The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast – Thriving!: How to Create a Healthier, Happier, and More Prosperous Life by Rand Selig

Episode Date: January 27, 2024

Thriving!: How to Create a Healthier, Happier, and More Prosperous Life by Rand Selig https://amzn.to/499rNF5 Randselig.com Imagine a life where you are living at your full potential. The power to make key choices in order to thrive is yours. Are you ready? Embrace your potential and a life of fulfillment with Thriving! This captivating book explores what it takes to create a purposeful, healthy, and happy life. Rand Selig, a seasoned expert, shares tools and decades of wisdom to help you thrive in every stage of your life. Thriving! is for a wide range of people throughout their lives — including when * Launching their adult lives and careers * Raising a family and addressing work-life balance * Building effectiveness and integrity as managers or leaders * Moving past a focus on self to becoming more engaged with helping others and the world around us * Gaining wisdom and evolving with soul. Inside Thriving!, among other things, you will discover how to: Forge enduring and deep relationships with yourself, friends, family, partners Strengthen your emotional health by learning to let go, forgive, and stop self-sabotaging Become a lifelong learner, fully accepting mistakes and turning them into valuable lessons Age well, creating and living your legacy while you are alive Define success on your terms, understand what “enough” truly means, and build a life-affirming future It’s time to become the author of your own story. Don’t wait another moment — get your inspiring copy of Thriving! now. Biography Rand Selig, an accomplished entrepreneur, coach, scoutmaster, board member, and roll-up-your-sleeves conservationist, shares his extensive expertise in his book Thriving! How to Create a Healthier, Happier, and More Prosperous Life. With an MBA from Stanford and undergraduate degrees in mathematics and psychology, he excels at managing complex projects globally. He is relentlessly positive and believes he can design his own life and others can, too.

You wanted the best. You've got the best podcast, the hottest podcast in the world. The Chris Voss Show, the preeminent podcast with guests so smart you may experience serious brain bleed. The CEOs, authors, thought leaders, visionaries, and motivators. Get ready, get ready, strap yourself in. Keep your hands, arms, and legs inside the vehicle at all times, because you're about to go on a monster education roller coaster with your brain. Now, here's your host, Chris Voss. Hi, folks. It's Voss here from thechrisvossshow.com. There you go, ladies and gentlemen. The Iron Lady sings it. That makes it official. We are live on the Chris Voss Show.

And we certainly appreciate you guys being here. You know, we're having a special January. We've been doing this for 15 years. We have the most amazing guests on the show. I don't know. It seems like there's a whole mess of people who decided to check in a podcast to improve the quality of their life on New Year's resolutions. I know they're at my gym, filling my gym, which I wish they would just give up hope on that but don't give up hope on the chris voss

show anyways we are up this is hard to do because the show has millions of downloads people we are up in january this month at 2024 i should probably say for people watching this years from now we are up 245 percent in downloads for the month of January. So welcome to the new, our audience is new with us. We appreciate you guys being here and congratulations. We hope you stick around for another 15 years. And yeah, I don't even know what to say. I just scratch my head at all and be like, well, I hope we help people get their New Year's resolutions done.

Otherwise they're going to check out like Jim. But the great thing is we always have the smartest people on this show, none of them are me. That's why we have guests. The CEOs, the billionaires, the Pulitzer Prize winners, all the amazing people, their stories, their lives, their journeys, their cathartic moments that they come teach you so that number one, you learn you're not alone in life

with some of the problems you may be having or challenges. And number two, they give you the resources so that you can get out of the jams maybe you put yourself into I don't think we've ever had a I don't think there hasn't been a guest we have on the show Who can get you about any jam in life Even we have attorneys that get you to prison

So there's that So we've covered the gambit There you go Somebody was sitting there going, how do I get out of jail Anyway, I'm not even sure if we have a penitentiary Segment of the Chris Foss show But we should find out. Anyway, guys, as always, for the show to your family, friends, and relatives, go to goodreads.com for it says Chris Foss.

