Have you ever wondered how to design your life so that every moment counts? In this episode of the Exceptional Companies Podcast, I explore blending work, family, and personal growth into one cohesive journey. What if you could offload your mental clutter and embrace imperfection to unlock true mastery? Join my conversation with Joseph Thompson as we reveal how stacking your daily actions can transform the way you live and lead. Curious to learn more?

I've got databases on, you know, you know the eight parts of life. I can then go in and I can tag with people, right? I can go and tag people who I think are experts at their physical life, who are experts at their midst of life, who are experts at their family lives. I care enough about Hugh as a human being.

To put in a system so that I can organize how I interact with you and serve you better.

Joseph Thompson: There's clarity in the volume as well that you just don't know what you don't know until you start doing right.

He's here to guide you through the complex world of business transactions and growth. Each week, we dive deep with actionable insights, expert interviews, and real world strategies to activate and equip you to live exceptionally and build exceptional businesses. Now, let's dive into today's episode.

Here's your host, Chris Segers.

Chris Seegers: Welcome to the Exceptional Companies Podcast, where we discuss how to buy, sell, or grow your business. I'm joined today by a very good friend and guest Joseph Thompson. Joseph, welcome to the show, brother.

Joseph Thompson: Thanks, man. Happy be here humble, it's an honor. Love the pod.

And then we really dug into some really incredible things in regards to having a second brain. For your personal and professional life, taking more shots on goal and really just kind of expediting and building that bridge as you go across it. But for the sake of our audience, tell us a little bit about your background and your story, and maybe how we met and, fast forward to today,

And then you have kids and you hope that they get good grades and, they go to a good typical societal

Joseph Thompson: That's right.

Chris Seegers: The way that everybody

Joseph Thompson: That's right. You know, I that world and, you know, I'm still in that world and, you know, I've had a, a couple, a taste of the good life with equity and, that kind of deal. And so, but, you know, really fast forwarding, graduated, through school, uh, at petroleum engineering.

And then, my wife and I we took A little break over into central Europe and Slovakia. We were missionaries over there for about 13 months. and then, we moved our family out to Midland, so I can use my degree and, God put us together, in our path. So that was,

And let's travel. Now they traveled and did some different things, but he's a believer as well. So why, instead of just coming out of A& M, I know you did really well, in university, had a bunch of job offers, with a lot of friends we knew out in the Permian Basin in oil and gas. Why go serve somewhere else

Right? And it's just one of those where every single day was almost a week of marriage, in kind of the everyday. normal life where, you know, you spend a couple hours at home and you've got dinner to deal with and putting a kid down and all of those things that kind of, you know, you're juggling. And so it was really cool to go shoulder to shoulder, face to face, with my wife doing something that matters and was meaningful, and really create a foundation for that relationship.

Chris Seegers: And really that's what I heard is. You said let's accelerate and maybe intentionally or unintentionally, but let's accelerate the time together in our marriage to get to more of a mastery in marriage. Now, marriage is a tough thing every day, no matter how long you've been married, but you've got more reps.

In the front end of your marriage than just going to work, seeing your spouse for an hour, watching Netflix for two hours, going to bed, having some weekend time. How has that influenced your reps

I think Yeah, yeah, absolutely. you know, it's the reps and then the with the right goal, right? They're, you know, not every rep is considered equal or kind of. It fits inside that mental model equally. And so you get reps on things that matter, in when you're serving together and you're, you know, in an area, you're in a place where you don't speak the language.

You're learning how to solve problems as one rather than as two individuals, but then also, you know, it's the quality of the reps, but then, you know, it's the rep count, right? It's one of those where, you know, I love the 10, 000 hour concept because it does set, you know, more reasonable expectation on the idea of mastery, right?

May look different, it may carry a different weight or anything like that, but it's doing the same kind of, show you overload, you know, to use a, you know, more physical fitness model.

