What happens when you spend years learning how to lead, knock on 9,000 doors, and discover that the conversations happening face-to-face are dramatically different from the conversations happening online? In this episode of Leading Visionaries, host Anjel B. Hartwell sits down with Christopher Rivers, former Army Officer and author of You Shouldn’t Have to Kill to Get Ahead.

Christopher shares what he learned from knocking on thousands of doors, why he believes meaningful change starts with everyday conversations, and how his book became the foundation for a larger mission to make complicated policy and political conversations more approachable.

You'll also hear how Christopher is turning his ideas into multiple formats, including an audiobook and digital experiences, while building a mission-driven business.

What You Will Learn:

How having a clear vision differs from being able to see the path to achieving it.

Why your vision may develop through experience rather than appearing fully formed.

How a 1% improvement mindset can help develop leadership over time.

Why leadership is built through consistent personal growth rather than a single workshop or title.

What Christopher learned from knocking on 9,000 doors during his political campaigns.

How information overload can make it harder to find the information needed to make good decisions.

Why face-to-face conversations can help people navigate disagreement and different perspectives.

Two questions that can create more productive conversations around difficult issues.

How a book can become the foundation for a larger mission-driven business.

Why entrepreneurs need to meet people where they are and create multiple ways for people to engage with their ideas.

How speaking, books, digital products, and educational tools can become revenue streams for a mission-driven organization.

FAQ:

How does the 1% mindset help develop leadership?

The 1% mindset focuses on becoming a slightly better version of yourself each day. Christopher Rivers believes that consistently improving yourself over time can develop the discipline, experience, and personal growth required for leadership.

What can knocking on 9,000 doors teach you about leadership?

Knocking on 9,000 doors created an opportunity to speak directly with people across different political perspectives. Those conversations showed Christopher that many people's personal concerns and conversations were different from the broader conversations happening through media and online platforms.

How can people have better conversations when they disagree?

Two questions can help create more productive conversations: "What would you have to see to change your mind?" and "How would you feel if it happened to you?" These questions encourage people to consider whether they are genuinely open to new information and how an issue might affect them personally.

Connect with Christopher Rivers

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LVP 152 Christopher

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Now, here's your host, Anjel B. Hartwell

Anjel: Welcome to another episode of the Leading Visionaries podcast, where we celebrate the ingenious, insightful, innovative, and inspired leading visionaries of our time, and provide our listeners with world-class examples of the kind of courage, clarity, and confidence it takes to bring visions into reality.

His career spans military leadership, US diplomacy, corporate strategy, and a run for state office where he knocked on 9,000 doors to hear directly from the people he hoped to serve. He's the author of You Shouldn't Have To Kill To Get Ahead, a powerful blend of lived experience, leadership lessons, and a clear-eyed look at why so many Americans feel stuck and what it would take to rebuild a country where everyone has a fair shot.

Christopher: It is so great to be here. I'm looking forward to it.

Anjel: Excellent. Well, I, I like to start our conversations talking either about leadership or vision, and since you've got quite a long leadership legacy, I think we're gonna start with vision.

So I'm curious, for you, were you the kid who had vision and, you know, now you have turned into the adult that brings visions into reality? Or has acquiring vision been something that came as you matured?

Christopher: You know, when I think about vision, I think about two parts of it, and one part is how clear is that vision in your own head, and then how far...

Outside of anything particularly faith or religious related, just the act of helping people I loved, and I wanted to try to find a way to do that all through my life. I, however, because I grew up in a lower income family, didn't have the ability early on to see far down the road. I got to see my dad, who was a great industrial mechanic, my mom, who did temp work, and it's hard to see, like, how you're going to put a life together helping people when the best examples you have around you, and, you know, this is pre-internet age, pre everyone having a smartphone age, for those listening.

Anjel: Mm. Beautiful. Well, two quick questions. Number one is where in New England, and, uh, and then I'll ask the second one.

Christopher: Yeah, so I grew up in a town called Naugatuck, Connecticut. It's sort of in central Connecticut.

Anjel: Okay, great. You know, the second question is really about this idea of you said when you were growing up, we, you didn't have the internet, you didn't have the smartphone, so the only things that you saw were whatever you were exposed to in your immediate environment.

Christopher: Yeah, I think I'm gonna turn a cliche sort of on its head and butcher this metaphor a bit. But- Mm-hmm ... you know, there's sort of this idea that you can either be a mile wide and an inch deep or an inch wide and a mile deep. And I think for those of us who grew up pre-internet age, based on what you saw from your parents, your grandparents, your aunts, uncles, your neighbors, you got to see what their life was like in sort of a mile deep.

But you only got an inch wide because you only got the people you were accessed to. And oh, by the way, if you're gonna look at an entire society, it's sort of inherently unfair. Like, if you're on the lower end of the income ladder, you really only get to see who you're immediately related to or your friends and your small little network.

