Young and Profiting with Hala Taha - John R. Miles: Escape Quiet Desperation and Transform Your Life with Intentional Living | E300

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Starting point is 00:00:29 at Shopify.com slash profiting. As always, you can find all of our incredible deals in the show notes. 900 million people in 142 countries feel unfulfilled in what they do. How many of us are intentional about where we wanna take our lives? We pursue what we should do for a career versus what's really driving the passion inside of us.

Starting point is 00:00:52 And when we chase the money, the possessions, and we realize that none of that is bringing us fulfillment or happiness, we're left with this profound sense of quiet desperation. Passion struck is really about how do you close that gap? Young Improfiters, do you ever feel stuck? Do you feel like you're just settling for good enough? Do you feel like you really haven't found your North Star in your life or your career? Well, today we're going to talk all about passion and purpose. Joining us on the podcast today is John R. Miles, who has followed his passions throughout his career, going from the US Navy to becoming a C-suite executive

Starting point is 00:01:45 in top Fortune 500 companies, to now being an accomplished podcaster and new author. He's got a new book called Passion Struck, 12 Powerful Principles to Unlock Your Purpose and Ignite Your Most Intentional Life. John, welcome to Young and Profiting Podcast. Hala, thank you so much for having me. Your show is incredible and it's an honor to be here

Starting point is 00:02:09 to serve your community. I'm so excited for this conversation. I think it's gonna be so valuable for everyone. So I wanna just dive in right into the meat and potatoes of today's interview, which is all about becoming passion struck. So you've got this very popular podcast called Passion Struck.

Starting point is 00:02:24 I always see you around the charts. You're doing an incredible job teaching people about entrepreneurship and how to have purpose and passion. You also have a new book called Passion Struck. And so I'm curious to understand what does Passion Struck mean to you? And why are you so compelled to teach on the topic? I love this question and thank you for it and I'll give you the origin story. So first to answer it, Passionstruck is about having an intense, what I say almost inexplorable drive to mold one's life in the pursuit of becoming our ideal self. even in my vocabulary up until about four years ago. And as I was on my own journey of how do I cross the gap from where I was, which is really in the state of being my odd self, to going on my own journey of trying to become my ideal self, I started studying luminaries, many of that people on the show will have heard of people like Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Oprah, et cetera. And I started to wonder in my research, what allowed them to break through and to themselves reach this state where they are willing to put it all on the line with the goal of taking on a problem that they see so inherently needs to be solved that they're willing to devote themselves to it.

Starting point is 00:03:52 And I was talking to a friend of mine, Keith Crotch, he founded a company named Ariba, was the CEO of DocuSign, in case people have heard of his name before. And Keith says to me, well, it sounds like what's happening is you're going from being stuck in your life to becoming passion struck and that phrase just hit me. And from that point forward, I knew it was the one that I was destined to

Starting point is 00:04:17 use, but I really feared it wasn't going to be available until I found it, uh, that it was miraculously on GoDaddy. I love that. And here you are now, this whole journey, 10-year journey of working on Passionstruck. So you have a really impressive background. You started in the military, in the Navy. You went into corporate. You had C-suite roles, senior executive roles at big companies like Lowe's and Swiss Watch.

Starting point is 00:04:42 Very, very impressive. And I'd love to understand throughout all these phases of your journey, were you passion struck? Were you more passion struck in one experience than another experience? I'd love to learn a little bit more about your career journey in that way. One of the things I talk about a lot on the podcast and in the book is this need to reinvent ourselves.

Starting point is 00:05:03 I think it's something that more and more people are gonna experience on a faster pace than even I did. But I went through periods of my career, some of them self-induced, some of them induced by external circumstances where I found myself needing to reinvent myself. Coming out of the Naval Academy, I was absolutely passion struck.

Starting point is 00:05:25 I had been selected as one of only a few people who got a coveted billet to go work for the National Security Agency. And the backstory for me is I had always wanted to be a Navy SEAL, but I had some traumatic brain injuries when I was playing rugby that precluded me medically from going that path. But being an officer, especially working for the NSA, it's kind of like being the CFO in a company or the head of HR where you cut across all the different disciplines of a company. I got to do the same thing when it came to the Navy and Marine Corps. And so I was able to not only get the opportunity to work directly

Starting point is 00:06:07 with SEALs and I was assigned to Naval Special Warfare Unit 10, but I also got to deploy on aircraft carriers, cruisers, destroyers, submarines, aircraft, and really had a very fun passion struck part of my life. And I wanted that to continue. And so when I got out of the military, I did so only because I'd gotten an appointment to become an FBI agent. And I'm literally Thursday or Friday,

