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Welcome to Leading With Force — a podcast where seasoned entrepreneur Brian Force shares the invaluable lessons he's learned on his journey through this crazy, wonderful life. Having built several multimillion-dollar companies, Brian dives into the nuts and bolts of building successful teams, scaling businesses, and leading with passion and purpose.
Each episode offers practical tools to effectively cast your vision, build your team, boost productivity, and become the leader you were meant to be. Brian's mission is to inspire you to unlock the incredible power within yourself, achieve your goals, and make a meaningful impact on the world. Join us as we explore how to find your inner leader, empower others, and embrace your journey.
Here's something that I want you to consider that may be a little bit inspiring. Hopefully, it is. I hope, if anything, it at least just gives you a little peace of mind as to where you're at on your journey. If you have any sort of big goal that you're striving towards, the [00:01:00] world around you is going to make you feel like you're not nearly as far along as you should be towards that goal at this particular moment in time.
That's just the simple truth. Whatever your big, scary, crazy goals are, or as Jim Collins would call them, your big, hairy, audacious goals, the world around you is designed to make you feel like you're not nearly as far along on that journey at this particular moment in time as you should be.
If you look around you and you view what you're doing through the lens of what it feels like everyone else is doing on their journeys, you're always going to feel like you're not doing enough, like you're behind.
This is how our world in the modern day is designed. Our world is designed where we've got tools and mechanisms to put forth only the best parts of our lives. And by the way, those don't even have to be true. And [00:02:00] hide and mask all the realities of our day to day. If you just look on social media, you will see this glamorous bubble that we all live in where every single person's business is crushing it.
Lives are going well. Marriage is perfectly intact and it's designed to make them feel better, get a little bit of a dopamine hit and continue this feedback loop where we put things out there that people like and comment on and reshare and give us the juice to say, I'm worthy.
I'm happy. The bad things in my life don't exist. And then when hundreds of millions or billions of people all do that at once, it makes everybody look like everything's going really well and everybody feel on the inside like they're way behind. Those same people that are posting [00:03:00] something about an amazing accomplishment they just had also feel like they're a million miles behind every other person who put something out.
It's a vicious cycle. And so the way that our modern society is designed is to make you feel like you're never doing enough. And if you allow that to seep in your big, hairy, audacious goal is always going to seem like it's a million miles away.
Here's the thing about big, scary, visionary type goals. They are pretty far away. By default, they should be. Whatever thing it is that you're trying to achieve, whatever thing it is that feels like it's a million miles away, it's that far away for a reason. You have the opportunity to go on a journey to get there.
To experience what it's like to build a life and a version of yourself. that achieves whatever that [00:04:00] is. And it's going to take some time. In fact, it's going to take a lot of time. It might even be your life's work. And so it could take your entire life. That's why having the right goal And having the mindset that you're going to fall in love with the experience, the ups and downs, the trials and tribulations of going through and becoming that person every day.
Having that right goal is so important because the goal is to have the experience, the outcome is whatever you're trying to achieve. But there are going to be many ups and downs on the way to achieving that goal. And the world around you is designed to make you feel like no one else is having the downs.
Everyone else is only having ups and ups and ups and things are only getting better and better and better for them. I've been very privileged. Over the course of my career to meet many [00:05:00] fascinating people, many entrepreneurs, many high level business people, many executives, many founders, and what I can tell you with absolute certainty is no one is ever doing as well as the social media age would have you think there are certainly many successful people out there, but even those really successful people that you look up to.
They're most likely coming from the same place of stress and chaos and the world is on fire and I've got a whole set of problems I've got to deal with tomorrow as you are. And they feel the same way about their big goals as you do about yours. They're just in a different industry or at a different moment in time, but they're no less stressed.
That is unless they're coming from a place of true purpose and joy and meaning and fulfillment in what they do. The world is just one big Spider Man meme where they're all pointing at one another. We just don't know it because we don't allow ourselves to see beyond the smoke and mirrors that people put [00:06:00] forth.
So it's incredibly important to remember this and to keep things in context, because in order to achieve that really big goal, That outcome one, you have to fall in love with the experience of getting there. And that means being okay with the ups and downs and the hard stuff and the stress.
