Hey, everybody, welcome back to The Parallel Entrepreneur. I'm your host,
Mark Cleveland, and today I'm thrilled to introduce someone who's spent his
entire career connecting people with innovators and inspiring entrepreneurial journeys.
Francisco Gonzalez is the founder and CEO of Fearless Journeys,
a dynamic community for aspiring and ascending entrepreneurs.
He's also the host of the Agents of Innovation podcast, where he shared over
130 captivating conversations with entrepreneurs, philanthropists, and artists since 2015.
Francisco is also the author of The Heart of the American Dream,
which is the sequel to his insightful book, The American Dream is a Terrible Thing to Waste.
As executive director of the Economic Club of Miami and a visiting professor
at Universidad Francisco Maraquin in Guatemala.
Francisco teaches courses on entrepreneurship and innovation,
while also mentoring the next generation of change makers.
Francisco, I'm thrilled to have you here today.
Mark, thank you for having me on your podcast. I really appreciate it.
I remember when you were once on my podcast.
I do too. It felt like yesterday and yet so long ago. So what episode number was that?
I believe it was episode 31 of the Agents of Innovation podcast.
So people can go back. Gosh, I think it was six, seven years ago now.
But it's funny because we talked a lot about you being a parallel entrepreneur.
And in fact, in my first book, you're also the subject of chapter 35.
That is the book, The American Dream is a Terrible Thing to Waste.
And I titled the chapter, Mark Cleveland, a parallel entrepreneur in unparalleled times.
And all of a sudden, now you have a podcast called the parallel entrepreneur.
So it's everything just fits so well. It is so true.
The seeds that get planted in our lives and spring later into fruit,
man, I'm grateful for that experience.
I also have you as a featured innovator in my Fearless Journeys community now.
I know you've come on some of the live sessions we've done and we've connected
each other, both of us with a lot of different people. It's a relationship,
lifelong relationship mindset that does not express itself in transactions.
It expresses itself in love.
I guess my first question for you is what's the very first entrepreneurial thing that you ever did?
My high school best friend, Sean Gross, and I, we grew up in Broward County,
Florida, and he had an idea for us to start an auto detailing business.
Both of us were involved in sports. I played competitive junior tennis.
He played competitive golf.
I worked at a tennis pro shop on the weekends, taught tennis to little kids in the summer.
He was working at Champ Sports in the mall. And on top of that,
we said, let's start something else.
This will pay for our concerts and baseball games that we wanted to go to and things like that.
So it was fun. And yeah, we ended up having about 200 customers over about a
year and a half, some repeat customers too.
And it was very easy to go solicit people when you're 17 years old and ask them
if they need a car detail.
There is almost always an extremely early emergence of your entrepreneurial
spirit. And in your case, you know, it's high school. And then that continues.
Most recently, I'm wanting you to tell the story of what inspired you to start
Fearless Journeys as a community and a business.
Yeah, you know, Mark, from the time I graduated from with my master's degree
in history at the University of Maryland, till for the next 16 years,
I worked at three different organizations, all three were nonprofit organizations
focused on public policy.
And I primarily was in charge of doing the development fundraising operations
for those organizations. And it's very much like business development in a for-profit
organization that translates to a non-profit.
And you're dealing with donors that could be considered customers,
but you're building relationships.
And I always feel like every relationship for me, even though I may be trying
to solicit a donation from someone,
I always just viewed it as a very authentic. We're on the same team.
I'm just employed by the non-profit organization. The donor is just as much
a part of the team because they're the one funding it.
And they're coming to the activities and the events and things like that.
So you get to know these people.
And I have so many friends today from that first organization.
And yet I went on to work for the next organization for nine years and then
another one for four years.
One of the things I started noticing
is I visited with a lot of business owners, a lot of entrepreneurs.
And I just would walk away from learning all these stories of people.
Because first of all, if you're good at sales or fundraising,
you want to get to know your customer, right?
And so I would really ask a lot of questions. And I'm just, I have a very curious
mindset when it comes to other people.
