EntreLeadership - #127: Our Top Podcasts of 2015

Episode Date: December 28, 2015

We’re highlighting some of our favorite podcast interviews of the year. Check out these great conversations with: Donald Miller John C. Maxwell Gretchen Rubin Patrick Lencioni Shawn Achor Austin Kleon Gary Vaynerchuk
 John O’Leary Another great episode sponsored by our friends at Infusionsoft Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

helping business leaders grow themselves, their team, and their profits. This is the Entree Leadership Podcast. Now, here is your host, Ken Coleman. Hello, folks, thank you so much for the download broadcasting from the Music City. We are hoping that you had a wonderful Merry Christmas and that you were geared up to get 2016 kicked off in a fantastic fashion. And so we're going to have a special podcast today. We thought it would be fun. Eric the producer and Blake Thompson, the executive producer of the Dave Ramsey Show and the Entree Leadership Podcast.

Got together. We thought, well, what if we picked our favorite conversations from this podcast of 2015 and played you some excerpts? So that's what we're going to do. And of course, folks, for those of you real hardcore fans, I can hear the tweets now. I can read them, Eric. Well, why didn't you have this person, this person, this person? Well, this is going to be a little bit longer podcast than normal. but we still want to respect your time.

And so we kind of narrowed it down. We had some fun with this. This was a fun exercise. So we're giving you our top eight conversations. And again, short excerpts of those interviews. Now, what I'm going to do for you, if you're new to the podcast or you can't remember, I'm going to tell you which episode that these are from so you can go back and listen to them. And the point in doing this is to celebrate and look forward, but to also bring you some nuggets

of things you've already heard and maybe remind you to go back and read. revisit these things. That's what's great about a podcast. It's on demand and it's there for your growth. So, this is going to be a lot of fun because we are passionate about you, the small business owner, that you grow yourself so that you can grow your team so that ultimately you can grow your profits. So this is going to be fun. Here's the eight. You ready to go? Donald Miller, John Maxwell, Gretchen Rubin, Pat Lincione, Sean Acor, Austin Cleon, Gary Vaynerchuk, and John O'Leary. And I love this. This is a very diverse list. So much goodness this year. In a year that we went from two episodes a month by monthly, excuse me, to an episode each week. And boy, oh boy, it has been fun for us. We're hearing great feedback from you. And this is a great chance for me to tell you. We love your feedback. What do you want more of, less of? Interview suggestions. Story suggestions. Podcast at ontreleadership.com is the email. We do read them. Podcast at Entreeleadership.com is the email. We do read them. Podcast at Entreleleadership.com. Leadership.com.

Twitter, I always try to respond to every tweet. Love the Entree Leadership community. Two places to reach out to us on Twitter. At Entree Leadership. At Ken Coleman, we'd love to hear from you. Of course, we're powered by our dear friends at InfusionSoft. You want to learn more about what they're doing to help the small business man and woman. The companies, the organizations that you're running, go to infusionsoft.com slash

Entree. Infusionsoft.com slash Entree. So let's get right to this. This again, this is kind of fun. And what we're doing is just pulling what we found to be really great moments from our favorite conversations. We start off with Donald Miller, multi-New York Times bestselling author. Lives in Nashville now and is really dedicating himself to Storybrand, a young company for he and his team, but they are exploding in how they are helping organizations truly figure out the story, the branding message.

And so we talk in this little excerpt a lot about the seven parts of story. When you understand the seven parts of story, you begin to understand how. to tell a story, specifically the story of your organization. So here is just a bit of my conversation with Donald Miller, which, by the way, was in episode 103. Check it out. So here's the basics of a story, seven parts. One, you've got a character, right? That character wants something, but they encounter trouble, a problem. That's number two. They can't get themselves out of the problem, so another character steps into the story. That's the guide. Yoda steps in for Luke Skywalker. That's step three is the guide.

Then the guide gives them a plan, something that they can act on that gives them a sense of confidence. That would be Yoda saying, Luke, trust the force, right? And then the fourth aspect is they have to act on that plan. It's the call to action. They have to go and fight and try to win the day. And then six and seven are what could happen if this does or doesn't work. This can end in a success or a failure. That's the seven aspects of story.

You see it repeated over and over in almost every single movie that you see. And it works. and it's been tested over 2,000 years. So that says something to me. That says the human brain works this way already. That's right. So if we can speak the language that the human brain actually speaks, we will be speaking in such a way that people understand us.

So the story brand process starts with the character, right? Except most companies think they're the hero of the story. This is a critical mistake. You aren't the hero of the story. Your brand is not the hero of the story. Your customer is the hero of the story. So we actually don't teach people to tell their story. We teach people to understand the story of their customer.

They are all on a heroic journey. And the first thing we have to define about your customer is what do they want? As it relates to your brand, what do they want? And we need to get that crystal clear. Companies that sell solutions to external problems do okay. But companies that sell solutions to the internal problems those external problems create go through the roof. In other words, if we understand the frustration our customer is experiencing, speak to it and say we can resolve that.

That's what they're really looking for. They're not looking for a solution to the external problem. They're looking for a solution to the frustration that the external problem is causing in them. Your brand is not the hero. In other words, your customer does not care if your grandfather started the company. That's a big shift. They really don't care. It's a big shift.

