RULES ARE FOR THE OTHER GUY! PART 1

THE FAST PASS OF LIFE AND BUSINESS!

As many of you know, because I talk about it all the time, I’m an avid reader, writer, and note taker, and I’ve been gathering thoughts and ideas over the years that have made profound differences in my own life, and I’m pleased to say, in the lives of others. I know this because I get feedback and have conversations with people almost every day who listen to the podcast, or are part of our coaching program, and they willingly share that something they heard in an episode, or maybe something we talked about on a coaching call that got them thinking in a different way. Let me be the first to say that I don’t take credit for these mini breakthroughs that people share with me because I know full well that its not me creating that, its always within the individual already. Sometimes we just need to hear or see something in a certain way to help peel back a layer within us that reveals a new understanding. Everything we talk about on this podcast is simply my experiences, my own understanding, maybe something I read, most likely something somebody else said that helped create a new understanding within me, I just end up sharing it in these episodes and when it a person who is ready to hear that thing at the right time, and in the right mind-frame, there’s a chemical reaction that takes place and growth occurs. Its not magical, its simply part of a practice I started years ago around a disciplined morning writing routine, coupled with a mindset of experimentation.

I didn’t invent that practice or mindset either, they were given to me by the collective mentorship of the human guides, as well as the written guides, that I’ve had over the years. One of those mentors was a man who had no idea he was even mentoring me at the time. He was the owner of the pizza take out restaurant that I worked at when I was 17 years old. His name was Frank Nall, and he owned several pizza places, some tanning salons, and a few other small businesses. He was a high energy dude who would fly into the restaurant in a whirlwind whenever he was in town and make sure everything was running as it should. I would watch him talk with the managers, the workers, the customers, and just observe how he dealt with everyone around him. I’m not proud of it today because Frank was not a great role model in many ways. He drank a lot, he smoked, he did drugs, and he was a bit of a womanizer, but Frank was really nice, great to his people, and great with people. He was a large personality with, most likely, chemically assisted energy reserves. What I remember most about Frank Nall was his saying that ‘rules are for the other guy!’ He said it somewhat in jest, but when he said it, you could tell that it was part of his fundamental belief system. The way I took the phrase, based on the context of when he would typically say it, was that most people played by a certain set of rules that often held them back. Frank didn’t play by those rules, which is what made him successful. He never needed anybody else’s permission to do something, he never waited for approval, and he never heard the word no. A manager would ask if they could try something new in the restaurant and Frank would say, “f*uck yes you can try it! Make a million dollars and give me some of it! Rules are for the other guy!”, after which he would laugh a wide-open mouth full belly laugh. 

What I learned from Frank, and his belief that rules were for the other guy, was that there are opportunities to bypass the standard waiting in line mentality, or unwritten rule following, that often plagues people in all walks of life. I’m not talking about breaking laws or stepping on others, by the way. I never saw Frank treat anyone less than any way. He treated everyone the same whether they were sweeping the floor or the owner of the strip mall his pizza joints operated in. He always moved with purpose, spoke with intent, and made stuff happen in short time. What took an average person a day or two to get accomplished, Frank would do in an hour. I realized over the years that Frank lived by a different set of rules and beliefs than the average person. Nothing was an impediment to him accomplishing what he set out to do. I’ve also realized over the years that Frank’s methods allowed him to bypass most people standing in the proverbial line, almost as if he had a fast pass to the front of the line at every ride in the amusement park. What I’d like to share with you in the next two episodes are some of the lessons I learned from watching Frank, and several people just like Frank over the next 30+ years. I often refer to these as the ‘fast pass of life’ because, to me, they are the ‘rules are for the other guy’ rules that allowed people like Frank to get ahead faster in life.

