Passion Struck with John R. Miles - Robert Glazer on How to Transform Your Life Using the Compass Within | EP 668

Episode Date: September 25, 2025

In this episode of Passion Struck, I sit down with Robert Glazer — serial entrepreneur, five-time best-selling author, and founder of Acceleration Partners — to explore his powerful new book The Compass Within. Robert shares why success can still feel empty if your life is out of alignment, and how identifying your actionable core values becomes the starting point for lasting fulfillment.Whether you’re at a crossroads in your career, questioning the culture you’re part of, or simply longing for greater purpose, this conversation will give you a practical blueprint for finding your “compass within” and living by it with courage.Visit this link for the full show notesGo Deeper: The Ignited Life SubstackIf this episode stirred something in you, The Ignited Life is where the transformation continues. Each week, I share behind-the-scenes insights, science-backed tools, and personal reflections to help you turn intention into action.Subscribe🔗  and get the companion resources delivered straight to your inbox.Catch more of Robert Glazer: https://robertglazer.com/If you liked the show, please leave us a review—it only takes a moment and helps us reach more people! Don’t forget to include your Twitter or Instagram handle so we can thank you personally.Get the full companion workbook at TheIgnitedLife.netFull episode on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@JohnRMilesListen on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcastsEveryone deserves to feel valued and important. Show it by wearing it: https://startmattering.com/See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Your first great love story is free when you sign up for a free 30-day trial at audible.ca slash Wondery. That's audible.com. Coming up next on Passionstruck. I am very outcome-oriented. I believe in KPIs and dashboards. And we had one of the first remote companies and my friends before COVID. How do you know people are doing work? And I'm like, I don't know. They all have the same number of clients. We have two key metrics. is the program doing well and they're staying retained and the client is happy. So if somehow they have five clients and their program is doing well and it's growing and they figured out how to do that in 10 hours a week, God bless them. Like they're doing the right thing.

We just always had an outcome orientation. Welcome to Passion Struck. Hi, I'm your host, John R. Miles. And on the show, we decipher the secrets, tips, and guidance of the world's most inspiring people and turned their wisdom into practical advice for you, and those around you. Our mission is to help you unlock the power of intentionality so that you can become the best version of yourself. If you're new to the show, I offer advice and answer listener questions on Fridays. We have long-form interviews the rest of the week with guests

ranging from astronauts to authors, CEOs, creators, innovators, scientists, military leaders, visionaries, and athletes. Now, let's go out there and become passion struck. 668 of Passion Struck is here, and I'm so glad you've joined us. Whether you're a long-time listener or brand new, welcome. Over a third of you come back week after week, which tells me Passion Struck isn't just a podcast. Together, we're passing the ripple of mattering farther than we ever imagined. And if this show has ever helped you see yourself more clearly or take one small step toward growth, here's how you can help keep it growing. Share the episode with someone who needs to hear it and leave a five-star rating or review on Apple or Spotify. It helps the

algorithm send this conversation to more people who need it. Earlier this week, we explored the science of personality change with Olga Kazan and how you can become you but better. Today, we take the next step, from clarity to capacity, because what if the answer to your overwhelm isn't doing more at all? What if the real breakthrough is building the kind of inner and outer capacity that allows you to sustain impact, not just for a season, but for a lifetime. Joining me is Robert Glazier, serial entrepreneur, five-time bestselling author, founder of Acceleration Partners, and The Voice Behind Friday Forward, a newsletter that's read by over 200,000 leaders worldwide. Robert's newest book, The Compass Within, is a powerful parable

about discovering and living by your core values. In today's conversation, we explore why so many high achievers feel quietly misaligned, even when life looks good on paper. We go into the difference between being busy and being truly aligned. We discuss how Robert skilled a high-performance company without sacrificing values or well-being, and how to rebuild capacity across four dimensions, spiritual, intellectual, emotional, and physical, so you can thrive in the long term. If you've ever had the whisper inside saying, this isn't me, or wondered whether you're climbing the right mountain, This episode will help you find your compass and start charting your own course. If you want to take today's conversation even deeper, you can join us at the igniteddlife.net

for a deeper dive on today's episode along with the companion workbook. And if you'd like to watch this episode dialogue, head over to YouTube at John R. Miles. All right, let's get into it. Here's my powerful conversation with Robert Glazier. Thank you for choosing Passionstruck and choosing me to be your host and guide on your journey to creating an intentional life. Now, let that journey begin. I am absolutely thrilled today

to have Robert Glazer on Passionstruck. Welcome, Robert. How are you today? Thanks for having me, John. I usually like to start these episodes out by asking people about their background, but I want to take yours a little bit different. Most people don't have a rock bottom moment.