No, you've got to only think about your customer in their story. And yes, the internal problem versus the external problem is huge. Now, here's an example of it. And we show how Apple does this, Coke does this. One of the things that I like to do in the workshop is I start talking about political campaigns, presidential campaigns. If you look at the problem that George W. Bush ran against Gore on and won that election and really shouldn't have won that election. He wasn't as big of a name or a known personality, even though his dad was president. Gore had the upper hand there, but George W. Bush ran on the

problem of high taxes. That's an external problem, right? But it has an incredible internal manifestation. He could go around the country and say, you know what, you're not going to be able to send your daughter to college because you're giving your money to the government. Yeah, that's a raw nerve. It's a raw nerve. It's a raw nerve. Okay. And he won the election. And then if you look at Mitt Romney, Mitt Romney, probably similar ideology to George W. Bush, he ran on the problem with a national deficit. Now, you and I know as entrepreneurs and you working with Dave Ramsey, you certainly know, our national debt is a serious, serious problem. I was so grateful that Mitt Romney was willing to talk about this. But here's the problem with it.

If my parents are running up their credit card debt and I can't feel it, I'm not really wanting to do anything about it. I'm just playing Nintendo as a kid, right? Yeah, you shake your head when you hear about it, but it's not visceral. There isn't an internal manifestation. Now, remember, why do customers make decisions? They make decisions to solve internal problems. Yes. So Mitt Romney chose an external problem with no internal manifestation.

Nobody could understand it, and he didn't get any passion behind the campaign. Those are the sort of solutions that we're looking for in your brand. A lot of brands will go in. They'll talk about their external problem that they solve, but they're not talking about the frustration that that problem is causing. And if they talk about that, customers engage much, much better. And people don't understand how human their customers are and how they're looking for a guide. They're looking for Yoda to help them win the day. In branding, we want to show people the happy ending that they can have if they engage our brand.

And also let them know a little bit about the failure that we can help them avoid. That raises the stakes in our brand messaging. You know, the bottom line, Ken, is human beings have been speaking language of story for thousands of years since the days of Plato. So if brands, and some of them intuitively do it, Apple does it, Starbucks does it, Coca-Cola does a great job, they intuitively understand their customer's story and position themselves as the guide. But if we can learn to do that, it might be the difference between a successful business and a business that fails. Because I can't tell you how many people I know who have really great products and services that customers rave about, but they're not spreading. And I think their problem is they're just not talking about their products the right way.

And what's so great about it, it's like this story thing really gets back to the purity of why we do what we do. Every business that's listening in today, every owner, every manager, whatever you're at, you are essentially solving problems. That's how business exists. Only reason somebody walks through your doors, they've got a problem. That's the only reason they're walking through your doors, they've got a problem. And we just forget about it, and we get focused on all our problems being how do we get more people to buy our stuff? And it's just gotten all turned upside down. It turns in a noise because we're running a sale and we, you know, we, we walk through an airport and we got bought this book and it gave us this technique.

And three weeks later, we walked through an airport and got this book, got this technique. And now we're tried 50 different things and we've got no marketing plan or strategy at all. We really need to cut it all back, come up with a very simple, compelling message and execute it in all our branding material. All right. I hope you enjoyed that again. You can hear the entire conversation, episode 103 on iTunes. And, of course, you can always get the episodes at entreleadership.com. click on podcast on the homepage, and you can go get all of our episodes.

All right, the next one was with John Maxwell, and this is always a treat to talk with John. John is a leadership guru. Everything kind of took off for him many, many years ago when he launched the 21 irrefutable laws of leadership. I had the extreme privilege to work for about three years with John, travel with John, and learn from John. And so because I love questions so much, he had written a new book about questions, And so I asked him specifically, how does he use questions? How can we use questions to lead better? Once I know the value and the high return, the questions give me,

then I need to keep asking them. Almost everything I have that's wonderful. There are those who love to learn, but they don't really care to grow. There are those who want to get to keep them together. You've got to have a desire to learn, but you learn for the sake of learning alone. So that makes the questions that a person asked to be quite strong. strategic. They now ask the right questions to the right people, and guess what, they get the right

answer. I sit down many times and I'll have a lunch or dinner people and we'll have a nice conversation. No one asked me a question. And I just think to myself, do they not realize if they ask me some questions that they can probably help them? That's right. And so it isn't coming into the presence of get the right answers to find out what you really need to be successful. attitude. The greatest compliment, kid, I can give you, is to ask your opinion. I say, hey, kid, tell what you think about this. There's not a higher compliment. What I'm really saying is, I value what you say. I value what you know. I value who you are. How have you, over the years, learned how to use questions in those fundamental meetings,

if you will, with your team and then in casting vision? Well, when you ask questions, you find out what the other person knows, and I always assume that they know something. I don't know many times, even as a leader, I'll come in with an idea, and I'll sit down. Let me tell you what I have. I have a good idea. But this needs to be a great idea, but I don't have capacity to make it a great idea myself, but you have capacity to help me. So let's all jump in. Let me ask you questions, and you give me your thoughts and your opinions.

Let's let the best idea win. Well, when you have that kind of humility and you are sincere and people know that you really want to hear from them, their goals. They're coming to the table and are saying, wow, John values my opinion. Now, what I've discovered was early in my leadership life, I can either be a directive and say, here's where we're going and have a certain amount of people follow me because I'm clear in my vision, but have many people who are very smart not follow me because they're not having any. ownership or any input.