The first fast pass I recognized in the Frank Nall’s of the world is that they were always very comfortable in what I call ‘the land of the lost’.  Although Frank never seemed like he was lost or didn’t know what to do, he was quite fond of saying, “I have no idea what the eff is gonna happen, let’s try it and see!” I’ve realized over the years that if you want to jump in the fast pass lane and bypass all those waiting in line, you have to get really comfortable with discomfort, and with not knowing what the outcome will be. This doesn’t mean not to plan, or set goals, or anticipate positive outcomes, it means that those who move through the line quicker and seem to end up at the front of the line don’t need 100% confirmation that what they’re about to try will have a successful outcome. Most people want 100% assurance that the project they’re thinking of undertaking will be successful, profitable, positive, and will lead to something good. The reality is that some certain percentage of things we might attempt will fail. In fact, they’ve already failed in some mirror multiverse version of your life, you just don’t know it yet. And you won’t know it until you make the attempt and realize it in reality. The thing is, you can’t avoid the failure by not making the attempt, you only push the growth opportunity further down the road. 

Those in the fast pass line of life and business tend to be the most curious, yet not in any way threatened by the prospect of unfamiliarity and failure. While everybody around them is seeking comfort, certainty, familiarity, and a guarantee of a successful outcome, these folks are blowing through the failures and attempts faster than everyone else, which means they’re getting to the successes that much faster, and likely with more knowledge and experience than everyone else. Are they smarter than everybody else? Rarely! They just take more ‘at bats’ than most, they learn from the experiences, and they avoid the addiction to certainty that most people get stuck on. Not becoming a ‘certainty addict’ is another way to say being comfortable in the ‘land of the lost’. Everybody is lost, to some degree. In fact, there’s a psychological pattern called imposter syndrome that many people suffer from, which is where you feel like you’re just faking your way through things, you’re not smart enough, you’re not good enough, you’re not talented enough and eventually you will be exposed as a fraud. This is very common for a lot of people and its one of the things that keeps people from achieving more than they’re capable of. Those in the fast pass lane don’t care about feeling like an imposter because they’re simply too busy gaining life experience by trying things. You’ve got to get comfortable with not having all the answers, yet moving forward anyways. 

The next quality, or belief, if you will, of those who seem to have a fast pass in life and business is that self improvement, and the obsession with working on ourselves, quite often leads to an improper belief that we can begin helping others once we’ve arrived at some distant level of growth or success. And this is completely backwards. The Frank’s of the world, at least the one’s that I was lucky enough to meet and learn from, all had a belief that part of their job was to take people with them. They all seemed to innately understand that their success would be determined, to a large degree, by how many people they could help along the way. Frank Nall was a pizza franchise owner selling pizzas to as many people as he could. Was he helping those people? No, he was helping everybody he came in contact with along the way, either as their employer, boss, mentor, manager, or some other form of help that he could offer somebody. I saw Frank pull money out of his pocket regularly to help his young employees pay their bills. He offered advice and mentorship where he saw somebody struggling. I’ve had the great fortune to have several Frank’s in my life and they all seemed to recognize the same universal truth: they’re growth and success was wholly dependent on what problems they solved for people, how many people they could take with them, and helping people who were lost or in need of help. For all their individual faults, and all of them had a slew of them, they all seemed to have these same traits of finding people and helping them. 

One of the things I realized by watching this particular trait was that, quite often, the answers to many of their questions, problems, challenges, and obstacles, lay within another person. It was almost as if they were on a treasure hunt and the treasure existed inside of the individuals they chose to help along their path. Some would provide life lessons, some became employees, some became leaders in their organizations, some provide simply joy in helping that individual, but it seemed the goal was to help as many people as possible, not only for the sheer joy of doing so, but also to unlock the answers that lie within each one of them. This goes back to a prior podcast I did on the topic of ‘who, not how’, that I learned from Dan Sullivan. Quite often, the answers we are seeking lie within a ‘who’, not a ‘how’. Help as many people as you can along the way and look for those who might be lost or need your help. Take the focus off your own issues and challenges from time to time and look for who you’ve been charged with helping and see if your own issues aren’t solved along the way. 