YouTube.com for it says Chris Foss. LinkedIn.com for it says Chris Foss. Subscribe to the big LinkedIn newsletter, the 130,000 LinkedIn group over there as well. Today, we have an amazing gentleman and author on the show. He is the author of the latest book to come out September 18th called Thriving, How to Create a Healthier, Happier, and More Prosperous Life. Now who doesn't want to do that? Ran Selig is on the show with us today,

and he'll be talking to us about his latest division, what he put in his book. He has an MBA from Stanford and has earned undergraduate degrees in mathematics and psychology. He's managed hundreds of complex projects in his career and has run his financial services firm for over 35 years. He's lived and worked in Europe, Asia, Mexico, and the Caribbean. He was a Little League coach and scoutmaster and has served on numerous boards for decades. He's a roll up your sleeves conservationist uh can committed to helping others and mother earth by making annual

philanthropic contributions welcome the show rand how are you hey chris it's great to be here there you go it's great to have you if i can learn to spell stuff uh i've got a camera here for the screen so i have to fight i have to look around uh so give us your dot coms where can people find you on the interwebs so for my book uh www.randsalig.com that'll take you right to uh the websites on my book there you go so thriving give us a,000 overview of what's inside your book. Well, thriving is all about the possibility of reaching our potential. We have this power to do that. And I believe I've lived my life this way, and I believe others can too. I can design my own life. And in a related way,

we can also be the author of our own story. The author of our own story. That's one of the things we talk about on the show. The stories are the owner's book to the manual of life. That's how we learn. That's how we learn from each other. That's how we gather our stories together and everything else. And so thriving,

why did you choose that as the title of the book? Well, I wanted it to jump off the shelf, so to speak. Thriving is a powerful word. It's not a hard word. We all use it if we speak English. So it's around, it's familiar, but it's not necessarily very accessible. And I should tell you, Chris, and your listeners that thriving is really about the climate. It's not the weather.

It's not today. It's not yesterday. It's the longer period of time because any given day, things could be really great or maybe not so good. There you go. And you talk about several aspects in the book. We'll get to here. But give us a rundown of your life. How did you grow up? Kind of what motivated you to make some of the changes in your life? Maybe when did you discover that you could be the architect, the author of your life?

Well, I'm very fortunate. I have two great parents. They're both still alive. Dad's 101, mom's 98. Dad was, his first career was in the army, which took us, unfortunately, to not a zillion different places all at once. But over the course of growing up, we lived in four different places. And mom was initially a bacteriologist, a scientist. And dad, very, very disciplined. I learned a tremendous amount of having grit and a moral compass from him. And from mom, I learned a love of nature and just being curious. All of those qualities have really stood me in great stead. I became a really good student as I became a teenager.

And this became one of my very first principles of excellence being so important in just everything I do. And I've added to that as a sort of grounding way of living to have purpose. And we can talk more about that, but excellence, purpose. And then as I evolved a little bit more, I realized that I just need to be a voice for encouragement. Originally, that was with my family, with my kids. And then the last little part of the flower that's unfolding is being loved. Not the romantic thing that we know about and that we see on Hollywood movies and so on, but just the act of going through day-to-day life as a kind person, as a caring person, as engaging with people,

even if they're just providing a cup of coffee to you, to experience them and share with them and be that love. There you go. Now, you opened up the book talking about character and I believe that's kind of the foundation of where you start building character. Tell us a little bit about why that's important as the lead out to thriving. Well, character is absolutely essential for navigating forward if you're going to be on a path to thriving. Half of my book is about thriving personally, and it starts with this building character issue.

And I like to share a quote, which is the leading quote from that first chapter. It's, life is a grindstone. It will grind you down into grains of sand or will polish you like a fine gem. It all depends on what you're made of. There you go. And you talk about basically the first section is good cards, bad cards, playing them well. Yeah. Yes, absolutely. We're all at some level in the game. Whether we like it or not. Yeah, whether we like it or not. Nobody gets that alive.