Like, how did you get from here to there? And when I was meeting somebody who
might be a potential donor or was already a supporter of the organization,
I probably was meeting them at their point of success, right?
Like they've already done something notable, right?
And yet, when you meet with them and you start going back, what were they doing
10 years ago, 20 years ago, 30 years ago, their trajectory was not as smooth
and straight as you might imagine.
The journey of a business owner, entrepreneur.
So there was just so many ups and downs and even failures that they had.
And every time I would walk away from one of these conversations,
I would say, gosh, I wish more people could hear that person's story.
And after I probably said that to myself 20 or 30 times after leaving a meeting,
I was in the car and I was turning on a podcast. podcast and a little light bulb went off in my head.
And I thought maybe I can have a podcast and allow these people to tell their
stories. Well, I started that podcast in 2015.
And nine years later, I've had 151 episodes.
2020 happened. I was getting close to 100 episodes. I was thinking at the time,
maybe I should do something to commemorate 100 episodes.
And I had actually been putting blog posts up on every episode as well.
So one of the first things that came to mind was maybe I could write a book.
And that was one of the things that led me then to saying, wouldn't it be cool
if I could connect all these entrepreneurs like Mark Cleveland?
Like, wouldn't it be cool if he could meet?
In fact, I've had a lot of musicians on too. And I introduced you actually in
2020 to a few of the musicians in Nashville.
It was, we all sat down together and talked about the entrepreneurial journey
in Music City from the creative class. I was like the entrepreneur in the room
who couldn't play piano well, and they were all super creative people.
That was a lot of fun. That exercise we did was like the...
Beginning of what Fearless Journeys became to say, what if I could connect these
other entrepreneurs with each other?
And in addition to that, people who are listeners to the podcast,
in addition to just listening,
I said, what if I started a community where the listeners or anybody else that
just happens to come along and could connect with some of these great innovators
I've had on the podcast, and they could all be connecting with each other and
really learning from each other. So that's what we started.
What we set out to do is say, okay, we're going to continue the podcast,
but we'll have these online live leadership sessions every month where we'll
have one of the innovators come on and lead a session on some area of expertise they already have.
And I'm lucky that something like 55 of my previous podcast guests have elected
to become a featured innovator in the Fearless Journeys community.
So very thankful you're one of them as well.
And then also we do a book club. Sometimes they're very focused on entrepreneurship.
Sometimes it's just self-growth type books, mindset type things,
things that really prepare you to be an entrepreneur.
Oftentimes we'll bring the author on one of the live sessions.
So the community has an opportunity to interact with the author.
And if we don't get the author, we'll get somebody either close to the author
or somebody very familiar with the book that we're studying to do it.
In addition, the fun thing, maybe the number one fun thing we do in Fearless
Journeys is we have these great group trips.
And we do somewhere between three to five trips a year now.
We've gone to places like Guatemala, Argentina, Uruguay, Colombia.
We came to Nashville, and we're actually planning some great group trips back
to Guatemala, Dominican Republic.
I've got Norway, Morocco, and the Patagonia on our list for 2025.
So it's going to be great, but we don't just travel together.
I mean, yes, we're going to go visit some great landmarks, eat some great food,
do all the fun things you want to do in Buenos Aires or wherever we go.
But we're going to meet with local entrepreneurs that you could sit across the
table, get inspired by, visit their places of business.
Maybe that place of business is a factory. Maybe it's a coffee farm in Guatemala.
We went to a free trade zone in Uruguay. I mean, just some cool things that
most people would not be able to do on a travel experience, but for fearless journeys.
Yeah. You know, I think the biggest thing to learn is to listen to your customers
or even potential customers and get that feedback. You know,
what is it about what you're offering that they want?
Maybe there's something you're not offering that they want, but they think you can offer it.
They believe you can offer it based on something else and how you might need to shift.
You know, I think we become very wedded quickly to what we think works and what
we think what we're offering is the thing to offer.
But oftentimes, there's sometimes you got to let some things go and focus on
what's actually working. What do you see the parallel entrepreneur doing differently
than a typical entrepreneur?
I think for me, maybe my greatest asset is I'm a great connector of people,
but also I'm a great connector of the dots.
