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Welcome to the Healing Our Politics Podcast!
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Guest:
Andrew Hutton is co-founder of Day One, which supported early-stage founders and their teams in navigating from 0 to 1 by taking a customer-discovery-led approach to go-to-market. Andrew is an industry-leading expert in human and user-centered design principles, a master at customer interview techniques, a teacher, coach, a former illustrious Parsons School of Design professor, and an Elected Leaders Collective board member. This episode is all about transferrable knowledge, learning from another wisdom tradition to set yourself apart in public service - in this case, entrepreneurship and start-up mindset.
Andrew Hutton is co-founder of Day One, which supported early-stage founders and their teams in navigating from 0 to 1 by taking a customer-discovery-led approach to go-to-market. Andrew is an industry-leading expert in human and user-centered design principles, a master at customer interview techniques, a teacher, coach, a former illustrious Parsons School of Design professor, and an Elected Leaders Collective board member. This episode is all about transferrable knowledge, learning from another wisdom tradition to set yourself apart in public service - in this case, entrepreneurship and start-up mindset.
About the Episode:
In this episode, we discuss how a pig farm in Uganda took Andrew from West Wing dreams to the mean streets of entrepreneurship. The principles, practices, and strategies of an entrepreneurial mindset and how they can be applied in your public service journey. Human-centered design and design thinking, how you can use small tests to improve professional and personal efficacy and mitigate downside risk to drive public policy innovation. Creating positive constraints to encourage growth and nimbleness to shake your organization out of its rut. How to re-frame “failure,” learn to fail forward, and use setbacks to build resilience and organizational power. How can we work with societal factors and constraints to more effectively measure and plan around risk - professionally and otherwise? How can we speak to citizens differently, using customer discovery techniques to create better policies and bring people together? I hope you enjoy this wide-ranging conversation with my friend, Andrew Hutton.
Key Topics Discussed:
· [00:01:51] Episode/guest intro
· [00:03:20] The value of entrepreneurial mindset
· [00:05:55] West Wing Dreams
· [00:09:47] Building a pig farm in Uganda
· [00:11:51] Throw your hat over the wall
· [00:15:30] Raising the bar to do harder things
· [00:16:50] The invisible public hand in individual success
· [00:18:49] You CAN fail + survive
· [00:19:58] The fear of failure
· [00:21:30] Using failure as a ladder
· [00:22:35] Progress in action
· [00:23:18] Andrew’s framework for challenges
· [00:27:50] Strength and success through vulnerability
· [00:29:20] Skippy failing forward
· [00:31:00] Compressing the learning curve
· [00:31:42] Build an entrepreneurial mindset
· [00:32:55] Supercharge your personal growth
· [00:35:22] The value of cohort work
· [00:36:50] The experiential approach to life
· [00:39:23] For victory: Chunk down
· [00:42:36] Design thinking + strategy
· [00:43:32] IDEO
· [00:44:10] Human-Centered Design
· [00:44:55] TED Human-Centered Design in Affordable Housing
· [00:47:05] Principals of User-Centered Design
· [00:51:10] Moving policy forward w/o institutional support
· [00:51:50] Leading through trust
· [00:55:00] Day One Accelerator
· [01:02:52] ELC Foundation donors
· [01:07:26] The more I know, the more I know I don’t know
· [01:08:00] VC’s + politicians
· [01:08:58] Happiness = reality - expectations
· [01:13:05] The value of entrepreneurial mindset
· [01:13:37] The Tim Ferriss Show
· [01:14:28] Performing like a superstar
· [01:15:00] Bend your bell curve
· [01:17:04] “Internet literacy”: Busting the bubble
· [01:20:00] The mirage of comparative success
· [01:22:10] Businesses lie
· [01:23:30] Should everyone be civically active?
· [01:25:17] Design thinking in public spaces
· [01:29:22] Carbonated water foundations
· [01:31:12] Question all assumptions
· [01:32:36] The problem with public comment
· [01:33:42] Going rouge for citizens
· [01:34:46] Customer discovery
· [01:43:51] Asking the “right” questions
· [01:45:15] The emotional danger in identification
· [01:48:00] Secret name game
· [01:49:28] Final question: Create the space you want to lead in
· [01:50:47] “The Leader’s Handbook” Newsletter
· [01:51:25] Sponsor: ELC
Key References and Resources Mentioned:
· [00:35:22] The value of cohort work
· [01:29:22] Carbonated water foundations: Paris
· [01:34:46] Customer discovery; The Mom Test; Rob Fitzpatrick
Where to Find Andrew Hutton:
Where to Find Host Skippy Mesirow:
- Receive Support at the Elected Leaders Collective
- Follow on Instagram www.instagam.com/skippymesirow
- Book a free Clarity Call to see if coaching is right for you
Episode Sponsor:
Helping You Heal Our Politics
The Elected Leaders Collective (ELC) organization is the leading US-based provider of mental well-being training for public servants, conducted by public servants and the world's best mental health and human optimization professionals. With ELC Training, you will learn to rise above and become the political healer you were meant to be, improving your well-being in the process.
Contact the HOP Team:
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Creators & Guests
Host
Skippy Mesirow
Skippy Mesirow is a prominent leader, certified Master Coach, and founder of the Elected Leaders Collective (ELC) and ELC Foundation. ELC leads the US in mental health and well-being training for public servants, recognized in The Apolitical Foundation's Mere Mortals report, and named as one of 26 worldwide political well-being "Trailblazer Organizations." A transformational leader in political innovation and wellness, Skippy serves on Gov. Polis’s Natural Medicine Advisory. Skippy’s work has been featured in numerous podcasts and publications, as well as main-stage speaking engagements for organizations NLC, YEO, CML, MT2030, Bridging Divides, and Fulcrum, highlighting his significant contributions to mental health, community, and policy reform. Alongside his professional achievements, Skippy lives in Aspen, CO. with his partner Jamie where he enjoys running ultra-marathons, road biking, motorcycling, international travel, culinary arts, Burning Man, and lifelong learning.
Producer
Aaron Calafato
Aaron’s stories are currently heard by millions around the globe on his award-winning Podcast 7 Minute Stories and on YouTube. Aaron is a co-host of Glassdoor's new podcast (The Lonely Office) and serves as a podcast consultant for some of the fastest-growing companies in the world.
Editor
Jesse Link
Jesse is a strategy, research and partnership consultant and podcast enthusiast. A 2x founder, former Goldman Sachs Vice President and advisor to 25+ businesses, Jesse brings a unique and diverse background to HoP, helping to elevate the range, depth and perspective of HoP's conversations and strategy.
What is Healing Our Politics?
Hello,
I’m Skippy Mesirow, host of “Healing Our Politics,” the show that shows you, the heart-centered public servants and political leaders, how to heal our politics by starting with the human in the mirror.
Healing Our Politics, “HOP,” is a first-of-its-kind show that provides tools and practices for mental well-being, health, and balance, specifically for public servants so we can do good by feeling good and safe in our jobs.
HOP brings together experts, scientists, doctors, thought leaders, healers, and coaches to share their insights in practical, tactical, actionable ways specifically tailored to the public service experience for you to test and implement with yourself and your teams. Episodes feature intimate conversations with global leaders about their self-care practices and personal challenges, providing insights for a more holistic, connected approach to leadership. Whether you're a Mayor, teacher, police officer, or staffer, this podcast will guide you to be the best version of yourself in service to yourself and the world!
Sign up for our once-per-month Leader’s Handbook newsletter to receive an actionable toolkit of how-to guides on topics discussed on the podcast that month to test and implement in your life and with your team: https://leadershandbook.substack.com/
Hello. My name is Skippy Mesereau, coach, former elected official, and lifetime public servant. Welcome to Healing Our Politics. The show that shows you, the heart centered public servant and political leader, how to heal our politics by starting with the human in the mirror. It is my job to sit down or stand up with the best experts providing you actionable, practical, tactical tools that you can test out today in your life and with your teams.
Speaker 1:I will also talk to leaders across the globe with a self care practice, getting to know them at a deeply human and personal level so that you can learn from their challenges and journey. Warning, this is a post partisan space. Yes, I have a bias. You have a bias. We all have a bias.
Speaker 1:Everybody gets a bias. And I will be stripping out all of the unconscious cues of bias from this space. No politics, partisanship or policy here because well-being belongs to all of us and we will all be better served. If every human in leadership, regardless of party, ideology, race, or geography, are happier, healthier, and more connected. This show is about resourcing you, the human doing leadership, and trusting you to make up your own damn mind about what to do with it and what's best for your community.
Speaker 1:So as always, with love, here we go. This episode is all about transferrable knowledge, learning from another wisdom tradition, and I sit down with entrepreneur and expert in human centered design, Andrew Hutton. Andrew is cofounder of Day 1, a teacher, coach, and former professor at the illustrious Parsons School of Design and an Elected Leaders Collective board member. In this episode, we discuss how a pig farm in Uganda took him from West Wing dreams to the mean streets of entrepreneurship, the principles, practices, and strategies of an entrepreneurial mindset and how they can be applied in your public service journey, human centered design and design thinking, how you can use small tests to improve professional and personal efficacy and mitigate downside risk, creating positive constraints to encourage growth, how to fail forward and build a resilient mindset, the necessity of accounting for societal factors when planning professionally and otherwise, how to use customer discovery techniques, this is fun, to create better policies, strategies to make failure your friend preemptively, and so much more. I hope you enjoy this wide ranging conversation with my friend, Andrew Hutton.
Speaker 1:And I think today the magic is going to be translating the experience of the entrepreneur into the public policy and public service realm. Talking about taking feedback, how to work with criticism, what failing forward is and learning to apply these lessons with a different frame in service. And so I am hyped to dig in.
Speaker 2:Me too. Skibby, thank you so much for that. I'm so excited. I too had those same thoughts. I haven't dusted off my political hat in forever.
Speaker 2:I don't know. But you framed it perfectly. I'm sure we'll get into this. This is maybe some of my language. I don't know if you would have this, but, like, entrepreneurial learning and the way you apply entrepreneurship as a practice and principle, not even to entrepreneurial activities, I think is something everyone, whether you're in politics or in education or building businesses or just a corporate person or everything in between, stay at home parents.
Speaker 2:I think life is better navigated with a entrepreneurial mind of Yeah. Trying things out, figuring things out by doing them. So, yeah, excited to share some of that worldview and thought process and seed some ideas and see what it comes of it.
Speaker 1:Couldn't agree more. And I think about when I was first involved in public service, not elected office yet, but was also working on starting a company and went to something called startup weekend, which is basically like a 2 day boot camp of taking an idea into practice. And I remember thinking at that time, like, how the hell don't we do this for public policy frameworks? And so there is just so much of that goodness that we will get into and that, you know, you've created. But I think for me, I always like to start these journeys at the beginning and with the humans so that we know who we're talking to, where they came from, what their learning process is.
Speaker 1:I'm going to start somewhere that may go nowhere, but I'm wondering if you could, and this may be unexpected, but can you tell me about 6 months building a pig farm in Uganda?
Speaker 2:I absolutely can start there. I honestly do think that that's where my entrepreneurial mindset really started because that experience so I'll even, like, run into that. Actually, here's my political overlap. So when I went to college I'm going all the way back. So when I started as an undergrad
Speaker 1:Some poli sci in there. Right?
Speaker 2:I went to school as a poli sci slash economics double major. I finished with that. And I wanted to be, no joke, I wanted to be either Sam Seaborne or Jed Bartlett or Mhmm. I basically wanted to be the amalgamation. I really wanted to be Jed Bartlett, an economist, politician, but, you know, basically, he was both, and he was that professorial, but wielded power, but was so human and good, brought the Bible verses out when he needed to, like, he had everything.
Speaker 1:Every presidential election, Ted Bartlett gets a non de minimis amount of votes, and there's part of me that's not pissed about it.
Speaker 2:No, not at all. And so that was me coming into college. And because I was in my early teens going through high school when West Wing was playing literally for the first time, and my parents watched it, and I remember watching it. And so I got this indoctrination into The West Wing as it was playing live, and I totally lived through season 4 being awesome and season 5 sucking. That happened to me live as younger than most people probably.
Speaker 2:Anyway, I took that into and I had some really great teachers in high school. So again, part of my story, I'd say most people have one of that that one formative teacher who just stand and deliver style, like takes you and, like, puts you on a pedestal or dead poets. I had that, and he was very much mix of economics and political science and philosophy and okay. This is a long story, but maybe it's fine. So I took that into undergrad, started these double majors, and was moving pretty fast.
Speaker 2:Right? I was able to take all these other classes. I found myself, again, the west wing sort of like was my life. I was like, oh, I gotta be pre law. I gotta go get the law degree.