The next thing I learned from a couple great mentors who seemed to always move quickly to the front of the line, was their ability to access times in their lives when they were successful or accomplished, and then draw on those times for support to inform them how to be successful moving forward. I actually learned this from my appraiser mentor when I asked him one day what he thought the secret to his success was. Once we got through the typical stuff about strong work ethic, networking, having a vision, goal setting, and picking the right people, he said something that stuck with me. He said, “whenever I need some confidence or strength to push myself toward a goal, I just think back to my graduation from the Boss.” I said, you mean when you graduated to being the boss? He said, “no, when I graduated from the Boulder Outdoor Survival School”, which I had never heard of. So he went on to explain what the survival school was, what they teach you, what he learned, what he endured, and how accomplished he learned to feel making fire, shelter, tools and weapons, and the overwhelming self confidence he gained from surviving a grueling outdoor survival academy. What he learned from that experience was that, any time he was in doubt about his ability to accomplish something, he would think back to that experience and remind himself of his achievements and suddenly the strength, the vision, the creativity, and the energy would come to him to plow forward. He would essentially say to himself, “I flippin’ made fire from nothing man! I lived off the land for 6 days! I survived and now have a whole new set of skills with which to survive in life! What’s the worst thing that could happen to me now?!”

This was huge to me because I often found myself suffering from imposter syndrome and waiting my turn in line, so to speak, for somebody else to grant me permission to move ahead. When my mentor shared that story with me I suddenly realized that I had a bunch of those same types of experiences in my history. I had survived lots of things in my past. I had lived in a zen monastery, had survived a grueling martial arts live in student internship, had traveled the world and been in lots of precarious positions that I somehow made it out of, I had a 3rd degree black belt in Aikido, other degrees in 3 other martial arts, successes in prior businesses, along with several failures. What we all tend to focus on, however, is the most painful of our past experiences. These tend to be the most memorable for us, and the ones that most inform our decisions to try something in the future. We touch the stove and get burned and learn not to do that again. It’s a built-in survival mechanism to keep us alive. The problem is that we often remember things much worse than they actually were. We build up the painful moments as being more painful than they actually were, especially the emotional ones. Instead of focusing on the pain and the failures, we must learn to focus on the achievements, however great or small, the successes, the times when we accomplished something, and the times when we made it through some kind of difficulty. We need to use those memories as the ones to build off of, not the ones that remind us, quite often falsely so, of when we failed at something.  Learn to go back in time and tap into the most empowering times in your past, not the least empowering and energy sapping experiences. 

This leads right into the fourth recognition I had about how to gain a fast pass to the front of the line, and it came from that same conversation with my mentor. It was simply this; we must always look for the opportunities to exit our own comfort zones. I had already known this one internally at that point because a good portion of my life was already spend doing things that made me uncomfortable. I bought my first duplex at 18, I moved to chicago at 20, I traveled the world from 20 to 30, lived uncomfortably for many years during that time and all by design. The whole zen philosophy was about recognizing and accepting that life is suffering, to a large degree, and the more you accepted it and stepped into the suffering, instead of avoiding it, the less you suffered. It’s the paradox of suffering. The less emotion you contribute to your struggle, the less suffering you experience. Accept that some things are difficult, and you become friends with the struggle. Pretty soon you realize that there are rewards for deliberately stepping into the struggle, instead of avoiding it. The more we push ourselves outside of our comfort zones, the more rewarding life becomes overall. The more we try to avoid the struggle and seek comfort, the more deluded and unhappy we become.

That is not to say that we are not meant to enjoy some creature comforts in life. You don’t have to sleep on a cold concrete floor to achieve what I just mentioned. Its that the greater the level of comfort we create around ourselves, the more we then seek to protect the comfort level, instead of taking more risks like the ones that got us to that level of comfort in the first place. Its like playing risky in the game to score some goals, then playing the rest of the game trying not to lose, instead of playing to win. The strategy should always be to play the game to win it, not play not to lose it. We play not to lose when we get comfortable. Find your comfort zones in life and business and learn to move beyond them. Take some risks, get embarrassed, move toward and through your fears, and, if there is to be a new comfort zone, it should be in getting comfortable with discomfort. If you want to jump into the line that moves past everybody else, you’ll have to be wiling to do what they’re all not willing to do. 

