Welcome to the potential leader lab, and I'm your host, Perry Maughmer. So here is where we Explore Experiment Evolve, and that's why I call it a lab. It's a metaphysical lab. It's a metaphorical lab. It's in an actual place, but the reason we do it is because we wanna create a better world for those we care deeply about. And so that requires that we explore concepts, experiment with behaviors, and evolve into the very best version of ourselves. So if you like what you hear, please consider doing a couple things. 1 is leave a review.

Number of stars is up to you. I want it to accurately reflect your opinion. So 1, 2, 3, 4, 5. Whatever it is, it is. There's a couple other things that are actually more important to me. 1 is if you like what you hear and you enjoy the concepts, recommend it to somebody else because, learning and growing and evolving is a group effort. It's a team sport. It's very hard to do on your own.

So if you share it with somebody, you have somebody else that's gonna join in that in that evolution with you, it becomes a lot more powerful. And then finally, if you do hear things and you think to yourself, gee, that could matter to me, the more you talk about that, the more you share it, the more you, the more you discuss the concept with somebody within 24 hours, the more likely it's gonna lock into your memory so that you can retain it because that's one of the challenges in learning. Right? We we read, we hear a lot of things, but we don't repeat them, so therefore, they don't become encoded. And what we wanna do is lay down those tracks in our brain so that those synapses connect. So with that said, let's get going. We're gonna take a little bit different track today.

We're gonna talk about a poem. And the reason we're gonna talk about

it is because it's a poem that I recently shared with some of my clients and some of my Vistage groups, and it was meaningful to them. It's meaningful to me. Gave me great pause. Kinda it kind of, it it really aligns with where I'm at right now and how I've been thinking for the past maybe 24 to 36 months.

And it kinda struck a chord with me. So I thought it'd be yeah.

I don't know. I don't I have no idea if it'll be beneficial, but I think it will. And I guess I just wanted to go ahead and share it because I think it's something that's very powerful, and it and it did it did create something very different for me. So the the, poem is actually called The Valuable Time of Maturity by Mario de Andrade. And he was a Brazilian poet, novelist, musicologist, art historian, critic, and photographer.

And he lived from 18/93 to 1945. Right? So here's the thing.

What does it mean to fully understand the value of time? That's that's the question, and this poem by Andrade touches those themes of kind of self reflection, prioritization, and the overall concept of maturity. And I will say we're gonna dive into some possibly uncomfortable truths about time, choices, and and what it means to really live fully. Because we need to stop wasting time because there are some brutal truths around maturity and leadership, And I love that phrase, brutal truth. We actually do an exercise. I do it with a lot of my Pinnacle clients, and it's called the brutal truths, the brutal facts. And it brings out a lot of really great conversations among leadership teams. So I want you to kinda sit back. I'm gonna I'm gonna read a little bit of the poem.

I'm gonna ask some questions. We're gonna talk about it a

little bit. So I'm just gonna read through the poem all

at once because I want you to hear the whole thing, and I hope I do it justice.

Here we go. I've

counted my years and discovered that I have less time to live going forward than I have lived until now. I have more past than future. I feel like the boy who received a bowl of candies, the first ones he ate ungracious, but when he realized there were only a few left, he began to taste them deeply.

I do not have time to deal with mediocrity. I do not want

to be in meetings where parade inflamed egos. I am bothered by the envious who seek to discredit the most able to usurp their places, coveting their seats, talent, achievements, and luck. I do not have time for endless conversations, useless to discuss about the lives of others who are not part of mine. I do not have time to manage sensitivities of people who, despite their chronological age, are immature. I cannot stand the results that generates from those struggling for power. People do not discuss content, only the labels. My time has become scarce to discuss labels. I want the essence.

My soul is in a hurry. Not many candies in the bowl. I want to live close to human people, very human, who laugh at their own stumbles and away from those turned smug and overconfident with their triumphs, away from those filled with self importance, who does not run away from their responsibilities, who defends human dignity, and who only want to walk on the side of truth and honesty. The essential is what makes it worthwhile. I want to surround myself with people who knows how to touch the hearts of people, people to whom the hard knocks of life taught them to grow with softness in their soul. Yes. I am in a hurry to live with intensity that only maturity can bring. I intend not to waste any part of the goodies I have left.