So I think one of the ways a great connector of people could work is it's not
just that, you know, I want Mark Cleveland to meet somebody of interest.
But it's that, hey, Mark can bring this to that person.
This person can bring this to Mark.
Wow, there might be something that might just happen, some magic that might
happen if I can connect those two people. I think that's my strong point.
And that's whether it comes to fearless journeys.
I'm really trying to connect people.
Ideas and particularly with other innovators. And I do that on the sessions. I do that in the trips.
I do that on the podcast. I do that through my books. I do that through teaching.
So always connecting ideas and people. Yeah, your superpower is connecting. I've experienced that.
Communicating, I've experienced that. And you're working with entrepreneurs
who many of them have some of these similar superpowers.
So Francisco, let's pivot for a moment and talk about role models and mentors,
people who inspired your approach to running multiple businesses,
your approach to business in general.
It's a workshop that moves around the globe. I just think it's incredibly important
to just point people to the Fearless Journeys community. I just can't help but endorse it fully.
We'll put links to this podcast so people can find you easily.
Yeah, people can come to fearlessjourneys.org and start getting a little taste
of what it's like. You'll get some of the emails.
For the book club, most people tell me I usually will read one or two of the
books a year, but the rest of them, I'll just follow your weekly summaries.
And that gets me caught up with the book.
Yeah. It's like the cheat sheet, Francisco's cliff notes. I consume them.
I'm wanting to dive into your experience with so many entrepreneurial conversations
to just really highlight what is it that you think is working that's making
parallel entrepreneurs tick.
What are some of the pain points and conversations that you tend to have?
Yeah. You know, it's hard to pick like one or even a couple of people because
I would say kind of people that inspire me are the kind of people I've had on my podcast.
Man, you do one podcast, you do five podcasts, you do 20, 30, 40.
Every time you get off a podcast episode with one of these entrepreneurs,
you're like so inspired. You're like, want to become an entrepreneur herself.
What was cool is then I was getting like.
All this advice from each of them about what to do, what they thought would
be great, you know, strengths, weaknesses, all these sorts of things.
And it's cool. And I'm still getting that advice. And I also feel like that's
a real asset for me that I can, again, like you said, these are not really transactional relationships.
These are, we all want to see each other grow.
So the journey is about building and extending relationships and then creating organizations.
And many of these entrepreneurs dream, they expect that they're going to have
an exit someday. I'm curious, are they seeking advice? Are they giving advice?
What have you heard from your entrepreneurial community that might be nuggets
of wisdom for our listeners?
Yeah, I've had a few. One of them was on one of our online sessions where people
have said they should have exited sooner.
These are people who are running very successful businesses.
And I think the reason they probably didn't actually goes to the title of my new book.
The title of the book is The Heart of the American Dream. And the reason I called
it that is because of the love and the passion that is required to be an entrepreneur.
But when they get to a point of success, they're still so wedded to what ultimately
drove them to start the company.
They can't imagine giving it up. It's like giving up one of your children, right?
And so it's difficult to do. But I talked to so many entrepreneurs where they're
like, man, you know, that one time I thought about exiting and I didn't and I should have.
I find myself to be a committed optimist,
and my friends and parallel entrepreneur companions, they are,
at least in my experience, as you mentioned, wedded to this thing.
And they either think it's worth more than it really is, or they're waiting
for two more years to get it worth what they think it could be worth.
I really find a serious dose of pragmatism is important and good advisors that
can help you see how the market is valuing a company,
whether you're a tuck-in right now or a platform or somebody that's going to
go public, all these different methods of generating wealth for the founder.
And they just don't ever pull the trigger. They're so involved in that identity
of this business has my last name.
In my own experience, we spend a lot of time talking about what's your life
going to be looking like after you exit and trying to imagine what success looks
like in both operating and continuing to control this enterprise and husband
it to some form of a greater level of success.
Or when it's time to hand it off to someone else and go to the bank and say, thanks.
Um i'm but i do i hear
people thinking about holding on for more money or holding on for more something
how much is enough yeah for sure you know what i think there's also something
else i think that's identity too i think they're a little scared to to lose
that part of their identity they are the ceo of x right that they you.
