Young and Profiting with Hala Taha - Caspar Craven: Anchor Your Success | Leadership | E14

Episode Date: January 15, 2019

Ahoy, Young and Profiters! In this episode we’re yappin’ with Caspar Craven, a man who is famous for sailing around the world with his wife and 3 small children. Caspar is a British entrepreneur, adventurer and motivational speaker who has built several million dollar companies from scratch. He currently spends his time speaking with businesses and leaders from around the world, and helps them become more successful through better collaboration and teamwork. January is National Slavery and Human Trafficking Awareness Month! Find out your slavery footprint: slaveryfootprint.org Want to connect with other YAP listeners? Join the YAP Society on Slack: bit.ly/yapsociety Follow YAP on IG @youngandprofiting Follow Hala on Linkedin: www.linkedin.com/in/htaha/ Follow Hala on Instagram: www.instagram.com/yapwithhala Check out our website to meet the team, view show notes and transcripts: www.youngandprofiting.com  

This episode is sponsored by Audible. If you like podcasts, then you'll love Audible. To download your free audiobook today, go to audibletrial.com slash yap. This is a public service announcement. January is National Slavery and Human Trafficking Prevention Month. To help support the cause, we're kicking off every show this month alongside Mick McEwen, a former U.S. Department of Homeland Security senior official, Mick. Tell us, what is human trafficking and how big of a problem is this?

Human trafficking is modern day slavery. and involves the use of force, fraud, or coercion to obtain some type of labor or commercial sex act. It's a huge problem, Hala. It is the second fastest growing criminal industry in the world, even though it's illegal in every country on the planet. It's hard to get exact numbers, but we think 79% of human trafficking is in the form of sexual exploitation, and the international labor organization estimates that there are 4.8 million people trapped in forced sexual exploitation globally. Other organizations quadruple that number. The victims are mostly women and girls. In fact, almost 20% of all trafficking victims worldwide are children. That's absolutely terrible,

but there's got to be something we can do about it. What are some of the indicators of human trafficking that can help us potentially identify a victim? There are definitely some red flags look out for. While the victims are sometimes kept behind locked doors, many times they are hidden right in front of us in places like hotels, construction sites, and nail salons. Here are some indicators that you should be paying attention to. Are there poor living conditions or signs of physical abuse? Do you see multiple people living in a cramped space? Is there an inability to speak to someone alone?

And if you do speak to them, do their answers appear to be scripted and rehearsed? Lastly, employers or some other people are holding on to their identity documents. People often wonder, when would I ever see this occur? Great example would be at a pharmacy or a bank. If you witness someone showing their identification and then handing it right back to someone else, Think about it. They're giving their identification for safekeeping to someone else. Who really does that without being forced to do it? Got it. All right. Well, that's really helpful. So what happens if I witness a few of these red flags? What do I do next? Don't be a hero. Contact law enforcement by calling 911. Do not try to attempt to rescue a trafficking victim yourself. And if you identify a victim who's no longer in harm and has escaped the trafficking situation, there are a number of organizations who can help with shelter, medical care,

and legal assistance. If this is the case and you're in the United States, call the National Human Trafficking Hotline at 1-88-373-78-88. You don't need to remember the number. Just Google it if you ever need it. Thanks, Mick, for helping us raise awareness of human trafficking. To all my listeners, let's be sure to be on the lookout for anything fishy, and together we could combat this issue. You're listening to Yap, Young and Profiting Podcast, a place where you can listen, learn, and grow. I'm your host, Halataha, and today we're Yapin with Casper Craven, a man who's famous for sailing around the world with his wife and three children. Casper is a British entrepreneur, adventurer, and motivational speaker who has built several million dollar companies from scratch. He currently spends his time speaking with businesses and leaders from around the world and helps them become more successful through better collaboration and teamwork.

Hi, Casper. Thanks for joining Young and Profiting Podcast. Hi, Harlet. It's a pleasure to be here. Very excited for this interview. So let's get started. One of the main things that you're known for is sailing around the world, an excursion that took two years, which you embarked on with your wife and three small children who were just nine, seven, and two.

