Owners Stall When They Stop Changing and Refuse to Delegate

All right. Happy Saturday. Welcome to the Marketing MadMen. Trip Jobe and Nick Constantino here live from the Battery. And Nick, we are going to talk about life and business. I mean, we got it all, I think, today.

Yeah, and we're just gonna hit it running, because the dude that we're about to interview and have on the show has climbed a bunch of mountains and has been in planes and gone fast. And so we're just gonna hit this thing running as fast as we can. So to do that, I'm going to introduce Andy Christiansen. How you doing, bud?

That's great. Best intro I think I've ever had. Big mountains, big planes, fast.

We got to set it up, right? So I have on here a motivational speaker, a TED Talk speaker, how to motivate, and a host of a tenacious podcast. And if you're calling it a tenacious podcast, there's a reason behind it. So those are all the setups. We're good to go. I just said all the things you are now. Get us up to speed on how you got there.

It's my greatest trait, being tenacious, because I grew up a blue collar kid in Cleveland, Ohio, raised by a single dad. And it was really like being raised by wolves. I had to figure it out on my own. It was catch as catch can. And I realized that if I worked hard… at 11, I started my first business cutting grass. Then I raked leaves. Then I shoveled snow. Then I learned how to paint houses. And there's other things that weren't legal I won't mention. But I learned how to make money and make things happen. And that's been my trait in business. And along the way, I got a college degree somehow, a bunch of certifications, wrote a book after flunking English in college. So again, tenacious. I just get in there and I make things work.

Yeah, love it. So, military background.

To some degree. I wrote the book that you have in your hand called The 40-40 Principle. And a guy in the military invited me to England, an American base over there, Mildenhall, to come speak. And that started this love affair that we both had with leadership. Then he moved to the States, and we created this leadership course together. I teach it separately, he teaches it at the Air Force, and I've been adjunct professor of leadership at the Air Force for about 15 years.

Yeah, so military adjacent, but you actually probably see it with a completely different perspective because you get to see it from the outside looking in. And not many people are granted that opportunity. Usually you only see it from the inside out. So that's got to be unique for you.

I'm one of 1% of civilians that have been in a fighter jet, a T-38 trainer jet. That's Mach speeds.

That's cool. So again, we're going to go Mach speed. All right, so look, TED Talks, all these things, they have become such a part of the nomenclature. You look on LinkedIn, everyone's doing a TED Talk. There's so much stuff going on all the time. Talk a little bit about what your day-to-day is right now. Talk about what you do, what you do to motivate, who you speak in front of, how these things are being booked. Because I think we're going to open up a lot of conversations about when you need to find someone like Andy. If you want to be a speaker, here's how you do it. I think this is going to pave the course for a lot of different conversations.

Yeah, it's a longer story than I'm going to give it, for obvious reasons. But I started out in college as a finance guy. I'm a business guy. Like I said, I started my first business when I was a teenager. And I thought I wanted to go make millions of dollars. And at some point, after I launched a product called Fruit2O from a company called Very Fine, we sold it to Kraft. It was the first fruit flavored, no calorie water. So spring water with Splenda. I couldn't believe no one had invented it, but we did. We sold the company. At that point, I was 37. I don't know if I got hit on my head somewhere that year, but I departed from business, so to speak, because I wanted to help people. I just woke up one day and I said, that's what I want to do with the rest of my life. And I started meeting with people in coffee shops and I would ask them questions about what they wanted to do with their life. And they said, can we do this again? I'm like, this was really helpful to you? I thought I was the only guy interested in this.

Well, you said in your intro, you make things happen and you make money. Sometimes they're not the same. Sometimes making things happen isn't necessarily about the money.

And maybe it's just that people need someone to ask them the questions so they can come up with the right answers, which is what I've found really is what a coach does. You're not a consultant coming in with the best idea. You're asking that person what their best idea is, because no one's generally listening. We're all busy talking.

