Unlock the rebellious value of discomfort and real growth by rethinking your need for answers (with a nod to pirate radio’s freewheeling spirit).

I talk about moving away from the pressure to have ready-made solutions and embracing the ongoing, sometimes uncomfortable process of thinking out loud.

Inspired by the ethos of pirate radio, spaces where unconventional ideas flourish, I encourage you to treat life as an evolving challenge, not a box to check off. This means continually reflecting and adapting, both for personal benefit and the well-being of those we care about.

Consider the importance of humility, especially if you are used to being seen as solution-providers. Intellectualizing discomfort can keep us from true growth. And existential reflections, like those from "The Denial of Death" by Ernest Becker, inform our obsession with planning and control.

Like the pirate radio DJs who voiced what others kept silent, I challenge you to process life openly, beyond face-to-face conventions.

Key Takeaways:

• Embrace discomfort and uncertainty which could lead to deeper growth and more authentic leadership
• The urge to plan and control is often linked to our denial of mortality
• Pirate radio’s ethos encourages open, honest processing of ideas outside conventional boundaries
• Humility involves questioning why we hold certain beliefs and being open to evolving them
• Serving others means continuous personal evolution, not just self-improvement for personal gain

If you value personal reflection and want to break free from routine patterns, take a cue from pirate radio. Start your own journey of evolving thought.

Perry Maughmer believes the world deserves better leadership; that in every human interaction there is the opportunity to either build others up or tear them down; and that leadership is the choice we make in those moments.

These beliefs led Perry to create the Potential Leader Lab. He wanted to offer those who share his beliefs the space and safety to explore transformative ideas, experiment with new behaviors, and evolve into the leaders they were meant to be and that the world needs.

This is a framework he has used again and again with his Vistage peer advisory groups and companies like Turn-Key Tunneling, Convergint, Haughn &  Associates, I Am Boundless, Ketchum & Walton, LSP Technologies, and Ahlum & Arbor.

Perry lives and works on the shores of Buckeye Lake in Ohio, in the mountains of northwest Georgia, and on the beach in Anna Maria, Florida with his amazingly creative wife Lisa. They have 2 rescue dogs and are intermittently visited by their 3 wonderful children throughout the year. Perry & Lisa are living life in crescendo and focused on exploring, experimenting, and evolving their vision of a life they have no desire to retire from.

Copyright 2026 Perry Maughmer

Welcome to the Relentless Few Podcast. So,

or welcome back if you've been here before. Well,

just a fun little note. This will be the second time I recorded this

episode because I'm using some new software so I can record anywhere

and remotely. And, um, I didn't press the right button. So

I texted Lisa, who's my wife, because I said, hey, I just recorded a

podcast. And I said, well, actually I didn't record it. I just talked for 25

minutes. But I didn't press the record button. So this is actually take 2,

which will be great because it won't be a repeat of take 1 because

I have no idea what I said on that one. And I have no intention

of trying to figure it out because what I'm trying to do with

the podcast from this point forward is I actually want it to be

kind of a record of processing for

myself. I don't have a clean

script. I don't have even an outline of what I want to talk about.

I have thoughts and I wanted this to be, I was telling

Brett, who was my producer, that I wanted this to be kind of a

live processing of those thoughts that aren't clear yet, that I don't have answers

for, that I don't have systems or frameworks or results or

anything for. I'm just going to share my thinking.

with folks because I want them, I want all of

you to do it for yourself, to

share your thinking and to think out loud for yourself

because everybody's doing it. We just don't admit to it, I

guess, because we all want to look like we have answers. So that's what this

is. And, and I think it's a little bit, um, I actually want it to

be like a pirate radio station and those things don't exist anymore.

Because, you know, traditional radio doesn't exist hardly anymore. But back

in the, I think it was the late '80s, it might've been, there was

a movie called Pump Up the Volume with Christian Slater. And he had a, he

was a young, young kid at the time and he had a pirate radio station.

It was like an alter ego for himself. And it was very different than

the person he was day to day. It was subversive, like pirate radio stations

are. And I liked it. I like the concept

and I like the idea of having an opportunity to

talk on the airwaves in a way that you wouldn't talk face-to-face because

it's okay. It doesn't make people as

uncomfortable as if you were doing it face-to-face in a group.