Starting point is 00:06:37 the week before I'm supposed to report on a Monday, I just left military service when I get a call from my detailer telling me, John, Congress can't pass the budget. Your class, unfortunately, has been recycled. My naive sense is thinking, okay, I'll go back in a couple months. What I found out in a couple months was that it was literally going to be three to four years later. And i quickly had to pay that this led me to join booze allen management consulting firm which turn out to be a blessing in disguise it was such a great transition for me because i had a lot of military veterans and new how to transition them and then i went from there to anderson consulting and so that was a really passion struck period of my time, learning the corporate world and

Starting point is 00:07:28 really changing my trajectory from where I thought it was going to go. And then I would say I faced another pivot that I never expected. When I was at Anderson, we had about half our office dedicated to supporting Enron and when Enron had their terrible fall, so did Anderson. And so I found myself in a matter of weeks again, pivoting, having to reinvent myself. And this time I went into the fortune 500 world first as a chief information security officer, then went to Lowe's then eventually to Dell. And during that journey, I was absolutely passion struck until I would say the tail end of Lowe's going into Dell,

Starting point is 00:08:12 where I really found myself starting to experience being in this quandary that Henry David Thoreau describes as quiet desperation, where I really found myself stuck down a career path that looking back I never expected myself to take and now I couldn't seem to pull myself from its grasp and that really led me into a period of soul searching where I wasn't passion struck on the journey to finding myself again and eventually creating this brand at the back end of it. As you were talking, I had an idea come to my head. I don't know if you already say this. You can be passion struck or you can be passion stuck.

Starting point is 00:08:54 Right. And it just really depends how you're feeling throughout your career. So talk to us, what are some of the feelings of feeling passion struck? What do you feel when you're in the zone your passion struck. You have this deep exceeded desire that goes beyond ambition it's this relentless quest for growth. For impact fulfillment it's the kind of passion that transforms anything that you face into stepping stones of growth and really discovery and in order to do this there are a number of mindset shifts and behavior shifts that are required to achieve the state and it's fundamentally rewiring how we think how we feel and act and most And most importantly, intentionally aligning our values with our long-term ambitions and aspirations,

Starting point is 00:09:50 and making sure that they are all interconnected, not as it often happens where they're independent variables. So you were alluding to this at the end of your corporate career at Lowe's, you started to feel stuck. And I learned that something really triggered this. It was a couple of traumatic experiences. You actually were faced with an armed robber in your house and you had a gun pointed to your head. And at that point, everything changed for you. So talk to us about that moment,

Starting point is 00:10:19 some of the events that happened that led you to eventually become an entrepreneur and what you were feeling that day. Yeah, so this was just a normal Tuesday and I was in my normal routine, took my daughter to school, went to the gym at this time I was going to Orange Theory and then something happened that was completely out of normal. We had an electrical fire at the gym that started in their air conditioning systems that forced me to go home earlier than I typically would have. Unbeknownst to me, the person who ended up confronting me had been canvassing my whereabouts and looking at my patterns and it used this moment when they knew I would be away.

Starting point is 00:11:07 To come into the house and so I walked in on them unexpectedly for them and unexpectedly for me. And you kind of get that feeling in the back of your mind that something's just not right and I had gone in the house to change clothes so I could do a different workout routine. And when I went up the stairs was confronted with that burglar pointing what turns out to be my own handgun at me. And when that happens, I don't care whether it's in combat or in this situation, you're forced into a decision. Either you're going to charge up the stairs and try to take them out. And there's probably a low likelihood of having a positive outcome without yourself being shot or there's how do you elude this threat to live another day?

Starting point is 00:11:56 And I, in the split second that I had chose that second option and was able to elude them and get out of there and. I guess the double whammy of what i experienced was just a few days later i remember spending the weekend with my really good friend tim. Talking about all that happened i was starting to process it monday morning comes around in new york ready to do some interviewing and a keynote. When my phone starts blowing up i answered and it turns out that my friend tim who had been there to comfort me had committed suicide. And so in a matter of five or six days i had these two traumatic events really hit me and it caused me to just awaken inside and realize that my life could have been over. Tim's life just ended i need to rethink everything i'm doing and to turn a new course so that was really the impetus for me then spending a couple of years really doing profound introspection into how I wanted to transform my life. I want to stick on this a bit because I feel like it's so important for us to be the best versions

Starting point is 00:13:12 of ourselves. We really need to think positively about our past and reframe our past. And I know that you had a lot of self-blame turn up after these events. Can you talk to us about some of the self blame you were facing and how you were able to reframe your past a bit to move forward? Yeah, so this is something I really talk about in the first principle in my book, which I call becoming a mission angler. And the origin of this phrase mission mission angler, is I wanted to pick phrases or metaphors that people could understand so when they read the chapters or heard about them, they would remember them. So where I live here in Tampa Bay, we live in some of the best fishing area in the world. And my friends who are really master anglers, they don't just get on the boat on the weekend pointed in any.