That's the best salesperson. That's the best anything in business. Now sometimes you can add influence to get someone to the answer you want them to get to, but ultimately what you're trying to do is guide somebody down. It's funny, and I think the biggest problem, you know, I've met so many motivational speakers and business coaches. A lot of times you meet them and the first thought is, all you are is a shrink to a guy that can't admit he needs help. Like, don't call yourself a business coach. You're just laying him down on the couch and listening to him and he's paying you an exorbitant amount of money to do so. I think that there's a fine line. And look, the point is that I think we've gotten to a point now where everyone on LinkedIn is giving advice. You go on Instagram, it's a million people that are trying to give you advice. And then you start reading their resumes and it's like, who am I taking advice from? What is this? You went through it. You sold a business. You know, I like how you glanced over the illicit activities that made money. You know what? That's the people I want to hire. You did those things. You know how to run numbers and keep it away from the cops, so that's probably a skill set in there. That's a benefit to me and my career and everybody else around them. Don't do it in the building, but what you do at home is none of my business. So I think one of the reasons that people gravitate towards you, besides authenticity, besides the fact that you're tenacious, is you are probably the manifestation of what they wished they could be themselves, but either couldn't when they were young, or they just want to be that because that's what people think of themselves as. Right? I had a similar upbringing. I was one of four boys, but I remember at 9 years old riding my bike in Queens to go get pizza down the street in Queens. You know the murder rate in Queens in the 90s? I didn't know there was a murder rate. I knew I had a bunch of Korean friends and that the gangs they were affiliated with would protect me. Nine years old.

But if you look like you own the place, they let you by.

You look like you own the place and you don't do stupid stuff. You don't need to be making eye contact with people. Walk by, head on a swivel, do your thing. No one will ever bother you. They look for targets. As long as you are confident in your steps, no one's going to look at you as a target. They're going to look at you as, wait, what's this guy doing here? Which is a better thing. Anyway, okay, we went very, very fast. So what I want to talk about now, one of the things that has really come up that you have put some time in, is scaling. When we talk about business, it seems to me, and Trip, you can probably chime in here, that business tends to be really good at the 1 million to about the 20, 25 million range. That's where one person can do it. They can hire a staff of people they trust, maybe even 30, 35.

I actually think the stats are such that very few make it from 1 to 10. I think that 8, 9 is kind of a threshold. I think if you get to 10, from there they tend to go more. That seems to be a…

Let's talk about that 10 to 25 range, so we have some numbers on it. That 10 to 25 range, that's a lot of the advice you're giving now. That's a lot of what these guys need: scaling. How do you scale your business? How do you put people in place? So talk about how in your career you found out that it's something you could help people with. Obviously you did it with your own company. You scaled it to a point where it was going to be sold. But talk about how you get to that point, and when you realize that it's something that you're going to need help with.

Yeah, I've got a line that I love, which is every four years you're a freshman again. And I think senioritis, you can have senioritis at any age in life.

I had it as a junior and a senior.

Not just school years. And I think the biggest problem that I see is senioritis. A person starts a business, they get some degree of success, and then they become a senior, and they believe that they can just hit rinse and repeat on how they got there.

They put it on autopilot.

They do. And they wonder why they stagnate. Let's call it 1 to 5 million, or 5 to 10. About every 5 million, I see this happen. You're a freshman again. And something needs to change. Phil Knight, the number one quote on his mantra list is: our business is always changing. Phil Knight, Nike. And that is the biggest lesson I don't think people learn. They stay the same.

Yeah. And you even have the case studies, right, of your Kodaks and your Xeroxes and your Blockbusters and these chains that ran on autopilot. And look, let's not be fools here. They made so much money, right? Even when the company went bankrupt, the executives and all the people with stakes in it made a lot of money over that time frame. It's always the lowest level investors that end up getting screwed in the end, that hitched their wagon at the wrong time. But again, this is going to bring me to the next thing, and I want to spend the next segment talking about this, but let me set it up. I think one of the problems is that we talk about emotional intelligence and self-awareness and we go into such depth on it, but the more successful you are, the harder it actually is to have self-awareness. Because what you like doing is you start liking the smell of your own farts. I know it's a graphic statement, but when you start thinking you're so good, and to an extent you have to in business, it's hard to really look at things objectively. And I think that's where a lot of the flaw is. So we're going to talk next segment about scaling, about emotional intelligence, about the self-awareness that allows you to realize that you need help. But what do you think the biggest blockade is? If you have to pick one thing, obviously autopilot, but what stops people from pushing forward? Is it just complacency with where they are? Is it that they close the circle so they don't have any confidants that are telling them to grow? What do you think the biggest factor in that complacency is?

Army of one. I am my own solution. I see it all the time. I will not mention the specific name of the company, but they're the largest chicken retail restaurant chain in the country. And they are some of the best at this. In fact, the owners, the franchisees of those restaurants, if they are in the store every day of the week, they're not successful. The most successful ones are rarely ever there because they have duplicated themselves. They've found a way to get a general manager in there that is as good, if not better than them, at running the business. And I believe that's the solution. You've got to delegate, is the simple way of putting it. But nowadays, you can't really find enough people to delegate to. You have to learn to coach them up. So the business owner of today has to realize they either hire someone to coach them on leadership skills, or coach them themselves, apprentice them. We used to have apprentices.