And I really think that sharing this story will give a good introduction of who you are, and it's a good flow for sharing the message that you have for the world, both personally and professionally in our lives. So let's start from the beginning. Take us back to where it started. What was your life like before you decided to set sail around the world? I used to have what I would call a conventional or regular life. So I left college and worked my way up through corporate world, kind of got up to middle management by my early 30s, and then set up my own business when I was early 30s and ran that for probably, what was it now, about five or six years. And by then I was in sort of mid to late 30s. with my wife, we got married, and we had a couple of kids. And life was kind of okay to the outside world.

It probably looked amazing. You know, you're married, you've got two kids, you're running your own business. Isn't that the dream, right? But on the inside, it felt really, really tough because you're working sort of 16, 18 hours a day in the business. And back then, I'd have earned more money stacking shelves down at the UK equivalent of Walmart. The life was dominated by arguments about money, feeling guilty, not spending enough time with the children.

And we hadn't figured out how to really grow our business and create a profitable business. So when we had our first idea, we were in a pretty challenged place, emotionally, financially and timewise. So that was kind of the breeding ground for us to say, hang on a second, this probably looks great, but we were asking ourselves, is this all there is to life? That's so interesting. So then how did you guys come up with the idea to sail around the world? Well, we kind of sat down with each other and we asked ourselves the question. It's like, what's really important to both of us in life? What do we really want to go and do? Because if this was what everything was cracked up to be, then it wasn't that great. So we started to really understand, and really listen to each other in terms of what we wanted to go and do.

And some months previous to that, my brother-in-law, we've been at a birthday party, and he told us about this family who sailed around the world and then went on to say how ridiculous it was. But that just kind of like piqued the interest for me and Nicola. And so, you know, that would be kind of quite cool to go and do that. So when we started to listen to each other, what was really important to Nicola was going and traveling. And what was important to both of us was spending time with our kids because our kids were growing up. And we just weren't seeing them at all. And we're thinking, what's the point of having kids if you don't end up spending time with them?

And so that was kind of the starting point. And we talked about what was important. And for me, I love time on the water. I love traveling as well. And the more we talked, we started to hatch this plan to go and we wanted to go and sail around the world for two years. and literally go and experience the world with our kids. You know, back then, it was a crazy, crazy idea because Nicola, she had been on a boat twice back then,

and she'd been seasick both times. We didn't have the money. We didn't have a boat. So there are all sorts of reasons why it was just a ridiculous idea, but it still caught our imagination. We created a whole narrative of the future for us that involved this sailing plan. So let's go and do that.

So you literally sail, around the world to save your marriage. Well, so we gave ourselves a five-year plan to change everything. And what saved our marriage was the process we went through to go and have the amazing family experiences. Because our marriage was saved in the five years beforehand, not during the sailing. It was the idea of doing something together. So, you know, it could have been going on a road trip across America.

It could have been backpacking across Asia. It could have been anything, right? But having a shared goal rather than both going off on our own different career paths. And I think that's what happens to so many other people. It's like, you know, you go through college and you get the ideas you want to get in what career you want to have. And people get together. But people grow apart because they're going on different paths and different trajectories. And that was us.

but by creating this shared story and uniting us with where we were going, that was the thing that changed everything. Now, that's very romantic. I don't know how anybody could top that. So I heard it took five years to prepare for this trip. You just mentioned previously that it was very expensive to sail around the world. So let's talk about that. How did you achieve your financial goals? And what were the mind shifts that you had to take to make this trip a reality? Two big questions there. Okay, so the financial goals. So when we had the idea, I had this small consulting business, we had sales probably about half a million dollars and losing money. So in that five years to turn things around,

I spent the first two years where I thought I was doing things, but really I wasn't doing anything at all. I was fooling myself. In my previous businesses, I'd always said, I'm going to build a business up at five years' time. I'm going to go and sell it. But that five years, it always stayed five years away. And because we put a date in the diary, so the first of August 2014, we're going to be heading off, that now was getting closer.