Speaker 2:That's what the all these people have. PhD in economics or a law degree. So halfway through or like my sophomore year, I chose law degree. So the rest of my college time basically led to law school. So did the LSAT, did the prelaw, did the internship that turned into like a job where I got to really see how law firms work, a cool small boutique law firm in, you know, the suburbs of Chicago.
Speaker 2:Mhmm. And it was there that I saw the sausage getting made, and I was like, oh, there's a lot of paperwork, and it's like 90% paperwork. And these lawyers drafting replies to responses to huge reams of submissions. And I'm like, oh, law is like a tiny bit, not even a tiny bit, like 0% of law is like arguing before the supreme court. And 99.9999999 percent of law is wasting people's money in, like, a zero sum game that lawyers are the only winners.
Speaker 1:They always win.
Speaker 2:Sorry. It's all the lawyers. Right? So the 21 year old me, I got to the end of my college career. I had been accepted into law schools.
Speaker 2:I had got my scholarships. I was down to my final 2 or 3 choices. And I was basically like, little existential crisis, do I really need to go to law school to do what I wanna do in life? And obviously, I didn't really know what I wanted to do in life, but I wanted to be more than a lawyer. I wanted to be a CMC board.
Speaker 2:Right? More than a lawyer. Right? I wanted to have impact on the White House. Maybe I shouldn't take on 6 figures of debt and spend 3 extra years just getting a degree that I don't really need if I just wanna go hit the ground running.
Speaker 1:I just wanna point out something right here because I just so appreciate this about you as you have a very insightful observational mind, but you're very practical. You know? Like, I just you didn't get tied up in I locked out. Title of lawyer, etcetera. Like, you just
Speaker 2:for a long time. That's the thing. Okay. I was probably just a little ahead for my age. Right?
Speaker 2:Like, most college kids are not necessarily thinking this way. I, like, had that on. I, like, had that as my identity for, like, 3 or 4 years of college. But then I think a lot of young folks go through that quarter life crisis where they're 25 and they're like, why did I start this path? Yeah.
Speaker 2:I had that 3 years earlier. So I got to have the crisis at 21, 22 without spending those post call. So college wasn't wasted. I got an entire sequence of life happened, but that takes us to Uganda. Because as I finished college, and I said, like, no, and basically let all of my acceptances to law school lapse, I had nothing to do.
Speaker 2:So what do you do when you're a 22 year old? So again, super fortuitous. I had a friend who graduated, who knew a little bit more what he wanted to do with his life, and he had, over the, like a year or so, had set up this really cool social business, literally a pig farm. So this is where it happened. So really forward thinking guy, someone I was already admiring as like a 22 year old.
Speaker 2:He set up this project by raising money, going over to Uganda, to the small village outside of Kampala, and hooked up with a orphanage to build them a farm to be a sustainable source of revenue. Cool idea. Social business idea. I was totally into it.
Speaker 1:How did he target Uganda?
Speaker 2:So he had some connections. He had done some volunteering over there. So this orphanage was something that he was already connected to. That's the thing. So Got it.
Speaker 2:You know, like a church connection or something.
Speaker 1:First people listening who are like, Uganda, where is that on a map? It's an East African country, sort of Central East.
Speaker 2:Yeah. West of Kenya, landlocked, but it is on Lake Victoria, which is the source of the Nile. Beautiful. And what
Speaker 1:Winston Churchill called the pearl of Africa. It's deeply rich. It's really cool. Beautiful culture, former English colony, so English speaking, so easier to navigate. So just a number of reasons why some might might end up there.
Speaker 2:Exactly. Exactly. And it's sandwiched between Kenya and Rwanda. Right? And and Kampala is near Entebbe.
Speaker 2:Entebbe is I don't know his movie about it. Yeah. So he had this thing going. Again, super fortuitous. He was he was doing this cool thing.
Speaker 2:He actually set it up over, like, the summer after graduating, and then it was like, I gotta come home, but this is not ready to, like, just give away. Like, it's not ready to stand on its own. So he literally asked me I can't remember why it made sense. I think we were just catching up. I told him I was a free agent.
Speaker 2:And he's like, why don't you come over to literally Africa and just do what I was doing and run this thing and shepherd it for a chunk of time. Mhmm. I don't know if it was right away or let me think about it, but I had nothing going on. So I said yes. So I think, again, without being like, this is like my operating model for life, I was just like, let's just say yes to things.
Speaker 2:Yeah. And I think it's a good operating model for life generally to say yes to big things that seem scary. Because when you get into them, even if they are actually scary and hard and, like, kinda crazy, you'll benefit from them.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:And so I'm a huge fan of, like, throwing your hat over the wall and forcing yourself to go get it, That metaphor. Right? So if you're you're staring at a wall and you're, like, really scared to try, do a thing that's easy. Throw your hat. And then all of a sudden your brain goes, well, now I have to go get it.
Speaker 2:So take the decision to do the hard thing away from yourself so that you end up saying yes by almost by automatic. Like, I gotta go get my hat or else my mom's gonna kill me kind of thing. Right? Yes. Throw your hat over the wall and go get it.
Speaker 1:Taking a risky action knowingly, but you're doing so in such a way that creates both positive and negative constraints to force follow through.
Speaker 2:To force follow through. If I had to, like, wake up every day and say I'm going to Africa, eventually, you say no because you just get realistic or something.
Speaker 1:Right? Flight.
Speaker 2:But you just got exactly three flights and stuff like that. So that's how it happened. So then I got over there. Crazy. You're right.
Speaker 2:Like, English speaking, that's kind of the one positive thing in a sense of, like, a customization, but, like, wildly different culture, completely different. And I was, like, the boss of this business. Again, I was an entrepreneur without being an entrepreneur because Were
Speaker 1:your, quote unquote, employees, Ugandans?
Speaker 2:Yep. Yep.
Speaker 1:Yep. Was there an incoming distrust or frustration with an outsider being the one in the decision making role?
Speaker 2:Definitely a little bit of that. Again, like most organizations, there was like a partner board level. The the orphanage had a leadership team, and they were co bosses. They were the boss, kind of. I was next underneath them.
Speaker 2:Right? But I kinda answered to them. It was their land. It was their everything. We were guests helping them.
Speaker 2:Right? So we're obviously listening and taking direction. But then I had a person who was a actually a what do you call it? A university grad who was like an agricultural degreed university grad to help agronomically run the farm. Then we had, like, half a dozen farmhands, local guys.
Speaker 2:And obviously, like, I don't know anything about their life. You know, that's such a distance. But, yeah, just got thrown into, like, running a business. I literally did things like take a taxi into town and, like, buying feed and materials and loading them up on, like, a rented truck and getting them back. Crazy things.
Speaker 1:Like a moto with Yeah. Like a boda boda. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I don't know. Everything you think about doing business in the US times, like, 10 and it's silliness. I bought supplies. I sold pigs.
Speaker 2:I slaughtered pigs, which is not cool and fun. It was wild. I literally went to, like, government offices to go get stamps of approval. I bought a truck. Those sound like decently standard, but, like, everything was nuts.
Speaker 1:Yes.
Speaker 2:So let me let me wrap this up to say I spent 6 months over there. Right? Really cool opportunity. I mentioned this was the beginning of my entrepreneurial mindset because, yes, I was running a business and really, I wasn't treating it very entrepreneurially. I had no craft.
Speaker 2:I didn't know anything about entrepreneurship or business. I was just doing stuff.
Speaker 1:You're just showing up out of curiosity, like left foot, right foot, basically.
Speaker 2:And failing forward 100%. And not even again, not even failing forward in a way that I would advise an entrepreneur to do today, which is test something, try something out. Just like doing my best to stay in the game day to day and then, like, little failures. And there's coming up the next day, picking yourself up and being like, well, we can't just, like, leave. So what do we do next?
Speaker 2:Right? We lost this. This didn't come up to as as far as we wanted. This cost more than we wanted it. We got less.
Speaker 2:What do we do? What do we do? So I spent 6 months there because I got, like, burnt out. I was just, like, failing forward, had all sorts of challenges. I kinda got to the end of my, like, everything.
Speaker 2:Kinda told my tapped out essentially and said, I gotta go home. Can you come back in and replace me? But really, I came back debriefed, decompressed for a while. I realized that I had, like, raised the bar in my life for hard things that I've ever done. And again, I'm kind of like a decently insulated kid who, like, the hardest thing I've ever done was, like, take an AP test.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I, like, really shot up in terms of tough things. And even though I hadn't necessarily succeeded, I failed. And I think I did own that. I said, like, man, this thing is further along than when we started, but we did not get our profit margins.
Speaker 2:We did not do this, that, or that as a business.
Speaker 1:What are the specific things that you had failed to hit?
Speaker 2:So, you know, our our product was to raise pigs, and they were not growing as fast as we wanted them to. We weren't getting the prices at market. Mhmm. We had this plan to, like, store the feed during the the dry season instead of buying it at all the times, but then we got, not moldy, but it got, weevil. Bugs were getting into it.
Speaker 2:Mhmm. And so we, like, lost some of that. We just had stuff go bad. All the things, like, again, if you have a business model, you say, like, here's my top line. I'm gonna sell x number of pigs for y price.
Speaker 2:Here's my cost basis. This is how much stuff we're gonna lose. All of those numbers are worse than you wanted them to be, and it was operationally, like, my fault.
Speaker 1:Interesting. I'm curious if this rings true to you, but what stands out for me here is we often, I think, can make the assumption of, like, oh, selling pigs is an easy off the shelf business. People do it all the time. They suck at this in Uganda. I'm gonna go do it.
Speaker 1:And we fail to take into account the environmental factors that make it as such, which is like, yes, you can always get the feed right in America because you have guaranteed power of the electric grid. And so you're not going to have infestation from things That doesn't exist there. You can go to the market and have a price here because contract law is the norm and the expectation, but there, it's not. And so, all of a sudden, this easy thing, once you're in that environment, turns out to be just as hard as it is for everyone else.
Speaker 2:10000%. 10 and then chalk it up to the fact that, like, I was getting the worst price from everybody because I'm a white dude walking in. Right. Yes. So I'm making mistakes.
Speaker 2:I'm getting the worst prices, and we yeah. It was harder. Exactly. We were, like, trying to be these, like, white guys coming in and saying, like, we can build a better business, trying to, like, be really smart about it. And the reality is there's a reason why people feed their pigs scraps because they don't grow any faster when you feed them expensive stuff.
Speaker 2:They actually just grow at this. So absolutely. So if we had framed the whole thing as, like, Andrew's gonna go in and just shake it down. Just try everything once and just see what the real reality is, we would have had a much better expectation. And that would have been the mindset to say, hey.
Speaker 2:Pick a thing. Do it. It's freaking hard. And then just set your expectations after. But we came in with a plan and a goal and all these things, and it was like just miss, miss, miss, miss, miss.
Speaker 2:Mhmm. I think
Speaker 1:it's such a lesson in humility and also, like, environmental attunement and So much. Yeah.
Speaker 2:So the lessons I came away with were just infinite in terms of, like, okay, this is what life is really like when you go do an unknown thing, a hard thing. But I'll tell you the number one lesson, the, like, ultimate thing, you can fail and survive. You're gonna be here the next day. And so don't just bite off hard things, go nuts. Go nuts because I came out of that a year later.
Speaker 2:So here's what happened in my career, right? I did that for 6 months with like 3 months on on either side. So I chunk up a year of my life to that. Afterwards, I went to grad school, I got a job at Accenture, I did a bunch of like kinda normal business y things. I was like playing on another level compared to my peers, and I felt it.
Speaker 2:I knew it because I had, like, gone through the ringer and survived. One, I think I'm we're speaking to, like, folks who have been through ringers and survived. Right? So maybe you can relate. Right?
Speaker 2:But that was just huge, and it happened really early in my career, and I just felt like I can go through walls because I had kinda gone through a wall.
Speaker 1:I wonder what your direct experience of this is, which is to say, yes. What you're saying makes sense theoretically. I think most of us would agree with it theoretically. Like, what doesn't kill us makes us stronger. Yes.
Speaker 1:And yet, there is, I think for many, I've observed, myself included, I've been in this camp, there is a fear that if I fail at something and I'm known to be a quote failure at something, that I will be in some way extricated from community, cut off from resources, exiled, not liked. No one's gonna give me a second chance. What was your direct experience with that?
Speaker 2:Yeah. That you you framed it up the right way. So came home from this experience. Again, wasn't the first thing I thought. I was gonna sleep in my bed and, like, not get haggled when I go to the grocery store.
Speaker 2:I just need to, like, revert to my life. But it was when I was going to apply to new jobs. Right? And I was starting to describe my experiences. And it wasn't just the clubs I did in school and my classes.