Starting point is 00:14:06 Direction at any time and just going hope they're gonna catch fish they go out with a very disciplined intentional plan of knowing what's in season knowing where it's located knowing the tides. Knowing the moon phases etc and being extremely intentional about their pursuit but how many of us in our own lives are that intentional about where we want to take our lives and in my case it wasn't only finding that direction there was also a huge gap that i had and this was a gap where that i had and this was a gap where earlier in my life i had experienced profound trauma both as a child in combat and then later on in my life as we had just discussed. And for me it was really dealing with this trauma that i had put aside because when i was growing up and especially when I was in the military, we were told to suppress it, to not bring it up. You're going to lose your security, Clarence's people weren't going to respect you. This PTSD that everyone keeps talking about doesn't really exist, etc.

Starting point is 00:15:18 And so all the stuff from earlier in my life, I had buried deep down. And when these two incidents happened in that short period of time, not only did it unearth, I guess, the emotions from those two circumstances, but it brought up everything in my past. So as I looked at becoming this mission angler in my life, I realized that there was this gap that I had to cross. And Dr. Benjamin Hardy writes about this in his book, The Gap Versus the Gain, and so much in our life, we think about ourselves and we compare ourselves

Starting point is 00:15:54 to other people. And when we're constantly comparing ourselves to others, we actually find ourselves in the gap. It would be like you or I trying to compare ourselves as podcasters to the success of Joe Rogan. If we do that, we're constantly going to be in the gap. Whereas the gain is where we're looking at where we are in our life compared to where we were in the past and the incremental gains that we're making. And so for me to cross this chasm of where I had been, which was living out, if you look at self-discrepancy theory, my ought self, which is

Starting point is 00:16:33 who I thought I should be, I wanted to get to who I could be, which was my ideal self. And the starting point for that was dealing with unresolved trauma. And so after I experienced those two things, I then went through two years of just intense cognitive processing therapy, EMDR, prolonged exposure therapy, and a number of other modalities to start working on getting rid of those stuck points that were holding me back. And one thing that I like to tell people is that we have to have a fixed point that we start from. And when we start mastering it, that's when it opens up opportunities for us

Starting point is 00:17:16 to pursue other areas in our lives where we can also change the course of our lives, whether it's our health, our relationships, our career, our finances, et cetera. I love that you brought up Benjamin Hardy. He is one of my favorite guests. He's been on the show three times and you brought up the gap and the gain.

Starting point is 00:17:35 It's so true when we're living to these ideals, for example, I want to become as successful as Joe Rogan. And every time you reach another level in your career, that target just keeps moving, moving, moving, moving. You never actually reach that target. If you're always comparing yourself to the future version that you want to be, or the person that you want to be like a competitor,

Starting point is 00:17:58 like you were saying, you're really just in that gap, rather than being in the game, which is measuring yourself against your past. The other thing that Benjamin Hardy talks about is becoming your future you and the fact that you're not even your past self anymore. You're not the same person that you were last week, let alone last year, let alone 10 years ago. And so you have permission to forgive your past self, to reinvent your past story and your memories and your

Starting point is 00:18:26 narrative of your past is constantly changing. So he applies the 80-20 rule, the Pareto principle, to your past. 80% of your past probably doesn't serve you. So what is holding you back? How can you reframe your past so that you can move forward and attract more of what you want to be in the future and be more like the future self that you want to be. So I love that you brought up Benjamin Hardy. He's great.

Starting point is 00:18:50 He's been on my show as well. And that whole mission Angler and what I was talking about was self discrepancy theory is really what he talks about in future self. It's really, how do you rebuild this image of yourself, this ideal self that you want to create as your future self, and do it in a way where you're not looking back on your past and the mistakes that you've made, rather you're looking at yourself anew at the opportunities you have to pursue becoming who you would like to be. Okay, so let's move on to your new book, Passion Strike. You quote Henry David Thoreau at the start of your book

Starting point is 00:19:27 and argue that most people today lead lives of quiet desperation. So why do you think most people are hesitant to pursue their own dreams and passions? Well, I think it's we get stuck in becoming our odd self. We get stuck in this life oftentimes where we pursue what we should do for career versus what's really driving the passion inside of us and. The further we get into these careers i call them portfolio careers the harder it is to change because all of a sudden now we have. The car we drive the house we live in the financial.

Starting point is 00:20:07 Commodities that we built up the social standing the family were supporting and we start seeing that gap. Between where we are and where we wanna be in it keeps growing and we're so comfortable in the life that we're in that it just compounds itself and what ends up happening over time though is we start realizing that the things that. We thought we're bringing us joy bring us anything but and we wind up feeling more and more like. We wake up in the morning and that the actions were taking they just don't matter we don't matter and our lives don't hold significance. And i think that's exactly what henry david throw was talking about when we chase these. Extrinsic things that life teases us with that we think are gonna bring us joy the titles the money the possessions whatever have you The titles the money the possessions whatever have you and we realize when we get there that none of that. I'm massive wealth that we've had is bringing us fulfillment or happiness etc and then we're left with this profound sense.

