The Entrepreneur Breakthrough Lounge podcast episode features an enlightening conversation with Dave Feidner, a certified EOS Implementer and seasoned entrepreneur.

Dave shares his journey from his humble beginnings delivering newspapers in Vermont to becoming a key player in building a global business empire.

Throughout the discussion, Dave emphasizes the importance of learning from mistakes, hiring smarter individuals, and maintaining a perspective of gratitude.

He recounts the challenges and triumphs of his career, including a pivotal moment during the September 11 attacks that tested his leadership and resolve.

Dave's insights into maintaining objectivity, leveraging peer support, and the transformative power of gratitude resonate deeply with listeners, offering valuable lessons for entrepreneurs at any stage of their journey.

Takeaways:

• Entrepreneurship often requires taking risks and stepping out of your comfort zone to achieve growth and success.
• Finding and hiring people who are smarter than you is crucial for significant business growth.
• Peer groups like EO and YPO provide invaluable support and perspective for entrepreneurs facing challenges.
• Objectivity and outside perspectives are essential for seeing the true state of your business and making informed decisions.
• Gratitude and focusing on the present can lead to happiness and optimal performance in life and business.
• Building strong relationships and networks can support entrepreneurs through tough times and help them succeed.

Connect with Dave:

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/david-feidner/

Website: https://www.eosworldwide.com/dave-feidner

If you're a solopreneur or small business owner who wants to achieve business success without sacrificing your relationships, well being, or happiness, you are in the right place.

This is the entrepreneur Breakthrough Lounge podcast where your host, certified business coach and media strategist RJ Parrish, and successful guest entrepreneurs share their experiences and insights to help you succeed without making the same mistakes they did.

Please enjoy the show.

All right, Dave, paint the picture for me.

Where did your career in business first start delivering newspapers?

and on the coldest day of my life, which was, I believe, 60 below zero.

Who would do such a crazy thing?

Not a lot of eleven year olds these days, that's for sure.

So that was your first foray into entrepreneurship?

You got your own paper route.

I got my own paper route.

I want to say that I paid fifteen cents per newspaper and I sold them for 25.

It was a program that the local newspaper in my town, which was Burlington, Vermont, they called the gym program, which was j I m junior independent merchant.

So, I mean, it was child labor and so we were unemployable.

But it was a way of getting the newspapers delivered.

And you had these young kids and I don't know, there appeared to be no age limit, you know, so an eleven year old could do this, but I did it from age eleven until I think, age 15.

And I will tell you that Saturdays and Sundays were my favorite days of the week for a long time, simply because they did not have a Saturday and Sunday newspaper.

And then they started a Sunday newspaper as well.

And that paper was like that thick versus the rest of the week.

So not only did I have to get up on Sundays as well, but the load in terms of what I had to carry was that much.

and I had to get up and go get the newspapers and deliver them house to house.

It sounds terrible as far as it sounds awful even now.

So you did that until 15.

Where did you leave that wonderful gig, your little newspaper empire, for something better?

I said, screw this.

And I think it got outlawed at some point in time because I know it doesn't exist anymore, but it went away.

So it was a long time ago.

Yeah.

The worst part, I don't know if the worst part was doing that or collecting money because I had to go around and collect money from people as well.

And people could find all kinds of reasons to not pay an eleven year old kid a dollar for their newspapers for the past couple of weeks.

And you had to figure out how to get money from people.

So that was my start.

Yeah.

Any like terrible horror stories of having to track down and like, you know, steal their potted plants or something, hold them as ransom to get your $2 they owed you?

No, I just stopped delivering to some of them.

The other problem was that sometimes I would forget to deliver a newspaper to a house.

It's just, you know, something about slogging it through the dark of a winter morning in Vermont because it was usually dark and it was cold and you know, sometimes the houses were the way the neighborhoods were.

You would just kind of go from this house to the next house and you would forget that, oh, there's this long driveway that goes to this other house and somehow you would forget that person and oh my God, I would get home and the phone would start ringing and I was like, oh shit, you know, or, oh, why do I have three newspapers left in my bag?

So that was the start.

Yeah.

That's where you cut your entrepreneurial teeth.

Then that was it.

What it was like, yeah.

So what?

From there, I know eventually you branched out to much bigger things.

Where was the first real step into, I won't say real business because it was, I mean, that's probably the realest business, if we're being honest.

But when you stepped into your career really started?

Oh, you know, I did like a series of odd jobs from that point.

Forward.

Into college and most of them sucked.

And so, but I was, I mean, I was a learner.

I am a learner.

I'm a lifelong learner.

I love education.