Can't imagine themselves out of. I like to look at a company as if it were your first child.
You learn a lot with that first child.
And then, you know, a couple of years later, it comes along your second.
And if you're blessed, maybe you have a third, you go from playing two-on-one
to playing one-on-one man defense.
And then you go to playing zone and pretty quick, you get to the fourth child
and you're like, all right, I surrender.
Don't kill each other. And all these learning experiences, I think you become a better parent.
Let's say, for example, those are four companies that you've started over that
10-year period. And they're all maturing at different times and have different requirements.
And you don't lose contact or lose the love for the first child when he or she
goes off to college. But you do have to let go.
I'm excited about the idea of saying, look, I love all four of my children and
I love them each and find them each where they are.
And then I give them the resources they need and watch them make mistakes and
grow and then celebrate when it's time for them to move on to the next stage.
And I think if an entrepreneur were to sort of adopt that idea about their company,
as opposed to this is something I'm holding onto for dear life and it's all about me.
I wonder if that can't be a healthy conversation. I think one of the things
I've also found in a recent conversation with one entrepreneur who actually
did exit the company, one concern that many have is what's going to happen,
not just to the actual company.
I mean, they're going to get their pay and they're going to walk away,
but to the people that they left behind that are also still working there.
And then, you know, you come to some agreements, maybe with the person or entity
taking over your company that's buying it from you.
And but you don't know for sure. And also, there's just a lot of pain in those
moments of knowing they're going to let certain people go that you've been close
to over the over the years, because they have some other vision of how they're
going to do something with that company.
So I think there's a lot of pain points. But those are those are good ways to look at it, Mark.
I think I think you're right. You've got to at some point be able to let go
and let that take its course.
And then also where what could you be doing next? Right? Like,
you can be starting a podcast while your kids are off in college.
Sharing knowledge i just feel that like there's so
much fear in these decisions in these discussions
at the employee level the entrepreneur has a certain trepidation with knowing
that that's a responsibility for them and post merger acquisition integration
experiences can be really challenging because it's often not thought through
you do have to address fear people just operate,
I think, from a position of fear.
Speaking for myself, I know that there's been decisions that I've made that
I had the fear factor was just weighed in too heavily.
And I know that's one of the things I love about your community, the fearless journeys.
There's a nugget in there about unlocking potential, unleashing potential everywhere
by eliminating fear. Talk about that.
I think that's one of the biggest things people have. You hit it on the head.
I I mean, and we really named it that because we wanted to embolden people on their own journey.
You know, you've got to be willing to take risk. And one of the questions I've
asked myself many times here is I just said, what's my obstacle?
One. Two, what's the worst that can happen if I do this and it fails?
And usually the worst thing that can happen is not that bad.
You know, when we start to understand...
Fear and what it is and why it's there. It's there because we human beings have
evolved from hundreds of thousands of years of history,
where 95, maybe 98% of the human experience was in survivor mode every day.
We literally had to go out and hunt and kill what we wanted to eat,
maybe defend ourselves from other people or other animals from the weather elements.
So it's ingrained in us and the fear was put there to help us to survive.
So therefore, we then now transition
the concept of fear to things that really are not going to kill us.
We're just afraid because it makes us uncomfortable to do something new,
something that's not in our routines or in our habits.
It's going to be disruptive, whatever you're going to do. So we have fear about
disruption because we want to be, you know, in control.
Yeah. I set a goal for myself at the beginning of 2024 that I would respect
and appreciate the defenses, my wisdom, my little voice, my inner Mark Cleveland, my higher self.
I wouldn't betray myself. I wouldn't live out of fear. And this,
I think, is a conversation we have to have with ourselves all the time,
not just in any one point in time.
But I remember this point in time early this year when I decided I would fear less.
I'm just going to fear less. I'm just going to go act and do the things that
my heart is asking me to invest my passion in.
And doing a podcast is one of those things. So first of all,
I want to comment on two things. I think that's the best way to look at the
word fearless is fearless.