Starting point is 00:21:21 Emptiness or is he calls it quite desperation and if you look at gallop it's a clear indication that this is going on their surveys evaluated one point three billion people across the world and they found that nine hundred million people in hundred forty two countries feel unfulfilled in what they do and another thing i like to site here is research from tom gilovich shoes a psychologist at cornell who's been studying people and what causes their regrets and what he found was an astounding 76% of people that he surveyed in their third trimester of life all cited that their biggest regrets stem from the same thing. It's not the mistakes that they made in life. It was not pursuing the what ifs, the should haves,

Starting point is 00:22:05 not going after becoming their ideal self. And it mirrors what Gallup found and it mirrors what David Theroux says. So then passion struck is really about how do you close that gap? Let's hold that thought and take a quick break with our sponsors. Young and Profiters, there is no better time

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Starting point is 00:26:55 feel about the state of the American dream. I know you mentioned it in your book. And I had Dean Graziosi on and people like Harley Finkelstein from Shopify and they all believe that American Dream is live and well. It's no better time to be an entrepreneur. Lots of people are able to explore their passions because of the internet and the abundance of the internet and things like that. I'm curious to understand how you feel about entrepreneurship and the American Dream and the state of everything right now? Well, I respect all the people

Starting point is 00:27:26 that you just said very much. However, I completely and wholeheartedly disagree on the state of affairs. Dean's got a couple of younger kids. I happen to have a couple of kids who are 20 and 26. We're a little bit further ahead of them and are experiencing the world right now head on. I have to tell you if you look at the data and you look at what i put in my book entrepreneurship.

Starting point is 00:27:53 The pursuit of small business has been on a three decade decline not only in the united states but in most of western civilization. There is almost this inverse ratio of people going into large companies instead of pursuing the entrepreneurial path. I really took the united states coming out of war war two to the precipice of greatness fewer and fewer people. Are going down the path of entrepreneurship or taking the risk of doing something on their own. ship or taking the rest of doing something on their own. And it's easy to see why because you come out of an MBA at Harvard and you're offered the opportunity to go into a hedge fund or into a management consulting fund, private equity and they give you all this money. So so many people see that and they don't want to make that riskier choice of going down the entrepreneurial path so they take the safe path and this has been going on and compounding and so what you see is the bigger companies.

Starting point is 00:28:54 Add more more people flocking to him and the smaller companies and entrepreneurs keep on dwindling in the gap is only gotten worse and so what that creates now. Is an environment where fewer fewer people of my sons age twenty six i talked all his friends none of them see how they can go right now unless they're in a select few. How they're gonna make the american dream reality. select few, how they're going to make the American dream a reality. And what's happening is we have outsourced so much to other countries, so many of the fundamental middle-class jobs that made America what it was. That we're collapsing that. And now we're getting more and more into growing upper class and a growing lower class with a completely shortened or eliminated

Starting point is 00:29:48 middle class that was really driving the country before. Now I believe that we are also on the cusp of a major change. I think history repeats itself and just as you had people who had individual professions, whether it was a blacksmith back in the day, a printer, something like that, I think we are going to have in the future, more people being solo entrepreneurs. So this is something I do agree with Dean on

Starting point is 00:30:21 that because of technology, because of where digital is going to accept row. We have the opportunity to retrain people to be their own bosses and i think more more people can be solo entrepreneurs and i really think that that's where things. Could go and will go especially as we're faced with more automation i robotics, robotics, etc. displacing what is going to become hundreds of millions of people over the next five to 10 years. And how does your concept of passion struck really relate to the fact that it seems like you're trying to create more entrepreneurs?

Starting point is 00:30:58 Yes, I am trying to really say that what I found from my career, and I chose that path that i'm describing where i joined the big companies i went for more of the comfort. And the security of having the check of having the stability that that is going to be harder and harder to do for people in the future because. Unless we change the way that companies are evaluating how they're viewed by shareholders in the boards that are running them. It's really driven by creating shareholder value which you do by top line growth and eliminating or impacting your bottom line and trying to take expenses out so all the companies that i've ever been in if we could eliminate headcount which is the biggest cost burden that you have in a company. You're gonna do it ninety nine times out of a hundred now there are some companies eccentric is a great example where is there bringing a into eccentric they're trying to take. The jobs that can be automated through AI and retrain those positions that they're really

Starting point is 00:32:09 using the AI to make decisions and to really expand the role of their jobs. But I think, far and wide, more companies are going to use it just to take costs out of the businesses, which means more people's livelihoods are gonna be at threat. So this is why I'm pushing people to wake up and realize that the one thing that we have as being human beings that differentiates us from all the other species is that we are really

Starting point is 00:32:39 the ultimate learning machines. And so we need to get into the habit of becoming constant learners to stay ahead of the digital trends, which are only going to grow faster and to reposition ourselves as I was alluding to earlier in a way that instead of being at the mercy of a large company that we're working for, being a solo entrepreneur and really choosing

Starting point is 00:33:07 our clientele that we want to serve so that if one would fire us for whatever reason, we have safety nets in place that can protect us and our livelihood. So this reminds me about a chapter in your book about comfort. You say that comfort is the enemy of adaptability can you talk to us about this. Why we need to be adaptable as entrepreneurs and also maybe some examples of people who have been adaptable and who have thrived. Can the person i really speak about in this whole chapters is jeff bezos and it's interesting because when i. Start out this chapter i originally wrote it about originality and adaptability wasn't part of it.