Exactly. It's a metaphor. It's a metaphor when I'm talking about playing cards. But some people come to the table and are not ready to play, or they don't really know the rules very well, or they kind of want to get ahead and kind of look over the shoulder of somebody else who's playing. There's a lot of ways in which these cards come along. And we can get good cards, and we can play them well. There's lots of things

that i talk about in my book thriving about that there is ways to play the cards well but on the other hand the harder case would be where you get not so good cards what do you do then and again this is where you have to reach down into this question of character and your whole personality and learn to play them well. So you can get bad cards and play them well. That is possible too. And it really comes down to how you react to what happens to you in life, how you deal with it, how you can play the victim and be like, oh, this thing hurt me. And, you know, it's okay to acknowledge that. But how you use that through the rest of your life, whether you use it to empower you, make you better, improve the quality of your life, whether you learn from it, et cetera, et cetera.

That's one thing you talk about, too, in that chapter is being a lifelong learner. How important in improving the quality of your life do you think that is? Again, I think it's one of these incredibly important things, Chris. When I say lifelong learner, I don't mean that every minute of the day you're reading another book or you're Googling something. But it's about being curious. And curiosity plays such important dividends in so many ways in our lives. For example, if you're disagreeing with somebody, you can get yourself into a lot of frustration or maybe anger or maybe hurt that relationship because what you're hearing doesn't fit with what you're all about. But on the other hand, if you pull away, kind of like being a fly on the wall, and you say, let me be curious, why is this person saying these things? Why do they believe

what they believe? Then you can be asking questions, and you don't have to weigh in with your own judgments or your own opinions. You can just say, hey, that's very interesting to me. Where did you learn that? Or why do you believe that? So, being a lifelong learner is really important in that regard, but it's also incredibly important in terms of learning from your own mistakes. There's so many of my clients and so many people I've known over the years who are still, to this day, maybe years, decades later, lamenting about something that happened to them a long time ago. And it just in talking to them, I realized that whatever they fell into, whatever little hole in life they fell into, they really didn't learn enough about that to avoid having it happen again and put it in some kind of perspective so

that they can say hey i'm not a bad person and yes i'm alive today and i'm happy to be so imagine carrying all that weight for all that time you know a lifetime 50 40 30 50 years um yeah it's it's quite the burden and you know you know, you can't change the past. You can't change, technically, you can affect the future, but, you know, what you worry about is, what is it, like 97% of what will come true, the fears we have about the future. You just have to worry about what's here and now and how you react to it.

And that's really an important part. Well, in terms of not being able to change the past i think that we have a lot of power and this this issue of the power of choice about how we feel and how we recapture i was talking about being the author of our own story we can um not not necessarily make it all up but you can look at your history and decide what to emphasize what to just sort of ignore what's really not very important anymore and maybe it was important 10 years ago but now it's no longer part of your storyline that's okay and i think it's especially important for uh dealing with parents and the tricky part is where maybe a parent has passed away and there was some

unresolved issue that's still repairable by writing a letter now obviously the letter's not sent but what you do is you write this letter to in my case it would be my father and i would say you know to this this sort of fictional father it was great to have such a marvelous weekend with you we did this we did that we talked about these great things well i'm making that up but i am by writing that letter repairing that relationship and moving on i'm creating inventing if you will this other father very powerful very powerful uh you talk about money emotions managing ourselves. Let's touch on a little bit of that because there's a lot you have in this book.

And so let's touch on some of that if we could tease out a little bit of that. Well, I believe very firmly. I mean, my whole world for decades since my late 20s has been in the investment banking, the finance world. And this is a lot of people who are just interested in money and are, well, maybe amoral. But the moral compass seems to be put aside if it's inconvenient. So I believe, and creating my own firm really, really enabled me to do this, that we can define success on our own terms. It's a critical ingredient. And what does that mean?

That means that you're looking internally. You're not looking across at some coworker or some neighbor to see what they're doing or what new toys they have. What you're looking at is your own set of important measures. You know, what's going to add value to your life? Well, then go do that. If that means taking a, you know, a long hike rather than jumping in an airplane, well then, my gosh, then take that long hike. You know, the issue is that we should be treasuring our relationships, not our possessions. There you go. And because, you know, you're is that we should be treasuring our relationships, not our possessions. There you go. And, and because, you know, you're not going to be able to take any of that with you,

the things you're going to remember, you know, I'm not going to remember, I don't know how much money I had in the bank, uh, 20 years ago, I actually kind of do, but there's a lot of money. Um, but, uh, I actually don't know what it was exactly. I have a rough idea, but you're not, it's not going to matter. It doesn't matter now. It doesn't matter. And it really didn't matter. If I could give everything up for something, it wouldn't be to have some amount in the bank.