Speaker 2:I had this like work experience. And not just a work experience, I did a freaking big hard thing, took a huge leap. Here's where I learned it and I learned it so cleanly. I started to admit, I did this hard thing. It did not go as planned.
Speaker 2:I'll say I failed. I had to tap out. Business didn't work. I was emotionally burnt out. I had to pass the keys back.
Speaker 2:And that was the end of the story, frankly. I'm like in these interviews, like, I like Accenture. Yeah. I like distinctly remember a couple of them where I would recount the story and like use that. So I was obviously portraying that I was very humble, portraying that I was learning a lot, portraying that I was on the other side of it, and I really chalk those stories up.
Speaker 2:Again, I wasn't on the winning side yet. I was kind of in the middle portraying these stories, and I think that's what set me apart.
Speaker 1:Do you remember were you scared to share that? Do you remember what you felt like?
Speaker 2:I think I had internalized that this is how to frame it. I don't know why. Like, so again, I was probably what you're saying is, like, a big deal to me because I had started to recognize that this failure was my differentiator, that this was not a negative thing on my resume, that this was what set me apart. And when I played that card in that way, it absolutely turned into it was that. And I just recognized it.
Speaker 2:Again, we only see things in hindsight, but a few months later, I was looking around at my peers who joined when I joined at Accenture. It's Accenture management consulting firm, not the craziest exclusive thing, but not the easiest to get into. And I'm like, why did I get in? Oh, I really probably looked like a 1% because I had done something. I had really done something different to stand out.
Speaker 2:And I had the mindset that I was way more mature, I think, than well, I was also, like, 24 at the time, and so I was not just a recent grad. I had life under my belt. And it just, like, clicked for me. So those two experiences together between doing the thing, surviving it, recognizing that this is now my story, I'm gonna own it. And then seeing how that played out as positive in other people's eyes, just solidified for me that just do things.
Speaker 2:2 things happen. You either win or you get an experience, and you will come out stronger. Again, theoretically so you said it. We all know it theoretically. I experienced one full cycle of that, and I was just, like, hooked.
Speaker 2:So So this is how it's gotta be. Yeah. Right?
Speaker 1:You built the confidence in action. You got the result. You got the feedback, and so it it sept into the veins, then it became embodied.
Speaker 2:It's like it's like when a little kid does something good, and their parent, like, smiles big. Now I'm gonna play soccer because that gets my dad excited. Right? And now all of a sudden, they're soccer fiends for the rest of their lives. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Those reinforcing mechanisms still happen.
Speaker 1:So for someone listening who wants to apply it, I love the way you frame this, like throw the hat over the wall and go get it. If you were to, like, as tightly as possible, describe sort of the steps of that process from noticing the wall to deciding whether or not to throw, to owning the setbacks or failures on the back end, what would that look like?
Speaker 2:Yeah. I think, honestly, it's hard to not notice the walls because they come up just there's just life events. Do I try for a new job? Do I well, really, it's less of, like, try for a job. It's like, do I take a job?
Speaker 2:Maybe that's different or out of my field or whatever. Do I move? Do I get in a relationship with somebody? The big life events are these walls. And it's when opportunities come your way.
Speaker 2:They're not infinite numbers of these, especially the really formative ones. If I had said no to this project, my life would be entirely different, entirely different. It's wild. So say yes. So say yes, you'll see them.
Speaker 2:So so throwing the hat over the wall is how you say yes. So it's these big life moments. I just moved. At this point in my life, 12, 15 years later, doesn't feel nearly as big. That's pretty big to move with a 1 year old and start in a new city.
Speaker 1:Yes, sir.
Speaker 2:Most of us are gonna, at some point in our life, are going to have a version of that. Do I uproot and decamp and go? And my thought to everybody is say yes at least once in your life, if not often, to that move to a new city for whatever reason. Just because of whatever for whatever reason. Right?
Speaker 2:Move to a new city, take that new job, take that new project. It might be like, Andrew, I don't get, like, jobs all the time. Someone asks you to run for something. How about, Skippy? When was the first time you ran for something?
Speaker 2:It was probably one of those, like, universe opportunities, and you said yes. Right?
Speaker 1:You know, it's interesting. Yes and no. The first time I got asked to run for something, I was recruited by a nonprofit group. To run for State House. And I spent a lot of time.
Speaker 1:I left where I lived. I went down to Denver. I met the team. I was there for a weekend. I considered their pitch and platform and all of that.
Speaker 1:And I loved what they were doing. I still love what they do. The organization has shifted, and they really do amazing work on healing. Well, my words, healing or something, that's not how they put it, but, from a much more, you know, structural electoral and finance place. I decided no.
Speaker 1:But it was in the container of that cons intensive consideration that I got to really think about what I wanted to run for and why, and that's where I made the decision. I do wanna run, but not here. I wanna run locally.
Speaker 2:Everyone's gonna have a flavor of it. That sounds awesome. Yeah. So the moments are gonna happen. How do you throw your head over the wall?
Speaker 2:Like I said, like, is there any way to just, like, say yes and get out of the way so that your other decisions kind of already made for you? So here's the thing. This might not work for everybody, I'll admit, is that I'm one of these people that is much more driven by, call it external commitments. So if I make a commitment to you, I'm gonna follow it up. Mhmm.
Speaker 2:If I make a commitment to myself, like I'm gonna wake up every Saturday and go running, I'm not gonna follow it up. I'm not gonna go running every Saturday. Mhmm. But I will make this podcast. Mhmm.
Speaker 2:Everything. So by saying yes to a friend and getting the hat over the wall, that worked for me. Right? Mhmm. So I don't know.
Speaker 2:Whatever gets you committed, whatever makes you commit to things, whatever you can not bear to break a whatever. Right? Is it to yourself? Is it to other people? I think that's a big deal.
Speaker 2:And then life just happens and and then you kinda get to again, my thought is if you can get over that activation hump, then you just go with it for as long as you can ride it and just take it where it goes. And now you're in a new plane, new territory. Right? And- Yeah. And again, 2 things happen.
Speaker 2:You either like get to a good place or it doesn't work and your way further forward in life. And by that, I mean, you've learned, you've built connections, you've got that experience. And again, just from that one experience of my life between 20 and 20, maybe whatever, 21 and 24, you move up so much faster in these moments. Yeah. And so, I don't know, you can be in a crazy ride to the top all your entire career in life.
Speaker 2:It's more likely that you go into bursts where things are kinda steady, but then an opportunity comes and you take it and you, like, jump up and you shift. Right? So at least that's what I found.
Speaker 1:And so then on the other side of the wall, when you come back and you're in the place of owning any setbacks or failures, and let's say you are a person who is afraid of doing that for whatever reason, totally get it. I've been there. Yep. What thoughts do you have on how to work with that fear and continue to act in ownership?
Speaker 2:So I think there's kind of the head and the heart side of, like, owning your failures. Right? And so maybe it's mostly heart and, like, the emotions of it, but the thing that plays into that for me is a mindset of, like, here's another thing that I found works is being vulnerable. I found that and again, I can caveat this, maybe it's because I'm a man and men are usually not and therefore I stand out by being vulnerable. But by being vulnerable and being willing to both talk about the failure, but talk even about the, like, feeling of the failure or just things like even one click underneath the surface, it makes it all come to life.
Speaker 2:And so somehow I got there. I wasn't in therapy or anything at the time, so I just got there myself, right, being vulnerable enough with myself to say it to make it real. But I found that even a lot of my career, I was on a call with some colleagues, and actually, I was kind of recounting stories like this. Actually, I wasn't recounting this story. I was recounting like day 1, the failure of being an entrepreneur.
Speaker 2:And I was calling, talking about it in some of this language, and they were calling out like, oh, that's really vulnerable. I'm like, yeah. That's kind of like the only way I know how to operate. I found much more success in being like that than, like, coloring over things.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Maybe it's because I fail a lot. Maybe I, should, win more. So I have less of these stories, but, no. I think it's part of life. If you make life failing forward a good thing, there's nothing bad left.
Speaker 2:There's
Speaker 1:nothing bad. There's nothing bad left?
Speaker 2:I don't know. Let's do whatever.
Speaker 1:If I think about my life, the times that I'm most proud of that I would least wanna give up were the times where I was literally or figuratively stuck in the mud because they are always the ones that have led to the greatest growth. And the actual wins, it feels like a little pin on the military jacket. It's like, oh, that's nice.
Speaker 2:Right. I don't
Speaker 1:have any time thinking about it. Like, it's so in the background.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:But it it's really the the failures that have shaped me.
Speaker 2:The wins are like data points. They stack up in a different way, but the losses are just deeper and they're not just data points or experiences and they have feels. I'm thinking about every chunk of my career has the, like, usually, the win is in taking the leap, frankly. I'm just thinking about different career jumps, and I'm like, yeah. Each leap was there, and then it's awesome, and then it gets hard.
Speaker 2:Mhmm. And then that's where things change and lead to the next thing, which you don't know if it's leap up, but you're at least leaping. Then in hindsight, once you get some space, those hard parts are learning moments.
Speaker 1:Well, when you're talking about that, the vision I got or the visualization I got was, like, the phase change of a liquid. Right? Like, if you're the outside observer, you see the moment where it freezes. You see the moment where the water becomes gaseous, but all the work is done in between. When from the outside, it looks kinda boring, but, like, that's when all the interesting stuff's really happening internally.
Speaker 2:Totally. And I'll say, like, even internally, it's happening, but I remember, like, a recent switch. When I left the last job I had before starting my real entrepreneurial career at day 1, there was some, like, turmoil. It was tough. There was a season that was hard, and it was the beginning of the pandemic, and there was lots of changes for a lot of different businesses and organizations.
Speaker 2:And so I was like, that was a sucky time. And my learnings are only, like, 12 months after that of, like, oh, I probably should've handled it differently. That's the reality of when you apply this mindset to life, the feedback loop is in months, if not years. Yeah. Okay.
Speaker 2:A 6 month tough season leads to 6 months of starting a startup, leads to 6 months of getting things going and feeling good about it. Now I can look back 18 months later and be like, oh, I probably paid attention to things that didn't matter. I probably fought some fights that I need to fight. I probably felt some feels that I realized are completely unnecessary. I should have been this, that, or whatever.
Speaker 2:And, actually, the reason I say it like that is just because, this thought process of bringing an entrepreneurial attitude to your life. The idea that it definitely can and has for me and probably is for everybody, manifests in these actual life moves and moments. And that motion of this, this, here, I don't know what's down the road. And that's true. You can't predict the future.
Speaker 2:So the only way to get there is to do the thing and see what happens and then iterate. Mhmm. In real entrepreneurship, especially if you can control some some variables, those things can happen in, like, days weeks. And the idea to put it out there for everybody is to do it in a controlled enough environment where you can even maybe test multiple things and pick the one that works. That generally doesn't happen in life.
Speaker 2:You don't get to try out 3 jobs and pick the one that works to take a job. And so really the ultimate entrepreneurial attitude is that leap. The leap where you learn as it happens and after the fact, and then you incorporate it. And then once you learn that, those motions are generally always positive. Either you win or you learn, means you take lots of leaps.
Speaker 2:And then if you can get to the point where you do things in parallel, not just in sequence, now you're learning, like, 10 x faster than anybody. Yeah. Right?
Speaker 1:Yeah. I mean, it reminds me the analogy, and and I think you're right in an unsupported environment. The integration of learnings is slow. It could take months, years, even decades, but like the entrepreneurial development journey, if you make the investment in whether it's having coaching relationship or being part of a cohort or a program like a day 1 or a start up weekend. But if you make that investment for your personal growth, you can very much accelerate that process through the daily and weekly evaluation process and iteration that you're talking about in real time.
Speaker 1:And you can not shortcut the mistakes, but you can shortcut the reuptake of the understanding and the learning from the mistakes in the same way that you would in, like, a weekend boot camp where you might have the same idea for the same company, but there's not someone there to push you, if you don't have someone giving you structure,
Speaker 2:if you
Speaker 1:don't have the accountability, you know, for all the normal human reasons, it could drag on for years.
Speaker 2:Yep. Yep. I mean, those boot camps, that concept, it is, one, collapsing tons of time into a short time. It's not just that though. So let's say a project is gonna take 48 hours.
Speaker 2:You can either do it in 1 weekend or you can do it over 1 month or 2 months or 5 months. Then you're right. There's the accountability to push it. You actually do more in 48 hours than you would over a broader amount of time because you have all those things pushing you. Add onto that, now you've got this condensation of people.
Speaker 2:So again, if you spread it out over a long period of time, you don't get those people and that's some serendipity magic, the molecules bouncing and creating a Mhmm. An explosion. And then on top of that, generally, everyone knows that this, like, pressure cooker is happening, so they bring resources.
Speaker 1:Yes.