So college was definitely something that I was doing and needed to do.

I enjoyed it.

But when I got college, I felt unemployable.

I just like seeing friends going off and going through interviews and getting into this company and that company and I'm like, it just felt wrong to me and I just, every one of those things I went to, I think the big thing was I wanted to control my destiny.

I wanted freedom to make my own decisions about things.

And by just absolute sheer luck, I ended up landing a job with a company that was a family owned company and very entrepreneurial in nature where you were able to come in on the ground floor and immediately take responsibility for building a business within a business.

And that's how I got started.

It just, everything clicked, and it was about going out, and here's a region that's yours, go build a business there.

And, okay, go out and get customers, go out and hire people.

They gave you the technology and all the other stuff that you needed, but it was, there was an enormous amount of freedom.

And within the box that was constructed, it worked in a way that it would not have worked if I had done any of the stuff that my friends were doing.

Yeah.

And into an environment where you were able to flex that entrepreneurial inclination, where you had the freedom, to an extent, to kind of do things the way you wanted to do them within certain parameters, you had some resources to do it, and then you got to just go and hone those skills.

Yeah.

And also, I have a travel bug in me.

I don't know.

This might have come from my parents because they took us overseas when I was a kid and we lived for a period of time in Europe.

So I'm a bit of a travel nut, adventure seeker.

And this job offered that opportunity to do it.

So I went from my hometown of Burlington, Vermont, to Albany, New York, and helped build a business there.

And then I went from there to New York City and opened an office and started to build a business there until I made it the largest one in the company.

And they said, okay, go take over.

Go do this region over here and build that out.

And so I started opening offices and hiring a shitload of people.

And then I got very close with the owners and the founder visionary of the business.

One night at a restaurant did one of these things to me, and he said, I'd like you to come to Michigan.

And it just so happened that he was mentoring this young woman that I had fallen in love with, and he knew that.

So he enticed me with both love and money, and I moved to Michigan.

And it was a few years later that I had developed a close enough relationship with them that I was able to convince them to let me take the business global.

And then I left the US and started launching and building companies using their money.

Yeah.

Until ultimately that circle got closed because a group of investors came along and they enticed me to join with them.

And we ended up buying the family out, and I became a part owner in the business.

And then we started doing crazy things and really took off and built it into what ultimately became the world's largest provider of that business at its peak.

What did that look like in terms of countries represented?

How do you quantify it.

So it's peak.

It's like today it still exists.

It's an international business.

We went through a whole bunch of different private equity transactions and restructurings and things.

The US business ended up running into some serious headwinds because the primary client base was retail.

The international business, which was the piece that I built, ended up becoming this collection of entrepreneurial companies that in some cases I had started from scratch.

I went to France and opened a business in France.

Who thinks of doing stuff like that?

Well, I came up with an idea and a way to do it and we did it.

But ultimately a lot of buying a lot of companies, a lot of small entrepreneurial, family based companies and just aggregating them together.

So it ended up today I want to say that business is probably doing around 350 million in revenue and it exists heavily in Europe, Latin America, and a bit in Asia Pacific area.

But it's a wonderful group of many former owners of businesses that were purchased are still running those businesses today within that organization.

So that's essentially where I really found my love of working for entrepreneurs, because had to get those folks on board, had to find a way to integrate them into this family of companies that we were creating, and I ultimately had to become one of them as well.

Yeah.

What was the growth trajectory of when you first came in family business to now that ballpark, 350 million.

What was that growth like?

Yeah, so the whole organization, we ended up doing a transaction with a big private equity company.

We sold to the Blackstone Group.

I want to say our peak revenue as a global organization, US, everything was probably around 700 million or so.

And then the us piece just started to slide.

International peace continued to climb.

When I launched the international piece, I mean, it was pennies.

It was nothing.

I mean, it was zero in Europe.

It was damn close to zero in Latin America.

I mean, it was small, but within probably six years or so, six, seven years, got it up to 100 million.

That was the.

That was sort of the first phase of growth.

Yeah.

What do you think?

What led to that?

Like, if you had to, you know, looking back in hindsight, what were the two or three things, if any, stand out to you that you did to have that kind of significant growth?

I found people who were smarter than me and hired them.

I got attracted to YPO.

I never became a member of YPO, but I got introduced to the concept and I found a couple of individuals who were YPO members who were way smarter or more ambitious than me.

And I said, okay, here you go, you take that piece.

And they.

A lot of it was built basically under their tutelage.

I will say some of them took way bigger risks than I would have taken if I had tried to do it myself.

But the right people taking chances on folks, that was it.

Because I learned very quickly on I could not do this myself.