They typically just wake up day and wonder, is this really it? Is this what my life has come to? Why do you think that quiet question is so common? And why do you think it's so easy to ignore? It's a great question. I think that a lot of times we're just really influenced by external perceptions of what we should do, who we should be, what we should like, what we should like learning. And we learn that, look, we're training a puppy right now and you learn very young there's either treats or there's like bad dog right I think society does this to us and is looking for us to conform to certain things and those systems they serve a lot of people but not everyone so I think you learn to play the game you learn to do

these things and then whether it's at 18 or 28 or 38 or 48 I think a lot of us have that moment that you're talking about being like look this isn't me or I don't want to be doing this And I think at that lowest point, there's just a real disconnect with what you value because when you're doing what you feel like you're supposed to be doing, man, it's hard at sometimes. But you just don't, I don't think you have that bottoming out dread feeling. You have that I need to do this and push forward feeling. Having core values and living by them is two different things entirely. And I remember I was in this position. I was a senior executive at Dell at the time, and I was faced with a huge decision.

I was leading the largest project in the company. We were spending about $150 million a year on it, and I inherited this from my predecessor, who had been the CIO and had been promoted to be president of one of the business units at Dell. So he was running about a $20 billion business. And I, after examining it and bringing in a couple experts to make sure my sounding board was correct, we realized that we were going to implement this thing. It was going to cost about three quarters of a billion dollars by the time we were said and done. And it wouldn't fulfill 50% of the reasons that we were installing it.

And so I had this defining moment. that I could either go along with the crowd, keep doing the implementation, or I could stand up for doing what was right for the shareholders of Dell, but it would probably put me in the target line site of that president. And I made the decision to recommend a different solution. And ultimately, it ended up costing me my job because he ended up going after me. And I remember about 18 months after I had left, I got an interesting call from the CFO saying ultimately I was right and that person at that point was asked to leave the firm. But it costs me a lot. But looking back, I don't think I would have done it any other way because to me, doing what is right has

always been a foundational principle of mine. But my point for bringing that whole story up is core values, if you really live by them, do lead you to have to make some very difficult choices in life. It's funny, I'm working on an article for HBR, and we get on this, and it's an excellent point. Core values have a cost, and it's usually a higher cost in the short term, particularly when you're putting your boat upstream, they don't, look, when the water's coming downstream and your boat's coming downstream, it's great. You don't get a lot of credit for that. But I'm talking in this article with, particularly about what the base camp guys did in 2022 when they abolished politics at their company. And the world came after them.

And this is the height of cancel culture. And they were like, look, we'd rather just shut it all down than being a toxic politically environment company is not what we want. And the mob came after them and all that stuff. And two years later, they're record profits, record happiness, tons of people who don't want politics and the work applying. And a lot of companies that got into this performatively. and lost their focus or having a lot of problems. So it's a great point. There's a cost, right?

And it's not easy. But the analogy I always use is, so imagine like a sports car and what was a year of the sports car. And this is why you got to know what they are first. A lot of us have a sense that we're values oriented, but we don't know how to articulate them in a way that is helpful from a decision-making process. So if I have a sports car in a tunnel and I turn off the light,

I'm going to drive down, I'm going to drift to the right side wall, I'm going to smash on that wall. I'm going to pull back to the middle. I'm going to overcompensate. I'm going to go to the left wall. I'm probably going to get through the tunnel. But my car is going to look like, well, there's a PG show. It's going to look like crap at the end, right?

I'm going to get through. That's how a lot of us operate. But if I turn on the lights and I see the yellow lines, and I know that those are my values. I just, I stay away from the wall to begin with and to get in the center lane. And most of us know and recognize our values from when they are violated. And we know that feels really pretty. And look, sometimes you have to do it and you can maintain it for a little while. But like to do that in the long run, it really, you give up something kind of a big part of yourself. And I think you start to not like yourself in a lot of ways. Robert, thanks for sharing that. And today we are discussing your new upcoming book, The Compass Within, subtitled a little story about the values that guide us. And as I was reading this, In some ways, it reminded me of Robin Sharma's The 5 AM Club and him telling a parable.

Why did you take the approach of creating a parable in a story to illustrate this book? It's a great question. And so I, it's to go back to the genesis of when I figured out this formula for myself for figuring out your core values and actionable core values, I then started training and teaching our leaders on it. And I built a really good process. And we were able to get these breakthroughs. And I wrote this book, Elevate. And people would ask me and they'd say, okay, I'm all in the core values. How do I do it? And I was like, there's not really an easy answer. But I've been working on this process. I turned this into a course. A couple thousand people took the course. And I have all

kinds of notes on people that have changed their lives and made different decisions. I was like, I really want to get this to a lot more people. And I had written some books. And it would be a book. but I'm just not sure people are going to pick up and read a book about core values. And I love that book. I love the goal. I love Pat Lindsay's books. I've always resonated with a parable format. My daughter was challenging me to do something hard and write fiction. And I was like, I wonder if this would work better if I created a character and I showed this. And then at the end, I told everyone what they saw and how they could implement it in their own lives. So it's interesting, I have friends and stuff who've read the book. It's not out yet. But they're like, I felt like you were talking about me

today or a lot of people can see themselves in the character because we run into these things in in our lives regularly but i definitely just felt it worked better as a show not tell the tell's at the end but i think everyone will relate to some aspect of jamie's life who's the protagonist in the story at some point so you open up the book with a question that i have to say most of us try to avoid. What if success still leaves you empty? Because that's what it did for me. What was the personal experience for you that sparked that question? I never fit into a lot of these systems, right? So I was actually a kind of gross underachiever for a lot of my life because I was an entrepreneurial creative kid who just didn't like school and was bored. And then when