And it is uncomfortable. It's uncomfortable to process life. What's uncomfortable for me, I

don't want to universalize this to everybody. I have no

idea if it's uncomfortable for everybody else. It is uncomfortable for me to

to not have an outline, an answer, a product, a

solution, whatever that is, because I spent so many years

crafting that brand or persona

of having the answer, the insight, the understanding, the solution,

easing the anguish and anxiety and uncertainty

with a solution. And I don't,

I don't feel that's the way to go forward. That's been an evolution of my

thinking. It's been a painful one at that because when

you have an identity that's aligned to that, shifting your identity

can be scary and uncomfortable

and anxiety-producing, which is doing all of those things for me

or to me as it were, or I'm doing them to myself, I guess.

I do think that, you know,

I'm getting to the point where I think that for my, for me,

the point of living is to play at the meaning of life. And so that's

a constant evolution for me. And I want it to continue to be, I want

it to continue to be something that evolves for

me. And that's, again, it leads to a little bit of

discomfort, but I'm okay with that because I don't, I don't want to continue to

tranquilize myself with trivial things, which I do quite frequently. I'm not

sure about you, but I definitely do

it. And I try to,

I've spent many years trying to

immediately intellectualize something for myself because it gets me out of the

discomfort and I want to be able to dwell in things. I want to develop

the capacity to dwell in things. I don't want to dwell

on them because I do really good at dwelling on them. Believe me, I can

dwell on things almost better than anybody I know for

days, weeks, months, holding

myself horribly accountable in a negative way with a lot of guilt

and shame. Guilt being that I did wrong and shame being that I am

wrong. And then sometimes a little bit of despair, which is, you know,

I'm never going to be able to change it. It just is what it is.

And those are 3 things I want to have less of in my life,

but those are also up to me to figure out. Nobody's

doing it to me. I'm doing it to myself and I'm damn good at

it. In fact, that's the thing I'm probably best at.

And it's ironic for me because I spend

so much of my focus when I'm working with people trying

to make it clear to them that they shouldn't do that.

I see that all the time in leaders. I see that all the time in

people, everybody, whether leading is a verb,

not a noun. It's just something we do. But I think when we get into

those roles, we put so much of that responsibility on

ourselves. And I am not universalizing this. I'm speaking from

experience, which I think is different. I'm not trying to universalize something

that I don't have experience in. I've spent the last decade talking to leaders in

organizations and I see it. Now, I will openly admit, I see

it through my frame, so I'm probably looking for it because I feel it. So

I'm, there's a certain amount of projection that probably goes on here. There's no doubt

about it, but I do hear it in people's voices. I ask them straight out

how they feel about it. And it's so funny because I don't think

we're okay in business to talk about shame and

guilt. We want to talk about failure and loss and

accountability, and metrics and KPIs. And

we want to take that stuff out of our heart and into our head. And

I get it. I get why, because it's far easier.

I can attest to that. Like, it's far, far easier

to deal with those things, something that's objective, rather

than deal with something that could hurt.

And so I get it, but it's also the human condition

and there is no business doesn't exist.

You know, business is just something we made up, but it's still a bunch of

humans. And so we're really at the mercy of who we are

and how we feel based on what we're going to achieve.

So a lot of this that I'm working through right now is really,

you know, based on a couple— I'm always trying to

look for new thoughts on what I'm, you know,

learn from smarter people. So I'm reading a couple books, The Denial of Death

by Ernest Becker and The Courage to Be by Paul

Tillich. And I just finished Becker's Denial of

Death, and that was some great stuff in there.

You know, one thing that struck me, and the reason I read the book is

because I was doing some other research in it, and the concept around

where Becker's book came from is

His general concept is everything we're doing, anything anybody, anybody,

any human is doing in their life is more or less at some

level building an immortality project for themselves because we're

trying to escape death. And I've always thought this was interesting because,

you know, as I dove deeper in existentialism,

one of the core tenets, interestingly enough, of

that when it comes to the behaviors that we exhibit, As you talk

about all the planning we do, because we are generally, and again,

just speaking from my own experience, we are obsessed with planning.

