TESLOOP vs. Amtrack with Haydn Sonnad
Posted by John Livesay in podcast | 0 comments
Episode Summary:
The key to success is not about being perfect but having the confidence to pursue your vision in your market. Haydn Sonnad takes smart marketing to another level with TESLOOP and how he pitched this to Elon Musk. The first thing he knew was to not compete with Uber or Lyft. Rather, his company puts the customer first. To do this, Haydn becomes the customer first before giving out something to other people. Haydn explains how TESLOOP offers a cheaper way of traveling in the long haul from San Diego to Palm Springs.
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Our guest on The Successful Pitch is Haydn Sonnad, who is the Founder of TESLOOP, which allows you to be in a Tesla and go from Los Angeles to San Diego or Los Angeles to Palm Springs. It’s an amazing new way to get around in a long distance ride without having to fight traffic or take the train or plane. I took it myself and loved it. He’s only nineteen years old. He’s gotten his startup funded. He talks about how he puts himself literally in the mind or the seat of the customer, how he anticipates every potential thing they might want to have, and what he’s going to do in the future with a car that drives itself.
Listen To The Episode Here
TESLOOP vs. Amtrack with Haydn Sonnad
Our guest is Haydn Sonnad, who is the Founder of TESLOOP. I have personally experienced this incredible service from Angeles to San Diego in a Tesla. Think Uber meets the Concorde jet; that was my experience of it. Everything from a concierge that’s making sure you’re happy, to first class service from “Would you like a drink? Would you like a snack? Would you like a pillow? Would you like earphones? What music would you like to hear?” It was amazing. When I had the opportunity to hear him speak about how he came up with this idea and how it’s scaling and how he got funding, I wanted to have him as a guest on The Successful Pitch. Haydn, welcome to the show.
John, thanks.
Back in 2015, you told your dad that you wanted a Tesla, correct?
Yeah, I just found out what Teslas were in late 2013. Ever since I saw one in person for the first time, I was just fanatic about them.
What did your dad say to you that made you come up with the idea of TESLOOP?
For a decent amount of time, maybe a little over two years before I had the idea, my dad had also been relatively fanatic about Elon Musk and all of his companies he was creating. I’d always hear videos of Elon talking in the background my entire life, so I wasn’t naïve about Tesla. When I was exposed to the economics of Tesla, I just dug into them and how Elon was preaching how these cars had longevity and they were backed by unlimited mile eight-year warranties, it caught my interest because I’ve never enjoyed vehicle maintenance work, like working on cars. I thought it’d be cool if you didn’t have to work on a car as much and you could just drive it a lot. From there, I initially had the idea to just lease out one car because I wanted to get into it and just look at the cars and see how they work for me. I figured that the lease was about $2,000 a month, insurance would be about $1,000, so if I can make up $3,000 month by dragging people back and forth from LA to Vegas, I’d be able to pay for the car and then I’d be able to drive the car when it wasn’t being used. That seemed great to me, because it was a win-win. I wanted to drive these cars, but obviously I couldn’t just buy one.
The range for the Tesla when it’s fully charged is about 250 miles, correct?
Yeah, give or take. The battery has a degradation curve, so it does get a little worse over time. Our 300,000-mile Tesla is probably at 80% of its initial capacity.
How many miles is it from LA to Vegas? Do you have to stop?
Yeah. LA to Vegas was 280, and you do have to do one charging stop in Barstow, which made it not the best trip for us. We generally don’t want to be doing trips that require charging stops. It would just add time to the trip. If you’re already competing on time against airlines, you want everything to be in your favor.
Smart Marketing: If you’re already competing on time against airlines, you want everything to be in your favor.
Is that why you decided you’re going to pivot and go to different locations, like San Diego and Palm Springs?
Initially after the first two months, we wanted to switch into Southern California, but there’s an intensive permitting process for going intrastate, which is like departing in California and arriving in California. For about a year, we bypassed that by leaving California and going to Nevada. After all the permits and TCP got sorted out, we were able to do the intra-California routes, which is where we first launched Palm Springs. Palm springs for TESLOOP is a great route. It’s the perfect distance. You don’t have to do a charging stop on the way. It’s a very isolated community, so nobody living there has a better way of getting in and out, the trains are bad, planes are super expensive, and not too many people like to drive themselves, especially the elderly who cluster in Palm Springs. They want to get back to their family in LA, but they don’t want to have to drive for three hours in traffic. That’s just both tiring and frustrating.
When did you launch Palm Springs?
We launched Palm Springs I believe in June of 2016, but the month might be wrong.
You’ve just hit your year mark there. Where along the route did you get a co-founder?
I got co-founders about a month in. Originally I pitched the idea of getting that one car and driving people back and forth to Vegas to my dad because I wanted him to financially back the down payment on the car, and he was pretty skeptical about the idea. He was like, “You’re sixteen, you’re not a good driver, and the time to drive back and forth from LA and Vegas is a terrible safety hazard.” I was like, “It might be, but at the same time, autopilot is going to drive these people anyways in the next couple of years, so it doesn’t matter if I’m good at driving or not. It just matters how well Tesla can put together their autonomous capabilities.” He was like, “That makes sense, but I don’t know enough about it, so go ask Elon Musk.” I managed to finesse my way into the Tesla shareholders meeting.
Let’s paint the picture. You’re sixteen years old, using some of your connections because I’m imagining you’re not a stockholder of any size, and you somehow managed to get in there. Tell us that story a little bit because that’s phenomenal vision, chutzpah, confidence that many people at many ages don’t even think to do.
I can’t dig too deep into the details of how I got into the meeting. It wasn’t from having connections. Security at the event wasn’t too strong. It’s not too hard to make people believe you’re a shareholder, if you can provide documents that back up your story.
You get in and there’s a bunch of people that want to get his attention and ask a question. How did you get picked?
I looked at the videos. They just stopped doing the whole Q&A with Elon at the last shareholders meeting, but they’ve done like four or five before, so I had already seen what the setup was like and I noticed that the microphone stands were on either side of the aisle and towards the end of the pitch, they just said, “Get lined up behind the microphone and then you ask Elon your question.” He normally didn’t get to everyone, so the first man on each side got to ask their questions. I just got in and I sat the closest chair to the microphone, and the second they opened up for questions, I got the second question.
[Tweet “Let go of being perfect.”]
I love that you did some due diligence. That right there is such a great takeaway. It’s not about just due diligence on pitching an investor or pitching a client. It’s figuring out the lay of the land before you even walk in the room. Good for you. What was it like talking to Elon who you grew up with his voice in the background?
It was a little intimidating definitely, and I wanted to make sure I got my question down right. I did and I went up and stuttered a little bit, but that’s fine. I conveyed my point and then I got him to answer it well and he said “Within three years, autopilot is going to be able to drive someone from LA to New York 100%.” He said he estimated it by three years, but they’re on track to do it in three years or one year from now. I was like, “My plan will work.”
I love that you just said that I wasn’t perfect and I stumbled a little bit. That’s the key to success. You probably have already figured this out, but you don’t have to be perfect to be successful. The fact, is you’re probably going to be nervous, you can practice as much as you can, and even if you stumble, at least you still got your question in and got your affirmation going. Let’s talk about the name because it’s not Tesla, it’s TESLOOP. From what I’ve read, they didn’t say they had a problem with it, so you didn’t have any big lawsuit pending with people thinking it was a Tesla company?