It would be for me to spend five or ten minutes with somebody who I can't spend time with anymore. Get them back. To me, that would be more valuable. And I think what you've expressed in the book is money isn't everything. We need to value people and value the important things in life as we go through it. I like your book because you pretty much walk people through almost like an owner's manual to life and all the different aspects of it. You break down in little pieces of chapters on,

you know, how to do this, how to do that, how to work through this. Uh, we have, uh, Kelly coming in from our,

uh, audience there. Love it. Rand, we don't just survive. We can thrive. And so that's what you're telling people how to do is don't just survive. Just don't go,

don't go through your life like, um, a robot where you're telling people how to do is don't just survive just don't go don't go through your life like um a robot where you're just like i don't know people don't know what to do you know i remember as a child i was i i used to listen to it was billy joel's my life that used to make me wonder about midlife crises and i remember i think i was listening to when i was 11 through whenever and i remember, who are these single people and they're divorced and why are they having all these midlife crises? And, and, you know, my, you know, I would hear, I think my mom ran about, you know, when, when they get certain age, they just going off with girls and, and a car, a red car, you know, and it's that sort of thing. And, uh, so I'm like, well, how, how, why are all these guys getting married?

And then somewhere they wake up around 40 or 50 and they and they're like hey i'm gonna go have fun in life and i'm like how do i keep that from happening to me and i actually thought about this and it had a huge impact on my life thanks billy joel um a lot of social billy joe had an impact on my life but and so i i started looking at life at life as choices that I could make. And it occurred to me one day, because we would get that old Sears catalog. Remember that old JCPenney phone book saying you could whack somebody and kill them with? It's that and the old pages. I remember looking at it one day and I go, you know, life is like, from what I can tell about life, life is like a giant catalog.

And you can choose what you want to be. You want to be an author, you go over here. You want to be a dancer for ballet, you go over here. You can kind of choose things in life. You don't have to, you know. And I was going through that crisis as a teenager because I'm like, everyone tells me I got to do this and I got to do that. I got to do this and I got to do that.

And it's like, what if I don't want to do that? You know, what if I want to go do this? And who says I got to do that? Well, everyone, you know, this is what everyone does, Chris. And you're like, well, everyone who? So those are some of the things I was identifying when I was young. Well, I think this choice you talk about is really the heart of my book and heart of my thinking. Choice covers everything that happens to us. I mean, obviously, there are people who abdicate and don't make choices out of wherever their mind is.

But the choice is about what to do or not to do. It's about how to feel. And the thing about feelings is that some of those feelings come up, wow, lickety split. And they could be coming from something decades old or when you were a kid. Again, it's sort of a trigger point. It comes up.

Choices about who we spend time with. I've heard maybe you, Chris, have heard or your listeners have heard that we are the average of the five people that we spend the most time with. Well, you think about that and you think, wow, am I the smartest or the nicest or the funniest person I know? Maybe you need to add some new people to your group. So choices are all around us. There you go. That's why I always surround myself with ugly people, so I can be the best looking guy in the room.

Sorry, I had to get that joke in there. That's good. I like that one. I like that one. I'm still the dumbest person in the room, but that's another story. So designing your life, people need to think of it from this thing. And by thinking of it from I'm going to design my life, you take out the victimhood mentality.

How bad is it to have a victimhood mindset as opposed to I'm going to be the artist or storyteller or filmmaker behind my life. Well, you know, when I talk about that in the book, I end with the question, if you have that, what's it getting? Where is it taking you? What's it getting you? And I've yet to meet somebody who has a victim mentality where it seems like it's a win. It does not. It seems to shrink the world all around and make people very fearful and angry. I don't think those emotions serve us very well. I understand they come up. I've had them, of course, but to answer that question, no, I don't think victim mentality

goes very well. Because you're, no, I don't think victim mentality goes very well. Because you're not empowered. You don't have any control. You're just like, everything is my fault. I'm just going to sit here and stew and complain about Poe is me and I'm a victim. You know, I mean, you can do the Poe is me thing for about five seconds and be like, well, this sucks. Somebody drove into my car today. But then how you take it, you know, a lot of this, a lot of it, you know, stoicism, Marcus Aurelius, meditations,

you know, how you respond to stuff. I think Seneca covered this a lot too. But I like in your book how you break it down. You go through everything, spirituality and religion, gratitude, purpose and meaning. Let's talk about like gratitude is so important and uh and and having that in your life yeah well i mean i think we all know that if you have a good attitude i mean i i think of myself as being relentlessly positive and i you know there's so many qualities that i can point to about how I'm living life very consciously, intentionally, and being positive is right there in the absolute middle of it.