Starting point is 00:33:48 But as I read the chapter and really thought about it and what causes the people that we see who are passion struck to excel, it's really this combination of originality with adaptability. And in this chapter, I talk about jeff's journey through where he was himself being an investor to wanting to start amazon. And a lot of people think when you hear about amazon it doesn't sound like an original idea to me the original idea behind amazon wasn't being.

Starting point is 00:34:22 Online bookstore i mean those already kind of existed. What borders and barnes and noble to some point what is this really want to create was the everything store. What he was smart enough to realize that if that is what his longer term goal was he had to have a starting point. I would allow him to enter the market at some point where consumers were used to doing something, books, that he could do more efficiently on the internet. And by doing so, he could start perfecting his supply chain, et cetera. I think the other original thing that people don't really consider when they think about

Starting point is 00:35:01 Amazon is Amazon is really a data company more than it is a retailer and so first he started to grab. Data on individuals who using the platform then created the prime platform. At the same time they created a ws which is now housing everyone's data. What he was using that power of data to really power all the algorithms that were deciding what products were being put in front of people and to really customize each person's view. Now along this path of originality, he also had to adapt to competitors coming after him, the biggest being Walmart earlier in his history, obviously the bookstores. He had to adapt to regulators coming after him, people wanting to try to disrupt his business model. And so I think the way he ran the company and it's still being run this way was phenomenal

Starting point is 00:36:02 in that he really started to create entrepreneurs within amazon. No it's a great case study of intrapreneurs in the way that he would have a need that he saw. And what farm it out to three or four different groups who didn't know that they were getting the same assignment and then have all of them come to him to give him the most original idea with the most adaptable. Wait to undertake it that amazon could then take implement and grow from so i think she is a great example of combining this originality with the adaptability that you're gonna have to have. with the adaptability that you're going to have to have in your life or your business, especially in the future. And the adaptability really hearkens back to what I was talking about when I was describing the need to reinvent yourself. That reinvention and adapting to the way that the market and technology are unfolding is going to be paramount to everyone who's listening to this podcast.

Starting point is 00:37:06 This reminds me of a really famous quote by another awesome entrepreneur, Elon Musk. He says, running a startup is like chewing glass and staring into the abyss. After a while, you stop staring, but the glass chewing never ends. And really what he means by this glass chewing is that as an entrepreneur, you always think you got to be innovative, you got to be creative, you got to do new stuff, you want the sexy thing, the exciting thing. But a lot of running your company is chewing glass or doing the things that you know you have to do the problem solving, adapting, adaptability, having your nose to the ground, understanding what's actually good for your business, not just what's new

Starting point is 00:37:41 and exciting. And then the other part staring into the abyss is really all about you're facing extermination. 90% of startups fail. You're scared of failure. Eventually that goes away once you have more stability, but you're always having to combat the problems and chew glass. So do you have any advice in terms of as entrepreneurs, how can we get better at chewing glass and doing the things that we don't necessarily want to do, but have to do to run our business?

Starting point is 00:38:07 Yeah. I mean, in the book, I highlight the story of Jim McKelvey. And for those who don't know who Jim McKelvey is, people know his more famous other half of Square, who started Twitter, Jack Dorsey, very well. But the two of them really started square off the back of. Jim mckelvey's journey of being a glass blower and having an expensive piece of art that he wasn't able to sell. Because he wasn't able to accept the payment at the time that the person wanted to buy it. So we started to think how could i disrupt the payment industry with a device and it's a great.

Starting point is 00:38:49 Story if you haven't studied it of doing what you have exactly described it's what you find a problem that's worth solving. And when i talk to jim and he describes all the people he's tried to mentor into entrepreneurs one of the biggest reasons he says that they fail is because as you described hardships are going to come about. You're going to be in a state where you're doing more and more class and he says it's during these times where people get distracted from solving the main thing that was the whole Genesis for them starting their journey. And the farther they waiver from their focus on that main thing, the more times those companies don't achieve profitability or don't achieve the outcome that they came into existence trying to solve. And so what I learned from that is really this whole thing that Steven Covey talks about that the main thing is keeping the main thing, the main thing. And so it really becomes an art of balancing what is important versus what is the most urgent thing and staying on top of that so that you're not in a point where what becomes urgent to you are the things