But in most cases, and especially if this is their first business, that's what they did. They became the business. They ran the business, and they don't know how to do something differently, correct?

That's their wheelhouse. They're good at it, or they wouldn't have gotten to where they are. But the hardest lesson to learn is, it's like having children. You have to treat them one way when they're infants, another way when they're young, another way when they're teenagers, and an entirely different way when they're adults. And if you don't evolve, and that's really what a business owner needs to do, you're gonna be stuck.

Do you ever see instances where a business owner realizes they need someone, they probably can't do it, and they actually bring someone in to be that operational arm while they do what they do?

Oh yeah, those are the smart ones, and that's where we need to go: how do you get there? And that's humility, and that's having emotional intelligence, being able to pull back and delegate and say, hey, I'm not the entire solution.

Yeah, and in my interactions with business owners, we tend to be in that 8 to 20 million range. The biggest problem is the ego involved in being a business owner, because for a while, when you're scaling that business from zero to 10 million, you have to be the boss. You have to make decisions. That's what gets you there. But then when you get there, it's very hard, one, to share the knowledge you've learned in a way that's not condescending, and two, to take somebody else in with an external perspective and say, come teach me. And I think that's the problem. There's a person who's built for 0 to 10 million. There's probably a person who's built for 10 to 30 million, and then there's probably a person built for 30 million plus. But that's not what we're teaching people. We're teaching people, just keep growing, keep growing. It's good for the economy. It's good for those around you. So when we get back from the break, we're going to dive in on that. We covered a lot really fast, but I think that's a great intro. You've been listening to the Marketing MadMen on Xtra 106.3, and we'll be right back.

Welcome back to the Marketing MadMen, Trip Jobe and Nick Constantino here. Right before the break, we were talking about humility, kind of delegation, and I think that really brings in a topic we bring up a lot, which is emotional intelligence, or emotional IQ.

And we kind of bash it every once in a while when we bring it up. I just think whenever something becomes a buzzword, it becomes something that is either taken advantage of or just milked. First of all, I understand it is important. The motivations of people have changed so quickly, right? The baby boomer, my dad, went to work every day, didn't ask questions, did it because that's what he thought he had to do. He did the same routine because in his generation, that's what they were taught to do. Coming off the greatest generation, that's what he was taught to do. If you look now, each person is so differently motivated that it is not passing on your intelligence, it is gaining emotional intelligence from them, that I think is required of being a leader. I don't like relating back to sports because I don't think it applies everywhere, but it's a good application. Michael Jordan could have never been a coach. He can't even be an owner. I mean, the team is just a disaster. But it just goes to show you that just because you're the best… And what do sales managers especially do, whatever companies want to do? They want to take their best salespeople and they want them to manage. And they think that that's how it works. So Andy, in your experience, talk a little bit about what emotional intelligence means to you, and where you saw some vulnerabilities in the teachings that have allowed you to help these businesses grow.

Emotional intelligence, what a heated or explosive topic. I don't even know if most people like the word emotion tied into business, because we don't fully understand it. So it's a little bit of a dangerous, or a very dangerous, topic. And I'll tell you quickly how I learned about emotional intelligence. I'm sorry, it's a personal example, and my wife knows this story and she laughs, but I took her to counseling to get her fixed.

Yeah. To get her right, because you were about 15 years into the marriage.

And certainly it wasn't me. Right.

I'm throwing air quotes up for you.

Don't worry. Pause, power of the pause. And so we went to the therapist, and after about a month, the therapist checked back in with me: how are we doing? I said, we're doing great, because she gave us some stuff to do and she was doing it and we were doing it. And she said, well, that's good. Hey, tell me your story. I said, me? Why do you want to hear about me? Now if somebody asks me, hey, I'll talk about me all day, but I was like, why here? Why do I want to pay for that? She said, humor me. A year later of visits back and forth. My wife a month, me a whole year. I did not have EQ, what I call social intelligence, emotional intelligence. It's heart skills versus head, right? Intellectual intelligence is IQ, intellectual quotient. EQ is emotional quotient. We all get it now because it's been out for 25 years, but I don't know how many of us really do it. I had to go through a year of therapy just to get it. And I don't know if I fully have it now. I think I do, but that's always a dangerous place to be. So I like to work with people that are hungry, that want to get better. And if you're not hungry, man, we're just taking data in. We're really good at talking about it. I don't know if we're really good at doing it. That's what I see in business today. The ones that are doing well say it and do it. I have a quote that I love. It's on the back of all my note cards, and it says, the proof of desire is in the pursuit. Talk is cheap. I want to see people do it. I have a tattoo right here on my left shoulder that says esse quam videri. It's our family motto. And that means to be rather than to appear. Esse quam videri. That's what business people need to be to make it these days.