Fear is not going to go away. we're going to have fear. It's a natural instinct.
We're going to have it. It's just how do we react to it? How do we work with it?
Amy Gearhart did an online session about making fear your friend.
And what I actually just told you, I kind of stole from Amy a little bit,
because that's what she was talking about.
But what she added to that was usually the thing you fear is the thing you need
to do, because there's some reason why that feeling is there,
because it's actually something that's telling you what you need to do.
And you need to understand how to, like you said, fear less and kind of lean into that thing.
The other thing I wanted to say is about the podcast, at least five or six years
ago, I literally got rid of cable. I was just tired of the news.
I just felt like there was so much noise in the world.
And there's also so much negativity. But I will say I started listening to more podcasts.
And I have a few that I'm like religiously listened to every day or every week
that I've been listening to for years, because they give me like enough of my
information. And it's like, you know, it's more positive.
I think everything is about what you're adding to your diet,
your intellectual diet.
That's how you're going to see the world. If you're following things on social media or...
On the news that have a lot of
negative vibes, guess what? You're going to have a lot of negative vibes.
So I'm not saying you have to live in fantasy land, like, you know,
but you do need to have some sense of reality. But I think that you need to,
you know, really kind of understand like what you put in is going to be what comes out.
And time is one of the undeniable, most limited resources we have.
So I appreciate books that I read and podcasts that I consume and entertainment.
And the news, as you just mentioned, I've really sort of diminished the amount
of attention I pay to the programming that is headed my way that does not add
to my goals and objectives to be a better human.
And it's pretty easy. You just tune out and instead tune in to wisdom.
And I'm curious, do you have, in your own experience, Francisco,
do you have a spiritual or a mindfulness practice? And how does it help you?
Well, you know, I'm a person of Catholic faith. I go to, I go to mass every
Sunday, but doing that for years and maybe, maybe some, some weeks more if I, if I got a chance.
And I think just personal prayer as well. So I think that is the thing that
grounds me the most is my faith.
It also makes me more optimistic, I think, because no matter what's happening
in the world or things around me, I think when you have, if when you're a person
of faith, you're just, you're going to believe that there is a, there's a bigger story.
There's a guidance that you can turn to that you don't have to have so much worry.
I mean, I think, you know, Jesus said in the gospel somewhere like to his disciples
who were worried all the time about everything, by the way, they're walking
with somebody who they thought was the son of God, and they're still worried
and anxious and have all these concerns, just like everybody else.
And he said, why, why are you worrying so much? The father feeds the birds.
You don't, you don't think he's going to take care of you. And so I think when
you live with that, with that kind of mindset, you just kind of relax,
like things will take care of themselves.
And then I do think, you know, Mark, I think people, again, we are also so disconnected
from nature these days, right? And so we do need to get outside more.
I begin every day after I get up, I eat breakfast, and I take a 30 or 40 minute walk in the morning.
I think getting in touch with nature is one of the things that will really keep
us alive as humans and also grounded as well.
So you do these book reviews as a part of the Fearless Journey community.
I have benefited greatly from that.
Let's talk about the best two
books that you've reviewed and that you've consumed and shared recently.
If I had to boil it down, it's probably this one, The Alchemist.
It's, I think, been published in 80 different languages.
Olo Coelho is the author, and he's a Brazilian author, and it's like 30,
35 years old now, and his book is the most translated by any living author.
I've read it at least five times now. Little did I know, I think it planted
some seeds in my head because two years later, I started Fearless Journeys.
And when I went back about a year later, I said, I want to use that book for
the first book in the book club. And when I reread it, I said,
oh my gosh, this is like me.
This is like Fearless Journeys. Because the whole thing was Santiago,
the boy in the story, he's actually, he's on a physical journey,
but he's on an actual mental journey as well, spiritual journey.
And I'm trying to find his treasure. And at the end of the day,
I don't really want to give the book away, but I would just say like the biggest
lesson is that the journey is what is oftentimes what it's about.
It's not even just about like where we're going. It's about what we're learning
along the journey and all the different people that come in and out of our life
that are part of forming us and part of helping us on that journey.