Or I could say, here's what I think we should be doing. Now, let's all make it better. You know, you clarify me. You add value. You make this better than what I gave you. And when you sincerely want to have people add to you by asking questions, that's what to do. In fact, I always say this.

If I go in the room with a good idea and I don't come out of the room with a better idea, it's because I didn't ask questions. And because I didn't ask questions, I didn't improve myself, It did improve my idea. But when I go into that room, and with a good idea, and I say, okay, I'm going in here to ask questions of the people in this room to make this good idea a great idea. Well, because they can tell it's an attitude. They can tell if I really want to hear them or whether I'm just patriots. You can hear the entire interview on episode 92, episode 92 on iTunes, entreleadership.com.

Gretchen Rubin was one of my favorite conversations by far. new to Gretchen, just discovered Gretchen's work about a year and a half ago. And this is from episode 101, discussing habits. How do we make good habits and break bad ones from her book better than before? And this is just ready made for taking on a new project or stepping into a new year. How do we make good habits and break bad ones? This is Gretchen Rubin. Well, Gretchen, I want to focus on.

a phrase that you use around habits. And I think it's a wonderful framework for why you wrote this book. You say that habits are the invisible architecture of our everyday lives. That is a wonderful word picture. And words matter so much, and you believe that as well. What does that actually look like when it shapes us every day? Well, absolutely. I mean, habits research suggests make up about 40% of everyday life. And what that means is that that if we have habits that work for us, it's going to be a lot easier for us to be happier, healthier, and more productive. And if our habits don't work for us, that's just going to be a much bigger challenge because they just do make up so much of what we do every day. And so

if you're trying to get better than before, do something better, working on your habits is a really good way to start because it's freeing and energizing because you're not making decisions, you're not using willpower, and yet it does infiltrate every part of what you're doing. And so This has to do with how you respond to an expectation, whether it's an outer expectation like a work deadline or request from a spouse or an inner expectation, like your own desire to keep a year's resolution, your own desire to start a business in your free time. So there's upholders, questioners, obligers, and rebels. Upholders readily respond to outer and inner expectations.

They meet a work deadline. They keep an ear's resolution without much effort. They want to meet external expectations, but their expectations for them. themselves are just as important or more important. Next are questioners. Questioners question all expectations. They'll do something if they think it makes sense. They hate anything arbitrary or irrational. They want to know why am I listening to you. So they make everything an inner expectation because if they endorse it, if they buy into it, they'll meet it without trouble. If they don't accept it, they won't follow it. Next are obligers. Obligers readily meet

outer expectations, but they struggle to meet inner expectations. And I got insights. into this tendency when someone told me, well, the funny thing about me is when I was in high school on the track team, I never missed track practice, but I can't go running now. Well, when there was a team and a coach providing external accountability, the habit was effortless. But without that, the habit wasn't forming. So what was needed was external accountability. And finally, rebels. They want to do what they want to do, when they want to do it in their own way. If you ask or tell them to do something, they're very likely to do the opposite. And I must say, of all the tendencies, Revel is the smallest tendency, and obliger is the largest tendency.

So anyone who's struggling to meet inner expectations, the answer is to put in a form of external accountability. If you're having trouble meeting a deadline for career transition you want to make, give yourself external accountability, and it's going to be a lot, lot easier to follow through on that habit. Overwhelmingly, people are questioners or obligers, and this has enormous implications for healthcare professionals, device manufacturers, teachers, spouses, HR people, teams, because if you want to communicate in a way with someone and you want to be compelling, you have to talk to them and set up things in a way that's going to allow them to succeed. For instance, if you're working with an obligeer, you want to give them systems of external

accountability, like deadlines and supervision and benchmarks, because without that, they're not going to move forward, that was hard for me as an upholder to understand until I came up with this framework. And you know what? That translates to leadership as well. You know what I mean? Where you kind of got that rebel employee. Maybe they're not a rebel in spirit and in heart, but they just have rebel tendencies, right? They want to do it on their own and how to guide them as opposed to manage them. Big difference. So what managers of rebels say is like what works for them is to say like, hey, you've got the chops, get this done. This is your budget. This is when the client needs it. go do your thing.

And the more freedom they have to do it in their own way, then the more that they will embrace that. And they'll do things like they won't keep the budget because they have to prove that they're doing it their own way, but they will deliver because often they do want to show what they can do. But the more you micromanage, the more that they're going to start pushing back. And so it is tricky. I've talked to people who manage lots of rebels.

So this myth is like if only I could figure out the right, kind of the right specific habit, then I'll succeed. No, it's the question of the match. what is true for you, and then how do you bring your habits? Like, if you're an obligeer, what you need is external accountability. That's what you need. So figure that out, and you'll be finished. Some habits form faster, some form much more slowly, some form overnight.

And it's a myth to think that there's a certain number of repetitions that's going to solidify that habit for us. Folks, I'm going to tell you this candidly. Better than before, one of the best books I've read in a long time. I cannot recommend it any higher. It really hit me between the eyes because I'm a spontaneous kind of feel guy. And discipline for me is something I always have to struggle with, thus habits. Help with that. This really helped me.