And one of the reasons, that we've had a little bit of success is my wife and I started when we got married, we moved to Midland and just said, Hey, we want to do life together. And we started buying businesses together and real estate together and investing together. And so we spent every, instead of just like goofing off going on vacation.

For every weekend traveling, we spent every weekend working together. And so we got a lot of reps doing things that were pretty high stress very quickly in our marriage. And it's helped us to be able to take on a lot of things that most folks would think were crazy. But for us, it's like, Hey, we've been doing this for a long time now.

Was the period in time when he finally said, I'm not trying to make you like me. I'm just loving you how you are. And I was like, man, that's, I have such, that was so convicting for me. Cause I oftentimes I'm trying to like, Hey, let's do personal development based on how Chris Seegers would do it. Or, Hey, you know, you should have these habits or you should have this view for your life or this mission.

And so that's something like, as we improve our marriages, I was like, that's such a good word. Of just being with our spouse and not trying to put them in our box, which I, you know, I do on a weekly basis for sure. So, okay. So let's take this concept. So you come back, was it Slovakia, right? You came back from Slovakia, you come right back into it.

Because you, you try to make very complicated things simple, which is one of our core tenants is like every business is simple, like business is very simple. You've just got to get the right data and find the right answers and not overcomplicate it. So walk us through that progression a little bit about how you got into that. And some of the

Joseph Thompson: Yeah, no, I think, it's 1 of those where, you know, I think the context here is I'm a. I'm a fairly intellectually, I don't like to do the hard thing. I appreciate doing the hard thing. And so, you know, my greatest strength and my greatest weakness, I think, might be, some semblance of laziness.

Okay. Great. You know, value for the company you're working for. And really, that value comes in the shape of a couple of things. Sometimes you're able to, because of the data that you've pulled together and the analytics you've done, maybe you're able to do something cheaper. Maybe you're able to do something more accurate.

It's, you know, you're doing work with coding and R and Python and all the fun stuff. And it, and it is technical, but really value that sound fun to the know, found it doesn't you know, value, value I found, and, you know, with talking to you and but other people, especially out in Midland, and then now in Austin, Yeah.

You know, you learn that, you know, the kind of loop that closes on data analytics is the idea of storytelling. And it's this idea that your data has a story in it. And really, you have to connect the data and the purpose of that data to the value of whatever you're trying to create for and solve for.

And so it's 1 of those where, you know, they want to hear the impact. they want to hear the bottom line of what the data is telling them. And then if they want to double click into how we got there, you know, that whole. Breadcrumb trail is there, you know, for us to kind of go in and audit, you know, the process or the decision that you make.

Chris Seegers: I love that. And we use EOS in all of our businesses. And we've taken all our data across all the platforms and synthesized them into scorecards. And I'm a strategic advisor and a partner in an oil and gas company called Rockport, which is going to be one of the number one independent oil and gas upstream development companies in the U S it's going to happen.

And so, when we talk about lead and lag measures in a scorecard. So the lag measure is the outcome, like what you want, right? So, Hey, we want to grow revenue by X percentage. That's a lag measure. The lead measures are the daily activities. And so when it comes to operational and financial, it's actually a lot easier to split that up, but then we started saying.

How do we do this for impact if our, one of our core tenants is to advance human flourishing through hydrocarbons, we're like, okay, well, what does that really mean? We create a great product. we're already doing that, but we also give a lot of money away. We're serving in different capacities.

And my partner, Ted, I think is actually brilliant in this. One of the things as we started thinking about advancing human flourishing is our team members And one of the main things to help them flourish is improving their quality of life with their family, giving them time and make sure, making sure we're not workaholics and then also their physical fitness.

So he's rolled out this, health tracking where we're doing kind of analytics on blood work for any of the employees that want to, but also creating this platform around working out where they hopefully are, you know, and we're kind of tracking against each other. So now we've got this impact scorecard.