I put it all together, I ran really hard in another direction. And it still wasn't, me. And it really wasn't until I was invited to a leadership retreat and we got into this. I realized, wow, I'm very values driven, but I don't know what they are. And so if I'm going to change how I lead and live in my business, like I got to figure that out. And that sort of sent me on this six-month odyssey and really changed everything for me. And I'm trying to help people realize, again, there are a lot of mountains and there's good reasons to be on mountains and not. And a lot of people spend a lot of time climbing something that just doesn't matter to them or won't bring fulfillment or happiness. And I think really, if you can, I made a lot of changes in my life. When the values

were clear, it changed the types of policies I had in my company, who we hired friends that I doubled down on and acquaintances, friends that I moved away from because I was like, huh, here's what I want. And these people don't serve that. And these people do. And that's where first, as you, I think you made this point astutely, like, first you need to know how to the compass and to read it, and then you need to go in that direction. So there's living by your values is important, but if you can't articulate clear and I'm talking about one word values, I don't think work. Like in terms of actionable book or values, they need to be more than one word. They need to be differentiated. They need to be able to describe a behavior or a decision that you

want to do or not want to do. So first you have to identify them and then you have to live by them. It's really hard to live by them if you don't know what they are. True to that. Well, I want to go back to Jamie, who's your main character who you brought up earlier, because Jamie appears to have it all, but he's quietly unraveling. And I think that's true for many of us. We live in what I say, Henry David Thoreau got right a century ago. We live in quiet desperation.

Why did you choose to tell this story through the lens of quiet success or quiet desperation rather than dramatic failure? I love that question. God, I wish I had gotten that into the book in some ways because I always say this a lot. You have that friend who was like fired from their job and then they went on to start a hundred million dollar company and you hear these stories and it's like when it's good enough, no one ever makes a change. It's really only when they're forced to or when it's bad. And so if it's okay enough, like you can go on for a while, but that has consequences. Like I know someone who refused to make a hard decision and they were. in a situation that was really not aligned

and they took the easy route and they've been paying for that for the last seven years, right? For those two years of kind of coasting. So Jamie's wrestling with what I call the big three. And this is where I think the core values and decision making have the biggest impact, which is who you choose as your partner, the vocation you choose or the place that you wanna work.

So that could either be the type of work you do or where you choose to do it. And then I wanna think a lot of us forget about, which is your community, And if those do not reflect your values, my experience is that they have very little chance of success. And those are really important things. Obviously, we understand the partner, but even the community. So let's say you had a health scare and your health is really important to you. And you're in an area, you live in Newcastle, England. And in Newcastle, England, like, people go out drinking six

nights a week, right? It's going to be really hard for you to live in that culture and go out six nights a week and not drinks. You're either going to do something you don't want to do or do something that's hurting you. And so it's very different than living in Park City where everyone's, there's a six o'clock hiking club. So I think we forget about our environment and our community and how much that reinforces the things that are important to us and how hard it is when there's not alignment there. Yeah, and I want to focus on that word alignment because in chapter one of the book, you described this feeling of unspoken misalignment. And I love that phrase. How does that differ, do you think, from burnout, which we hear a lot, are dissatisfaction,

and why is it so dangerous? I think it's the logical. The misalignment is what leads to burnout and dissatisfaction going on for a long time. It's probably the logical conclusion of misalignment. Because again, if you think about Edison or people who worked on, like, he worked on 10,000 things that didn't work, but he was so motivated by what he was trying to do that he just didn't care. So I think that's why we get burned out. When we're doing, like, when you are doing something aligned with your values, it's hard. Time slows down. It's difficult. You're putting up

a fight. When you're doing something aligned, like time flies. It's natural. You're happy to do more. This is the stuff where you're like, for your friend, let me do that for you. I love planning trips. Let me just do that for you. And that's not the stuff that burns us out. So it's not the time. I think it's where and how we're spending the time and whether we realize, well, we're doing that with things that are aligned, right? A lot of it, the best goals that you've said are long-term goals and their goals that are aligned to your values, right? A lot of people have a goal of some sort of secondary home.

And I've always said, be really careful. Like, why do you want that? Is it a trophy of achievement? Or do you visualize this family and family dinners and this family place and getting together and community is important? Well, if that's what you vision in that goal, then you would not put your marriage and your family at risk working towards that second home because it's not going to deliver what you were looking for. Exactly. That is so true. There was a point as I was reading early in the book where I went back

to my own career again. You were talking about Jamie's performance review and after that review, he walks back by the company's core values on a lobby wall, which are things like respect, integrity, win as a team, clients first. And he scoffs because he realizes that he hasn't heard them spoken aloud since orientation. And it created a memory for me of two different scenarios I was part of, both of them Fortune 100 companies. I remember my time at Lowe's and when you would walk into the new headquarters in Moresville, the visitor entrance had the core values. at the top of the ceiling. But for Lowe's, everyone lived by the core values,

and I remember in our executive meetings, Robert Niblock or our chief human resources officer would always bring up a core value during our meetings. It's not that it's on the wall or not on the wall. It's that where else is it? Yes, and so they would always talk about it. They would give examples of people, even at a store level, who were living it.