If you're in that boat, I'm telling you, if you've never read this book better than before, I really recommend. I will tell you this, this is fun. For me, my favorite two conversations, one was Gretchen. I'll save the other one. See if you can guess which one it is. I'll tell you after we play it for you, but moving on into a longtime friend. One of the fringe benefits of the kind of gig that I get to do here and have done before I arrived here is the people I get to interview, and every once in a while you get to interview multiple times,

and you kind of get to know them because you're going deep. Even though you're not friends with them, you're going deep. Then every once in a while, you become friends with somebody. And Pat Lynch-eone is certainly that. What a brilliant guy. This is from episode 89, and his book was called, the advantage, the latest book, and this is breakthrough stuff. Talking about organizational health.

So here is a part of my conversation with Pat Linchony. Now, early on in the book, there's a section Understanding Organizational Health, and I want to dive into this right here, because I think it will help inform the rest of our conversation. What does organizational health look like if you were to break that down? You can't give us the whole chapter there and all that, but what does it look like? You know, the most important thing is it's an organization where politics are minimized. There's almost no politics. What I mean is people don't say things that they don't mean and they're not trying to manipulate one another.

And confusion is gone. People know what's going on and they know what they need to do to be successful. Those are the two biggest things. You know, most organizations, people say there's a lot of politics here and I'm always confused about what's going on. Those two things going away. And as a result of that morale and productivity are very high. And I don't mean that in some kind of esoteric sense. I mean, people are psyched to come to work and they know what to do and they get a lot done when they're there.

And the final quality of a healthy organization is that good people almost never leave, unless there's some overwhelming, compelling reason not to do with the culture of the organization, but with their lives. So those are the signs that an organization is healthy, and it doesn't take a diagnostic quiz to figure it out. Most people can walk around a company and ask people how things are going, and that the answers are going to get from people and the general spirit of the organization is going to make that clear.

I think 15% of organizations are probably healthy. Wow. And I don't say that in a cynical way or like, these dumb people need it. I think just when you put together a bunch of fallible human beings in an organization, and if they're not intentionally, purposefully doing the right things,

it's going to produce a very messy result. Now, and life is messy, but what I mean messy, I mean, a lot of self-interested people doing things that aren't necessarily good for the greater good. And so I would say it's about 15%. But the good news is this, if a leader is sincere in his or her desire to make their organization healthy and can put together a handful of people at the leadership level, and they want to do it,

it's immensely doable, it's even simple, conceptually. It takes a lot of hard work and persistence, but it's not complicated. So my hope and the purpose of my company is, we want that to be 85% one day. We want people to say, of course we're going to make our organization healthy. We have high-speed internet. We've got sound financials. Why wouldn't we make our organization?

We want to make it a standard in business. When human beings can come to the table and learn to be genuinely vulnerable with one another, it changes everything. And it is the beginning of this entire process. Conversely, if a group of people cannot come to the table and be vulnerable with one another, they are not going to build trust, and organizational health is not going to be possible. So that's really the tip of the spear. Trust through vulnerability among that handful of people at the top.

How many companies have established that level of trust, and we're all in this together, and we're all for each other? Not very many. You know, it's far more common in the world for people to look out for themselves. We come out of the womb protecting ourselves, and it's not natural for people to put others ahead of themselves. And yet when they do that, amazing things happen. You see it in the world of sports, you see it in business, in churches, in the military, in every kind of organization. When you get that of spree to core, that real selflessness, awesome things happen. And we work with teams to try

to help them do that. Mastering conflict, I mean, my gosh, there are a few people in this world that are okay stepping in a conflict. It's like a sport for them. They're good at it or they like it, and it's how they're wired. But generally speaking, no one really likes to deal with conflict. But when there's trust, Pat, conflict becomes a lot easier, right? Because we're not on edge. We're not guarding our back. We're just fighting for what we believe in. Exactly. If you know that the people care about you and you care about them, and you would never say anything that would break down the team or break them down, then when you get into an argument, even if it's a little uncomfortable, you know it's for the right reason and you know you're going to be able to recover. So trust

makes conflict the pursuit of truth. Whereas without trust, conflict is politics. I'm trying to win. And you're right. People do not like to engage in conflict. I think it's one of the norms in our society is to always be nice. But nice isn't always kind because you're not telling people the things they need to hear to get better. And this niceness in society really hurts teams and ultimately leads to really damaging relationships. Unbelievable trust makes conflict about the pursuit of truth, not anything else. That is unbelievable.

All right, I got to keep... If you go into a company where people trust each other? and go to one of their meetings, they're going to have discussions that look like arguments that are going to make you think they hate each other. And at the end of that meeting, they're going to be laughing, and they're going to talk about why that was a great decision because nobody was ever trying to tear anybody down.

They were just trying to get it truth, and they get at it faster and more effectively because they're not editing themselves, they're not holding back their opinions, and everybody knows that. It's efficient, it's effective, and it's, frankly, a lot more engaging than meetings where people are sitting back,

calculating the cost of conflict, holding back their opinions, not saying what they want out of fear that people will take it the wrong way, or that they'll be found out. To me, it's one of the greatest competitive advantages. If I had to assess any organization large or small can, I wouldn't look at their balance sheet. I wouldn't look at it. I wouldn't talk to their customers. The first thing I would do is I would go to their meetings and see if they really engaged with one another.