I needed to find people, and I took a lot of Americans on expatriate assignments and sent them off into other countries.

And that worked kind of for a little bit.

But ultimately, I had to find folks that were there in those countries and give them whatever resources that they need and just let them do their thing.

I was very controlling at one point and very believing that things had to be done a certain way.

And when I started to loosen up on that and just say, you know what, UK is the UK?

France is France.

Germany is Germany, Brazil is Brazil.

You guys just figure it out.

Here's the general frame, the general model, but you figure it out.

You know your markets, you know your culture.

And ultimately, they were able to find new products and services, for example, that were totally unique and made sense for those markets that were not things that we were necessarily doing in the US.

Makes a ton of sense.

Is there anything, looking back, that you probably would have done differently?

Yes.

The one single thing is that I got introduced to Verne Harnish's Rockefeller habits, and I did not hire somebody professionally to help me with that, just tried to do it on my own.

I actually was one of these YPO guys that introduced me to it.

And so he facilitated us through and got us started, but it kind of fell apart, the discipline to do it across all those entities, we're just way, way too loose with it.

So had I been smarter and actually gone out and found somebody who could lead us through that, an outsider, that's what I would have done at the time.

EOS, which is what I do today, wasn't really well known.

I certainly didn't know about it.

But man, oh, man, if I had known about it then, and if I had found an EOS implementer, knowing what I know now, that's what I would have done.

I would have hired somebody to do precisely that.

Yeah.

What were the core thing now, having made that connection?

If I just had this, if I had someone that could have helped me get these, a couple of things right, looking back at the challenges that were probably harder than they needed to be, what are the things that would have been fixed had you had an us implementer?

Oh, yeah.

Structure.

Structure was a big piece.

I allowed an enormous amount of ambiguity around accountability for stuff.

And the structure was constantly changing.

And the mistake I made of was a common mistake.

Here's Joe running this business unit or doing this job, and you discover, or I discovered that Joe wasn't.

He was good at doing, like, let's call it 75% of it, but there was this 25% that Joe wasn't particularly good at.

And I'm like, all right, we're going to take that 25% away from Joe.

We're going to give it to Maryland.

All right, so Mary takes on that.

All right, cool.

But then you discover that there's.

Mary's got that plus some other stuff, and then there's this other stuff that it kind of messes up.

Mary's not particularly good at doing this.

Then you take that away from Mary and you give that to somebody else.

And before I knew it, I had a whole bunch of people who had jobs that were perfectly constructed for them, and they were all sleeping well at night, and I wasn't.

And that is a common dysfunction that I find with many of the companies that I work for now.

So I have total empathy for it.

So had I instead taken a completely different approach, which just says, look, here's the business.

Here's where we're going.

This is the structure that we need.

Engage them, those other leaders with me in that process of creating what that thing needed to look like, and then said, okay, who fits here?

Who fits there?

Gone through that process and just acknowledging and owning whatever issues were that emerged from it and then solving those things, I would have gotten to where I needed to be a hell of a lot faster.

Yeah.

And I think the takeaway there being, I mean, you said the same thing in two different ways.

Hiring people that are smarter than you for specific things and then having the outside perspective and skillset a professional at doing something to help you implement the things that you don't know.

Yeah.

Or that maybe you've identified, but you shouldn't be the one fixing your own problem in this.

Yes.

Objectivity to your point.

Now, it's like what I'm talking about, that piece, which is just figuring out to not go and create a perfect environment for somebody, just saying, well, we're just gonna, like, carve out a role for you and just make it perfect for you.

I mean, that part was just totally dysfunctional.

But bringing an outsider in to guide me through a process of creating that.

The big insight that I have learned, everybody learns is when you exit your company, there's a period of time where all of a sudden the noise kind of goes away, and you look back and you've got absolute clarity about what was going on there that you never could have had when you were in the midst of it.

And I subsequently learned that this has all been scientifically and mathematically proven by a gentleman named Kurt Godel back in the mid 20th century, who actually mathematically proved that you can't be both part of the system and understand it at the same time.

It is impossible for you to have pure objectivity about your own business when you are sitting in your own business and you're part of that thing.

So only an outsider, detached, can see that.

Which is why, you know, when organizations really do get into trouble and a turnaround is required, it's almost impossible for them to do it without bringing somebody in, somebody who does not have the emotional attachment to the past, somebody who can see the things that you can't see.

Yeah, I was just having a conversation within the last few weeks with someone.

They mentioned one of the biggest pieces of value that a consultant or a coach or some outside expert brings is maintaining objectivity.

That's why you can never become an employee of somewhere like you can't be there too often, because then you'll have the same issue.