Well, the thing is that there's different levels, and some people maybe eventually get emotional awareness, which you're talking about, but don't want to act on it. They can at least spot it, but it's not for them or whatever. There's some people even further to the left, let's say, who can't even do that, because they're not even aware of it. And that's not how they do it.

They have to look up what empathy means. Like I did.

You know, it's funny, everyone knows it's something you have to have. I've been managing people, and again, I have 25 to 65 age ranges. So you've got to vary the way you treat emotional intelligence. We're a small company that does big things. We're always in the limelight with the Braves in Georgia. So it's a unique beast that we are. But where it really started coming out in me is I started really looking into the past. I started reading books, you know, Ray Dalio and Fareed Zakaria, these different perspectives of how the world works. In fact, I'm reading one now about salt, and it traces the history of the world from the salt trade, pretty much. It's the whole history of the world, because it's this thing that is so important. And what I've learned is, first of all, to understand how insignificant the things are that happen in your life. We have to look backwards to see that most of these things have repeated, right? Everyone's like, these are unheralded times. No, these exact same times have happened many times throughout history, right? The USA is at the end of its empire, the 300 year empire timeline, the economic cycle, the business cycle. This has happened. So once you know it's already happened, that means it shouldn't be scary. And when things are not scary, you are able to speak to people in a way that rationalizes: hold on, guys, before we start doing this, here is what you need to get out of this. I am not training you to be good at 680 The Fan. I'm training you to be good. It is the owner of this company's job to pay you enough to keep you here. Steve Jobs and Simon Sinek, there's all these guys now that say this, but looking at right now, looking at the future, wasn't it for me. It was looking to the past that helped me get a better understanding of what's happening around me, and that helped me build my emotional intelligence. If that makes any sense whatsoever.

Wise, very wise.

I mean, I had a CEO many years ago, and his thing was, when people don't understand, they make it up. And when people make it up, it's usually negative, right? So it's going back to, what are you able to share? And you're talking about actions. I'll share right now things I'm going through, things my team is going through. We just put my dad into memory care. It's one of those things where I could just take vacation and not be involved and not tell people what's going on. But I'm open with my team: hey, I'm gonna be away. I'm not gonna be available this day. Normally you can catch me, da, da, da. I've got one person on my team who's going through a family issue, and they said, well, I think I need to take the morning off. I said, it's your family. You need to take the whole day. If you need to send anything to me, send it to me, whatever. To me, it's more that you do talk about it, but you show it in your actions versus hiding things. I think 20 years ago it would just be, all right, I'm just going to block off my calendar and not tell anyone what's going on. I'm the boss and I can get away with that. But that doesn't work, I don't think.

But you know what? That was reinforced. Growing up, the goal was to eliminate vulnerability. Do not be vulnerable. And then Brene Brown, the author, comes along and does the TEDx. And it's like, vulnerability is now a superpower. And so a whole generation or two have had to learn to adapt and embrace that. And it shows authenticity.

Yeah, it actually is. They've done all these studies on the psychology of trustworthiness. There's a spectrum of four boxes. If you take a person who's attractive and smart and they show vulnerability, their trust immediately goes upward. But if you take a person who's not smart and not attractive and they're vulnerable, they immediately go backwards the other way. People don't want to hear from them. Subconsciously, they want to see the people they envy be vulnerable, because that makes them relatable. So it is this scale. It's an incredible thing.

Is that why Tom Brady talks about the yoga instructor and everything? Is that to make him more likable? Hey, he got caught cheating, man.

He showed vulnerability many times. He got caught cheating many times. He showed vulnerability. Gisele broke his heart. He showed vulnerability. Look, now I'm going to hit this from the other side, because I think one of the problems is once it starts mixing into the lexicon, people also take advantage. And I have plenty of people that work for me that are like, my God, I need a mental health day. I'm like, it's the 2nd of January. You had off for two weeks. What do you mean you need a mental health day? So I think the problem is that once we get to a point where we go down these pathways, people find ways to exploit it. I'm not saying consciously. I'm saying subconsciously. Like you said, you're either the tenacious person that wants to push through, or… And it's like, look, dude, I don't want to be that guy. Mental health isn't a new thing. You think you're the only person with ADD? Are you freaking kidding me? Anxiety is a defense. We used to have to run from wild animals. This is not, my God, I woke up and I'm just so stressed out. And I also think the word emotional screws it up, because like you said, especially as men, emotion is not something that's talked about, okay? But one of the kindest things you can do for people is rip the freaking band-aid off and tell them right away. The worst thing you can do, if we're talking emotional intelligence, is belabor a point because you're afraid to have the confrontation. I think the root of a lot of these problems in business is that people are afraid of confrontation, for whatever reason. Do you see that? Are you seeing where people just won't make the decisions and the impact, for whatever reason?