If they debated and argued well, because that to me is a sign that they're going to make the decisions. Another great sign that I should have put in the book, I put about it in different parts. A healthy organization is going to be the one where people don't have anything left to say in the hallways after a meeting. All right, again, you can get that in full conversation, episode 89. Now, I told you that Gretchen Rubin was one of my top two conversations in 2015. The second one, a guy that I had never heard before, heard of before, rather, in my life. Episode 121, just recently. Sean Acorn. The book, Happiness Advantage. I'm going to tell you right now. Better than before. Happiness

Advantage. It's a left-right combo. Bleu me away. Love them. They sit at home on my desk, always thumbing through them. Great, great stuff. And so I really love Sean's empirical research on this subject, happiness. And how do you define happiness? I've heard people try to define it. He gives what I think is the best definition of all time. Here's Sean Acre. The way that the ancient Greeks defined happiness was not the way we do in the modern world, which is pleasure. They defined happiness as the joy you feel moving towards your potential. And for me, I love that definition because it changes the pursuit of happiness. It changes it from something that's momentary to something you can experience. Joy is something you experience even when life is not pleasurable, right?

Like working long hours and days and months and years trying to start up a business, but you find it to be meaningful or in the midst of, you know, childbirth, long run, you can have high joy but low pleasure. And the other part is I think a lot of people are afraid of happiness because if I'm happy now, maybe I'll stop pushing as hard. And that's what pleasure does, but joy does the exact opposite. Joy actually fuels us towards our potential. It makes us want to learn about the world, makes us want to see as much of as we can and to find ways of being able to see more and more of our potential. What do you observe when it comes to joy around the world? and where I'm going with this, Sean, is maybe the countries where they have a lot less than we Americans are blessed to have.

What does joy look like around the world versus an America? So it is interesting. I started doing all this research at Harvard. So the vision of happiness was related to grades. It was related to a very closed and insular and very privileged society. And I realize that this research is useless unless it works out in the messiness of life. So in the middle of the economic global collapse that happened in 2007, I started taking this research out to try and battle test it across the globe. And what I found was I started learning so much more from these other countries, more from people outside of Harvard than I had been learning in a decade of studying happiness there.

One of the things that was most impactful for me, partly what you were describing, I had some assumptions about what creates happiness. And I assumed that if you put somebody in place with beautiful buildings and with tons of money, and they have all these opportunities and intelligence, that they'll be much happier than somebody who's living in the midst of poverty, or that there's instability, or that they're living with debt. But it turns out as I started traveling, that's not the experience at all. And as we did the research, we found that if I know everything about your external world, we can only predict 10% of your long-term happiness. 90% of happiness is a mystery to scientist, if all we have is your external world, because it turns out that 90% of our long-term happiness is based upon how your brain is processing the world you find yourself in, how you think about your money, how you think about your position, how you think about your family.

And I did travel to 50 countries. Two of them, I was shocked to find happiness there. I work with some farmers in Zimbabwe who had lost their lands. the government had taken away the land from the farmers, and now the entire country was starving. The entire currency actually collapsed. They were moving their money around in wheelbarrows. And I was like, well, this is a place where people are not going to be happy, right?

I was just up with Swiss bankers who didn't get their bonuses once, and they were devastated and depressed. And then I found these people who had lost everything, and I was like, well, of course they'll be unhappy. And I was stunned that was not the case at all. And what was keeping them together was two things. first of all, they had optimism. They believed that eventually their behavior would matter to improve the situation.

So they thought, no matter what had happened up to this point, things will get better if they keep trying. But even more powerful than that was actually social connection. In places like Venezuela and in Zimbabwe, I found that while there was tons of instability in their life, what they had was deep social connection. The breadth, depth, and meaning in their social relationships was so strong that even in the midst of chaos, they could actually still find meaning and joy within their life. I feel like it's very easy for us entrepreneurs and for people who, you know, are sometimes chasing a job to leave all of our social support networks for it.

We just found out that social connection is not only the greatest predictor of happiness. Social connection is as predictive of how long you will end up living as obesity, high blood pressure, or smoking. Let me show you how powerful this is. Researchers at University of Pennsylvania have found that if you have four-year-old children with genes for pessimism and around the dinner table you have them practice thinking of three new things that they're grateful for that have occurred over the past 24 hours simply three new gratitudes each day you can take a child with genes for pessimism and rewire their brain over a period

of just 21 to 28 days to actually become a lifelong default optimist if they continue those patterns you don't have to just be a child you can do this at age 84 it turns out the reason why this research is incredible. It's not that gratitude's good for you. Everyone that's listening gets that. The reason why this research is creating a revolution within the society is because it's saying that a two-minute positive intervention in your life could actually trump not only your genes, but eight decades of experience, making happiness and access to joy a possibility for all of us, and actually allowing us to use more of our brain. It turns out that we have higher levels of intelligence. It triples our levels of creativity. It increases our ability to solve problems. All of those things improve in the

human brain's positive. And it turns out happiness is not something you inherit. Happiness is something you cultivate. You know, actually over the past seven years, I've worked with over a third of the Fortune 100 companies. So one of the things we found was that most entrepreneurs actually get into trouble because they think if I work harder right now, I'll be more successful. And as soon as I achieve these lofty goals I've set for myself, then I'll feel happier. So they hit their sales target, then they raise it. Or they hit their growth earnings. They want to double it for the next year or keep that doubling happening or you know a student might get good grades in school but then they have to get into a better school the problem is that success is a moving target for the human