So now in 2011, it was three years away rather than five years away. And that forced me to start thinking about it differently. And previously, I thought I had figure out all the answers on my own to all these different things. And then I realized that I had to go and find people who are way smarter than I was, who'd had six. go and be humble and go and sit down and learn from them and say, look, tell me what you've done. And that was the start of the big mindset shift for me, realizing that I had just had to surround myself with people who've been on this path before. So that was the first step. And then I filled my mind with these different ideas of how to really grow and make a successful business.

And I then came back into my company. And I started changing every. thing, hiring staff, new products, new services, just like going nuts in the business. And that worked for about three months until the rest of my team turned around. They said, look, you carry on doing that. We're all going to leave just because you're being a nightmare. So that was my second turning point because I realized that to build anything amazing, I had to create an awesome team of people, especially because I knew that we were going to be on a boat at some point. and therefore the team had to run the business.

I couldn't jump in and go and fix the problems. So right from that three years before going, I was asking the question, how do we build a business that can run without us? So I then sort of had to go through quite a humbling process of learning how to be a leader, how to engage everybody based on their strengths, rather than saying, I'm right.

I had to listen to all the reasons why other people had. And I realized actually the secret was just surrounding myself by really smart people, creating the right culture and encouraging each person to be brilliant to whatever they were expert at doing. And that really started to transition that business. So that business carried on growing. We put an amazing team of people in place. We ended up selling that business for seven figures whilst we sailed across the Pacific Ocean. But what was quite cool was the processes that I had learned to, A, build a successful profitable business, and B, build an amazing rock star team. We applied that and we created two new ventures from scratch.

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I read that your company goes by the mantra, it doesn't matter who is right, it only matters what is right. And I really adore that. Yeah, it's funny. I'm reading principles at the moment. by Ray Dalio. And, you know, the whole idea he talks about, and that's about the idea of meritocracy. The best ideas float to the top. It's exactly the same thing. And, you know, the traditional way of doing things, how I've been brought up in the corporate world was, you know, there's the hierarchy and the people above you know best. But, yeah, that really worked for us. Yeah, it doesn't matter who is right. It only matters what is right. That became the through line in the company.

Very cool. And so earlier you mentioned that you had a date in the diary. And, you know, it was locked in stone from my understanding for a very long time until you had a back injury and an operation and you had to push it back about just three weeks. So why was it so important for you guys to stick to a deadline? Okay. So one of my fundamental beliefs is nothing ever happens without a deadline because there'll always be a reason to push things out. So in that last year before we went away, there were loads of reasons why we shouldn't have gone. We hadn't sold the main business yet. everyone said, you're crazy. If you go now, the business will go bust. And my back injury, you mentioned, if we had allowed it, any one of those reasons could have stopped us. But by having

that date in the diary, it forces you to think about things in a different way, to think creatively. And, you know, it's the skill set that we had to develop for doing that was the same skill set that helped us and challenging situations when we're in the middle of the ocean. Because you have to get super resourceful. It's just, it's an easy answer to say, well, just give myself more time. I'll go and do this. I'll go and do this. But when you really put yourself to the sword, then that just unleashes creativity and

resourcefulness, which we've all got. But by moving the deadline back, you let yourself off the hook, basically. So you have to force yourself with a deadline. Yeah, I love that. I think that's really great. I recently put up a post on LinkedIn that I feel like reminds me of this where I said, when it comes down to it, whenever you're faced with a decision, you always just have two choices. It's either make an excuse or make progress. Those are your two choices.

Exactly. Absolutely. There's nothing else in between, right? One of my mentors always used to say that people who are good at making excuses are generally not good at making things happen. So, you know, I do a ton of research on my guess. And what I've is that over the five years while you guys were planning on this trip, you told many people in your community about it, and you were known as the family that was going to sail around the world. So you made it public, and I was wondering if that was on purpose, or did that just happen naturally?