Like there's a lot of planning that goes on. You know, we've got to have

checklists and plans and 5-year plans and 3-year plans and visions and, you know, call

them what you will, you know, whatever you want to say. We have to have

big, hairy, audacious goals. I mean, God, there's the vocabulary goes on and

on for how we're going to plan for ourselves. And

One thing that struck me, I read several years ago, was that

all of the planning is really another way for us to

avoid death. And that was, you know, Tillich's,

or I mean, sorry, Becker's book, The Denial of Death. I mean, that's the title

of the book, but the reason that plans help us do

that is because the underlying assumption when we do any plan, big, hairy, audacious

goal, any of those things, The underlying assumption that we never

vocalize is that we're still going to be alive to

achieve it or when that happens. So that's great to come up with a 5-year,

10-year, whatever plan, because we're just like, the natural assumption is, well, I'm still going

to be here. So we're pushing death out. Like we're stiff-arming death

to a certain extent. And I think that's true. And

that's what struck me. Like what struck me about Becker's book was the thing about

the immortality project. And that really kind of shook me

to my core of what I do for myself. You know, thinking

about all these things that I try to work on and create

and what, why do I do it? So I'm not questioning what I believe, but

I am trying to question why I need to believe it.

And then shifting it when it doesn't align with my values, because that's the tricky

part. The tricky part is I thought it did. Like I thought those

things aligned with my values and then I was challenged by that because

the thing it shakes for me, this whole thing about planning and, you know,

the, and again, you know, there's Friedrich Hayek and his knowledge problem

about where does knowledge reside to be able to do

things. I keep going back for myself to this

level of humility. And I think for me, that's

what's core in all this. And that's why I try to now, which I

didn't before, My God, I had answers at every turn for everybody,

but I never stopped and thought about how was I getting to those answers and

why did I believe those answers were going to work for other people? Because what

I was drawing on is my own experience, my own insights with little

to no concept of what they were actually seeking.

Because oftentimes it takes so long for people to be clear about what they actually

want. All of us as humans, I'm not, again, not trying to

universalize, but I'm just saying, my experience with myself and others is, you

know, we, if you sit and talk with somebody about a challenge or something

that's challenging them right now and they want to fix, we're all about solutions,

but we're very, we, I try to do it more and more

now, be more curious about the underlying issues that are going

on for them so I can truly get to the, help

them get to the root of what they're trying to accomplish and what's holding them

up. Instead of just locking in on, oh, you

said their first initial statement is, well, I want to fix this. And then we

just go whole, we go no holds barred on coming up with solutions for that

problem. And oftentimes that's not that from

what I've seen year after year after year, after doing this for over a decade,

is that that's very rarely somebody's first initial thought

of, well, this is the thing I want to solve for. That thing will

very rarely hold up. Under scrutiny.

And so for me to exercise that curiosity more

for myself and for other people with the

underlying value being humility, because

I don't know, I don't know what they're talking about. I don't know why

it matters to them. So if I'm curious, I can, I can ask better

questions that will help me help them.

Because again, there's this great thing.

It's like, you know, the bad news is no one's coming to save us. The

good news is we never needed saved in the first place. So it's great that

nobody's coming to save us because we don't need it. All we need is

space and safety to explore what we're

thinking. Because it is my belief

that most people will get to the solution. And in

fact, They know what the solution is,

but they've created a problem to shift away from needing to do the thing

they know they need to do because they don't want to do that thing. So

they shift into a different problem so that there's a different solution

that's more,

let's see, less taxing, less emotionally taxing, less personally

accountable, less uncomfortable. Call it what you will. And again,

just sharing my experiences here with a lot of watching people go through this,

watching myself go through this.

That's the hardest part of the human experiment, right? That's the hardest part

of this whole thing. At least it is for me. I don't know if it

is for you. Only you know that. But actually

locking into what I know to be true. And then,

but for me, it's taking, it's creating the space for myself

to dwell in that for the appropriate amount of time and not jump, not let

it jump from my heart to my head, not try to intellectualize it too fast

because that's my superpower is intellectualizing things.

And I've spent a lot of years honing that superpower and it provides safety

for me. And that's what the safety is. I never

have to do the other thing. I never have to dwell in it and sit

with what my body's feeling and telling me. And I don't sit in that discomfort

and I need to. That's my own personal observation for me is I need to

do that. It's valuable for me to do that. And it also slows me down

and makes me more present, which is also what I would like to

do for my own, just me personally. And

I know I'm Sisyphus pushing the rock up the hill.

And I know that, and that's a, It sounds like a grind because

it is, because every time the rock, at the end of the day, the rock

rolls back down the hill as it should, because I never meet the same

rock. It's like Heraclitus, right? I'm never meeting

the rock the same way the second time after I've already put— this isn't

eternal repetition, it's recurrence. And repetition and

recurrence are different for me because I'm

convinced for myself, I never, I might, I might run into a similar

challenge, but it's never the same because I'm not the

same. I don't see it the same way,

hopefully, because I keep evolving. So if I keep

evolving, I'm never repeating anything. If I'm repeating anything, it's because I'm not

evolving. Because I can run into the same challenge, and believe me, I

do. I run into the same challenges for myself.