Originally I came up with the name TESLOOP when I was brainstorming ideas with my dad and he said something like Viperloop and I was like, “That’s terrible. That just sounds weird.” I did like loop because it incorporates the Hyperloop, which isn’t going to be possible for at least a couple more years. It also works out because TESLOOP, we’re just creating loops in Tesla, the car, so it’s a very literal name. Even when I talked to Elon, I’m going to be creating a constant loop between LA and Las Vegas and I’ll call it TESLOOP. He chuckled at that, he thought it was funny. About six months after we had started service, we got an email from Tesla. It was some lower-end corporate guy and he was like, “We’d like for you to change the name because we think it’s a little close and there may be a copyright issue.” We were like, “Of course, we had some backup names. There was no problem with that.” We of course liked the name TESLOOP the most, but if there’s any problem with Tesla, we didn’t want to go forward on that because we’re based on their platform and we want to be as friendly with them as possible. We responded and we’re like, “If you could have someone from the actual corporate come and let us know and tell us what exactly the problem is, we’ll change it.” They never responded back to that, so we’ve had the name for over two years now. They haven’t had a problem, and it’s trademarked under a different industry category than Tesla, so we got through in the trademarking process.
The other thing I love about what you’re doing is that you’re not competing with Uber and Lyft. This is not for short, little, long distance. This is for the long haul, San Diego, two to three-hour Palm springs-LA, and that market is not being tapped because that would cost way more than what you’re charging around $49 or so depending on where you sit if you were to take an Uber there and it wouldn’t be nearly as comfortable. That is smart marketing. Can you tell us the story of how far in were you? How much proof of concept did you have before you reached out to investors?
Let me just go back one step and talk about why we’re not competing with Uber and other intercity ride-sharing services. Fundamentally, they’re all based on the car won’t come on a platform, which is your internal combustion engine and you drive it yourself, an old car. I can almost bet that just don’t make sense in the future. There’re no other players in the regional mobility space that are on this platform, so we’re able to offer a way cheaper product than what you could do in an Uber. Uber from LA to Palm Springs is generally about $150, maybe $160 or $170, whereas the TESLOOP is about a third of that cost, if not less. I don’t think Uber is ever going to be competing in the long distance mobility space, just because they’re not on this car 2.0 platform and it doesn’t make sense for them. Eventually there are going to be competitors. There’re even competitors right now, but they are just planes, trains and buses, so they are again not economic competitors; they’re just in the same space as us.
Smart Marketing: It’s great when travels are rewarding and people are looking forward to it and they can see something to gain out of it.
When you look at the product required for regional versus in-city mobility, it’s a lot easier to get a fully automated in-city mobility product like the Tesla Network, which is going to be mobilizing all of the Model 3s to allow people to book them out on the months that you’re not using them. That’s going kill the inter-city space, and we don’t want to be competing at all with Tesla especially. When it’s in a long distance model, there’s a lot more human interaction, there’s a lot more routing that needs to get done, and there’s a lot more attention required to deliver a consistent experience. That’s very key to long distance, where if you’re going to be in the car for three or four hours, you don’t want to have that aspect of unpredictability like you find in Uber.
Let’s just take little reality check on that, especially if you’re taking senior citizens back and forth between LA and Palm Springs. I’m guessing that bathroom stops are a concern as opposed to train that might have a bathroom on it, but you’ve addressed that.
We definitely have always considered that and surprisingly it very infrequently comes up. Very little people ever request bathroom stops. When they do, we make it simple for them so you can either just tell your pilot, “I need to go to the bathroom. Can you pull over at the next exit?” If you don’t feel comfortable since it is in a ride-sharing scenario, you can just text your ground control operator and they’ll convey the message to the pilot, so you don’t have to expose yourself if you’re uncomfortable with that.
That’s forward thinking, that concept of putting yourself in the seat of the passenger’s mindset. That’s great.
We spent a lot of hours just driving around in the cars and testing out every single possible amenity. We’ve gone through twenty different travel pillows and all these headphones and we’ve tried to create the most consumer-friendly cabin as possible.
When I was hearing your talk, you said it’s the vibe of being in a Starbucks with Wi-Fi and all the amenities of free water and everything. It’s a great experience and it’s a great model and no one else is doing it. Do you ever worry that you could get competitors?
There’s definitely going to be competitors in the future once people understand that this model makes a lot more economic sense and it’s a lot cheaper for them to run mobility on it, but TESLOOP is relatively defensible. When you look at Starbucks, coffee is not a defensible industry. There’re so many coffee shops. It’s unprecedented for a coffee company to reach into the billion-dollar market caps. Starbucks did that by creating an experience. We’re creating an experience at TESLOOP that’s very consistent. It’s not going to be something that you’re unsure what you’re going into. Our routing is all done on proprietary software, so it’s very hard to replicate the exact routing we’re using. There are very different requirements when it’s electric autonomous cars as compared to gas cars, because there’s a lot more considerations to take into account. Also these cars can query so much telemetric data every quarter of a second, so there’s a lot more data processing. That helps you also get better estimations of everything related to the car. That’s hard to replicate, but that’s not impossible. If a company were to take $15 million and get a bunch of cars, they could do this. At scale, we could get better. The trips become shorter because we’re able to link people that are closer together at origin and both destination.
We’ll have more frequency, so it’ll become to a point where even though they are pre-scheduled trips, it’ll be on demand. If we’re having a trip leave every hour, that’s pretty close to on-demand. You never going to have to wait more than two hours until one car is full or something. When you’re doing this long distance, you also want frequency, because there’re a lot of different times that people are traveling for different reasons and you want to be able to satisfy everyone’s time. Also, we can make a more personalized experience through social engineering, which is linking similar people with each other in the car so we can get beneficial human interaction and get people talk to each other and have party cabins and whatnot. There’re a lot of possibilities for creating a very personable brand.
[Tweet “Have a conversation not a presentation when you pitch.”]
That’s where it is an exciting, unexpected treat. I had somebody in the car with me on the way to San Diego that we had a lot in common. We didn’t know each other, but he was fascinating and he found me interesting, so the kinds of people you meet doing this are great. One of my friends, Mark Lovett who lives in San Diego is the Founder of the TEDx down there, and when I told him that’s how I arrived, he got jazzed because one of their goals is getting as many people in LA as possible to come to San Diego to the TEDx events. Imagine getting several cars of yours taking people down to San Diego at different times that everyone in the car would be going to a TEDx anyway and you start this interesting conversations before you even arrive or on the way back talking about the talks you heard. It’s an incredible opportunity.
It’s great when travels are rewarding and people are looking forward to it and they can see something to gain out of it instead of just losing their time and money and motivation to move.
Who knows what connections you would be making there? I was also fascinated that you call the driver a pilot. I believe there’s a two-day training. Can you talk about that?
The training is more intensive than what you’d find in Uber. We train them to be a brand ambassador. We train them how to handle the in-cabin experience, so how to regulate that everyone’s happy. They have to learn how to operate the cars, because driving a Tesla is different than driving a normal car. There’s autopilot you need to deal with, and there are no gears. It’s very different, so we give them at least five hours on-the-road training experience then they do a practice loop where there’s a TESLOOP employee, and then they do one solo loop where they’re heavily monitored. If they pass and we like them and they’re friendly, they become pilots. The pool of people we choose our pilots from is also what adds to TESLOOP. Instead of just having professional drivers that have come to a point in their life where they’re strictly professional drivers and they have less outside experiences to talk about, that can be boring. If you’re bringing in young actors and people that are just full of life and enthusiasm and like talking to others, it can help some people feel more comfortable in the car and just having a rewarding time.
The other thing that’s coming down the road, no pun intended, is the concept that eventually a passenger could be the pilot in exchange for not having to pay for the ride. How would that work? Would you have to train the passenger?
The passenger program could be one of the most revolutionary thing that’s happened to travel that’s tapping into consumer mobility. The way it’s going work is after you are a passenger on TESLOOP and you’ve taken it maybe once or twice. We haven’t finalized the details on this. You’ll be able to apply to a position called the passenger pilots where on any of our routes, you can book the driver’s seat for free in exchange for being a conductor of the trip. Yes, there’s going to be a little bit of training for them. They’re still going to have to do a couple hours, but by that point, once we launched this, autopilot is going to be driving the car safer than any human can drive the car. The actual driving task is going to be very mitigated through autonomous capabilities and it’s not going to be something that’s dangerous to give out to people that aren’t very experienced drivers. We are going to feel very comfortable that we’re able to do this very safely and efficiently. The insurance companies have given us the okay on this. We’ve already done a couple of tests on our Vegas route, but we haven’t pushed that forward just yet. We still want to create the most consistent experience as possible for now and it becomes a little less consistent when you have uncontracted pilots.