Speaker 2:And so they bring that knowledge and that experience and those mentors and coaches happen. So I don't know what I'm saying here. It's just go to more boot camps. It's a really good recipe for moving life forward, sprints, things like that. I mean, that's why, again, like, entrepreneurs do use the word sprint more than they should, And they try to use it like we're technology everything's technology.
Speaker 2:Right? But the day of a sprint is all those things together. Right? We're gonna time bound things, time box things. And that just as a corollary, it's not the principle of what we're talking about.
Speaker 2:It just takes all the essences of what happens when entrepreneurial mindsets and activities are happening and makes them happen. Takes away some of the variables, takes away some of your ability to not fall off the wagon, but like what happens when it's all spread out. Right? You don't get the right people around you. You do kinda get a little lazy and procrastinate.
Speaker 2:Right? So, man, so much is getting out of your own way.
Speaker 1:Very much so. Very much so. I mean, it reminds me of a cohort we did maybe a year and a half ago, that I was co coaching through ELC, and we had a city council member from a very small rural town in Colorado. They came in with a deeply dysfunctional council. They had no city manager.
Speaker 1:They just fired him. There was no one in leadership. They're literally getting at fights at the dais. People are sniping at each other in the like, it's a whole thing. And not to say what caused what, but because this person was in a container with other elected officials within, I think it was like a 9 month period.
Speaker 1:This individual was able to learn from the others in the group, find tools, find his own contribution, his own complicity in the conditions that he claimed not to want Mhmm. Shift his behavior, begin to show up and support other leaders. And within a year, they had a new city manager they all like. They were doing their first strategic plan since 94, their first housing plan since. And, you know, it's not to say that's a direct thing, but to have that regular iteration and observation is what empowers one to drive that change rather than waiting 5 election cycles, for instance.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Well, what you're bringing up for me, and this is again, when I think about bringing entrepreneurship to other aspects of life, whether it's politics or raising your kids or anything, the main thing to grapple with, I mean, I'm grappling with it, is how do you take an iterative approach to parts of life? Like we just said, like your career isn't as I mean, it actually is very iterative. Like, you can try something and go there. Most of us don't.
Speaker 2:We kind of play it out as like one long stretch. We don't necessarily take feedback and and try the next thing. We don't treat each unit as a experiment. Mhmm. And so that is again, if I was to unpack, like, the entrepreneurial mindset, it's to create everything around that principle.
Speaker 2:Everything in your mindset needs to be that I'm doing something, it's experiments. Mindset has to be, I've created a runway. I'm meaning like I have time and capital and energy to do experiments. There's a saying around startups that like a startup is not a company, it's not a business. It is a organization that is meant to run experiments and find some truth about and the reason why startups are that is because startups are new businesses, proto businesses.
Speaker 2:And if a business was already existing, you wouldn't need a startup, right? So how do you go from no business to business startup? And a startup is discovering a truth. Truth generally about markets, about customers and products, and what do customers need that they don't have today that is better than their alternatives. And that's the simple math of a business.
Speaker 2:Right? Can I create something better?
Speaker 1:Can you tell me if there's there maybe additional the 2 primary perspectives for business building or product development. Now, of course, there's every gray in between. Yeah. Yeah. But there's what you're talking about, which is really applying the scientific method
Speaker 2:Yes.
Speaker 1:Of hypothesis, test, feedback, not success or failure, just feedback, and then iterating based on that and doing it as quickly as possible. And this is certainly made famous by Facebook, move fast and break things. Yeah. Right? Yep.
Speaker 1:Yep. But works in a lot of places. In in many ways, it's analogous to how AI writes your sentences very quickly. It's the same process. On the other hand, there's the Henry Ford Model T, right,
Speaker 2:which
Speaker 1:is if I ask people what kind of vehicle they wanted, they would have said a faster horse. I have to show them the thing that they want first, and maybe put Steve Jobs in this camp Mhmm. As well. And I think that, you know, there's always room for both in the public policy space. Let's just say in policy making.
Speaker 1:It doesn't have to be from an elected body. It could be administrative work. It could be school boards, etcetera.
Speaker 2:Right.
Speaker 1:I think many people, and I've been guilty of this as well, fall into a victim mentality of, well, I'm only one of X. I'm not the decision maker. I don't get to decide. And so I might agree that taking a more experimental approach to policy making, where we're testing things, where we're working with humans and I'm going to come back to human centered design and some of these things in a second, but I might think that's a great idea. In fact, I did think that was a great idea.
Speaker 1:I think I fell into this of like, I want to do that and I would try to push for it, say at the council table or with staff. People would not get it. They would not want to lose control. They would have some pushback and then I would go, oh, well, we can't do it. And what I'm realizing listening to you is I didn't chunk it small enough.
Speaker 1:Yes. That my job was not to make the whole system bend to this new system. It could have been to start implementing it in my own life. Like, what if I had chunked it down to 5 minute conversations with citizens on the street corner to start getting feedback of what they thought about it? Yeah.
Speaker 1:Or testing out individual ideas of, like, what would you think about adding a trampoline to the gymnastics?
Speaker 2:That's an experiment. That's a test. Yep. Yep. Chunking it down, what you implicitly mean by chucking it down is you're taking the risk of failure.
Speaker 2:So when you ask somebody, what do you think about adding a trampoline? And they go, you're an idiot. The risk of that and being negative and a failure is like nothing. So why not just go do it? So mentally, we spent the first whole chunk of this conversation being when you do big things in life, there's no real risk of failure, just go do them.
Speaker 2:Mhmm. But we know in practice, there's a plenty of things that we just know it. Like you could just probably look at your weekly workflow that if you do things, there's some risk of failure. If you do the wrong thing, you're gonna fail. Yes.
Speaker 2:That is kinda true in most business and everything, organizational, political, everything bureaucratic environments. There's plenty of things that do not have room for failure. So as a leader, as an entrepreneur, you have to chunk it down such that if the failure happens, you either learn or you go forward. And again, now I'm just reframing failure as learn or go forward in a way that doesn't kill you. So, yes.
Speaker 2:Yes. And when I was describing it for a business, right, so a startups again, this might not be here nor there for the audience, but like when you're setting up a startup, the main thing you need to do is set it up so that the number of experiments you run, none of them kill you. If you run an experiment that's 5 months long and you only have 5 months of capital, and afterwards you have to put the startup to the side and go get a job, failure will kill you. You've literally set yourself up to be very fragile. If this experiment doesn't work, I'm gonna have to go get a job and leave this business behind.
Speaker 2:That's not a good experiment. Those experiments should be 5 days. Mhmm. Where if the first one fails, you learned and now you try the next thing. Now you have 10 of them.
Speaker 2:And if you run 10 experiments sequentially, are you way more likely to get it right than 1 over 5 months? Yes. Every single time.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 2:How do you chunk these down in the political world? That's a great thought process.
Speaker 1:I wanna kinda async back memento style to just add in some concepts that people may not be familiar with. Sure. That I think can inform their understanding of how to use that. And so you, both as a student, as an employee, as a professor, in and around the world of design thinking Yeah. And design strategy.
Speaker 1:Yeah. So can you talk about what is design thinking and just start to lay out some of the basic foundations of this?
Speaker 2:Totally. Totally. So this was the driver, this theory, that's not even theory, I don't even know what you would call this, Practice, design thinking. Kinda got like a big d, big d proper noun sort of thing. I did go to school for it, became this practice that I was implementing as a consultant.
Speaker 2:I kept teaching. It's very much this if you look it up, it'll become a thing. Right? So design thinking at its very core to say it almost stupidly is thinking like a designer. But what does that mean?
Speaker 2:A designer goes all the way back to there's a company called IDEO. Mhmm. Very, very, very cool for anyone in the design world, design firm that is 50 plus years old. And in the eighties and this is there's actually probably some precedents earlier than this.
Speaker 1:They used to have their annual summits in Aspen.
Speaker 2:Oh, really?
Speaker 1:I think so.
Speaker 2:I mean, they're really cool, so it doesn't surprise me. But in the 70s 80s, the small version of this company popularized this thought which was, Hey, we're designers, we create chairs, we create things. But we're not just creating things to be functional, to work technologically, we're creating things that fit into their broader environment. They work for the human. So there's another side of design thinking, it's also called human centered design, And it basically says, I'm not gonna just design something for the business model, so it makes money, or design something so it works for the functional specs.
Speaker 2:Those two things are important. It has to work, it has to make money, at least in business. But let's design for the human, and let's take the human as they are. Let's not, like, presuppose that they're this, like, homoeconomicist robot. Mhmm.
Speaker 2:But, like, let's just presuppose that they, like, have quirks and they sit in chairs weirdly and they, whatever, do all these things.
Speaker 1:Talking about. I always podcast them. I know. Right?
Speaker 2:So the principle is take people as they are and design for them, whether it's a chair, a mouse, or a business, or a product or service, something esoteric. Right? So that has application everywhere.
Speaker 1:I watched I think it was a TED talk. I could be incorrect about this. If we can find it for the show notes, we will. But it was about the use of human centered design in building of affordable housing, and I think it was in Brazil, I wanna say, and they took this approach of inviting the community into design and they ended up with some very unexpected outcomes, which included houses that were partially finished. And that was a way that they could allow for more people to be served, because people said, hey, we want our whole community to be served, and it shouldn't just be about me.
Speaker 1:And what might have been considered imperfect to the government, but actually allowed the citizen over time to expand and to personalize in a way that they found beneficial. And so they're able to do, like, way more with less faster.
Speaker 2:Absolutely. I mean, what happens is you get these surprising outcomes. Right? So if you ever have a top down, this is what it must be, whether it's a building code or laws generally are like that. This is what it must be for everybody.
Speaker 2:But if you let something come up organically and you design either with or for people in a community, you do get all these surprising things. And to tie some things together, you really do need to have this humble, empathetic mindset. Like, you're the one in control of the outputs. You're gonna create this thing. You're the designer.
Speaker 2:You're God. Mhmm. But, no, you don't know better than the user. Mhmm. You have to put yourself underneath, behind, in service of the user Beginner's mind.
Speaker 2:To say, like, how do you need this? You might be, like, a house needs 4 walls, and they go, actually, I would rather have 10 houses with 3 walls than the opposite. Right. And, like, if if that's true, and again, maybe understand why they want that, and then maybe there's another another workaround where it's like, okay. Well, it's actually untenable structurally to create 3 sided houses.
Speaker 2:So what if we make them with thinner walls? Because we thought you needed this. Again, it's all these, like, preconceived notions of what you think somebody needs, wants, and how they operate, how they work, and just recognizing that you don't know them. You wanna learn it from them directly. And so there's so many really, really powerful tenets to this set of practices.
Speaker 2:So one is this empathy. Empathy for the user, customer, constituent, whomever. 2nd is this iterative mindset. So one of the major overlaps between design thinking as a locus of practice and entrepreneurship, and I've kind of I'll say I'm kind of practitioners of both, is the idea of experimentation and iteration. So you hear something from a user, a constituent, a customer, and they say, I want this.
Speaker 2:It's your job to go back and say, how can I deliver that and meet all my other requirements? Maybe there's a budget requirement. So again, let's just play this out as a politician. Right? You hear things.
Speaker 2:You say, I need to answer what they want, but I also have to get a bunch of other people to say yes. Gotta rally the troops and get the votes. I have to do it in a budgety thing. Right? So I have to get creative.
Speaker 2:Creativity is just matching all those constraints and figuring out the answer. Mhmm. But you just can't leave that leg of the stool. You can't just can't ignore the customer, the user, the constituent. But to close the loop here, the idea that I hear this thing, I try this thing out, it's maybe a novel interesting idea.
Speaker 2:Maybe I am gonna try something wild. You put it in play, and they come back and say, no. You got it wrong. Well, tell me what I got wrong. You're using it now.
Speaker 2:It's not working as you thought it was. What's the answer? And then going again. Mhmm. So when you bring those two things together, it's a little dangerous to say I'm gonna listen so much to the customer that I'm gonna get it right.
Speaker 2:I think that's both like you got the empathy, but you've got a little too much of I'm gonna get it right. That's not gonna happen. So you have to have empathy, and then you gotta build it, and then you gotta deploy it, and then you gotta see and then you do it again. So you really never get away from the experimental mindset. That's a definitely a part of design thinking as well in the practice and the principles.
Speaker 2:Design thinking as much as entrepreneurship, maybe more so is very applicable to public service. I would say entrepreneurship has a little less I'll come back to your point of Steve Jobs and Henry Ford, that side of entrepreneurship where it's like, I'm gonna kinda tell the user what they want. It's actually more at odds to design thinking than the experimental side. It it's the outlier. It's definitely the outlier.