And then I went to Dell, which I mentioned, before. And Dell also had core values, but during my time there, I don't think I ever heard any of them amplified. And it was amazing the cultural difference I saw. It all leads me to the question, why do you believe core values have become decoration instead of direction in companies? Well, even before social media, we've become very performative as a society. People do something. They see someone else doing it. The famous story, which has talked about in conclusion in the book is at the height of their fraud and everything, Enron had core values of integrity and honesty. That's not what got you promoted at Enron. A guy you promoted

was probably taking huge risks, stabbing people in the back, making as much money as you can, like what the culture rewards. And so I was just a disbeliever in core values for years because I saw all this crap at all the walls of all the companies I went to and know and behaved by it. But as I really dug into extraordinary companies and companies like Southwest, which has a core value of, wow, our customers, and their employees have taken people home on Thanksgiving and done crazy stuff for them. I realized, oh, there is some difference here. There's a difference between saying the things and doing the things, right? United Airlines had these core values of we fly friendly, we fly right. And then their employees dragged the guy off

a plane and bloodied him rather than giving him $700 for bumping him. And Southwest was rerouting someone whose kid got sick on a flight. No, there was no instruction. manual, just like, this is who we are and this is what we do. So I went from being a skeptic to being a believer, but also understanding that very few people, you know, had it done in the way that you're talking about with coals and more of them had the sort of Dell version of these are things that we put on the wall in our lobby. I hope you're loving this conversation with Robert Glazer. If this resonates with you, join us at the ignitedlife.net. Where you can download the workbook and join the conversation to start building real connection in your life. Thank you for

supporting the partners who support the show. You're listening to Passionstruck on the Passionstruck Network. Now, back to my conversation with Robert Glazier. I'm smiling because you brought up Wow, and that was what we talked about all the time at Lowe, especially in the stores, was delivering Wow customer service 100% of the time. And how do you get that across all the channels that a customer interacts with? because you can wow them in the store and then they call up to get support on the phone and you get a disgruntled worker and that becomes how they see the company. So it was really important for people to understand that.

And it's so amazing when you meet a value-based leader. In the book, you highlight a woman named Stacey as someone who was a value-based leader, someone who mentored, shielded her team from toxicity, handled the most difficult conversations with clients, with composure and grace. And then she suddenly resigns. And Jamie is beside himself. Why did you choose to create that scenario? Why was that so important for you to show that wake up call? Yeah, because look, we hear all the thing like people don't leave companies. They leave their leader. And I've been in a lot of situations where the leader, it's often the other way, like it can be both ways, right? There are subculture in a negative way.

there are a subculture in a positive way. And what Jamie had to see in this story without giving it all away is like, what was the actual culture of the company versus he happened to win the lottery and have a great leader? And at the end of the day, they had shared values, but those values weren't shared by a lot of the leaders in the organization. And that, I think, is what happens to so many people. Do you think in the companies that you've been in that there's a difference between the old guard and the new guard when it comes to core values, do you find that

one set seems to live them more? Because I definitely found that to be the case at Lowe's, that you had a larger amount of old guard who really believed in the company mission. And so they helped the new guard adapt to that philosophy, whereas in other companies I've joined, so much of the old guard is gone, that there's no one who is keeping the legacy going and making that a primary talking point, even at lunches, coffee meetings, things like that. I think it depends. These things get transmuted from top down, but at some point in order to scale, they can't just live with the top five or seven leaders in the organization.

It's actually the middle managers who carry that forward and reinforce it. When we were growing our company pretty quickly, people were like, look, are we going to lose the culture? Are we going to be different? And I'm like, that's up to you all, right? Like, we're living these things and hiring them and reinforcing it with you. If you don't do the same things in your team, that's where it'll fall apart. So really, it is that middle, right?

And so for every company, it's like they have the things they celebrate and they reward. Some of them are explicit. Some of them are implicit. Some of them are the things on the walls. And some of them aren't the things on the wall, right? Like one thing I'm really careful about when I'm talking to company leaders around their corporate values is look if you just reward a i s in seat time just raw input hours that's what you're going to get you're going to get a workaholic culture that's what marissa mire had at yahoo but that's not

great results sometime i'd rather have a rigorous outcome oriented culture that says look you john you did the right 20 hours this week let's all celebrate john man he made the right calls and the right thing and he had five million in sales and not stephanie who worked 80 hours and made 400 calls and had no sales. But, man, Stephanie really burned the midnight oil. Like, I'm empirically telling people be like Stephanie or be like John, but one way or the other. Yeah, well, I think we've all seen those people who are constantly busy.