Smart Marketing: The people we invest in are the ones that are human and are authentic.
Take us back to what your experience was pitching to get funded.
We’ve done a lot of different fundraising angles. We have had more than one person involved. There’s been me, my dad, the other two co-founders, Jared and Brian, we’ve all pitched in and tried to help get money for the company. That’s of course an important thing to do for any startup. I’ll just go through one. The very first one I ever did was up in the Bay Area. I forgot the name of the firm, but I went in and it was hard to say anything other than intimidating. It was scary. They were the most institutional investor stereotypes. They were just guys in suits with notebooks all sitting across from me on a table. You can prepare your deck and you can get all your talking points together. Every time once you get into a meeting, the conversation will organically drift into something else and you have to have all these answers that you need to figure out. There’ll be raising questions you haven’t even thought about. It can be scary to think that you’re answering a question in a way they don’t want to hear and that could result in them not giving you money which could in turn be very detrimental to the company. There’s definitely a lot of pressure in situations like that, but at the end of the day, I always go back into the conversational tone and just try to explain it to them as if they were my friend. I don’t try to bring in all these terms. It’s just as simple as possible and go into the fundamental values of TESLOOP and why this makes sense in the future and why it’s a good investment for them now.
That’s so smart. If all the investors I’ve interviewed on my podcast tell me, “The people we invest in are the ones that are human and are authentic,” and as you said, having a conversation like you’re a friend, because it is a relationship that you’re building. It’s not just “Here’s the money, bye.” They typically want to be involved and on your board and there are certain milestones they want you to hit and you have to be transparent if you’re hitting a bump in the road, again another pun. They’re investing in you even more than the idea. I can see why someone said yes to you. What are your next steps? Do you have big milestones? Did you raise enough money to last you twelve months or longer?
I’d say we have about until early next year enough money to run until then in the bank, but we’re going to start raising a real Series A probably end of September or early October. We want to get a lot of money so we can horizontally scale out these operations to a lot of different cities and find what markets work best for us and then further scale in there.
Do you plan to do LA or San Francisco to New York, that kind of venture? Are you’re going to stay within this 200-mile sweet spot?
The sweet spot is the 50 to 250-mile routes. The sweet spot is going to get a little bit longer as car batteries get better and supercharging speeds get quicker. I don’t think ever it will make sense to go from LA to New York. That’s 2,000 miles. That’s way too far. The plane is always going to beat you in that scenario, unless there’s some Hyperloop that does it better. We’re sticking to that electric car loop and hold that range. There’s a ton of markets that play into that. We can go to Texas and there’s the Houston, Dallas, Austin, and San Antonio area. There’re places all over Florida and Seattle, Portland. There’re a lot of routes. Even with 2% of the market share of people commuting between the cities, we can fill hundreds of cars. It won’t be too hard for us to get a decent amount of cars out there and a decent amount of markets.
What piece of advice you have for our audience on getting a startup to become a reality? Getting it funded and scaling it?
What we focus on always at TESLOOP is put the customer first. That’s cliché and everyone tries to say that, but you have to become the customer before you can give out something to other people. You have to take a second to try out your product and anything that you don’t like about it, there’s going to be someone else who doesn’t like that. Even if it’s most insignificant, like you think the travel pillow should be rectangular instead of horseshoe-shaped, you have to make sure that you’re confident in that and that’s how you would like this product to be.
[Tweet “Become the customer to anticipate their needs.”]
That’s great. Become the customer is a great mindset and a great way to watch what you’re doing. This is going to be successful because I’m a customer and I’m a fan and I’m telling all my friends. I even did a Facebook Live about it and it got a ton of views. It’s exciting. As you said, no one gets off a plane at United Airlines and says, “I just had the best flight ever.” There’s a real buzz about what you’re doing and I couldn’t be happier to be on the sidelines cheering you on. Thanks for sharing your insights and your passion for what you’re doing and making a difference on the carbon footprint and giving us all a better way to get around.
For the audience, email [email protected] and you’ll get a free first ride to try out TESLOOP on any of our routes.
That’s very generous of you, Haydn. Thank you so much.
If you want John’s free PFD of the three mistakes to avoid when you pitch, go to JohnLivesay.com and enter your email. Remember people have to trust, like and know you before they say yes.
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Connecting The Millennial Generation with Josh Tickell
Posted by John Livesay in podcast | 0 comments
Episode Summary:
Parents often teach their kids that there are many ways to solve a problem. Whether its fossils fuels, climate change, or connecting the millennial generation, Josh Tickell will find a way to solve it. As America’s number one strategist for generational conflict, Josh has filmed many movies geared towards millennials. He creates a future and works around it backwards so everyone can tag along his non-linear journey. His concept of reverse engineering the concept of business is the future of storytelling and a great blueprint for success and scaling.
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Our guest on The Successful Pitch is Josh Tickell, the author of Kiss the Ground. The foreword was written by the CEO and Founder of Whole Foods. He has an amazing story that he shares with us of how Whole Foods got started. The book is sold on Amazon who also owns Whole Food. Josh talks about how if we put the right food in our body, we’re not only healing our body but healing the planet. He said the real key is to figure out how you want to reverse engineer the future. He has some great insights on how he’s done that not only with this book, but other movies that he’s created. He’s been on all kinds of press. He has smart insights on reverse engineer something, tells a story, and then solve a problem, whether that problem is oil, climate change, or the generational conflict. He is literally an expert on knowing why the cultures don’t get along and have different work styles and values.
Listen To The Episode Here
Connecting The Millennial Generation with Josh Tickell
Our guest is Josh Tickell and he has been called America’s number one strategist for connecting with the millennial generation a.k.a. generation Y according to Inc. magazine. He’s also a film director that specializes in movies that are geared to the millennials. He grew up in Louisiana where he lived next to waterways that were polluted by petroleum refineries. In 1997, he captured national attention by driving a van powered by used French fry oil across the US. The Veggie Van, as it was called, became a viral sensation. Then four years later, after the first web browser was introduced, his website was receiving over a million unique visitors. Today, that would be equivalent to probably 100 million. He’s done so many other incredible things. I’ve had the pleasure of hearing him speak. He’s got a great book called Kiss the Ground. Josh, welcome to the show.
Thank you, John. Thanks for having me.
It’s so exciting to see all the different things that people like you have created in their life. I always like to ask my guests to take us back to their own story of origin. Can you take us back to what it was like then? How that has led you to decide that you wanted to be a keynote speaker as well as an author and filmmaker?
It is not a linear journey as you might expect. I was born in Australia. I grew up there until I was nine years old. I grew up very much outdoors in nature, enjoying the beauty of planet earth. When I was nine, we moved to Louisiana. My mother’s mother, my grandmother, was sick and dying of cancer. We realized that all of the people that we knew were sick and dying of cancer. It’s no exaggeration to say that the lymphoma leukemia and cancer rate in what’s called Cancer Quarter is a thousand times the national average. There are 150 petrochemical facilities in a hundred mile stretch of land between Houston and Baton Rouge. That’s where we lived. It set me off at young age thinking, “There must be alternatives to everything we see. There’s got to be at least one other pathway.” My guiding light all these years is to find a solution to a problem. What’s the problem? Is it oil? Is it climate change? Is it generational conflict? Is it all of these things together? That’s led me on this distinct and non-linear path that has brought me through promoting alternative fuels, to making movies, to writing books on how to reverse climate change.
[Tweet “Reverse engineer your future.”]
You’re almost like the male version of Erin Brockovich. You see a problem, you’d become the voice of the people who don’t have a voice. That turns into a movie.