Speaker 2:There's definitely political examples. Right? Like, you definitely want a leader. You don't want, like, Martin Luther King did not, like, ABC test his speeches. Actually, maybe he did.
Speaker 2:Maybe he did.
Speaker 1:To say. I think I think he stopped. Did. Right? I have a dream speech was not written on the paper.
Speaker 1:It was a riff, or at least the I have a dream part of it was a riff.
Speaker 2:Sam Seaborne, ABC tested his speeches. Right? Does a real came out of the cave movement leader. To somebody who's, like, building a movement and, like, rallying a leader leader, are they ABC testing their messages? Probably, maybe.
Speaker 2:So there is definitely a place for, like, outlier. I don't know what you even call these folks, but it's not really entrepreneurship, frankly. Mhmm. It's kind of like a movement. It's kind of like borderline culty, to say it both negatively and positively.
Speaker 2:Right? Like, you're just bringing people along. And again, this is a little theoretical, but like let's say you were gonna try to like build a new movement around x, y, or z, I don't know. And you got no takers, you'd have to iterate. And if you believed it so badly, but no one else believed it, you'd be the crazy person on the street corner.
Speaker 2:And that's what happened. So if you wanna have impact, you both have to believe something, and you have to understand what others believe. I don't know. Flip flopping actually is not a bad thing to me. It just means you're trying stuff and you're listening.
Speaker 2:So the fact that, like, we ding a politician for flip flopping is a little sad because it just means they're trying stuff and learning.
Speaker 1:Well, self defeating. For sure. Okay. So understood this sort of iterative, empathetic, experiential
Speaker 2:Right.
Speaker 1:Collectivist process where the designer is not the decision maker and the architect, but is really the facilitator, the ombudsman, and the servant.
Speaker 2:That's the way to say it. Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely.
Speaker 1:I actually have experience with this. Towards the end of my time in office, I was pursuing some mental health work community. I came from 4 times the national suicide rate. I had, through some friends, veterans and otherwise, mostly veterans, become aware of some of the breakthroughs with psychedelic mental health work, and I was interested in bringing that in as an opportunity in the therapeutic environment for my community. And no surprise, so part of this was forced, but no surprise the political apparatus didn't want to touch it with a 10 foot pole, because it was new and weird and out there and risky and all the things that most institutions don't enjoy.
Speaker 1:And so ultimately, what we do, for being honest, is punted it.
Speaker 2:Right? Mhmm.
Speaker 1:Said, oh, let's just let the citizens handle this. Mhmm. And instead of kinda putting the tail between the legs and leaving, we chose to do exactly that. And I made a choice personally really early on that I wasn't going to lead the process that I was going to help create the conditions for the community to do what was asked to like really let the community lead. And so my role was like, get the space, send out the invites, help coordinate agendas, bring in experts, bring in policy experts, etcetera, but really let the community lead.
Speaker 1:And to your point, it ended up somewhere that I would have never imagined
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 1:That for many times I thought, oh, this has gone off the rails. It's never going to happen. It's taking forever. And it ended up in a place that was far more successful than I could have possibly imagined. And it helped a number of the people, the citizens who showed up for that are now really important, empowered, well funded community leaders in the space, which would never have happened if it was a government.
Speaker 2:Right. Yeah. Yeah. One of the things that I think entrepreneurship forces one to think about, here's what it is. So growing up in life, you're in school.
Speaker 2:School has almost all of our schooling has a very set input output, study, get a good grade. There's one answer. There's no iteration in school, frankly, all the way through. And people get really good at just winning tests and does not create an entrepreneur. Then you go get a job and most fields also have a way to win, consulting, banking, just any corporate job.
Speaker 2:99% of American life does not set you up for any of these things. So that's why it's actually pretty novel, right?
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:But the reality is what entrepreneurship forces you to face and then so does politics is that just because you have an idea doesn't matter. What matters is do other people like that idea? Are they willing to put their money or their support or whatever is valuable on the line? Are they willing to pay you for your product or service? Are they willing to vote for you?
Speaker 2:Are they willing to rally around you? So you realize that you're a facilitator. You realize that your ideas are whatever, not precious. It's what other people take and uptake. Mhmm.
Speaker 2:So eventually, you learn if my thing's not getting uptaken, whether it's by my colleagues for votes, whether it's by the constituents, whether it's by the customers, again, you're not flip flopping. You're just going where people want things. Frankly, it's the free market in action. Let people say I want these things, whether it's democratically or in the free market. And things got off rails when, like, top down whatevers get to truly decide.
Speaker 2:No. You're all gonna have bread of this kind. Right? It's not gonna create a very
Speaker 1:good society. Right? Yeah. Author authoritarian regimes of all stripes and, size have not gone well. The results are in, folks.
Speaker 2:And and entrepreneurship is kind of the opposite of that. It's literally let the cards lie. And that's why businesses go out of business because either tastes change or, frankly, my business went out of business because you build something that's not sustainable. Not enough people want it. Not enough people want it enough to pay you enough for it.
Speaker 1:So Alright. We're gonna come into that. But before we do it, let's jump into your most recent failing forward at day 1. And I mean, first, maybe just describe what day 1 was. And it was a number of things over the years.
Speaker 1:We don't have to get into all the details and stretch it out, but help us understand what you built, and then maybe some of the more exciting moments where you just felt on fire and this was shooting to stars, and then what it felt like to yeah, move through that not materializing in the way that your excited mind may have projected.
Speaker 2:Totally and totally. So just a tiny bit more context, the run up. So I launched day 1 in the spring to summer of 2020, which was right when the pandemic was getting going, 2020. And it was my first full on entrepreneurial it was my first startup. I've done other plenty of entrepreneurial things like in Uganda and some other projects here and there.
Speaker 2:This was the first time I, like, made a go of it. It's like my day job is gonna be this business. I'm gonna bring in partners, outside capital, the whole 9 yards. Leading up to that, I had spent time in the world of venture capital and so I had a very front row seat to that journey. So again, entrepreneurship, design thinking led to entrepreneurship for me.
Speaker 2:I was in the passenger seat of a lot of startups, very early stage startups. I felt the chip on my shoulder to jump in myself and have the driver's seat experience.
Speaker 1:Well, I mean, in in some ways at Accenture, correct me if I'm wrong, you were sort of the hired gun design thinker that was brought in as a, like, very intensive day 1 program in a single human body suit to help companies grow or
Speaker 2:others? Well, I'm thinking about I'm I'm referencing the thing I did between Accenture
Speaker 1:Oh, okay.
Speaker 2:Day 1. So that is very fair for for when you're a consultant, you're embodying this new way of thinking, trying to get an organization there. That's, like, two levels removed. I was at this venture studio, venture capital firm called Human Ventures, where I was one level removed. I was as close as you can get without being in the game.
Speaker 2:And then day 1, I was in the game. So that was my 3 or 4 years that you stopped turning.
Speaker 1:Campaign volunteer to campaign staff to candidate.
Speaker 2:Essentially. And candidate is like being a donor.
Speaker 1:By the way.
Speaker 2:Yeah. They're
Speaker 1:all very different, it turns out.
Speaker 2:Exactly. And you kinda think it's an upward drop. You're, like, getting closer to the glory, but, it's kinda not very glorious to be the candidate, to be the Absolutely glorious. It's it's tough. It's tough.
Speaker 2:So the reason I say that is because I had been in this environment where I was around and supporting and building startups with entrepreneurs. Day 1, my startup was also a place where I was around and supporting and building startups with entrepreneurs, but in just a different way. And so the way was to build more of a, one virtual during the pandemic, when everything went remote and everything, everyone left cities, so you needed to be online to see anybody and we obviously were quarantining anyway. So there was a year and a half or so of tailwinds where remote was everything. And there was like Zoom blew up, dozens of companies got huge in, like, a year just because of the pandemic.
Speaker 2:We kind of got those tailwinds. We were also creating a community that had one part education, one part support. The thinking that at the time, we weren't the only ones doing this kind of thing, and everyone who was doing it was kind of all playing into like a new kind of university. You don't need to go to a university to learn anymore. That's kind of not what universities, like, at least primarily are for.
Speaker 2:They're for the people you meet And the guy container, like a boot camp, but in a bigger way. Right?
Speaker 1:It's not
Speaker 2:just 2 days of a weekend. It's 2 to 4 years of your life, and you do a big thing in that compressed time frame. Right? And so why does that have to be 100 of 1,000 of dollars and only for 18 to 22 year olds? So net, the business was to create a new kind of place for that.
Speaker 2:And there was a few of us doing it. We all kind of had our little flavors of how to do this, but we were creating these new places, new environments, virtual, one part learning, one part community, one part support and mentorship and coaching for entrepreneurs. So that's what day 1 was. And this idea of a cohort also kind of came out of that time period where instead of this being just like a free for all, you you have a class, where you have people that are going through a class, basically a class. We called it a cohort.
Speaker 2:It thought everything it was meant to denote something different, but it really was set number of people for set number of weeks going through a set number of sessions. Yeah. You know, whether it's, you know, super structured or less structured. But again, took the benefits of like, you can't do a 4 year sprint, you can't even do it, you don't, can't do an infinite sprint, so you can do an 8 week sprint. So all to say we ran these kinds of programs.
Speaker 2:We ran these programs for the better part of 3 years in different varieties. Some were as small as a dozen, some were as big as over a 100 actually, we had one that was over a 100. So we had everything in between in size, and this was us experimenting. So that first year and a half, lots of experiments, but we had tailwinds. Things were going well, things were going right.
Speaker 2:Our team grew, we raised money. We got people like Gary Vaynerchuk excited to join on Bard as an investor. And then as the pandemic ended and the market sort of tipped over the last 2 years, 22 and 23, the tailwinds became headwinds. The markets tipping was a big deal. Sure.
Speaker 2:People got laid off from Facebook and got 12 months of severance, and in 2021, that was really cool. And they started startups, and they, like, did all this stuff. But in 2022, you got laid off from Zoom because no longer is remote nearly as big, and Mhmm. You're more fearful. So you're not spending money and
Speaker 1:Almost like you started building day 1 in America, and then 2 years later, you're building it in Uganda.
Speaker 2:It definitely felt like a different world. In some ways, here's what's tough about it. The reason why that doesn't always quite hold is because that would have been obvious that this was different. And in some ways, it was obvious, the headlines, the pundits started talking differently, but you don't necessarily always feel it. You're like the frog in the pot of water or whatever.
Speaker 2:So that was a big learning. Again, this is like an entrepreneurial learning. I don't know if it plays over to politics, but it pays to be very attuned to these shifting wins, and we did not necessarily align our strategy. I don't know if things would have necessarily been any different, but I know we didn't nest didn't get the timing. We got some timing awesome, and then we got some timing way wrong.
Speaker 1:I think here's how it tracks, and I'll give an example. And it's regardless of what you think about the policy is not important here. But there was, you know, ongoing multi administration negotiations on the continuation of the peace process in the Middle East. It looks like Israel is getting closer to Saudi Arabia, some other partners. Right.
Speaker 1:Looks like there's gonna be a big breakthrough, and then October 7th happens. And then there's the Gaza war that follows that incursion into Israel, back into Gaza, and it's like, the goals, the people, none of that's changed, but all of a sudden, that falls apart. Right? Because the environment around you has shifted.
Speaker 2:Yeah. And so, as an entrepreneur, you don't control that nearly, and so you gotta play the hands that's dealt and you gotta Yeah. I mean, there's tons of lessons about every era of entrepreneurs. I'm definitely part of this pandemic era of entrepreneurs. And there's Skippy, you are too.
Speaker 2:Or there's a lot of us.
Speaker 1:Right? We're doing it right now, baby.
Speaker 2:There's a dotcom bubble in 2,001. There's the financial crisis era. We kinda just slipped through one of those. It was crazy in its own way. It's really hard to plan for that.
Speaker 2:You just kinda gotta take your lump sometimes. And if you have Again, if you don't know the dynamics of venture capital, it's not win a little bit. It's like go big or go home. Mhmm. In the middle is actually no man's land.
Speaker 2:And so you shoot for go big and that actually exposes you to go home. And a lot of startups have gone home in a way that's kind of part of the design of the system for good or for bad in a very interesting way.
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Speaker 1:Healing our politics listeners receive 10% off all elected leaders collective services using the code hashtag political healer. Use it today and become one of the brave political leaders healing our politics. Use code hashtag political healer by going to www.electedleaderscollective.com and starting today. That's www.electedleaderscollective.com and starting today. You just said something that makes me wanna ask you 3 separate things at the same time that I can't decide.
Speaker 2:Figure it out.
Speaker 1:But so you you helped me decide where to go with that because I think it's there's so much interesting, juicy stuff in here. One, I'm curious about chasing the mirage that is set by the most successful entrepreneurs versus the reality of the universe and where people land. B, I've heard you talk about people chasing VC money and politicians sharing something, which is those who deserve it most want it least.
