Strategy Sprints For SaaS With Simon Severino
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Do you want to know the secret to becoming irresistible to your clients? John Livesay’s guest might just have the thing for you. In this episode, John talks with the man who created the Strategy Sprints method, Simon Severino. Simon talks about how strategy sprints work, and how they help improve businesses. Simon and John discuss business strategies that can help double revenue. Simon shares his insights on using strategy sprints to help run your business smoother. Join in and get a few pointers on improving your business profits.
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Listen to the podcast here
Strategy Sprints For SaaS With Simon Severino
Our guest is Simon Severino who is the Founder of Strategy Sprints. He helps companies focus on what they need to do and how to do it to get their business to scale. Enjoy the episode.
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Our guest is Simon Severino. He helps business owners run their company smoother and improve sales. He created the Strategy Sprints Method that doubles revenue in 90 days. He is the CEO of Strategy Sprints. He’s also a Forbes Business Council Member, a contributor to Entrepreneur Magazine, and a member of Duke Corporate Education. Simon is the Founder of Strategy Sprints, which is a global team of certified Strategy Sprints coaches helping business owners run their company smoother and doubling their revenue in 90 days. Simon, welcome to the show.
It’s so cool to be here, John.
You and I have become friends. I have seen your strategy in action. I have seen some of the ability to get people to focus and not be overwhelmed or as one person once said to me, “Many entrepreneurs try to boil the ocean and instead of being known for one thing.” Of course, we remember that Amazon just sold books and yet people forget that. They think, “I want to be Amazon, sell and do everything.” I think what you are doing is smart. Also, there are sports analogy there, obviously with sprinting. Let’s go back to when you were a young lad, childhood school, wherever you want, give us a flavor of some of the things you learned from your parents and how you’ve got to have this wonderful focus.
Back in school, Rome, the ‘80s, I was a nerd. I was the guy where you go, “What did he say? What?” You could say a philosopher. I was thinking fancy, very far away, somewhere in the universe, while my colleagues were playing sports. I was like, “I don’t get this thing with sports. I like books.” That’s what I was. The question was, “What is eternal and what is ephemeral?” For me, it was always about, “What’s this whole thing?” Before I do one thing like I become an engineer or a doctor or one of these boring things in here, “What’s the whole thing? What is a human being? How did we get here? Where did we go to? Does anybody have a clue? If I don’t have a clue, I don’t want to become an engineer or a doctor. I want to get the whole thing first. What is this?” That’s how I was, very strange.
I know you had a Philosophy and a Psychology background in school. You then went to MIT Design Thinking. This is not something that you just did on a whim but it was very strategic. I’m sure we can weave in as we discover more of what you are doing now, the importance of having a sense of self and a sense of purpose that gives you the focus. Would that be accurate?
It was a long road up to here what I’m just focused on one thing and it works on a global scale. The journey was super complicated, long with a ton of twists. The first part was studying Psychology and becoming a Psychotherapist. In between, I studied Philosophy because I was searching for this answer. “What is this thing? What is the whole thing and what are the parts?” I did find some answers in philosophy. They then sent me to psychology. They said, “What you were asking, you have to ask these Freud guys there. It’s the other department.” I went to the other department. I started that stuff and I liked it a lot, but it was everything backward. I said, “Beautiful. This department has taught me a lot but where is the forward part of that?” Individuals have their history but what about the future? How do we shape the future? What’s next? They then said, “You then have to talk to the other department. These are the coaches and so I landed with the coaches.
This is where I belong because coaching, I love it. It transforms stuff. You don’t take things as a given, but you break through and it’s always forwards. This is where I found my place. I am a coach. I belong in this world. I am thriving in this world and I love it. I am now certifying coaches on a global scale and we meet every Monday. We have a great time. We are helping people by having more cash and more time, which is a great act of service. What is more important and what makes more fulfillment than serving somebody?
You talk about helping people become irresistible to clients, which is you are singing my song. That’s what I love to do as well through storytelling. How do you do it through Strategy Sprints? What is it that allows people to become irresistible once they have this method in place?
Week one of the sprint, which is always twelve weeks. We have found that you need around twenty days to break current patterns and you take around 80 to 90 days to install new patterns. That’s why 90 days is the minimum chunk and this is our cycle, 90 days which is 12 sprints of 1 week. Week one is always the equalizer. Equalizer means find your niche. Do your Blue Ocean Strategy. What does that mean? Look around yourself. You are swimming in that direction. Who else is swimming there? You could call it, technically, it’s competitive analysis. Where are they swimming? Where’s the next thing that you need to swim around?
[bctt tweet=”Have a vivid vision. Get a unique niche.” username=”John_Livesay”]
This is the equalizer, which asks the question, what’s your uniqueness? This is important because if you just do what others do, you have to swim out of competition. There is only one John. There is only one Simon. What makes you, you? The equalizer helps you get that on a numerical level. It asks first and I’m happy to share it at the end of this episode with the people to share my real equalizer that we do every month for half an hour because it’s such a great tool.