And do you think that spotlight put pressure on your family to really make it happen? 100%. It was a core fundamental strategy. And that whole thing of going public with what you're going to go and do it really tests whether you mean it or not. And yeah, by making yourself publicly accountable, it increases the pressure, it increases the certainty that it's going to happen. Everyone laughed at us at first and said, they're crazy, you can't do it, and gave us all the reasons.

And there were some good reasons there, to be fair. But by talking about it, it just became the most natural thing in the world for us. And, you know, the first time you say it, I was like, oh, that feels really, really unkind. comfortable. But by the time you said it like 50 times, 100 times, then you start to really own that story and that piece of language. You become comfortable with it. And actually, it was insanely helpful all the feedback that people gave us, which sounded like criticism saying, well, you should be thinking about this or you'd be crazy not to think about this. So actually people, although it

looks like they were criticizing, actually it was really helpful helping us think through. all the challenges and issues we had to cover. So, no, fundamental strategy of making it public. Got it. And so do you think that that really kind of made you stick to your goal? Absolutely. Or do you think that regardless, you would have? Oh, that's a good question. If we hadn't made it public, would we have done it? You know what? I don't think we would have done it if we hadn't made it public. Because I think the whole thing is all about belief. And you've got to own that story in every single. cell and fiber in your body.

Yeah. And the only way to do that is to make it part of your internal dialogue and your external dialogue and the public accountability, of course, from everybody else, kind of forcing the issue. They're fundamental. Yeah. And, you know, when so many people are kind of giving you negativity or telling you you're so crazy to do this, if you don't go, then you just have egg on your face.

So I feel like that probably was a motivating factor. So let's stick on the naysayers for a little bit. How did you deal with them? How did you deal with that criticism? So whenever anybody sort of gives you something which sounds like criticism, my filter on the world is this, that I think there are very few people in the world who are genuinely really nasty, mean people. I think generally people mean well. And if I adopt that mindset, when I hear someone saying something, I'm saying, okay, so what are they frightened about?

what are the fears, what's going on here, what's their belief, what's their thought process, and I get curious. Why are they saying that? And what I'm doing is I'm sifting through the words, the language, trying to understand if there's something that I can learn here. It might be. So I remember my mum saying, well, what about the schooling and what about the storm? Well, this happens.

And it was just giving me different scenarios to think about it and think, well, what would I do in that situation? So if you like, it just helped us to scenario plan. Every time we heard all these different things, so, yeah, schooling, medical and so on, we write them all down. And we wouldn't ignore them because that would be crazy, because there were important considerations to think about. But at the same time, if we tried to address every single one of those up front, we would have been overwhelmed and it would have stalled us and we wouldn't have gone anywhere.

because someone like early on could come up with the six reasons why we shouldn't do it. And because we didn't have good answers, then the dangers, well, you kill it. But you write them all down and then you tackle them one at a time. And you say, okay, so how are we going to figure out what do we do about medical care? And we came up with all our different strategies. So we both ended up training to be ships doctors. We had a huge amount of medical supplies on board. We always knew where there was a doctor on another boat.

We had a speed dial to a hospital in the UK. So if there were ever issues, then we could get access to an expert really, really quickly. But it was only because we just took each one and just broke it down step by step rather than being overwhelmed by it. Very interesting. It seems like we could really apply this all in our daily lives. And it reminds me of something that Hillary Clinton once said. She said, learn how to take criticism seriously, but not personally. So you really have to just learn from the criticism that you get. Not every critic is a hater. Some people are just genuinely interested to help you improve or in your case specifically to be safe as you sail around the world. And if there's truth to criticism, you better just learn from it. And if not, just let it roll off your back. Absolutely. Absolutely. Again, go back to what Ray Dalio says in principles. It's all about finding the truth. And it doesn't matter where that truth comes from. So,

to take an emotional position and just create an argument. It's crazy because you're missing out on what value there may be in finding that truth. Exactly. Happy New Year, Yap, gang. I just love the unique energy of the new year. It's all about fresh starts. And fresh starts not only feel possible, but also feel encouraged. And if you've been thinking about starting a business, this is your sign.