brain so if happiness is on the opposite side of success for you if that's how you're motivating yourself you're actually limiting both your success and your happiness because your brain never actually gets to happiness you've pushed it over what we call the cognitive horizon because it's on the opposite side of a moving target for the brain but flip it around if you can get your team to become more positive by first changing your leadership. If you can become more positive yourself as you're trying to pursue these entrepreneurial ideas or to create a strong business, it turns out that when the human brain is positive, every single business and educational outcome we know how to test for rises

dramatically. John Aker, episode 121. I'm telling you, folks, I love it. I went bananas when he defined happiness because it is really, really simple but so profound. If you have not heard that entire conversation, and if you've not gotten the book, again, I'm going to tell you, Gretchen Rubin, better than before. Sean Acre, happiness advantage, my two favorite books that I read this year corresponding to interviews that we did here. So check those out, episode 121, episode 101, my two favorites. Now, and that's saying a lot, Eric, the producer, you know this.

Because when we first met each other, it wasn't very long after that I freaked out in a positive way about Austin Cleon telling you about. Austin. His book, Steel Like an Artist, Little Teeny Book, probably the book that I've recommended more than any other book in my life. I just love it. I'm a creative, and I nerd out on creative concepts and people that are very creative. It's a great, great book, a little book, and I highly recommend you get that book as well. And so in this portion of the conversation from episode 99, I really wanted him to unpack this idea that the book is titled, Steel, Like an artist. What does that mean? What does that look like? I think stealing like an artist is really about saturating yourself with the right influences,

picking and choosing your influences, finding out all there is to know about the particular world you're interested in. And that's the first step to then being able to pick and choose the parts that you want to reconfigure and make into your own work. But I think people start out in the beginning, they say, oh, I have to find my voice in order to make stuff. And it's like, well, actually, you have to start making stuff and start throwing stuff into the pot, you know, and mixing it up before you can actually find what it is that's yours. You can learn how to be a self-propelled learner. If you can learn to be someone who, any hunch you come across, any little tidbit, any little factoid that, like, sounds some little bell in your head, if you can then learn to follow those leads and to research, and not only research, but search. You know, I think curiosity is about being on the lookout for things. And I think,

you know, we're such a shallow culture. On the whole, everyone's kind of reading the same blogs and reading the same books and, you know, spreading around the same information. I think it's a matter of effort. If you just throw a little bit of effort into the search, if you just dive a little bit deeper than the average Joe or the average person in your field. It's amazing what you can dig up. So I think it's just pushing yourself to go one further than most people go. David Foster Wallace said that the difference between a great nonfiction writer and just a regular person was that the writer spent more time thinking about a subject than the other person. You know, we have this idea if only we had more time or we had better tools or if we

had, you know, more education, we could start making the things that we want to make or run the business we want to run. But creativity is about making do with what you've got. You know, the true act of creativity is taking what's at your disposal and turning it into something that you need or you want to use or something that we've never seen. And so I think that people need to do as they need to realize that creativity isn't about having this, immense set of options available to you. Creativity is really about setting some limits on yourself. The idea is like, go ahead. What kind of business could you start with 100 bucks? Could you shoot a film with your iPhone on your lunch break? Could you draw a good picture with a ballpoint pen and

your legal pad at work? That kind of thing. Just to jump in and really go for it. And to know that it's really the limitations on creativity. It's the constraints that push us to really come up with the interesting work. What I see when I meet entrepreneurs is this kind of scrappiness with the really good ones, the idea of just doing what you can with what you've got. And kind of, I guess the term is bootstrapping, but the people I really look up to are those people that, you know, they don't have to go out and look for a bunch of venture capital funds.

They don't have to go out and like, you know, they somehow figure out how to get a business off the ground out of almost raw necessity. I wonder if maybe to, you know, attempt mastery while retaining an amateur spirit with it all. Maybe that might be the way to go. Austin Cleon, episode 99, keeping that curiosity alive. What a tremendous challenge that is for all of us. All right, so the next one, how do you not put Gary V on your favorite conversations list? This was an easy decision for me.

Others I wrestled with making the top eight. But this one was a no-brainer. Largely because the interview was unscripted. I'll tell you this, when I meet you folks out on the road at Entry leadership events and smart events and things of that nature, and you come up to me, and a typical question that I get is, how do you prepare, you know, how do you know what you're going to ask all this kind of things. And I do always prepare, except for this one interview. I didn't prepare. I literally knew that when coming in to talk to Gary Vee, I wanted to try to get him beyond his normal kind of just shoot from the hip. Can I really make him think and go deep? He's a great

thinker, but he's so on his feet, he knows exactly what he believes. There's not a whole lot of margin with Gary Vee. He knows exactly what he thinks, why he thinks it, and he always shares it. So many ways to describe Gary Vaynerchuk. The bottom line is, is an entrepreneurial machine. He's into so many different businesses now, of course, one of the leading thinkers on social media and how to be effective in marketing, connecting, selling. The guy is an author of books. His book that I think everyone should read, Jab, Jab, Right Hook. Of course, you can check him out online, Gary Vaynerchuk, V-A-Y-N-E-R-C-H-U-K. This was so compelling. I heard from so many of you that are Gary V fans, that you really enjoyed the style of the conversation.