It's all part of you becoming who you need to become to achieve the thing you want to achieve. And you can't let it make you feel like the world around you is perfect. And you're the only one going through these things because you're not. In fact, There's an incredibly small minority of people that everything's going right for all the time.
But if you were to look online, it feels like everyone else is just killing it. They're not. What I will tell you is most people that you look up to, that you believe are highly successful just from their social media presence are not nearly as successful as you think they are in many different ways, financially, business wise, spiritually, and the purpose and [00:07:00] meaning they find in life.
In fact, I would argue that the more they make it seem like things are going really well in their lives, the less they truly are finding fulfillment. The reality is when you're truly fulfilled in life, you feel less compelled to Make a show of it online. And that's not a criticism of anybody. And I won't never judge anybody for putting positive things out there into the world.
I hope that you do. I truly do. I've just observed that social media is sometimes, oftentimes I should say, an outlet. For expressing just the best of us so that we can get that little dopamine hit that little feedback loop that says, I'm still worthy. And then when we project only those good things out there and that's all everybody else sees and everyone else is doing that, then we all feel like we're not doing enough.
You are you're doing plenty. You are worthy. You're amazing and you look beautiful today. [00:08:00] Now, here's why this is so important. Your goals, the big ones, the scary ones, the visionary type ones. They probably aren't pretty far away. I feel this in my life. I have a goal in five years to sell one of my companies for 30 million.
That is my goal. And the reason that that goal is there is because the company that I will have to build in the person that I will have to become to realize that financial outcome aligns with the amount of people that I want to help, but also. Leave space for the fact that there are other things I want to do with my life, other businesses I want to be a part of and other ways I want to contribute.
And so if I continue down this path for an extended period of time, I might miss out on my ability to contribute in other ways. And so I've done a lot of deep thought, a lot of math, and a lot of real consideration around if we get here, when we get here in this period of time, I know that I will have been [00:09:00] fulfilled in this journey.
We would have realized a really nice outcome. It would have helped a lot of people along the way, and it'll give me the means to go and do the next thing that I really want to do, but that's really far away selling a company for that much money. is a very, very, very difficult hill to climb. You've got to work at it every single day, but here's the reality.
There are going to be a lot of ups and downs on this journey, just like the stock market, good days, bad days, up days, down days, but over the long term, our trajectory will be up. And in this company, we've been running it for three years.
Now we've had a massive upward trajectory. If you look at our numbers, our growth has been substantial. It's been phenomenal to watch and to be a small part of, but there are also days where it feels like we should all just bail where we should shut the lights. No one can find us in here. Because the world is chaotic and it's scary [00:10:00] and the clients aren't happy and someone is quitting or A really difficult scenario just popped up or we have a massive expense.
We weren't accounting for Things can be very, very, very hard. And there are often times we look around and we go, our competitors are so much more dialed in than we are. Our competitors are so much further along than we are. Our competitors are looking at us, laughing at us and saying that we're beneath them.
We are not worthy of being in their space. I've had to work really hard to rally our team at times to help remind them that we're probably One of the best competitors in the space at this young point in our journey Because we put so much emphasis on coming from a place of purpose in what we do being proactive around solving problems Really sticking to systems and processes that we know will provide the outcomes for our clients that we're looking for But it doesn't make the world perfect.
In fact, it makes us [00:11:00] feel like we're not doing enough all the time. And in order to get to where we're going, we're going to need to realize and you're going to need to realize in your journey.
that there are going to be many milestones and victories along the way. And if you don't add all those up, if you don't allow those to bring energy into your life, if you don't allow those to be a celebration, at least for a brief moment in time,
it won't propel you forward, you'll lose that energy, you'll lose that steam. If all you ever focus on is I'm not doing enough, everybody else is so much further, everybody else is celebrating, everybody else is crushing it. And I'm not, if you allow yourself to internalize that untruth. Then you're always going to be facing headwinds wherever you are in your journey right now.