To some degree, yes. I don’t consider myself an activist. I don’t consider myself a front lines type person. What I try to do with my work, my team, and everybody I work with, is I try to create a future and work backwards. What does the future look like without fossil fuels? In 2006,we were filming Fuel which won Sundance, went to the White House, went to 150 countries, and was translated in all languages. When we were filming Fuel, we go, “What does the future look like?”We said, “We have a particular desire for this one fuel.” I was into biodiesel at the time. It definitely looks like plugs on electric vehicles. We found a company that would modify a Prius. They put a big battery where it previously used to have a little battery. They put a big battery in the Prius and they put a plug on the Prius. We filmed a Prius plugging into solar panels and we said, “This is the future that we see.”We got a letter from Toyota right away, “You can’t modify our Prius without our permission.”Fast forward six years and Toyota releases the plug-in Prius.
That’s what we try to do with all of our work, create the future and visualize the future. Tell the story and make sure it’s scientifically valid. Sometimes it does shame car companies, oil companies, and these big companies. They’re not organized around future vision. The exception is Elon Musk who I interviewed later for Pump, the third film that we made. His companies are organized around a future vision. You are seeing this with the new generation. You’re seeing this with millennials. You’re seeing this with a lot of the companies that are being formed today, which are B Corps, Benefit Corps. They are organized around future vision. That’s where we get powerful, where we can use the vehicle of corporation to make a big difference in the world.
I look for problems to solve, whether it’s oil, climate change, or generational conflict. If you’re a startup trying to figure out, “How am I going to scale my business or even get it funded?” I love this concept of, “No matter what business you’re in, how do I reverse engineer what I want to have happen?” This concept of reverse engineering this future, telling a story that is solving a problem, is such a great blueprint, whether you’re making your film, working on scaling your business, or growing your brand as yourself, no matter what it is you’re selling. Clearly, you’ve had some success there. It’s fascinating that you’re not an activist yet you have the results of one without possibly the controversy. Would that be fair?
Yes, sometimes there’s a little controversy.
Connecting The Millennial Generation: Food is the basis for society so we have a more peaceful, equitable planet.
It’s unintentional. You’re not approaching it from an antagonistic, “Let’s go out and scream and yell,” necessarily. You find your voice through your filmmaking. It’s even much less confrontational than someone like Michael Moore who also makes movies that get a lot of attention about pointing out disruptive concepts. Let’s talk about how you became an expert in Generation Y. What’s the problem that you see happening with the generational conflict? Is it baby boomers versus Generation Y? Tell us that story.
Let me answer that question after I talk about my journey to learn about millennials. The journey began with my first film, Fuel. Wed did over 100 college bookings with the movie, which is unheard of. You don’t go to 100 colleges. These were paid speaking engagements. As a filmmaker, you’re not going to say no. I did a lot of them with my wife who is a millennial. It was so interesting to see the generational difference between myself. I was born in 1975.A lot of the young people that we were speaking with were born after 1985, ten years’ difference but a totally different mindset. The more colleges I went to and the more we screened the film commercially in theaters, the more I saw the audience was such a clear linear divide in terms of age range. We had young people come in to see the movie.
We did not have Generation X-ers. We did not have baby boomers unless they were dragged by their millennial children. It was college age at the time. As that progressed three movies later, I went, “We got the same people showing up to all these films. We got the same people not showing up to all these films. What gives?” That’s when I decided to turn the camera the other way on the audience and really dive into what are the values differences. What is the core of the code of the millennial generation? That’s been an investigation that I’ve been on for four years now. It started by looking at corporate social value. Corporate social value came in when the millennial buying power came online.
What year was that do you think?
A lot of people are confused as to which generation is which. The other confusion is many people conflate the idea of a marketing segment and the idea of a generation, and they will mix them up. Asocial generation is a group of people born in the span of about twenty years who experienced the same touchstone moments. Have a birth rate either rise or fall. For millennials, we’re talking about people who came of age in the new millennium. They were born roughly from the end of the oil crisis and the financial crisis of the 1970s, at the end of 1979, beginning of 1980 until September 11th, 2001 when the birth rate dropped. Those two periods of time has the most intense rise of human births in the history of our civilization, 80 million people in the US and 2 billion worldwide.
That’s a big a-ha moment. A lot of baby boomers think, “We’re the biggest and we’re growing up be the biggest forever.” Everything’s been so geared to marketing and advertising world towards baby boomers because they had the money. The baby boomers are causing a lot of disruption. A lot of the values are different. I’m fascinated that it ended 2001 right when 9/11 happened. Is that a strange coincidence or is that what you were talking about when you mentioned big social marker?
No coincidence at all. We experienced social moments viscerally when they are huge. People have more babies when things are going well, less babies when things are not going well. Economically speaking, that factors in tremendously to people’s procreation numbers. When you look at the millennial generation and the baby boomer generation, they’re roughly the same size. There are 78 million baby boomers and 80 million millennials in the US. Millennials is a little bigger. Largely, the millennials are the children of the baby boomers. There is a generation in between, which was a dip in births. That’s Generation X. We’ve got these two massive generations. They’re like two weights on the end of the spring.
The baby boomers are known for creating great music. They set culture on its path. They’re moralists so it’s very much right or wrong. Abortion is right or abortion is wrong. There is no in between. That’s the way they are in many issues. You can see that in the presidential race of 2016.We had two baby boomer candidates. We had Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump. Everything was either morally right or morally wrong. There was no gray area for them. Then you’ve got somebody from a completely different generation, Bernie Sanders. You saw the radical difference in terms of view of the world. We also get our worldview from our generation. When you look at the boomers and you look at millennials, your question was, “What’s the generational conflict we see?”
I finished the manuscript for the book on millennials. We’re looking at The Revolution Generation. Most people seem to gravitate to it. The big a-ha, the big OMG in the book is when we look at wealth dynamics, at social dynamics, at class dynamics, race dynamics, all the way down the line. There isn’t a massive aggregation of income, not wealth, inside the baby boomer generation. This cuts across all developed nations, like eighteen developed nations. Australia is the only exception. Baby boomer income is growing. Millennial income is declining, meaning the money we make, not the money saved. You’ve got these economically disparate generations. What set the millennials apart was 2008, not 2001. 2001 changed the birth rate, but 2008 created the tenor of a generation.
Connecting The Millennial Generation: Create the future and visualize the future.
Social generation experiences touchstone moments together. All millennials were born by 2008. The youngest were about eight years old, the oldest were about 28. That middle range of those people were experiencing the workforce. They were experiencing college. They were experiencing debt. They’re experiencing parents being laid off in mass, coming home with their things in boxes, their photographs. Social security was a concept that was part of our social construct. That is not part of the construct of millennials. Now you’ve got an economic free for all generation that doesn’t believe in any of the economic principles that came before. They don’t believe in the patriarchy of the man making the money and the woman being the housewife. They don’t believe in corporate power. They don’t believe the corporate structure will be around. You see this explosion and disruption, Uber, Bitcoin, all of these things. That is a different universe than the one in which baby boomers grew up in.
Airbnb is classic. The fact that we work is going to create shared living space for that generation. The baby boomers would not be comfortable in that work or living space. This group’s whole shared economy concept is revolutionary to say the least.
When you put these two generations in a room together and you go, “You are going to accomplish tasks.”The baby boomers organize in a hierarchical manner. They begin to dole out who’s going to do what. There’s an alpha. That person gets established very quickly. All of the hierarchy gets established all the way down to the bottom level of bureaucracy where you’ve got people just sitting there, mouth breathing, drooling. Millennials are completely different. They create a team, they organize as a unit, then they begin to attack tasks together. It’s almost like parallel processing. The communication style is different. It’s dynamic. It’s constant communication. There’s information flowing back from all the points. If one person isn’t as strong as the rest of the team, the team compensates. You try to create a work style that’s going to work for a hierarchal military patriarchal model and an equitable teamwork model. When you put those things together in the workplace, there’s explosions, fireworks.