I use this assessment tool. I use a lot of tools with businesses, because people need a diagnostic to know where they're not doing well and where they are doing well. 92% of people lack the desire to face conflict. So 92% is conflict avoidance.

By the way, we did not plan any of this. I didn't know he had a stat waiting for me. I just went on a rant. So this is working even better than I thought. So 92% of people have an innate part of them that avoids conflict.

It's a judgment tool called the Judgment Index. It measures people's judgment. And part of judgment is…

Can I borrow that tool? Can I borrow that tool? I would like to run that on every salesperson I have.

Let's go from there. And this is a word I know, Andy, you're waiting to hear. So then how do you create a culture in a business that includes accountability and also includes some of that emotional IQ?

Accountability to me is access and information. Someone has to grant you access and some degree of information, right? Otherwise, what are you being held accountable to? Otherwise, what is it? Micromanagement, bullying, nagging? So I don't know that real, true accountability can happen without that. I'm not sure that answered your question.

I think transparency. That was the immediate word, if you wanted one word, but you're right. You can't hold somebody accountable to metrics they don't understand. And it's actually the biggest problem with marketing, if I'll be honest with you. The biggest problem with marketing is that someone's like, okay, well, we're measuring these results. We do this. Okay. Well, are you going to tell me what you're holding me accountable to, or do you want me to just magically guess it so you can hold it against me later? Don't hold somebody accountable to a metric that you can't measure and that isn't clear and easy to understand. These are not new business principles. This has been around since the dawn of time.

Psychological ownership. If you come up with those together, and the person that you want to hold accountable comes up with their own accountability, usually they're way more apt to want to be accountable to that than if it's applied to them.

Yeah, I love it.

Certain personalities.

But that's that self-awareness and that EQ also. One, the manager has to trust the person enough to allow it to happen, and two, the person has to look inward enough and say, one, what I've been doing to date has not been good enough, or two, man, I had a really good year, I don't think I can duplicate that next year, let me set it a little bit lower. You have to be self-aware. Because I'll tell you this, I have had those exact meetings, and I have to give the people their numbers. And if you don't know your numbers, what are you holding yourself to? That's almost an embarrassment. So again, this is why we're having this conversation. It is a very hard balance to strike. When you meet people, can EQ be taught? Talk about that. Is it something that's innate in people and you're just bringing it out, or do you have methods of actually training people how to be better at it?

Well, it's a great question. The father of emotional intelligence, Daniel Goleman, says it's a learned trait more than it is an inborn trait. And being self-aware, being others-aware, being relationally aware, those are things that generally people learn. You might learn it as you saw your father do it, which is largely the way I saw it. My father was brilliant with people, and I was like, how do you do that? I can never do that. And now I'm probably as good, if not better than he was. And our kids look at me and they're like, I can never do what you do. Like, yeah.

But that's part of the question, though. That was probably innate in you. It just needed something to bring it out. Being influenced by your father brought out something that was somewhere in there.

I think so.

Yeah.

And then you realize in culture and in business, people skills matter.

Well, it gets reinforced, right, by either positive actions or negative actions.

But they did a study. Dale Carnegie, the first self-help book ever written, How to Win Friends and Influence People. They did a study at Carnegie Mellon in Pittsburgh of what makes a person successful. Did you ever hear this one? 15% of how people are successful is technical aptitude, your technical abilities. The other 85, you want to guess?

Interpersonal.

Charisma, interpersonal.

Yes, it's the people skills part. Even when that study was done back in, I believe, the 40s, that was that important.

Sure. So we were chatting during the break, and I know you've got a number of things on that. So let's take it to culture, culture in business. What are your thoughts today? What do you see? And what are some of the challenges ahead?

So the smartest thing I've heard in the last few years about culture… well, let me define culture. Culture to me is just a combination of the things we say and do on a daily basis, at work, at home, wherever you want to define that culture. You already have a culture. The question is, is it the culture you want? And most people think a better corporate culture is, we're going to put in free snacks. We're going to get…

We're going to have a happy hour with a ping pong table. Every tech company has one. And then everyone's playing beer pong on it anyway, so it's destroyed in a week.