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your genius. So going back to making it public, part of making it public was standing your ground and making a firm decision about sailing around the world. And I believe that when you believe something, things can change quickly. So when you have a firm and clear decision, you start to take action, you start to keep taking actions and building habits that help you continue to make progress towards your goals. So can you talk about this concept of relentless action? Yeah. I mean, It's exactly what you just said, basically. Once you've got that crystal clear story, when you can be single-minded about where you're going,

then that cuts away so many different confusions you might face because each individual decision you're faced with, you say, is it moving me meaningfully, measurably closer towards my goal? And it's like, well, it's a yes, no question then. So you can be really, really focused. and there were loads of things that we tried to try and create the money to make it happen. And loads of things didn't work. But the simple mantra was, well, you try something.

If that doesn't work, you try something else. If that doesn't work, you try something else. And you keep going until you get to it. So it's just that mindset that you just haven't figured out the answer yet. And you will figure it out. You just might not know what it is right now. So that's basically what behind the relentless action, that once you're driven by something that's burning so powerfully inside you or inside you as a family team,

then nothing's going to stand in your way. What's the famous saying? You either find a way or you make a way, right? And that's what's going to get you there. Very cool. So let's talk about the preparation that you took specifically with your family. So we talked about the financial, how you got ready, you know, with your business and being able to let your business be managed by other people while you sail around the world. how about the preparation for actually going on this trip? From what I read, you basically treated it like a business plan. You had a vision, a purpose, organizational values. And that's super interesting to me. So can you describe how you got your family ready?

Yeah. It's funny. This is one of the things I speak to a lot of companies about, about how do you take corporate or business principles and apply them at home? And also, how do you take principles that operate in at home or in a family and apply them in a business. business because I think the thing that makes us successful in both business and family is exactly the same, but so often people have a mental separation. This is how I am in my work life. This is how I am in my home life. But it's identifying what are the core factors that make you thrive. So the key things that I found that transformed the business were around having the really clear direction, where are we going, the really clear understanding of why it mattered, having the really clear purpose, and then having the values. So defining how we act together, how we work together, how do we behave. Those were things that fundamentally changed the game

in the business and just led to our stellar growth. So I observed that was working in terms of unlocking the human potential at work. So I kind of thought, well, that would be interesting to try that at home as well. I've never seen that done anywhere. So we went through the same process with the kids of talking about the really clear vision and engaging them on a level they could understand. So creating pictures, cutting out pictures, and just sort of imagining what the future look like, talking about the mission, why did it matter? And for us on a family level, that was all about creating magical, life-changing experiences. And then the values, which were a core part of how we dealt with challenging situations.

The same things that we've done at work, we just did at home. And so we co-created a set of family values and then talked about how do we show up when we live those values at their very best, and then just created rewards and prizes so that we would make sure that those values actually stuck. because I remember doing values back in my corporate days and just thinking it was a whole bunch of BS and it was kind of like done badly as I think most companies do it

but when you do it well and you really engage people then I think you just get incredible engagement with the team and with the people. So those were the business ideas that we were taken into family life. Okay, so now let's transfer it back to business. So if we have a team that we're working with or maybe a business that we're starting,

what's your advice on determining your values and then having, like you mentioned, people stick with them? So I'll tell you the way not to do it first because I've made every mistake in the book. So the way not to do it is for the CEO to go home, sit down and write out like six values and say these are the values and come up with a smart way of remembering them and then go into the business and say, here's our values. Because I did that. And the business turned around to me and said, no, they're not. So we had to co-create them. And the value in the process is everyone feeling engaged, everyone having a voice. So I was imagining it like cooking a meal, right, that you've got the big hot on the stove.

And if everyone's like chopping up some measles or some vegetables or whatever else and they're putting it in and everyone's stirring it and adding some herbs and spices, once you co-create that meal, you have much more ownership. Same thing with values. That with an early stage team, you sit there and you talk about, you know, What are the things that are important to us? How do we want to act? How do we want to engage together? And it's that process itself that creates the glue for how you work together. So the process is actually more important than the values that come out of it.