Speaker 2:Mhmm. Super real. Well, one thing I'll say just about the bigger picture is that I think we, my co founder and I, when building day 1, we kinda made the right call at all the right times. So in 2020, it went in 2021 in particular, the smart move was to swing because there was so much momentum. So you swing big.
Speaker 2:That was the optimal strategy. If money's there, you take it. Mhmm. Until it goes away and it becomes an issue. Right?
Speaker 2:So there's definitely caveats and there's definitely, like, wiser ways to go about it, but it's extremely tough and borderline maybe not even that smart to not take things that are there for you as long as you don't let it take you to the wrong spot. So that's the thing where it's very easy, and we kinda did this was we took the thing that was there, the right move, but then we got a little over our skis and things shifted. So second time founder Andrew or maybe a more gray haired founder would have operated similarly, but, like, with some differences.
Speaker 1:A little more risk mitigation.
Speaker 2:Again, I'm now 35, smack dab in the middle of my career. And I feel like, you know that curve that says the people who, like, don't know as much are the most confident?
Speaker 1:Yes.
Speaker 2:I'm like on the downward trend where I'm like, I've now learned enough to know I don't know anything because I've been hit in some serious ways. And it started when I was 22. I didn't know anything, and I just failed. And it took, like, 8 of those until 35 for me to start to be like, maybe I don't know everything. Maybe I'm actually dumber than I than I project.
Speaker 2:And and 1, everyone listening, you're somewhere on that curve. Let's be serious. And 2, the faster you can get over the hump to realize what you don't know, you're gonna make better decisions. But to the point of, like, the people who get VC are the ones who need it the least, 1000,000%. I have this vast new appreciation for multi multi time founders because they've learned things through the ringer that no one knows until you've gone through it.
Speaker 2:And if you've stayed in the game, like, multiple times and gotten punched whether you win, lose, or or draw, it says something. So, like, multi time founders should get second looks and more attention. They are legit. It is legit. And, again, as a first time founder, I chafed against that.
Speaker 2:I was like, why are these other people getting such a leg up in, like, fundraising? And there's 100 of 1000 of first time founders who are all trying to break in, and we're all salty. We're all salty about the nature of the game. And I'm telling you, as I'm, like, one step past that, the game is the game for a reason because 2nd time founders have earned major, major wisdom.
Speaker 1:Now having worked with thousands of founders Yeah. In some way or another, many first timers. Yeah. What are some of the most common misunderstandings that first time founders hold?
Speaker 2:I think that first time founders get too creative. Mhmm. Some of the 2nd time founders that I've worked with more recently are building very, very clearly understandable things that are actually frankly way less creative than the first time founders building the next whizbang AI for whatever. And it's like, it's because they're not solving brand new emergent things. They're solving for, like, problems that have been problems for 20 years.
Speaker 2:Mhmm. Really boring parts of big businesses. And so that's a little inside baseball. And again, this is a little bit I got I'm, like, getting gray hairs, and it's like I have appreciation for folks who have deep experience because I'm, like, only by being, like, a 50, 60 year old person who's lived inside of an organization, like a big, big Texaco or something, you know, some, like, big company for 30 years and knows where the problems are, that person actually knows where to, like, really build. I know Facebook was made by, like, a college kid, Mark Zuckerberg.
Speaker 2:What mistakes do first time and second time founders do differently? So I think they go for the wrong ideas. They they go for ideas that are not real, too clever, versus ideas that are just simple, gonna make money, etcetera.
Speaker 1:What other misunderstandings do first time founders tend to have or commonly held?
Speaker 2:1st time founders, and I know this because I don't know what it feels like when it's working. Mhmm. And so and so here's the thing. By default, you don't know anything. You don't know if it's working or not working.
Speaker 2:And then you star, and by default, it's not working.
Speaker 1:Right. Right. The airplane, the airplane is not flying itself.
Speaker 2:Yeah. By default, you are not getting customers. 1st time founders, 1, they don't know what it's like to feel the opposite. So in some ways, they are like that frog in the pod and it's boiling because they're like, it's not working. They don't know the alternative.
Speaker 2:They don't know how dangerous it is to be where they are. And so that's why you see lots of first time founders play a business out, like, we almost did, right, for 2, 3 years and it's not quite working. It's because they kind of maybe think it's working or it's worked a little bit and they've taken that little bit, but there is this qualitative, just draw a line, not working and working. Working meaning it's gonna go, and it's gonna pay your bills. It's gonna grow into a lot of people.
Speaker 2:It's gonna serve a lot of people. It's gonna do all the things. Not working is everything else. It doesn't matter if you have a lot of people or even a lot of customers, but if you're mortgaging your life, any way you're burning money. Right?
Speaker 2:That's business. If you're not making money, you're losing money. So it's that sentiment of this is what it looks like to be building something that people want in a way that's gonna, like, be a real business. It's hard to really add a ton more to that because it's a feeling. Yeah.
Speaker 1:I mean, it's like being a race car driver. Right? Until you can drive by feel, you can't really drive.
Speaker 2:Totally. Totally. And so I see a lot of first time founders almost playing at it, and I'm like, see them still building their business from, like, 4 years ago, and I'm like, you're not really building that, are you? Because it would have either won or lost by now. Right?
Speaker 2:Yeah. Actually, I say that, and that's a little disingenuous because, like, maybe it is a very slow success. Here's the thing. Actually, here's the thing. I'm about to say, like, oh, yeah.
Speaker 2:There's definitely room for these, like, long that's survivorship bias. Because I can name for you 5 companies that took 10 years to succeed, But dang, in the 10 years it took those 5 to succeed, 5,000,000 went under. So do not anchor on the 5 that went big. You're gonna be one of the 5,000,000.
Speaker 1:I think this is such an interesting point, and I've heard it said I wish I knew what the attribution was because I think this is great. I don't. But if you're out there, please take it. And I bring it back to this because we're focused on the mental well-being of leaders, not just the outward success. But I've heard it said that happiness or contentment equals reality minus expectations.
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 1:And I think we so frequently misattribute reality to what we see in the news, which isn't to say what we see in the news isn't reality. But to your point, it is a very, very, very narrow sliver of quote, unquote, newsworthy, aka attention worthy selection bias of the scope of reality. And, yeah, I was listening to, Tim Ferriss show a couple weeks ago, and he was talking about this in terms of physical fitness. It's like if you were sitting around watching the Super Bowl and you thought, oh, man. I put on a couple pounds.
Speaker 1:I haven't worked out in, like, 6 years. I really need to get back to the gym. It would be a really poor strategy to, like, look up from your bowl of nachos at the TV and be like, oh, Patrick Mahomes. Yeah. He's he's in pretty good shape.
Speaker 1:I should do I should be like that. I'm gonna go be like Patrick Mahomes. And that is in the political world, in the professional world, in the entrepreneurship world. I think what most of us do most of the time is assume companies are all $1,000,000,000. They happen in 6 months.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Like Yeah.
Speaker 1:What's the reality? If we were to dispel the mirage and yield the reality such that people do not subtract an expectation denominator higher than their numerator?
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. I have a few thoughts. One is the odds are, to a high degree, that, like, you are the average. Because what you see is, like, orders of magnitude further removed from you.
Speaker 2:Right? So we're looking at a bell curve. You see this little tiny edge. Anyone who makes it to Shark Tank, makes it on whatever, the TV for good looking whatever shows, being a celebrity, that's the tippy tip edge. Whether you're a little bit to the right or a little bit to the left of the standard deviation of the mean, everyone is way more like you than not, and that's for entrepreneurship and for, like, weight, you know, and fitness.
Speaker 2:So that's interesting. If you happen to get a look at the world, you'd almost certainly say, like, oh, I'm okay. I'm a little overweight, a little underweight. I'm a little and you'd be like, I'm fine. You wouldn't feel the difference.
Speaker 2:Mhmm. I don't know if that does anything for you, but it kinda makes everyone probably stay back. The one positive thing of seeing all these superstars is maybe I wanna be like that. Like, I shoot for the stars, but we know that that gets misinterpreted.
Speaker 1:Yeah. We all have agency to expand or contract our envelope of possibility. Yeah. Whether that's the likelihood we're gonna get cancer or how big our bicep is or whatever, but we exist within parameters that are set in some way by nature. Yeah.
Speaker 1:And so when we're comparing ourselves to people who not only have had the best training in the known world in the history of man, but are also probably just genetic freaks Yeah. Right. We set ourselves up for failure. And so what I'm hearing from you is, like, even if you're not in the middle of the bell curve, statistically, that's the most likely outcome, but maybe you're not. But what if you were, and what if you thought through what you would do if you were from not a surrender position of, oh, this is a reason not to proceed, but from an empowered position of what can I do to bend my own bell curve the most?
Speaker 2:That's where I was gonna go. So one, recognize you're on 1 or 2 sides of the standard of the middle. And then 2 Standard. The the solution the the action plan anywhere further forward, again, not even to the top because whatever, is not to copy what those people did because it's not realistic. It's not even real.
Speaker 2:It's not even steps. So let's say I'm gonna give you entrepreneurship lessons. Let's say there's a parallel for how to have fitness lessons. The problem is, and this happens on entrepreneurship and in fitness, is that the best way to break through the noise and to sell a bunch of courses or to get a lot of people is to show those outliers and to kinda like sell the dream.
Speaker 1:That's right.
Speaker 2:We just all have to recognize this is where, like, information like, Internet literacy. We all have to recognize we live in a world where all the incentives are to lie about the path. Because if I told you what it took, it'd be boring and lame and would not break through and be sexy. That's for fitness. That's for entrepreneurship.
Speaker 2:Frankly, it's for mental well-being. Yes. And so we're doing a version of that. We're basically saying like, it's not sexy, but it's real and raw and honest, and we're having fun conversations about it. And these are the beginnings of the tips and tricks, and it doesn't look like a 20 step plan.
Speaker 2:It doesn't look like anything like this.
Speaker 1:Let's ask, like, what are the realities of, let's say, building a business? So if you look at whether it's people that have passed through day 1 or just general stats that you're aware of, of entrepreneurship in general, things like what percentage of companies succeed. When we think of success in terms of, like, the lifestyle of the founder and income, Yeah. What does that actually look like? How long does it take?
Speaker 1:Like, what's the what's, like, the real ground truth of what's happening in the middle of the bell curve?
Speaker 2:Yeah. Most of the stats are around, like, 90% of companies will fail in 5 years. I would say that's probably directionally right. There's also stats of like more people are starting businesses now than ever. There's definitely more accessibility and tools and the Internet is obviously not new, but like we're definitely continually just pushing in directions of like there's all sorts of reasons and abilities to start.
Speaker 2:Failure rate is still very high, and I think the way I con I reckon I reckon with that, I think it's actually very natural for most businesses to die in the sense that markets are shifting, tastes are shifting, you're, as an entrepreneur, shifting, and so just because you even have something that's working for a minute, doesn't mean it's gonna stay around. And so that could be like a tire shop, that could be a new never before seen thing, something digital, something community based, something software based, could be, like I said, like a sweaty startup. That's a fun term of just doing, like, a landscaping business. Right? Mhmm.
Speaker 2:Landscaping businesses are as standard as they come. If you just try hard enough and put the effort in, the odds are you're gonna get somewhere. But the odds are you're also gonna die in 5 years or so just because you're gonna maybe move on or I'm retired. Or whatever. So all that to say, I do think entrepreneurship just has this idea of failure baked in.
Speaker 2:I don't think we can avoid it. We shouldn't avoid it. And so one, that takes me back to learn all you can. 2, the reality is you stack up 2 or 3 failures and if you can set those failures up, this goes way back to the beginning of our conversation. If you can do those 2 or 3 entrepreneurial failures in a way that doesn't kill you, in a way that doesn't mortgage your house, these are learning journeys, you only need one win.
Speaker 2:The stats are just really skewed because you're still part of the 90% of businesses that died, but ultimately, you're getting yourself as, like, a person into, like, you're doing something great for yourself and for your family. Yeah.
Speaker 1:And so
Speaker 2:that's the promise of entrepreneurship. And what's tough about that, again, just back to the idea of, like, you see these, like, winners and they only show the positive end journey and don't always talk about the middle, and even if they told you this is how great I am now and you can be here too, Are the steps the same? Yeah. We're still wrestling with the distance there. There's really not many straight lines in entrepreneurship.
Speaker 1:Yeah. And it's incumbent upon and beneficial to us as leaders to question our own assumptions, our own projections about people, because when they're incorrect, they actually hurt us. So, just as an example, you know, Andrew, you were in this camp for me. Now I'm not gonna say anything that I'm about to say is untrue, but, wow, look at Andrew. He's running this big company.