For half an hour, you ask five questions. The first is, “What’s your competitive arena? What are your top three competitors plus what else can the customer do?” That’s why it’s a competitive arena and not just the list of top three competitors. It’s because your customer can not only go to another supplier, they can also have behavioral alternatives themselves. They can say, “If I don’t buy from you, I have Mike, the intern does it.” That’s a behavior alternative. That’s what they compare you to.
“If I don’t buy from you, I can hire somebody and do it internally, I can make a robot do it, I can just do nothing.” These are real alternatives that they are comparing. You make a list of the real alternatives, then you make a list of the features. What they are looking for? You rate from 1 to 10 if you are winning or if competitors are winning. Now, the equalizer does it for you because it’s a smart spreadsheet that creates three clusters. One cluster is where you are winning and the other cluster, is where you are losing.
You are taking a concept that’s intuitive and putting a numeric around it. What you are doing is so smart because you are allowing people to get their focus off of themselves and put their empathy hat on and say, “Where do people see me? Not just between me and my competitors but what else do I have to do?” For example, before Uber came, people could either walk in the rain, drive in the rain, rent a car or get a cab. Those were still other choices when they decide not to get an Uber. That’s an example of what other behavior they could do besides Uber versus Lyft, let’s say. Being able to understand your customer’s choices besides you and your competitors, is smart. I have never heard anyone else say that. Assigning then a number to it is even another level of sophistication.
As a speaker, I have done this exercise where I list about 7 to 8 qualities that speakers have, again putting myself in the shoes of an event planner or a client hiring a speaker, for example, how famous am I compared to other speakers? I’m not Steve Wozniak and yet I’m not unknown completely. I have been on TV. There’s a level of what that number is and then you look at what’s my marketing materials on a scale of 1 to 10. You go down each of those things and then you start to get a little scorecard for yourself. Of course, when you start doing that plus analyzing where your competitors are, again you are putting that lens on of, “Here’s where I can improve and here’s where my standing is.” What I think you are doing is giving people not just a roadmap, but here’s where you are on the map.
That’s a unique distinction, Simon. I want to say hats off to you for taking it another level beyond, “Here’s the roadmap of all your choices now, but where are you on this roadmap?” I haven’t heard of anybody else doing that analytically for people because when that happens, then I can see now where you are able to deliver on one of your promises, which is to be immune to competition. What a fascinating choice of words that is. This equalizer is just the first of many twelve weeks of sprinting and getting that in. Let’s face it, if you are an athlete, as a former swimmer we just didn’t jump in the pool and started swimming laps we had, “When are we going to swim? What’s the timeframe?” Many of us in the entrepreneur world without this awareness just start swimming and hope for the best. Of course, that’s why they flounder.
If you think of a swimmer, a swimmer will think a lot about what distance they compete in, when they compete and then the training plan will be on many levels. You have sleeping, eating and not-drinking and not going out plan. You have periodization of your training, where the cycles get more intensive the nearer you get to the race, which is a simulation of the intensity. Before you will build up in cycles the intensity of what you do and this is exactly the Strategy Sprints Method. You’ve got the point well because every single 1 of the 274 templates does exactly this. It’s a GPS that helps you locate yourself where you are in the context of your competitors and your clients. It helps you empathize, see yourself from the client’s needs, perspective and then define the one next thing that you will improve or fix, which is the next bottleneck.
You know where you are. You know where you want to go. You know what’s needed, not just what your team geeks out but what people want to get or grab from you because they need it. They want it. It’s a real problem that you are solving. Now, you define the one thing that you will improve by 1% this week. Sprint by sprint, week by week, that’s why it works. Everybody asks, “How can you double revenue?” We go, “We have twelve times the chance to the course is correct.” Even if you screw up six weeks, you have still six times the chance to course-correct.
Here’s an analogy for you. Imagine if the Titanic captain had twelve weeks to go through your course, correct and make decisions of how fast they were going in the dark and make that decision to turn before the iceberg scraped the side of the ship. If your company is the Titanic and you were full speed ahead in the dark and it’s too late to turn because you can’t turn fast enough and you still have leaks happening in this case, maybe it’s cashflow or whatever, so that Titanic analogy holds up for you. You know me, I love visual to go on a story, to go with what you are doing.
The other question I have for you is on your Strategy Sprints’ website. You talk about your core values and nobody loves an alliteration more than I do. You have focused, freedom and flow, then three Hs, Humble, Hungry and Happy. I’m curious to ask when you work with clients on their sprints and what makes them unique, do you get into helping them define values like this so that again, it laser focuses them and lets people know who it’s for who it’s not for?
Strategy Sprints: Being humble is when you see somebody and say, “Oh, he can be my teacher about this. I can learn from this person.”
Yes, because its core. Culture is key. It’s maybe the most vital part of a business. You wouldn’t expect this from somebody who calls his company, Strategy Sprints but culture is where the magic happens. The only thing is there is no direct button to change the culture because you change culture via structures, processes and strategy. The way you do it every day creates the culture. This is important because we help in improving the tool vital things which are more time, more cash. Now, how do you do it?
First, you need to get the founder out of the weeds. Usually, the people who founded it out of love, of passion and nerding out are now the bottleneck. You need to get them out of the weeds, create space for them to work on the business, not in the business. We do this in week two by mapping out the key components, the marketing, sales and operational activities. We map them out. We ride them down. We pull the single people out of that because now the process can do it. People can come in and out of the process. You can easily hire people in other countries to do it. Now, we have pulled out of the weeds, the founder.