I hear the same challenges from other people. Yeah. And

that's the biggest aha for me. And the thing that freed me

up the most is knowing that I'm not repeating things. It isn't like, how many

times do I have to solve this? Or why do I keep running into this?

It's not the same. I'm not the same person in

my estimation. Like, that's my goal. My goal isn't

to change the world. It's the change.

It's that I evolve so that I never meet the world the same way

twice, I guess.

Because life, in my opinion, life is an insurmountable problem. And

it's not a bad— and problem doesn't mean bad. Problem just means

it's always going to present itself as a challenge.

And that's really what where I'm at.

And I'm trying, I just want to be more okay with that because I don't,

my goal isn't to be, let me think about

this for a second, isn't to be strong enough to change the world, but I

want to be strong enough to see the world differently because if I do, it

presents me with different choices and different choices present me with different

outcomes. So I, I'm not trying to change it because I can't change the

outside. Like I can't change the world. And the more I try to change the

world, I've said for, I've

repeated this so many times over the years, the world, I recognize for myself,

the world never has, it doesn't

currently, and never will care about what I want, nor should it,

by the way. Like it isn't, not only will it not, it shouldn't

because I'm a part of the world. Like I have the humility to understand, well,

actually I don't. I'm trying to develop the humility to understand I'm part of the

ecosystem. Like I'm not above or beyond anything and that I'm just a,

I'm just a cog. Right. And I'm okay with that. Like I don't,

I'm becoming okay with that. I can't say that I am okay with it, but

I'm becoming okay with understanding how much

I don't matter.

And I'm okay with, I'm starting to become okay with and actually

embracing insignificance. Because

when it, for me, the trade-off is once I'm insignificant and don't

matter, I'm free to act because I don't have an outside,

an outsized understanding of my impact that way

because it doesn't exist

for me. And that is not the way I have always thought. It is not

the way that I've thought for a lot of years.

And it makes the world a more peaceful place for

me. And hopefully, ultimately, it makes the world a more peaceful

place for people around me, the people I care deeply about, which is really my

goal because it's, you know, I've, I want to, I want

to be, I want to have clarity for myself about what I want most, but

what I want most is based on the other people that I

care about. It's in context of that. It isn't, and

I'm wrestling with this right now on something else. It isn't what we, I thought

about changing it to what we want most, but I don't want, it's not a

collective. It's not, I'm not taking votes. I want to be

cognizant that I'm impacting other people because, you know, we go

to Maslow and it's the hierarchy of human needs and self-actualization. And

he said later it was self-transcendence. And I want to be clear for myself that

I am striving to, I want to become the best version of myself, To

serve those that I care deeply about. That's what I want to do. I always

want to— that's the humility part for me. That's where you get rid of hubris.

I'm not trying to become the best

version of myself for me. That's why part of it is for me is

that I keep reflecting back on what is needed by other people, by the people

that I serve, by the people that I care deeply about, the people I want

to have a positive impact on. What do they need from me? And that gives

me the motivation to keep evolving. Because

some of the things that, some of the ways I show up aren't

serving others well, and therefore they're not serving me well. They

serve me well because it's easy. They serve me well because I don't have to

think about it and it's, I don't have to expend any energy and I can

do that all day long, but it's not ultimately achieving

what I want to achieve. And that is by making a better world for people

that I care uniquely about. And so that's what all of this is.

in all of this effort and challenge and struggle, which

I view as a positive for myself, that I continue

to do is on that. And I don't have an answer. Like

it's never, you know, one of the things that

I came up with was, you know, the whole definition of a relentless few are

people that they're done when they're dead. And that

sometimes for me is just flat out exhausting.

One of the places that's exhausting is like, you know, physical

activity, like, you know, whatever you do, however you do it, you know, getting out

and moving your body and making sure that you're strong

enough, you know, to do the things you want to do both, you know, in

all aspects, you know, physically and emotionally and cognitively. And I think we need

to be strong across all of those and that requires effort. And sometimes,

you know, I'm at the gym or something and I'm I'm doing

exercises and sometimes I think to myself, I'm like, God, I'm going to do this

for another 20 years. Maybe, you know, I'm 59 years old. So maybe I do

this for another, you know, am I keep doing this? And the answer is yes.