It certainly was fun for me. Episode 108, and there's no other setup. This is Gary V. Raw. I want to talk about something that you're talking about all the time, and that is self-awareness. I agree with you. This is the single most important thing that anybody in the world needs to be focusing on, not just entrepreneurs or leaders. But let's talk about this self-awareness.

why do you think this is the single biggest issue we should be focusing on? Because when you're not tricking yourself, you're putting yourself in a position to succeed, right? The thing that I'm most scared about when I talk about self-awareness is, can it be formed? Can you get better at it? Is it something you can learn? Because if it is, it is literally the only thing I should spend my life talking about because it is absolutely the backbone of success because what happens is you keep yourself away from things that are not going to make you successful, and you're going to do the things that will make you successful

and successful in life, let alone business, right? You're going to be happier and you're going to make more money. I mean, it's not super complicated. So I think when you look at the people that we kind of give accolades to in society, I think tend to be very self-aware because they're people that had enormously interesting skills, whether athletically or artistically, business chops, and they went all in on it. There's very few people that become great,

later on. They're doing all the things in the early days, and it comes actually from self-awareness. It's recognizing your talent and then honing it, putting in the work. So I just think it is one of the most important characteristics a human being can have. Self-awareness and empathy to me are the two sides of the coin that allow you to be great. Do we need to focus on our weaknesses at all, or are you a guy? I happen to be this one and says, hey, let's just be aware of my weaknesses so I can mitigate those. and totally play to my strengths. Do you agree with that? 100%. It is absolutely what I've been preaching my whole life, even as a kid to my friends.

I think the American economy is enormously affected by people selling people on their weaknesses. Take these pills. Take, you know, do this. Get prettier. Get thinner. Get smarter. Get richer. People are prying on weaknesses, and I really like to think about it the other way. For many of women that are listening right now and they're beginning to be honest or they've already been honest with themselves and they realize, I don't know that I'm 100% self-aware. Curious to know what you would say to them if you were having lunch with them right now to get self-aware quick. What would you tell them to do? Ask 10 people around them what they think of them. And they should go to their mom, their brother, their sister, the best friend, their boss, the people that work for them and say, listen, I'm about to ask you a question.

but before I ask you the question, and this is literally verbatim what I think people should do if they want to figure out self-awareness, I'm about to ask you a question, but before I ask you a question, you need to understand that I 100% need the truth, and it's going to be so hard for you to tell me the truth because either you admire me, you fear me, you love me,

but I'm begging you for the truth, no matter what you think I want to hear, just tell me exactly what you actually think, and that will bring me the most value in the world. I may cry, I may be stunned, I may be upset for five seconds, but net net, I promise you I won't. I am asking you to tell me what you think, and then you ask the question, do you think I can sing? Do you think I can make money?

Do you think, do you think, like ask them, what do they think your strengths are and what do they think your weaknesses are? Again, Gary Vaynerchuk, episode 108, love the talk about self-awareness. Boy, is he self-awareness? Well, our last excerpt easily. was the most powerful interview. 2015, John O'Leary, Episode 119. If you're not familiar with John, he's going to have a great book that's coming out in 2016,

and we'll tell you more about that. We mentioned it in the entire conversation, episode 119 again. But if you don't know who John is real quick, this is a guy who, as a young boy, goofing around with gasoline and fire, literally burned himself almost to death, and made an unbelievable recovery. to now inspire thousands upon thousands.

And we really get into, if you know your why, you can endure anyhow. And this is a guy who's walked many miles in one of the most gruesomely painful, difficult howls. But he knew his why, and he made it through this, will encourage you. What this doctor spoke into is what ultimately motivates all of us and its purpose, its mission, its passion, its cause greater than self. There's a quote from Victor Frankel. It's my favorite quote, I think. Frankl survives the Holocaust. In his book, Mancertrami,

meaning, this quote shows up. The quote is, when you know your why, you can endure anyhow. My why today, if you ask me why I speak, why I write, why I parent,

why I hit church on Sundays and try to live it throughout the week, why I do the stuff of life. My why is very clear because my life is hard. It's physically time-wise, but my why is clear.

It allows me to run over. The hard part. My why is when you know your why, you can endure any house, why will you thrive? And here it is. God demands it. My family deserves it, and the world is starred for it. So each day and every interaction, all day long, that is in front of me.

It weighs in my heart. It pulls me forward, and it launches me into engaging in life again. And I think oftentimes the leaders listening to this podcast may forget what a pat on the back does for a busy way down team member. And from a guy, from a gal who is already super busy for us to slow down for things. 30 seconds, sit down and say, what's going on at home? Or great job on that presentation. I don't know if I tell you enough how much your work matters around here. It really does encourage, lift up, and inspire people to do their best work. It takes us no time. It's the right thing, and it's transformative in their life, than in our lives and then in our business. I think very

frequently we leaders know our goals financially. We know our goals for the bottom line. We know our goals for employee headcount. We know what we're trying to achieve. And yet frequently, we don't know what the goals are the men and women, the children in our lives, our aging parents, what their goals are that most allow us to achieve our goals. And so I would encourage folks to take the time not only to identify their goals and their strategies to achieve it, but then spend the painful necessary time to uncover what the goals and the dreams are the men and women that we get to serve with. I'll walk with you.