To make sure I heard you right because I love this phrase. It will be a great tweet. “You help people work on the business, not in it.” Is that correct?
Exactly. You have to work on the business of business. This is our operating model, the business of business, improving, form, fit and function of the marketing, sales and delivery system. To do that, when you get the founders out of the weeds, now they are working on the business, what is this on business? It’s growth and culture, creating activities, growth-related activities, joint ventures, bigger leveraged corporations. The list of Dream 100 clients, the vivid vision on five pages of how it feels, smells and tastes. This is important and hiring and firing. The next thing is culture. That’s defining the values and what is important to you.
Let’s talk about what your values are here. You are helping people focus and get freedom. When all that happens, things happen and their businesses are inflow. They are not starting and stopping. I think that is my understanding and observation of what you are doing. The concept is staying humble, hungry and ultimately being happy, which ties into the freedom aspect of it as well, whether you are not overwhelmed and so stressed out. I think we know what it means to stay hungry and not get lax but a lot of people don’t talk about humble being a value. What does humble mean to you and how do you incorporate that into your values and culture?
We can always learn and we are always 1% worse the next week and 1% better than last week. When we meet somebody, we see them as a teacher. I can learn from John. The first time I saw you, your superpower and what amazing transformative power you have. Immediately, I asked you to come into my mastermind and teach it to the whole community. Bring your superpowers.
Just to be clear, I’m not Superman. My superpower is helping people fix their elevator stories for those people who don’t know what you were referring to. Like, “What is he doing?”
Being humble is you see somebody and say, “He can be my teacher about this. I can learn from this person this.” The opposite would be, I see somebody and say, “I am the expert here. I am the big speaker.” Everybody is great at something. When you see somebody, do you come from a place of, “I can learn from you or do you go into a competition?” This is humble. I can always learn from people I need.
“Do I learn from you or do I see you as a competitor?” If you have that mindset of, “I’m going to learn from you,” then that’s where the collaboration and the growth come as you talk about these partnerships that can happen. I want to ask you two questions. One, who’s the ideal client for this Strategy Sprints program because I’m guessing it’s not somebody who just has an idea or probably maybe I’m wrong. It’s not a Fortune 500 company like Coca-Cola either. There’s probably something in between.
We have a very specific ideal client. It is a SaaS or service business. Typically, it’s a consulting company, marketing company, with 1 to 10 people on staff doing above $35,000 revenue per month and the owner is still in the weeds.
[bctt tweet=”Culture may be the most vital part in any business.” username=”John_Livesay”]
That couldn’t be clear. In terms of the coaches that you have, what is that ideal background that somebody becomes a certified Strategy Sprints coach?
I was talking about this with Gino Wickman, who has a similar model of certified coaches. I asked him because he has more years in this, “What do you look for in a coach?” I was validated that we have the same approach. We say there are some skills that we can teach and some skills that you just need to have because we cannot teach them. The entrepreneurial skills are what they need to have because you either have them or you don’t.
These are things like responsibility, passion, problem-solving, thinking on your feet, finding stuff out and the capability to endure. If you don’t know something, you Google it. You don’t re-delegate it. That’s what an entrepreneur does. “I don’t know. I have to find out.” Always curious, always moving forward trying out stuff and also always responsible. You will never come with excuses and say, “I didn’t have the time or the resources or this wasn’t working.” You make sure it works.
I want to underline this. I want to circle it, highlight it and put it in a sky banner. If someone can hear what you said, “Emphasize this and stop using excuses,” especially the excuses, “I’m so busy.” I can’t tell you how many people tell me, “I didn’t get to that because I’m so busy. My life is hectic and busy.” After a while, when 10 to 12 people a week are saying that to you, I want to zoom out and think to myself, “Do you think you were the only one that’s busy? Does it imply that you were busier than everyone else? Does it somehow make me think that you’ve got great time management skills? Do you think it’s an impressive thing to brag about?”
I think so many people are unaware of how often they are saying it and what it comes across as, it doesn’t impress me. It does the opposite. I think, “You’ve got to get your act together and not be in the weeds.” You are always implying that your time is more important than mine because you are too busy to do any research or take a minute to just be present. That constant frenetic behavior of overwhelm and stress to somehow make it seem like you are important, I think has the opposite effect. I have never had this conversation with anybody else but you are the perfect person to have it with because this isn’t an unexpected outcome in addition to doubling revenue.
We started from the superficial discussion. Some skills like the coaching skills, we teach them. Other skills, the entrepreneurial, they need to bring them. Why? After years of experience in hiring and firing, I concluded. I do three interviews at the beginning and I have one-month probation and in this phase, I observe exactly this, how do they deal with failure and with stress? If I see that somebody has a pattern that together we cannot flexibilize and not overcome, then this is a reason to quit working together because it doesn’t fit our values. What do I do to be a role model for my kids, for myself and to live it every day?