That's not just the hard, Hey, we, we made a. We, our profit margin went up. We returned more capital to our investors. We drilled better wells. Now it's like, all right, we've got this advanced human flourishing lens that we're building and it's not real complicated. It's kind of four or five different things that we're tracking, but every year we track that it's getting better and better where we're like, Oh, actually the data that we should be monitoring is this.

Joseph Thompson: Yeah, it's a, a thing. you know, just on the impact side, it's, it's something our industry is, is done poorly. I think in the past, you know, of really. Kind of taking that next step and, you know, marketing, uh, ourselves as, you know, impact for human flourishing. And so I think, you know, it's something that I think is a worthwhile kind of focus, you know, for companies in our space.

Chris Seegers: So give us some example, Joseph, for our listeners that haven't really heard about this concept of the different core areas of your life. Give

Joseph Thompson: Yeah. So, you know, so there's 8 of them that I kind of go through whether, you know, it's in the morning and I'm or I'm grading myself at the end of the day or something like that. And, you know, the helpful piece here is a lot of people have 2 sectors, right? They have work and they have life. Right? And the hard part with that is, you know, work is almost graded for you.

You know, my finances or something like that and saying, Hey, man, I'm killing it on this thing. And then having these other pieces of my life that are suffering and not being managed or measured. And so, you know, the 8 that I think about, and they kind of fit into quadrants, but you have physical and mental life.

Right? And so, you know, your health. Uh, your physical life is going to be your diet, exercise, sleep, supplementation, that kind of deal. And then there's overlap between the two. You and I have talked about stacked, kind of behaviors too, where we could try to stack as many of these as possible into our schedule.

Chris Seegers: there because that's really critical and I, and then let's keep going. So one thing that I've said is I'm trying to get seven points of value with everything I do. And it's, I don't know why the seven number it's maybe it's God's perfect number anyways. I just came up with a number. And so the point is like, as we're trying to integrate these different.

Then we had to get home, get them fed. And I was like, okay, what if we stacked our small group with people that were already doing soccer practice with at our house, doing social with our kids, doing family, like how can we get seven points of value where we're using the same time more efficiently to integrate those pieces of life.

So your physical life serves your mental life. It serves your family life. It serves your spiritual life, your spiritual life. Yeah. Serves your physical life. It creates meaning for the other seven, right? And so it's this idea that instead of, you know, one existing and taking from the others, you almost have this servant sector mentality where all of them exist to serve the others, right?

It's going to be helpful and invaluable. And in any other piece, right? It may be, you know, going to church and not stacking, you know. Your spiritual life with your social life with your family life. And then, you know, you can add on to other things and you, you're just creating richer moments and you're allowing yourself that, you know, I, I feel like I'm not doing enough with my time.

If I'm just doing 1 thing, right? That's, you know, the points of value. It's the value proposition of your minute or your hour or your day. It's saying, Hey, can we, can we somehow? Yeah.

Chris Seegers: I love that. And I would differentiate to like, it's really critical not to micro or not to multitask. This is not multitasking. So people don't think, Hey, this is trying to do five things at the same time. It's doing similar things that you're integrating them. So it is like, if you're going to eat with somebody and you're already going to be social.

What if you had a list of questions that took your conversation from kind of BS, like, Hey, you know, what happened this weekend and football or whatever to, Hey, you know, what's, what are three to five goals that you have over the next three years? Or like, how are you thinking about parenting? Here's something we're struggling with.

And so it's really just, and your example was great. Like My partners who are my brothers and some of my businesses. Now we're doing our walks where we're doing our, our, our level 10 or us meeting, but we're walking. And so, and if we need to like record some notes, we'll record them on the phone and then, you know, email them to each other.

And there's truths to it that no matter what, who you are, there's different language around it to synthesize it. We use the architecture of life as kind of that, and we have done blueprinting. So the blueprint for an exceptional life, the blueprint for exceptional wealth, the blueprint for exceptional business.