And then I look back and it's funny because part of this is,

you know, the whole conceptual part of this is I've been doing, I've been showing

up in some way, shape, or form. And I'm using this as just a micro

example for myself is at the gym since I was, you know, I first started

really working out when I was in college. So, you You know, that was, you

know, when I was 18, 19 is when I got introduced to formally working out.

Didn't do a lot of it, did a little bit of it in high school,

but not like I did when I got to college. And so, you know,

19, I'm 59 now, let's call it 40 years. So in some way, shape,

or form, I've been doing this for 40 years already. So on one hand, I'm

like, I only have to do it for another 20. So that doesn't sound so

bad because it's only half as long as I've been doing it. But I will

tell you, and I think it's just like everything else emotionally and cognitively and

physically, I think as we age, the amount of

effort it takes to just keep up increases. So

the effort that I used when I was in my 20s to work out, I

have to use a lot more effort now to get a little less

of a result. I hope that makes sense. So it's, I got to

try harder to just keep— so the amount of effort I have to do just

to stay static is a lot. You know, you work out a lot just

not to lose anything. Then you got to add on to that. And I think

that, and I use the term workout generally for physically, stuff, physicality,

but I'm also talking about cognitively and emotionally because there's a certain amount of

calcification that happens on all those for me as I

age. Again, I'm trying not to universalize, so please excuse that as

I'm sure it's going to happen again and again, is that

I'm not as open as I used to be to things.

I'm a little more risk-averse. And I don't think I mean that from the

standpoint of effort. I mean it from the standpoint of risk,

purely of risk of identity and what I'm doing and standing in the world

and all of those things, right? Because once we have stuff, you know, we, when

we're younger, we don't have as much stuff. So we're willing to risk and then

we get stuff and we shift from risk to protection. Because now I don't want

to, it was all about gaining stuff initially. Now it's not about, now it's about

not losing that stuff. And that's a significant different

approach. Like if I'm risking the gain,

Because I don't have much to lose. But then, you know, they've done all that

work with behavioral economics and they've proven this, that, you know, we're totally more

risk-averse. I mean, I'd rather not lose than gain. And

I think I do that both from an emotional and a

cognitive, not as much from a physical, although I am quite aware there are

things I don't want to do anymore because they're too risky and it takes a

long time to bounce back. And so I, that does creep into

my mind there too. But I'm more cognizant now

of the risk involved in a lot of things, which I should

be. And I'm okay with that, but I want to balance that so I don't

become too risk-averse and things start calcifying even more and more and more

because then we just start, I just start allowing everything to kind of

close in and I do less and I experience less and I grow

less. And that's really my passion around that is I

I don't want to be 100% grow, grow, grow, and evolve, but I also don't

want to close myself off to opportunities and things that would be better

for me because they help me become more the person I want to show up

as. So that's kind of where the thinking is

right now. And I'm sure,

and again, I just wanted to do this as kind of an

insight into where I was, what I was bouncing around inside my head

right now and where it all stands. None of it is

solidified. And I think I'm becoming more

accepting of that, that that's the state. The state I want to stay in

to a certain extent is constantly that subtle

churn of what am I,

how am I showing up? And is it the best version for those that I

care deeply about? And if it's not, what opportunities do I

have? And then continuing to build up the reserves,

you know, physically and emotionally and cognitively to do that. But it does take a

lot of energy to do that. So I have to, that's one piece I've never

been good at is the, we can call it whatever we want, but self-care,

you know, being able to make sure that I show up with the energy required

to do these things. So I am focused a lot on that, making very

little headway in that area, trying to, but

it, but again, you know, adjusting behaviors and habits

and activities is really what's hard for me. Like it has been really hard for

me to make a commitment to do things that I know would provide me with

more energy. So I'm playing with a lot of stuff, doing a lot of experiments,

sometimes, you know, not getting the results that

I want, but I am doing it. And that's all, that's

all we can all do, right? We just got to show up, show up and

put in the work and really kind of absorb ourselves in the process and not

on the outcome. But I think that's a topic for another day.

So. Hope you enjoyed it. Hopefully

this stimulated something in you for you to think about. If not, you know, take

whatever piece did and throw out the rest or, you

know, throw the whole thing out because I understand if it's not of value and

if you're looking for, if you're looking for a framework or an answer, or an

insight, not sure you're going to find it here because

not sure I have any of those to share. And when I, on top of

that, if I do get to the point where I think I do, I'm going

to refrain from sharing them because I don't know that that's good for

anybody. So thanks for joining. Talk

again soon.