I have two boys and it’s the same thing. I also am under continuous scrutiny on how I deal with life, the pandemic, the weather and setbacks. My wife and my kids, are watching me and I’m watching myself. Even if I am quite an intentional and disciplined person, I’m a triathlete so I am used to endurance and staying accountable to myself but I have just started a 75 days’ mental toughness challenge because I see that it is continuous work to spot that. When you do this mental thing with yourself and say, “I’m so busy,” I want to spot that and I want to have the strength to say, “I will now decide not to go into that pattern. I will now decide to go into another pattern,” but you need a certain level of energy to do that and that’s what I’m working on every day.
Disrupt the pattern. That’s the takeaway, almost like a needle on a record. Remember it used to scratch? You need to wake yourself up because you are almost in a hypnotic trance. Where’s your go-to excuse? It may be considered socially acceptable to say, “I’m so busy. I didn’t get to that. I’m working hard.” That’s always happening for you. It’s not a limited sprint. Your life is like that because you are trying to boil the ocean, for lack of a better analogy there.
If someone says, “I think I would want to be potential certified a Strategy Sprints coach,” we have a sense of those skills that you can teach and those that you can’t, do they have to have been in business for a while or had any expertise? You have these amazing coaches on your website where you get to see these niches. That’s what I love. You’ve got someone who has got an expertise in automotive and then someone else is an expert in pharma.
Imagine your ideal client saying, “We are a consultant in a marketing agency. We’ve gotten people. Our revenues are 35K a month. I’m still in the weeds but I’m in this industry.” You were like, “No problem. We’ve got Javier on the line, who can help you get this equalizer targeted because that’s this industry.” I thought that was a very smart decision on your part to have not just Strategy Sprints coaches but within different expertise. I’m sure that’s not an accident.
Strategy Sprints: We are always 1% worse the next week and 1% better than last week.
This comes back to what we have talked about before. When I go humble through the world, I see superpowers everywhere. Of course, I have a limited set of superpowers. I can do just 1 to 2 things may be quite good and that’s it. I’m a good super-connector and initiator. That’s what I do. I initiate, I super connect. Now, everything else, I need other experts. I go around. I like people and I like interaction. I make friends and I say, ‘This guy, he was running Google in that country. Now, he’s a management advisor.” I talked to this guy and say, “This is my platform. This is what I do. Who is your ideal client? What do you like to change in their life and their business?” If there is a fit, I invite them into our world. This is how we started the certification program. Now, we have in every time zone, in every country. We have Shanghai, San Francisco, Los Angeles and London. We have different verticals and they have different backgrounds from being the salesperson of Coca-Cola to running a big marketing agency. I can bring together the right project and the right skills.
How do people find you? Is it usually hearing you on a podcast or hearing your own podcast? Is it referrals? What’s your strategy on how people find you?
In terms of sales strategy, we do both. We have an inbound team doing many inbound activities. We have an outbound team doing many outbound activities. I run a daily podcast, which I enjoy a lot and meet a lot of people. I hang out in our community, which is a Facebook group of around 800 people. It’s called Entrepreneurship in Sprints. They help each other and challenge each other. It’s beautiful to be there. The easiest way to find us is StrategySprints.com.
What’s the name of your podcast for people who might want to listen?
I love the consistent branding. Kudos to you for that. Any last thoughts or ideas that you want to share with us?
I would like to share one thing. If people at the beginning were thinking, “I would like to do this equalizer thing, which shows me my uniqueness and in half an hour, I can cut costs and double down on where I’m winning.” If you have half an hour, go to StrategySprints.com/equalizer. You can grab the real template that I use. It’s a spreadsheet. There is a thirteen minutes’ video where I show how I use the spreadsheet. You then put in half an hour with your team there. You will find out where you are currently winning, where you are not winning and it will make some proposals where you should invest more in and where you cut your costs so that you can reinvest in where you are currently winning.
Simon, thank you so much for sharing your passion, your values come across, your happiness, your humbleness, your focus and ultimately the freedom that you are giving people and taking this because you are now in Austria, global. It’s an inspiration to all of us and I just want to thank you for figuring out what your superpower is and making the world better because of it.
Thank you for the chance to share my journey with your beautiful community, John.
Important Links
- Strategy Sprints
- Forbes Business Council Member
- Entrepreneur Magazine
- Duke Corporate Education
- Entrepreneurship in Sprints – Facebook Group
- The Strategy Sprints Podcast
- StrategySprints.com/equalizer
- Blue Ocean Strategy
- Better Selling Through Storytelling Method Online Course
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At 10 years old, I had to wear husky-sized pants…
Posted by John Livesay in blog | 0 comments
The day my mom took me shopping for “back to school” clothes and I realized that the only pants that fit me were labeled “husky,” I was humiliated. I thought, This is a nightmare!
This was especially challenging for my dad as he was a great athlete in both baseball and football. To this day, anything to do with hand-eye coordination and a ball is a no-go for me.
But still, I struggle with my weight. The imprinting of emotional eating is something that requires a “re-wiring” every once in a while.
Just when I think I have mastered replacing a stressful situation with something besides a cookie, a new challenging situation comes along.
What always amuses me is when labels are created.
“The Freshman 15” for the 15lbs many freshmen in college gain from all the late-night pizza and beer.
Now it is “The Covid 15.”