But one thing that you've utilized that actually really helped me start organizing my ideas just about life and seeing the patterns was a concept that you called the second brain. And I had a Google sheet that I called my life plan. It was a Chris Seeger's life plan. I still utilize it to this day.

Joseph Thompson: Yeah, so, you know, I think the idea of the 2nd brain 1st came up with, by Tiago forte. so it's important that we attribute that, but, you know, the idea there was is okay. I think in terms of systems, I build out data systems with data sources, and then, you know, I have this, you know, this limited amount of RAM in our head, right?

And so, for me, it was always like, hey, let's, let's put this all in memory, let's keep it up upstairs, and let's just try to, like, white knuckle the idea there. But life got more complicated, I got married, so then, you know, the amount of people that I knew 10x, you know, it didn't double, because my wife is a social butterfly, and, you know, I'm not.

Right? So, if we meet someone. And, and this could be anybody. but if we go to a conference, if we meet someone new at Bible study, if we meet someone new at church, it goes into our CRM. And I've got an inbox and then kind of like deeper vault structure. So it's like, you've got high line, high level information of just like quick capture kind of dynamic.

And then you've got like deep. You know, rich kind of data. What's cool about notion and they allow you to take these databases and then you can combine them together and you can reference the other databases. And so we actually have our entire calendar in notion. Right? So all of our events, we've got a database of things that we spend our time on.

It's a two way kind of thing. And so if I wanted to look at the calendar and I wanted to just filter out for. You know, all of the events I've ever, you know, that I have this month, I can see those and I can see the people that I'm doing it with. But what's really cool is I can go in to my Chris Seeger's, you know, profile and I can see all of the events I've ever done with Chris Seeger's, whether it be, you know.

Men's retreats or coffees or podcasts or our times in Colorado Springs, where our families have spent time together, you know, and it, and it really does allow us to, to love and serve people well.

But when it comes to people always ask me this, cause I meet a ton of people and I love people and I, my wife and I are just connectors. So we're always meeting people. We have people do our house. We go to church, we get a small group, we go to these events, we do all the stuff. And then somebody will be like, Hey, how did you meet Joseph Thompson?

I know his son's name, his wife's name, I know, but, you know, like, all these things. And I've been capturing a lot of that in notes, but it doesn't communicate with everything else. Right? Like I really make an effort anywhere we go, whether it be the gym, I want to know everybody that's It's at the gym, checking me in the folks working out, et cetera.

What, like, how would somebody think about starting? In this project, overwhelming to me, even just to get started. Like, how would you approach

Joseph Thompson: no, I think, I think you've got to pick the things that, your ram is, is spending a lot of time on. Right. And so this, you know, another point about the idea of the 2nd brain is that it allows this 1, you know, the 1 that I have, and I carry around with me, the ability to be present, like, my brain isn't sitting there trying to remember, you know, so and so's name who served me last Friday at the restaurant.

Right. Because it's sitting there and I may not remember it with this brain, but I can look it up quickly. And so, I would just say if you're sitting there and you're, you're churning on things, whether it's, you know, if it's business ideas, if it's theory, or if it's, you know, I've listened to a lot of your podcast.

Where my feet are at. it's okay. Let's start to build out databases and structured data around those things. Right? And so I've got databases on, you know, the 8 parts of life. I can then go in and I can tag. With people, right? I can go and tag people who I think are experts at their physical life, who are experts at their mental life, who are experts at their family life.

And so, you know, to answer the question, I would say, look. what are the five things that you're just sitting there rattling on? Is it a list of people? Is it a list of places? Like it could be your bucket list where you sit there and you know, you've got your dream or is it, you know, you're in the middle of a construction project and you just have all these ideas about, you know, the way you want your closet to look or you want your kitchen or whatever.

Chris Seegers: I love it, man. And one of the tools that we built for our team and for our companies is called the tribe tracker. Because of this, we said, all right, if all the stats say you're this, some of the seven to 10 people around you, well, how are we tracking that and actually like delineating why these people should be around us? Because we want folks around us that are integrated life people, like great faith, great family lives and marriages are exceptional at business or work, whatever they're in. And how do we track that? And so we built this tribe tracker to basically put you at the universe and say, all right, now we're tracking this.