But as you just pointed out, busyness doesn't equate to results. Oh, and that's the last thing. You talk about burnout. Like, that's the win-win. Like, how do we get people focused on not the just raw number of hours? which will burn you out, but getting whatever results matter. And that is something that was hard for me to deal with personally at Lowe's. I had a boss who was the chief operating officer who used to show up because he loved

the company. He was there for 40 years, but he would show up at 5 o'clock in the morning, and he wouldn't leave most days until 7 or 8 o'clock at night. And it created this environment, unfortunately, where people felt like they had to work the same sort of hours. Do you have a family? I'm just curious. Yep, he had a family. And after he moved to the headquarters, after we moved from where we previously were to this new headquarters, he probably had an hour and 10, hour and 20 minute commute each way. Believe it or not. So this guy was getting up probably at 3.30 in the morning to come into work. He was a multi-millionaire. And he lived on a

like a hundred acre farm etc but curious if his family liked him it doesn't seem like he was around that much yeah look we all had a similar story so I had a one of my first jobs like was actually a business that was around kind of new parents and the CEO was one of the few people who was not a parent at the time and recruited everyone under this guys of flexibility because we were all dramatically underpaid and he'd be the first one in and the last one to leave and you could see the resentment growing. And early on, I recognized this was stupid. I was a super high performer, but he was getting really frustrated about hours.

And we're like, look, we're all making very little money. This was part of the sort of tradeoff. I ran an experiment one week to prove my point. And I came in earlier than him. I came in earlier and I stayed later and I played games on my computer during that time. And he was much happier with me and my performance. And that changed everything for me and how I lead and how I manage for the rest of my career being like, this is stupid. This is optical.

I am very outcome-oriented. I believe in KPIs and dashboards. And we had one of the first remote companies and my friends before COVID were like, how do you know people are doing work? And I'm like, I don't know. They all have the same number of clients. We have two key metrics. Is the program doing well and they're staying retained and the client is happy? So if somehow they have five clients and their program is doing well and it's growing and they figured out how to do that in 10 hours a week, God bless them.

Like they're doing the right thing. I, we just always had an outcome orientation, which I think is extremely important. But what do you do in the situation that Jamie finds himself in where he, as you write, is nodding in a meeting and thinking, that's not my voice? this is something that I wrote about in my own book that I call the mask of pretense that so many people put on. Why do you think so many people put on that mask without even realizing they're doing it? Look, there's, and I want to be honest about this, there's times that you have to do this. There's times when I had a kid and I needed the money and I needed to like sacrifice a little bit on what I really wanted to say and do out of that safety and security.

And you can do that for a little bit of time without feeling horrible. But if that becomes your default mode of operation, that is where you're going to have burnout and despair and anxiety and what you said before. So I don't want to pretend like we never have to operate in these environments, but in a perfect world and a lot of us can't run our own businesses, you would be like, look, this is me and this is authentically me and who I am as a leader of what I want to do. And you take the good and the bad and that's what it is. And when people would come to work on my team, I'd say, here is why you will love working for me, and here's why you will hate it. Here are the things that are important to me. I just believe in doing things better. Like, it's a core value of mine.

It's been consistent for a long time. If you join my team and you're constantly like, look, we just can't make it better. We should just do the same thing. Or that's how it's always been. Those are fighting words to me. It's just not going to work on my team. You can be a great person, but there's a different environment for you. And it's not a great fit for our company.

Like, we're a, my company was a fast-moving marketing agency that needed people who wanted to act and make decisions and move quickly. It wasn't a consensus-making slow environment. That's just how the work was constructed, and it worked for a certain type of person, and it didn't for another. And we're just trying to find those matches. Like, I have kids going through the college process, and we're clear about this in college, right? There's a large city school with a campus and then, or in a city with a college. town, and there's a smaller liberal art school out in Maine, and they have totally different value propositions, and they can both be great schools, but probably for different people.

The only difference is that school is not pretending to be that school, and that school is not pretending to be that school. We oftentimes, in business or otherwise, just put out these signals and try to be everything to everyone. At our company, and my line was always, we're just trying to find the one to two percent of people who align to our values and how we work and the right people for us. I'm going to assume that 98% are not. I'm smiling because I was in Maine last week and I drove by many of them small Maine. Yeah, they're beautiful. Kobe College Bates, all these things. But if you want a Texas, it is a totally different value proposition, right? It's not a right or a wrong. Oh, I have a daughter who's a senior in college. And I remember when we were going

through the college selection process, she ended up going to University of Florida. We looked at some very small liberal arts colleges and ivy league schools as well and to her credit uf for her felt the most like it fit her value system it's great school yeah so i want to jump to chapter two it's titled the whisper what does the whisper represent and why is it so easy to ignore i think one of my good friends over on the podcast connor neal who actually talked to this morning he always says that really focuses on, sorry, Philip McCurnan. I talked to Connor this morning. They're both Irish. I mix them up. Philip always says that a lot of people travel a lot of miles to meet with him. And Philip's kind of a clarity expert, clarity coach, for the clarity that they don't really