You'll be too close to it, you're too attached, you're too familiar with it to be able to have the right perspective to know how to address it.

And you can work with, you know, be a fractional person, or you can be a long term consultant for somebody, but there's a level of distance you need to have for perspective to be maintained for that integrity be held.

So looking at this huge change as you stepped into this company, you built it up into this giant global beast of a company.

You exit out, you make a shift over this whole stretch, what was the highest point of your career?

All right, so two things come to mind.

One, washing.

There was a day a little while after we sold to the Blackstone group, after we had done the ex, after we had sold the business.

I'm living in London, and I'm standing there with my wife, and we were taking our distribution from the sale, and all of a sudden, I'm like, hey, honey, take a look at our bank account.

There was more money in my bank account than I had ever, at any point in time, thought I would have in my life.

So to a certain extent, that was it.

But that was.

That was a moment in time, all right?

Everybody should experience it.

Who has been a business owner?

I would say that part was memorable.

The more relevant in terms of being a peak for me has probably been seeing the people that I hired and brought in succeed.

And in one case, my successor was today the CEO of that organization, wonderful israeli guy who's way smarter than me.

Seeing what he has done with that entity today gives me an enormous amount of joy.

But several employees of mine, several folks who had worked under my tutelage, left and started their own businesses and then became my Eos clients.

And seeing them succeed today is the other thing that gives me great joy.

Yeah.

Now let's flip that on its head.

What about the low points?

I'm sure it wasn't all just rainbows and, you know, popping champagnes and launching new companies and new countries and yacht parties.

I'm sure it was.

There were some dark days.

Yeah.

So I'm actually doing a talk, and I was thinking of sharing this in an upcoming talk that I'm about to do.

Do you ever have nights when you struggle with sleeping?

Sure.

Like when there's something like just crush.

It's like the weight of the world is on you and your mind just won't stop.

This happened early on and everything was based upon a promise.

I mean, here I have enticed a family business to do something that, frankly, they didn't want to do.

I mean, in many ways I took them kicking and screaming through this process and now they had spent a bunch of money to buy a company overseas and we were about a year and a half into it and it was failing miserably and it was all on me to sort this out and figure it out.

I had reported to a board to meet me at 730 that morning.

So I got my butt in 730 in the morning.

I'm like, okay, here's the situation.

I laid it out for them, I owned it completely, and I said, this is what I believe it will fix it.

And it involved getting them on board.

And there were, what, seven of them, I think seven people that had to be on board with this thing.

And then I had to convince an american guy to take on an expatriate assignment overseas for a couple of years.

And I didn't know if it was going to be a couple of years or if it was going to be, you know, a short period of time or whatever.

I had to entice him to do this.

I managed to get this guy on the phone, and I sold him, you know, like, with it.

We talked for, like an hour, and I sold him, and he was bought in.

And I'm like, ah, great.

And I hung up the phone, and then I looked around, and for some, like, there was this eerie silence in the building.

And I'm like, what the hell is going on?

And I started to look around, and people were clustering around televisions, and I went, I looked at my laptop and I couldn't bring up my Internet feed.

The World Trade center had come down.

The terrorists had attacked.

Everything that I'd laid out that morning went to shit that day, and I couldn't get on a plane.

I couldn't do any of the things.

They all backed out of the plan.

I then had to spend the next two weeks reconstructing and reselling that entire thing to get everybody back on board with it.

And then finally, the very first flight available, when flights started flying again, I was on it, went overseas, and I fired the entire leadership team of that business.

I brought a new leadership team in, but it was like, literally either I was going to make this thing work or I was going to have to leave, because it was the family's money and I had taken down this path, and I had no idea if I was going to be able to pull it off.

But pulled it off we did.

And from that point, there were still a lot of bumps, but it was not that long.

I mean, it was in six, seven years later, we had $100 million global business, and it is today a very, very profitable business that never would have existed if we hadn't taken that step at that time.

Yeah, man.

I mean, when you're in that sort of environment, that situation, and there's just no way to know what's past the veil of stuff.

You can't control things that you don't know how it's going to play out.

If there are other people that need to do what they say they're going to do, and it becomes a little bit of a gamble or a risk, how do you feel your risk tolerance or risk aversion or your ability to kind of internalize that and make that kind of call?

How did that evolve over time?

So I am a strategic coach client.

So I've learned a lot from Dan Sullivan and my coach, Chad Johnson, and going through that program.

But one thing that I learned, I learned what it was called through strategic coach.

I experienced it through this process.

And it's the four C's of confidence.