Speaker 1:They've had tens of cohorts through. They've got this super fancy social media guy supporting him. They're raising 1,000,000 of dollars. He's on podcasts. He's on the TV.
Speaker 1:Andrew's got it made. There's some little part of my mind that's like looking at Andrew on a yacht, sipping back, like it's a second yacht because the first one broke down, and he's in my orcas. And, you know, there's, like, supermodels that, like, that runs through my head. And I have that with a number I've had 2 coaching sessions with 2 people that in a similar kind of position to where you are. Obviously, won't disclose who they are, but run successful organizations that have, you know, international acclaim and membership.
Speaker 1:They get to meet with the coolest people around, like, they all of that. And then you drop in, and it's like, oh, well, they have a house. They're lucky in that way, but they're kind of just scraping by. They're not saving money. The wife is upset because they just had a kid and they don't know if they can afford daycare.
Speaker 1:They're working all the time to keep the thing afloat. Is the passion still? And it's like, woah. That mirage that I'm basing my success off of, that I'm benchmarking my success off of is so not real.
Speaker 2:I completely resonate with that. Every business is a shit show underneath the hood, whether they're succeeding or not. Succeeding shit shows again, it's an entire spectrum of, like, rocketship has one version, going well, just over the middle line, just under the middle line, and then everything. And this is the thing, I did this, which is you definitely paint the rosiest picture you can on social media. There is no incentive.
Speaker 2:There's very little incentive. Everything I said before about being vulnerable, Andrew, operates like that. But the business, day 1, did not operate like that. The business was not vulnerable. The business was like, we're killing it every single time.
Speaker 2:And of course, that rubs off maybe on me a little bit, but, like, yeah, every business is doing that. Every single one. Some are flat out lying straight up, the same way like Instagram pictures are doctored. These are just like fake. Some are just like portraying only the good stuff.
Speaker 2:That's standard. So, yeah, it's endemic. You really cannot base anything, self worth, business worth. You definitely shouldn't base your your worth on your business as well. Let's let's to get that on the table as well because your businesses will die.
Speaker 2:Mhmm. And they're gonna go to 0, and you're gonna make way less money than you made at your very standard job.
Speaker 1:Yeah. And
Speaker 2:here's the thing. Don't know if you agree with this, Skippy, which is I've gotten to the point where I think entrepreneurship as a mindset and practice, kind of like design thinking, is pretty valuable for everybody. It's pretty universal. Mhmm. All things equal, it'd be it's better to be comfortable with failure.
Speaker 2:It's better to be comfortable and be experimental. It's better to be empathetic to your customers. But the real journey of jumping into startup or even to start a small business is definitely not for everybody. But it's hard to say that to anyone's face because you probably are gonna know that after you've done 2 or 3 of these. Does that carry over to politics, which is it'd be so good if everybody was more involved, if everybody cared a little bit more about their communities, if everybody was a little more informed about the issues and had opinions that were informed, but not nearly everybody should run or actively get involved in a way that's beyond just participating.
Speaker 1:Does that align? Yeah. I mean, it's certainly a 100% aligns in that. What I found in my own life and in the coaching practice is that really the biggest linchpin, the greatest superpower is when you recognize there are no bad experiences in life. There are only enjoyable experiences and experiences you learn from.
Speaker 1:And through repetition, through through the power of reps and survivorship bias, we must say out the other side, you come to recognize that your moments of greatest internal strife and challenge are the moments that best served you in life, and then you can switch into a place where in the moment, when you're being challenged, not that it doesn't hurt, but you actually get a little bit excited about it. You recognize something's coming. And when that switch flips, you're in a different universe. And I experienced that right in the middle of my last term in office, where I went from a place of what I would have thought initially was like empowered leadership and whatever, but was really like kind of selfish victim mentality into one that was really about facilitating public good, working with others, like seeing the losses as just steps, just stepping stones. So I think a 100%, I agree with your conclusion about the mindset.
Speaker 1:I think that the political space or the lawmaking space would benefit from more of design thinking, but it's different than entrepreneurship. Because like you said, you get to chunk things down to a place where it's not going to kill you. But in the public sphere, you're often thinking about real life and death decisions, and not just for you, but for 1,000 or millions of people. Yeah. You don't have the same space to take risks in many places.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:And so you have to be able to parse out where that type of work is appropriate and where it's not. You wouldn't wanna turn your well, maybe you would. I don't know. I don't wanna I assume you wouldn't want to turn over your water sanitation district, for instance, to an iterative public led process. I I could see that going off the rails.
Speaker 2:Right. Right. Right. This again, I probably get immediately hypothetical in that situation. Obviously, you wouldn't let people vote on technical water things.
Speaker 2:That's just silly.
Speaker 1:Well, increasingly, it's happening, and we don't have to go down that road, but increasingly, it's happening, and I would argue the results aren't good.
Speaker 2:No. I mean, I wouldn't suggest it. I wouldn't I wouldn't believe they'd be good either. My political science background, my strongest held belief is that I'm a big fan of representative government, which is Right.
Speaker 1:Pick your people
Speaker 2:and let them do their thing.
Speaker 1:Do the thing. Oh, and so that's getting back to your second question was my point is, like, no. It's not for everyone by design. It's designed to free you, Andrew, up to go build day 1. Yeah.
Speaker 1:It's designed to free you, fictitious person named Sally. You know?
Speaker 2:So there there is a parallel where almost by definition, it's not designed for everybody to be in the arena running these things and to be vying the arena of ideas and and and elections and such. But it'd be great if everybody was a participant and had some mindsets that were informed. And then, yeah, I wish I don't think everyone should be in the arena, you know, mortgaging their house to go start a startup. Right? But everyone can be design led and entrepreneurial.
Speaker 2:And the end state of that mindset of design thinking entrepreneurship applied anywhere is you shouldn't make the water process at the, like, big level. Can you chunk it down? Can you just try out? Can you take 5 different solutions, solvents, whatever you're and just take water off to the side so it's zero impact on anybody and try the thing out? There is always a way to try and experiment on a thing.
Speaker 2:Again, me kind of shitting on politics, there's a world where, like, you you're gonna get further by being a diatribe for your specific solution versus, hey, why don't we create a little test bed, try out 5 things in a way that nobody gets hurt? It's like the clinical trial mindset. We're gonna actually get to better outcomes.
Speaker 1:Or you could have a subset of people and ask them what's most important
Speaker 2:to you in their
Speaker 1:order delivery. Right? Is it reliability? Is it temperature? Is it purity?
Speaker 1:Right? All of that.
Speaker 2:A test can be any see, that that's a fun thought process. What are tests? So that happens in entrepreneurship a lot because it's it's a very nonstandard thought process for somebody to even think in experimentations. They don't. They think in inputs and outputs.
Speaker 2:I do a thing and it has an impact. And so in lots of ways, and this is a little bit of like the craft of being an entrepreneur, is thinking what ways can I experiment? What can I try? And so just framing a conversation as an experiment is really, really good. Go ask so let's think of all the ways you can experiment.
Speaker 2:Go ask different people, not just the people that you maybe get on the phone when you call them, but go to different places and get different people. Ask them different questions. They might answer questions differently. Show up with something. Show up with a thing.
Speaker 2:Show them 2 different things. Don't trust their answers. Make them experience it. This is the thing. I could, like, ideate with anybody to be like, what are you working on?
Speaker 2:What legislation's on the table? What are the questions people have? One side likes this, one side doesn't like that. This is the issue. I'm actually gonna try to take all our shoes and make them black and white.
Speaker 2:Okay. So there's there's something to be understood here. So, I mean, standard thing is like, let's understand the other side. That's I'm not even gonna talk about that. It's more of, what could we do to go get better data to show one is the right way or the the wrong way?
Speaker 1:Yeah. It's so funny. So there's 2 things that are coming to mind as like real world application examples of this in the policy space that I think might help illustrate for someone like how to expand sort of the Overton window of like where we could go with this. So following the water example, anyone who's been to Paris in France will know that in addition to regular water fountains, there are carbonated water fountains, which is the thing that you think is I don't think it happened in France, but it is delightful. It's joy.
Speaker 1:I can't imagine a city hall in America that comes up with that solution. But I could imagine a experimentally minded group of staffers putting together a working group and starting to ask some leading questions around, what do you want from your water and unearthing some unexpected results of, like, we want to enjoy time with family in a park. Oh, okay. Well, what makes you really enjoy? I felt lunch does.
Speaker 1:Oh, what are your favorite things with lunch? And it's like, oh, carbonated water. Mhmm. Oh, okay. Would have never done that.
Speaker 1:How much money would it cost to do that, at sort. Right? And so you could see how Mhmm. Opening the aperture to something that would seem closed loop could yield a result like that and would ultimately result in more joy from the citizenry that is directly associated with the government, which potentially could then create a feedback loop of trust. You could find this cascading waterfall of positive effects from something that you would have never planned.
Speaker 1:And the second thought that came through is related to this because I've heard you say what you control is inputs, but you're judged on the outputs. Yeah. I've always loved that quote from you. There was a project, this is from memory, the details aren't going to be precise, but there was a major rail project to increase the speed of the high speed rail going into London from some of the outlying areas. This project took, you know, I don't know, 5, 10, 15 years, 1,000,000,000 of dollars, and ended up saving something like 7 to 11 minutes off of the route.
Speaker 1:And I was reading a book from a world famous designer who said, okay. Well, several $1,000,000,000 all this time, you save 7 to 11 minutes. He's like, you could have given me a 100th of that budget. I would have put a beautiful coffee shop on board, hired models to be the servers in the train, and people would have asked me to spend 11 more minutes on the train.
Speaker 2:The name was escaping me too. He's a prolific speaker designer, and it's reframing. I mean, that's the ultimate side of, like, human psychology. Yes. You've spent all this money to make the time go faster because that's all you can think about, but
Speaker 1:you're making a baseline assumption at moment 1 that the end goal is efficiency without ever really checking in to see what people want. Maybe they just want more time to work or with their kids. Maybe they would have just loved WiFi, you know, in the desk. There may have been so many other paths of less resistance and better outcome for the citizenry if you had just checked in earlier, asked the right questions, and critically done it in the right environment. And this is now me editorializing, but asking people through a newspaper that 4% of citizens read
Speaker 2:Exactly.
Speaker 1:To come give public comment in a scary room filled by cameras where they feel like they're on trial and they've done something wrong before they walk in, is not going to reliably source the audience that you seek, nor the openness of opinion that you desire. Like, you have to cultivate the environment if you want to have authentic and representative response.
Speaker 2:You're right. There's design thinking in there, which is, hey, let's get outside the box. Let's change what the question is we're even asking. What do you want in your rail experience? And then, try this on.
Speaker 2:There's There's some point in the process where you have to requisition money to do anything. What if the first moment was instead of requisitioning anything, I'm gonna requisition $25, which is drops in the bucket. 2, take one route and put 1 coffee shop with these waitresses or waiters, right, and try it out and then do some surveys. That's an experiment within the scope of things.
Speaker 1:Yes.
Speaker 2:Someone literally could have gone rogue. This is what I think is fun. Could you go rogue and do that? Could you go rogue and just show up with boxes of Joe and just some good looking friends and just be like, I'm gonna make this train trip enjoyable and pass out coffee.
Speaker 1:Put a little GoPro in the corner and smiling. Smiles afterwards.
Speaker 2:So, like, if I was an entrepreneur again, entrepreneurs are a little have to be pirates because by definition, they're creating something new. They can be pirates in most free markets, whereas in the government, it might be a little harder. But all that to say is the essence of that is there have to be chunkable, testable things. That if you could show that GoPro or you could show those surveys, you'd be like, let's go this way. And again, like the idea sounds good, data is better, straight up.
Speaker 2:So if you can go close the loop, so you listen, idea, experiment, data, now you roll it out and you save $15,000,000,000, whatever. That's good practice.
Speaker 1:Okay. So that's a perfect segue to something that you're kind of famous for and I think is super applicable for this audience, which is this idea of customer discovery.
Speaker 2:Cool.
Speaker 1:You know, famously have a 100 conversations with a 100 people in a 100 days. What is customer discovery? Why should we care about it? How does it work?
Speaker 2:So you mentioned the version of it, a big piece of it, which is, when you talk to people getting in that environment. But fundamentally, it's the idea of any startup, any business. The first fundamental mindset is your ideas are, at best, guesses, hypotheses, if we're gonna be scientific. And the answer lies in the market, the customer. And so if you're not talking to them in a serious way and talking to them is a bare minimum, Talking to them in a structured in the right way, which is what you described.
Speaker 2:Right? Not not in a scary way, but in a way that elicits real information. And better than talking to them, getting them to experience things in a small indicative way. Customer discovery is learning from your customers, the people that ultimately matter, about what the truth is. The truth is about this specific thing, meaning this hypothesis, is it right or wrong?