Because nobody's going to go and create values like, you know, be evil, be nasty. They're all going to be good things heading in a certain direction. So it's more important that everyone feels involved in creating them. And then talking about how do we make. make sure that those values live in the business. What's the process for how they actually show up? And again, co-creating that. So fundamentally important. And you see all the big successful companies, right? They all have strong culture. And so many of them are values-driven organizations. I say, me, the fast-growing companies that I see are very much values-driven.

And that was the principle. I love that advice. Personally, after reading your story and all your emphasis around values. It inspired me. And now I have a team of eight who helped me work on this podcast. So we're going to sit down and talk about our values and outline them. And I'm super, you know, looking forward to that. So thank you. I look forward to hearing what they are. Yeah, you want to create a big picture right. So that's what we did, both home and in work, created a big picture, like we've painted it. And all the values were written up on there. because once you have it visual in your workplace, and even if that's virtual, then if people have a copy of it or something like that, it provides a visual anchor. They're lovely saying

in Daniel Karneman's book, Thinking Fast and Slow, but what you see is all there is. So it's having those constant reminders around you, focusing on those things that are right and enjoy. Have fun doing it. Thanks. Okay, so let's get back to you in the trip. So what are your best memories of that trip. And can you also tell us about a challenge that you had and overcame? Okay. Best memories. One that comes to my mind is we were sailing downwind from the Marquesa islands, which are in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, to another set of islands called the Tuomotos. A beautiful, beautiful starry night. And you imagine the boat sort of gliding down these waves and there's the phosphorescence coming out of the back of the boat.

It's like this sort of this trail running behind, just lighting up where you've been and sitting up on the foredeck at the front of the boat with my nine-year-old daughter. We were looking up at the stars and the planets, and we're wondering and talking about whether there's a daddy and her little girl somewhere else out there on another planet and just talking about the universe and the world

and just being present there in the moment. The magic was experiencing stuff together with our kids. So, yeah, lots and lots of magical experiences like that. Could you talk about the Galapagos Island, how like all the animals were coming to you and not scared? Oh, amazing. Yeah, so basically, so there's no natural predators in the Galapagos Islands. So as we were sailing towards this, they sit right on the equator. We're about, I don't know, 12, 15 hours away from the islands. And this huge great big bird is called Redfooted Boobie came and lands on the bows of the boat.

and literally me and the children, we would walk right up to it. So we're like literally a couple of feet away from it. And it just didn't show any fear at all because they've not been trained to be fearful. And then when we got there, we went swimming with the sharks and the sea lions everywhere

and the black iguanas and the tortoises. And yeah, it's an incredible place. It's a magical place. And actually once you understand how Darwin came up with his theories of evolution there and you see about how the irons are developed, It's, yeah, real, real magic. So, yeah, amazing place.

Sounds incredible. So a challenge. A challenge. Yeah. Yeah, I've got a few to choose from. What one shall I talk about? I'll talk about one that's different. I don't normally talk about.

So as we were sailing across the Indian Ocean, my brother was actually on board at the time. And we had, came and woke me up to go and watch on morning. And he said, I don't want to worry you. But in the middle of the night, something went twang. And things that make noises unexpectedly on a boat

are really, really not welcome friends. So we went and investigated and we found that one of the rigging wires, which is the wires that hold the mast in place, the mast is the big stick in the middle of the boat, which you hang the sails off. It's got 19 strands of wire

tightly woven together to create each of the rigging wires coming down to the deck. And one strand out of this 19 had broken. And one strand on its own is not terminal, but it's worrying because they're the 19 strands for a reason. So we spent the next hour or so just figuring out what do we do about this challenge. And we went up the mast and we took additional ropes and we were tying them back down to the deck. So to strengthen that side of the rigging.