“If only it was 15 extra pounds!” I thought to myself when I read this. For me, the perfect storm for weight gain is isolation, stress, and the fear of the unknown. To have all of that happen right after I moved from LA to Austin on March 1, 2020, was a new level of stress eating.
Just when I was starting to get in a better frame of mind, Texas got hit with a freak snowstorm in February 2021, and I, along with thousands of others, lost power and water. Luckily, I was able to stay at a friend’s heated home, but let me tell you… there was no “healthy eating” during survival mode.
Well, now the challenge is to still accept and love myself despite clothes that don’t fit or a number on the scale.
No amount of beating myself up ever helps anything.
Instead, let’s all give ourselves a little compassion, and remember we are the director of the movie of our life.
We can change the story at any time.
What story are you telling yourself around addiction: whether it is food, drugs, work, relationships, drinking, or anything else you use to “escape the current anxiety”?
Let me know so I can remind you of the truth of who you are!
Leadership For Smart People With Adam Quiney
Posted by John Livesay in podcast | 0 comments
There is leadership and then there is leadership for smart people. What is the difference and why does it matter? Joining John Livesay on the show to enlighten us about this is Adam Quiney, a coach for the Smartest People In The Room. Smart, brilliant people often feel bored when they lack challenge or have too much of it; they fear looking stupid though they shouldn’t, and they tend to act condescendingly. Being a smart person yourself possessing these qualities, how do you lead other smart people in your team? One advice Adam gives is, you can’t think your way into your heart. Tune in to this episode where Adam discusses leadership for smart people. Enjoy!
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Listen to the podcast here
Leadership For Smart People With Adam Quiney
Our guest is Adam Quiney. He said, “The goal is not to get rid of your concerns and resolve them, but instead learn how to dissolve them.” Adam works with smart people who sometimes struggle with boredom and the questions around, “Do you want to be right or do you want to be happy?” Adam says he learned firsthand that we cannot think our way into our heart. Enjoy the episode.
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Our guest is Adam Quiney who is an Executive Leadership Coach specializing in working with the smartest people in the room. A former Software Developer and Attorney, Adam learned the hard way about the costs that come from keeping your heart safe and chasing after external rewards to feel whole and complete. From love, Adam is connection, passion, presence, wit, and brilliance. From fear, he is awkward, robotic, apathetic, irrelevant and arrogant. He learned to embrace all these parts of himself and works with others to do the same in their own lives. Living with his beautiful wife and their two dogs, one of which is a cat, in Victoria, BC, he is a man on a mission to bring the world to a more inspired and fully-expressed place. Adam, welcome to the show.
Thank you, John. My bio sounds so cool as you read it.
I try to put a little emotion in everything in storytelling. Before we get into what you’re doing now, I love to ask guests to take us back to their own story of origin. You can go back as far as childhood, high school, college, whatever it is. At one point, you decided you wanted to be in the software world and a lawyer. That’s an interesting combination. Usually, it’s one or the other. You decide where you want to tell the beginning of your story for us.
I’ll start us at software, how I got to law, and then into what I do. You can interrupt me at any point if it’s too long or questions or whatever. It was sequential service. In software, I was working in that field for about five years. What I was doing was getting good at controlling all the variables that would come into the space. I was a project manager at this point and I would get everything handled. I managed to control the world at large. That meant I could get most of my work done in about three hours. The remaining five hours of my day, because you got to be seated in your seat, I would spend surreptitiously getting stoned, working with a rear view mirror above my monitors so I could see if people are coming up, and working madly on a whole bunch of other projects.
I was very committed and driven to do work. I’m very A-type. I was siloing my life and not a model employee by any stretch of the imagination, although I was sophisticated in making it seem as though that was what I was. I could create this appearance for someone doing things well. Underneath all that, what was happening was I was getting more and more righteous about what I was doing. It was like, “I’m doing this because I’m not getting challenged enough at work.” That would then have me spend more time at work and less time doing this other stuff I’m doing over here that’s not so good. That was the point where I decided, “I’m going to leave this career. I’m going to study something new. I’m going to take on law and I’m going to practice that field.”
I went back to school for that. One of the things about it was I was surrounded by smart people who had thought a lot about everything that they had to say. At first, that was thrilling. As I learned more about law which is fascinating to study, you’re learning about the operating system that society runs on top of along with all its bugs and how you hack it. The theory of attorney, I found very noble. You’re like Atticus Finch standing for someone when everyone in society has turned their back on them. The practice of it, I found very opportunistic, quite cutthroat, very capitalistic. The highest ideal was not the truth. It was being right.
[bctt tweet=”Concerns don’t get resolved; they get dissolved.” username=”John_Livesay”]
The path I found myself on, I’ve noticed a lot of people around me, and those that were already doing this work was about getting better at running everything through your head and at shutting down your heart. They would say things to us like, “It’s important to be able to empathize with the client or with the person on the other side of the table so that you know where they’re coming from, but then you got to put that away so that you can formulate the strongest legal arguments.” I felt concerned a little bit as I was doing this. I couldn’t find attorneys who loved what they did or didn’t feel like they loved it.
It’s shocking. My many friends, my sister, and a lot of people go through the process, it’s not easy for most. Even if it is, it’s somewhat tedious. It’s the thing that I hear. It’s emotionally draining if you’re a divorce attorney and you’re dealing with that every day. What kind of law were you going to specialize in or did you specialize?