The last thing I’ll say about this one is that income is a drug. Paychecks are a drug that we all get hooked on to some degree. We push through prior levels of earning capability and get hooked on new levels of income and the lifestyle that comes along with it. These too are comfort levels we build ourselves into. Once we get used to a particular level of income and lifestyle, it gets tougher and tougher to imagine anything else, which means it’s tougher and tougher to take risks. At some point we just play not to lose, instead of playing to win. We play to protect what we have instead of playing to increase it in other areas. One of the most common discussions I have in coaching people is how to get to the next level from where they are now. And it doesn’t matter if it’s a one-person shop making $75,000 per year, or a 20-person shop where the owner is making $750,000 per year, there are certain things that need to be accepted and understood if you want to go to the next level. One of those things is that your income level will probably have to drop to some degree to get to the next level. Why? Its called investment and the investment in growth in many companies often comes out of the owner’s income. Trying to maintain your income level, while also growing to the next level, is often a very expensive and frustrating experience. Once they accept that they’ll probably have to invest some of their own income in order to implement the things that will be required to grow, they start to see the path to something even greater. Once you get comfortable at a certain level of life, you have to ask yourself if you’re now playing not to lose or are you willing to push yourself out of your comfort zone to experience some new level. I can’t answer that question for you, it must come from you. 

The fifth mindset and behavior for getting a fast pass in life and business, in my opinion, is to delve into what you’re obsessed with. What do I mean by this one? Well, what I am not referring to are habits and personal obsessions that might be frowned upon by your neighbors. What I am referring to is the thing, or things, that steal time in your calendar. What do you think of and go to when you’re not working? What would you do for free if it was available to you? Why do I mention this one? Because passion leads to purpose and there a shitload of people out in the world today doing things with no purpose driving it. It is through our struggles and outside of out comfort zones where we often find our obsessions and passions, but however we acquire or uncover them, its often through these passions that we start to identify our purpose. Please notice what I have not said is that you have to be passionate about your work to be successful, or that you have to start a business around your passion. That isnt what I am saying. I have done this in the past and it burned me out for that passion. What I am saying, however, is that passion often leads to finding our purpose. If you haven’t found your purpose yet, its ok and there is nothing wrong with you. Its just that there is a new kind of freedom and opportunity that comes when you do find your purpose. 

We talk often in coaching about identifying your core purpose, and your business’s core values and purpose, because when you do you immediately begin to attract all the things that are in alignment with those values and purpose. You also learn to pass on all the things that don’t align with your purpose. Since purpose often evolves out of what you’re passionate about, finding your passion, or your obsession, is one of the most powerful paths toward it. I also firmly believe that our businesses are, essentially, vehicles for self actualization. We might be passionate about the business we’re in, but that’s fairly rare. What most businesses provide are a means for the owner and its people to pursue their own personal goals in life. You build a business, your business provides income, your income allows you to self actualize, or experience life and the world via your hobbies, pursuits, and passions and realize your highest potential. Self actualization is becoming the best version of yourself and, in my opinion, the best version of yourself must always include your purpose and your passions. There can be subcategories of the best version of yourself, for instance, being the best father, husband, wife, or even appraiser that you can be, and they don’t have to be heavily rooted in something you’re passionate about. But you cannot reach the highest level of self actualization and self fulfillment without identifying what your core purpose and passion(s) are. Where your business is worlds away from your purpose, your passion, and your obsessions, or where your business doesn’t allow for some kind of inclusion of your purpose and passions, it will always take more of your life energy than it gives back. In that instance, it is merely a trade. You trade your life, your energy, and your valuable time for income, which you then take out into the world to explore and experience life. 

Those who seem to have a fast pass and move to the head of the line are those who found the intersection where their purpose and passion collided with their vehicle of income production. Not all successful people have a passion for what they do to earn their living. But the ones that I’ve met who have the proverbial fast pass had all identified their purpose, they knew what they were passionate about, and they found a way to imbue their businesses with both. It seemed to be the rocket fuel that allowed them to flow more easily through the cycles of life and business. Find your obsession, which is where purpose and passion intersect, and then find ways to inject your business with that purpose and passion. 

Thank you, my friends, for tuning into part one of this series. As always, I truly appreciate you investing your most valuable currency with me again this week and I hope I’ve been able to provide some value for you that far exceeds your investment of time. I look forward to talking to you one on one should you ever decide to take me up on my free coaching offer, or should you decide to become one of our level 1 coaching and mastermind members, or should you decide to blast your life and business to the next levels by becoming part of one of our black belt coaching teams. But until then, or until next week, I’ll keep pumping out the content and providing free value for you. See you next week my friends, I’m out…