But there's a refrain in that book that goes something like this.
When you really want something, all the universe will conspire to help you.
And when I was on my journey starting Fearless Journeys, there could not have
been a bigger mantra that came true like a thousand times.
That's the one thing I try to get across with Fearless Journeys is helping people build the mindset.
Because if you really put your mind to it, anything, I mean, it sounds so trite.
Anything is possible. But when you really, I think if you do any kind of spiritual
meditation, anything like that, and you focus and you visualize,
any kind of visualization techniques.
I mean, that will be part of that universe coming along to help you.
So The Alchemist, I think, is an incredible book on so many levels.
It's hard to say the next one, but the next one that I'd say I've read the most
is Atomic Habits by James Clear.
I've used it in some of my classes down in Guatemala to students on entrepreneurship and innovation.
And it's just the process of building and or breaking a habit.
It is truly a process. You're not going to become something different overnight
but i think it comes back to something i said earlier too james clear says if you want,
to build these habits, you first have to identify with the person you want to be.
So if you're not yet a writer or
you're not yet a runner, how can you do something small on a daily basis?
And maybe it's just writing one page of a journal every day.
And then you are now a writer if you do that enough days in a row.
And that one page might become five pages or 10 pages. And now you have a book.
He teaches you so well how to just craft your own identity, and then the habits will follow.
You know, I've seen this question asked a million times, which is more important,
the journey or the destination?
And the answer is the company.
I'm curious about your experience with the companionship and how you've observed
that in your community of entrepreneurs.
Well, what I often like to say is the mantra, So, you know, no one journeys
alone, you know, like be bold, be courageous, go on that journey,
go forward with what you're doing.
But understand that no one, I mean, literally no one that I've ever met that's
successful has ever done anything on their own.
Whatever it is, there's a hundred different ways that people are helped.
So you should look around and who can help you and who can you be helping?
I think everybody should have mentors. Not only are they going to give you advice,
they're going to probably connect you to other people and they're going to give
you some wisdom, but also there are other people you could be helping with in different ways.
And so, you know, everybody's at a different station at their life at different
times, but at each point, you kind of got to look, who could help me? Who could I help?
And by the way, would you help other people? Let me tell you,
that's going to come back.
I don't, I don't do this because I think it's going to come back,
but I don't know how many times it has.
Sometimes you could actually see this connection very directly come back,
but really more than anything I think you see
this person with some real talent with some you know whatever it is that they
have to offer and you want to help them you know bloom it's a two-way relationship
and the mentor mentee I think everybody kind of helps each other so if you could
talk to your younger self what's the first thing you would say.
Every high school person I meet, I usually tell them, Mark, don't go right to college.
At least take a gap year. So many people are in a rush to do the thing they
think they're going to do.
And they should probably get a little bit more experience in the world.
Maybe that means just working a job and saving some money.
Maybe it means going and trying to do something entrepreneurial when you're 18, 19.
Maybe it means traveling the world a little bit. I would actually also say,
go to a place like Guatemala and learn another language.
Spend three to six months away. Learning a second language, and by the way,
a third, fourth, even better, is going to give you such a heads up in the business world.
By going to another country or just traveling a little bit, you will learn a
lot more about yourself and about the world. Those are the things I would tell
myself. Don't go right to college.
Travel more. Travel with a purpose. By the way, Mark, I know your story.
You didn't finish college because you were doing something entrepreneurial.
And, um, and so I think you ended up going back, I think, and getting a degree later.
Yeah. Uh, my experience as a college student was, you know, I thought I was
going to go get a red tie and a blue suit and join IBM.
You know, this is in the Pacific Northwest.
I was going to the university of Oregon and I started my own company just to
try to pay my way through college.
And it, it exploded in the best way. And I just never looked back and I kept
on doing that, started a software company. And your comment about service really anchors me.
I decided to go back to finish what I started and transferred my credits to
Lipscomb University. It was a faith-based university.
And I had this terrific experience of academically studying the Old Testament
and looking at faith through a history or through a leadership lens.