It's basically, you're not going to have confidence to do these things if you've never done them before.

What matters is, see number one, committing to actually do it.

See number two, having the courage to take the next step.

And that's the tough part because you've got to.

Just once you're in, you're in.

And it's kind of like the Winston Churchill phrase, when you're going through hell, keep going.

But what emerges out of that is a capability.

Okay?

Now I've experienced that and now I know what this looks like and I know what I will do in that situation.

And from that, then comes the confidence to then do it again.

So that has been the repeating pattern for me, just having done it, having experienced the discomfort, but then acquiring the capability that comes from doing it.

And then ultimately the confidence is just like, that's a pattern.

You just got to keep repeating it over and over again.

And that's how you succeeded.

Yeah.

There's a lot of wisdom in that, I think, because we mystify so often of, well, I haven't done this thing before.

I don't know how it's going to play out.

And it can be at any level.

I mean, it doesn't have to be this big, multinational $100 million operation.

Even if you're running a small company, a few hundred thousand in revenue, there is equal fear.

I mean, I think there's even greater fear when you haven't made your 1st $1,000.

Just getting someone to pay you something in exchange for some.

It's that sense of overcoming that in many ways, mental barrier of just getting out of your own way.

And I love the four season for that reason.

Yeah, the four C's.

Yeah.

It's a wonderful framework because it just.

It helps you realize, like, there's just a process here.

You have to just do it.

And eventually you'll be confident because you'll have just done it enough.

You'll have proof that you've gone through it and you didn't die.

And you are probably more capable than you think.

Yeah.

So it's interesting because what happens now, it's amazing because your body understands this thing in a way that your mind does nothing.

Yeah.

So when you're in those situations, it's like you get a pit in your stomach or something, or like you get elevated, you know, your heart starts racing a bit or you're breathing or whatever that is, your body telling you that you're in that state, your mind hasn't necessarily engaged with it.

What I've now learned is, oh, that thing is happening, and it's a good thing.

That means I'm doing what I'm supposed to be doing right now, which is entering the danger, or as Eleanor roosevelt once called it, do something every day that scares you.

It's literally that, yeah, I 100% agree.

So looking at your journey, you sell this company.

Is that where you transition to private consulting and eoshdhehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehe?

Yeah.

So the wonderful thing about sort of building an organization by buying other companies is you get to work with a lot of entrepreneurs.

I mean, family businesses.

You're going in and you're convincing.

This family business, in one case it's french, another one is a German.

You know, they were all family businesses for the most part, so they had to trust you and you had to build a relationship with them.

But they were entrepreneurs, and I just loved working with these folks.

But there was so many that I was involved in sort of assessing over a long period of time that post sale, post sort of during the long exit process.

Many of them who did not end up getting purchased came calling, and they're like, hey, could you help me with this?

Could you help me with that?

You didn't buy us, but I'd really like to sell to somebody.

Could you help me with that?

And so I started helping, and it was very piecemeal work because I really didn't.

I knew kind of what they needed to do.

I wasn't an expert on this in any fashion, but I could help and point them in the right direction.

And then all of a sudden, somebody gives me this book, and I'm a big reader, and I read it, and I got to know some folks that were eos implementers, and I'm like, actually, almost every single one of them just needs what's in this book, and I'm happy to teach them that.

And that would be way easier than me trying to make up my own stuff.

And it was already figured out.

And I'm like, oh, there's a community of folks that are doing this.

So I wouldn't be on my own doing this by myself.

So that led to me joining the eos community and becoming an EOS implementer.

And I get to do now what I love to do.

I'll build a great companies, but more in a teacher facilitator.

Coach role than actually having to be the person who's going out and hiring the people and dealing with all the challenges along the way.

It is more, as Dan Sullivan would refer to it, my unique ability.

I've gone through the unique ability framework and done that work to get to the root of what my unique ability is, and it is doing this work.

So I'm in a place of peace that more so than I have ever been at any point in my life.

Yeah, you have a natural sort of tendency to want to have control over your life.

You've told me that many times.

And now in the sort of capacity by which you can help business.

I know you've said in the past that at your core you've always been a teacher and a coach.

What was it only through the unique ability assessment or what was kind of the process of self discovery of realizing this is who I am, this is what I am meant to do.

So unique ability is probably a big trigger for me.

I had to actually go through that process.

I had to go through strategic coach to do that.

But I have become obsessive about taking assessments and continuously peeling back the layers and understanding myself very, very well.

But I don't believe it is possible to control.

What I have learned is that there are the actions that I can take and that is the only thing that I can control.

Because the universe has got its own plan, God's got his own plan.

So at best, you can be a co creator.