Baby boomers are like, “I’m not using Slack. I’m not going to give way. You better answer my email. I’m not answering your texts right back and forth.” I’ve seen it. I’ve experienced it. It’s quite fascinating. You said there’s a ten-year difference between you and your wife. You can’t believe how much difference there is. My youngest sister is five years younger than I am. I experienced a complete disconnect with her because we have completely different tastes in music. Her frame of references of what she remembers and what she doesn’t historically is very different. That’s why I like your book title, The Revolution Generation. Instantly, in my head I go, “You say you want a revolution?” that music. For some people, they don’t have that song as a reference guide so they wouldn’t resonate with it. For me, that was instantly what came up. Take a minute and talk about how music reflects what’s going on with this generational conflict.
Music is part of our shared value system. Part of how you know what generation you’re from is by the music you resonate to you. There is no way to grow up in a westernized culture without being inundated with music. I don’t care if you only go shopping once a year, you are going to hear that stuff coming in over the pipe, the canned speakers. I took a yoga class and the woman teaching it is about my age. All the music was the coolest stuff in the late ‘80s. I’m going, “This is such awesome music.”I’m thinking to myself, “All the twenty-year olds in this class, none of them even know who these musicians are.”Part of how you construct your identity is through your peer relationships, through what you speak about. Music is a generational expression of what’s going on in the world. Think about Billy Joel and how influential he was. Think about Billy Idol. The millennials are like, “That’s classic.” You’re like, “Who’s cool? Katy Perry is.” It’s a totally different world. That’s how you know what generation you’re in.
Let’s transition into Kiss the Ground: How the Food You Eat Can Reverse Climate Change, Heal Your Body, & Ultimately Save Our World. That is amazing to think of all of those things being influenced by what we put in our mouth, whether it’s climate control, oil, what we put in our car, fuel. There’s a whole generational focus that’s very different than the baby boomers who grew up on Jolly Green Giant and Favita cheese. There was no concept of farm to table. Only the people who lived in a farm had that. Now, people living in urban areas want that.
Kiss the Ground: How the Food You Eat Can Reverse Climate Change, Heal Your Body & Ultimately Save Our World
That’s a very millennial concept. Health has come online hugely as they see their parents age, as they see a generation of people who are mired in a medical system that is about going after disease versus going after prevention. That is economic. When you have the money to have surgeries, do pills, and all of that stuff, you have a different mindset than when you grow up in an economy that doesn’t have money. If you don’t have money, you’re about prevention. You’re going to go to yoga classes, you’re going to run, and you’re going to try and eat healthier. That is a generational mindset. The two stories, Kiss the Ground and The Revolution Generation, are part of the same arc. We’ve talked about The Revolution Generation. It’s about the people who are going to change the world, hopefully save it. Kiss the Ground is the blueprint. It’s the how-to. If we look at all the dynamics of humanity right now, we look at all the great challenges that we have, we have huge geopolitical challenges with North Korea with the potential for a new nuclear threat. We’ve got bio-terrorism. Then we’ve got the dynamics that affect everyone. Food, water, climate. I’m not talking about, “Did humans create global warming?” We don’t even have to have that conversation.
We know stoic and metrically that if you burn a gallon of fuel, it creates 22 pounds of carbon dioxide. It is provable. It is absolute. There is no question. That’s 22 pounds of carbon dioxide goes into the atmosphere. What it does after that long-term, whether it heats or cools the planet, is a different conversation. We know once again scientifically, the majority of that carbon dioxide will go into the oceans where it acidifies the water. In that water is the phytoplankton and coral. The phytoplankton and coral creates 50% of the oxygen we breathe. We’re acidifying and killing the life forms that create oxygen for humans. This is a very simple conversation. If we want to have human life three generations from now, we have to deal with carbon dioxide in our atmosphere. I don’t care what you believe in, I don’t care what your system of understanding is, that is absolute. The best way to suck carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere is to put it in the soil.
Here’s what happens. When you bring carbon dioxide in the soil, you also bring water and nitrogen into the soil. The soil fertility goes through the roof. You can grow more food. The water that’s stored becomes part of the localized water cycle which diminishes drought. It reverses desertification and brings life back. Let’s look at the other human problem. A billion refugees by 2050 don’t have food, they don’t have water, and they don’t have a place to farm. That’s happening already. That’s what happened with Syria which expressed itself as a civil war. If we go back, what actually happened was serious. Farming intensified because they had to get water. Desertification was happening, which is a man-made problem. Now, Syria has a few million refugees. Let’s expand that to a billion. What does the world look like? The world looks dysfunctional with a billion refugees. If we’re going to deal with the biggest and most immediate threat to humanity, we have to address carbon dioxide. The way we do it is by building soil fertility. That’s what Kiss the Ground, the book, is about, which is on Amazon.com. You can order it. It is an incredible book. It’s a blueprint for the future.
[Tweet “Heal your body and heal the planet at the same time.”]
You also have the foreword by John Mackey. For those who don’t know, tell everybody who John is and what an interesting, impressive person to get to write your foreword.
John started a health food store in Austin, Texas. The store started about 30 years ago. It got flooded in a freak flood that totally destroyed it. He put his family’s money on the line. He put all his friends’ money into it. The store was gutted. He had nothing. No money. He was going to go bankrupt. The next day, the entire community of people that bought food from that store showed up. They began to mop, clean, and built. What that community built under John’s leadership is something called Whole Foods.
I never knew that story of origin. I love it. Thank you so much for that.
Whole Foods has been sold to Amazon.com. It’s an amazing testament to our society’s change in taste and what we value.85% of Americans will buy organic food this year. That is a huge vote for clean and healthy food for our children.
That generation who’s buying the organic food typically doesn’t have a huge disposable income compared to the baby boomers, yet they see the value in it for prevention.
It’s a value shift. Baby boomers were raised largely in TV dinner, Levitin, suburbanite explosion of the world, that everything could be George Jetson-ized, wrapped in plastic, and come out a machine. Fast forward 40 years and we realize that is the worst thing you can do for your health. That is the worst thing you could do for the planet. The values are shifting.
In the book, there are interesting and accessible interviews. You don’t have to be a scientist to want to read this book at all. You’ve interviewed celebrity chefs, farmers, and ranchers. It’s being turned into a documentary film narrated by Woody Harrelson.
I basically lived on the road for a year with the support of my amazing family. It was an incredible experience to go and meet these people, live with them, and see this whole other world. How we can heal our bodies and heal the planet at the same time? That’s the big lesson. If what you’re putting into your body is good for your body, it’s nutritionally dense, it’s full of life, and it’s also good for the soil, that is the big lesson.
[Tweet “Everyone who eats needs to read Kiss the Ground.”]
Talk about zooming out and thinking on a spiritual, philosophical look at life and everything being connected, that you’re not isolated from plants, trees, and animals. You’re putting that into your body as nutrition and fuel. It’s makes perfect sense, but I don’t think I’ve ever heard anybody explain it quite the way you did in a very concise and compelling pinch. If you’ll hear your body, you’re healing the planet at the same time, even if that’s not your intent or goal.
One of the people who did a review of the book on Goodreads said, “Everyone who eat needs to read Kiss the Ground.” If you are interested in health and you don’t care about the climate, you don’t care about the future. You’re going to do what’s best for your body. That is agreed instinct that is, in this case, very good. We want people to do the absolute best thing for their health. As we show in the book, The Harvard Medical School has what they call The Healthy Eating Plate, the culmination of a thousand studies that they’ve done over decades. That is what we codify in the book as the regenerative diet, a diet that’s rich in plants and vegetables. We’re not saying don’t eat meat. We’re saying be very selective with the type of meat you eat. It’s a diet that eschews things that are made from corn syrup and things that are highly processed. It’s not a hard diet to follow because it’s a lifestyle. When you take that on with Kiss the Ground as your manual, you begin to transform inside and outside.
When we’re healed, we’re not healed alone. We’re healing not just ourselves but hopefully, our family and ideally the planet along the way. Are there any last thoughts you want to leave our audience with about Kiss the Ground or telling a good story?