I wake up and I'm doing a little jig. You know, I may have a challenging day ahead of me, but I'm looking for the good qualities. If nothing else, then the day will end and i will have gotten through it so attitude uh matters a lot it is something that we can control um and let me just see something um yeah the four things that we can control today this is just something that i pulled up there's a great guy john gordon written books. I don't know if you know him, Chris, but good guy. He says the four things that we can

control are our attitude, our effort, our behavior, and our actions. Wow. Wow. Starts with attitude. Yeah. And if you're grateful, that puts you in a humbler position

to accept the world and be thankful for what you have. In a world like we have today, we have so many people that are living off FOMO. Social media seems to incur a lot of this. They feel that they need to keep up with the Joneses.

There's a lot of fraud in the FOMO. I mean, for a couple hundred bucks, you can go down in LA and get a picture of you seated in a stage set that looks like a private plane. And then you can post on your Instagram and everybody thinks you're ultra rich and flying around in private planes. Um, and, uh, you know, there's a story after story of those frauds being busted and you find out they're not who they are. And people are, you know, they feel shame in their life. They allow themselves to feel shame in their life because they're like,

well, I don't have a private jet. I'm not succeeding like that person is. When really the person you compete with the most, my biggest competitor is me and my discipline and making me a better person. And my biggest competitor is the guy who's like no let's just sit and watch a little tv and have a burger you know that's who i'm competing against getting getting me off the couch and and doing the things i'm supposed to do that's that's my journey that's my discipline that's the person i need to beat uh maybe sometimes uh with a whip because i need to be like hey get off the couch eh um and knows god knows i need that every now and

then um there's there's a there's a great line about that from hemingway chris you're gonna like this one there's nothing noble in being superior to your fellow man true nobility is being superior to your former self there you go there you go to always bettering yourself as we talked about earlier uh you talk about purpose and meaning in chapter eight uh this seems to be something i resonate with and talk to people a lot i think i always had my purpose and meaning through life and what i wanted to achieve but i find a lot of people don't like you'll say what's your purpose in life? And they're like, I don't know. And then you'd be like, well, I don't know, have kids, raise a family.

Well, I mean, that's a noble purpose. But I mean, is there something bigger than, like, what does it mean to you? How does it motivate you? How does it drive your purpose? Because you can lose your family. I mean, you get divorced. I know plenty of guys who never see their kids again because they're, they're, uh, alienated from their kids. Um, you know, you've got to have a purpose, I think much bigger than that in life as to what your overall meeting,

what your overall journey and your walkthrough in life is about. Yeah, it, it, it's, uh, it, it can't be understated how important that is. And, you know, so many of my clients over the years where they came to me and said, hey, Rand, I want to sell my company. Can you help me with that? And I said, absolutely. Let's start with your objectives. What are you all about? What are we trying to accomplish? Because if I bring a transaction together that doesn't meet your objectives, it fails. It's not right. So we need to have a litmus test in front of us at all times and review it periodically. Is this meeting your objectives?

And what I found with a lot of these, they're really great people. They're very accomplished. They built up a successful business, sold it for a chunk of money. I stayed close to them because I built this relationship where I became their most trusted advisor maybe ever in their life. And I'd see them several years later, and they went through their bucket list. They traveled. Their golf game got them a lot better and so on and so forth. But they were a shadow of their bucket list. They traveled, their golf game got them a lot better and so on and so forth, but they were a shadow of their former selves. They weren't engaging with as

many people. They weren't being challenged as much. So what they exchanged for was not good. They did not spend the time to come up with the new purpose. It's a really critical thing. Purpose is very related to meaning as well. And, you know, there's some thinking that meaning boils down to three things. It boils down to you controlling, the autonomy you have to control the work you do and that you get the feedback you get the results of that work are known to you maybe financially or otherwise you also meaning comes from those moments in time when you're very brave, you know, whether it's a personal tragedy, bankruptcy, you know, war situation, whatever. And you stand up tall and noble and you still have honesty and integrity with what you do.