A co creator.

And so what I choose to do is be a co creator.

There's all this stuff that's going to be outside of my control.

There's going to be, you know, the decisions that the teams that I work with are going to make on their own.

There's going to be whatever happens in the universe that I have absolutely no control over.

But I can be a co creator by getting clear about what it is that I want and getting singularly focused on steps that I can take that are at least directionally accurate with achieving that and not get too caught up on my happiness being dependent upon me actually getting to that end state.

My happiness is much more associated with me just going out every day and doing exactly what I have committed myself to doing.

An interesting point.

So usually our frame around happiness is tied to some end result.

We will be happy when x happens, when I achieve x, when I make this much money or I get this position where I sell this or whatever, or in the real unfortunate sort of dismal state of things, I'll be happy when I retire, it's not a good plan having.

I think this is something that everyone goes through, hopefully.

And the goal is to have this inner look at yourself.

I think that as soon as possible, whatever, wherever you're at today, if you haven't had the conversation with yourself doing it, because finding if happiness is tied to a desired end state, which you don't currently have, then you're making it external from yourself, and it makes it almost impossible to really achieve it, because it's just.

It's separate from yourself.

It's always going to be down the road.

Whereas if you can design or make choices where you can do the things that bring you joy, and it's just in the process of doing that is where your happiness comes from, then those are the people that you see that are actually happy, because it's all 99% journey anyways.

Oh, I've had so many epiphanies on this over the years, RJ, and you just said it magnificently.

There was a TED talk by a monk in whose name I cannot remember, but he did a talk on happiness and gratitude, and I.

It really stuck with me because, you know, there is perhaps this common perception, if you will, that, well, if you're happy, you're grateful, but actually it works exactly in reverse.

And because there's plenty of people who have all kinds of things that they should be grateful for, and they're not happy at all, and then you have other people who are just in desperate states and, you know, living a very subsistence life, and they are.

They just beam with happiness.

So a book that I did a.

Didn't read the entire book.

Again, I'm not going to get the author right on this, but it's happy for no reason is a wonderful.

I did sort of a short cliff notes version of it.

It also speaks along the lines of this exact same concept.

I also have a 91 year old mother who lives this every single day.

I talk to my mother every week, and this woman just beams with happiness and gratitude.

And I honestly cannot remember a time in my life, except perhaps when I had done something wrong and I was a kid when she wasn't, you know, just in a very good mood and very happy, and very, very grateful.

So, like, there is just going about your day and recognizing, hey, you're alive, the world is full of possibility for you.

You have no reason not to be happy.

And just going out and doing every day the very best that you can do, that's enough.

That's enough for happiness.

Why do you think in your experience people at any range of success.

Like, why does it seem so much easier to choose to be detached, frustrated, angry, when we can choose simply to be happy?

This is where the epiphany for me, if you just choose to appreciate what you have, and it's not that you can't want more, but to realize that where you are today, if you are healthy, the five to ten closest people to you are healthy and safe and secure.

Your city's not getting bombed, famine hasn't struck, you're able to eat, and you have shelter.

Outside of extreme outliers, why is it that people tend to choose an existence of either detachment and escapism or leaning the opposite way and just having this sort of negative outlook?

Do you have any thoughts on that?

Well, it's a slippery slope.

It doesn't happen overnight.

It's a learned behavior.

And there's an enormous amount of stimulation that's out there that is suggesting that you should be exactly that.

And if you succumb to it, it happens bit by bit.

It happens because now all of a sudden, I just happen to be hanging around a bunch of people who think and act that way every day.

And that behavior becomes an echo chamber that just reinforces that approach.

So you can slip into that, all of us can slip into it.

So it is, like you said, it's a choice.

If you're in an environment where there's a lot of negativity, you're going to start to model the behavior.

You're going to start to exhibit the behaviors that are being modeled around you.

If you want to be happy, be with other happy people.

You said it perfectly.

So looking at, I mean, you've seen multiple arenas of business and something that I think does not get enough attention, it's getting better.

But there's so much that still gets glossed over.

We can talk about the highlight day of you sold this company and you get this huge payout.

Amazing.

I'm sure you did some fun stuff with it in the coming days, but there's also a lot of when the stress and the uncertainty and the fear and the pressure, that feeling you mentioned when you're up at night and it feels like you're just getting crushed, you can't breathe and your heart is pounding in your chest, you're worried you're having a heart attack.

There are people that live that and don't say anything to anyone.

And a lot of them never actually get help.

They just bear it until they can't.

Or ideally, something else comes along and they go a different direction.