Part of what we always try and do with our stories is in part reverse engineering the future. In Kiss the Ground, we went, “What does the future look like where the climate is balanced, where carbon dioxide is not in excess in the atmosphere?”The good news is that is achievable within your and my lifetime, and definitely within the lifetime of millennials. That is a world which has abundant food and abundant fresh water. Ultimately, food is the basis for society, so we have a more peaceful, equitable planet. When you look at that future, you go, “It’s too big. I can’t participate.” You go, “You do. You participate.” If you’re in America, you probably participated three times a day by what you put in your mouth. In terms of telling a good story, the biggest thing that I can leave as a takeaway is how do we get people to participate in creating the story? That’s what we’re doing with Kiss the Ground. That’s why the book is out there on Amazon and other places. We want people to take that story into their own lives, and then write their own story. Write the future because that’s what’s available.
That’s the ultimate summary. When you get a shared vision, you get a lot of customers, you get a lot of investors, you get the best people to join your team. Josh has given us that blueprint, not only in Kiss the Ground, but in this interview. Thank you so much, Josh.
John, thank you. Thanks to your audience.
Links Mentioned:
- Josh Tickell
- Kiss the Ground
- Whole Foods
- Elon Musk
- The Revolution Generation
- Kiss the Ground: How the Food You Eat Can Reverse Climate Change, Heal Your Body, &Ultimately Save Our World
- Amazon.com
- John Mackey
- The Healthy Eating Plate
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Libby Gill, The Hope Driven Leader
Posted by John Livesay in podcast | 0 comments
Episode Summary:
Hopes starts when we believe that change is possible. Being a hope-driven leader means believing that whatever you do makes a difference for the entire team. If hope is one of your foundations in leadership, you are leading by inspiring and informing; not by demanding and ordering. Libby Gill believes that when you become this kind of leader, you will be able to determine the outcome of your team’s performance. She shares that hope and happiness are key to keeping up with the velocity of technological changes as leader.
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Are you someone who’s hopeful or are you someone who’s pessimistic? Our guest, Libby Gill, is the expert on hope. In fact, she’s written a book called The Hope-Driven Leader. She said, “Hope is what is connected to taking action. That’s the difference between hope and optimism even though they are both emotional cousins. It’s hard to be hopeless and happy at the same time.” She gives us specific ways that we can bring hope into our lives and into our careers. Enjoy the episode.
Listen To The Episode Here
Libby Gill, The Hope Driven Leader
I have Libby Gill as my guest. She is the former head of communications and public relations for big companies like Sony, Universal, and Turner Broadcasting. She’s now the CEO of LA-based Libby Gill & Company, which is an executive coaching and consulting firm. She guides emerging and established leaders and organizations like Acura, Capital One, Disney, Honda, the big boys and women. Libby shared her success strategies on everything from CNN to the Today Show, to Time, The New York Times and many more. She’s the author of four books. The latest one is The Hope-Driven Leader: Harness the Power of Positivity at Work. I’m very excited to have her on the show. Welcome, Libby.
Thank you, John. I’m happy to be here.
One of the things that we didn’t touch on in your little introduction is that you’re also a keynote speaker.
Yes, I am. I just did a keynote in Kansas City and it’s exciting. I know you do the same thing, John. It’s a lot of fun to be able to spread your message and get to connect with people whose paths you might not ever cross otherwise.
You had all these great jobs in corporate entertainment, which is very challenging to get let alone decide to make that leap to be an entrepreneur. What made you decide to do that?
I’d been in television. I headed communications at those three studios and after a long time launching television shows and promoting our studio and our celebrities and our executives, what I found I loved was turning my team, my kids, and in my world anybody under 30 is still a kid, into real leaders. That was a joy. The studio could be chaotic and crazy swirling around us and I typically had the youngest and greenest staff of any department because what we did was very time and labor‑intensive. You got to know people and learned what made them tick. I just found that such a joyful process to help people sort out their own career path and help boost them along the way.
What’s some of the things that you find most challenging with leaders since you’ve had a front row seat to them? The biggest thing that people are dealing with now is just the velocity of change. We’re all faced with technological changes. There are always sorts of advances and things. It’s very difficult to keep up, regulations, political atmosphere, all of these things. In the corporate world, it’s just compounded by the fact that the people are managing human beings that have to adapt to all these changes. If you think about it, the rapidity of change right now, the acceleration, this may be the slowest rate of change we ever deal with in our lives again. We’re not going to slow down. We’re going to continue to speed up.
Hope Driven Leader: The biggest thing that people are dealing with now is just the velocity of change.
I’ve seen presentations on this. It’s the hockey stick. Everyone thinks, “I’ll eventually catch my breath again.” It’s not the case at all with artificial intelligence and all the other things coming.
Just think about driverless cars. We think, “Who would have shopped online?” but now everyone does and yet, Amazon’s only been around since 1994. To us, it feels like it’s been here forever. All of these things, Airbnb and Uber, that affect us in our personal lives, artificial intelligence and internet grocery shopping, all the things that have changed professionally. Dealing with people who are really hardwired, we are not very skillful as animals. We look at things negatively and that’s the way we’ve survived. We don’t have a lot of defensive skills. We’ve had to weigh out who’s in our path, what’s in our path, how are we going to respond to this? Our fight or flight response is kicked in to high gear when we’re dealing with all these changes in the workplace, even though we don’t always realize it’s just our primitive brain reacting as it’s supposed to.
It’s interesting you talked about Amazon because one of the things I work with people on is getting their pitch clear and concise. I tell people, “Remember when Amazon just sold books,” and people forget. I said, “They were known for one thing and everybody in business needs to be known for one thing first before you’re known for all the other things you could do.” I’m guessing that that becomes one of the challenges that you see in the corporate world and in the clients you coach, which is they’re trying to be known for a lot of things and then they end up not being known for any one thing.
The truth is you don’t have to be good. Amazon is its own unique category like Oprah Winfrey. You can’t compare anybody to either of those. For most organizations, they only have to be good at a few things, their core competency, and then they can branch from there. That first thing is figuring out, “How do I get everybody marching in the same direction?” We’ve been taught that there is a leadership style, but the fact is there are so many different styles. When leaders can figure out, “What’s my superpower? What am I great at and how do I develop that so I can lead people in the way that works for me?,” that’s up to you.
What’s your superpower?
My superpower is what I write about. I feel I’ve got a good handle on inspiring people to go through all these changes. I went through a lot of changes myself. I grew up on a couple of different continents. I went to six different high schools including two in my senior year. How do you go through all these changes? When I started in the corporate world, in corporate entertainment, I started this little company that was founded by a real legend in the business. Norman Lear was the guy who created All in The Family and all those great shows and I thought, “I’m in this mid-sized company founded by this legend. I’m going to learn so much.” About five minutes later, that company was bought by Columbia Pictures and then by Coca-cola and then by Sony. It was either raise your hand and go with it and figure it out as you go or stay in this little place. I thought, “I’m just going to keep raising my hand whether I know this or not.” In five years, I went from being an assistant in Norman Lear’s company to being head of the publicity, advertising, and promotion for Sony’s television business.
I’m a big fan of his as well. In fact, he has a podcast out so let’s give a shout-out to Norman Lear’s podcast because it’s fantastic. He’s in his 90s, talk about staying relevant, healthy and funny and still working. It’s just amazing. His podcast is called All of the Above with Norman Lear. Since we both are admirers of him, we might as well send people to that podcast as well. Let’s talk about your book, The Hope-Driven Leader. What made you write about hope?
Somebody pointed out to me that I had been talking and writing about hope for a long time and I had a book that came out years ago called Traveling Hopefully. It’s about getting over the negative stories of the past, letting go of that baggage whether it’s personal or professional or whatever it is. I kept talking about hope and I had to sneak it in especially at keynotes because people thought, “It was fuzzy or abstract.” The more I study about hope, I had the good fortune to learn about this body of science that comes out of the medical community and positive psychology called hope theory. It is the research about hope. I was able to turn my personal obsession into a professional one and study and learn about the benefits of being a hopeful leader. That’s what kicked it in to high gear.