There's still only 24 hours in a day. There's still only so much attention you can put to it as a human being. And so most people, instead of being an inch wide and a mile deep on a couple options, are an inch deep and a mile wide, and you can't go any wider no matter how much more information's at your fingertips.

And I actually kind of feel like, and I do a lot of work with education now as a sort of consultant trying to make it better for students, and it's just, it is harder to navigate now than it ever was before the internet. And it's weird, and it's counterintuitive because you think, well, every answer you have for every question that you wanna ask is in your hand in your smartphone.

Anjel: Yeah. Well, and now that's gonna just segue us right into leadership, which in my mind, leadership, you know, one of the key tenets of leadership is making good decisions. So I'd love to have you speak a little bit about your leadership journey. Were you the kid who was kind of the natural leader, or was leadership something that kind of emerged for you through your military service or through your educational career or, you know, even later?

Christopher: Yeah, it really, for me, the military career is really where I started to identify as a leader. In my family, I grew up, I'm the youngest of three children, then my dad got remarried, I was sort of the middle of five children for a while. No real organic leadership role, and I was always in my own organic family.

And it served me well for not getting the negative attention that I didn't wanna get, right? It allowed me to really take some time to explore what I really liked and to figure things out for myself. And that paid off dividends once I got in positions where, you know, as I grew up and got in shape, and then was in positions where lives are on the line, decisions have to get made.

And because I did all that hard work and didn't really get any gratification for it for a very long time, I mean, like, once you get used to that delayed gratification, you really can take on the, "I'm willing to work at improving myself for years and years and years at a time." And all of a sudden you look around and you realize there's actually no one better to do, to lead than you.

Ooh. But for me, the breakout was in military service where there is this hierarchy where you can't get around, and especially coming out of West Point as an officer, you are the leader. That's your job. Mm. You can't get around it, and so you just start to embrace it

Anjel: Right. Okay, great. So let's talk about how you led yourself into becoming an author.

Like, where did that come from?

Christopher: So, and this goes back to just me trying to help people, and that's why I wanted to run for office. My party affiliation is probably the least important thing about me, but we have a political system. If you want to try to influence policy at any level, you have to run for office, so you have to do it as a member of a party.

And if you, like, are a policy nerd reading the sort of research papers, you'll see, like, there's actually a lot of good thought leadership, and the answers that we need aren't, like, hard to come up with. They're not even anything new we need to come up with. And seeing that disconnect between knowing that there are answers to the problems that everyone I'm talking to has, but we're not talking about at the national level said, "I need to put this all in one place and just get it out to people," and that's where the book idea came from.

Anjel: Mm-hmm. Beautiful. Well, obviously you have you know, taken and done some significant research by knocking on 9,000 doors, no doubt about it. I wanna talk more about the book, but we're so close to the break. What I think I'm gonna do is take an early break and come back, and we'll dive in a little bit more deep.

At Creative Age Consulting Group, we work with visionary founders and seasoned leaders to monetize their vision, expertise their leadership, or further capitalize on what they've already built. Our Big Money Business Strategy Intensive is our introductory engagement designed to provide clarity about the revenue-amplifying strategy required to move forward.

We might as well shout out to our listeners in both Iraq and Afghanistan because our guest was in both of those places, as well as to our listeners in French Polynesia, which sounds like a great place to go. And we will be right back with Christopher Rivers

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So it's one thing to have an idea for a book, it's another thing to bring a book into life, which you have done. And so I'd love to hear what your vision is now for this book, and I'm very curious about the title. So tell us a little bit first about the title, and then where you'd like to see this book go and how you'd like, it to be impacting the, the readers who have the opportunity to read it.

And it just seems crazy to me that the richest country in the history of the world has that as a primary path, and I wanted to show people with my own life story what that actually looks like, because I don't think we talk about it enough. And then the second part of the book is diagnosing how do we get to now politically, where so many people are asking for change and the economic system seems to keep getting more and more out of balance to the point where people are working more hours per day, they're producing more per hour and earning less for it than basically any time in American history.

And people are quite literally at the point, if you look at the stats of the deaths of despair and other stats that we don't really like to look at, but people are quite literally working themselves to death. At the same time, the corporate earnings across the country are exponentially growing, and at the same time, our national debt is exponentially growing.

And then by the time I finished writing the book about a year later, it was one in three. And that to me is a massive alarm to say, like, the system itself is broken. And I put the entire last section or part of the book is all about how do we fix it? How do we look back at our own American history and say, "What has already worked?

We could just show up to vote and do it through the institutions we have, and demand them to be better. I'm not here advocating for the status quo by any means. And so that's the three different ways the title is reflected in the three different parts of the book, and I hope that when people pick it up and read it, one, it is written in a way where my mom and all my aunts who don't have the education I have can just understand the major points that tends to hide behind jargon.

And it-- we have to stop thinking that the four hundred and thirty-five members of the House of Representatives or the hundred senators or the person that happens to be in the White House at the time is gonna solve it for the rest of us. Like, true change at a country level comes from popular will starting to say, "I think we can do better than what we're doing now," and that has a role for everyone to play a leadership role in.