That's meaning. And then the third that's talked about is caring for another person. That doesn't mean necessarily an emotional or romantic relationship. It means taking care, taking care of somebody. Maybe that's a parent. Maybe that's somebody who's not well. These things provide a lot of meaning. And just take another minute with this, Chris, because this is so, so, so important. And so you're right, so many people are a little confused about it. I don't think there's any substitute than to figure out the purpose than a deep dive into your soul. Who are you? What really matters to you? Not anybody but you. What's important to you, what provides purpose to you may be of really no consequence to me and vice versa.

And that's okay. It's okay to swim against the water. It's okay to not do what your parents said was the right thing for you to do. I'm giving everybody full permission. Go for it. It's a bunch of teenagers right now going mom screw you way to go yeah yeah yeah yeah which is i don't know i guess it depends on what mom's selling you know uh sorry moms i just lost the whole mom crowd uh the mom mom's a teenager crowd

um so there you go i it's finding your purpose is so important and i'll ask people what it is and they're just like i don't know i don't know maybe i like raising my kids and it's like well you're not going to do that all your life i mean you're going to support your kids all your life but i mean i think i think i heard recently there's a really weird statistic that the amount of hours you spend with your children up until you get them out of their house is enormous. And the amount of time that you spend with them when they're out of the house individually is like a very small amount of hours comparatively. And so you got to go find something else to do with your life i think a lot of people maybe maybe when they become empty nesters you see them get divorced you realize that maybe they didn't have a bigger purpose so that maybe their marriage or their relationship or i don't know maybe they're

just sick of each other who knows i don't know it's not my problem you know i just heard chris i haven't verified it but the highest rate of suicide in the world right now is in Korea because the grandparents who used to, you know, spend time with the grandkids and be asked questions and, oh, grandma, grandpa, how do you do this? You know, when you were a kid, what did you do? And so on. That's gone away because of internet. And the kids, the grandkids are now going and Googling stuff. And the grandparents have, like, no role. And so it's a crushing moment in huge suicides.

Wow. Now, is it the older people that are committing suicide because they, wow, that's unfortunate. You know, we live in an interesting world with our culture i was talking about somebody the other day who was complaining about ageism in our in our culture and they're they're dealing with you know they've they've lived a lifetime where they have uh you know extraordinary skill experience knowledge and and i was like yeah a lot of people my age, I work for myself, so I never had that problem. But a lot of people that I know that work for other people,

they're complaining about it too, about ageism. And over my time, I'm sure your time as a VC or working with your funds, you've seen this. But in Silicon Valley, we see a lot of young people that are put in charge of stuff. And there's a certain, there's a certain mindset to doing that. There's certain things to,

you know, they can see things maybe because they're younger, they're younger generation. They can see outside of the box. But a lot of the times you see them run great companies that has so much potential in the ground. And you're like, why didn't you bring in some older people experience?

You know, and you're like why didn't you bring in some older people experience uh you know uh you can read some of the stories from some of my friends uh who've written books about um you know the crazy alcohol parties and goof off parties and in some of these things you know we work had we work with the original ceo we work had there's some strange ass shit going on in those companies um they really needed somebody older coming in and going hey this is not how we do it kids let's uh it's not a romper room let's grow up and make a profit here and make this thing work and i'm not saying there's anything wrong with younger people but it helps have the balance that equilibrium and um you know finding your place so yeah that's what i think about that well i i um related to that

is something that i also have done a lot of thinking about and have talked to a lot of people about and it's it's it's in my book in a number of places is what's involved with aging well you talk about age ageism it's just all over this. And I think for me, it boils down to four things. One, having friends of all ages. You know, most folks have friends plus or minus five years of their age. So, having somebody half your age or 20 years older than you, that's a whole new thing. And it takes a whole different kind of person to be with them, to listen, to ask questions, and so on. A second thing is what we talked about before, this being curious and being a lifelong learner. Huge thing of aging well.