And I had a great time collaborating with the students and learning in that
environment. And I think it anchors me in two things, like you said,
service and lifelong learning.
That is key. We have to be lifelong learners.
Your education doesn't end when you get that degree. This is why business people
go to conferences too, right?
This is why people are joining mastermind communities. I mean,
it's just constantly learning from other people. Yeah, and you can be on the
other side of the world for less than a thousand bucks.
You can, I mean, just the opportunity to, the idea that we can jump in an airplane
and go somewhere and be in a completely different culture.
I learned so much when I was interfacing with
Chinese manufacturers and Taiwanese manufacturers and
different businesses and European manufacturers and
traveling and meeting the different business cultural influences that teach
me how I can interact with people that are not like me and benefit from diversity
of perspective and even learn how to approach relationships in a way that another culture does.
There's a lot of value there you learn
from a diversity of perspectives so that
way you're learning how to interact with all different kinds of people in different
cultures maybe different languages like you got to find out where to eat you
know for the first time how to eat it maybe you don't want to drink the water
because it's not clean how do i get clean water like you've every little problem
solving your problem solving at scale problem solving all day long during your travel experiences.
What are some of the most important skills or traits that you think a parallel
entrepreneur should develop?
Well, especially for parallel entrepreneurs, I don't think this is going to
be a shocking answer. I think time management, more than anything else, blocking time.
I try not to do any calls in the morning because one call distracts me and then
I never get anything done. So I try to keep all my calls to the afternoon.
By the way, the afternoon, your energy is down. At the beginning of the day,
you can do a lot more focus.
Phone calls are great because they bring up your energy and you're talking to people.
But in the morning, they can send you down lots of rabbit holes. Right.
And then it's good to build those habits, like James Clear says,
but it's good to do something adventurous every week, something.
Maybe it's going out with your friends one night.
Maybe it's taking a hike on the weekend. Like just do something different to
make that week a little bit more special so you're not totally caught in your routine.
So what's your North Star, Francisco?
Give me three words that define who you are and how does that relate to your North Star?
Three words that define who I am. I would say, you know, I'm curious,
I'm adventurous, and I'm faithful, consistent.
And yeah, my North Star is Jesus. But I think serving others,
putting, you know, I think that's the idea that probably grounds everything.
By the way, that's the first characteristic I outline in my new book,
The Heart of the American Dream, is that that's the first characteristic of
entrepreneurs, the first characteristic of their heart.
That one thing I've seen from entrepreneurs is how committed they are to serving others.
It's not that they just want to make a buck they're bringing something to the
world that they believe in so much that they want to help other people and in
return people will pay them for it so for me.
In serving others, it's more about connecting them with other innovators in
different parts of the world and really just helping them connect the dots in their own life as well.
I think that my life is a constant thrill-seeking, learning, adventure.
And by nature, I'm pushing myself out of my comfort zone all the time.
And it becomes something that doesn't cause me to be fearful and it becomes
something that I can learn hacks and habits.
So the atomic habits that come with being adventurous. I would just want to
encourage everybody who's thinking about starting a business,
anybody who has a business and is an entrepreneur and wants to press it to the next level,
find the joy in that, find the excitement, get yourself out of your comfort
zone, do something that scares you every day.
And while you're doing that, you are adventurous.
This is an exciting life we lead, right?
By the way, Mark, adventurous is also one of the principles I outlined in the
second book, you know, of the 10 that I identified, because that's what I looked at.
The entrepreneur has an adventurous heart.
Starting a business, let me tell you, is adventurous, right?
But getting yourself out of your comfort zone is an adventure.
Try to inspire your curiosity and try to really take on more adventures every
day that you can. How can that not inspire your team?
And then you got to, you got to accept the fact they're going to make mistakes
along the way and deconstruct those mistakes and figure out what the little
victory is and what you've learned and, and go address, go do it again.
Pick another path when you run into a dead end.
And I mean, how many times have you tried something that didn't work,
but then you tried something later and it worked the second time you did it?
Yeah, no. And sometimes the third, fourth, fifth, right?
I mean, you know, the famous phrase by Thomas Edison, right?