Anjel: Well, you know, in our, in the first part of this conversation we talked about, you know, the difference between before the internet and after the internet.

Christopher: Mm-hmm.

Anjel: Right? And you mentioned that in your book you've done your best to clarify the points that are behind the jargon. I've heard and seen around the internet that Americans are the most propagandized people on the planet.

from this jargon and, and really get to the point?

And in the sort of technology systems we have now, we don't have a single source of information like we used to in the pre-internet age. We don't have the nightly news that everyone huddles up and sees anymore. And there's pros and cons to that. There's things we can solve. But to get to the... So that first point is just reinforcing, yes, it's a real problem.

The second point is the other place you see it as a real problem is in the labels that we use. And even on the face of it, it doesn't make sense. The Conservative Party in the United States isn't trying to conserve anything. They have not been trying to conserve anything for quite some time, and they're open about that.

It's, and these terms just don't really mean anything anymore, but yet we always use them to say, "What team are you on?" is really what we're saying. Mm-hmm. And the last point that actually gets to the solution of it is it is amazing with social media algorithms how easy it is for them, for the algorithms themselves to feed you what you want to hear.

And there's other studies out there that will say by as high me click on like seven things randomly on Facebook- They won't, they, the algorithm, will know more about your political preferences than your spouse. Mm. And it is probably even better now, 'cause that research was several years old. Mm. And I think the way you overcome that is kinda go old school.

And yet, one of the basic things as human beings to live together in community is be able to disagree with each other and work stuff out. Mm-hmm. And this is where, I think Brene Brown says in her research, like, "Growth starts where comfort ends." I think we all have to get a little bit more comfortable being uncomfortable- Yeah

and to be able to talk to the people that we actually love and cherish and spent decades with in our lives, and talk this stuff out face to face. I don't think it's gonna happen online. I don't think it's gonna happen through a particular campaign. I don't think we need to wait for a knight in shining armor to come in and save us politically.

I think it really happens at the kitchen table. Mm. It really happens at the playground. It happens while you're waiting to pick your kid up. That, those conversations, and having them way more often, even though you might get set up to have some really disappointing conversations. And then if you're gonna have those conversations, the two questions I would want everyone to have in the back of their head is, first, what would you have to see to change your mind?

Well, someday you're probably gonna need the help, or someone that you care about is gonna need that help. Mm. And boy, whether it's coming out of COVID or whether it's a whole bunch of other things, it's amazing how much people's perceptions of what they have been rallying against changes as soon as it's directly impacting them.

And so-

Anjel: Oh, yeah. ...

Christopher: you don't have to wait for that impact. You could just, like, be disciplined and always ask yourself those questions. So that's the advice I would give.

Anjel: Beautiful. All right, we only have a few minutes left, Christopher, so what I'd really like to ask you now, because a lot of the people who are listening to this have founded something or they're thinking about founding something, and, you know, you've, you've gone into business for yourself.

Christopher: So my vision for the business is to make politics and policy discussions approachable to average everyday people all around the world. We're starting here in America. I started with the book as the core, getting all the big ideas into one spot that not only I believe in, but I can also, as I'm looking to staff up with volunteers or employees and whatnot, I have a really simple artifact to give them and say, "Read this.

If you believe anywhere close to this, let's game on. If you look at this and say, 'This is a whole bunch of hogwash,' then, like, probably we shouldn't be in partnership together." And then two, start making it in different modalities. Not everyone's gonna read the book. Not everyone's gonna listen to the audiobook.

And right now, a lot of people are online, and a lot of people are not reading books the way that they used to. And so for me, with my business and what we're doing with my effort in the United States, and then I do wanna take this around the world because I think a whole bunch of countries are actually struggling with very similar things that has different names, different

Like, it'll have to be, the details will have to be different, but the underneath it is very, very similar. And just start with the core ideas and then bridge out from there as you build your team and build your vision. That's what I'm doing.

Anjel: All right. Beautiful. Well, last question because this is always a pertinent question for anybody who's in a founder seat: how do you see yourself monetizing?

Like, what is your, what is your relationship ... Let me say this differently. What's your relationship with money and monetizing your own mission?

Christopher: Yeah, so it's, one, when you start with a book, it's relatively easy to start monetizing 'cause you're selling the book, so that's already happening. And then adding in the audiobook format, that's being monetized.

But it, it all stems from the core ideas in the book, and we'll just keep layering onto that as long as we keep finding, like, people and audiences that wanna receive it in different ways. And then the last thing I'll say, 'cause I think a lot of founders overlook it, speaking tour. Like, there is a lot of opportunities if you're a mission-driven organization in any way, shape, or form.

Anjel: Mm. Beautiful. I love it. All right. Well, thank you so much for being with me today, Christopher. It's been my pleasure hosting you.

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