Starting point is 00:40:10 that aren't important and which makes you drift farther and farther from the problem that you're trying to solve to begin with. So given all these problems that entrepreneurs have to solve, it leads to a lot of stress, anxiety, burnout. And you say the antidote to this is really perspective. Can you talk to us about some of your guidance when it comes to having more perspective and how that can reduce our anxiety and stress? We live in a world, since most of us are brought up in Western culture of looking at things as black and white, either or. And

Starting point is 00:40:46 so what this is causing is so many of us to live on the extremes. Is it left? Is it right? Are we right? Are we wrong? And what this chapter in my book is really about is exploring more Eastern philosophy of both and thinking of paradoxical thinking and the person I highlight in this chapter is a dear friend of mine, Chris Cassidy, Chris backstory. We graduated together from the Naval Academy. He became a Navy SEAL and then was selected into NASA and was eventually the chief astronaut for NASA. But I remember interviewing Chris for the book and we were talking about his time at basic underwater demolition school, BUDS, when he was learning to become and training

Starting point is 00:41:37 to become a SEAL. He was talking about, you know, at the Naval Academy, it was difficult enough to get from one activity to a next. But when you're in Bud's, especially during Hell Week, it becomes almost unthinkable how you're going to get through it. And so he said he started to learn that instead of looking at the boundaries, meaning, can I get through this or can't I get through this? He started to look at the both and in it. And he started to see that life could very much resemble a rubber band and time could be expanded or extracted

Starting point is 00:42:18 depending upon what you were going through. And he said during periods of hardships, he started to get the perspective that all I need to do is hold on for five more minutes. All i need to do is hold on for another forty five minutes and we're gonna break for lunch all i need to do then is to get through the next evolution so that i can make it to dinner and go home. And then there were times when it could expand when he was experiencing flow state. And time could be a weapon in your arsenal where you could use it to really take on a different meaning and what you were doing. And he described to me, as he was sitting there during Hell

Starting point is 00:43:02 Week, and they were freezing and just wanting to give up that there was an exchange officer who happened to be from Thailand who was there who even though everyone else was in a difficult situation this person had virtually no body fat and he just saw the person just buckling and just using every ounce that they had to stay in the moment and to use their mind to battle through it. Any said that's where the whole concept of this rubber band and expand ability or extraction really came into being because he thought. is he thought if that Thai officer has the brain power and willingness and mindset to get through this, then I can too and so can the men who are with me. And so it's really just a different way of looking at our circumstances and thinking about it in a different paradoxical way, which becomes a different perspective for how we

Starting point is 00:44:04 get through challenges or struggles that we encounter or how we use the good times as a glide path to do more with. It reminds me a lot about Ethan Cross's self distancing guidance. The fact that if you have anxiety, if you're struggling, thinking of yourself in the third person can help, talking to yourself in the third person. And then also something he talks about called the Batman effect,

Starting point is 00:44:31 which is basically having some like alter ego, where you think of yourself as like a superhero who has all the strengths where you're weak and what would they do in that situation. So that kind of reminds me of what you were just explaining with the rubber band, because in the moments of being expansive, you might be just trying to figure out what would your greater self do in this situation to get out of it. Is that right if I understand that correctly?

Starting point is 00:44:55 Yeah it is and I'm glad you brought up Ethan because he's a good friend of mine and his book Chatter is great but yes I mean that's exactly what i'm talking about and it also leads into another thing that i often talk about is what ends up happening to us is we become our own vision are we end up arson and the very goals and ambitions that we want to have in life because. want to have in life because of our own self image that we have of ourselves that we cannot do it. So we put roadblocks in the way almost unintentionally at times, or they seem unintentionally, but they're all intentional. And we vision the very things that we want to accomplish. Just another way of looking at that.

Starting point is 00:45:41 We'll be right back after a quick break from our sponsors. that. We'll be right back after a quick break from our sponsors. Okay. So I want to get into some leadership stuff because you have some really great leadership advice in the book. One of the things that I really liked is this phrase you have, think with your feet. I can't wait to use this moving forward because I lead a team of like 60 people and I just feel like I'll always remember it. Think with my feet.

Starting point is 00:46:05 Can you talk to us about what that means? The origin of this is I had a great mentor, Jay Skabinski, who was my CIO when I was at LendLace and Jay was really trying to take on a lot of projects that were going to change the company. But many of these things were initiatives that the people who had been there for a while didn't want to undertake. What happens and i think we see this all the time you go into these meetings and. He was good about getting everyone globally cuz one least was a global company together into a room to discuss what we were going to do. into a room to discuss what we were going to do and then have everyone go out there after they're not in unison and accomplish it and he said to me after one of these.