He said something like, you know, somebody said, we've tried this,
sir, 6,000 times. And he said, no, we just, we just figured out 6,000 ways it
doesn't work. Like, let's try something else.
And I think that's the true, like entrepreneur mindset is saying,
in the failure, we learned something.
We learned how not to do something, or we're going to learn how to do something better next time.
And that's what you do. you apply it and you you iterate and you try to do it
again and look sometimes you can run out of money or you can run out of time
like you can't keep doing the same things forever but i think.
Look at everything not as a failure but as a learning experience and as an adventure
you know that sounds like the way to do it well you know we've talked a lot
of about the way it's done the way it gets done easier the way you have more
fun doing it and entrepreneurs are i think not always having fun.
I think there's a stage in your business where you're searching for,
hey, what's fun about this? Where's the joy?
Because it's not easy. And at the same time, you hear people say,
if I find something I love to do and I find joy in it, then I never work a day in my life.
And I find joy in building organizations. I find joy in advising,
being a travel guide in the M&A experience or helping somebody start a company
because I've done a number of times.
And I also find joy in doing wildly different things.
I find synergies from bicycle manufacturing to sock manufacturing to information
services with transportation and logistics to starting a maritime company.
They all made sense to me at the time.
At the same time, I learned something in one industry that I could apply to another.
Not just immediately adjacent lessons,
but basic paradigm shifts that were only available to me because I went out
and learned an entire new industry and didn't spend a career in any one thing.
What is the thing that most entrepreneurs are trying today to do a little bit
more of or a little bit less of?
I think they're trying to delegate a lot more, including to AI.
I think you're seeing so much attention right now and
so much conversation is about what can ai
do for me how can it 10x me
100x me whatever delegating to
either other employees other maybe contractors or uh or or actually ai and it's
all about making your business more efficient more effective and so that's the
number one conversation i see people having right now also hiring in other places
where the labor is less as well.
And that gives those people opportunities to have jobs as well.
But the biggest thing is because if you're concerned about your business and
what it's trying to do for people, you're trying to figure out how you can get
the most out of your resources to make your business more successful,
reach more people, build more customers.
Francisco, what's the question that I should be asking you and I have not? I'm stumped, Mark.
What should you be asking at me that you have not asked me. Well,
you know, let me just put it this way.
We talk a lot about entrepreneurs, even now parallel entrepreneurs.
And so you're talking about people who have done something.
That very few people are doing starting a business. And then the parallel entrepreneur
is doing something that even fewer people are doing, not only starting multiple
businesses, but running sometimes multiple businesses at the same time.
This is the definition of insanity, right?
Like doing all these things. I've heard that before. Yeah.
And so a lot of times when I'm talking to people, and even when I was starting
Fearless Journeys, the original approach was a community for aspiring and ascending entrepreneurs.
I would say that that's not for most people.
But what everybody can do is build an entrepreneur mindset.
And an entrepreneur mindset, that's why I outline in these two books,
these 10 principles of the mind and 10 principles of the heart.
Because if you could model that in whatever you're doing now,
you will be a more valuable person, a more valuable asset to your company,
if you can model these characteristics of the entrepreneur.
And maybe one day that will prepare you and that you'll actually be an entrepreneur
in the sense of starting and running a business.
They are sort of the superheroes in our society if they're able to succeed and
they bring us so many great, they change our lives.
I mean, if we look at the super entrepreneurs, the ones that are on another
level, like the Steve Jobs and the Mark Zuckerbergs and the Elon Musk,
I mean, just look at how those people change the world. Thomas Edison, I mentioned before.
You're only going to work this
hard if your heart is into it and this long and with this much passion.
So even if you don't ever start a business, you could model these characteristics,
make yourself more successful, more capable, more mentally strong.
That's going to carry you through any challenge you have in life,
whether it's in your life, your career, your marriage, like whatever it is.
If you have these kinds of characteristics, you're going to make you a better person.
Well, Francisco, it's a pleasure to have you on my journey. Thank you for being
my companion and I love you.
I love you too, Mark. Thank you. Thanks for joining us.