want. They're in a relationship they know is a dead end. They're in a job. They know that's meant they want to do. They know it. It's just like dealing with it is really hard. So it's easy to just kind of push it away. And I think, are we listening to those voices or are we not listening to those voices? And we could tell ourselves a lot of lies. We're really good at lying to ourselves as humans. If you want to be employed for out of AI and all stuff, psychology is the way to go, because we do a lot of things that just don't make sense. Yes, and I just, I realized I got the title wrong of your chapter, so I apologize for that. I worked around it. Yeah, no, it's the disconnects. But I'm going to go there because in this chapter, you really bring up something

that I don't think people think about enough, and that is their surroundings. And oftentimes, and I felt this myself, I had been living in the same town here in Florida for about 14 or 15 years, and I just had this spider sense for a long time that the environment just wasn't the right one for me to grow in the ways that I wanted to grow personally. But I think oftentimes it's difficult to realize those things. How do you encourage people to figure out if their surroundings are right or wrong? And why does that make such a big difference? I think like Jamie, if you have the clarity on your values, that starts to really show itself.

And it starts to be clear. And look, I say all the time, like, Park City is one of my favorite places. the world. My wife and I plan to spend a lot more time there when the kids run out of the house. Like when we are there, we are super active. We are walking miles a day and hiking and doing all the stuff and outside. It's not like I can't walk outside here where I live in a suburb. It's not like I can't do that stuff. It exists to me. It's just not the default of what the people are doing and what the culture is doing. And yet that's just not the same extent. And so environments are really powerful, right? There's you drive.

and there's towns where there's all political signs one way or all another way. Like, I'm a centrist. Like, I want to have nuanced conversations with people and respectful. I don't want a candidate's name painted on the side of my house. I want to live in a place where, you know, everyone's pressured to pick a team. So I, as you said, I just don't think, I think we forget about this. I think it's like we forget about how much we are a product of our environment, our community. And if we're living somewhere that has a lot of the opposite of what we value. And again, you need that clarity. It's pretty draining. And it's worth a revisit. Robert, I have a children's book coming out in December. And it's a parable of sorts. And I found it very much more difficult than I thought

to write this. Because at the end of the day, you're playing with about 800 words in a book for four to eight year olds. But I went through this process. and I'm wondering if you did as well. In the book, Jamie encounters a person named Jack who becomes a mentor to him. And in my book, Luma, the main character, meets Oliver, who is this sage owl. And I at first had it where Oliver was more dictating

the steps for Luma to take in her life. And then I decided, let's abandon that and let's start using this as a way where he starts asking Luma questions to get her to make her own decision but guides her. And that's the approach that you took with Jack. Did you face that same? Yeah. Did you face that same type of dilemma? No, it's funny. I've been accused of being Jamie and I have accused of being Jack. There's a lot of truth and true stories, some of them which are totally irrelevant in the book that just mixed like with fiction because they were fun for me to anchor in.

there. And my kids are all characters in the books, their names. But they're all non-major characters so that they didn't fight over it. No Jamie or Jack. But I like, Jack for me was this archetype of who is the almost like TV mentor that I would have liked to have. And I would have liked them to talk to me and explain things to me. And it really, it came down to this confident, but humble and Socratic method. And that's who I am drawn towards and the type of mentorship. And it was never going to be, even how they meet, right? It was never going to be someone who was more draconian and authoritarian with their advice. And that way, he's leading Jamie into the conclusions.

And a couple of the breakthroughs are Jimmy pulls it together. Jack just sets the framework for him. As you go through the book, Jamie starts mapping out his real values. Why doesn't matter do you think that we define them in our own words, rather than picking them from a list of common beliefs that we see others talk about. So I really don't believe in one word values. Because, and so first of all,

I think if they're the non-negotiable principles, they need to be unique, right? So things like discipline and self-awareness and trust and family, like I've heard eight different definitions of integrity. I think they need to be phrases. I think they need to describe. I have this sort of this validator

in the book. But one of the key things in that is, does the opposite cause discomfort, like deep discomfort? Because that's how you know it's really a core value. And then can you use it to make a decision or look at your behavior? Could you objectively rate yourself on it? And most one word core values don't fit that test, but something like include all perspectives or think about the long term, right? It does. I think when you have a three or four of those that are unique to you. That's a very unique blueprint that someone else couldn't say. And they become what I call actionable core values where I can make decisions. I can look at actions. I could say I should do this. I don't do this. That's the whole point of them. I can say that my community does not

include all perspectives. This is a know it all pick a team and whatever. And I got, I don't want that. And it's interesting. Again, I know a lot about the people I've worked with over the years and I've helped a lot and figure out your values. And I always say, let's imagine like, the value of include all perspectives. I know that's your value. Like, John, I'm never going to ask you to go build consensus around something. I'm never going to be like, John, I need you to go rush and make a unilateral decision. Don't talk to anyone.