Is there a big difference between being hopeful and optimistic?
There is. Obviously, they’re related. They’re emotional cousins. Here’s the difference. Optimism is a generalized sense of, “It’s all going to be fine. It’s all going to turn out okay,” which is great, but hope links that to actions. It makes it specific and situational and focused on the future. In other words, “If I believe this and I behave accordingly, I’m going to go in this direction.” When you see it with an open-eye sense of reality, “This may not be easy but I see the pitfalls. I see the obstacles. I know there are some out there that I may not even see yet, but this is so important. I’m going to keep going towards that vision.” That’s the difference between hope and optimism. It’s action-based.
[Tweet “Hope and optimism are emotional cousins.”]
If we distinguish hope versus happiness, would you say that everyone who is hopeful is therefore happier than those who aren’t?
It’s hard to be hopeless and happy. They are clearly linked. There’s so much research about it now which I love, but according to the data, it is about being having a positive outlook on life and absence of major stressors. We’re not all happy all the time, but many of us have that happiness set point that people talk about. Hope is very much directed towards the future and based on, “If I do this, then this will happen.” It starts with a fundamental belief that change is possible. We think about that and think, “Doesn’t everybody believe that?” Think about someone. We’ve all got someone in our own life that that doesn’t believe change is possible. It’s that, “It is what it is,” person. “No matter what I do, nothing will change.” We all know one or several of those people.
Hope starts with a belief that change is possible and then an expectation that what you do as an individual is what makes the difference. You determine the outcome. It’s not determined by your boss or your spouse or the world at large. It’s up to you. When you put those together and you have that future vision that is so visceral and so intense and so inspiring, and the trick is, and what you’re so good at, John, is then you have to be able to articulate that to others. You’re leading yourself, which is okay but when you’re a leader, you can lead by demanding and ordering and requiring or you can lead by inspiring and informing.
Let’s double click on what you said about not being dependent on outside events to determine whether you make the choice to be happy. A lot of people think, “My boss is my boss and the marketplace is what it is. It’s never going to get better for us. My boss is never suddenly going to be someone who gives acknowledgement or whatever.” What do you say to those people of how they can find hope even if they’re in a culture that doesn’t exude it?
There are people who say, “I’ve got a terrible boss and I’m not going anywhere.” Hope is not rose-colored glasses. You look at that with a sense of reality. That’s the difference between what the hope pioneers, the hope theorists coined true hope versus false hope. In false hope, it’s the person who says, “Maybe someday it will change. My boss will suddenly wake up and be a different human being.” That’s not going to happen. That’s false hope, but true hope is looking at it, “What can I do to influence the situation?” Honestly, if you’ve done everything you can and it’s not getting better and you’re going to work with your stomach in knots, then wake up and look around and say, “This is never going to change, but I can. I can look for another department in my company. I can look for a different job. I can look for another way to handle this.”
That’s where the risk-taking comes in and that’s where as human beings, we trigger those biological fears and we get scared. “What if it’s worse over here? What if I get a meaner boss?” Those things are possible but you don’t know and we never have 100% of the data. It’s up to you to either try it out or make peace with where you are with a less than positive or fulfilling environment. For me, that was never going to happen. That’s why I worked in my corporate career at three different studios and I wasn’t jumping ship constantly. That was over eighteen years. It was always this sense of, “I think there’s another adventure out there. Let me try that.”
Starting your own business in your 40s, I had never run my own business. I’d never even thought about it. That was a pretty daunting time to think, “Let me go be an entrepreneur.” It was just time for a change and frankly if the right corporate job had come along, I probably would have grabbed it. Being a speaker and teaching and writing and training, all of those things, it’s hard to find that job. Instead, I decided I just create it.
We both have done the corporate world and now work for ourselves. For you, was it a difficult transition?
It was difficult in the sense of, “I no longer had that nice universal title. I’m no longer senior vice president of something at a Fortune 500 company.” That disappeared. Then you have that moment of, “Will the phone ever ring or will I figure out what the heck I’m doing?” I had those same fears everybody else does, but I had some money in the bank and I had a plan. I’d never been a great person about soliciting help, but I was the sole support of my kids and myself. I’ve done favors for people for all these years and it’s time to ask and I started asking. At first, you suck it up and say, “Would you mentor me and guide me?” I went to a former boss at Sony who today is one of my real heroes of that corporate world and just asked him if we could have a quarterly breakfast. He said, “No.” “How about monthly? How about you pick up the phone anytime you hit a snag?” He later told me, “I had no clue what you were doing.” I said, “Neither did I, so that made two of us.”
Hope Driven Leader: Raise your hand, be vulnerable and ask for the help you need and you might just get it.
He was a business guy and he shepherded me through this process. He never let me pick up a check. He always answered questions. He introduced me to other people who were so instrumental and that’s the first hurdle people have to get over. Raise your hand, be vulnerable and ask for the help you need and you might just get it. There are a lot of nice people out in the world as you discover when you start asking all of them for help. I discovered the art of the small favor, “Could you help me do this one thing?” It sends a signal that you need some help. You’re not going to suck up somebody’s time and energy without their consent, but that you need a little help and could they do it. You find out how gracious people can be and it’s pretty humbling.
The big takeaway for me is that you built a relationship already with someone who weren’t starting from scratch asking for the small favors or mentoring without having given something to some people in the past. That’s important for people to realize that there’s always something you can give other people who are helping you whether it’s advice themselves. Maybe you’re an expert in social media and they’re not or whatever it might be, to come up with ways to offer your help back because it is a two-way street.
For myself just launching a podcast, I realized the tech part of it, how to edit it and promote it, I didn’t know how to do any of that. I realized that if I was going to invest in my own career, I had to hire some people to help me as well. There’s not only the small favor and the mentoring that you can do, but sometimes you have to hire people to help you as well for skills you don’t have.
You have to do it before you think you can afford it. Entrepreneurs, whether it’s a college intern or a virtual assistant, whatever it is that you bring onboard or whomever, you find that you’ve got to focus on your highest level activity and if that’s marketing and providing the services to your clients, nobody can get out there and give a keynote for us. We’ve got to do that, but somebody can book our travel. You start looking at what can you shift to someone else so that you can focus your time.
Ideally, if you can spend 80% of your time and that’s arbitrary, maybe it’s 60%, maybe it’s 90%, on what you do best and let other people take care of whether it is the technical or the social media or the travel planning or the outreach, whatever that is, so that you can be giving back. Social media is such a good way to provide value to people. Through your podcast, through our platforms, through posting articles on LinkedIn or wherever you do what you do, you’ve got a great way to open doors and give something to people before you start asking. You got to give them some value and build those relationships.
[Tweet “It’s hard to be hopeless and happy at the same time.”]
If someone is a leader at a company, even if it’s their own company or a big company, and they say, “I think my team could use some hope or motivation or just start to get them onboard with what my new vision is going to be, to adapt to all of this disruption happening,” what would be some tips you have for leaders?
I always tell clients, “Don’t overlook the obvious. What you know is in your head but it’s not in everybody else’s head.” The first thing obviously is to share your purpose. Make sure everybody understands, “This is what we do and this is what we care about.” That you’re all onboard together and that they have a vivid picture of the future. You’ve got to connect everybody from your brand new college recruit that just graduated and this is their first job. They’ve got to understand where the future is just like your high-level CFO or another high-level sophisticated employee. We’ve all got to understand and articulate where we’re going.
One of the amazing things that I see, I do a lot of work in healthcare, is when a medical device company that I worked with brought in people who had made the pacemaker for the patient. They connected the person who made that pacemaker by serial number to the patient that had that pacemaker inside them. Can you imagine if you’re a guy, you’re a manufacturer essentially, and suddenly you meet somebody whose device that you built is in their body? Talk about a powerful connection for people that don’t always see the end results. As a leader, you’ve got to connect the dots for people. They could be a file clerk but they’ve got to see, “This is the big picture of what we do. This is how we change lives by our product or services, the information we provide.” That’s your job as a leader, to get people fired up and excited about their role so they don’t feel like, “I’m just a corporate drone or a cog in the wheel.” “No. You’re a vital part of this organization and here’s why.”