But there is very much, you know, at this category where people just are living this terrible existence, you know, what have you kind of seen in that realm?

Have you?

Yeah, that was me.

I was one of those people.

I learned.

So when I got introduced to YPO, I was already beyond the age, I think it was.

I was getting close to the age where I couldn't even get into YPO because I was older.

And so it was the first time I got exposed to the concept of a forum.

And I have since gotten to know and become a sponsor for EO, the entrepreneurs organization.

So getting into a peer group is the way to create a psychological bond with other people who are going through something that you're going through, and to not feel like you have to go through it alone.

So I today sponsor the Detroit chapter of EO.

I see that going on within that chapter and in the forum work.

I host forums here in my session room.

And it is a powerful, powerful way for people to expose their blind spots for people to become, to form bonds.

So there's this ancient wisdom Aristotle once articulated about friendships, and Aristotle spoke of friendships, of being of three kinds.

There's friends of utility, friends of pleasure, and there's friends of the good, friends of utility.

Most of us have friends of utility.

They're useful friends, and they're often business friends.

The problem is with those friendships, when the utility goes away, the friendship goes away.

There's friends of pleasure, and similar things happen.

When the pleasure goes away, the friendship goes away.

Then there's friends of the good, and those are friends that will help you, and that you will help them.

You have a bond with them.

And getting yourself as an entrepreneur or as a CEO into one of those groups where there are other people facing those same dark challenges is the best cure for that stuff.

Having that kind of a place to go to, that kind of a network to go to, is just massively beneficial.

Is when you are in that position and you have these pressures that are put on you by your professional obligations, in your position as a leader, or within your department, or by your board, or your investors, or whoever it might be, your clients.

There's also the pressure that you redouble around yourself, of the self inflated, of, I am a failure if I don't do this.

I am not good enough if I don't pull this off.

I said I would do this, I'm a liar if I don't.

And you run through all the doomsday scenarios of how the world is going to be on fire and you'll never recover.

If something doesn't go well, which is usually untrue, usually there's going to be an alternative, and while unpleasant, it will eventually be okay.

Yeah.

But having that external, yet again, a theme of today, of people having people to go to where you realize, oh, it's not just me.

It's not.

I am not the only one experiencing this.

He did five years ago and he turned out okay.

He actually takes weekends off to be with his kids now.

You know, he's actually home by five, and he doesn't go home and, you know, kick the dog and, you know, angry all the time and having that, like you said, that peer group, I don't know of anything else that I've experienced that can have a more meaningful impression or impact on where I'm currently at at any given point than just getting around other people and hearing their experiences.

Yeah, well, the other thing that you just expressed there was making think about the challenge that is in front of me or is in front of any of us at any given time.

We're sitting there, we're dealing with something.

All right, so there's this wonderful phrase that I've recently heard, and I can't even remember what the source of it was, but it's where we get caught up in either some belief about the past.

So we've labeled something that's happened in the past as bad, and we're carrying the burden of that.

And we've often created a story about it that actually doesn't match the reality of what actually occurred.

Because we saw it that way, other people might have seen it and experienced it inside a completely different way, or we're sitting there and we're worrying about the future and we're catastrophizing.

And in either case, we're inflicting suffering upon ourselves.

So here's the phrase.

Obsession about the past leads to depression.

Obsession about the future leads to anxiety.

However, obsession about the present leads to optimum performance.

So if you can just get yourself in the frame of mind of being neutral about these things and focusing on what needs to happen now, that's what leads to optimum performance.

There are several people that I've met recently that are just super good at doing this stuff.

There's a young man and eo that I met recently that just blows my mind at how he just is able to put himself into that frame of mind and make really, really Uber focused decisions by not catastrophizing, by just being able to be very, very thoughtful about things so I just, I try as much as possible to emulate those behaviors.

I think there's always a degree of consideration for where things are going in the future, especially if you're in a leadership role.

Right.

But I think in just an entrepreneurial sense, there is an overinflation of the importance of what's to come.

Because so often entrepreneurs are goal oriented because we just have to it's constraints.

We give ourselves targets.

We're shooting for a lot of material that generally people in our industry consume.

Teach us that sort of thing of having your targets and reverse engineer your ten year goal and put a plan in for what are you doing this weekend?

It kind of feeds into itself.

But when you put so much emphasis on the future, similar to the comment earlier about happiness, it just takes you away from right now.

An epiphany I've been having with myself recently is realizing just where I'm at in my journey.

I'm 30 years old, I've got a young daughter realizing that no matter what the next decade or two play out, as whatever happens will happen, I'm going to keep doing the things that I'm doing.

Things will play out either incredibly well or they won't.