Starting point is 00:47:00 Offsite meetings that we had where we had flown everyone and he goes i want you to watch people over the next couple weeks. Because because you're gonna see pretty clearly who is speaking with their mouth and who is speaking with their feet and. He was so right there were so many of them who came into that meeting and we're just nodding approval and then the second that they left they were doing everything in their power to afford. The success of the project and then you had people who were speaking in their feet in the opposite direction, who were coming out of the meeting and doing everything that they could to move the project forward. And it is such an interesting way that people live their lives, whether it's in a business setting, or even doing a self help exercise where you see someone like Tony Robbins talk about something on the screen and you say you're going to do it, but then your actions go in the exact opposite of doing them. And so you were actually speaking with your feet by not pursuing that thing that you signed up in your mind to do.

Starting point is 00:48:04 So that's really what speaking with your feet is all about. I love that. Think with your feet, lead with your feet, speak with your feet. It's so true. You've got to actually lead by example. You also talk about the need to practice eyes on, hands off in leadership. Can you talk about that?

Starting point is 00:48:21 Yeah, where this really came from was I was having a discussion with General Stan McChrystal and also Keith Crotch, who I referenced earlier. And I realized that what I was trained to be throughout most of my career was a servant leader. And there's nothing wrong with servant leadership. It served me extremely well. However, when I think of servant leadership, it really does

Starting point is 00:48:47 revolve around being more hands on with our employees. And I think with the way that companies are operating, more and more people are working outside of the office, we have more people in other countries who are part of the teams, and so as i was thinking about this i thought that we needed a new leadership paradigm that i call carter leadership. Which is really leading with intention because just as a gardener nurtures their crops. intentionally nurtures their teams growth and it's really doing so in this eyes on hands off approach where the leader becomes informed without micromanaging which is so critical in today's innovation driven workplaces so this eyes on hands off to put this into perspective and I'll just since I brought up general McCrstal I'll use a

Starting point is 00:49:46 military example of this. So imagine him as the leader who's in charge of all forces in Afghanistan and he's got a team of Rangers who's trying to take an Al Qaeda position or a Taliban position on a mountainside that's hundred miles away from him. There is no way that he is going to be able to micromanage what is happening on that operation because he's not there. He's not a part of it. So what he can do is he can be eyes on from the standpoint of observing what they're doing, giving them the best training that he possibly could, making sure that they understand the rules of engagement the parameters of the mission what their expectations are.

Starting point is 00:50:32 What's the needs to be hands off realizing that he's given them all that information and training. in the moment where they're experiencing what the enemy is doing, letting them make split moment decisions on the battlefield and being eyes on, but hands off in dictating what their behaviors are. It's the same thing that happens on the workplace where you have a gifted software developer. Oftentimes we want to micromanage the results that we get out of the developer. And what I'm saying is, in the same way, we need to give him or her the parameters of what we want accomplished, but be hands off and letting them use their creativity and

Starting point is 00:51:21 innovation to develop the best way to approach it and to create the results that we're looking for. Such good advice. And I want to go back to chewing glass a bit because as leaders, as entrepreneurs, we're always competing with long-term vision and what we want to do in the future, as well as all the short-term needs and all the problems. You have a really good framework called the turtle and be effect. Can you talk to us about that and how that can help us plan

Starting point is 00:51:50 and be more effective leaders? Yeah. Well, I'm glad you brought this up because you used Elon Musk quote to describe this in this chapter is really about Elon Musk. So something that I found out about him from a long term mentor mine astronaut when you lauren's was that. When the space shuttle was going away and president bush put out the elective through nasa that companies could bid on this. Not only was space x at the time of startup but they were the only one who did both on. at the time of startup but they were the only one who did both on delivery and supply delivery meaning.

Starting point is 00:52:35 They decided that if they could attack both with the same rocket the same capsule. Parameters that they might start out a little bit behind the competition. what over time they would position themselves to be so far in the forefront which is exactly what we're seeing today but at the time it happened, who is an extremely risky move but musk use the same thing and how he angled for this that he's used to pursue everything that he's done. he's done and you've got to think about what he is really trying to do if you ask him is to save humanity from itself he thinks eventually we're going to have to get off the planet earth and in order to do that and survive on another planet you're going to have to perfect different things you're gonna have to have a way to get there of course what you're also gonna need to learn how to harness electricity in a different way and distort differently. You're going to have to learn how to go under earth in order to create civilizations because we can't survive on top of the planet, which is his boring company.

Starting point is 00:53:39 And so the way that he does all these different things, whether it's creating the solar cells, that he does all these different things, whether it's creating the solar cells, the cars, SpaceX, is he looks at the long term strategy of saving humanity from itself, which is akin to the tortoise, who takes very slow logical steps on its path to achieving its ultimate goal. But then, on its path to achieving its ultimate goal but then in the day to day moments and operating these different ventures he's acting more like the be. Where the beast purpose is to serve the queen and the hive and they are very much about doing whatever they have to do in the present moment to achieve what needs to be done so the real art here becomes how do you combine the best virtues of a b with the best virtues of the tortoise so that your actions. Are you doing in the micro moments that make up your day are leading you towards where you wanna go to fill your long term, but you're doing it in the daily repetition or daily movements of meeting your midterm ambitions. That's what the B and turtle effect is really about.