That's like kryptonite. That's like asking you to do something that's kryptonite. And so when we understand these things, I think it's like the ultimate personality test in terms of what do we want people to do and how they best operate and communicate. One of the core values that I've given myself is this phrase, it's better to ski than to be skied. I think so many of us tend to copy the pass of others rather than focus on originality, meaning I think we have to figure out what our superpowers are, but then there's a way to deploy them. And I think when you are original about it and you author your,

life in your own way. It's just so much more powerful than trying to conscript to what someone else has done before you. Yeah. I'm surprised. You have a podcast about helping discuss people's passions. I don't know. If I was wording that, I would be like set your own tracks or something like that. That's right. That's a strong differentiated. That's very different than like integrity or trust. I understand very specifically what that means. I think many listeners may see themselves as a Jamie. But there are also people around him who are stuck as well. What advice do you give someone trying to navigate this shift while still in a life that doesn't support it? Look, there's getting the clarity and then there's always a time around doing something. And I'm not telling everyone to quit their

jobs and go do stuff. But first, you want to have this clarity. So if you want to read the book or do the work. And the work starts with six questions on the book. If you want to see the questions and the examples and you just do that exercise, you'd be like, huh, I'm starting to see some things here. So those are at robert glazer.com slash six, the six questions that start you down that process. But first gain the clarity. And then you can think about what does a plan look like. And maybe it's a year or maybe it's two years or maybe it's you. Someone told me they've never realized that they had such a passion for, I can't remember what was like food or something like And so they joined a board of a company focused on that.

And they loved, actually, they never realized how passionate they were about education. And so they ran for the school board and something they didn't think they would do. And they were on the school board. And well, that wasn't their day job. That fulfilled like a big part of it. So you can get started in these directions. But I don't think you can do anything until you have that clarity. And my goal and my sort of B-Hag is to help a million people figure out their core values.

That's my purpose for the next five years. And I know a lot of people listen to this, yeah, they'll go back to their job. And then some will sit down and do that work. And those are the ones I get these notes from three months later saying, I figured this out and I made some big changes and I did this. And I'm so glad that I did it. If you feel happy in that autopilot mode, that's the problem we were talking about before, where good enough can be dangerous.

And then sometimes what happens is that falls away or that job that paid you great, but that you hated everyone you worked with and you have no connection. two goes away and then it's really hard to recover because you don't have any network. So I just don't see how you can go wrong getting a little bit of clarity on this and then thinking about where in your life you can make some changes. I wanted to ask you a couple questions about your podcast. I saw you recently had on a mutual friend, Rory Vaden, on the show to talk about personal branding. What type of entrepreneurs do you like to focus on with the show? The show is a combination of people who have built things and people who have, I would say it's a little

combination of Tim Ferriss and how I built this. It's either someone who's got a very unique perspective that leaders can learn from or something that are really world class at like in Rory or it's someone like Jesse Cole who built the Savannah Bananas who will tell us the story of what they did and how they did it. I've had Jesse on a few times and I honestly like I've learned more from his. He should be like an HBO case study because I think he's seen as a little bit of an eccentric, but he is very specific and purposeful, how he has built that brand. He has studied P.T. Barnum and Disney and all of the gurus of entertainment, and he knows exactly what he's doing. It's just amazing to watch his success. It is pretty amazing. How does he get the players

to do the role acting that they do? I asked him if that was a problem, like if they saw it was ridiculous. And now he's got his own league, right? But before that, he had college players coming in and he had to convince them to do this. But I think people saw that was the culture and that was fun and that was rewarded. And now it's like you go play on the team because you want to do this. I think that was a that was an old challenge because he's actually shut down the minor league team. And now he's just building this entire league of his own. It's like the Harlem Globetrotters except there's a league of teams and the games aren't fixed. Well, it's given a completely new dimension to baseball, which.

Football stadiums, right? It's amazing. Well, it is amazing because the viewership and interest in baseball has been declining for so long. I can't watch a baseball game anymore, and I grew up as a Red Sox fan. Well, I think that's where they played their last game, wasn't it? Yeah, at Fenway. And actually, they were at the Coldplay show before the Coldplay show heard around the world. And when Clay played yellow, he sang it to the bananas.

It was pretty cool. They were in Fenway. They were at Foxborough in between the game. games at Fenway. I want to go back to the book because you use an interesting story, kind of a personal one, to close the book. And it happened to do with a play date that your child was on with another child and your child wasn't a very good swimmer. This other family ends up on this play date taking him to this pool party without kind of telling you. And I've been through this with my kids as well. That kid goes on a play date. Next thing you know,

they're doing something completely different than you thought they were going to do. And then in your scenario, you can't get in touch with the parents. Why did you, maybe you can talk more about this scenario, but why did you choose to use this as the ending point? Because what I've learned in my life is that when you ignore small fissures of core values, they tend to turn into earthquakes eventually. And to me, that was the sort of don't ignore your guy. And the story was my son was, he was pretty young, I don't know, he's six or seven and he had a friend.