They're not on their own. These are powerful words for a burn nurse. Absolutely. And they are extremely important for all of us in leadership as we got our kids for or aging parents forward and everybody in our teams forward. We'll walk with them. What a gift to be able secretly to serve and walk with people in their life. I think a challenge for all of us today, and so I'll ask you to ask yourself this question,

who do you need to walk up to today and say, I'll walk with you? I think we need to be looking for those opportunities. John, I want you to share the three questions that you share to our audience today, powerful questions for those who life is hitting them right now and they just feel like they're getting crushed. And it's normal to ask these questions with the wrong perspective. And you showed us how to ask them with the right perspective. That's right. Will you reveal those three questions and then I want to walk through each of them?

Absolutely. You know, I think when we're having bad days at work or the traffic built up on us this morning or we get a call that we need to pick up our kids from school, they're sick, whatever the challenge is, there are generally three questions we ask ourselves. And there's more, but it starts with these three. The first, and listeners, yell it out in your cars right now. What's our first victim's question? Why me?

Oh, man, dang the luck. Me again. Oh, here we go. Me again. Why me? The second question is we kind of go through the day and our hearts get a little colder. Well, you know what? Who cares?

We just kind of become a little bit more different to our nagging spouse, our pain in the neck kids, our aging parents, our financial woes. The struggle's going on at work, man. Just cold clam up, man. Cross your arms. ask the question, who cares? And the third question as we go toward the end of the day

is, well, geez, what's the point? And that's a really dangerous question. What's the point? Because this can lead to a very bad decision. What's the point? So what I'd like your followers to do, is to ask three completely different questions. I think these are life-taking

the three I'd like to put forward or life-giving. Different questions, so they may want to write these down. The first one, and I think this is the way to kick off every morning. Why me? Man, why do I get to work? Why do I get to see light?

Why do I get to hear sound? Why do I get to smell? Many of your followers, why do I get to live in one of the freest countries in the history of mankind? How frequently do we race into our day unfocus on the gifts that have allowed us to come to this place in our life?

So I encourage folks to begin the day, prayerfully, reflectfully, with a journal. Why me? Man, dang, I'm lucky. Then there's another question. As we uncross our arms, open up our hearts. Who cares? Who cares if it's hard?

Who cares if there's traffic? who cares if there's change, who cares if she's sometimes tougher, he's sometimes difficult. Who cares if life is challenging. It's worth it and it's worth fighting for. So who cares? It's a great question, actually. Ask from the right lens. And the third is, what's the point?

And this leads us to our mission. This leads us back to our why and this leads to a cause always greater than self. There's a book called Change or Die. I'll give you the cliff notes right now. Change is hard. Who knew? Yeah, change is hard. And diet, finances work.

Change is hard. Three things allow us to make change. change must be radical radical not easy in other words it's radical it's a completely different diet program than you're on it's living life like no one else it's different it's hard first it must be radical second we can't do it by ourselves you're not alone wolf maybe we ought to stop acting like we need others we need to encourage we need to be encouraged and the third is it's got to be mission centered we can't make any great change in life for us not for our pocketbook not for our waistline if it ends there. We can make massive change, though, if it's about a cause, if it's about

others, if it's about mission. And I think these three questions allow us to first start off on ourselves, but then allow us to spend the rest of the day thinking and working diligently for others. So there it is. Why me? Who cares? What's the point? And final word from you, I want to tee you up, because when you revealed those questions to us, you made a distinction. You said, when we asked those questions, why me, who cares what's the point? You said, we need to Ask those not as victims, but as victors. Wow. Encourage leaders on that thought.

I think it's really important to understand that every challenge is an opportunity. We talked very briefly about market conditions today. As of today, markets are down everywhere. One way to view that is, oh, my gosh, why am I? There it goes. Why me? The alternative is to say, why am I? What does this mean?

What are the gifts of my life? How fortunate am I that I was able to save in the first place? Geez, what a gift. it allows us to take a completely different lens into our work, that's awesome, into our relationships, that's huge, into our life. That allows us to see the same life that everybody else sees from a different perspective, which allows us to embrace a different lesson and take a different step forward. It's every challenge, every tragedy, every fire presents within it also the gift of opportunity.

Always, not sometimes, not just for positive people, always in every interaction. And as victors, as leaders, and that's all your followers. We get to choose stop showing up as victims and start showing up as a victor. There it is, folks, our favorite eight conversations of the year and pieces of those conversations. Now, again, I've given you each one of the episodes so that you can go back and review, or maybe it's the first time that you've joined us on the podcast here, and you want to go back and listen to some of these that you heard highlighted today. And so here's what we're going to do for you.

If you just go to entreleadership.com, click on podcast this episode, We have in the show notes each one of the episode numbers of the people you're listening to. So, again, easy to get back to and listen to if you've never heard them before or again, you want to refresh these conversations. It has been an unbelievably fast 2015 and an unbelievably fabulous 2015 in large part because you people who listen to the Entree Leadership podcast are so great to serve. We've heard from so many of you. We want to continue to hear from you podcast at Entreeleadership.com.

And as we wrap our final podcast of 2015, we're looking forward to an amazing year in 2016, and we wish that for you as well. As we always say that we truly mean on behalf of Eric the producer and everyone at Entree Leadership, thank you so much for listening. Happy New Year. We'll talk to you again, 2016.