That's great. I even heard that with football teams, the big trend now is if a new coach comes into an NFL team or a college team and there's a ping pong table, it's leaving. And if there isn't one, one's coming in. Anything to signal that something new is here. And so the biggest thing in these cultures now: if you went to college, you may have heard of Maslow's hierarchy. It was this big thing. Abraham Maslow said that at the bottom of it is food and shelter, but at the top of the four or five stages is self-actualization. For the first time in history, we have a culture, a workplace like the one where you work, where people are at self-actualization. This is the biggest problem and opportunity, because the millennials and centennials are all expecting self-actualization type things at work.

Let's define that for a second. Give us self-actualization, before some people just make up their own perception of what it is. Give us what you mean.

Let's start at the basics. Most bosses still today think, I'm just providing for you to have food and shelter. You can pay your rent, you've got a job, you should be happy. And a lot of millennials and centennials, so millennials are 44 down to about 27, and the centennials are now 26 and below, they are looking for this self-actualization.

Impact. They're creating impact.

Yeah. Can I understand what our purpose is here at work? Why do we have core values, but I don't see them on the walls? Why don't we talk about them? Why are we not actualizing these things? And then furthermore, they want somebody to help them with their self-actualization. Like, help me come up with mine. That's where they're at.

Yeah. And now I see what you're saying, because the opportunity is that if you can portray that from the top down, people buy in. The negative side is, you should figure that out for your freaking self. That's not something that I am telling you to do. But that being said, I've met so many different kinds of people. I've trained so many different kinds of people. There are some people that, no matter how you hammer them, are always going to want to be sheep. They're always going to want to be told what to do. Do I want them on my sales staff? I'll save that conversation for a different time. But I think if you are aware of yourself, it is easier to be aware of other people. In my first five years of managing, that was probably the hardest thing. I was like, I get it, why don't you? And then once you remove that and you say, wait a second, you work better when I give you a set of parameters… Military kids are the greatest example. With a military kid, if you say, I don't understand why you're not doing this, they're gonna look at you like you're crazy. But if you say, here are the parameters, work within these, they'll be okay, and they'll walk out and do it.

You just identified the curse of knowledge. When you said, hey, I've been doing this for five years, just do it the way I'm doing it. I understand it, why don't you? We all do that. And they're doing that too. They're coming to work saying, I want to know what my purpose is in life. Why don't you want me to know what my purpose is in life? Why aren't you helping me? We're all coming in with this curse of knowledge mindset that we woke up in the morning with. So I'm about to publish a book next month called Minute to Meaning. It's how to find your life purpose in under one minute. And it's super achievable. I do it all the time in groups and whatnot. And this is something they're going to love to have at work. Like, hey, business owner, you can do this in a minute. You're gonna be self-actualizing your whole staff.

Yeah, I see. Look, again, one of the weird things about millennials is they're a very transitional generation. I'm the older part of the millennials, and I grew up with tech, but I also had a cell phone with a cord on it. So I'm that transition. I saw what it was and what it is now. And I think every generation has an important part in business to some extent. So I've seen everyone across the board. And it's not only age anymore. I think it's also upbringing, right? If you were born in a certain generation of this country, everyone was around the same socioeconomic status, right? The picket fence was part of it. Now you meet people and you're almost immediately gauging mommy and daddy money. You know these things about them because of the behavior. So that is another wrinkle in this. It used to just be an age thing. It used to be, you know, the Yankees talk faster than the Southerners. It used to be easy. Now you sit around these people and you're making these guesses. And I found myself a lot of times guessing completely wrong, but they're part of the culture now, which again makes it so hard to self-actualize and to make a set of parameters that helps people self-actualize.

Four to five different generations, one marketplace.

Yeah. All right. How much time we got, man? I have no idea what's going on.

I have no idea what's going on. We said we were going to go all over at 100 miles an hour. We didn't talk about mountains yet.

Yeah, let's get to that. Let's get to that. What I want to do in the last segment, I've decided now, is talk about how we got here and what's broken. I personally blame a lot on the educational system, but that's what segment three is for. How do we train this better?

We only have nine minutes for the education system.

There's already been 75 minutes of content. We're fine. Okay, so first of all, you've been in a plane. That's pretty cool. You went at Mach speed, going faster than the speed of sound. That's insane. Talk about the mountain climbing. Talk about the marathons and the running, because when you talk about self-actualization and a mental place, like, I run for 30 seconds and my ADD kicks in. I'm like, I'm over this. So what I do is I hop on a really intense HIIT machine, and I play video games while I'm on it, because 40 minutes and 800 calories will go by and my body doesn't feel it because I'm completely distracted. So my body can do it, but my brain is not wired to do that stuff. I found a workaround, but your brain apparently is wired to do it. So talk about the distance stuff and just the wear and tear on your body of hiking and doing these marathons and things.