Initially, my thinking was intellectual property because it’s interesting to me and my background was software. I was like, “That’d be cool and a good fit.” With about a year left of law school, I was clear I was going to finish, practice law, ride the bar, and do all that. I was also clear, “I don’t think this is the profession for me,” for all of the reasons I’ve mentioned. I wasn’t looking to, “How do I find my niche in law and push that forward?” I was like, “I’m going to find a place to work while I build this new thing called coaching.” The cool thing about the place I ended up was I worked with this guy who is cool. We got along super well. His background prior to law was he was a commercial fisherman.
We ended up doing a whole bunch of maritime law, along with a lot of general practice. Some corporate, wills and estate, family law, but then a lot of law where I was at the north end of the island I live on, which is about an eight-hour drive up there. I’m defending a fisherman who had bagged up some seals in his fishing net, dragged them, and let them go to try to tell them, “Don’t eat the fish out of my net,” which is innocent in a way. It’s very old-world thinking. Nowadays, the seal goes where it wants to go and you do not touch it. That’s the law. I learned all these interesting weird facts about seals, the migratory patterns of them, and stuff like that. It’s weird.
You’re doing that and then you still are feeling a little dissatisfied. You knew going in this wasn’t for you. You call yourself an obsessive perfectionist on your website, which I find fascinating. A lot of people will own up to being a perfectionist, but you layered on obsessive. I would think that would make you a great lawyer because or even a software person because you’re checking and double-checking every detail and don’t want to be surprised in court or what have you. As a person, what I’m hearing you say is it gets you too much in your head and you’re never present with anybody.
I love that you picked out both of those words. The way it occurs to me these days and what I can distinguish about it is I learned somewhere along the lines growing up from parents who loved me very much and wanting to instill a good work ethic that what was natural, what I would do innately wasn’t quite enough. There was always a little bit more and a little bit further I needed to go. I learned from there not to trust that part of me that’s like, “This is good enough. I’m happy with this. This is finished. I don’t want to do anymore.” On the one hand, that is a great piece of work ethic to learn to always go one step further. When that becomes automatic and always on, it becomes less this good thing and more like I can’t trust that intuitive part of myself that says, “This is fine. You’ve done enough. This doesn’t need to go one step further.”
Leadership for Smart People: How You Let Go of Being OK Being Alone
As time went on, I got better and better at strategizing to ensure that the problem with me of not going far enough didn’t come to light. It became this pattern that was always like, “Don’t trust what’s natural for you, Adam. Go one step further.” That becomes two steps further and then three steps further. That part of me that’s very obsessive and perfectionistic shows up often when I’m up to something that has high stakes and I’m worried. I’m afraid it’s not going to be good enough and then that’s my easy go-to. It was like, “Here’s the solution to your fears, Adam. Spend the next five years making this perfect.”
I know for myself, I was aware of its tendency to keep people at bay. It’s through our vulnerability that we’ve let people in and drop the mask and people can relate to us. We think, “I have to look perfect. I have to be perfect. If I make a mistake, then no one’s going to want to be my friend or love me.” Ironically, the opposite is true. I’m fascinated by what you said about the law, “They need to be right over truth,” and this compulsive need that becomes, “I’d rather be right than happy.” Flipping that is, “Would you rather be happy versus right?” If you ask that to some people, they struggle with the answer sometimes, which fascinates me. It’s not an obvious choice to be happy. I think it’s because their self-worth is so tied into needing to be perfect and being right all the time. You’re the expert who can probably answer that in a way that I want to get your insight on what that is.
You’ve drawn it out beautifully. That’s so accurate. First of all, when we ask people that question, “Would you rather be right or happy?” Some people, the strategy they’ve learned in their life is always come from their heart, which is great until there’s a time when you need to come from your head. There’s no right way to be. What we ideally want is the most fluidity and the most range available to us. The people that question will have the most impact on are the people like me who learned to operate entirely from your head. You never have to be with the messiness of heartbreak or getting intimacy wrong, which is hilarious thought in itself, getting it wrong.
When we ask someone like me or my people, “Would you rather be right or happy?” Where we go to answer that question is not the place that would make a difference, which is our heart, we’d go up into our head. We’re like, “What does it mean to be right? What is happiness really?” We started doing this calculus and it’s like “None of the juice that’s going to set someone like me free is up here in my head.” That’s just doing more of what I’m already doing. Whereas if there’s ever a way or access to get down to that person’s heart and have them be with what that question means. It might almost be devastating for them to see what is available is so much richer. It’s hard to get there from our head. We can’t think our way into our heart.
That’s great line. That’s going to be a great tweet, “We can’t think our way into our heart.”
I’ve tried a lot.
[bctt tweet=”Brilliant people fear looking stupid.” username=”John_Livesay”]
A lot of people joke around like, “I don’t want to be the smartest person in the room.” You have doubled down on this concept of, “I only want to work with the smartest people.” There has to be some confidence that you can hang with those kinds of people because smart people, in my experience, tend to test other people, the earning the right I call it, “You got to be smart as I am before taking advice from you.” Having that niche is fascinating. With your legal and software backgrounds, you’ve proven that you can certainly be book-smart and achieve. What are some of the biggest challenges that you see smart people struggle with?