Starting point is 00:54:56 It's how do you use deliberate action, whether you're in a business setting or a personal setting, to take the actions that you want to align your values and your workload to your shorter term ambitions while pursuing your long-term aspirations. I love everything that you just broke down there. I loved the story with Elon Musk. So we've mentioned a lot of entrepreneurs in this episode.

Starting point is 00:55:20 I feel like we named off like 50 people. One person we didn't talk about was Steve Jobs. And you draw a really cool story of him in your book where you talk about his ability to overcome the fear of being wrong. And as entrepreneurs, we're risk takers, we have to be creating new things. There's a lot of failure involved and a fear of being wrong. So can you talk to us about how we can get better at this fear of failure?

Starting point is 00:55:48 Yeah, I picked Steve Jobs because he's a very recognizable name and people often see the output of what he created at Apple without really analyzing the backstory of all the things that he had to overcome to have that success. And one thing I have found, and this is really about being a boundary magnifier, is sometimes being right means being alone. And in the case of Jobs, he felt so passionate that the right path for Apple was the path that he was advocating for that he was willing to give up. Is roll their as ceo because he was so passionate about it and it's something that i found in my own career and multiple circumstances and i'm sure it's something that.

Starting point is 00:56:41 Many of the listeners have found themselves into sometimes we're asked to do things in our jobs that go against who we are what are values are what we think. Is the right thing to do and so often. We lean into what the popular thing is to do or what's going to bring job safety instead of doing the right thing and this chapter is really. That on your entrepreneurial journey or your business journey you're gonna be encountered with many circumstances we're doing the right thing. And embodying your values means that sometimes you're gonna be standing alone in your convictions to do it. And that's exactly what we saw with Steve Jobs. And not only did he leave the company with those convictions, but he doubled down on that vision. And that's what eventually brought him back and led him to creating

Starting point is 00:57:37 the Apple that we see today and the legacy that he left behind. Well, John, this was such an amazing conversation. I loved having you on the show. I end my show with two questions that I ask all my guests. So the first one, and you can answer this however you'd like, can be about today's topic, it could just be whatever comes to your mind. What is the one actionable thing our young

Starting point is 00:57:59 and profitors can do today to become more profitable tomorrow? So one thing I love to tell people is that when you get up in the morning, you should look at yourself and the image that is shining back at you and realize that that person is the most incredible person on earth that you were ever going to meet now you also have to come to the realization as you're looking at that person, that they're also the most self critical person you're ever gonna meet and so really your battle. Greatness is really the battle between those two dimensions of yourself and it's really mastering wearing the true you the true authentic you that realizes the capabilities

Starting point is 00:58:45 the true authentic you that realizes the capabilities and the gifts that you have and that you were put here to do something that only you can do on earth. And your goal should be finding out what that is, the problem you're called to solve and then doing it to better humanity. So good. And what is your secret to profiting in life? And this can go of course beyond just financial profiting in life? And this can go, of course, beyond just financial,

Starting point is 00:59:06 but profiting in all the different ways of life. When I was at that tail end of Lowe's going into Dell, I happened to come out of that time and met with a psychologist who had me analyze my life by picturing myself sitting on a kitchen bar stool. And what I realized is that although I was on that stool, the supports underneath it weren't in balance. For me, the constant grind had become overwhelmingly a greater support than every other one in my life.

Starting point is 00:59:40 And whether it's the constant grind or something else, I think we need to ask ourselves, are our lives truly in balance? And going back to Benjamin Hardy, what he got me to do is to picture myself sitting on the stool that my future self would want to sit on if I could become my ideal self. And if I did so, what would those supports look like? And what would I need to do to go from the way it looked today to the way that I wanted to look in the future? And I think that that's an exercise that all the listeners should go through and a great way to think about this, if it seems like it's too difficult to go from point A to point

Starting point is 01:00:21 B, is to do a reverse bucket list. And that is look at your life, and instead of examining all the things that you want to accomplish, look at all the things that you have already accomplished that you never thought would have been possible. And to use those to gain the confidence to understand that you can change the parameters

Starting point is 01:00:41 of what's underneath your stool to whatever you want it to be in the future. Such good advice. I really, really love that analogy. John, where can everybody learn more about you and everything that you do? So if you want to learn more about me personally, you can go to my website, johnrmiddlinitialmiles.com. And if you want to learn more about Passion Struck, the podcast, the book, what the company is doing, you can go to passionstruck.com. Awesome, John.

Starting point is 01:01:09 Thank you so much for joining Young and Profiting Podcast. Thank you so much. It was such an honor to be here. you

Young and Profiting with Hala Taha - John R. Miles: Escape Quiet Desperation and Transform Your Life with Intentional Living | E300

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