That’s one thing and that requires that as leaders, we got to know our people. If you’ve got a company of 25 or 150, you can know every single person. If you’ve got a company of 30,000 or 300,000 people, you can’t know all those people personally, but you can know your top line people. Then they know the level below them. As long as that message is trickling down about, “Here’s what we stand for, here’s what we care about and here’s where we’re going, here’s how you connect to that vision,” then everybody is feeding that sense of hopefulness all the way through the organization.
What brands do you think exude hopefulness that are out there? Is it a Starbucks or is it anything like that that you can point to?
Starbucks is one of them certainly because they’re one of the good guys. We know what Howard Schultz is doing in terms of fair trade and all the things that they put back into the organization. I love those companies like TOMS shoes that has their One for One initiative where they buy a pair of shoes, they donate a pair of shoes. I’ve been over to TOMS’ headquarters which is here in LA. It’s in Venice. Seeing what they do and why it’s so cool and, and how they’ve got those organizations in countries around the world that are set up to provide those shoes. That’s so important to our Millennials. You look at the stats. Millennials are going to connect and look at now. To get just a touch political, but two of the big companies, both Walmart and DICK’S Sporting Goods have decided, “We’re going to do what we can and what we feel is appropriate to stem some of the gun violence that’s out there,” and at risk to their own bottom line.
DICK’S took some of those assault rifles off the shelf, but I think they’re going to get it back. It was the right thing to do. It was a smart thing to do because Millennials want those purpose-driven companies. When they think about, “Where am I going to spend my sporting good dollars? Whether it’s to buy a basketball or whether it’s to buy a hunting rifle, I’m going to go somewhere that gets it. In my worldview, they get it.” Understanding because by 2020, our workforce is going to be 60% of Millennials, so we better understand what they care about. Those are the kinds of purpose-driven companies. We don’t all have to have the same point of view, but we should have a point of view and be able to stand up and say, “This is what I believe and why.”
What I’m hearing is that companies that have a clear purpose and a mission for why they’re in business beyond making money are more likely to have a culture and a mindset of being hopeful than those who don’t have a purpose except to make money. Would that be fair?
Absolutely. I just saw a piece on a show about Beautycounter, which I know because I have friends and colleagues that are involved in it. That started because the founder didn’t want people wearing makeup with all sorts of ingredients that had been banned through much of the developed world but not here in the US. She started with, “I’m going to make these products,” and then found a way to market and sell them. That was a real mission. That started with somebody who had a real purpose.
Is there any little tidbit you can share with us that you haven’t already from what you’ve learned from all the research on hope theory?
One thing is about the way you connect with your teams. It didn’t necessarily come out of hope theory, but some of the research that I did about the engagement with your team. It flies in the face of conventional wisdom that in those big team meetings, which is one of the major complaints of my corporate clients and I’m a big fan of, “Start your meetings at a weird time like 9:21 AM.” It sends a message that, “This meeting is different and it’s important and you better show up on time because we’re starting at 9:21 AM.” Teams are engaged and don’t just sit there and listen and interact with the boss.
There was one MIT study that I cited in my book, The Hope-Driven Leader, where they put devices on people that monitored what their body language was, who they were talking to, who they were listening to, the volume of their voice, and what they found was the level of energy and interaction was as important as the substance of the meeting. The fact that people were talking to each other and they were engaging with people besides the leader, then the other part that was so critical was exploration.
Team members that go out and meet with other people outside of their immediate group or team and bring that information back to the team. The explorers provided a level of not only energy and information, but they brought in new ideas and new risk taking. Things that people could act upon that they might not have stumbled upon in their immediate world. It is that idea of energy and engagement and external exploration. Go to that conference. Listen to that speaker. When I get to go to an event and there are other speakers and the travel schedule allows, I’m first in the door. I want to hear what they have to say and also how they say it because that’s so important to how we engage.
Two things there. What you’re talking about being an explorer reminds me of Tim Sanders’ book Dealstorming, which is all about collaborative selling and having other departments interact with each other and all be part of the same vision. I love that. It’s so funny you brought up other keynote speakers because I’m giving a talk and there’s a speaker that’s speaking the night before on the topic of focus and then I’m giving my talk on Getting to Yes. I’m flying in early so that I can start mingling with the audience at dinner but also hear what that speaker has to say about focus so that I can then incorporate it into my talk the next morning. For the audience, there’s a through line of what they just heard the night before and what I’m saying so it’s all consistent. Doing things like that make you an explorer, make you more relevant, and ultimately then the audience gets more energized.
It connects it all to them. It makes it one overarching theme where you’ve got different information and different takeaways from the other speaker, but it all makes sense in that same world. Just as business people, people are paying a lot of money to go hear some of these people like you speak. Why would we not want to sit in and soak up that knowledge and that information? It’s the best way to learn about our own business.
Hope Driven Leader: Hopeful people tend to be stewards of our own future.
I do have a question for you around the connection research, if there’s any, on hope and health, or optimism. Are people who are more hopeful healthier or when you get a diagnosis of something, does hope come into play?
It’s interesting that you asked that because where I started with the research of hope was having the good fortune to read a book called The Anatomy of Hope by a man named Dr. Jerome Groopman who’s a Harvard-trained oncologist. He was one of the early researchers in AIDS and then he himself had this major pain issue. He had a back problem that for twenty years plagued him and then he went in a completely different way. He went to sports medicine and was able to cure it about 90%, which was interesting. What he said was early in his career as an oncologist and a clinician, thinking he was doing the right thing, he would give so much information about their diagnosis to the patient and their families. Then he realized they were shutting down. They felt so hopeless. It’s like, “There’s nothing I can do.” They didn’t participate in their own healing process. Part of that is mental and part of it is the physical follow through. There is definitely a brain chemical factor. When you feel like, “I’m going to get through this,” your brain releases endorphins and enkephalins that suppress pain, that boost the immune system. He saw that these patients weren’t able to do that.
The Hope-Driven Leader: Harness the Power of Positivity at Work
As we often do, he swung too far to the other side and started limiting the information and saw the people were getting that sense of false hope. They felt like, “I guess no news is good news. I’m going to be okay,” even when that wasn’t necessarily true. He had to find that spot in the center where he could give them the diagnosis and the information, but also leave them that sense of possibility even when the situation was dire, that there was always hope, that there was always a possibility. He didn’t rob them of that sense because he knew he was not playing God. He didn’t have all the answers. There’s definitely a connection. In my book, I cite this study that was done in San Antonio where people followed people who self-identified as hopeful and hopeless and the ones who said they were hopeless, no surprise tended to be smokers, they overate, they over drink, they didn’t exercise. They had a shorter lifespan than people who said they were hopeful. Hopeful people, we tend to be stewards of our own future, but people who did not feel hopeless did not. The morbidity rate, it came much younger than the group that identified themselves as hopeful. There is absolutely a correlation.
The book is again The Hope-Driven Leader: Harness the Power of Positivity at Work. Any last words of advice for the listeners?
Just for people to think about how can you feed hope? There’s no neutrality. You’re either feeding it or you’re starving it. In whatever way is meaningful to you, feed hope into your environment.
How can people follow you on social media, Libby?
Go to LibbyGill.com, my website. I’m active on Instagram, LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter.
Thanks for sharing your hopeful insights and we’re all inspired to feed it going forward. Thank you so much.
Thank you.
Links Mentioned:
- Libby Gill
- The Hope-Driven Leader: Harness the Power of Positivity at Work
- Norman Lear
- All of the Above with Norman Lear
- Traveling Hopefully
- Beautycounter
- Dealstorming
- The Anatomy of Hope
- LibbyGill.com
- Libby’s Instagram
- Libby’s LinkedIn
- Libby’s Facebook
- Libby Twitter
- Libby Gill & Company
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