Being grateful. Again, something that you were talking about, Chris. our struggles are because we aren't really seeing the whole story. You know, a bad day followed by a nice weekend. Well, I had a bad day. Well, no, you had a bad day and a nice weekend. So, you know, there's a great quote that goes like, the struggle ends when gratitude begins. There you go. You know, that's why There you go. You know,

that's why I hang out. You know, you say you should have a hangout with a spectrum of young people and old people. I try and do that. So what I do is I go down to the preschools and I hang out there and I say the preschoolers, Hey, what do you think about Bitcoin?

Like 20 years from now? Cause you're going to, you know, you're going to be 20 years. Which, which, which sort of bet you think, which should I do?

Here's some, here's some stocks that might be good, some EV cards. What do you think about this? Should I do that? So that's what I try and do. I try and tap into those young kids. And mostly they're just eating sand and looking at me funny. But every now and then one's like, yeah, buy Bitcoin.

So that's, I don't know. I'm just going with that. Don't do that. I think I ate a lot of sand. I just lost the whole preschool crowd too. Sorry, two of them just left. Not all preschoolers eat sand. I just want to make that clear.

It was just me early when I was a kid. You talk about it in your book. I suppose I should bring this up. I'm 56 today. It's my birthday today. Congratulations. Yeah. should bring this up i'm 50 i'm 56 today it's my birthday today so um congratulations yeah well you know i i yeah and to us i started to dodge what i was going to speak to and then realized i should shut up again when i turned 50 i had i made this pose me post and i write a lot of

tongue-in-cheek and comedy stuff on on my facebook you know so i wrote some kind of tongue-in-cheek sort of woe is me everything heard since 50 years old and and i remember people were you know throwing the sling of the stuff around with me and somebody wrote me and they hit me like a ton of bricks and they go you know chris there's a lot of people who would really have loved to make it to 50 so maybe you just sit down shut shut up, and realize and cherish what a moment is, the fact that you get there. And somebody asked me today, they go,

what do you hope for? What do you want for your birthday? What do you want to get? What would you like? I'm like, you know what? I like world peace. I like to have the song Imagine be fulfilled. I'd like to have us uh the song imagine be fulfilled um i'd like to uh but i i just like to also have health and happiness like all of us not just me all of us so if we can work on that

maybe in a couple wars that'd be good to come to think about yeah but uh you know being so you talk about in the book about aging well with souls. You call it evolving, aging with soul. So I already sold my soul to the devil. That's how I got this podcast. But how can people like me evolve and age better? Yeah, yeah. Well, again, a lot of people are shocked when I say this, but I am an introvert.

You know, I'm a very social person, but also technically an introvert, which means I do a lot of thinking. I like to be by myself. You know, I don't go into a meeting without having an agenda, which I share ahead of time. But evolving with soul is an inner look. It's, it's, it's evolving means that you're doing something to yourself or responding to something that happened to you.

So there are several components to that. One is becoming a better listener. Boy, that's something I've really had to work out because. What? No, I'm just kidding. I had to be a shit there

yeah yeah I mean you know if you think you have a bunch of stuff to say then there's not necessarily a lot of room to listen so being more patient being more encouraging and as I was talking about being

love just how you act it's not it's not about your intention. It's about your actions. I think the possibility of setting aside judgment and expanding perspective, hugely important areas to evolve. Evolving also, you mentioned, you know, having a birthday and moving on, your kids getting older, you know, part of what I've learned is that there are times when you just got to let go. And I like to share this little exercise, if I may. So, hold your fist up and hold something tight. Look at your knuckles at the top. Make them white. And you're

seeing your knuckles at the top. And then you say you're holding onto something that you've not been able to let go of for a long time. Something you did, something somebody did to you. Now turn your fist over, still holding very tight. And you see your knuckles again white. And then one day, one moment, you say to yourself, wait a minute, I'm powerful. I'm in charge here. I'm driving my own bus. I'm going to let go. And you slowly open your fingers, you wiggle your fingers and your thumb, your hand actually starts rising because it's so much lighter. Yeah. And this is one of these evolving steps, is forgiving yourself and others and letting go. There you go.