If you look back five years, 10 years, that person would probably be pretty happy if they were in your shoes right now. I know this to be certain in my journey, the version of [00:12:00] myself 10 years ago would be thrilled to be where I'm at right now. I could also tell you where I'm at right now. I've experienced a lot of failure and a lot of disasters in my business career.
I've had businesses that have made millions of dollars a year and then dissolved almost overnight in difficult times and I've taken those losses very hard and it's really been disruptive for my ability to get up and try again. And I've had to really keep in mind and get the thought process down of where was I?
Where am I now? What have I learned? How much better equipped am I now to keep moving forward? And that's become incredibly valuable to me that that thought process has become incredibly valuable. So a tool that you can use, I want to make sure that I'm not just rambling down a rabbit hole and trying to just gas you up.
I want to give you something that's of utility. I want you to make a habit of celebrating the milestones [00:13:00] along the way. Small habit of having small celebrations for small victories, larger celebrations for larger victories, and reminding yourself that the goal is the experience. The outcome, the big goal, the thing you're trying to achieve, that's just the outcome of going through the experience.
But the goal itself is to become the version of you. That's going to achieve that outcome and that takes the experience. So you need to celebrate every move forward you make towards that goal because that's the growth process. That's you becoming the new you. We do this in one of our companies. One of my partners and I are really big wine enthusiasts.
I'm mostly a red wine guy and we really love wine. bottles of wine from a few really particular wineries in Napa Valley that we've, we've developed relationships with the owners over [00:14:00] time and they're wonderful, beautiful people. And they have some of the best wines on earth and we get bottles from them every year.
And what we do is really simple. I have like, bottles of wine sitting in my house right now that are from particular wineries that remind me of amazing times that are some of the best I've ever had in my life and remind me of beautiful people that I've, I've shared wine, a glass of wine with over the years, and they're just really meaningful to me.
We don't make a habit of just drinking those bottles of wine with a good steak or anything like that. What we do instead is we align our favorite bottles of wine. We take simple yellow post it notes. My partner and I will write down the thing that we need to have achieved on our journey to open this particular bottle of wine.
If we have 12 bottles of wine, there might be 12 different milestones that we will achieve over the next two to three years, that [00:15:00] every quarter or twice a year, we will crack open one of those bottles of wine and achieve the next piece of the journey and the version of ourselves that we would have needed to become to get to that particular checkpoint on the way.
And I think that's so important. I think it's so important to not just have this big scary goal that you're working towards every day. It's so important to have a mechanism by which you celebrate the incremental gains in the version of yourself that you're becoming to go and achieve that outcome.
Celebrate the victories and block out all of the noise that is telling you that everyone else has already got it figured out. I am so blessed to have so many people in my life that are really phenomenal business people, really phenomenal philosophers and thinkers and entrepreneurs and renegades. And I can [00:16:00] tell you with certainty, I have learned very few things for sure.
But I can be sure that none of them have it figured out that in every single one of their lives, no matter how much financial success they've achieved, how much business success they've achieved , they're not quite there yet. They feel the same way that you feel. There's always another thing that's broken.
Or that's going to happen and that they're afraid of that it could take down everything and they look around into the same ecosphere that you do and they see everyone else feeling like they're doing more.
It is the absolute truth and until you break down that facade and just take joy and pleasure in the journey. You're always going to feel like you're behind everybody else. You are blessed every day to get up and be exactly where you are in this particular moment. Feel that, enjoy that, appreciate that, and [00:17:00] allow yourself those checkpoints and those milestones along the way.
To celebrate you becoming the version of you that's going to achieve that massive goal, that massive outcome. So however you want to outline and do that mechanism, me, it's really great bottles of red wine for one of our companies. For you, it could be something different, but I want you to take some time today to outline and put in place your check marks, the things on your journey that you're going to celebrate to remind you that you are moving forward.
And to forget about everyone who's making you feel like you're not because the reality they're just as confused and lost sometimes as you are. But every day you get up with a gift and that gift is a new opportunity to move forward. Figure out your check marks, keep moving forward. You are blessed, you are worthy and you're going to crush it.
Thank you for hanging out with me. I appreciate you listening to this episode [00:18:00] and I'll see you next time. Okay.