Yeah, the only thing I can say is, hey, you're brilliant for coming up with that, because whenever I hear someone does not get a natural high from, say, running or biking or hiking, I'm like, I don't know how I would ever do it if I didn't get the natural high. So I think it's easier for someone like me. I'll just put that out there. I started running when I was a little kid. I would run to the store. I would run to the mall. I ran everywhere. I just was into running, and it gave me a buzz. I'd probably be on a lot of medication if I didn't run. It's just the thing that keeps me mentally sane, talking about mental health. So I run, and I put a race on the calendar once a year. I have one in March, a Spartan Race, 10K. Otherwise I don't stay in shape. The fear of having a heart attack says, man, you better get in the gym. You better run today. Better do some legs. The mountain climbing, though, I kind of backed into that. Our second oldest son turned 14, and I was like, we need to hike a fourteener, a 14,000 foot mountain. Colorado's got over 52 of them. And so we went out and we hiked it. At one point lightning was above us. At one point it was next to us. And then at another point it was below us. This was Mount Elbert in Colorado. And I was like, we're gonna get electrocuted. If we go down, we have to go through lightning now. What do we do? And it snowed at the top of that mountain on July 7th. That was our first fourteener. I probably should have never gone back, nor should he. But we've done dozens since then, and I take groups out.

What's your favorite?

Oh, favorite? Well, it would be in California, Whitney. Mount Whitney is the tallest mountain in the States. It's such a bear. I mean, we were almost delusional when we got to the top of it. You should do these in two days, like get to the camp near the top, then summit. We do them all in one day. It's too much. But…

I've got to imagine it's amazing bonding time. I imagine a lot of the lessons in life and business are being taught there, especially to your son, but to the groups you're with also.

We brought a recovery group with us once, and this one guy had been in a recovery house, six weeks off of heroin. And somehow he summited Longs Peak, which is a big mountain in Colorado, and came down. He had a lot of help, but he did it. And this dude probably never did heroin again.

That's probably not a natural detox.

And I've checked in with this guy and he's doing great. But certain people just need to have accomplishments. When we do that, we release dopamine, oxytocin, serotonin, endorphins, and we get that natural high.

And you're on the high for quite a bit.

But you know what it is, though? This is a big problem in the world of psychology, the dopamine rush. The dopamine is getting to the top. The serotonin floods at the top, but that's a long way of dopamine. Seeing that top, every inch you get closer is like that dopamine drip, which is what social media and everything is trying to duplicate. So now that you put it that way, I'm climbing a freaking mountain.

Our listeners are on dopamine right now, so we're going to give them a break, and we'll be right back.

That's your best segue ever, Trip. We'll be right back.

Welcome back to the Marketing MadMen on Xtra 106.3. Nick Constantino here with Andy Christiansen and Trip Jobe, and we have covered so much. I hope you appreciate the lightning round, because this is knowledge, but most importantly, this is real talk. We don't even have a script in front of us. I have a list of what Andy's done, and that's the extent of what we've talked about. We've weaved in, we've weaved out, but I promise you, if you listen and hold on, you're gonna sound like you know what the hell you're talking about, which is always the goal of this thing. But what I want to end with is this. You have the Chinese working 90 hours a week, putting out economic output, learning electric cars, chips, all the things that we were so good at. We are breeding children that are coming out with none of the skills that are required for the workforce that's in front of us. Entrepreneurship is not taught. We are pretty much sheep. We are taught to hear one level of the history of this country, from a white European man's background, not the struggle. We don't learn. I don't need a fix of the educational system, but what do we have to start doing? What can we start instilling in our kids to make them more equipped for what the future will be? Because right now I am worried that superpower status will be lost not because of economics, but because of the workforce that we are putting out there.

Dropping the anvil.

I had to do it. It's just been brewing up in me.

I love it. Yeah. I have this big idea, an opinion, I guess I'll say. You went to get pizza in Queens through part mafia, part gangs. Who knew what you were going through? And I don't know if we do enough of that anymore. I'm not saying everyone should live in that type of an area and be put in harm's way. But our lives are so easy now as kids. It's cushy. And so they don't have to work hard. We're protected. Yeah, mom and dad can help me if I need help. And I'm not saying we were that much better as parents. We made our kids cut grass and do chores and stuff where most people didn't. But I think a lot of it comes back to upbringing and helping our kids do hard things. Are they doing hard things anymore?

