that passion never comes across yeah so anyway just i just like my like good barbecue Low and slow. My voice will be a little deeper, you know, and I'll talk a little slower.

Yeah, well, I'm going to bring it down one more notch. I did not reenact the machine gun sounds nor the explosion sounds. I tried it and it sounded horrible. It was terrible out there. Like, we can get some B-roll audio for that. That's cool. That's awesome. They're going to do that. All right, guys, so go get this book from Amazon or your favorite bookstore right now. It is out right now if you're listening to this by two copies. One is a Christmas gift. Brent, thank you so much for joining us on the show. And as always, be sure to take a screenshot when you're listening to this episode. it in your stories tag brent tag myself and uh never forget to tell your mama we'll see you later