Speaker 2:Frankly, this is the big thing we haven't talked about, before you go jump in and outlay $15,000,000,000 before you go in and outlay your mortgage your house, before you go and outlay 3 years of your life. So actually that's a big, big, big thing. So why do customer discovery, frankly? And why do design thinking? Why do anything experimental?
Speaker 2:It's because we have scarce resources. $15,000,000,000 for a train, 5 years of your life, your house, all these things that you would have to put on the line, you would rather have more confidence and more proof before you make big big bets. So customer discovery is just one of the best ways to go derisk. Validate is a word I'll use a lot, and give yourself confidence, and not just yourself. Again, because you can be overconfident, you can be falsely confident, but give true confidence and rationale for why a thing is the right thing to do.
Speaker 2:Mhmm. So talking to your customers is a simple way to say it, and you'll get very far if you just do that, and then you can layer in. Again, it's a whole discipline and practice. Talk to them in the right way. Ask them the right questions.
Speaker 2:Be very iterative about the questions and the way you ask them, and then even further, get them to experience the thing. So the train example is a perfect example.
Speaker 1:So let's get let's, like, really break that down. So first, you have identifying the correct, quote unquote, audience, then you have asking the correct, quote unquote, questions, and then you have in the right way. How do you first select your audience?
Speaker 2:Yeah. This is fun because, ultimately, who your audience is, there's a lot of people in the world. The markets the world is way bigger than any of us can conceive. 1,000,000,000 and billions of people, the Internet is huge, the city you live in is way bigger than you think. So you think you wanna talk to these certain people, whether it's to sell them something or because you think they're the constituents that are gonna love your new initiative.
Speaker 2:You think. It's a hypothesis. So I say you just have to start somewhere. You just have to have a hypothesis. Again, the scientific method starts with a hypothesis.
Speaker 2:I think this is true. I don't know it. Which you
Speaker 1:should write down.
Speaker 2:Which you should write down.
Speaker 1:Verify. Right.
Speaker 2:Be be as clear as be again, the scientific method creates things that are invalidatable, meaning you can disprove it. Mhmm. And if you create a hypothesis that's not disprovable, you haven't been scientific. That's where pseudoscience comes in. You say things that are just unfalsifiable.
Speaker 1:Could you do this for us as if you're back at day 1 of your day 1? Like, what was your first hypothesis, and then how did you
Speaker 2:Sure.
Speaker 1:Find your audience?
Speaker 2:So our hypothesis was that there is a new a new ish, they've been around, but there's now more class of entrepreneurial people who are embarking on entrepreneurial journeys. There's somewhere between negative 6 months, meaning they might not have even left their day job, to 6 months in to their entrepreneurial journey and they're floundering. So who is this person? Generally, Internet native, white collar professionals who were active on Twitter and face or mostly Twitter, frankly, or certain LinkedIn communities.
Speaker 1:Just to clarify for me. So the hypothesis is there is a floundering group of proto entrepreneurs who we can help.
Speaker 2:Well, that's 2 hypotheses. It's the who, the group of entrepreneurs or proto entrepreneurs. And then the other hypothesis is what is their problem or their need? K. And so the need is they are looking for community, they're looking for education, they're looking for a leg up, the things that happen when you're part of an in crowd.
Speaker 2:And so one thing I'll say about our hypothesis is that's like a few too many things altogether. Right? One of those could be true more than the other. It's hard to differentiate if you don't separate them.
Speaker 1:If you were going back to do it again, what would be your opening hypothesis recognizing that that does not preclude you from having a future hypothesis?
Speaker 2:I focus on one of those things. Is it community? Is it education? Is it mentorship? Etcetera.
Speaker 2:I would have focused on one specific need. So you have the who, you have the why, and then the what is what you bring to the table. And that's the hypothesis. I think that by creating a virtual cohort based community, we'll deliver this. We'll solve for that need.
Speaker 2:Actually, really what I'm saying is solve for that need, but solve for that need in such a way that people will put money down and not just any amount of money, enough money to pay me and my staff to make a business. And so it's not just put money down, but love it so much that they tell their friends.
Speaker 1:Okay. So you have these three initial hypotheses. You need to confirm all of them to some degree to have a successful business, but you're just gonna test out the first one to start. That's gonna be the who. And so then when
Speaker 2:That's not entirely true. Right? So a business is interesting because you have to test those first three together. Because Okay. The who, the problem, and the solution, they're a package.
Speaker 2:And this is what's really tough about is you can be a little right and a little wrong. So the way we tested it was we just put a website up and launched it on social media and had a form that somebody could sign up on. We didn't take any money right away either. We just said, are you interested? And we got, like, a 100 people to sign up within, like, a week.
Speaker 2:And we told them there was a price and and so we kind of knew this was close to real. So, yeah, the test if I had put a paywall right away, I would have gotten different information. I don't know if it would have been better or smart, but you can adjust things like that. Do you charge right away? Do you charge down the road?
Speaker 2:How specific do I make it? So I made it decently unspecific, which meant I was testing that. Do people find themselves in this more broadly described thing? We basically have got some good yeses for the first while, and then and then things change. Or another way to say it is our our bar got a lot higher too, and so we had a good thing that it wasn't a great thing.
Speaker 1:Once you had the 200 and a bit in the door, did you then proceed to do direct customer discovery or calls with them to find out So which parts of that stuff were true, or
Speaker 2:how did it work? Yeah. So this is where, as a practitioner who's so close to it, sometimes I, like, fudge my own rules. So I did calls before that launch to understand and talk to people. We launched it, and then we kinda got just busy doing it.
Speaker 2:And we weren't nearly as structured to ask them what's happening, and that's obvious a little bit to our detriment. We really should have been super structured about why are you coming here, what's working, what's not working, do more of that, less of this. Mhmm. We got some feedback, but I would probably change it a little bit. I wouldn't necessarily wholesale change what we did just because net in the end, that is sort of like life and what happens and it's the art of it is you really as much as I'll teach you these things, you do them differently in practice.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Okay. So I just wanna make sure I'm understanding this process. Yeah. So if I do, maybe I'm denser than the listener, probably so.
Speaker 1:But so you're first creating a hypothesis. In this case, it's a multi tiered hypothesis. But for the sake of this recap, let's focus on, there is a proto entrepreneur within 6 months of, you know, starting a business who needs assistance. And so then you're creating falsifiable claims that can be tested, things that can be disproven, which would include some of the things you mentioned. They are within that time frame of starting a business.
Speaker 1:They, in fact, have a pulse. We can reach them on Twitter and Instagram. They are struggling with x, y, and z. And so you can then pick up the phone, identify people that meet what you believe is that group, have conversations, and okay. Yep.
Speaker 1:So now you're in the conversation, and you have to have the conversation the right way. What does that mean?
Speaker 2:What's that question? So the right question this is actually a little more cut and dry in the sense that the right question is just one that is not leading. So you don't presuppose the answer and say, like, so you really hated it when this happened. Right?
Speaker 1:Don't be a push pull, people.
Speaker 2:So open ended, how did you feel when this happened? So asking open ended questions and generally asking past tense questions. Because if you ask future tense questions, how would you react if this happened? Again, people are it's open ended, but it's like pontificating. But if you say, the last time you went to the grocery store, how did you feel when this happened?
Speaker 2:That's gonna be real. So there's really 2 premises, open ended questions and past tense and as specific as possible. If you ask questions in those two ways about the thing you care about, you're asking good questions. And then it becomes a little bit of art because people's answers are never completely like, they're not answering it like a survey. You wanna listen to everything.
Speaker 2:Their excitement, their intonation, the specifics, do they go into other areas, all these things. So you do have to kind of read between the lines, but if you can ask it those ways, you're in a much better spot than like, so would you like it if this was created for you? They will say yes every time, and that's a false positive.
Speaker 1:Right. Which is only gonna harm you downstream.
Speaker 2:Yeah. You're just gonna waste time and money on the wrong thing and think you're right and but you're actually definitely wrong and and you don't know why you're yeah. It's gonna be very bad.
Speaker 1:And our minds are wired for confirmation bias. We like to seek evidence that confirms our previously held beliefs, and we can also tie our ego, our identity to an idea in such a way like, if if you have an idea for something and I have a coffee cup right here that is a elephant, and it makes me happy. And I've decided that everyone will be happier with elephant cups, and I'm going out and calling to have my customer discovery to determine if, in fact, there are people who drink liquids and would be happier out of an elephant cup, if I hear people say, That's a fucking stupid idea, or I'd be pissed, I don't like whatever it is, and I'm having a negative emotional reaction, I've identified with that. I have tied my identity to this idea, and I'm no longer taking the critique as a critique of the idea. I'm taking it as a critique of me in some way.
Speaker 1:It means I'm stupid. It means I don't understand people. It means I don't fit in. There's some deeper level story that is unconsciously being triggered that is causing me to react in that way. And so I'm wondering, what do you do, if anything, to either prepare for that so that you're not identified with your idea Mhmm.
Speaker 1:Or to process those emotions if and when they come up?
Speaker 2:Yeah. It's kinda like one of those things where, like, you have an with somebody, but you don't talk about it right away, and you let it build, and it builds and builds and gets way bigger. So the best thing to do is to be the faster you're moving, the faster you're having ideas and trying them, everything will feel that these are quicker, faster, breakable, discardable things. And so that's the best way to get ahead of it all. It is to be like, I'm gonna have a new idea next week, so let's just move on.
Speaker 2:Mhmm. But then that cuts the other way. I've seen people do this. They hold on to an idea for too long, and it's like, this has gotten way too big. You just need to ship it.
Speaker 2:Just get it out of here. And so that then is pulling teeth and pushing, and it's tough. And so, yes, you really need to find yourself the best place to be is in a, like, mode where it's moving fast and kind of happening. That's the main, like, tactical thing I can say to get your mind in a spot where, like, you yeah. You treat the idea as a very killable thing.
Speaker 2:And then if you are holding on to ideas, it just means that, like, your environment is not such that, like, you have any I mean, truly, like, psychological safety around, like, saying either to yourself or to your cofounder or to your anyone, boss, investors, this was a bad idea. I like to get to a spot where I'm working with people where I tell them like we're gonna try things and they're not gonna work, get ready for it. And all you have to do is say that upfront. And if everyone's on board with that, and then you pay it off, then you're in the glare.
Speaker 1:The way that I've used that most successfully is I am not great at remembering names, and especially when you're in the public light, you're meeting, I mean, sometimes hundreds of people a day. The single best strategy I ever identified was every time I meet somebody, I say, hey. So nice to meet you. I'm really bad at remembering names. If I ask you again, I apologize.
Speaker 1:It's just because I really wanna know. You own it, and it's like it's freedom to your spirit, but you've also now switched the thing. Because now, if and when you forget, you're no longer forgetting because you're careless. You are asking because you care, which is also authentically true. Yes.
Speaker 1:And, so that that really resonates with me. I I think, yeah, just tell the team up front.
Speaker 2:It's that's the same principle. It resonates it shows them that, like, I care enough, and this is how we're gonna operate, and I know this is the best way to do it. And so come along.
Speaker 1:So good. So good. Andrew, this has been so fun. There are still innumerable things on my sheet that I really hoped we could get to, so maybe they'll be around too. But we always finish this show with the same question for every guest.
Speaker 1:And I just I wanna just really thank and celebrate you for bringing wisdom from a knowledge tradition that is foreign to many of us in, and I really hope that it can be transferred and used. And I think there's a lot of gold here to do that with. The question is this. The the humans listening to this podcast are not passive observers. They are the humans in the arena.
Speaker 1:And if you were to leave them with just one thing, one thought, one idea, one quote, one practice, one anything that would best resource them to be a personal vector for healing our politics, what would you leave them with?
Speaker 2:All these things that we've said of preparing, being ready to fail, all these things, really come home when you've set up your environment to accept those attitudes and those practices. Walking into a meeting saying like, hey, guys, this is gonna get interrupted in this way or like, we're setting up a budget. Hey, guys, we're gonna set aside money and we're gonna do this thing or again, whatever the setting that intention, setting that space and getting the right people aligned to you is going to give you all the air cover you need to then put those in practice and create that feedback loop. You're gonna bring people into this new way of thinking and working and and living. They're gonna feel it.
Speaker 2:They're gonna see you guys going faster and moving, and then it's all gonna snowball from there. Create that space. That's an awesome way to get this thing going, and then it'll just happen.
Speaker 1:Beautiful. Andrew, thank you so much for coming on the Healing Our Politics podcast. It's just awesome to spend time with you, brother.
Speaker 2:Thank you so much. I so appreciate you, Skip. Great to be here.
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