We’re talking about the quality of brilliance. It’s the word I would use to describe it. What brilliant people fear underneath it all is occurring or perhaps even being stupid or looking stupid. The most generous people in the world tend to be preoccupied with fears about being selfish. That’s less of a concern for me because part of what I bring to the table is brilliance. It’s the absence of that, which is more frightening. From a fear of looking or being stupid, brilliant people tend to create 1 of 2 or often both flavors of strategy. One is knowing all the answers and be brilliant at arguing to prove why I’m right. When someone else occurs smart, condescend and bring them down so at least you’re below me. All amazing traits for a lawyer, you can probably see already.
The other strategy that they tend to move towards is getting, “I can admit that I don’t know. When I do, I stop until I do know.” They go to this point where they’re like, “I don’t know.” The solution then to not knowing is, “I need to read more books, figure out more answers, and then I can get back over to this other side where I’m the smart person and I can start moving forward.” The trouble with both of those is that what tends to set brilliant people completely free is a willingness to look stupid. They don’t have to keep score and they don’t have to pause every time they get stuck and figure out what’s the right answer, especially in areas of things like intimacy where there isn’t a right answer. If there was a right answer, there’s no longer intimacy. Now, there’s a right answer. It doesn’t exist whatever the counter. Here’s me being stupid.
It goes a little bit there. You’re looking for an answer where it doesn’t exist. If you find it, then you’re no longer being vulnerable and connecting. Let’s talk about this concept of being bored. If you’re someone who happens to be above average intelligence, school might be boring to you because it’s going too slow, or you master something. A lot of entrepreneurs say, “I only like launching something. I don’t like the real running of it. I need a new idea. I get bored quickly.” Some people get bored in their relationships. On the flip side, I’ll never forget my dad who was an accountant that he went on to become a carpenter. He was someone who was happy with very little stimulus.
I remember once saying to him, “Here are all these things you can do in case you get bored.” He looked at me surprised and went, “I never get bored.” I was like, “I need a lot of options. Can I watch Netflix? Is there a book to read? Is there an activity to do?” We are different in that regard. This concept of everybody wants to have their phone with them because if we didn’t stay online for five minutes, we’re not constantly entertained or we didn’t want to be bored. How do you help people, even if they’re not brilliant, not get bored with whatever is going on whether it’s in their career or relationship?
I want to pause to say one thing. Remember that, “Condescend and bring people down below me so that I get to feel brilliant?” As I’ve learned to let go of the safety that provides me and be with my own stupidity or, “natural human, not have everything figure doutedness,” I’ve learned everyone has the capacity for brilliance. What tends to get in the way of that is the lens through which we relate to them. “They’re smart. They’re dumb,” which then means that dumb person never gets to be smart because I’ve already labeled them.
Leadership For Smart People: For some people, the strategy they’ve learned in their life has always come from their heart, which is great until there’s a time when you need to come from your head.
It’s like creativity in a way. If you were told you can’t sing or you can’t paint, then you’d think you’re not creative at all. The same thing with brilliance. I may not be brilliant at everything, but there’s usually something we’re brilliant at. It comes easy sometimes that we don’t give it credit.
The question was, what do we do with boredom?
How do you help your clients, whether you’re speaking to an audience? I know you’re also a speaker or you help skilled people not get bored whether it’s financial professionals or CEOs. They get a little addicted sometimes to the adrenaline rush of a new challenge every day. When that’s not happening, they get bored.
One thing that I find often with people with a lot of brilliance is they have sharp learning curves. They can pick something up. It’s like snowboarding, where you become intermediate very fast, unlike skiing that takes a little bit longer. Brilliant people tend to have their sharp learning curves, which is thrilling at first because they’re like, “I’m awesome at something,” then comes the plateau, which is not that fun. The plateaus where we’re trying to integrate, learning stuff, doing drills or practices. It’s not sexy, exciting, and integrating the way it’s meant to. If you stick through the plateau, then you get the next upswing. That tends to be how growth works. What I noticed with brilliant people is we all have muscles in being with different aspects of life. Brilliant people like to hang out in that early sharp learning curve because it feels good and they feel they’re ahead of the game.
When things level off, that occurs to them like boredom. It occurs to them like, “Something is not right. This isn’t the way I’m supposed to be.” The opportunity often for those people is rather than run away and jump into the next thing where they can then feel the comfort of being in the new sharp learning curve or being in the next start of the relationship, “What am I trying to avoid in this moment? What is it about this flat plateau period that is edgy for me to be with? What is it about boredom that I can’t be with?” If they can start to look there, that’s where there could be a real breakthrough. Those people as a leader could start to be able to not just be with that sexy early starting point, but they could be the leader who also helps people get through the plateau, and then to the next thing. It broadens their range tremendously.
That leads into your book, which is called Leadership for Smart People: How You Let Go of Being OK Being Alone. That concept of being alone at the top is something a lot of people don’t think about when they struggle to get to the top.