I'm sure they will be more exquisite than most of which so far I've eaten. My goal is to arrive to the end satisfied and in peace with my loved ones and my conscience. I hope that your goal is the same, because either way, you will get there too. So that is the valuable time of maturity. So now,

time as currency, we trade it. We constantly trade money and time. But I wanna point out, at some point, you do flip. Right? The one line I'll point out is I have more past than future.

It's just a fact. Right? I have more past than future. I'm speaking in the present tense. I do. And I feel a lot of what Andrade said here. And it it does change things. It in a very positive, to me, a very positive uplifting way because you start to see things far more clearly. You start to do all the things Andrade said here about who you're gonna spend time with, what things you wanna be involved in.

It it gives you the power, the confidence, the clarity, the desire to do those things. And it really is about time because when you say I have more past than future, then what is in front of you becomes far more valuable than what's behind you. And you do, and I love his his metaphor about the candy in the bowl. The things taste different because there's less of them. The moments you wanna savor because there are

fewer of them. When you truly think about how many more years do I have theoretically.

I mean, I realize none of us know. But when you get to a certain age, you do start to know, if nothing else, you have far more past than future. And and I and I it also leads up to a certain point in our lives, and this and, again, I I'm a big fan of things that scale. And, Miyamoto Musashi in the book of 5 rings written somewhere I'm gonna get this wrong. I think it was in the it might have been in the 1200, might have been the 800 BC. He wrote this book called the book of 5 rings, and in it, there was this wonderful line from one thing no 10000. And so I love these concepts that we can grasp onto and apply at a micro, macro level and that apply across all ports of our life, our personal life, our business, whatever.

Right? And this thing of simplification is one of those things because we, as a people, tend to complicate things.

We tend to make things more complicated than they need to be in order to justify our knowledge and understanding. Because if we can understand them and they're more complicated, that makes us smarter, which increases our ego and so on and so

forth. But remember what Andrade said.

He wants people who laugh at their own stumbles. We don't have to know. And so at some point, we do wanna simplify things. We get the urge, and this may not strike everybody. Right? But think about it organizationally too. We wanna strive for things to be as simple as they can be, just not simpler. Right? The more complicated we make things, the harder it is. The harder it is to scale, the harder it is to teach, the harder it is to engage other people.

And to be quite candid with you, most things are far more simple than we make them. I mean, we're still reading Socrates. We still quote the stoics. We still quote all of these people that were 1000 of years ago that came up with these concepts that truly haven't changed. I mean, you can go back to there's nothing new. There's just new spin on old stuff. Right? You wanna bring it into the current world and make it relative again. I get that.

But those words, you know, Heraclitus, who said you

can never step in the same river twice because it's never the same river and you're never the same person. There's no there's no need to update that. There's no need to update Plato and Socrates. There's not even, you know, Nietzsche, Kierkegaard,

you know, the list goes on and on. Those great thinkers, those those those folks, Simone de Beauvoir, they're they're all they you know, she knew what she was talking about. And then you think about these these these concepts, you know, time is currency, simplification versus complication, quantity over quality. I mean, how often do you have that argument at work? How often do you have that argument with yourself? Is it about how much or how great they are? Is it about the quality of what you do or the quantity of what you do? Is it about the quality of the revenue or the quantity of the revenue? It's amazing because we know these concepts. These themes that Andrade used span the ages, and they work at an individual level, at a small company level, at a large company level, at a at a at a, you know, a a national level for nations. And where do we put our focus?

Because be what we focus on is is what we live. What we attend to is is our world.

Our personality will create our personal reality. We don't we don't see the world as

it is. We see it as we are. These are choices.

Time and currency, simply sim simple or complicated, quantity, quality, they're all choices. They're all choices we're empowered to make. He has this whole section in here, the things he doesn't wanna do, doesn't wanna deal with mediocrity, inflamed egos, people that try to discredit others, covet seats, endless conversations, useless to discuss about the lives of others. There's a great saying in most companies that are really good, we discuss things, not people. And we only talk about people if they're in

the room. We talk with them, not about them. Again, simple. Not a complicated concept. Shut it down. Somebody comes in your office and says, I got a problem with so and so. Okay. Well, let me get them in here so we can talk about it.