Well, it's difficult because there's folks like you that I'd love to hang out with every week and we live in different cities, but now we've got this tribe tracker. And then I actually got a personal CRM after kind of listening to what you were doing. And now it can ping me so I can set, hey, I want to make sure that I'm talking to Joseph minimum once a month.

I love that, man. And I think that's like a really great place to start.

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And it makes sense. In my mind is this idea of volume for volume sake, really? And it's this idea that shots on goal that the reps matter that, you know, they're not useless, you know, if the work product matter crappy at the end of that rep, like, that's okay. Like, it's part of the process to do that and, know, a helpful story.

But the final project is to come up with, The perfect pot, right? And then the other half of the class is directed their project and their score. Their grade is based on how many pots that they do. Right? And so more pots is better. And then the perfect pot is better for the other side. And so what you get, and, you know, it's a hypothetical story, but, you know, what you probably get in that situation is that even the 10th pot that's made by the people that are, you know, just putting shots on goal where volume is, is the goal.

Like, just do it, like, do the thing and, you know, don't judge yourself based on the outcome of that thing. Right? Like, we still want to be. You know, hold our stint nerd at excellence and we want to do things excellently, but, you know, at the end of the day. The volume is what creates the capability. It isn't, you know, and I think you hold these 2 things in intention, right?

There's clarity in the volume as well that you just don't know what you don't know until you start doing

Chris Seegers: Yeah, for sure. We, we had a phrase we used for a long time that I still use, which is biased to action. You have an idea, go put it into play, like, and our team knows that when they come in, they're like, Hey, Chris, what if we tried this different thing on marketing or, Hey, what if we approach this differently?

Hey, we want to buy a business. All right, let's go buy a business. And then now it's like, we own nine businesses. We'll probably own 50 by the time we die. And we're not any smarter than anybody else. We don't have any secret sauce. We just said, Hey, let's try it. Let's buy another one. Let's buy another one.

Let's buy a different kind of business. Let's refine our processes for how we buy it. when folks ask me about buying businesses, I'm like, go pull every online listing across the nation and start doing high level due diligence. Just reviewing them. Look at the economics, look at, Hey, are they asset heavy, not asset heavy?

What industry niches? And then pretty soon your start, you're, you get a gut, right? And that's the whole thing about trusting your gut. Only trust your gut if you've had a lot of repetitions in that space. Because pretty soon your, your integrated body, mind, soul starts synthesizing data and telling you things that you can't quite tell why.

This should be diff. This is listed too high. This, that, you know, all of a sudden it's like the folks that really do volume. in my book, Selling Main Street, I tell a story. I coached two different buyers, two folks, both had capital, both were smart, both had the right processes, both wanted to buy a business.

The one person who was an engineer, he just was like analyzing every single thing, Oh, what is my LOI need to look like? And is this right? And is it the proper language and blah, blah, blah. The other person who was a female was just like, I would say, Hey, just submit offers, here's a template, just go. And she boom, boom, boom, boom, boom.

She got a business on her contract and he's still looking for a business. Now she's owned that business for almost three years and is making a pile of money and is looking to buy other businesses, same competency. Like those same people could have been successful. The only difference was that biased action and just seeing a lot more and putting it into play.

Joseph Thompson: Yeah. Yeah. No, no another kind of hedge on the idea of kind of bias to action or shotgun goal is the mental model. I think I think it's Jeff Bezos. Yeah, he has this mental model of. You know, you've got reversible actions and irreversible actions, and most of your actions are reversible, right?

And there's a spectrum. Buying a business is probably it's reversible, but it's, you know, on not as reversible as, you know, other things might be like picking your outfit for the day or whatever. And so,

Chris Seegers: picking your spouse, right? Like most important decision of your life

And that's where you're going do it. 1 thing. I'm really, really excited about.