And we just had seen some things. He had a good friend with the family where they just felt like there were some values misalignment. But again, they would be really awkward to be like, we don't want you going to Timmy's house or whatever it is. Again, there's always a cost. And they had gone somewhere for the day. and like you just started to swim and we knew like these folks were big drinkers and hung out with people who were partiers and they said oh we're going to this without kind of asking us which I would never would have done we're going to the playing at our house to going to this pool party at this house and I'm thinking like I don't want my kid like like this jolt's drinking here we're not watching him he's not a really good swimmer this is not a situation and I would have never put another parent in that situation again that's just not a values alignment and we could couldn't get in touch with them. And I regretted making the decision. We couldn't get in touch with them for an hour. Like, we couldn't get in touch with anyone. And we were absolutely

panicked. And I was so mad at myself. And I remember the anger of you blew this. Like you had all the warning signs in the world about this and you chickened out. And it turned out fine and someone's phone was dead. But again, I just wouldn't bring home someone's kid hours later. There was all the things were not. So that was the end of that. And I just, the mistake I didn't make again. And while that one turned out okay is not ignoring those those little radar signs i had a scenario like this when my eldest child was in middle school we were living in austin texas so it was during the time i was at dell and he got really into gaming and they would do these parties where they'd bring their own computer screen and they would play war games and i dropped them off i had not really

met this parent before. He was the CEO of a fairly large tech company, but something just didn't feel right. And so I tried to get a hold of him, first my son, then the parent. I couldn't get in touch with either one. So I decided to drive back to the house and you know how much testosterone is going on with a bunch of middle school kids, especially if they're playing call of duty and he lets me back into the house and since i had left the whole island of his kitchen had semi-automatic weapons pistols real and other things just laid out with ammo just sitting there and i was just like what in the world are you doing and the parent was home and the parent was home and to bring it out at that time given what the kids were doing

and everything else. I remember my son was so angry for making him leave and there were some repercussions for him with those friends, but how improper for a person to do that without asking the parents of the kids if it was okay. And like I said, they don't come without cost and that's why people don't make these decisions. And you don't get any credit from making it

when the stream's going the same way. That's like I said before. When everyone, when your value is free speech and everyone's a free speech thing, you don't get credit. It's when, you know, someone says something that you really disagree with and you stand up for the free speech, even though you disagree. That's when you get credit. Well, Robert, if you could leave listeners with a challenge or imitation

after reading The Compass Within, what would it be? Look, you can decide to do the whole process, but my challenge would be just answer the six questions one morning. Answer them honestly on a piece of paper and take a look at those answers and see if there are some trends that may start to explain some things about your life and where you've been successful and unsuccessful. I've watched people post their answers online and on LinkedIn, and I think it's always more revealing than people think, and I think it might encourage you to take a deeper dive into that work. And I just haven't found anyone who hasn't gotten a benefit by getting

more clarity in this area. Robert, thank you so much for joining us on Passion Strike. It's an honor to have you. And I wish you all the success with this book launch. John, thanks for having me. And book launches October 14th. And if you sign up and buy the hardcover on the Compass Within website, you can get the course for free. Definitely do that if you're interested. But thanks for having me. That's a wrap on today's conversation. I hope it left you rethinking what it really means to grow. Here are three key takeaways I invite you to reflect on. First, core values aren't decoration, their direction. When you define them clearly and live by them consistently, they become the yellow lines that

keep your car from smashing against the walls. Second, Robert reminded us that capacity is built, not borrowed. True performance comes from expanding your spiritual, intellectual, emotional, and physical capacity, not just working harder. And third, alignment beats hustle. Business without alignment leads to burnout. out. Alignment fuels joy and sustainable results. Today's conversation reminded me that living by your values sometimes comes with a cost, but the price of ignoring them is far higher. I've experienced

this in my own career, and it's why I am so passionate about helping you get clarity on yours. If today's episode resonated with you, share it with a friend who might need it. And if you haven't already, please take a moment to leave a five-star rating or review on Apple or Spotify. It's the best way to help more people find the show. You can find full show notes and watch it. the video conversation on the Passion Struck YouTube channel, and don't forget to check out our store at start mattering.com for apparel that brings the mattering movement alive in your own life. Next week, I'm joined by my friend Joel Beasley, the host of the modern CTO podcast, but what we're really talking about is his journey of becoming passion struck. Joel shares how he turned

his love for stand-up comedy into reality and the mindset shifts that helped him turn passion into purpose. It's a conversation you don't want to miss. I need very difficult things. Otherwise, I spiral into depression. So if I'm not trying to solve some incredibly difficult problem, then I'm just uninterested in life itself. So early in my career, a lot of those were software problems, building systems, and then it became building businesses. And then I said, okay, well, now I've got to figure out how to solve this comedy problem. I had to set a goal, and I had to be careful. Ken taught me that one of the issues with my podcast is I set my goal and I achieved it without having another goal behind it.

And once you achieve that, like, massive goal that you never thought was possible, it's, oh, I thought that would take me a lifetime and that took me seven years, right? Until then, expand your capacity, lead with intention, and as always, live life, passion struck.