And then we put more repairs around the broken strands and we carried on. 24 hours later, we checked it again, and there were three broken strands. Now, I think if a fourth strand had gone, the mast would have fallen over, and then we wouldn't have been able to sail. We were about 800 miles away from Africa at that point, that we would have had a different set of challenges. And of course, you only have bad weather when things are going wrong as well. So lots of wind, lots of big seas. So actually, in that scenario, as soon as I found the three strands were broken. We turned the boat around, and we started to head back towards Australia, so sail in the

wrong way, because it took the pressure off that side of the rigging. There was on the port side, the left-hand side of the boat. So by changing direction, they put all the pressure on the right-hand side of the boat. And then that brought us some time to figure it out, and we tried putting more repairs in place. But the final solution was actually there were some friends of ours about 50 miles, miles away and called them up and they had the piece of repair equipment that we needed. And so they sailed towards us. We did a mid-ocean transfer of these little clamps that we needed to secure the rigging and get it in place. And just in case anyone is thinking, why didn't you

have those on board? If we took every single spare that we needed for every single situation, there wouldn't have been room for us on the boat because you'd need to take so many things. Anyway, so we got the equipment and we repaired it and we carried on. We made it to South Africa. But it was a scary moment because it's like you're challenged and you've got to sit there and think about how do you do this. But it's the same challenge we learned when we're creating the money for it. That, okay, well, no one else is going to fix this. So what are we going to do?

And that you get resourceful. Can you talk about how some of the value work that you did? Can you talk about a challenge where you channeled some of the value work that you did with your family before the trip? Yeah, of course. the one that comes to mind is when we had the power failure in the middle of the Pacific. And the instinctive reaction, I think if I'd been back in my old corporate world, would have been to turn around and to blame someone and start pointing out all the things that were wrong. It's your fault. Why didn't you think about this?

But because we spent so long on our values and ingraining our values, that those are the things that just became first nature. So rather than turning to blame, we just lived our values. We found the humor in the situation because we didn't have some working toilets, so we had to improvise with the bucket. And we just literally, for four days, we had to figure out how do we work together as a team. And that was, I think, our defining moment for living our values together. We looked after each other.

There was laughter, there was compassion, there was understanding. So literally, just living our values, rather than go. going to blame. But the only reason we were able to do that is that our values, we talked about them every single day. We've done these values awards. We've done these charts talking about what was right rather than what was wrong. So it was ingraining that behavior. Because most people in society talk about, you know, all the problems. You know people who start a sentence by saying the problem is and our brains are hardwired to think that way around. But by focusing on the values and telling people what they're doing well, then that's what helps.

you, I think, in challenging situations. So it goes against normal behaviors, but for me, it's much more powerful to do that. Yeah. So all this talk about your challenges, it really just proves how your attitude, your actions, your words, they can all really make a difference. And it reminds me of a formula I heard you say in another interview. It's E plus R equals O. Can you explain to our listeners what that is and how it's relevant? Of course. So the point being, In life, stuff will come up towards you. You'll have issues which arise, which you have no control over. And the only thing you can focus on is your reaction.

So the formula E plus R equals O is E is the event, something happens. So whether you have power failure in the middle of the ocean, whether you lose your job, whether you lose a key client, whether you run a project and it doesn't work, whatever it is, that's the event, something that happens to you. The only thing that matters is your reaction, what do you do about it? And the formula is the event plus your reaction equals the outcome. Not what a lot of people think, well, the event equals the outcome

because there's what you're going to do about it as a result. And so, you know, really it's just about taking personal responsibility in any particular situation. It's getting beyond the emotion of it and saying, okay, so what are we going to do? How are we going to figure this situation out? And again, it goes back to what we did in the businesses to transform those. And it showed up at sea as well. It's exactly the same principle.