I feel better already. Those five people, those five enemies I killed and buried in the backyard, I feel so much lighter now. So there's that. It's my birthday present to you, Chris. Thank you. Thank you. Do you have a spare shovel?

No, I'm just kidding. In a bag of lye? I don't know. Don't do that, folks. The attorneys make me say the ad hominems where, you know, don't murder people and put them in the backyard. Put them in a big farm. No, I'm just kidding. Don't do that, people.

Anyway, it's all comedy, folks. So give us a rundown of what you're doing um on your website or do you do any coaching do you do any services or if you just your main focus is to pitch the book out and improve the world yeah And I am all about engagement. So I'm going to be speaking in person things. Local high schools invited me, bookstores,

alumni groups, a book group in St. Louis has said, can we get a Zoom thing and have you come in and join us? Because this is the book we're reading right now. So it's about engagement so that I can give this message, this very positive message that we are powerful and that we can make these choices.

I also have aspirations to teach this as a course. You know, maybe a college course, maybe a continuing ed course. So I'd have to transform the book into some kind of a workbook to do that. But I would love to do that because just being smart in a, call it academic sense, is not enough in today's world. Maybe it never was. But to have this capacity to absorb what I'm talking about in this book, it's Shakespeare did not have it right. Hamlet was not right. It's not to be or not to be.

It's how to be and how not to be. So that's where I'd like to go. I'm not doing, I've been invited quite a number of times to be some kind of a coach to either a person or a small group. And I've been reluctant to do that because I'm trying to have a wider audience and a wider audience, uh, and use my time more broadly. There you go. At least for now. And so people can reach out to you on your website. They can download some quotes that you have from the book and they can probably keep in touch with you for future, uh, things that you do, hire you to speak, et cetera, et cetera. Um, give us your final thoughts on people to order at the book as we go out, uh as we go out and all that sort of stuff.

Well, this is my new mission. I believe very strongly in the principles that are underlying this book. It's taken me a lifetime to compile this. You know, I started writing this book three years ago, but it came from a four foot high stack of papers that I had been collecting since high school. Quotes, articles from, you know, magazines. When I read a book that I thought was particularly cool, I'd take some notes. Lots and lots of quotes, which are, you know, all over all over my book so this is an exciting moment to have this message I think it's a it's a great time in the world for it you know I believe that we need to marry power and love hmm And power can be defined

as the ability to achieve a purpose. I mean, you know, it's a big word but let's just go with that. Power, the ability to achieve a purpose. Well, and love doesn't have to be, again, the romantic

thing. Love can be about involving others. And so, power without love, think of yourself in a meeting. Power without love can be very oppressive. You know, somebody's running the meeting and doesn't allow anybody to add something to the agenda. And love without power can be very weak and ineffective, anemic. So, we really need to walk down this road. It's kind of like walking on one leg is power and then move to the other leg is love. And if you get more and more familiar with that, after all, what we practice we become, then we can start moving faster, even running. And this is a cool thing, too. There you go.

How to thrive instead of survive, as Kelly put it earlier. So there you go. It's been an honor to have you on the show, Rand, and share your vision with us. I love the book. This is like an owner's manual to life. I mean, you've, you've in a,

in, you've incrementally built throughout the chapters, laying a foundation and how to journey through life. And, uh, I'm, I'm excited to look, I read it,

um, and get into it because I, I always need reminders about stuff. Uh, you know, thou shalt not kill is usually one of them, obviously, for what's going on in my backyard, but great callback joke. But there you go. So give us your.com one more time as people go out.

Thank you, Chris. Yeah, www.randselig.com, R-A-N-d-s-e-l-i-g Here's the book. There you go. There you go. Order it up, folks, wherever fine books are sold. Thriving.

How to Create a Happier, Healthier. Let me recut that because I switched that around. Thriving. How to Create a Healthier, Happier, and More and more prosperous life. Came out September 18th, 2023.

Thanks for tuning in. Go to goodreads.com. Forge says Chris Voss. Refer the show to your family, friends, relatives. LinkedIn.com. Forge says Chris Voss. Chris Voss won the TikTok. Chris Voss, facebook.com.

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