So the only challenge I'm going to give there is that it has been proven time and time again that your upbringing these days relies solely on the amount of success and money your parents have. There aren't kids rising from adversity anymore. Those kids are the ones that get into the violence and the drugs, because we've segregated those neighborhoods so far away from each other. So my challenge is, I completely agree with you, but if that was the case, why are there not more people rising from the lower class to the middle class to the upper class? Because it's not happening anymore. The American dream when my grandfather came from Italy and my mother came from Italy was work hard and you can make it. We have lost that in the culture of this country. Talk about culture. We've lost that. People don't feel that anymore.

But even any level of adversity, going back to the stat about 92% not wanting conflict, I don't think we teach any level of adversity. It doesn't have to be the same levels that we had. One of the greatest quotes I have is from the founder of Spanx. Her family, every day at the dinner table, talked about, what did you fail at today? It doesn't have to be running through the middle of Queens, but I think having those moments of adversity and learning to overcome them is something.

Oh, we're terrified. We're terrified of failure. And we instill in such young children the fear of, oh, God forbid this teacher doesn't like you. And I'm not going to criticize teachers. That is an impossible task. But I'm saying that not everybody learns the same way. And if she got a bad English grade but a great math grade, she's going to be a math kid. Why is this so complicated, right? And then the problem is, like in Brazil, if you're a dummy, you go to trade school to learn to work with your hands. They clearly say you're not going to be smart. Why are we making kids that are not built for it be in this fast-paced literary world? Go be a plumber. We need plumbers. We're not instilling the value set which best represents what we need out of these people, personally, I think.

Yeah, I think it's back to every four years you're a freshman again, and we're not embracing that. We're stuck in senioritis. Well, this is the way we've always done it in the educational system. I have a friend who's high up at Coke, and he says, now, I don't want people with degrees. I want them with certifications. He'd rather have someone with a certification, like UX designer, user experience.

And those are free, by the way. You can get an AI crash course from Google so fast. If you really do it, you're going to be better equipped than most of the people out there.

Well, that's his point. He said, I know they can come in and hit the ground running, whereas if they have a four-year degree somewhere, I'm going to have to apprentice them.

Yeah, especially if it's a liberal arts college.

Well, and they probably took the initiative to get that certification.

If they did both, they're in the catbird seat.

Right. So, okay, what are your other thoughts around how we grow this next generation? As bosses, as with our kids, what other things can we do to get them more equipped?

All right, I'm going to give you the key to my second book that's coming out. It's all around one question. I want to help 100 million people get purpose statements, and it's by this question: if you had $10 million in the bank, what would you do for work?

I would put it into an annuity that makes 7% and I would travel the world.

Yeah, so you become a traveler. But if you had…

And I would document my travel, because I would want other people that have the opportunity to travel the way I do. Because I'm not a big money spender. I'm gonna find the little nooks of the world that no one's ever seen, go enjoy the best of that culture, and share it with the world.

I just don't think there's enough people thinking through, what is my unique ability on this planet? They're just going through school, and then maybe they get an accounting degree and they become an accountant. Nothing wrong with being an accountant. But if that wasn't your dream or your passion, you may not be a great accountant.

Do you believe that the corporate leaders of America are more like your buddy at Coca-Cola, or do you believe that they want the sheep to just do what they say? Are we seeing a changing of the guard there? Because it's not going to happen unless we make a change at the top.

I'd still say they're sheep.

Yeah, damn shame.

I'd say the boomers have been doing it the way they've been taught to do it by their mentors. And I think Gen X is following suit with the boomers. I keep asking and wondering about the millennials, who have been complaining about how things are run: we're not self-actualizing anyone, we don't have purpose statements, we don't have our core values on the walls. Are they going to do it? Or are they going to follow suit and be sheep?

I love it. So by the time we air this, the book will probably be out. Tell people where to find the book.

Yeah, you'll be able to find it on Amazon, and on my website, AndyChristiansen.com, as well. And it'll be called Minute to Meaning.

And I'm going to do that with my sales team. And then I'm going to do the opening for this show. I'm going to do a little blurb of what I learned from my sales team, to make sure we had some practical application. Because we talked about it at the end, I'm going to start with that, and then we'll really bring this thing full circle. This was a good one, Trip. I think we did a good job, man.

Andy, much appreciated. Now I learned about your exercise habits too, so no surprise you're multitasking there. But this is awesome. You've been listening to the Marketing MadMen on Xtra 106.3, and we'll be back next week.