[bctt tweet=”Always go one step further.” username=”John_Livesay”]
The thing that’s fascinating for me about these people we’re talking about is they’re almost never alone, but they’re often quite lonely. They’re very good at figuring out social dynamics. What’s the right thing for me to say to this person that’s going to trigger the response for them that makes them feel liked? They’re playing this game of a connection via chess, “If I move this here and that there, you feel liked and I get a smile from you. I occur as the life of the party,” but there’s no actual connection underneath it. It’s just the artifice of connection. They’re surrounded by people and if you’re like, “It’s lonely at the top.” They’re like, “I don’t feel that. I’m always around people.” At a deeper level, they’re like, “It never feels like anyone truly knows me. I never feel truly gotten.” That’s the dichotomy between how these people show up and occur to us versus what’s going on underneath that beautiful surface.
The people who want to have you come speak to their organization or people who hire you to coach them through these transformations of being bored and isolated, do you find that there’s an event that happens to realize they can’t keep going the way they’re going? It’s like a mini wake-up call for them, whether it’s their own illness, a divorce or being laid off that wakes them up.
Yes, for most of us. The way I would assert how life goes is we get the training around us like my parents gave me lovingly. It wasn’t like they were being malicious. We developed the strategies to overcome the deficiencies we’ve been trained exists in ourselves. We use those strategies, hone them, and get better at them. What’s happening is I’m creating this life that is a response to me being better and never having to feel stupid. That’s awesome, but there’s a cost to any strategy. It’s resisting something about myself rather than owning my fullest heart and expression.
Over time, that cost becomes more and more pronounced and the payoffs of the strategies diminish. It was like, “I can get another $100,000, but who cares? I can buy another Ferrari, but that’s not doing it anymore.” It’s like a painkiller, we need more to numb the same degree of existential pain we’re feeling. Usually, there’s a moment where people have a breakdown, get an illness, lose a loved one, or life does something that slaps them. It was like, “It’s fleeting. This is not a long ride. It’s precious and fragile. Is this the way you want to keep going?” That’s when they’re almost open a little bit briefly to allow something to make a difference for them.
Also, the concept of not comparing themselves to other people is where I see a lot of people struggling who need your help. “I have a private jet, but somebody else has a bigger private jet.” You’re like, “Are you kidding me?” That game never stops. Part of that comparison game is, “I care about what other people think about me. Therefore, I can’t ever be seen as stupid. If I let go a little bit of what other people think of me, what I’m judging myself with is so harsh and critical that it’s exhausting and draining.”
My observation of watching you work with people and interacting with you personally is, you get people to the place where they’re free of not only worrying about what other people think, but not worrying about trying to prove something to themselves anymore to compensate for whatever hole might be inside that, “I need to be the best of the best based on my family upbringing or trying to prove something to myself that I’m enough, that I could then be successful.” Whatever is driving them, it’s not from a place of expression. It’s from a place of emptiness. You get people to still stay a top performer but the motivation that gets them up and working is completely sourced from a different place. Would that be accurate?
Leadership For Smart People: What tends to set brilliant people completely free is a willingness to look stupid.
Yes. If I already 100% was able to trust that I’m experienced as brilliant by the rest of the world, or generous, spiritual, humility or whatever the thing is, the need to buy the next bigger jet, win the next case, or make you smaller than me, all of that falls away. The funny thing is when people first come to me, they’re like, “Help me get the big jet. We have to meet them there.” That’s the concern. Over time, they start to discover as we do that work that’s way down closer to the heart, core, soul or whatever we want to call it, it’s not that these other concerns get resolved, they’re dissolved. It’s like, “Why was I even caring about buying the next big jet?” It’s just, “I don’t need to.” It’s no longer there to resolve some pain that’s undistinguished.
Concerns don’t get resolved, they’re dissolved, especially if you tend to be somebody who’s a problem solver. You go, “I got to resolve this conflict. I got to resolve this problem.” You’re like, “No, we just need to dissolve the whole need to be right as a starting point.” What a great little soundbite, resolve, dissolve. That’s great. Any last thoughts you want to leave us with before we tell people how they can find you and explore hiring you as a speaker or coach?
The big one for me is to reiterate that idea that at some point, we learned there’s a deficiency in ourselves. We learned to rely on the fix for the deficiency to get us to where we’ve gotten in life. The reason it’s so hard to trust in ourselves is because we’ve built up a life based around avoiding a deficiency. We’re afraid that, “If I stop buying the planes or whatever, I’m going to lose all my drive. The reason I have all my drive is because I’m worried, I’m not enough” or some flavor of that. I get that. I can completely relate and empathize with it. We can try to trust intellectually, but we can only arrive at it through practice for getting supported. As we get deeper into being able to trust that who we are is sufficient and in fact is tremendous infinite possibility, everything starts to shift and it’s not a free ride. We’re letting go of stuff that’s got us far in life. Sometimes there are consequences to that, especially in the short-term.
You’re the perfect sherpa to help people get through those fears of what that unknown might look like when they finally realize they can’t keep going like this indefinitely. Is That All There Is song comes to mind. You make the world and anyone who’s interacted with you a much better place. Thank you so much for coming on the show and for being my friend.
It’s an honor to share a space with you. I love who you are and what you bring into the world. It’s cool to get to share the space with you.
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