Just stop the conversation. Simple, not complicated, but can you do it?

I mean, I was in a discussion yesterday with a group of people, and we were talking about this very thing where the question was, how do we do this? How do we bring these things to the forefront? And the question is, you just do. You know when the opportunity in a meeting with group of people when somebody says something and you know full well what they mean and you just gloss by it because you don't have the energy. Understand? There's no judgment involved, but you do have to own that decision. I mean, do just think about this stanza. People do not discuss content, only the labels. My time has become scarce to discuss labels. I want the essence. My soul is in a hurry.

Not many candies in the bowl. The whole poem, those six words, my soul is in a hurry. I think it would do us well if all of our souls were in a hurry for the right things. I want to live close to human people, very human, who laugh at their own stumbles and away from those turned smug and overconfident with their triumphs, away from those filled with self importance.

Aren't we all?

In in some way, shape, or form, aren't we all filled with self importance? We're all trying to find. So, you know, the great existential thinkers all said the same thing. Our our entire life is geared to help

us avoid death,

is what they say, to deal with the uncertainty that are surrounds death, to deal with the end. And so a lot of that means we have to make ourselves special because special people, we have to have some meaning in our life that makes sense of being here. That it can't just be we're thrown our throneness, which is a existential term, we're thrown into the world, we didn't choose to be born, then we then essence precedes existence precedes essence. So we didn't we didn't have an essence when we came into the world. So we we create our meaning by our actions.

You know, we have that power. We choose. So we create meaning, then we die. But our entire life is trying to make meaning of why we're here. That's that's what the existential concept of absurdity is. Right? It's the absurdity of our existence. And I know this is gonna be off putting for some folks. I get it.

You you don't have to align with what I'm talking about. But the concept is very interesting because if

you think about our entire life as trying to give meaning to the life so that there's some meaning in death. And by the way, this has taken a turn for the morose. I understand that. But it's okay. I don't I don't view it as morose. I view it as very empowering. It I don't know why we don't talk about it more openly because it's coming for all of us. Though I forget who said it, but, you know, nobody get I the one thing I do know is nobody gets out

alive. Right?

But we do have this time to make meaning with other people. Another another concept in existential world is relatedness. We only create meaning through others, with others. We don't do it on our own, and that that's what Andrade said here. My soul is in a hurry. I wanna live close to human people, very human. He doesn't just say I wanna close to human people. He follows it up with very human, who laugh at their own stumbles, who do not run away from their responsibilities, who defends human dignity, and who only want to walk on the side of truth and honesty.

The essential is what makes life worthwhile.

The essential. Everybody's gotta figure that part out for themselves. What is essential for you? Make those decisions. Be intentional. As we go through life, this it's you know, Cervantes said the journey is the end. Probably one of the things I quote most often. The journey is the end. That's one

of the reasons I hate goals. I hate them with a passion. It's it's not what you wanna achieve in life. It's who you become along the way.

That's what matters. Because really, nobody that you care about and

that cares about you give a shit about what you've accomplished in your life. They care about you because of who you are, because of what you mean to them.

We we know this. We all know this. You don't care about any of your loved ones for what they've accomplished, or how much money they earn, or

how what kinda car they drive, or what neighborhood they live in, or or what house they have, or what if they have a pool, or if they have a boat, or if they you don't you don't love people more or less because of those things. You love them for who they are. And beyond that, who they are to

you, with you.

And if they lost all that stuff, you'd still love them the same way, maybe even more. But yet, most of our lives are filled with the desire to go get those things because somehow that's gonna make us happy. And topic for another day, but we'd all be better off to avoid being happy and and pursue a eudaimonic life.

One filled with meaning and purpose instead of happiness. Because happiness, it's really funny. The root word of happiness is luck, chance.

And that's, you know, happiness ensues from the pursuit of something meaningful. It isn't the goal. So when you think about when you think about all this, the the when you think about Andrade's thoughts, what are you holding on to that no longer serves you? Have you ever asked yourself that? Where in your life

are you spending time without intention? Where are you just throwing that resource? If you thought about time and money,

if you thought thought about the same way, do you just indiscriminately spend money? Just throw money out the window? Or are you very selective about what you spend money on because of the value associated with what you get? Shouldn't we do the same thing with our time? Shouldn't we actually be more selective with our time than with our money?