Doesn't matter.

But I have today.

And no matter what financial success the next 20 years brings, or I know I would give it away in a heartbeat if I could come back and be here right now.

Most people don't realize that until it's too late.

So I play this game every now and then in my head when I do feel like some, I don't want to say depression, but when I do get into like a low state, okay?

And so here's the way the game works.

What I do is I say, okay, let's just put this aside for a moment, your current situation, all right?

And let's imagine a different situation.

Let's imagine a really, truly catastrophic situation.

Because you've experienced it before, you've had nightmares, right?

And where you wake up out of the nightmare and it's like it was just a dream.

So what if you had one of those situations?

It was like a terminal disease.

You knew your life was over, or you had done something really, really awful, like you had done something for which you felt like you could never be forgiven for, right?

And then you wake up, and instead of that situation existing, your current situation as it exists right now, how would you feel?

And you would be like, oh, I'd be overjoyed.

I'm like, okay, so you've got that situation.

Be happy.

And so that's the game I play that.

I love that one, because our brains are wonderful machines, but they're not very good at knowing what to focus on.

So when you give it a thing to shift your perspective and realize, you know, rather than being, you know, angry that I had to get up early this morning, traffic, whatever the thing might be, you know, that meeting was pointless.

It could have been an email.

Ah.

You know, that client has led me on and, you know, won't pay their invoice.

Whatever the thing might be.

Realizing.

Yeah.

Having that, if you got that phone call, you know, the dreaded, like, you know, you see a, you know, police number come up and you know that no matter what they're gonna say, it's not gonna be good.

Yeah.

The whole, this is going to be a before and after moment in your life where, like, everything after this is now categorized different.

Yeah.

And I try and visit that pretty often because those moments come and you never know when or what it's going to be, you know, and it can be a dark place to linger too long.

But I think sometimes just remembering, you know, like, how long do we have with a person that, you know, maybe they.

They've got a quirk that we.

It's a little annoying.

You know, it alternates between annoying and charming thing we love about them, but also can be a little bit much sometimes.

And you realize, like, man, if I got that phone call, I'd be devastated.

Yeah, it's interesting statistic.

I don't know if it's a statistic, but I know the study has been done.

People who won the lottery and what their feelings are, you know, several years later, overwhelmingly, there is a feeling of regret.

And then people who have been diagnosed with serious, serious illnesses and have come through and had to deal with the pain and the suffering of the treatments to come through that, overwhelmingly, their feeling is one of gratitude.

I talked to a gentleman the other night who had a rare kidney disease and was within, I think, a week, was very close to going on dialysis, and ended up having a living kidney donation.

But he went through that process, and he's now, you know, perfectly healthy.

And I asked him this very question.

I'm like, how do you feel?

And he's like, would not have changed it for anything.

Is totally grateful for having had that experience.

It has changed his being as a human being, having gone through that.

So the bad stuff is just a label.

I'm going to hit you with another one of my favorite quotes from Shakespeare.

Nothing is either good or bad but thinking makes it so you just never know.

Yeah, I agree.

Okay.

I feel like you and I could pour like a glass of bourbon and talk her for hours, but probably would.

Not be bourbon for me.

Glass of wine, a pint, whatever it may be.

Looking at sort of the transformation of where you started to the highs, the lows, the process between.

For someone who is earlier in their path, would you have any sort of guidance for them to help kind of find that place in life where they can be content, they can be successful, whatever that might mean for them, and avoid some of the heartache and anguish that you went through.

So a start with gratitude.

That's it.

Every day, be grateful that for whatever conditions that you have in front of you, whatever is there, you can create from that point.

It's been proven time after time in human life that it is possible to create from the lowest depths of existence to whatever you want.

So have the gratitude and the belief that it is possible to create from that point, wherever you are, and then just do your best to understand yourself, to ask for help, and to be willing to take steps that are going to feel uncomfortable.

Because when you start to establish a routine of doing that, and to the extent that you're broadcasting that out to the world, other people will show up, help will show up.

Superpowers will intervene.

God will intervene and help you if you are courageous and brave and loving to take the next step.

Fantastic.

Dave, this was a great conversation.

I really appreciate you coming on.

Thank you for having me.

RJ, it was wonderful to talk to you.

Thank you for joining us in the entrepreneur Breakthrough lounge.

We hope you find your time has been well spent.

If you wish for additional assistance or insight, be sure to visit our other episodes and to stay tuned for our next release.

If you require direct assistance with growing your business or solving an issue, please feel free to inquire on our website site or by scheduling an appointment using the link in the show notes or description.

Thank you and we bid you farewell.