Chris Seegers: Could I add one more lens real quick before we transition? Because I believe that 100%. So reversible actions shouldn't take a lot of time. Non reversible should take more time. The other lens that you and I have talked a lot about is moral and non moral decisions. So if you're a person of faith, I see believers all the time that get so caught up in non moral decisions.

Where they're like, I'm gonna pray about where my kids go to school and it's like, you should absolutely pray and you should get good counsel, but then you should do an action. Now if it's, hey, I'm thinking about doing something amoral, it's like, no, you can't come back from that, right? Like, if you go down, down the road and, you know, cheat on your wife or do something terrible, like, yeah, that's something that you should have, you know, taken more time, but Those moral amoral, it's like with a non moral decision for believers, I think it's like, yeah, you should pray on it, get wisdom and go.

Joseph, you were about to go

Joseph Thompson: Yeah, I mean, know, I think, know, the Bible as a book, I think, is, you know, not just a, you know, a serial text, an ancient text, you know, it's not even just a living word, but it's also a practical word. Right? I think, I think in today's world, you know. you have people even buy us away from like, oh, the Bible's on a textbook but it is practical, right?

If you want to optimize your work life, your family life, your social life, like the Bible, God has something to say about those parts of your life and really like. The punchline, which you mentioned earlier, is the idea of stewardship. Like, we are all stewarding our physical assets, our mental assets, our familial assets, our social assets, our financial assets, our spiritual assets, right?

All of it is an act that it's not ours. Right? you know, recently, I think it was even this week, this week, I've been thinking about the word resource. Right? And, and it's this idea where, you know, it's re meaning like, Yeah. Reuse, recycle, whatever, but then you've got source and like, by definition, the word is like stewardship.

You know, at the end of February, but, I'm really excited about the, landscape and what that looks like for business and for personal life and stuff like that. I mean, I think there's some hesitation and stuff like that. I think that's important as well, you know, to take technology and put it through the proper lens, but.

You know, I think I think there's going to be applications where, you know, you really do just like the kind of the good life sectors, but or the 2nd brain are all like, kind of technological. Mental models, I think I has the ability to go in and make, the time that you spend more efficient, right?

I think that space is really interesting. And so, just from a data lens, I think the whole world and some of the applications that are coming out of it are, you know, at least interesting.

Chris Seegers: Yeah, I'll give a specific area that's really interesting to me. So in the like proactive, health space, right? We have a lot of folks our age and older, younger, et cetera, that are like, Hey, I don't want to treat a symptom. I want to know what I need to do to have a healthy body. And one of our really dear friends went through a struggle where it was like physical issues, mental issues, health issues with her and her kids and her family.

In fact, one of my friends who is at the oil and gas conference, you and I were at. Gave me the same stories like, yeah, we didn't know why we were sick for two years and then finally somebody, but it's a specialist doctor that only knows about this type of mold that knew we had to treat it these different ways that all of our family thinks we're crazy because we're doing these different things than just traditional medicine.

And so, like, as we can get all that data set together and say, all right, now we've got one thing that tests all the things. Then it's, I mean, people with sleep issues, my brother struggled with sleep issues forever. He's tried diet things and all kinds of different things, and he still can't figure out what's the core problem.

Joseph Thompson: Yeah, I mean, brain. I would say, uh, offload offload your ram, be more present. You know, I I think that's a desire that all of us have. But the, you know, the idea is like, how do you practically do that? And at least for me, that's 1 way that I've practically found the ability to be more present and less less in my own head.

goal live

Chris Seegers: love it. Joseph. I love you, brother. You're such a dear friend. Thanks for sharing all the wisdom and taking

Joseph Thompson: it it

Chris Seegers: I'll have you on again and we'll do this down the road.

Appreciate you brother

Joseph Thompson: man. Appreciate you.

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