Because far as

I know, we can make more money. We cannot make more time. And you realize that when your soul is in a

hurry. Because the other thing, time is relative. So once you become aware, time moves faster.

The days, the weeks, the months, the years go quicker.

It's an amazing thing, you

know, the relativity of time. But I really do think if we all sat down and thought, what are we holding on to that no longer serves us? If we become intentional about each phase of our life, our own evolution, what

are we exploring? What things can we experiment with? How do we evolve

intentionally? And it really to me, this the the whole the whole concept of authenticity and existentialism is is really about what Andrade was writing about.

It's getting down. It's as as my as my pastor used to say, shucking it down to the cob. We come from a rural area. He

would say, we're we're really gonna shuck this down

to the cob. But do we do that enough? And I don't think we do because, let's be honest, it's good. It's uncomfortable.

Like, to really distill your life down to what's meaningful and then make decisions based on that. If you realize there are a few candies left in the bowl,

what would you do? And I've I've

always said death is a death is the ultimate clarifier. It can do in a heartbeat what you can't do for years. Now here's the kicker. You don't have to have it be that way. I don't want you to have it be that way. You can do that today, tomorrow, every day. You can live with that type of absolute clarity if you choose. Don't wait until you're forced to

because you're missing those things. Every day, you have a choice.

Every single day, you get to choose how you spend your day, how you spend your time, what you do and don't do, what you say and don't say. And as we know, we're always we always have a choice even if it's not the choice we want. So we have to accept that and own that. So I get it. Can't choose everything, but you can choose within parameters. So what are you choosing? And is it aligned with what you want most? Because as, you know, as he so eloquently said, I hope that your goal is the same because either way, you will get there too, And we will.

He wants to live with intensity that only maturity can bring. And this is not this is not age. This is maturity of soul, and being mature enough to say no, and put up boundaries.

And I think those are the the concrete actions that I take away from this that I'm gonna share with you as a way to kind of move on from this and and and do something with it. I'm gonna talk about these 4 practical takeaways. Number 1, audit your time. Just do it for a week. Think about where you spend your time, and then think about if that's reflective of where you wanna spend your time. If it is, awesome. That's amazing. If it's not, then make some different decisions.

Just do a do an audit for a week. Just block out and say, where am I spending my time? The whole day, not just your workday. I'm talking about your entire life. How are you spending your time for a week? And then the next one is an ongoing conversation I've had for years with people is say no more

often. If everything's important, nothing's important.

So there was a phrase I learned, years ago, the vital few should never be at the should never be lost at the expense of the trivial mini. So what are you what are your vital few? The you pick them, they're yours. There's no universal. You pick it. And it changes. You gotta keep re picking them because your life changes. Right? But you have to have a process to which you keep identifying these vital few things, and I love that vital few. These vital few things in your life, and then let the trivial many fall away.

Number 3 is go deeper with people. Seek deeper connections.

Don't don't be a

rock skipping across the surface. Aim for deep. Your in your in your work, at home, with your friends, hear, think, and feel, and talk deeply.

And finally act your way into being. I mean, this is the core of existentialism. All this out

of your time practice saying no and seep deeper connections. All of those things are actions act your way into being. Once you've identified that vital few, take action, act your way into being. That's the freedom you have against an absurd life. And I want you to I would love for you find this poem. You can just Google it, the valuable time of maturity.

Read it. Read it out loud to yourself. You don't have

to be around anybody else. Just read it out loud to yourself. Okay? And then just sit and see what bubbles up.

See what happens if you read this poem and you just sit and think for 3 minutes.

That's it.

Just what do you feel? What do you think? And then write it down. Do me a favor. Write it down. Don't just think it, don't just feel it, memorialize it. Write it down in your journal. Nobody else has to see this, but be honest with yourself. Be quiet and be honest.

And then ask yourself this question, what choice will I make tomorrow? The Valuable Time of The Valuable Time of Maturity by Mario de Andrade is the name of the poem. And remember, it's not about having the right answers, it's about asking the right questions. So until we get together next time, keep searching for those questions.