Yeah. And your reaction really depends on how strong your emotional resilience is and your ability to adapt to stressful environments. And that's really not something that we learn in school or college. So can you help us with some key traits of emotional resilience and how we can learn to be better at it? So it's funny. I do this with my old daughter, who's now back,

in school and going through exams and things like that. So in any particular situation, it's just pausing for a moment, just composing yourself, taking some deep breaths, and just stepping back from it and just sort of saying, okay, so what's really going on here? The way you train yourself to do this is to do this in less challenging, less life-threatening situations and then the more you do that, the more you condition yourself to dealing with challenging situations. And it's finding the emotional anchors in your life. So I remember with my oldest daughter, when we were in the island of Tonga, there was this underwater cave which she wanted to dive into. And she had to dive down two meters and swim along four meters underneath

this rock formation and then come up two meters inside this underwater cave. And she was a bit fearful about doing it beforehand. I mean, it's quite scary, right? Understandably. But she just like said, you know what? I'm going to have a go. I'm going to go and do it. And she did it.

And she came out of there. And, you know, she showed amazing courage to go and do it. But I've really anchored that moment. So whenever she's fearful at the time, I said, do you remember that time when you did this? Because all of us, we've had times, with scary times in our lives. And it's going back to that moment and saying,

okay, how were you in that moment? what did you do? And it's all about shifting your mindset to, you know, I can do this. I can figure out a way through it. So, you know, wherever the mind goes, the body will follow. So it's finding those triggers, those anchors to be able to take yourself back to a place where you can be more resourceful and helpful. That's really sound advice. So this trip, since the planning of it, seems to have really helped you understand the fundamentals. of leadership and teamwork and you've evolved to be such a great businessman. In fact, you've built three separate million dollar companies from scratch and considering that 90% of startups fail, that's a really huge accomplishment. So tell us, what is your secret sauce for being a good leader and running a successful business? So, you know, I've spoken to so many people in

different views on this. And I guess, you know, what I've learned from other people, what I've found works best for me. It comes down to one thing and it's caring about people. And it sounds really simple, but it really is just listening to people, understanding what's really important to them, helping them find their value, their purpose in the world. And sometimes it might mean that that person is not right for you and your business. And that's okay because then that creates the space for the right person to come in. But all businesses are built on people. And it's just, yeah, really giving a shit and caring about people and looking after them and helping them to achieve what they want. Because if you help other people achieve what they want, then they will help you achieve what

you want. So I would say that's what it comes down to for me. Very cool. So do you have any upcoming adventures planned? Yes, lots. So our boats in San Francisco, so I spend a good amount of my time in the States doing speaking events. Last summer, we sailed from San Francisco, go to Canada and back, and then we did San Francisco to Mexico and back, and currently planning another trip to Mexico and back, and then potentially after that, going to look at doing a Northwest Passage, so over the top of the Americas, from the Pacific into the Atlantic Ocean. So plenty more adventures planned. Wow. And where can our listeners go to learn everything about you?

Okay, so my name's pretty distinctive, Casper Craven, C-A-S-P-A-R-Craven. So my website, casparcraven.com, and then the same at LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, all the usual things. And he's everywhere and his stories everywhere. And you've got a book, right? And what's your book about? Yes, so basically the book is called Where the Magic Happens. It's on Amazon.

It's a hardback book and audiobook as well. But it's in two parts. The first part is the five years of preparation, which I think is the most interesting part, because that's the part that anyone can go and take and apply to their lives, no matter where they're up to. And it goes through all the steps that we had to learn by trial and error. And then the second part is about the sailing adventure and then what we learned from that. So it's kind of like a self-help book disguised as a sailing book, if you like. Yeah, it's very unique. Well, awesome, Casper. Thank you so much for sharing your story.

I feel like we've got a ton of gems out of it for our listeners. So I appreciate your time. And thank you so much. You are very welcome. Thank you for the lovely questions. We really enjoyed it. Thanks for listening to Young and Profiting podcast. Follow Yap on Instagram at Young and Profiting.com and check us out at Young and Profiting.com. And now you can chat live with us every single day on our new Slack channel. Check out our show notes or Young and Profiting.com for the link. You can find me on Instagram at Yap with Hala or LinkedIn. Just search for my name, Hala, Taha. Big thanks to the Yap team, Tim, Danny, Steeds, Nicholas, Christian, Stephanie, Kayla, and Ryan. Until next time, this is Hala, signing off.